“As he that taketh away a garment in cold weather, and as vinegar upon nitre, so is he that singeth songs to an heavy heart.” Proverbs 25:20

“And because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold.”  Matthew 24:12

I went scuba diving once.  In Cozumel, Mexico in 1989 or '90.  We were down about 80 feet.  Drift diving, they called it.  Drift diving means you don't have to actually swim; you can float with the current and the boat follows your bubbles so you don't have to swim back against it.  I had taken all the classes and was fully trained, but never bothered to get my official PADI certification.  In Mexico they didn't care.  We rented a couple guys with a small boat, donned our fish clothes, and fell backwards into the sea.  Down we went.

It was wild to look up and see the surface of the ocean, endless in every direction, twice as high as any cathedral.  Your bubbles floated like butterflies toward the surface, a swarm of tiny birds spiraling higher than any tree.  Almost any tree.  Up and up they go, your silent prayers to outer space, exploding like fireworks on the surface of the nonexistent moon.  Almost like birds, except real birds don't explode when they get to the moon.

Or do they? 

You had to adjust things, keep an eye on your depth-meter, do math problems on a whiteboard tethered to your suit, so you'd know how long you could stay at a certain depth without getting the bends.  It isn't hard, but the training is important.  Half of it is math.  The other half is not freaking out and never holding your breath.  You can never hold your breath while you're scuba diving.  Never.  You will die, and sailors from a thousand years ago will greet you with clammy kisses that will seem strange and disconcerting to your modern sensibilities.  Never hold your breath while scuba diving.

You will die.

The current took us over coral reefs, sloping down towards infinity.  The water became darker and denser, the deeper down it went.  The ocean swallowed itself in its own darkness.  You could feel the weight of it, its infinite depth, even as you floated above it, through it, suspended like a neoprene bubble above the abyss.  I saw a giant ballroom, so huge it had a ceiling but no floor, upon which whales danced with galleons, sea monsters, battleships.  It was a cold, dim room without walls, and squid and octopuses performed a strange, fluid dance in an odd time, impossible to execute without at least 8 legs.  No Fred Astaire, no Ginger Rogers, no Bob Fosse; those graceless, bipedal automatons have never conceived of a fluid, swirling dance such as I witnessed that day, floating 80 feet below the surface of the sky.  Not even spiders could do it.  Gravity is as the burden of death and sin, and anyone subjected to it has their capacity for grace significantly reduced.  Spiders included.  I watched as the battleships heaved in their rusty iron dresses, galleons creaked, giant squid spinning around them like ballerinas, figure skaters, skyscrapers upended, spinning like tops as tourists fell from their pockets like sticky pennies.  It was massive, deadly, impossible, intimidating in its scope and power.  Barnacles clapped together like castanets, keeping time for the low, deadly waltz happening a thousand feet or more below my feet.  Dead sailors floated across the non-existent floor like used candy wrappers in a parking lot.  I saw a group of juvenile monsters drinking from a submarine, crushing it under their feet when they were finished.  They laughed and kicked a crumpled torpedo like a beercan before returning to the party.  The cries and screams of the lost were not heard.  Only the music from the neverending murky ballroom, sloping toward infinity beneath me.  80 feet felt like a stone skipping off the surface.

Our Mexican day-guide tried to capture a lobster from the reefs, but he failed.  I remember him digging around in some coral, but the lobster escaped.  I never saw it.

We floated past a barracuda, which was hovering in the depths, watching us from 30 or 40 feet away like an emaciated Buddha.  I wondered if he was dangerous, watching his body ripple like a rubber knife, sharper than any samurai sword.  He wasn't swimming.  Not toward us, not away from us.  He hovered there like a wavy, rippling knife, watching these strange creatures with the plastic skin and tubes in their faces with befuddlement, or perhaps amusement, or even wonder.  He was watching us the way we watch fish in an aquarium, or animals in a zoo. 

This was his domain.  We existed behind some strange glass only he could see.  Perhaps he was a scientist, making notes about the weird aliens that fall like bubbling stars from the heaving, wavy gelatin sky, 80 feet above.  Where did these creatures come from?  I've heard myths about wormholes, God, aliens, but nothing that can withstand the rigors of scientific inquiry.  There is nothing to see above the sky.  Nobody can breathe there.  Nothing can live.  The surface of the sea is the edge of the world.  If you cross through it, you fall off the edge and into oblivion.  Often, when one of our own kind ventures too close to it, they are taken into the unknown, beyond the singularity, by an archetypal, Lovecraftian horror known as a "Chinese whaling ship."  I used to tell my kids mythological stories about Chinese whaling ships, to teach them about the importance of morals.  The myth of the "Chinese whaling ship" is the thread that has kept our society together for millennia.

