A Preview of Hell

I'm a religious person, but I don't spend a lot of time dwelling on the afterlife. That's because I've thought about it before, and I've never been able to grasp the concept of heaven or hell. Preachers describe heaven as a place of absolute joy where there are no problems and we just worship in the presence of God. Sounds boring to me. Without problems to take care of, what will we do with our time? Heck, I was really starting to get bored after six days of "relaxing" in Cancun. I can't imagine an eternity like that. And I have the same problem with hell, too. No matter how hard I tried, I've never been able to picture what hell would be like. After all, if it really were just a pool of fire where you were burned alive, after a few seconds your nerves would be burned off and you'd cease to feel the pain anyway, right? So hell is something I've never been able to envision, either.

Until last night.

Last night Meredith spent the night at a friend's house, and so Lisa and I had the night with just Natalie. On nights like that, when one of the kids is out, we usually try to do something special with the child who's left, maybe something that the other child wouldn't be interested in. Natalie loves crafts, so we took her to Michael's, which is a crafts superstore the size of a small Wal-Mart.

I think I had been to Michael's before once or twice, but I'd only run in to get something specific, and I'd always just asked at the front for what I'd wanted and someone had gone and gotten it for me. I'd never actually browsed the store before, like we did last night for about an hour and a half. And I have to tell you, I was blown away! I never knew such a place existed! Imagine browsing aisle after aisle of items and having no interest in any of them WHATSOEVER! I had no idea there was so much stuff in the world that I DIDN'T care about! I have never seen so much soft foam, balsa wood, fake flowers, and acrylic pens in my life!

It's sad that the most exciting aisle in the store for me was the candle aisle. While Lisa and Natalie continued browsing through the store, I pretty much stayed there and picked up a candle, read what was printed on it, smelled it and then thought, "Yep, that smells like linen all right!" Put that candle back; picked up another one. "Yup, oatmeal cookies!"

I also spent a bunch of time in the Halloween display aisle. In any other store I want nothing to do with the Halloween display aisle, as I find Halloween to be kind of stupid. In fact, at Wal-Mart or Bigg's or someplace like that I walk by the Halloween aisle and hope that none of the little automatically animated devices are motion sensitive because I don't need to hear a talking decapitated head ask me if I know why it has a headache. But there I was at Michael's, going through the aisle and pushing the button on every animated figure.

I was bored out of my mind. And the sad thing was that there was a Guitar World superstore right beside Michael's, but I'd promised before we left to stay in the crafts store and not wander off down the strip mall. After all, this was family time. So there I was, trapped in the store.

Trapped in my own personal hell.