Reader and commenter Gringo is a national treasure. At least in Sippicanville, surely. He’s reminded us that Tom Lehrer, another national treasure, at least once composed a Christmas Song. There may be others, I dunno. I’m not sure that Spending Hannukah in Santa Monica would count, but I guess it’s jubilee-related.
Tom had a great 97-year run, but his bones, if not the funny ones, ran out of gas this year. God rest ye, merry gentleman.
I haven’t read the Divine Comedy since I was a kid. That’s why I felt I needed to brush up on it before I improved it some. Don’t laugh. Dante was always cheating off me in Math class, although he was a teacher’s pet in Latin. So I feel like if anyone’s going to fix it, I should.
I guess first we should go over the original circles of Hell, in case you’ve forgotten where your iPhone handbasket travel agent, Steve Jobs, is sending you eventually. Yeah, I’ve seen what you’re scrolling through over your shoulder at the airport. Tsk. Tsk.
But I don’t judge, lest I be judged. And hooboy, I’d rather face the Doges in Venice than any angels who’ve heard what I’ve been muttering to myself lately. So let’s visit the nether regions together, and see how we’re going to fare, if Dante, revised, is to be believed.
Limbo:
No, no. Harry Belafonte is not involved, and no funky dancing, although the bar will still be set pretty low, as they say. There are no umbrellas in the drinks. The first circle of Hell is like the airport lounge when you’re snowed in. You’re not punished exactly, but your flight’s delayed indefinitely, and you have to hang around with allegedly virtuous people who don’t have their Christian Airlines boarding pass. Believe me, though, no matter how confusing the similarity in names might be, Christian Airlines has nothing to do with Spirit Airlines:
That’s not limbo. That’s demonic possession. We’ll explore that another time.
Lust:
The second circle treats its denizens to an unrelenting wind that blows them to and fro. It’s a fitting punishment for anyone who is swept away by excessive sexual desire. I guess the modern version of this would be living in a trailer park with a girl you knocked up when you had your beer goggles on. You’re waiting for God to send a retributive tornado to settle your hash, which by the way came out of a can, and is burning on the little stove you got in your single-wide.
Gluttony:
This is where cable TV chefs end up, I guess. The original description of eternal life in the third circle is lying in filthy, freezing slush while being pelted with icy rain and hail. Occasionally, the neighbor’s vicious dog (Cerberus) tears at your flesh. Since this is an exact rundown of what it’s like to live in western Maine, except the part about getting enough to eat in the first place, there’s no need to update it. Let’s move on.
Greed:
If you’ve been hoarding wealth, or raiding your kid’s piggy bank to go to the racetrack, this will be your zip code, forevermore. Your punishment is rolling heavy weights against one another until the end of time, accompanied by lots of clashing noises and shouting. So basically you get a job in an Amazon warehouse without a timeclock. Don’t drink out of the golden pop bottles you find lying around.
Wrath:
Remember, it’s not just rage that can plop you in this circle. Silent sulking will punch your ticket as well. I’m a stone cold lock for this circle. I’m an anger polymath, as you well know, so I’m actually able to silently sulk with my left hemisphere while berating counter help at fast food joints with my right hemisphere. The punishment for wrath has two tiers, like airplane tickets. The first class wrathful fight on the surface of the river Styx. If you’re flying sullen coach, you gurgle just beneath the surface, stuck in the mud while the plain angry folks stomp on your heads. Since I qualify both ways, I’ll just wade around, I guess, and get trespassed from Spirit Airlines.
Heresy:
This ring is for denial of the soul’s immortality or other core Christian beliefs, or maybe putting Canadian quarters in the donation basket on Sunday. The punishment is being entombed in flaming graves for eternity. I’m currently in Merida, Mexico, and I’m getting used to the climate. At this point, if I was put in a flaming grave, I’d probably ask Beelzebub if I could go home to get a blanket.
