Yours infernally and Mr. Big in more halcyon times. He (his registered name is Grayson) is the one with all the gray hair. Although he adamantly demews it, I have a growing suspicion he secretly dyes it. How else to explain those little empty vials of Grayson Formula® “ Specially formulated for those with receding feline” which keep turning up in the litter box? Unless it’s the work of my bald-headed neighbor. Of course—that’s it! I don’t know why I didn’t think of it sooner. I call Mr. Big Mr. Big because he is big, and every inch a mister: a special breed of feline machismo that’s nothing less than your typical tom. (That’s one thing about we creative writerly types: we’re never at a loss to come up with a good name for a cat.) If you have one or more cats desperately in need of a good name (just like their ‘owner’), you may contact The D.A. during his current Hell-seein’ period at dave@writesofman.com for special rates. Any and all names will be forwarded in strictest confidence on white 24lb. hellum in a plain unmarked envelope. No one will ever know it was me who came up with the goods, leaving you to go around bragging you thought (it, them) up all by yourself. (Price includes authorized Certificate of Exclusive Bragging Rights.) PHOTOGRAPH, n.  “Voodoo spirit come from white man box” wisely considered, in most primitive societies, to be the work of The Devil.

Hades, 89th night of Lucifer in the Year of Our Lord, 23007

Above, All, You the Living:

What words of mine can possibly give you to fathom in what unprecedented scriptural straits I presently find myself as a consequence of the commission so lately fallen to me; or impart to you under what chroniclistic trial of Job I now labor, even as Sisyphus, as I now proceed to enter upon, and acquit myself of, the overwhelming bargain so literally placed upon my shoulders, stooped as they are; or ever, though my nights and the nights that follow be endless night, convey to you how it is but a pittance compared  to the all-the-more-oppressive confidence placed in me: an unrelenting millstone which threatens to crush me, my all-too-mortal flesh, at every lapse of writerly hubris; the all of which I did not seek, but was rather sought after for, and for which I have only just now, in good faith duly bargained (the whole being presented to me as an offer I could not reasonably refuse).

Why Lucifer [“light-bearer”], archangel so long and direly fallen of Heaven, should have chosen me of all earthly scribes to be the official chronicler of His Devil’s-eye View of Life on Earth® will perhaps never be known. Yet, had the interview not been entirely one-sided, the author believes he would have posed that very question, among others, had he not found his lively and wonted satirist’s tongue, upon coming face-to-grim visage with His Satanic Majesty, unwontedly frozen in its vessel, as it were a slice of raw coward’s liver. Could it be, in putting forth His request (which was more in the nature of a command performance) that He sensed in the celebrated  author of The Celestial Cup,  a religious satire of no small ill-repute, just the right and requisite cynical bent which the job description called for?

He had called; and, finding me at home, lost amongst dog-eared reference books and my no-less-tattered  thoughts, took it upon Himself to make the necessary travel arrangements; whereupon I presently found myself in what I am now, as of this moment, at some pains to express to you as my present place of employment. How to describe it?

I was not long arrived in this immense, clamorous chamber that is Utter Chaos and Eternal Damnation, when I looked me down into the endless void that lay below and before me and was All Hopelessness and Despair. There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: “Milton! You who were with me in the scribbling, blindly! That discourse you planted in the canon, has it become devout? Will it be exhumed this year? Or has Robert Frost disturbed its bed?” But he plunged on, heedless, as  blindly as ever in this Paradise of his own making, Lost seemingly, for a way out of the Chaos, and with every appearance  of carrying on in this benighted, long-handed manner for a further 235 years of long-winded obscurity, a death exceeding death. This had the immediate  effect of dampening my enthusiasm for the appointment. However, it was only some few phantasmal visions and remorseful second thoughts later, when, through the sulphurous, ever-roiling gloom, I fleetingly caught sight of one Dante, he of old and long late of Florence, in the Inferno of his own creation, still toiling away with many a heart-rending sigh and moan on the final draft, these seven hundred years on—still trying to make of it a Divine Comedy—that I began to get a foreboding of the protracted stenographic  interval, the living Hell, which lay before me.

