Short story – “A Snowball’s Chance”

“A Snowball’s Chance”

“Hello, and welcome to Hell.”

“Excuse me?”

“Let me guess, you were a good person who led a good life, you don’t belong here, blah-blah-blah, blah-blah-blah-blah.”

“Well, yes.”

“Well, you still weren’t good enough and were sent here.”

“But where are the pits of fire and all that?”

“Ever hear of Global Warming?  As you humans warmed the planet, more and more of you became accustomed to the hot, humid, heat of Hell Classic.  So about a decade ago, the Big Man decided to make a change.  Hell froze over.  Instead of being jabbed with flaming pitchforks, you now get ice water enemas.  Instead of swimming in a boiling pool for all eternity, you now have to shovel snow for all of eternity.  And instead of demons nibbling off your toes, you now lose them to frostbite. 

“Welcome to Hell Zero … Degrees.  Don’t you just hate it?”

***

Several years ago, I was on a now defunct site where you posted stuff and got paid for visits, replies, etc.  As a way to get people to come back, I started doing monthly writing challenges.  I’d give a list of five words at the start of the month and ask people to write a story using all of them.  To show that it could be done, I’d have to write a story myself.  For one month I had the words: heat, humid, hot, hate, and hello.  I just started with, “Hello and welcome to Hell,” and it just sort of went from there.  I was looking at my stories from that site, and liked this one enough I figured I should repost it.

Some thoughts about Elon Musk

A year ago, I did a post titled Some thoughts on Elon Musk where I wondered if his talk about Mars was just a politician’s campaign promises?  A lot has happened since then concerning Musk, and I’ve thought about writing up some of my thoughts, but it seems like every day some new horrible thing comes out, and I worry I’d spend all this time making some coherent point only to have it buried under the day’s new shitshow.  But I had a couple of thoughts recently, and I figured I might as well share them.

My first thought was on his legacy.  As someone who occasionally writes stories set on a colonized Mars, I’ve been wondering – for some years – if I should set one in Musktown, or whatever.  Like in the past I’ve named things after Kim Stanley Robinson, or at least things from his Mars Trilogy.  But one thing that has been made certain over the last few months, is whenever humans do go to Mars, nothing there will be named after Musk.  I almost joked that maybe a sewage treatment plant, but honestly in a world where humans will need to recycle as much as possible, a sewage treatment plant will be a vital piece of infrastructure, and they’re not going to name it after some asshole.

My other thought was to wonder if some billionaire will one day fund a space mission to go out to Musk’s Roadster.  It would attach to the car and bring it back to Earth, just to burn it up in the atmosphere.  Hell, if you asked people to chip in $8, you could probably crowdfund the mission.

Random Story – Make them work for it

This is just an odd little story from my life.

With Christmas coming, I figured I’d let you know some wrapping tricks, in case you’re so inclined.

In my family, usually at Thanksgiving we’ll pick names for Christmas.  Sometimes there are shenanigans so that Person X will pick Person Y’s name so they can do some devious wrapping.  I usually just do devious wrapping on whoever I get.

A couple years ago, I picked one of my nephews.  I thought for a bit, and came up with an idea.  When we got together for Christmas, he got a wrapped box.  He took the wrapping off to find the box duct taped shut.  He dug through that, to find another duct taped box inside.  He dug through that, to find a third duct taped box.  Inside that, he found a clump of duct tape wrapping something the size of a gift card.  He got all that duct tape off to find a piece of cardboard, about the size of a gift card.  This confused him.  So that was when I walked over and handed him the gift card out of my pocket and said something like, “I guess I forgot to put it in.” I know my brother, his dad, got a good laugh out of it.

A related scheme, I think a few years earlier I got my other brother and I wrapped three or four boxes.  But I did put his gift card in it, I just tucked it under some crumpled newspaper in the outermost box.  So he dug through two duct taped boxes to find … nothing.  I then had to show him the gift card in the outermost box.  He got a chuckle out of it.