Violence:
This one is way too complicated, Dante. He says there’s three rings inside the seventh ring, but there are only nine rings, total. I told you he was bad at math. We get it, violence is bad. And all kinds of violence is mentioned. According to Dante, if you’re a blaspheming, sodomizing, credit card company executive, you’re going to have a very bad time in the afterlife. It’s not specified exactly what APY qualifies you for eternal damnation, but I think only secured credit card rates qualify you for Limbo, instead.
Fraud:
Oh come on, Dante. There are ten different ditches in the eighth circle. Again with the bad math. The ditches have seducers, flatterers, false prophets, hypocrites, thieves, and several other kinds of politicians in them. I’m not sure if a voter could get in.
Treachery:
Dante was running out of parchment again, so there are four demi-hells in the final circle of Hell. You’ll be frozen in ice for your sins, so I guess you could wave to the gluttons from your ice cube tray. Right in the center is Satan himself, eternally chewing on Judas Iscariot, Brutus, and Cassius. Wow, who knew stabbing Caesar was even worse than nailing the son of God to a tree?
OK, so there’s rings inside of circles with a flaming excavator for a bunch of unpleasant ditches. We get it. But honestly, with the passage of time, these punishments don’t scare anyone anymore. We need some new circles to keep the average person on the straight and narrow. I can thing of a few. How about a circle with really crummy wifi? Not a complete lack of wifi. That would be paradisaical. Just slow. Remember dial-up? Yeah, you’d be up half the night just downloading half a picture of a naked girl. Barely enough to get you into the Lust Circle.
I can think of some others. You know, maybe one circle could be a tattoo parlor in a leper colony. Stuff like that. But I’m often reminded of a quotation from Mark Twain:
Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company.
In the words of Yogi Berra (maybe), Mark Twain never said half the things he said. But that sure sounds like him. It’s an understandable comment if you’re a bit of a rogue with an active mind. There certainly is plenty of bad weather in Dante’s circles, to go with the inelegant arithmetic. But on the flip side, Brutus and Cassius would probably be interesting company, even while being devoured. Judas Iscariot would have plenty of coins for the jukebox of the damned. It wouldn’t be that awful.
Maybe we should come up with a new circle of hell that’s an unbelievable torment, and a stone cold groove at the same time. I think I’ve found it. Ladies and germs, I give you a Mexican bowling alley, the Eleventeenth, Funnest Circle of Hell:
I don’t think I’ll insult my Mexican friends by observing that Mexicans are not known for being quiet. They all told me they weren’t, so I didn’t have to figure it out on my own. I’ll also observe that where I live, Augusta, Maine, it’s louder than Mexico. The difference is that in Augusta, everyone is trying to be loud in order to annoy other people. They drive absurd pickup trucks and riced-out Civics with tailpipes the size of Dinty Moore cans and race up and down the streets blattering and backfiring. The motorcycles are Harleys with straight pipes and boombox radios playing heavy metal they can’t hear, but I sure do. As one of my teachers used to observe when a loud car drove by, “That’s all the noise they’re likely to make in this world.” Bothering other people is the only true American art form.
A Mexican bowling alley isn’t like that. Don’t get me wrong, it was louder than ten Sherman tanks with bees and fender washers in their hubcaps. But it was a brand of Happy Loud that the United States no longer celebrates. We put ourselves outside of enough beers to get our decks awash, and everyone in our group got a strike that we observed but couldn’t hear over the Mexican disco torch songs, the clatter of the balls, and the delightful incomprehensible Spanish chatter from the other lanes.
So to quote Twain again, for sure, right out of Huckleberry Finn’s mouth:
“All right, then, I’ll go to hell”—and tore it up. It was awful thoughts, and awful words, but they was said. And I let them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming.”
I’d settle for going to heaven for the dearth of snow to shovel. I’d be just as happy if I was damned to visit the Altabrisa Consolidated Cacophony and Gutterball Emporium forevermore.
It’s that time of year again. The snowbanks in Maine have receded to a distant memory instead of a salty spring puddle, and have long since released their pent up cargo of urban jellyfish (plastic bags from convenient stores) to drift on the sultry, room temperature breezes. That means it’s Ironman time!