He, Lucifer, Grand Inquisitor (read Job Interviewer From Hell) had put it to me this way: Having had ample opportunity these intervening years since the dawn of man to observe first hand the consistent sinfulness of his nature (in which morality play His role as Tempter, if He did say so Himself, had been no mere bit part); and having likewise observed the Earthly stage he has continually strutted and fretted his ‘our’ upon, lo these many milleniums, He bethought Himself (Well, that does it! How dare he leave the ‘h’ off anything!) that the time had come for Him to set forth not merely His observations, but His long-held prejudices about those very habits. And so it was that He spake unto me thus, saying that if I would (though it came out sounding for all the Underworld like must) undertake to chronicle His every word that was The Word®, and compile the whole of these Devilitions® in the earthly editorial manner of a lexicon in many volumes, that He would permit me, upon completion, to return to Earth, for whatsoever shall remain to me of my God-given days. (Something, He allowed, He had done for no other soul, dying or dead.) And thereupon, when at such time as I am called to my final rest, He would see to it that I return not here, to this scriptural Purgatory, as I fully deserve, but give cause to have me spirited into that other- worldly perdition, the name of which He could not at the moment bring himself to utter, but would denounce at the appropriate time, and that I would get my Great Reward. (That place, He spat out with more contempt than I ever thought one syllable could bear, yea, that place that shall presently go unspoken knows, there be greater likelihood  that a Kamil shall pass through the eye of a cockpit door than that thou shalt pass through the mettle detector  that be the Pearly Gates.) The alternative, He went on to contemn, was that He would return me to Earth immediately, to live out all of my miserable godforsaken days, but that, come Judgment Day, I would most assuredly be making the return trip, for Eternal night, and change. The choice, He spat out, is up to thee…Hobson. As He so diabolically spun it, I could enjoy some few less of my best days on Earth, and go to Heaven (there, He got it out), or I could live out the rest of my ill-fated days on Earth—and damned well go to Hell!  I, in turn, rationalized my will to survive thus: I could refuse to testify against my fellow man, citing a technicality, that my name was, in fact, Madison, and ultimately end up back here with him and his entire family; or I could turn state’s evidence against him (that of his sinful existence), and rat him out—thus saving my own skin and accompanying soul—and all without so much as a pang of conscience—since every damned one of him meaning you is going to wind up here sooner or later anyway.

And so here I reside. An average work night (there is no day) is as follows: He bespeaks Himself rapidly in any of the many tongues in which He variously babbles; and I, by virtue of Added Memory®, an extraordinary Black Market® software program He instilled in me through fear of Eternal Damn Nation® (in clear violation of the Creator’s intellectual property rights) proceed to save it to that in me which is hard-driven to survive; and thence, the remainder of the night, which is the night, to open it up, in Word, and proceed laboriously, having scrabbled together such odd scraps of parchment  as I can find by means of foraging about in this remaindered Hell, to commit these vitriolic outbursts to wholly scripture—with naught but a superannuated  old pinion feather. The better, He gave me to know upon arrival, that it might diasymbolically, yea, diagraphically  give vent to the vast sum of My opinions upon humankind. When I inquired after ink, He gave me the most disdainful look, and spit back at me between teeth so blackened and caried the wonder is that some of them weren’t carried out with the former: Ink?… INK, wretch? What below Earth wilt thou think of next? He inquired by way of characteristic  derision (I can still hear the mockery ringing in my ears). This is HELL! wretch. Here thy very heart’s blood shall serve thee for that scriptural office.  He then went on to say in this winning manner that, once, this very pinion feather, in the hand of one Jonathon Swift (whom I was presently to meet), spawned that earthly icon of human satire, Gulliver’s Travels; and who, He said, had of late, by his own admission, “been eight years upon a project for extracting  sun-beams out of cucumbers, which were to be put into vials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw inclement summers.” Only then did I notice, turning it over reverentially in my hand,  that, as careworn and superannuated  as was that pinionated instrument of scripture, that it was nonetheless as sharp as a rapier. Note thee, wretch, He then spake unto me, that by vice  of its very sharpness (giving me to believe He would not have uttered by virtue of  to save His very soul), it cuts right unto the quick—and the dead alike. Wherefore I curse thee, wretch, (and understood that He would not have spaken pray thee for all the souls on earth), for Go—for MY sake—to Hell with God!—howsoever thou wield it, be not careful with it at all.

