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'What's The Worst Thing That Could Happen?' no. 2: HELL

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13:14 / 22.08.03

What sort of things do you think you might be expected to endure in a
bloodless Hell?

ie, nothing obvious like being burnt, minced up, mashed, sliced or
diced.

Examples:

1. Eternal free-fall down a bottomless well [file under: Terror and Loss of Control]

2. Stuck for eternity in an empty room with only yourself for company [file under: Boredom and Madness]

3. Being force-fed enormous hairy spiders with huge, juicy abdomens full of thick white fluids [file under: f**king SPIDERS!]

4. Having to lick clean the mandibles of an enormous hairy spider that has been feasting on huge, bulbous flies that have been feasting on human excrement. Having to curl up to sleep with the same spider, which nuzzles you with its massive hairy face [file under: f**king SPIDERS! and lack of basic hygiene]

5. Watching your life as a film - every second of it, in real time - in an
audience made up of of every person you ever interacted with. Not only can the audience see and hear everything you did and said, they can hear every conscious thought you had at the time as well. The film does not end with your death, but continues with your viewing of it (including everything you thought to yourself as the horror unfolded on screen: "Shit, we're coming up to the duck episode!") Hilarity ensues.... [file under: humiliation and intrusion]

More please.

(Btw, I know there was a similar thread to this called The Modern Circles of Hell, but that was more about identifying common annoyances than thinking up unpleasantries).

Aethelwine Jedi

13:29 / 22.08.03

Example number for is fucking awesome. May I steal it for something? I'm not sure what. But it must be used somewhere!

13:35 / 22.08.03

1) Surrounded for all eternity by godawful bad taste statuettes, collectible plates, and related trinkets. Animals with big eyes, small children with oversized heads, stuff like that. No escape.

2) Everything smells like dog food (a really, really foul variety, too), all the time, everywhere. And you don't get used to the smell, either.

Both of those just get filed under The horror, the horror, as far as I am concerned.

3) You are cursed with an acute and persistent sense of your own inadequacy. You can't interact with other people, or even watch tv/films, or read, without being reminded of how much better than you everyone else is.

4) You have to spend eternity at a computer that will not do anything you want it to, keeps crashing, losing your work, refusing to connect to the net, and so forth.

13:37 / 22.08.03

Mine are a bit prosaic. Sorry.

No star here laces

13:49 / 22.08.03

It's just like normal life except all your clothes are two sizes two small and made out of bri-nylon.

An endless break-up scene - you spend eternity trying to explain to a partner that you can't see them anymore. They are alternately cloyingly sympathetic, hysterical, angry and loving but at no point do they actually acknowledge what you are saying to them, or leave the room. Perhaps this could be set in an incredible restaurant with a waiter bringing endless dishes of fine food which you never get to eat.

You get sent to Birmingham to work in a call centre for BT.

You are locked in a room with five counsellors who come from utterly different perspectives but try to analyse your life anyway. They could be a Presbyterian Vicar, a Management Consultant, a kaftan-wearing hippie, a london cabbie and your gran.

You have to play scrabble on a board a mile along each edge with three coked-up pedants.

Aethelwine Jedi

13:50 / 22.08.03

1. Being told some kind of incredibly heavy, major secret that relates to the most important thing you can think of, and then... forgetting it. And always being on the verge of remembering it, except that you can't because your life is always full of new and unusual fucking annoying distractions.

2. Being required to perform some kind of godawful pointless, menial task for all eternity (like, say; on the 51st second of every minute, you have to speak aloud a word that you've never said before) otherwise you'll never be able to see the person you love the most again. They'll just vanish, and you'll never know what's happened to them.

Tryphena Absent

13:58 / 22.08.03

Finding yourself stuck in a room with Olivia Newton John singing Hopelessly Devoted to You over and over again, while you're desperate to use the loo, for eternity.

