beautiful description of death

A terminally ill man had been visiting his pastor. As he was preparing to leave, he turned to his pastor and said, "Pastor, I am afraid to die. Tell me what lies on the other side."

Very quietly, the pastor said, "I don't know."

"You don't know?" the man asked incredulously. "You're a Christian man, you're a preacher. Don't you know what is on the other side?"

The pastor had been holding the handle of the door to his study. From the other side of the door came a sound of scratching and whining, and as he opened the door, a dog sprang into the room and leaped on him with an eager show of gladness.

Turning to his parishoner as the dog ran to the center of the room and stood by the nice new ottoman, the pastor said, "Did you notice my dog? He's never been in this room before. He didn't know what was inside. He knew nothing except that his master was here, and when the door opened, he sprang in without fear. I know little of what is on the other side of death, but I do know one thing: I know my master is there, and that is enough."

And that's when he kicked the dog for piddling on the furniture.

May today there be peas within you,
And lettuce and watercress too.
May you trust God that you are exactly
Where you are meant to be,
Unless you're in Harrisburg, or
Just outside Augusta, Georgia,
In which case you're probably screwed.
I believe that friends are quiet angels
Who quietly bear us along when our wings
Have trouble remembering how to fly.
(So please don't drop me. It's a long way down.)

The Golden Slippers

With only three days to go before Thanksgiving, the spirit of the season hadn't caught up with Donna yet. Cars were packed into the parking lot of the local supermarket, and it was even worse inside the store. Shopping carts and last-minute shoppers jammed the aisles and packed the checkout lanes so that the shortest one still would take at least twenty minutes.

In front of Donna were two small children, a boy about five years old and his little sister. The boy wore a ragged coat. Enormously large, tattered tennis shoes jutted far out in front of his much-too-short jeans. He clutched several crumpled dollar bills in his grimy hands.

The girl's clothing resembled her brother's. Her head was a matted mass of curly hair. Reminders of an evening meal showed on her small face. She carried a beautiful pair of shiny, gold house slippers from Aisle 6.

When the children finally reached the checkout register, the girl carefully placed the shoes on the counter. She treated them as though they were a treasure. The clerk rang up the bill. "That will be $16.09," he said.

Tinny Christmas music blared from Donna's cell phone, the sign of an impending call. "Myron! It's so good to hear from you!" she said loudly, oblivious to the annoyed stares of shoppers around her. "No, I'm just out finishing the shopping for Thursday. I got the candied yams for Mother, but I couldn't find the stuffing you said your daughter likes. Are you sure Stove Top even makes jellybean flavor?"

The boy laid his crumpled dollars atop the stand while he searched his pockets. He finally came up with $7.12. "I guess we will have to put them back," he said. "We will come back some other time, maybe tomorrow."

With that statement, a soft sob broke from the little girl. "But we need to buy them now," she wept.

"What do you mean, Myron?" Donna shrieked into her phone. "It's Monday evening, and I've been standing here for an hour at the supermarket with a twenty-pound turkey in my hands! How can Edith and Merkel even think about going to his father's?!

"Look, you give them a call and tell them we are not going to let them ruin Thanksgiving for everyone and visit his father just because the old man is 83 and all alone. He made it this far, he can make it one more year!"

The little boy cast an odd glance at Donna before turning back to his sister. "We'll go home and work on it," he said gently. "Don't cry. We'll come back."

Now other customers were shuffling nervously from one foot to the other, and a few were departing for longer but seemingly cheerier checkout lanes. One or two looked desperate enough to abandon their carts and make a break for another supermarket.

"I am not being unreasonable!" Donna shouted. "If you were with Dominion Wireless you could make that call for free! I get two thousand WheneverIDarnWellWant minutes each month, plus free weekends and even health benefits."

With a start, Donna realized that no one was moving. Her eyes swiveled onto a sniveling pair of waifs standing in front of her who suddenly began to quake. She turned her attention onto the cashier.

"Will you get them out of here?" she demanded.

"We were just going," muttered the boy. He fumbled past Donna with his sister, then surreptitiously added the golden slippers to her pile of groceries before ducking around to the exit with his sister.