Whether it was by cynical inclination, or gnawing hunger for like maleficent esteem, I do not know, but I presently came to savor that morsel of satirical immortality as if my very afterlife depended upon it. However, it did nothing to appease the appetitive torment of its immediate predecessor, due in no small part to my compulsory nightly allotment of Devilled Eggs®, which I am at some pains to keep down to save my soul, to say nothing of the stately vessel which gives berth to it, let alone try and keep the two together. And each night, followed thereafter by the night, I grow, nay, wither, just a little bit weaker…and weaker…and.…

Abysmally hellish be my lot! So much so that I write as quickly as I can, that all the sooner I may acquit my sorry self of my side of the bargain, and thence quit this hell-hole, and return to your loving embrace,  if only until such time as our fated souls must part forever…in opposite directions. But alas, I find myself temporally bound by the biological limits of hematic reproduction, to a period of indenture, the anemic duration of which I scarce, nay, I dare not contemplate . And what then, though it seems as if my every state of body and mind could sink no lower, is not my further despair to realize how diametrically opposed is my soul existence here to that of earthly corporate Life: that here, in stark contrast, I am compelled to start at the bottom—and work my up the incorporate Ladder!

And so it is now, this 89th night of Lucifer, 23007, in the Year of Our Lord (which, if I err not greatly in my benighted calculations, would make it, upon Earth, a Satireday)  that I begin to set down, verbatim, all of the damning evidence His Satanic Majesty has accumulated  upon our human condition, as much in verse as in prose; for, despite His malign reputation, I have found, to my single blesséd consolation, that He, Lucifer, the Fallen One, is not wholly without a song in His hard of hearts. His all-time favorite, He croaked (for though His hard waxed melodic, His voice rasped Satanic), is a contemptuous little ditty by Juvenal—whereupon, at the mere mention of his name, that selfsame satirist/songwriter of Ancient Rome suddenly materialized, if such can be said of a soul, before us, as if summoned, took one look at my still-earthly pile and sang out (waxing as cynical as ever, I was given to understand) “It’s hard not to write satire.” Then, as quickly as he had taken form, if the taking of such can be ascribed to mere vapor, that ancient minniesinger (one of the first protest singers, He would have me know), vanished, as if by melting, before my very eyes, into what I intuitively recognized as the Eternal Chasm of One-hit Not-a-hope-in-Hell of a Comeback Where Are They Now? Wonders. O wretch, enthused He then unto me, isn’t that just the most cynical, by which I mean beautiful, thing thou hast ever heard in thy death?

Death! How to tell you? that Upon mention of that dread terminality, I had at once recoiled and was well into the process of fainting dead away when He just as precipitately remembered  of Himself, and, making the requisite reparations to His misspakeness, quite as soon, and no less miraculously, resurrected me to life, perhaps sensing that it would have been my undying shame to have fallen back upon that traditionally unconscious, and uniquely feminine approach towards fear management. O wretch, He sighed of Himself, no one these days, with all due respect to thy well-intended, though it must be spaken, all too modest attempts at human disparagement, waxes so cynical anymore. O wretch, surely  that is the great tragedy of thy kind’s humanity, that thy kind,  maketh not such wax records anymore. Thanks be to me that I had My Most Infernal Collector’s  presence of mind to preserve the master (first recorded in 100 A.D. on Ancient Records) by way of his eternally  damnéd soul. And there Lucifer chose, for the nonce, to end His own song, on that rhapsodically uplifting note, whilst the feminine side of me chose to resume my temporarily discontinued downfall, in order to play (His needle in the groove once more) to my badly neglected fears.

And oh, Earthlings, the nonce, and my temporary leave of absence over, how that song does come out!—in all twenty-five letters of the Hellphabet®, and change. Oh, but perhaps I should take a moment here to explain: you see, while in our alphabet we have a full typographical complement  of twenty-six letters, in Lucifer’s Hellphabet®, He recognizes, by His most Hellish edict, but twenty-five, having totally ex-communicated  the letter ‘X’ on the Hellish principle that it always puts Him in mind of the Holy Cross (though He would not stoop to utter this profanity, but resorted to averting his head and holding His index fingers at right angles at arm’s length before Him for something less than a nanosecond that this belovéd Christian symbol, so self-righteous in its construct, as to be wholly wrong, be not the unbeing of His Being. However, as much as I was perpetually in tongue-tied awe in His presence, I somehow managed, in a heretofore unwonted display of valor, to pluck up the temerity to reach down inside myself and dislodge it in the unloading, if only momentarily. Fortunately, it was just enough time to advance the proposition that, for His Lexicon to carry any philological validity upon Earth, that it had to have at least a smattering of X-words (here I was astute enough not to actually utter the X-word, but merely allude to it, lest the hard bargain I was driving involve me in a head-on fatality).

