Whenever medieval mystics and other perverts talked about Hell, they liked to imagine gaudy Guginols of torture and abuse. Look at Bosch’s surreal labyrinths of misery for a particularly beautiful and grotesque example, or read Dante’s more lurid fantasies. Sulfurous monsters gnawing at your niblets, ironic pain and suffering, new frontiers in pitchforkery: It’s all there.
But with due respect to those sandal-wearing holy men, they’re wrong: Hell isn’t over-the-top. Hell is boredom. Hell is stagnation. Hell is, well, where the White Sox are.
Hell is being at .500, over and over, and over and over and over.