Well, I guess that’s what it means. I’m new to the city of Ogguster, our state’s capital. I’m pretty new to cities, period. Apparently, they have this sort of Bataan Death March of Fun every year, and they have it in a lot of places. It attracts contestants from all over the world, but it’s a very American idea to my eye. “Anything worth doing is worth overdoing” should be stamped on our currency and added to the National Anthem. The last three verses are really weird and you could slip it right in if you have a rhyming dictionary, and no one would notice.
I’m a stranger to Facebook, so I’m a stranger to most current happenings like these. It’s pointless to opine on such matters, but I shouldn’t have to have a Facebook account to look at a police department’s or any other government cabal’s information. But everyone assumes that’s where the squares go for their info, so that’s where they put said info. Oh well. But I honestly didn’t know that they held an Ironman competition in our city. Until I won it.
I’m so ill-informed about the topic that this morning I had to go to the Ironman website to verify exactly what the three portions of athletic misery technically consists of. Apparently, you’re supposed to swim for 1.2 miles in the Kennebec River, past a modest crop of signs that inform you of the wet weather sewer overflow discharge pipes that dot the shoreline. Then you’re required to haul your soggy bottom out of the river and plant it on a bicycle seat and pedal for 56 miles. After that thorough, but no doubt enjoyable chafing session, you’re supposed to trade your $10,000 carbon fiber streamlined bicycle for a wedge of orange to chew on and a cup of lukewarm water (about the same amount of water you still have in your shorts, I’ll bet). Then you run for 13.1 miles, which I noticed is exactly half the length of a marathon. I think they should totally call that a “half marathon.” I’m not on Facebook, so maybe they already do. In any case, I’m sure they all run the whole way while wondering if that guy they left their bike with actually had anything to do with event.
On a morning after basis, that sure sounds daunting. But in the heat of the moment, I just sort of got carried away with the zeitgeist and entered the contest without even trying. And get this, I did it in my pajamas, and my wife did it while naked. Of course this will require some explanation. Here goes:
You see, I don’t think it’s possible to “win” a contest that requires you to swim, bike, and run that far. Don’t get me wrong. In my younger days I was as foolish as the next guy, and ran around like a dog on the 4th of July, and biked like a Tour De France also-ran. Fitness freaks can’t just pull rank on me that easily. I came in 13th in a small town marathon once. I could average 20-25 miles per hour on a bike back in the day on a flat circuit. I’d be accused of cheating on the swimming portion, of course, because of the water wings. But other than that, pointless exertions like this event hold no terrors for me. I’m just not that interested.
Entering the event has many requirements I’m also not that interested in. First, it appears you have to buy all your garments at some kind of trapeze artist unitard store, and we don’t have one hereabouts. These Barnum and Bailey leotard onesies are covered with more slogans and logos than Don Draper’s desk, and I don’t know how exactly you’re supposed to get on that kind of gravy train. I think you have to drink Brawndo while skydiving with a GoPro on your helmet, then land in the bed of a vegan’s electric monster truck, or some other heroic deed, to catch the typical sponsor’s eye. I’m willing of course, but I can’t remember my YouTube login credentials, so the whole scheme would fall apart at the end there.
I would also apparently be required to purchase very elaborate running shoes in electrifying pink or lime green neon colors I haven’t seen since Cyndi Lauper stopped recording. I probably can’t afford those. Everyone was wearing those Randy Savage sunglasses, too, that looked like you could weld with them, or run through gamma rays or something. Maybe it was to protect you from going blind from the radioactive pink sneakers. I dunno. But while I used to own a welding helmet, I don’t remember where I put it. That’s another investment I don’t need to make, and I don’t think getting a beef jerky sponsorship logo on my unitard would impress the other contestants anyway.
I also noticed that some of the female runners had a male trailing them on a bicycle, exhorting them to keep going, with encouragements like, “You can do it!” and, “Keep up the pace!”, and “You got this!”, mostly to women who manifestly couldn’t do it, couldn’t keep up, and didn’t got this, so to speak. I imagined how many stab wounds I’d wake up with the next day if I tried this with my wife. Besides, as I mentioned, she was naked, and being naked, there would be no place to display any logos of energy drinks or energy bars or energy potions, so there would be no point in her competing.