So, who are these strange beasts who come from beyond the singularity, beyond the horrible fables that warn about "seafood restaurants" and "sport fishermen?"  They must be a very technologically-advanced species, to be able to travel freely in that airless place where nothing good exists.  Are they gods?  Our benevolent creators?  Do they bring tidings of peace, or war?   Do they intened to establish an embassy?  A sea port to the stars?  Or do they mean to eat and enslave us?

Better keep an eye on them.

With the exception of Narcos: Mexico, I'm not a big watcher of serial television shows, and have never even heard of the show Vikings until reading the comment section of the video above.  Apparently, this is the theme song.  I'm also unfamiliar with the scene in Breaking Bad in which this song is supposedly featured.  I like the actors on that show, but I find the drug theme in general to be spectacularly boring.  I've done way too many drugs to have any interest in watching a show about them, ever again.

(I liked Narcos: Mexico because of the characters; in mild contrast, the 2002 movie Spun is more about the drugs than the characters.  The characters are good, and they tried, but the movie isn't about them.  It's about drugs.  For this reason alone, I don't like it.  Narcos: Mexico is more about the characters.)

But if hell is an infinite ocean ballroom of horror, sorrow, and suffering, in which death reigns supreme, and darkness is king, then the video for "If I Had A Heart" by Fever Ray is the snorkeling equivalent.  Dark as it is, the video is the stone skipped off the surface of infinite suffering and terror that is the reality of hell itself.  The murder and corpses and reindeer horns and skull paint and weird pagan entities discovered by lost children ferried through the infernal bayous of hell by a psychedelic, apelike Charon in a Santa hat, on a boat lit by torches of hellfire, and the murky, beautiful gloom of the tune itself, are all mere glints of infernal anti-light, and contain almost nothing of the horror of the deadly ballroom torture caverns beneath the surface.  The hopelessness is real, the sentiment is true, but the video and tune itself are too beautiful for the subject matter they're trying to express.  The dead bodies scattered on the floor of the empty swimming pool, the dead shoes, the empty feet, the corpses akimbo, the patina of luxurious ennui lightly brushed on everything, all of it is actually beautiful.

Like the way some animals will lure their prey with deceptive markings.  Hmmm, says the mark.  What is this attractive, shiny object?  Is it a friend?  A lover?  Something sweet and forbidden to eat?

Watch out.  While it's okay to "wax cold" due to the apparently-increasing hopelessness and futility of life in a world that seems content to hold its breath underwater (Matthew 24:12), and that it's okay to not be in the mood for joyous anthems of grating, gaudy, would-be light while burdened with circumstances that make you feel like you're wearing boots of cement at the bottom of the sea (Proverbs 25:20),

Never, ever, under any circumstances actually complete your underwater training as a professional diving instructor in the lake of fire.  If you need to don a snorkel and listen to a song that people who wear antifreeze smiles would dismiss as "demonic" or "evil" because another glib, disingenuous "praise and worship" tune would send you to hell faster than anything, I'm not going to judge you.  I get it.  But never, ever hold your breath down there.  Never become a believer in it.  You will get the spiritual bends and die.  The current will suck you under, and you will be crushed like a cigarette butt on the threshing floors of death and pain for eternity.  Ground out, smothered, and gone.

According to Proverbs 25:20, it's alright.  A lot of people think there's something wrong with YOU when their silly "positivity" sends you ever deeper into a spiral of upside-down bubbles driven downward toward the bottom of the sea, ever-more-tightly compressed, depressed, and antisocial.  They are apparently completely unaware that they're taking away YOUR coat on a cold day, or pouring vinegar on YOUR teeth.  They really think the problem is with you.  According to Proverbs 25:20, it's not.

Just make sure you never become one with that oppressive weight.  No matter how sexy or cool the serpent makes it look.  If you find yourself drowning in the lake of fire, never bring more than a snorkel.  Not for sport; never for sport.  Those glib fools are like the joyous positivity types.  They think everything is fun, and cool.  People who play with fire for effect are fools.  Don't go down with them.  “Ye cannot drink the cup of the Lord, and the cup of devils: ye cannot be partakers of the Lord's table, and of the table of devils (1 Corinthians 10:21).”

But if your heart is a concrete block of unbearable pain, it's alright.  Don't blow your brains out.  Don't jump into the lake of fire, but if you find yourself drowning in one, it's alright if a dark song lifts your spirits, or eases them. 

Just make sure you're not wearing a wetsuit.

Or a firesuit, as the case may be.

Thanks for listening.