Ten minutes later, Donna emerged pushing a cart loaded with groceries, still talking on her cell phone with her brother Myron. There, poking out of a bag, were the golden slippers. While the little girl pretended to be hurt and fell against Donna's legs to distract her, the older brother pulled the slippers out of the cart.

"MY PHONE!" Donna shouted. She scrambled across the sidewalk and grabbed the phone. "Myron, hold on a minute." She stood up and looked at the two children critically. "Oh, it's you. What hideous slippers you bought."

"We thought Jesus would like them," the little girl said.

"Oh swell, Myron. It's a couple of religious freaks," Donna said into the phone before putting it back down again. "What do you mean by that?" she asked.

The boy answered. "Our mommy has thyroid cancer and is going to heaven soon. Daddy said she might be with Jesus before Thanksgiving."

The girl spoke. "My Sunday school teacher said the streets in heaven are shiny gold, just like these shoes. Won't mommy be beautiful walking on those streets to match these shoes?"

Donna rolled her eyes, and got back onto her phone to tell Myron how Child Welfare needed to do a better job keeping children off the streets. The little girl tearfully watched her scurry into the distance, until her brother showed her the twenty-pound turkey he had been able to snag too.

Somehow, they knew, it would be a happy Thanksgiving after all.

Moral: If we can't "hear you now," we must be deaf -- so just hang the freaking phone up already.

The Pit of Shame
Curious to see what the original is based on? We don't have the original story on our web site, but you can find "The Golden Slippers" all sorts of places on the Internet.

Mouse trap

A mouse (whose name was Clay), overhearing the farmer and his wife talking about something they had bought to "take care of the mouse" looked through a crack in the wall in hopes of seeing some kind of food. To her dismay, from the small plastic wrapper emerged not cheese but a shiny deadly mousetrap.

Devastated, the mouse retreated to the farmyard (which was called Trump Acres) and took up a loud lament, "A mousetrap's in the house! A mousetrap's in the house!" and soon enough the entire mouse population of the farm was alternately crying "Doom!" and beating their undersides with tiny clenched paws.

The chicken (whose name was Alla), scratching in the dirt for corn, clucked in annoyance at the commotion. "Little mouse, I can tell this is a grave concern to you," the hen said seriously before walking away. "But it is of no consequence to me, and I cannot be bothered by it. Just suck it up, princess."

The pig (whose name was Adam), still half-buried in the trough, was more sympathetic. "When I win the next farmyard election," he snorted before re-submerging headfirst in the pork barrel, "I promise to take immediate action to reduce the number of mousetraps in the house by thirty percent within three years. In the meantime, I can do nothing but pray… but be assured I will. Remember that I do respect you as a person."

 

The cow (whose name was Felisha), which had been chewing absently on the farmer's five-leafed bumper crop, only looked off dreamily into the sunset as the mouse repeated its terrible news. "That's a bummer," she said before walking away. "Say, did you know that I'm planning to develop the land in my stall? I'm going to call it Cowtopia."

The mouse sat and absorbed these various cruelties until the sun began to sink, then gathered herself and stiffly returned to the stall to feed her young for what may be the last time, and to think.

That very night, a loud snap echoed throughout the house, and the farmer's wife (whose name was Melania)hurried to the trap, knife in hand, to add yet another tail to her growing collection. In the darkness, she did not realize that the trap had caught not a mouse but a terrible snake, one filled with deadly venom, lured there by Clay and now caught by the tail.

The farmer (whose name was Donald) rushed his wife to the hospital, where she was treated with potent anti-venom, but infection set in, followed by terrible fever.

Chicken soup, the farmer thought after returning home, under the studied gaze of the mouse lingering unnoticed on the pantry shelf just above him. Chicken soup is just what you need when you have a fever.

Not long after, the chicken's neck lay pinned across a block of wood by the farmer's mighty left hand. The right hand placed the hatchet gently on the chicken's neck, then lifted it up to deliver a mighty swing. The last thing the chicken saw with its tear-filled eyes was the mouse looking down from the farmer's shoulder, a look of grim satisfaction on her pointy little snout.

When the fever did not break, the pig soon found itself hanging upside-down from a tree in preparation to feed all the friends and neighbors who had come to tend the farmer's wife in her illness. As its life drained away, the pig noticed the mouse distributing leaflets and campaign signs. and realized that this time he had lost the election.