14:12 / 22.08.03

This is meant to be Hell, not Heaven, ADL!

Tryphena Absent

14:19 / 22.08.03

One Anna's hell is a Sax's heaven

Foust is SO authentic

15:33 / 22.08.03

Held under water for eternity... never quite passing out, your lungs always screaming for air, your eyes bulging, limbs thrashing...

15:53 / 22.08.03

Working in a call center for BT, when you get up in the morning and its dark and when you go home it's dark as well, in Sunderland, the arse end of the North East.

*shivers* Whoa flashback.

17:51 / 22.08.03

saveloy's #5 is the most amazing thing i've ever thought of, and it sounds like it could almost be a "charlie kaufman" movie.

i'd say an eternity where you are *both* really, really thirsty, AND have to pee like a racehorse. totally.

17:53 / 22.08.03

and by "thought of," i mean, "wrapped my head around", not "come up with."

22:08 / 22.08.03

Being in some place kind of like a nursing home, usually in a dazed state. Every once in a while, you get your wits about you pretty nicely and realize quite fully that the people around you are stealing the things you held most precious, and plotting to keep your family from coming to see you, maybe by pretending you are never well enough to see them. You try to tell people about it, but they know you have these delusions that aren't true and they always answer as though they believe you, but they don't. After a while, you begin to wonder if maybe you are delusional. Sometimes, you even believe it, but this is not when you are lucid; it is when you are drugged up. The days when you could walk have passed. The days when you could feed yourself have passed. The days when you could hold a baby in your arms and be hopeful for the future have passed. You want to scream. You are angry all the time, and your arm hurts. The children that come to the home would have been a pleasure when you are younger. Now, they only remind you of your own uselessness. You wonder how many of them will end up like you.

03:05 / 23.08.03

My present hell is just fine.

I know what's going to happen and there ain't shit I can do about it.
file under:[MADNESS, and not necessarily BOREDOM ...but definately FUTILITY]

Oh! But there is this little vacationing spot in some lower hell realms I like to visit called: Your-taxidriver-has-an-I.Q-of-three-and-talks-incessantly-
about-anything-that-happens-to-POP-into-his-vac-brain. [file under: definately both BOREDOM AND MADNESS]

03:21 / 23.08.03

Commercials..all the bad ones....the "Can you here me now?" guy, that one with the barber cutting to much hair because she rather be driving some shitmobile (to the tune of some annoying 70s song) and countless others....

and Jeff Goldblum.

09:49 / 23.08.03

Children crying. Incessantly.

12:49 / 23.08.03

being on a crowded bus which is stuck in traffic on a really hot day and you've left your diskman at home.

Less searchable M0rd4nt

13:16 / 23.08.03

My personal hell would be to wake up in Florida and realise I was Mike Diana. (Link sooo not worksafe, BTW.)

Shanghai Quasar

14:39 / 23.08.03

Pong. All day, every day.

And you always lose.

17:19 / 23.08.03

All films are remade using actors you hate, and you have to watch at least two a day for all eternity. For instance, Gwyneth Paltrow as Galadriel in LotR. Take a minute to think about it...it's truly nightmarish, innit?

You've got permanent body odour/bad breath, and you know about it and you can't do anything about it, ever.

Grand Panjandrum of the Pointless

19:53 / 23.08.03

1.That which (it is rumoured) has happened to Thatcher, due to Alzheimer's, viz:
Total loss of the ability to form long term memories, just after the death of the person dearest to you. So you get to find out they are dead several times a day for the rest of your life.

2.Your physical appearance, voice and mood change beyond recognition every few minutes for eternity.

3. You can hear every single subconscious thought of every person within earshot. You are forced to live in a big city.
(cf George Eliot quote in the Barbelith commonplace thread)

4. The part of your mind controlling your inhibitions is disconnected from the part controlling your actions. Thus you go about committing faux pas left right and centre, feel the appropriate shame, but can do nothing about your actions.

