A Short Stay in Hell

by Steven L. Peck

“I remember when I first got here, I was a vegetarian deeply committed to eating low on the food chain. When I was alive, I didn’t want to be part of the industrial food complex with its abject animal cruelty. Then one day someone watching me eat said, ‘What, do you think there’s some Hell somewhere in the larger universe where people are running a chicken factory? Another where they make these meals for the kiosk and send them here on some sort of conveyer belt?’ The absurdity of it has never left me. We can’t care about anything here. We can’t make a difference – all meaning has been subtracted, we don’t know where anything comes from or where it goes. There’s no context for our lives. We’re all white, equal ciphers, instances of the same absurdity repeated over and over. We try to scratch some hope or meaning out of it with our university, but ultimately there is nothing to attach meaning to. We’re damned.”