Guide to Being Grumpy as Hell For No Reason.

I don’t believe in Hell. That’s just how I was raised. I was a Unitarian. They don’t believe in Hell. They believe almost nothing really, other than all people are good and that people in a position of privilege should always always always be pains in the asses and try their damndest to fix everything for everybody because they’re so smart and they know what’s best. That’s more or less it for that whole belief system. There’s a lot more to it than that, but this is the still-childishly-bucking-against-my-upbringing version. What are they gonna do? Condemn me to Hell? They can’t. They don’t believe in it. That’s why it’s so great to make fun of Unitarians. They have to forgive you for it right away, and their only recourse is passive aggressively not inviting you over for their annual “foods of the world” party where they get together and brag about how much they know about other cultures. And I don’t want to go to that anyway. Stupid Unitarians. Except: thanks for the whole “no Hell for me” thing, guys. It’s been great so far.

So I don’t have to believe in Hell. But I love thinking about Hell. I think I’ve figured out exactly what it’s like. For Americans. American Hell is an endless string of inconveniences piled on top of each other. Like even the inconveniences are incredibly, mind-blowingly inconvenient.

Here’s a typical day in American Hell: you have to wake up early (even though it's your day off) so you can pick up your Grandmother to drive across the state to get to your niece’s one year birthday party that you don’t even want to go to, and you have to pick up the cake, but when you get there the bakery section of the grocery store isn’t open yet, and nobody will help you even though the cake is sitting right there across the counter and you can see it, so you storm out and you call around to find a bakery that’s open, but the only one you can find is one of those vegan bakeries with the fruit-sweetened cake that’s just about the least fun thing for a one year old to eat, not to mention a choking hazard from all the crumbly apricot hunks, so you decide to go back to the grocery store with the bakery section that’s still closed to buy a pre-made grocery store cake and put the frosting on it yourself in the car on the way, but when you get to the check out counter, you realize you left your wallet at the vegan bakery… and it keeps going like this with flat tires and long bank lines because all the ATM’s are out of order, and you never get to the one-year-old niece’s birthday party that you didn’t even want to go to anyway because now you have a thousand other problems to deal with, because by the time you finally get there to pick up your Grandmother, she’s fallen in a non-injurious way, but it’s still serious-seeming enough that you have to take her to the emergency room where the vending machine will eat your last dollar instead of giving you the PayDay you don’t even want but you’re starving and it’s the only thing left and now you can’t eat it, and nobody you run into is helpful or even courteous because they’re all in the middle of their own Hell.

It’s as exhausting to live as it is to try and read that entire sentence. You don’t get a rest. You don’t get a period. You just have to keep going forever, and so does everybody else and it’s like a world where every living person is stuck in a stress dream they can’t wake up from. That’s American Hell.

And the funny thing about it is, Real America can turn into American Hell really fucking easily. Supremely fucking easily. That’s why all we Americans want to do is shove an “Angry Whopper” in our faces and watch American Idol. We’re scared of hell, and we know if we make a choice, even if it’s a bad one, we will at least not have to deal with anything more annoying than Ryan Seacrest for an hour. Which is a little like saying “our feelings will hurt less if we shoot ourselves in the leg,” but that’s the way it is. It doesn’t matter that we’re choosing Ryan Seacrest. The important thing is we’ve chosen, we’ve exerted what seems very much like control, and now our lives seem orderly for one hour that day. Is that so much to fucking ask, world? You get the point. America.

I’ve been stuck in American Hell a bit more than usual for a couple of months now. I’ve just had a bad luck run of logistical bullshit I don’t want to deal with but have to. I’ll spare you the bitch-and-moan details, but read the Guide to Totaling Your Girlfriend’s Brand New Car if you’re interested in knowing what I might have done differently. If I’d only taken my own advice, I’d be living in Mexico right now with a new family. I’m kind of morbidly curious about what Mexican Hell is like. It probably involves less anxiety over stupid shit and more anxiety over an “I can’t tell if I’d rather die of exposure or starvation”-type quandary.

