"Hell must be isothermal." - Henry Albert Ben

It’s 10 a.m. Monday.
I have been awake for three hours.

In those three hours I have done the following:

Picked up a weekend’s worth of dog poop in the dog run (conveniently frozen by April snow showers), walked the dog, and cleaned up his poop on the walk;

Emptied, cleaned, and refilled the cats’ litter box;

Cleaned the powder room and thrown in a load of dirty clothes from Seg’s minor accident this morning which resulted in pee all over the floor and him;

Changed The Baby’s incredibly wet and messy diaper and bathed him since the diaper had exploded and the mess was all down his legs and in his little p.j.’s.

This morning does not bode well for the rest of the week, bodily fluid-wise, but it does remind me of an old joke I haven’t thought of in years:

A man dies and goes to hell. He’s really worried since when he was alive, he’d been a terrible person. He’d lied and stolen and cheated, he’d embezzled money and faked expense reports, and he'd even pilfered office supplies. He had financially ruined his business partners and left his family destitute. He was worried about the fate that awaited his kind in Hell.

When he arrives, one of Satan’s minions takes him on a tour of Hades.

The first room they go in is full of people standing around in horse manure up to their chins. The stench and heat are terrible, demonic imps are capering about the room shouting and shrieking and tormenting people randomly. The people are clearly miserable, and the man is horrified. He asks the demon what these people’s sins were.

The demon replies, “These are all people who abused alcohol. Their drunknenness ruined their bodies and their lives, destroyed their families, and in some cases, devastated other families due to drunk driving.”

The second room is full of people up to their shoulders in horse manure. The stench and heat are pretty awful, and the demonic imps are capering about the room, making a lot of noise and pestering people. The people are pretty darn miserable, and the man is horrified (but not quite as much as he was in the first room). He asks the demon what these people’s sins were.

The imp replies, “These people were all drug addicts. They shot heroin, they smoked marijuana, they popped pills. And not only that, they sold drugs and ruined young people’s lives and destroyed their families.”

The third room is full of people up to their waists in horse manure. The stench and heat are terrible – but not nearly as terrible as in the first two rooms. The demonic imps in this room are lazing about, more or less completely ignoring their charges. The people are somewhat miserable, but it could be much worse, and the man is not nearly as horrified. He asks the demon what these people’s sins were.

The imp replies, “These people were all sex addicts. They slept with anything that breathed, and in some cases, not breathing. They lapped up depraved pornography like mother’s milk. They tormented animals, and performed unnatural acts against God, and ruined their spouse’s and family’s faith in love and the decency of human beings.”

The fourth room is the room the man has been dreading – the room reserved for gamblers and liars and cheaters, for embezzlers and people who perpetrated fraud and forgery upon their unsuspecting families and businesses. But when he walks in, the people in the room are standing around – in horse manure, true, but only to their knees. And they are all drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes and chatting it up with each other and their demonic captors. The man is more relieved than he can express. It may not be Heaven, but he can handle this. This is ok, even for eternity. After all, he thinks, it could be so much worse, he could have been a drunk or a junkie or a pedophile.

He turns to his tour guide and says, “Wow. Man. Gosh, I am soooo relieved. I really thought it was going to be so much worse, much more like those poor bastards in the first or second rooms, up to my neck in manure, miserable and sick, getting tortured by demons…wow. I guess I picked the right vice after all, eh?” He chuckles and punches the devil playfully on the shoulder.

Just then a loud bell rings, and the head demon in Room Four stands up and screams,
“All right, all you miserable cretins! Everybody back on your heads!”