What you make of it

To tell you the truth, I never contemplated my navel or ever sat on top a roof to watch the sunset set over the hills like the hippies did.  All those touchy-feely, philosophical things bored me.  I never tried to find the inner soul of a tree through drugs.  Passing acid and finding myself 30 feet up in a tree never seemed like very fun.  I was always terrified of heights anyway.  Most would say that the stuff between my birth and death is not worth repeating because of my lack of morals.  I blame my life on my grasp of reality.  I knew what I wanted out of life and I did what I wanted to get it.1

I was never one of those people who tired to be just like someone else.  People said I was often incredulous.  I always focused on the bad things in life.  My mother called me a cynic everyday.  I never loved anyone and always noticed the bad in people.  I lived for other people’s flaws.  That is how I knew how to manipulate them.    I often wondered if she even loved me.  But all that motherly love crap never worked on me.  She just said she loved me so that I would do what she told me. 2

“ Brian, take out the trash! Don’t you love your mother,” she would tell me.3

I hated being told what to do.  I hated all those people who told me to go to church.  Jesus freaks. The ones on the streets standing on buckets screaming the bible aloud really got to me. “Jesus will save your soul. Repent! You there sir, you will die young.  On New Years Eve, 2004 you will die!  Save yourself.  Repent!”  They sometimes also claimed to be pycic.   I wanted no part in their Jesus cults.4

But there was one thing that didn’t bother me.  Money.  It is the thing that bonded me to the world.  Without it, I knew that I wouldn’t have power.  Call me a bastard, but I wanted to be rich and be driven around by a chauffeur.  I knew at a small age that that was all I needed to have control.  I started doing odd jobs by mowing the neighbor’s lawns when I was 10.  I saved the money and soon enough I had enough to open a savings account.  In high school while the rest of the school was wasting their time with dumb broods at the drive in, I was at home doing my homework, at football practice or at work.  I worked as an assistant for a local attorney.  I had no time for worthless flirting with girls who only wanted one thing; for you to buy them something, or to wear your class ring.  The stupidity of high school frustrated me. I never dated girls who loved Jesus.  They always wore crosses that stared right back at me when I was trying to get them in the back of my car.  5

Right out of high school I attended Harvard.  I managed to get myself well known by all my professors and other professors.  They often invited me to go golfing.  They even once invited me on a trip on their yot.  That is where I met Sophia McClaim.  Tall and blonde.  That’s the way I liked them.  I hate no time for women and their silly games.  However, a group of buddies and I had a bet going who would get with her first.  She was the daughter of Professor McClaim.  By the time I graduated I had a job with a prestigious law firm and had won the bet.  We married that summer.  I didn’t expect marriage to be great, but this was worse.  She made me go to church every Sunday.  I never knew how to act in churches.  I couldn’t believe that I married a Jesus fanatic.  Every night before bed she prayed out loud to “the almighty one.”   6

All the bickering about the dishes or the trash got to me too.  I needed to escape. So, every Friday after work, I would spend my nights at Club Cassell, an upscale bar where I met beautiful women.   Sophia new about the women, but to my surprise never approached me about it until she caught me with one of them in our bed.  A week after, she moved back with her father. We divorced and I moved to New York.  7

No more church and back to reality. New York was great for me.  I owned my own pent house and had no one to bug me about the way I kept my bathroom.  Life was great.  I was making more money than I estimated I would.  My childhood dreams of being driven around by a chauffer came true.  8

I went through woman after woman. I used them for my own amusement and then left them.  I couldn’t deal with their “spiritual journeys.”  When the relationship got to the point where they thought that I really cared what they thought about their philosophies on the afterlife, that’s when the relationship had to end.  9

“Heaven and Hell are what you make of them,” one said.10

I never wanted to think about it.  I never bought that philosophical crap.  People just want to sound important so they use big words and talk about about God and religion.  I guess I’m just a heap of sacrilege.  If hell is real then I guess I am going there according to everyone.  11

“Your way of life is going to catch up with you one day Brian,”  my sister said one day.  12

I just didn’t think it would catch up with me so soon.  It was New Years Eve, 2004.  I drank too much.  I stumbled out of the building drunk as a I had ever been when, bam!  My whole body collided with a white minivan.  My body went flying through the windshield right into the passengers lap.  13

“Mommy!” the boy yelled.  14

I looked up at him, my blood was splattered all over his face.  He was scared.  I knew I was dying, I could feel it.  I felt like I was sinking.  15

“ Brain Hulberg .  You are sentenced to eternity in hell.”  A voice said.16

“This is not real,”  I kept telling ,myself.  “Hell is just some made up place to fulfill curiosity.”  17

I stepped out of the smashed minivan and put my hand to my head.  Blood was pouring from my head. I glanced around, looking for flames, listening for screaming.  All I could see was men and women starving, ill and dirty.  Poverty.  The women was right.  Hell is what you make of it.18