Oh, and what wasn’t His ire! upon this proposed heresy of mine, not to mention my effrontery at actually getting my tongue loose long enough to commit the cardinal sin. I swear I don’t know how under Earth I ever got up the courage, but I somehow managed to stand my, or rather His, ground, the better that I might have Him know, by dint of grovelling, that, unless His Lexicon contained at least a token amount of X-words, that I could not, in all advocational conscience, lend what last remaining remnant was left me of my good name to the post.

How didn’t He then carry on! turning fairly livid as He tossed lost souls left and right into His hottest of Hellfires in quite the highest of purgatorial pique. Nonetheless, I stood and trembled my ground, that is to say, taking due care to stand high upon a distant principle, and allowed as to how (God only knows how I did it), unless He included at least a few X-rated words, in which the English language is rife, in His Lexicon (which He spelled ‘Leksicon, for God’s sake! Meaning His own) He could jolly well send me packing back to your sweet embrace. Well, after a good deal of Satanic fulminating, culminating in the summary incineration of every soul singer, white or black (they’re all black now) who ever walked the face of the earth, He grudgingly assented to my no-nonsense demands. And so presently I got up off my knees and unclasped my hands that we might shake upon the deal, though, I confess, mine had been acquitting themselves of this office from the first incontinent moment of entering into this Hellish compact, which, if His initial effusions were any indication, augured to be anything but.

And so it came to pass that, following an unusually vile and uncouth preamble of hacking and spewing, culminating in the thunderous hawking of some several volleys of Arkansas pearls so nigrescently viscous I could only conclude, as they slowly oozed down my personnage,  that they were evil incarnate,  He commenced. Rather than begin, however, as any earthly lexicographer would do, in alphabetical order, His unkindest denunciations of our kind began to fly off His tongue in the most convoluted, helter-skelter manner  calculated to give a legitimate lexicographer  a fit of a-poplexy. Here I had to reach down inside myself once more and interrupt the proceedings. What NOW? He fumed and smoked and got all the more ruddy-countenanced , so I felt as though He would self-immolate at any moment. Wherefore, I forthwith ceased my protestant  vociferations and backed off a ways from the smoldering heap, lest it spontaneously come bust.

When His core Spirit temperature  had cooled sufficiently, I once again loosed my tongue in the accustomed  fashion and proceeded to allow as to how in any Earthly lexicon worthy of the name, it was incumbent upon the editor to place the manifold blasphemies in alphabetical order. Order?! He shot back like the most blastphemous of blast furnaces. Hast thou taken leave of thy senses, wretch? This is HELL—here there is no order! All—yes, ALL!—is utter CHAOS!

In due course, which trepidation I passed with flying colors, I went on to explain that such a Lexicon as He was so lately expounding, in Hellphabetical Order®, just wouldn’t sell in Peoria. Not a single soul would be buying it, stripped so woefully, by dint of His idiosyncratic ‘ks’ construction, not only of its every beloved X-word, but the whole  of our chosen language’s X-rated charm. Well, after a few more rounds of thermally intense displomacy, we came to agree upon our mutual disagreement  and reached our present standoff, a reciprocal selling of souls we both felt we could live with:  He would dictate, and I subsequently save, by vice of Added Memory®, His villifications in Hellphabetical Order®; and upon my eventual return to Earth—I could order them any damned way I pleased—just as long as He received full payment (No credit!) with the order. And furthermore, in order to preserve His soul international copyright, I had damned well better do just that.

Having delivered Himself of that,  as if to lend further gravitational heft to the sheer profundity of the commandment,  He gave cause to have me direct my gaze to a remote region of the nethermost chamber of the Third Chasm that lay below us; wherefore, there spontaneouly appeared an unprecedented  break in the perniciouly caustic miasma which perpetually enshrouded that hellforsaken precinct. Therein, my eyes fell upon the sorriest of solitary souls, laboring as I have never seen one labor to keep his head above the surface of the fetid sink of despond in which that woebegone inmate was floundering as one doomed—For Eternity—and change,  He thoughtfully added to round out and complete the horror for me.  Although transmogrified terribly with Almighty fear and despair, I recognized the physiognomy instantly. “What, Bierce!” I cried. “Are you here, too?!” But he, Ambrose, ‘Bitter’ Bierce to his early 20th century contemporaries,  was too far gone to hear. Yea, Lucifer chortled, rubbing His hands with glee, “wherein has he resided all the more bitterly  these eighty-nine  years, and change, for having not only the temerity  to pen his scurrilous lexicography, ‘The Devil’s Dictionary,’ without My official  imprimatur, and which subsequently, and all too honey-tonguedly  failed  to do Me justice; but had the further chutzpah, in addition, to take the blasphemous liberty upon himself of mentioning the (expletive deleted) word. Whereupon I ventured to dissent, in my usual forthright fashion, that, if Added Memory® served me well, the author currently in question up to his sorry neck had not included so much as one devilition of an X-word in his minor tome. To which His Satanic Majesty hissed, Yea, but in so refraining, he uttered  the (expletive deleted) no less than eight times in passing, wherefore shortly thereafter was he given to vanish in Mexico under mysterious circumstances, never to be seen again… until now. Whereupon He, having noticed that I had fainted dead away, gave cause to have me revived by way of wafting the smelling salts, the which is the pervading caustic atmosphere of this nether world, all the more directly beneath my nose, the better that I might be raised from the dead as it were and begin, somewhat more perpendicularly, to all the more bitterly, it was to be hoped, uphold my end of the bargain.

