HELL

Konichiwa my friends,

I’m in Japan on the last Teenage Bottlerocket tour of 2019! It’s been a very succesful, and very busy year, supporting our latest record, Stay Rad! Thank you to everyone who has supported the record or come out to a show! I’m a little pressed for time this tour, so rather than force an article, I’m going to instead share an excerpt from my latest book, The Death of You: A Book For Anyone Who Might Not Live Forever! Please enjoy, and if you haven’t checked out the book, click the link! If you have, and you enjoyed it please consider leaving an Amazon review, that shit helps a lot! Thank you as always, catch you when I’m back in the US!

Most of the major religions that believe in heaven also

believe in some kind of hell. No reward for a life well lived,

hell is heaven’s opposite. Instead of clouds and angels, hell

is associated with fire, El Diablo, and/or endless suffering

beyond imagination.

What exactly does “endless suffering beyond imagination”

mean? Does it mean burning and torture at the

hands of demons; fingernails pried off one by one and skin

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removed with a potato peeler? Do you get a paper cut in

between your toes, then it heals and someone gives you a

fresh one again? Does hell mean 24/7 Smashmouth’s “All-

Star” at full volume on eternal repeat?

I imagine there are people out there who wouldn’t mind

listening to Smashmouth. [Shiver.] I also imagine there are

people who have known great suffering already, for whom

the idea of eternal paper cuts doesn’t actually seem so

frightening. Which brings me to some sort of point about

hell: it has to be really personal. Just as one person’s vision

of heaven might fall short for another, hell can only be effective

if it’s tailored to the individual.

For example, I’m crazy allergic to cats. I don’t have anything

against cats, I just get really sneezy, itchy, and short of

breath if I’m around them for too long. In my version of

heaven, there are lots and lots of happy dogs. (There can be

cats too, but somehow I’m not allergic to them.) In my hell,

though, there are cats everywhere and I have no medication

and even though I wanna pet them and make friends, I

can’t because I can’t breathe. My real version of hell would

probably a lot more fucked-up than that, but you get the

point. Someone else might go to Miguel’s Cat Hell and find

themselves in their own Cat Heaven. So if Satan or whoever

in hell is in charge wanted to punish us both, he’d have to

put me in Cat Hell and the other person in some unimaginable

(to them at least) catless void.

Or let’s instead consider something we can all agree is

to be avoided. How about . . . being repeatedly stabbed and

burned for all eternity? Well, as I said before, some notion

of physical pain might not be a big deal compared to what

we actually experience in life. (Plus, can we even feel phys-

36 The Death of You

ical pain if we’ve died? Doesn’t shedding our physical body

imply also shedding physical sensations? But I digress.)

The point is: hell has to be deeper than our surface fears.

Let’s, for a moment, go back to heaven. If you’re in heaven,

have the endless-taco-bar, perfect-weather, hanging-with-

God existence, but one of your most beloved family members

is missing . . . well, that’s not heaven. On the opposite

side of the same coin, what if you’re in hell—burn-

and-stab

central HQ—but at the end of each torture session, you get

to spend a few minutes with all of your loved ones? Which

scenario would you take? Can all of the “heavenly” stuff

imaginable ever mean anything if you’re without the people

you love? And don’t we find that even the most hellish periods

of our lives are made at least tolerable thanks to the presence

and support of loved ones? The line between heaven

and hell can get pretty blurry—and that’s all down to love.