Sadly, the farmer's wife soon died. So many people attended her funeral that the farmer needed to slaughter his cow in order to feed them all.

"But what will become of Cowtopia now?" the cow told the smug little mouse, as she walked into her final stall. "By the way, I really hate you."

 

At the wake, several mourners remarked on the interesting kibbles the farmer had thought to add to the rice dish, and many of the children enjoyed playing with and petting the "gerbil" that they assumed had escaped from its cage. Several even showed the rodent to their mothers and fathers, who oohed and aahed over the nice pet and patted it on the head before wiping tears from their eyes, and one even kissed it.

But as his visitors finally filtered home, the farmer felt a cold shadow drape over him, and he shivered as he perceived the dark and mirthless eyes of the mouse upon him.

Not long after, a mysterious illness swept across the countryside, killing millions. The farmer, one of those unfortunates who did not die, spent the rest of his days locked in a sanitarium, haunted forever by visions of a large mouse with preternatural intelligence staring heartlessly at him with eyes that spoke of the void.

And so, wise reader, the next time you hear of someone facing a problem and think it doesn't concern you, remember that when one of us is threatened, all of us are at risk. We must keep our eyes upon one another and stay involved, or suffer the consequences.

Moral: The life you save could be your own.


The Pit of Shame
Curious to see what the original is based on? We don't have the original story on our web site, but you can find "Mouse Trap" all sorts of places on the Internet.

The Rescue

The Rescue

In the dark of a November morning in Markle City, a thunderstorm capsized a milk truck on the Number 17 Route. Stranded and in trouble, the buxom milkmaid Holly and her assistant sent out a call for help over the truck's CB radio.

The call came in and the city aldermen went at once into a closed-door meeting, where they worked long into the night to discuss ways to blame the mishap on the mayor, who represented another political party and was coming up for re-election. The next afternoon, they called a press conference that no one came to (except for a reporter from the Washington Post, who thought someone had mentioned free beer) and asked for a volunteer to risk life and limb to save the buxom milkmaid Holly.

All eyes swiveled on the hapless reporter.

Cursed by his misfortune at being the only attendee, the newly commissioned Rescuer of the Hapless (yet Buxom) Milkmaid Holly and her precious cargo jumped into his car and in a tizzy lurched around the town square, knocking down one newsstand after another that sold The New York Times.

After the reporter had driven off in the general direction of the Number 17 Route, the people of Markle City began their long, anxious wait — for the stores to open. Christmas was only forty-five days away, and the stores had not opened yet that morning for them to finish their Christmas shopping. What was worse, the lack of fresh milk had driven the local coffee shop cappuccino clientele into a caffeine-junkie rage that threatened to leave the lower part of the city in flames.

An hour later, the reporter from the Washington Post returned, screeching his car into the scattered remains of the newsstand that had once sold The Miami Herald, sending grocery fliers and tattered copies of Cosmopolitan flying.

The cheering people ran to greet the reporter and the buxom milkmaid Holly, who emerged from the fogged-up car, breathing rather heavily. Falling exhausted on the ground, the reporter announced that there hadn't been any room in the back seat for them to bring both the buxom milkmaid Holly AND her assistant, who had made the ultimate sacrifice by being left behind.

"We never would have made it past first base otherwise," the reporter explained, a little off-balance. "I mean, trying to hit one out of the park – wait, no, a line drive into left field… no no no, I mean, well, um, I would have struck out," he finished, thumping himself doltishly on the forehead when he realized he would never get a Pulitzer for this slew of commentary.

Not much into baseball after the recent "blink and you missed it" World Series, the city aldermen held another emergency meeting in order to determine how the mayor once again had been at fault. But as they spoke in guarded whispers and charted out their strategies on the white board, 36-year-old Smirkov Grinn took another look at the flushed and radiant buxom milkmaid Holly, smiled determinedly, and stepped forward.

His mother grabbed his arm, pleading, "Please don't go! Your father died in a freak milking accident ten years ago and your younger brother Jocko has been lost ever since you took him to Wal-Mart this past June. Smirkov, you cannot go, you are all I have left!"