So as I mentioned, I feel as though I’m the only real winner of the Augusta Ironman competition. It’s just that the events in my version of the race varied slightly from the swim, cycle, and the “sorta run, sorta walk fast” final leg. My version of the competition did have three amazing portions of exertions, and I nailed them:
Get woken up at 3:30 in the morning by the neighbor across the hall pounding on our door. The air conditioning unit for our apartment is on the fritz, so my wife was sleeping naked. She woke me up and sent me to the door in my jammies, (gym shorts and a t-shirt). Luckily for me, I used to be a professional musician, so I was used to naked girls hanging around while people hammered on my door telling me the cops had arrived. It’s part of the job description, I think. At any rate, the neighbor told me the cops were towing everybody’s cars out of the parking lot, mine included. That’s where the Ironman race was starting, and we were supposed to move our cars out of there. We had it on our Facebook page, I don’t know how you could have missed it.
The second leg was going down three flights of stairs. I did it in seventeen seconds. I’m sure that record will stand for a while.
The third leg was the most difficult, and I believe my performance was one for the record books. There were about a dozen policemen and about the same number of tow trucks in the parking lot. One wrecker was backed up to our car, and the driver was standing there holding the hook. And get this: I somehow convinced a tow truck driver and several policemen to move the tow truck and let me drive out of there instead of being towed. I talked ragtime faster than Joe Isuzu on meth. I’m still not sure how I managed it. As far as I know, it’s never even been attempted, never mind accomplished. Everyone else got towed, and a $350 bill to get their car back.
So we sat in our living room and watched the cyclists and the runners pass by our front windows, serene in the knowledge that no matter how you tote up the results, we won the Augusta Ironman competition, going away. And we got a spray of flowers to commemorate the victory.
I recently moved from the hinterlands to the metrop. It has taken me some time to make the transition. Our bustling citadel, Ogguster, has enough people in it to fill the bleachers at Fenway, or maybe start a statewide insurrection if the constabulary is sleeping. But Johnny Law only sleeps in the daytime, because that’s when they’re on the clock, and sedition traditionally happens after the sun goes down, so there’s not much danger of that.
I’ve had to make new friends. My old friends were reliable, but somewhat uncultured. They were generous to a fault, though. They didn’t seem to mind it when I’d take an armload of firewood from their pile, as long as it was in the middle of the night while they were sleeping. I knew their habits well, and discerned that asking during the day would have been an additional imposition on their time, so I avoided that as well. I hate bothering people.
It took me a while to find a new tabernacle to worship at in Ogguster. I had to hunt around for my particular denomination, but I eventually found one by following the neon signs. This particular bethel has perhaps more beer taps than yours. I’ve been instructed by everyone from the pope to that Clinton woman to socialize, and worship the redeemer, in my own way, so I do. It takes a village to fill the stools at our local mission house, or at least an army base nearby, so maybe she had a point. I’m not sure I should trust her opinions other than that. She’s rich, but she splits her time between Arkansas and upstate New York. That smacks of bouncing your head off the Scylla and Charybdis over and over, without even trying to navigate the water in between. And as far as the pope goes, we do have something like communion wafers, although they’re much larger, and they have logos all over them, and you set your chalice on them. They taste about the same at the Catholic variety, so I assume they’re valid tickets to the Glory Land anyway.
So my new friend in the city, Norman Rockwall, asked me if I wanted to see a local feller play Two Gentlemen of Verona in Monmouth. I remarked that I didn’t really care for soccer, and two against one seemed a trifle unfair, even if the Verona squad was unranked. He explained that he was talking about going to see Shakespeare. I admitted I didn’t care who was holding the tickets, I still wasn’t interested. Eventually I got the drift, though, that it was a night at the theater he was touting. That sounded classy. I never miss a chance to put on my best bib and tucker, so I said sure.
