Blog My Hell

There has been a minor craze going around YouTube in honor of the upcoming Halloween holiday called Draw My Hell. It was started by Mark Douglas of Barely Political, and the idea is to draw and narrate what your own personal hell would be like. Well I suck at drawing, so instead I am taking this concept and turning it toward my talents and I'm calling it "Blog My Hell." If anyone else is interested in doing this or the Draw My Hell challenge please feel free to share. I am always interested in seeing the inner torments of other people who aren't me.

In my Hell it is always a Tuesday, in early March. I hate Tuesdays, and early March is that time when you are sick of winter but you still have to endure for at least another six weeks until you get even a hint of spring warmth, and there isn't another day off from work in sight for at least four weeks. The dress code for Hell is a buttoned up shirt that never wants to stay tucked into my one-size too small pants and a tie that is always a little too tight, but for some reason won't hang straight down my shirt. My hair is always at that length right before I get a hair cut, where it just gets hot and itchy all the time.

I wake up every Tuesday morning and I have to shave, even though I don't need to. (It's just one of those things in Hell.) The water pressure in the shower is always too low to be refreshing, and there is no sweet spot between the hot and cold. Breakfast is a banana that you aren't quite sure whether or not it's still good to eat. I mean it tastes banana-ish, but it's kind of mushy and the dark spots I see on the peel give me pause.

Driving to work takes two hours and there is nothing on the radio but every Britney Spears and Ke$ha songs I've heard ten thousands times before, the kind that get stuck in your head and sit there on repeat for the rest of the day. For just a little extra discomfort, there is also a sampling of the kind Country songs that make me feel slightly uncomfortable to be a white man. All the while I sit in traffic raging at the cars that are too stupid to understand how to make a left hand turn at an intersection. (Pull into the middle of the lane so other hellspawn can pass you on the right! Damnit!)

I am always three minutes late when I get to work. I then spend the rest of my day never finishing any of my projects because I am constantly being interrupted by people with stupid questions or are too lazy to do something themselves. "What does it mean when it tells me to left-click?" "What does this error message mean?" "How do you do a mail-merge?" "How do you type the word 'six-six-six?'" I then spend the rest of my day explaining to old women how to download pictures from their email. Everyday I have to work through lunch, and the only snacks left to eat all contain pecans, raisins, and coconut. So that I am forced to look at the snacks and get hungrier and hungrier, but am unable to eat them.

It takes four hours to get back home through traffic and idiots. When I do finally get to eat, my dinner is always unsatisfying. My one roommate is an over weight forty-year old man who always makes me watch bad movies with him and then spends the majority of the time talking through the movies and explaining things I didn't care to know in the first place. In his spare time he collects pieces of toenails and uses them to construct scale models of historical turn-of the-last-century factories from the British Industrial Revolution. He has the coolest and hottest girlfriend who seems like she might be in to me, but of course neither of us will ever try anything because we both value the commitment she made to her toenail obsessed boyfriend. My other roommate is a nineteen-year old girl who "totes speaks like this so much, that I can't even..." and for no reason feels the need to claim everything even when it was clearly labeled with my name on it. She has no respect for boundaries and at night she stays up till 2 am blasting Britney Spears and Ke$ha songs while talking on the phone about how much her friends are basic bitches and who she hooked up with last night at the club. She spends her free time tanning and likes to have a beer and talk about how "totes wasted" she is. When I try to have a reasonable discussion with her she just screams really loudly till I start bleeding from the ears.

For the few precious hours of alone time I have, I sit in front of my half-finished novel, and alternate between starting at a blank page and pacing the room as I suffer from the worst case of writer's block imaginable. Sometimes I'll try to do something else but will get frustrated and go back to staring at the blank page as my mind fumbles for something (ANYTHING) to write down. Even worse, throughout my day, I will periodically come up with the most brilliant ideas for stories, novels, blogs, etc, (Like award winning, Harry Potter-level, ideas,) but the minute I sit down in front of my computer or take out a piece of paper to write it down, the idea will completely vanish and I'll be left with nothing but more writer's block. There is nothing to read in Hell, except 50 Shades of Gray and other trashy and grammatically incorrect fan-fiction that have made millions of dollars for authors who are way less talented than me.

In Hell, all my jokes are unfunny and poorly timed. In fact, whenever I say anything people just look at me like I have no idea what I am talking about. No one uses the oxford comma. My cell phone never has service and I am constantly missing important phone calls from friends and family whom I never get to see. I also miss calls from that better job I applied for, that girl I had a crush on back in high school, and the one that warns me to be in work the next day a half-hour earlier because I have an important meeting with an old woman who needs me to show her how to "do the Google." After a week of 86-straight Tuesdays, Satan allows us to have one Sunday, (Ironic, I know) but the day starts at 7 pm, and I have no time to do anything but grocery shop at Wal-Mart. After 348 days, any small amount of progress I have made on my projects at work or my personal writing gets reset and I start it all over again.

And that is my personal Hell.