With a steely glint in his eye, Smirkov replied, "Ma, I have to go. What if everyone in this town said, 'I can't go, let someone else do it?' I cannot help but do my duty. When the call for service comes, we all must take our turn and let the chips fall where they may."

Extracting himself from her iron grip, Smirkov leapt into the station wagon before she could refasten herself, simultaneously rolled up the windows and locked the doors in an amazing display of dexterity that could have only resulted from countless years of practice, and breathed a sigh of heavy relief. As his mother threw herself in front of the car to stop him, he threw the car into reverse and prepared for the rescue by driving to a neighboring town where he knew there was a coffee shop with a full stock of steamed milk.

An hour passed, and then another, and another, leaving the town aldermen wondering how to blame this new predicament on the mayor, as they were not nearly as creative as they were politically ambitious.

Finally a single headlight pierced the fog, and the old station wagon sputtered to a stop. Smirkov's head was sticking out the driver's window because he had never bothered to refill the washer fluid and the windshield was now creased with road salt.

Cupping his hands, the chief alderman asked, "Hoy, there, did you find the buxom milkmaid Holly's assistant?"

"Yeah." Smirkov grumbled with the growl of a man who has been sorely disillusioned. "Yeah, tell my mum I found the bum. It was Jocko."

Their mother was so overjoyed that she blubbered uncontrollably while the brass section of the marching band played one song, the woodwinds played a second, and slide whistles commandeered the third.

Jocko looked overwhelmed and uncomfortable. Smirkov wore a gigantic smile on his face — but whether it was the grin of someone truly as pleased as punch at finding his brother or of a frustrated postal worker with a handgun in his mail bag, no one knew for certain.

"Guess you're happy now, Ma, right?" Smirkov said at last, trying to make the best of things.

The stare their mother gave Smirkov was withering. "As if that even matters to you! Running off like that, risking your life on a fool's errand, without a thought for how it would affect your poor old mother! Didn't it occur to you that I'd be sick with worry at the thought of losing my second son as well?"

"Uh …well…"

"No, I don't suppose you did!" she said harshly. "Ever since you were born, the only one you've ever cared about has been yourself!

"And YOU!"

She rounded now on Jocko, who had survived his harrowing ordeal alongside the road by drinking skim milk and eating the foam padding in his seat.

"The nerve you have! Where have you been for the last five months?! Don't you know that I love the two of you so much that I would rip my legs off and feed them to crocodiles if I merely thought it would make you happy, and you can't even bother to call me or send me a lousy card on my birthday!"

And then Ma bobbled away.

"Well," Jocko said at last, as their sobbing mother receded in the distance. "Glad to see I didn't miss a thing."

Moral: If you dump your mother to rescue another, and it's your brother... don't bother.

The Pit of Shame
Copyright laws prevent us from sharing the original inspirational story that serves as the basis for today's mailing. Fortunately, lots of people on the Internet have posted stories like "Rescue at Sea" illegally for just such an emergency.

Southwest Arizona Rotten-Luck Tantra Totem

Southwest Arizona Rotten-Luck Tantra Totem

Do not keep this message. The tantra totem must leave your hands within 96 hours if you are to receive an unpleasant surprise. (This is true, even if you are not superstitious, and especially so if you are stupid and gullible.)

INSTRUCTIONS FOR A HARD-LUCK LIFE

1. Give people exactly what they ask for, no more than that and even if you know they meant something else entirely.
   
2. Memorize people's credit card numbers.
   
3. When Trump says, "You're fired," reply, "No, YOU are," and flick the match into his comb-over.
   
4. Believe everything you hear, spend all your cash, and sleep in until 11 a.m.
   
5. When you say, "I love you," make sure you have an ulterior motive.
   
6. When you say, "I'm sorry," do something rotten first so that they know you're not just goofing around.
   
7. Be engaged to be married for at least six months if you plan to leave them at the altar.
   
8. Believe in lust at first sight.
   
9. Never laugh at anyone's dreams. Belittle them as seriously as possible.
   
10. Love deeply and passionately, until someone better comes along. (Yes, it will hurt, but your pain will quickly fade.)
    
11. In disagreements, fight to win. Name-calling works when logic won't.
    
12. Judge people by their mothers, then by how they dot their I's.
    
13. Talk faster than people can think, you might be able to sneak something by.
    
14. When someone asks you a question you don't want to answer, smile and say, "Doesn't the world have problems enough without us wasting time on this trivial issue?"
    