We ended up outside a building big enough to be a reform school, but less charming. We got our ducats and went inside and climbed two or three hundred flights of stairs, or so it seemed to me, and sat with our backs to the wall up among the cobwebs. From our vantage point, it was a flea circus, but my friend assured me that the actors were bound to have good elocution. I professed indifference on what kind of tradesmen they might be during the day, I just wanted to make sure they yelled loud enough so we’d know who was the villain, so I’d know who to root for.
Just then, way down front, I spotted some guys dressed for a funeral. They were generally molesting some form of fiddle. They had all kinds. They tucked some under their chins, with a hanky in between, so I knew they must have been rented, but not cleaned every time, like a rental car. Some had bigger ones that sat between their knees. Other fellas had some too big to ride like a gentleman, and they sorta stood next to it and tried to play is side saddle. They were making a terrible racket, each playing something else, and I wondered aloud why they they’d get dressed up and pay for primo seats like that and then cause such a commotion. Norman explained that they were just tuning up, and that they were the orchestra. This flummoxed me. I tune up my snowmobile in the garage, not on the trail. Don’t musicians have a garage?
The theatrical bill of fare had shifted, and Norman informed me that the Two Gentlemen of Verona had the night off, probably to go home and guard their woodpiles. Tonight’s menu was going to be something along the lines of Julius Caesar vs. All Comers, sorta like a wrestling match at a county fair. I wasn’t too “up” on Julius, but Norman filled me in some. Julio was some form of garlic eater back in the day, and he bivouacked in Gaul several times, at least until he got tired of being so far from his woodpile all the time. Then he went one last time and turned the Gaullians into regular Frenchmen, who couldn’t do no harm, and became sort of military speed bumps forevermore. I covered my ears and yelled, “Spoilers!”, but Norman assured me that the play was about a totally different kettle of fish. Caesar was a busy dude and had all sorts of adventures, I gathered. No idea when he had time left over to invent salads and Orange Julius.
Then the curtain went up and the show was purdy good. Julius came rolling into town like it was the circus. Some carpenters and cobblers and assorted other people who lost their jobs to the Chinese started in with dost thous and beseechings, and various other incomprehensible blather, and then started going on and on about the Ides of March, which if you ask me isn’t half as scary as April 15th, but no one in Hollywood ever listens to me.
So Caesar’s wife California wanted him to call in sick to work but she’s not as good looking as Cleopatra so he went anyway. His friends are throwing one of those Animal House parties where everyone’s wearing bedsheets and partying hearty and he doesn’t want to miss it. So he goes, and get this, his friends stab him at the foot of Pompeii, which wasn’t erupting just then, I guess. Brutus was involved somehow, but I didn’t see Popeye or Wimpy or anyone amusing. The proceedings were kind of depressing, truth be told.
Then Caesar’s friend Mark Anthony threw one of those Iranian funerals where the crowd kinda tosses the interested party around like a ragdoll and generally act like they’re at a rave instead of a requiem. This was all followed up by some battle scenes that wouldn’t fit on the stage. Then everyone except Ogguster Caesar commits suicide. I guess Ogguster was vice-Caesar or something, but I gather not many people voted for him, or even knew he was on the ballot, just like our elections.
Well, it was a pretty good show, all around, but they should probably spring for more fake blood if they want to keep people interested in the cheap seats. And George Lucas coulda told them that it was a mistake to massacre Julius in the first play, right out of the gate. It makes sequels pretty difficult, and being back before Christ, the opportunities for time travel or clones were few and far between. But still, two thumbs up from this reviewer. No Christians were harmed in the making of the play, and the horses were killed off-stage.
Before I begin with the advices, I’m required to pull rank somehow. Lay out my bona fidos. In order to tempt you to take writing advice from me, I have to lure you into thinking that I’ve managed to produce some form of folding money by writing. That’s the Holy Grail, and I have to convince you I’ve had a swig from it before you’ll listen to me. Here goes: I’m such a good writer that I have intermittently been able to cover the monthly fee for keeping a bank account open to accept the money I’ve earned by writing. I know, huh? How awesome is that?