Anyway, dealing with a pile of American Hell inconveniences can make you grouchy. All day. For no reason. I almost snapped at a girl in line at Potbelly’s the other day because she couldn’t hear my cold-addled mumble of “no mustard, no pickles, no oil,” and I had to repeat myself. How much of a baby am I? I almost lost it because I had to repeat myself at Potbelly’s. You know, Potbelly's, the incredibly conveniently located in my office building sandwich place where they make delicious sandwiches just about right away for not much money. Like my time is that valuable that I can’t repeat a phrase more than once. I had big plans for that particular 4 seconds. What an asshole I almost was. Potbelly’s order making has nothing to do with my massively overdue gas bill or my girlfriend’s rental car I’m paying for. They are separate. You have to be polite, even when you’re grouchy.

And you have to have a sense of humor about yourself, because no matter how much your life resembles American Hell, at least it’s not Mexican Hell or Guatemalan Hell, which is probably just August in Guatemala. That’s the tricky thing about American Hell. You don’t often pause for thankful reflection when you’re on your knees with a jerry-rigged paperclip device trying to jimmy your Visa card out from under the counter at some out-of-town Jiffy Lube, regardless of whether or not the way you simultaneously dropped it and kicked it so it skidded under there was an unbelievable million to one shot that could never be duplicated. But you should. That’s the prefect time for it. You should be thankful that your Visa isn’t the only meal you’ll have for a week and the Jiffy Lube guys aren’t Nazis. You’re on your knees already. That’s a great place for a silent prayer of thanks. Or at least you could start laughing uncontrollably when the obese Jiffy Lube owner/manager waddles up, asks what’s going on, assesses the situation and after a perfectly timed pregnant pause unhelpfully announces, “Well, at’s the dangdest thing I ever saw.”

If things get too stressful: remember it probably won’t make anything all that much worse if you’re 25 minutes late instead of 23. You’re going to get yelled at anyway. And you’ve always got time for a quick dance party in the handicap bathroom stall. Al you can do is your best, and if your best isn’t good enough, because sometimes it won’t be, you might as well not get too wound up about whatever’s happening. When you get too wound up, you just end up screaming at a Potbelly’s person or knocking over an old lady who’s not walking fast enough for you to get to the bank 20 seconds faster than you otherwise would. Relax. You can be inconvenienced. It’s ok. Cool yourself off with a nice dance party in the bank’s handicap bathroom stall. You have David Banner’s masterpiece “Like a Pimp” in your iPod. Brush your shoulders off, homie.

Life is not always like that part at the end of act two of a comedy movie where the hero’s like “how could things GET any worse,” and a dog pees on his leg. Except sometimes it is. The weird thing is, why doesn’t that guy in that movie ever start laughing hysterically? That’s what I would do if a dog walked up to me and peed on my leg while I waited for a bus in a thunderstorm right after I just got in a big fight about how “I don’t need any more of your help” with my annoying but somehow wise new friend that I met while I was trying to get across the country to stop a wedding. I would laugh like a jackass. Because that’s funny. Maybe I would fight an urge to kick the dog and then the dog would grab my pant leg and I’d fall in the mud just as the bus rode past and splashed more mud all over me. Then I’d start laughing. Hold on, let me go make a change to my formulaic screenplay. It’s called “American Hell,” and I’m trying to get Jack McBrayer involved.

If laughing hysterically or pausing to become even more late or dancing to David Banner in the bathroom stall don't help you out, read a book about holocaust survivors. Remember that analogy I made about the Visa card and the Jiffy Lube Nazis? That was easy for me to make, because I just read "Maus." I have it on the brain. Thank God, right? The God I don't believe in because I'm a Unitarian and I don't have to (except sometimes I do, just in case).

I don’t even know how to wrap this up now. I was going to have some kind of witty conclusion about having a sense of humor and being polite when things are awful, but I’ve got to find out how to reformat this letter in a way that seems kind of illegal to me, and I have to call the rental car place to see if I can drop it off Saturday instead of today because it’s stuck in the snow and it’s out of gas anyway, and I have to see if my roommate can track down our gas bill account number so I can at least pay a portion of the stupid thing, and I swear to God I will punch Alice right in the crotch if she gives me any more suggestions about how I can avoid being late to work tomorrow. Ah ha ha.