15. Remember that great love and great achievements involve great risk, and resolve to find some easier way to do it.
    
16. Call your mother names.
    
17. Remember the three R's: Rage, Rum, and Remembering to Skip #17. (The fourth R, "redrum," is copyrighted, and we don't want to go through that again, do we?)
    
18. Don't let a little dispute injure a great friendship. Make sure it's completely dead so that it won't come back to haunt you.
    
19. When you realize you've made a mistake, take immediate steps to blame someone else.
    
20. Smile when picking up the phone. The telemarketer will find you so enjoyable he will get all his friends to call as well.
    
21. Marry someone you love to talk to. As you get older, you'll want a doormat to dump all your problems on.
    
22. Spend some time alone, especially when you're the only intern on call.
    
23. Open your arms to change, but don't let go of their hair.
    
24. Remember that silence is usually the easiest answer.
    
25. Read more books about TV.
    
26. Live a good, honorable life. When you get old and think back, you'll realize how much leeway you have before people will suspect anything.
    
27. Trust in God and race your Geo Tracker like hell on wheels.
    
28. In disagreements with loved ones, deal thoroughly with the current situation so that they're completely frazzled by the time you dredge up the past.
    
29. Read between the lines, even the ones that were never written.
    
30. Share your knowledge so that everyone knows how smart you are.
    
31. Be gentle with the earth. It's the best way to avoid yard work
    
32. Pray. People will vote for you.
    
33. Never interrupt when you are being flattered. You deserve the praise.
    
34. Mind your own business, and never forget that the whole world is your business.
    
35. Don't trust people who doesn't close their eyes when you kiss. (After all, you're the only one who should be looking around while frenching.)
    
36. Once a year, go home to pick up some more clean laundry.
    
37. If you make a lot of money, use it to help others while you're still alive, or you will never reap any of the rewards yourself.
    
38. Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a stroke of bad luck.
    
39. Learn the rules -- then lord it over others who break them and suffer the consequences.
    
40. Remember that the best relationship is one where your love for each other is greater than your need for each other - unless you're referring to your partner.
    
41. Judge your success by what you had to give up in order to get it; the more you abandoned, the better the prize!
    
42. Remember that your character is your destiny, but don't expect that to make any practical sense.
    
43. Approach love and cooking with reckless abandon, just like Jeffrey Dahmer did.
    

Now, here's the FUN part!

Send this to at least five people and your life will become more interesting

0-4 people: Your life will gain more attention.
5-9 people: Your life will gain a helluvalot of attention.
9-14 people: You will have at least five surprises in the next three weeks, probably consisting of mail bombs, poisoned chocolates, and drive-by shootings. (Don't fret, you've earned it!)
15 and above: Everyone figures that someone else will take care of you, so you will be completely ignored.

Your first stroke of bad luck occurred when you received this tantra totem. We promise that you will receive even more bad luck within four days of relaying it.

P.S. Do not shoot the messenger. We have already been shot by enough bad luck.

A copy of the original inspirational e-mail that we are parodying may be found at http://web.utk.edu/~dap/NepGLTT.html. We are not responsible for feelings of warm fuzziness, hyperglycemia, or ice cream headaches that result from reading the original.

Do it today!

Let me tell you about my brother Jocko. When he was a boy, Jocko had great difficulty in school. He was classified as educationally defunct, a condition that required both patience and medication (not for him, but for his parents, teachers, and especially his loving older brother).

But Jocko was a happy kid with a soft-shoe dance step that lit up the room, particularly when he would dance right into the wall partway through and knock a dozen framed pictures and a shelf full of knick-knacks from Mexico onto his head. Our parents acknowledged his academic difficulties but always tried to take a positive, if stretched, spin on things. "That's great, Jocko!" Ma would say. "You spelled 'cat' with only one E this time. I'm so proud of you."

You'll notice that I'm referring to Jocko in the past tense. Unfortunately we lost Jocko during a sale at Wal-Mart shortly after he graduated from high school this last June. Thanks to Jocko's inimitable fashion sense, an overenthusiastic shopper (according to the forensic know-it-all's) mistook him for a set of irregular sheets that were on sale for fifty percent off, paid for him at the checkout lane and shoved him in the trunk of her car with tons of other low-cost, low-quality items and drove off.

