not everyone gets to keep their bodies when they get sent to hell.

tailgaters are sometimes turned into trees. the devil will make them just stand there for a couple hundred years. then maybe turned into a house. then torn down. never burned. that would be too cute. he’d waterlog the wood. warp it. then allowed to float down styx back home to be reassigned.

some get turned into bugs. some into animals. some into peoples pets. some get turned into dangerous animals. some get turned into fish.

i used to be afraid of fish and when i got down here and they showed me my file it was cuz a long time ago i was sent to hell and then turned into a fish and had to swim around in the dark cold depths of the atlantic for a few dozen years.

apparently a while back i was given a reprieve from whatever i was doing and reassigned as a lightskinned black american male born to a well educated middle class family and raised in the suburbs in the midwest.

now, apparently, the giver of grace was not very happy with what i did with those blessings.

so there i was banging some girl at the sex palace and all of this was dawning on me. life is all context. perspective. compared to contracting stds nightly in the pits of pandemonium, flying chopper one across the skies of hollywood wasnt so bad.

and if i didnt like it, it wasnt like i was some old growth redwood, i could go do something else with my life. i could actually take control of my destiny as opposed to waiting on the universe to decide.

f the universe.

the universe is 2/3s lost souls doing what some guy more lost than them is telling them what to do.

i was getting used to my demonic body. my thing wasnt falling off any more. the crowd didnt flamethrow me as much any more. usually they waited until the end when i wasnt looking. then they all laughed and then applauded my incinerated smoking remains.

that night i went to bed and before i did i heard a still soft voice.

tony

yes?

today is the last day of the year.

it is?

yes, do you know what that means down here?

no, i dont.

it means that you can be judged again.

it does?

yes, are you sorry for what you did to get here?

yes i am.

do you think youve learned some valueable things here?

oh yes. definately.

do you think youd make a better person if you were given another chance?

oh yes! yes i would!

and then i woke up.

still in hell.

it was just a dream.

and then my dirty rag of a pillow said.

nobody gets out of hell.

dumbass.

Jack Bogdanski of Portland, Oregon

but the kids like to keep a nice sense of humor so on mondays people stand around the coffee maker and ask each other how their weekends were.

banged a cheerleader by the tire fire.

sure she was a woman?

i dont ask, they dont tell.

everything ends up nightmarish anyway, so if you open your eyes and that playmate is really a mountain goat, it wouldnt suprise me. i dont want to say im jaded, i guess ive just grown used to the horrific hallucination that is this hellish afterlife.

grits turn into maggots. beer turns into light beer. a vote for gore turns into a vote for bush.

a lot of time if youre trying to eat a steak it’ll get right off the table and run back onto the carcass of the dead beast.

and people really dont know how to cook anything medium-well here. it’s either rare or burnt.

Heaven has all the best chefs.

thanks to the xbi, on earth i never dreamed that much. here i dream all the time. its how they torture me. i’ll be in a meadow having a picnic with a french girl. the sun will be shining, the blanket will be spread out. the wicker basket is buldging with goodies. i uncork the wine without even a corkscrew. the wind is blowing out to left gently. no ants anywhere. no bees. no crows.

shes naked.

her girlfriend appears over the dale with an armful of freshly picked wildflowers. nude, except for her big floppy sunhat and a wet tshirt that says busblog.

a string quartet comfortably sitting under a weeping willow goes through several of aerosmiths greatest hits, their melodies drifting away in the breeze.

a mexican icecream man pushes his cart and rings his sleighbells and calls out in spanish that he has some sort of frozen treats.

a lion lays down with a lamb

and they rot in fast motion

the mexican icecream man scoops up the mess and puts it into his cart, it freezes and he sells it to the children for seventy five cents.

the french girl’s friend seems to be skipping closer to us but she never makes it over the dale.

the quartet is playing Incubus.

theres no food in the basket.

the wine is non alcoholic.

my breasts have developed.

fimoculous

sunday evenings i like to watch the sopranos and the simpsons. the sopranos are over for a while, thats fine, but i still have the simpsons.

not tonight though.

pissed my ass off.

my mom has been reading Blook and she says that it’s very visual. she also says she cant put it down.

that makes me happy again.

right before i was gruesomely murdered i had just sketched out the rough draft of For Your Ass, the long awaited sequel to Blook.

i emailed it to courtney love, but it might have bounced back. her mailbox gets full a lot.

drudge was on the radio tonight.

in hell they love drudge.

he was going off about how the movie industry shouldnt be so happy because they had a decent year.

he said that in 1959 people went to 40 movies a year, today they only go to 5.

but back then tickets only cost like a dime. so your annual expense to the movies was $4?

you know what, forget it. he was annoying. everyone laughed.

they hadnt laughed that hard since when trent lott said that the reasons the democrats are after him is because he’s a Christian.

thats one of the little jokes down here.

most of the guys down here werent Christians till they got sent here. but now it’s too late. plus its not even faith any more. we saw him.

it’s easy to believe in someone you can see.

so if one of the demons on earth want to throw out a little ironic bitterness, they identify themselves as Christians.

trent lott a Christian?

not everyone has to spend eternity in the pits of hell shovelling lava and being whipped by hooved taskmasters who have chariot wheels for hind legs.

some are allowed to spend time in Earth.

of course theres a catch.

you will either be superdeformed.

or dumb as a rock.

or blind and smelly.

or a chicago cubs fan.

or the enivitable victim of a horrendous attrocity or tragedy.

and even though you’d think that some of their life would be better than a day in hell, youre wrong because they know something really super terrible is going to happen, so dont enjoy the good because it might happen right when your mouth is open and your eyes are closed.

and this terribleness is from the hometown of evil.

a name you can trust.

fast hard deep