Hell is not fire and brimstone, although our ancient need to envision a place that delivers gaudy agony perfectly explains the popularity of Andrew Lloyd Webber. Hell is actually a parallel universe, exactly like the one we already inhabit, populated by the exact same people that we already know, except one thing: Every one perpetually behaves like it's the first six minutes after the alarm goes off on Monday morning.
Hell is filled with horrid-looking, droopy-eyed, apathetic people who groan and gawk in the mirror, pee loudly, and whose morals are such that they’d swap their grandmother’s liver medication for fifteen extra minutes of sleep. They are soulless heartbeats wrapped in skin. They are 90-year-old nuns who sputter the effword at innocent kittens underfoot.
Hostile moods aren't just for Monday mornings anymore. As daily stresses mount, by the time we get home after long days of work, school, lessons, classes and shopping, we're ready to blow a valve. According to singing behavior specialists the Mills Brothers, “You always hurt the one you love.“
Luckily, there’s something that works perfectly to help people snap out of their snarling, predator moods. It’s not therapy. It’s not anti-depressants. It's better than coffee. It's plastic and wires. It's...the telephone.
You slob! I just tripped over your slippers you left out. I’m sick of your bookmarks hanging over the sides of your book. Push them in! In! So that they jut out of the top of the book like...this!
[Phone rings]
What? I don't know where I learned the art of placing the bookmark! Certainly, I have no time to read. You see these dishes? They’re from your breakfast. I guess somebody's got to clean them. Here you read, I'll ---
[Phone rings]
---Just scrub the crusty yoke off this and load it into the -- by the way -- did you know this machine is called the dishwasher???--
[Picks up phone and responds in a tone akin to a wind chime after a soft breeze blow through at the end of a misty summer shower.]
Hellooooo? Omigoodness! It’s Laura! How are you? Oh, we’re just great. Hey, let me get the cordless, ‘kay? Just a sec---HAVE YOU EVER EVEN LOADED THE GODDAM DISHWASHER? HUH? AND WHERE’S THE CORDLESS? JESUS, CAN’T ANYBODY PUT THE CORDLESS BACK WHERE IT BE-- YES I SEE IT, SHUT UP... Hi, I’m back. I do? Thanks. Well, I FEEL great, too. And you...?
A phone call puts people on their best behavior. However, the phone call may interrupt and forever sidetrack advice that begins, “Here, let me show you a less stupid way to stack soup cans!”
Phone calls invite the world in. People are better behaved toward anybody outside of the family. (George Harrison said that the Beatles stopped sniping at each other when guest Billy Preston played on their “Let It Be” sessions.) The family has become the punching bag we slug when we’re sick and tired of being polite in public.
It’s not a bad thing. Your kids come home from someone else’s house. If the moment they come home they start mouthing off and fighting, you know that they had been well-behaved guests. If I pick up my daughter from a 4th grade sleepover and she is sweet to the host, (“Bye, Mrs. Lawrence, thanks so much for having me,”) then she jumps in my car:
“Good morning, sweetie,” I say.
“Drive, Dad!”
“How was your ---”
“I’m tired and cranky and Jennifer kept me up all night talking and...”
She begins to quietly sob.
“Are you all ri---”
“PLEEEEEEEEEEZ!!!!”
That tells me she was an angel and that she did me proud, and I should just shut up.
So the family is the cat we kick. We all put up with so much nonsense out there and keep a good stiff upper lip that it is otherwise unhealthy if we don’t go home and knock the stuffing out of each other.
Imagine, it’s 1963. Martin Luther King delivers a resounding speech to 200,000 people marching in Washington. He heads home, exhilarated but tired. “How was your day?” Coretta asks. He mumbles something, kicks over the ottoman. “What's wrong?” she asks.
He stews. "Where'd you put the comic section?”
“Where did I what?”
“Never mind!”
“Fine! I’m going to take a bath!”
The door slams behind her.
Softly, from behind the paper: “Free at last...free at last....”
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