I have held out hope all this time that he would wander out of the dressing room, a changed man, but it hasn't happened. Today the police notified me that they have pulled his lucky underpants from the river, the pair that he swore he would never take off as long as he lived, since it was the pair he was wearing when he met Katee Sackhoff at a science fiction convention.

I've had to accept the painful truth: Jocko is dead, and I'm out the fifty bucks he owed me.

One of the worst things for me is the tragic sense of loss. Jocko wasn't a particularly articulate fellow, but his life was one of unique achievement. A fantasy writer, he has left hundreds of tremendous story ideas unwritten and undeveloped; a humorist, he had a unique knack for building up a mailing list to thousands of people and then ceasing all humor-related writing for 18 months at a time. And while I graduated from high school right on schedule, at age 18, Jocko graduated in record time. (True, it was two months before he turned 35, so it wasn't a particularly good record, but that's not the point.) Jocko was a man among giants; given time, I have no doubt he would have been even less.

Worse, I am plagued with regrets of my own. If I had known that fateful moment by the linen department was the last time I would see him, I wouldn't have asked him if the Lederhosen made me look fat. I would have said, "Jocko, where on earth did you leave the TV remote?"

I also would have taken the time to count the many blessings he brought to his loved ones every time he left the room. I would have spent our Wal-Mart trip appreciating his cantankerous smile, his cacophonous laughter, his co-dependent affection for others, and the way he was so good at getting the Coke machine to dispense free product without the machine falling on top of him just like it shows in the little warning cartoon.

When you put all Jocko's good attributes on the scale and balance them with all his irritating traits such as the CD player that was always blaring out white Christian "rap," the amount of hair he had while I was completely bald, the dirty socks that crawled around under his bed and wandered the hallways late at night, the loud tuba music that would come from his room while I was trying to sleep because he had insomnia and decided to practice at 3 a.m., the times he used to lock me on the porch roof in my underwear when we were children, or even the time he let a stupid bird loose in the car while I was driving and I ended up crashing through the neighbor's fence and into the in-ground swimming pool being used as a temporary aquarium for displaced sand sharks, or the times he would follow me around middle school like a little lost and slightly hearing-impaired puppy, or the time he thought it was really funny to run refrigerator magnets round and round my entire Stan Freberg cassette tape collection ... well, I think you can easily guess how it all measures out.

But now Jocko is gone, and with him has gone my opportunity to tell him how I've always felt to have him for a brother. I won't get another chance to tell the miserable so-and-so all I would have wanted him to hear, but if you have a younger brother, you still can do it. Tell your kid brothers what you would want them to hear if you knew it would be your last conversation!

The last time I talked to Jocko was the day we went to Wal-Mart. He called me to say, "Hi, Smirkov! Look at these skis! I bet I can walk all the way to the pet section while wearing them," and then tripped right into the fish tanks. That memory gives me something to treasure forever.


If there is any purpose at all to Jocko's death, it'd be the first time anything that chowderhead ever did that had a reason. Maybe it's to make others appreciate more of life and to have people, especially families, take the time to let each other know how we feel about one another.

MORAL: When you're parked on a suspension bridge and dragging that body
out of the trunk, remember -- he's not heavy, he's your brother.

Pit of shame
Due to copyright laws, we are unable to share with you the original vignette that we are parodying here. However, you may see it posted illegally at: www.inspirationalstories.com/4/460.html

Heaven can wait

Matt Wegman pulled onto the interstate and felt the smooth acceleration of his sport utility vehicle. The roadside scenery fell behind as the road raced on, and Wegman felt completely at peace.

From time to time he would run into a pothole or run over a small family sedan on its way to the Jersey Shore, but with his SUV's massive frame and superior suspension system, he barely noticed the bump in the road even as the other motorists were dispatched in flowering red balls of fire beneath his wheels.

Forty miles and three-quarters of a tank of gas later, it suddenly occurred to Wegman that he was dead. He remembered dying; he recalled those last desperate weeks in Texas, gasping for fresh air that could not be found; and he remembered that he had traded in his SUV, affectionately called Bessie, years earlier for a Hummer. He began to wonder where the road was leading them.