5. You live in a world entirely inhabited by people apparently exactly like you in every respect, but who speak continually in a language you cannot understand and cannot learn even a few words of.

19:55 / 23.08.03

You are almost constantly in a restless sleep, plagued by a feeling that you should be doing a specific something else. You half-awaken panicked by this fact only are unable to orient yourself sufficiently to either remember what this something is or wake yourself, before falling back into the restless sleep you hear Michael Jackson's "Earth Song" playing faintly in the background... ad infinitum.
File under (Confusion, Madness, High Annoyance)

20:54 / 23.08.03

First, I want to register my strong objection to Saveloy's #4, on the grounds that I do not believe Hell should contain anything which may be described with the word 'nuzzle'. "Awww, wook at widdle spide-ums nuzzle nuzzle nuzzle!"

Second, I propose a Hell in which you suddenly understand anything you have ever wanted to know about science, politics, philosophy, art, and history, but when you try to communicate your knowledge of how to make the world into a utopia of unending bliss for everyone you can only say things like, "Awww, wook at widdle spide-ums nuzzle nuzzle nuzzle!"

21:45 / 23.08.03

Sappy ballads...24/7

For some relief you get to watch the soaps!

Or..

How about being MattsGurl4eva? (Can somebody else, pleeeze sign up to Barbelith!)

A

03:57 / 24.08.03

Eric Roberts continually pokes you in the side with a rusty fork, while he sings along in a shrill falsetto to the midi versions of christmas carols that play on a continuous loop at a tremendous volume. You're in the middle of the Arctic, but are only wearing a pair of shorts that are too small and made out of a doormat.

09:41 / 24.08.03

Yeah, I was thinking about Eric Roberts in relation to this thread, too.

Less searchable M0rd4nt

10:37 / 24.08.03

You're pushing 30, unemployed, and the last 20 or so jobs you've applied for were all in burger-bars or pubs and you've been turned down for every one.

Oh... wait...

14:00 / 24.08.03

Hmm...still waiting MC

Sounds a lot like highschool, though

hanabius yamamura

14:38 / 24.08.03

... i've just started reading the thread, but already feel freaked enough to post by the third on saveloy's list ie big juicy spiders etc. ... oh god, how f@$king horrible ...

hanabius yamamura

14:40 / 24.08.03

... good god, no. 4 ... what is it with the spiders? ...

16:37 / 24.08.03

Actually, this thread seems more like Purgatory than Hell.

Main Entry: pur·ga·to·ry
Pronunciation: 'p&r-g&-"tOr-E, -"tor-
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural -ries
Etymology: Middle English, from Anglo-French or Medieval Latin; Anglo-French purgatorie, from Medieval Latin purgatorium, from Late Latin, neuter of purgatorius purging, from Latin purgare
Date: 13th century
1 : an intermediate state after death for expiatory purification; specifically : a place or state of punishment wherein according to Roman Catholic doctrine the souls of those who die in God's grace may make satisfaction for past sins and so become fit for heaven
2 : a place or state of temporary suffering or misery

I mean really...nothing is forever, right?

Nevermind...I just figured it out. OUtsIde of time, everything is eternal.

Okay then...how about an eternal hangover? *ouchie!*

16:43 / 24.08.03

...and for the especially sinful, we can add some dry heaves to that.

Of course, there is no Tylenol in Hell either, that I recall.

19:17 / 24.08.03

Oh, there is, but no one can ever open those damned child-proof caps

21:05 / 25.08.03

You are subjected to an endless series of minor annoyances and irritations, but cannot articulate your anger and are forced to splutter with incoherent rage as the bathroom tap continues to drip, the computer crashes, the cat pees on the floor, the tumble-dryer eats one from every pair of your socks, the child next door shrieks in a curiously flat and monotonous manner, and so on ad infinitum. You cannot swear or speak normal words in a manner akin to swearing.

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