I don’t mean to brag, but I have adjectives I haven’t even used yet. I can swear more convincingly than Edna St. Vincent Millay and write dialog better than any you’ll find in the Encyclopedia Britannica. I can make grown men weep and women violent. I have the touch, and I’m here to give you the benefit of my touching.
I started out fairly wretched, so it was easier for me to become an inkstained wretch than most people. I wrote a book that had pages with printing on both sides and two covers that were too far apart. I sold several copies of that book to drunk persons who found themselves on Amazon at 4 AM (it’s my target demographic). That doesn’t mean you’ll necessarily have that kind of luck. Those people might have sobered up by now. I advise you to start off slowly and confine yourself to writing for the Internets. But whatever you decide, make sure you confine yourself, or someone else will.
Here’s my Top Ten Adviceses for Aspirating Writerers:
Make sure all the guidance you seek out on any topic is from a deciled list. Never read anything with even a hint of paragraphs about it. Numbered pages are right out. Don’t waste your time with any wild-eyed iconoclasts while you’re poking around the Intertunnel looking for your lists. Remember that nothing important ever consists of nine or eleven items. Ten items is your guarantee of quality.
Use words like “deciled” in your writing. It wasn’t a word until I made it a word in the previous entry on this list. Sprinkle in words like that, and pretty soon your blog or website or honeypot or whatever will be search engine optimized to be Numero Uno, baby, whenever anyone uses Google to look for words that don’t exist. Just watch the money roll in from that.
Only express strong opinions about who shot first or the dress some talentless skank was wearing at the Oscars. All other opinions will be met with an endless cavalcade of death threats on Twitter and bad reviews on Yelp! — whether or not you own a business. Yelpers will found a company under your name, rent a strip mall storefront, and then fill it with employees just so they can give you bad reviews if you express certain opinions that are beyond the pale. Never mention that Windows 10 works just fine, for instance.
Make sure you tell everyone how passionate you are about writing. Let’s say you’re applying for a job offered by a Bangladeshi spammer on People per Hour to fill out an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of the comments he’s leaving on abandoned blogs for generic Nair for back hair. It’s really important for you to assure him how passionate you are about that type of work. The job pays almost as well as delivering gluten-free pizza using Uber cab service, so you’re going to have to show some serious passion if you want to beat out Mikayla, Michaela, Makaila, Makhailla, and Premjit for the job.
You need a headshot photo. Make sure it’s taken of you, by you, at arm’s length. Employers have learned to trust only people who appear to be furtively looking up at the surveillance camera in a convenience store while pursing their lips into a kind of smirk. It gives off avibe that screams: passion.
Sometimes passion alone isn’t enough to get that Kenyan to award you that erotic fiction e-book gig. That’s when you need to haul out the big guns, and assure them that you have a real “flare” for writing to amplify all that passion.
You’re going to have to know all about how sexy a werewolf is. You can’t limit your ability to textually sexify werewolves solely to the terrestrial kind, either. Bone up on sexy interstellar werewolves along with the domestic breeds. It never hurts to have a minor in Sexy Vampirism to go with your B.A. in Libidinous Lycanthropy.
Don’t make the mistake of offering content that’s too challenging for the average college-educated person to understand. I mean, does that GIF really need to be animated? Can’t it just be a GIF?
Use mnemonic devices to organize your daily efforts. For instance, I keep a little framed sign on my desk that says: K.I.S.S.. It’s an acronym that reminds me that if I don’t write something and sell it soon, I might be Killed Indiscriminately by the ShutzStaffel. I think that’s what it stands for. I got it from the tail end of a deciled list and can only remember the first three items. Number 4 was an animated GIF, and I got confounded.
Under no circumstances get a real job and leave writing to people who are good at it. Get a real job and then use the office computer to write badly and show those starving writers they’re starving for a reason.
Well, there you have it. You’re now ready to enter the lucrative world of Intertunnel writing. If you’re wondering if my advice is any better than the other 40,995,651 websites offering writing advice, I urge you to search on Google for “Top Ten Adviceses for Aspirating Writerers.” I assure you I’ll be the very first entry on the search results. That’s how the quality of everything on the Intertunnel is determined.
Tag: humor
sippicancottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
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