He came upon a high, white stone wall along the right side of the road, just as the fuel light came on. The wall was made of the finest marble, and far up the hill he saw a tall arch that glowed in the sunlight.

When he drew close, he saw that the arch was set over a magnificent gate made of mother-of-pearl, and the street on the other side of the gate looked like it was made from the purest gold. He parked the SUV, let out a low whistle, and thought, "Man, I'd love to try the four-wheel drive on that!"

A man seated at a desk to one side of the gate, with the dirt-stained clothes and hefty frame of a laborer, looked up as Wegman stepped out of Bessie, and smiled. "Hi," he said. "Can I help you?"

Wegman tried not to react as the man reached out a grease-stained hand. He forced a smile and asked, "Excuse me, where are we?"

"This is -- hell!" The man screamed, and grabbed his wrist as a wasp stung him on the back of his right hand. From beyond the gate came the sounds of happy laughter, mixed with birdsong and carried aloft on a sweet-smelling breeze with the merest suggestion of wildflowers in full bloom. Softly from the background came the gentle susurrations of a river whose mere thought filled the receptive heart with new life.

"Err," Wegman said, an eye on Bessie's fuel gauge. "Could I trouble you for some gas?"

"It's not a problem at all," the man at the desk said, sucking at the welt now growing on his hand. "Come inside, and I'll be happy to direct you to some of the best places to get some. We have a burrito stand just down the street, and a few blocks away there's a Chinese restaurant that's a great place to get lots of gas."

Everyone's a comedian, thought Wegman, as the man gestured and the gate swung open.

"Can old Bessie," said Wegman, climbing into his SUV, "come in too?"

"Oh dear," the man said. "I'm sorry, sir, but we don't allow those inside. Besides, this isn't the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Our roads are so smooth you won't even notice you're driving anywhere."

Wegman thought a moment, then turned back onto the road and continued on his way.

Just as it seemed Bessie was running on fumes and surely would conk out, Wegman came to a dirt road leading through a gate that looked as if it had never been closed. There was a soft, broken-down split-rail fence. As he approached the gate, he saw a man inside, leaning against an apple tree and strumming on an acoustic guitar. On the fields beyond the man, children raced back and forth, kicking soccer balls to the shouts and jeers of parents. Rows and rows of identical houses stretched out as far as the eye could see, under a shimmering brown haze that filled the air above.

"Excuse me!" Wegman called to the man. "Do you mind if I come in?"

The guitarist looked up. He had a tired face and brown eyes that seemed lined with care and worry. About him hung the aura of a man used to newspaper deadlines, a man deeply acquainted with role-playing games, and a man who while deeply gifted artistically had never been able to make it commercially as a rock musician.

"Yeah, sure, come on in," he said, and he turned back his attention to the chords for "Blowin' in the Wind," which Wegman had not ever heard in 6/8 time, minor key before.

"What about Bessie?" Wegman asked, patting his SUV on the side of the door.

"Yeah, bring her in," the guitarist said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder at a nearby convenience store. "You can fill her up over at the pump."

Wegman grabbed a Coke and some Slim Jims from the convenience store, then walked to the pump to fill Bessie's tank. An LED display on the bump listed the price as $6.579 per liter. When he had paid, he drove toward the man who was sitting by the tree.

The gate and fence were nowhere to be seen; everywhere Wegman looked, the same soulless suburbia rolled on and on without interruption. There was no way to leave.

"What do you call this place?" Wegman asked.

"This is hell," the man answered. "My name's Lou, by the way."

Wegman shook the proffered hand enthusiastically. "Well, that's confusing," he said, pausing only to choke for five minutes on the ground-level ozone. "The man down the road said that was hell too."

"Oh, you mean the place with the clean air, hydrogen-powered cars, fresh water and happy animals frolicking beneath rows of trees?" said Lou. Overhead the sun squatted motionless over a landscape that never knew the peace of night. "Nope. That's heaven."

"Doesn't it make you mad for them to use your name like that?"

"No, we're just happy that they screen out the folks who would leave their best friends behind."

Moral: With gas prices so high, people who drive SUVs can just go to hell.

Pit of shame
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