James Joyce (through a fictional character) described Hell to a group of schoolboys thusly in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:

fractal by Sundstrom at www.sxc.hu

“Our earthly fire again, no matter how fierce or widespread it may be, is always of a limited extent; but the lake of fire in hell is boundless, shoreless and bottomless. It is on record that the devil himself, when asked the question by a certain soldier, was obliged to confess that if a whole mountain were thrown into the burning ocean of hell it would be burned up In an instant like a piece of wax. And this terrible fire will not afflict the bodies of the damned only from without, but each lost soul will be a hell unto itself, the boundless fire raging in its very vitals. O, how terrible is the lot of those wretched beings! The blood seethes and boils in the veins, the brains are boiling in the skull, the heart in the breast glowing and bursting, the bowels a red-hot mass of burning pulp, the tender eyes flaming like molten balls.”

I disagree on the temperature and circumstances of Hell.  I believe I have glimpsed it.

It is too cold for ice fishing and there is too much snow here. We have so much snow, in fact, that when holes are drilled, the pressure is so bad that water spews forth, slushifying everything and then freezing.  

photo by Xanderalex at www.sxc.hu

Forecast for tomorrow: 38 degrees below frickin’ zero (real temperature, not wind chill).  Record snowfall for the month of December and it’s still piling up.  

Somewhere a bad-ass Canadian ice fisherman is reading this and laughing while he screws together twelve foot extensions for his auger.  

I’m not.  Not when I have phrases like “afflict the bodies of the damned” and “how terrible is the lot of those wretched beings” unfurling themselves in my frozen brain.

Wake me up in May.