DANTE HIGH-FIVES BRADY ON THE STICKER THING

Every once in a while when that old bubble of inspiration wells up I like to steal away to a grove beside a babbling brook where, steeped in birdsong and breezy sighs and generally poetic ambience, I can suitably carry on the ancient poetic tradition of inventing new hells, to accommodate certain individuals in ways more suited to these changing times, or 'do a Dante,' as I put it if anybody asks, which of course in this drearily prosaic age nobody ever does, ergo I'm pointing it out for the first time publicly here, so take it or leave it.

Dante was a real expert at Hadean design and had a similar no-holds-barred approach, though he tended to go for general levels of eternal torment, rather than the individualized facilities I prefer. As to the big D's reasons for imagining infernos, I'm sure he had a major infernoload of reasons right there in his own day and age, just as I do, and so had to be selective, you can't invent a new pit of perdition for every pain in the ass that comes down the pike; infernal design takes time, with priority based on need.

I don't mean to imply that Dante had any less reason for all his hard work in this regard than I do now, but a glance around will tell you that perditional expansion has become a matter of some urgency in our time; besides, Dante was a pioneer, so he inevitably missed a few, not to mention the fact that progress practically goes hand in hand with hell development. Such creative condemnations relieve the tension and make this a better world to live in than it would ever be otherwise, as Dante was no doubt aware, I mean you can feel it in the push of his lines.

Also, Hadean architectural design affords me greater understanding of the deeper motivations and the many sources of the big D's inspiration, not to mention the personal satisfaction involved in seeing a successful design put to effective use, such as the one I just finished for select denizens of Wall Street, who will bake in the ashes of their fortunes while watching their unshorted stock prices fall for all eternity.

It's been a busy week. Just now I was devising an infernal program for the inventor of those stickers they put on things in stores, that you peel off when you get the thing home and find out the sticker won't come off but leaves a scratchy patch of devilishly gooey tackiness that you have to work at for years over the otherwise pristine surface of the otherwise beloved product until you finally give up trying and seethe a little down the decades each time you use whatever it is that has been permanently uglified by that tacky smear right there in of course the most prominent place, and I came to think that for the sticker malefactor, mentioned nowhere in Dante, a nice maximally negative eternity would be just the thing, in which said individual, as a life-sized product in the much-overheated Bargain Basement of Hell, is bodily wrapped in giant versions of these sticker tags and eventually purchased at a ripoff price by an irritable consumer-demon with pointy claws and all of time on its hands, and is taken home and peeled at for eons in growing frustration, using boiling water and various superheated noxious fluids together with various ineffective scraping tools, and then, when all raggedly stripped and tackily gummy, this sticker person is returned and restickered and put back on the shelf for resale, and so on throughout eternity.

I think this would be good, and I know Dante high-fives me on that; besides, he's in heaven, where moneymen are barred and there are no prices, so it's one big high-five anyway.