pantoum's Diaryland Diary

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MY PARTICULAR RING OF HELL

257.

I took 4degreez's test to see what ring of Dante's hell I would be banished to and, no surprise, it's the level for heretics, those folks who fail to believe in Gawd and the so-called afterlife. We make ourselves audible with our doleful sighs. (sigh)

So i know itt's naval-gazing, but here's my score:

Purgatory (where repenting believers are sent): VERY LOW

Level 1 (Limbo, where virtuous non-believers are sent): VERY LOW

Level 2 (where lustful people are sent.

This is the realm where the lustful spend eternity. Here, sinners are blown around endlessly by the unforgiving winds of unquenchable desire as punishment for their transgressions): VERY HIGH

Level 3 (where gluttonous people are sent): HIGH

Level 4 (where prodigal and avaricious people are sent): VERY LOW

Level 5 (where the river Styx runs and wrathful and gloomy people are sent. The gloomy's lamentations bubble to the surface of the black mud as they try to repeat a doleful hymn, though with unbroken words they cannot say it): HIGH

Level 6 (the City of Dis, where heretics are sent): EXTREME

Level 7 (where violent people are sent): VERY HIGH

Level 8 (the Maleboldge, where fraudulent, malicious, panderers are sent): HIGH

Level 9 (Cocytus, where treacherous people are sent. This level is also the home of sodomites and the wood of the suicides, with its "stunted and gnarled trees with twisting branches and poisoned fruit"): HIGH

My my. I am, apparently, a very bad person, saved from Cocytus only by the fact that I have not completely wasted my life and hoarded everything.

I do wonder about that description of Level 2 though. Where would lustful S/M practitioners dwell? Seems like it would really have to be in a Vanilla Sex sub-ring, where smiling dimpled cherubs bonk each other in the missionary position (only, people) and whisper Pat Boone-worthy lines to each other.

�

I am angry today because two employees failed to complete a task that I specifically instructed them to do, which means that I told two authors that a file would be posted on the Web yesterday and yet it is not.

This was to correct an error that one of them introduced when she reformatted it too, so we look particularly incompetent.

And they did not call me when they made the decision to NOT complete the task, although it would have been very easy for me to make what seems like a perfectly obvious judgment call, ESPECIALLY because I told the editor that it absolutely must post on Tuesday and, since it's printed, don't change anything except errors introduced in the conversion process.

It doesn't get much clearer than that, does it? And man, was I livid this morning.

But let's put this in perspective. Spending nearly all day at a cancer hospital with Shakespeare and other cancer patients was surreal. And I am saturated with TV now, saw more in the last two days than I've seen in three or more months.

A show starring Barbara Walters and other women�I think it was called "The View"�was all about female orgasms. It was really explicit and blasting through the oncology waiting room, where we were all pretending not to listen to their detailed information about, say, a woman's G Spot. But maybe some couples waiting to get the news at least had a moment of desire in that wretched place though.

We watched a football game at my house last night and some show featuring Navy lawyers and an amusing lawyer show ("Boston Commons"?) featuring James Spader and Captain Kirk gone to seed. And then a show called "Commander in Chief" in which Geena Davis plays the president. (This show will need to improve greatly to hold a candle to The West Wing.) And none of tbis kept us from thinking about the reality that Shakespeare's cancer may have reoccured.

We were all extremely nervous and afraid, so the wait was almost unbearable.

Meanwhile, I read the Oxford American music issue. Best run-on sentence:

What if we set up an official PayPal site for all indie musicians, anyone not on a major label, and whenever someone burns you a CD you like, say it'sBrand New Strings, you go to starvingartist.com and authorize five dollars or three dollars or a dollar to be transferred from your account to the coffers of Ricky Skaggs, and eventually everybody's doing it and the site shows competing thermometer mercury graphs to indicate which band has what money, encouraging you to donate to your favorite artists to bolster their currency in the eternal contest, which becomes an absolute equalizer that makes musicians rich and gives record companies their just desserts for suing all those little kids for file-shaaring, and music is populist again and Woody Guthrie descends from heaven to forgive the apostates, but, more importantly, artists start earning a sum that's in direct proportion to the amount of entertainment they provide, which in the case of the millionaires like Toby Keith turns out to be very little indeed, and so his thermometer bottoms-out and finally disappears from view.

Whew!

And all that while I was sitting in the waiting room listening to a commercial country singer crow "I found love at the K-Mart store" (about the Martha Stewart bedroom line), which was marketing to people who watch a soap opera set somewhere in the South where actors with very bad fake accents kidnap each other's children and call each other Dixie and shit.

5:30 p.m. - 2005-09-28

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