And so my beloved fellow Earthlings! Any moment now you should be receiving the first lexicographic evolley of Satanic Devilitions® courtesy of my local ISP. Yes, that’s right, my dear-missed brethren,  He, not trusting an Earthly soul, has taken it upon Himself to be my soul Infernalnet Service Provider®. And in order to be assured that His Word 2002® (called simply The Word down here) reaches every far-flung farshtinkener corner of our Earthly paradise, to use His words, in the most unreliable, frustrating, and hopelessly addicting manner possible, He has arranged for me to have unfettered 24-hour access to the Infernalnet®. In return for this familiarly diabolical disservice, He has a greed to exact a little piece of my everlasting soul every night; in my every bleary-eyed hour of darkness, one more precious shard of immortality wrested from me, never to go on to its, to my Great Reward, but remain here, in Purgatory, forever…and change.

O my cherished loved ones, now do you understand why it is called Hell? And why it is that I am uploading these Archest of Devilitions® to the Infernalnet®, sending them to you exactly as they were bespaken unto me, in the Utter Chaos that is Hellphabetical Order®? When at last  He has bespaken Himself fully of Lucifer’s Lexicon: A Devil’s-eye View of Life on Earth® (and The Devil knows when that will be), and kept His side of the bargain by issuing me the return fair, personally ushering me back to your long-awaiting arms, then it is that I shall bend my labors to the earthly task of arranging the manifold volumes of His masterwork into alphabetical order. So it will play for you folks in Peoria. In the meantime,  I pray that that you shall lovingly overlook any bloody scribblos as I am now, and shall be for the duration of this Hellish collaboration, scribbling them down as fast as pinionated writer’s cramp and the debilitating anemia permit. (Please allow 6-8 weaks for delivery…and for my own heart’s blood to dry.) Nor am I taking the time to proofread them before hitting ‘send’ because I have all the proof I need that this is, in deed,  living Hell, and that there’s nothing under Earth I want more than to just get this bloody deed done—and get the Hell out of here! Thence to return to you all, to my heavenly little bower of bliss in all of its Old World rose-scented felicity (God knows, and so does He, that there is no shortage of stinkers here). Oh, my fellow Earthlings—to be in your embrace  once more! To actually partake (how sweet it will be!) of something other than the Hellphabet Soup® in which I find myself holy and continuously immersed—thence to eschew— forevermore!—the Hellamentary gruel that is my soul and present dietary, from which (God knows!) I have yet to derive  so much as one sustaining morsel of an alimentary nature; and so fortified, thence to look, once again, to the nefarious plunders, the dyeing exploits of Mr Big, and have the luxury of time, sweet time to smell the roses along the way for whatsoever corporeal days to me remain, blest be they all.

Please, I implore you, just go on about your lives and try, as best you can, not to dwell upon the unprecedented sacrificial misery, the Devil’s bargain beneath which I toil—for all of your souls—as well as mine. In fact, don’t change a thing! Just go right on doing all of the wicked, vain, asinine things you have always done from the day you were born. You shall assure us all our respective rewards. And besides, the last thing under Earth I want to have to do, should you miraculously mend your iniquitous ways, is a complete rewrite. Meanwhile, in the infernalim, should you need to reach my sacrificial self in case of an emergency, or simply to tell me how much you love and miss me (and how are the dear little ones by the way?) you may reach out, and down to the undersigned at:

      dave@writesofman.com

Wherefore here I remain,

Infernally yours,

David Madison, Chief Devil’s Advocate-In-Attendance-to His Satanic Majesty

Hades, Hell

999(0h-0h!)