HUMAN WRECKAGE

The Siren Songs of Hell

One of the recent bishops of Rome came clean to the wavering faithful and finally admitted that Hell is a human construct. Still, Hell’s existence in some form gives me a forlorn hope: there may be an afterlife but it’s going to suck

I have throughout my life done many stupid, shameful, hurtful and harmful things. I was just following orders though God knows whose. Sometimes at night when I can’t get to sleep I scroll through the list of my transgressions. Guilty! I groan in the wee wee hours when there’s no ambient light leaking through the window blind. I understand that I have been largely the architect of my own Hell. J’accuse! Despair has suggested suicide a couple of times but never insisted.

I was born in midwinter. I am Canadian. I don’t believe it’s entirely irrational or illogical on my part to assume that I will die when there’s snow on the ground because the cold here can lock in for six months out of 12. Decent odds, 50-50. I’ve always pictured my Hell as a barren, nuclear winter wasteland. My naked, self-flagellated flesh burning in the liquid nitrogen freeze. Eternity’s going to hurt forever.

I will not suffer in silence. Because I’ve made my living for the most part sweating details (You too can channel your OCD into a lucrative career! Ask me how!), I’ve fretted over the soundtrack of meGeoff’s personal Hell, the music I’m doomed to scream along in agony with until the end of time and a few minutes after that because bad songs never seem to fade out. Initially I imagined the noise would be an endless loop of the overexposed high school warhorses I can no longer abide: Skynyrd’s Free Bird, Floyd’s Money, Deep Purple’s Smoke on the Water, Hotel California by the Eagles and Led Zep’s Stairway to Heaven. Pop revisionism is a peculiar and persuasive thing and so I expanded my top five list to include tracks from the New Seekers, Carpenters and ABBA to jibe with Dante’s poetic circles.

There! Satan’s mix tape task done and dusted for him, or so I thought. But there’s something else insidious and hideous happening in music these days. In the past 48 hours I have heard Diana Krall croon Heart of Gold and Lisa Loeb somnambulantly warble All the Young Dudes. I have also been subjected to sparse, jazz-tinged arrangements of You Can’t Always Get What You Want, Life on Mars? and After the Goldrush by overly earnest and breathy singers I wish I’d never heard. What fresh, insipid Hell is this?

Perhaps I was overly hasty envisioning my Hell as a harsh, unnatural alien landscape. Now it might be akin to a berth on meGeoff’s voyage of the damned. I am on a cruise ship endlessly shuttling back and forth between Disneyland and Disneyworld. I’m alone in the cocktail lounge. I am in formal evening wear but my collar’s too tight and I cannot loosen my tie. The pianist quietly butchers every song I ever loved, in ascending order just so I’m aware that what is very bad is going to get even worse.

There are Tiffany lamps on the tables, pastel fabric coverings on the chairs, ersatz brass portholes and murals of salmon-peach-watermelon sunsets with grinning, leaping dolphins in the foreground framed by charcoal silhouettes of palm trees on the walls. The bar is open but there’s no stock, nothing on tap, nothing to be had. The guy who founded Lululemon helps himself to a seat at my table. He has an umbrella drink but he won't buy me one. Instead, he scolds me for not living, laughing, loving and flossing. I am trapped in the room in his company. I cannot escape him to smoke a last cigarette outside on deck before jumping overboard. I want to die again but that’s no longer an option. Oh, my soul, it’s going to be the longest, darkest night I’ve ever known in both my lives. 

Copies of my latest novel The Garage Sailor are still available and ready to ship. Get aboard at Megeoff.com.