Augustine’s Children

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A horror film that relies more heavily on religion than just about any I’ve seen is Tin & Tina.  What really happens is up to you to decide because different characters have different interpretations.  Adolfo and Lola can’t have children.  Lola was pregnant with twins but a miscarriage with complications left her sterile.  The couple visits a convent to adopt two children.  Lola is attracted to two seven-year-olds with albinism.  The twins are very religious, while Adolfo and Lola aren’t.  The religion of the kids leads them to strange behaviors which can be disturbing, or even dangerous.  Lola begins to suspect they are trying to kill her, and, after she miraculously becomes pregnant, her son.  In a fit of rage Adolfo burns their Bible and the couple return the children to the orphanage.  Then Adolfo is struck by lightning and the house burns down.  Or is his death really the doing of the children?

In the view of the nun at the orphanage, the children are completely innocent.  Her teachings, however, raise some doubts.  When the family dog, which is terrified of the children, bites Lola, the children “cleanse” him by taking out his heart and washing it, assuming the dog will be resurrected.  Or do they?  A bully who teases them at school has an accident, but Lola believes that the twins caused it.  (There is some evidence of this, but it is ambiguous.)  When Lola refuses to let her newborn be baptized, the twins do it by holding him upside down in a fountain.  Are they attempting to drown him?  Each time they act innocent and quote the Bible to justify what they’re doing.  Lola believes they were in the house the night Adolfo burned to death, and the children believe whatever someone sows, they reap.  He had burnt their Bible.

Horror is often ambiguous.  Tin & Tina (their names short for Augustine, for they were in an Augustinian convent) remains ambiguous throughout.  Are these kids really just doing what they believe is right and only look guilty, or are they carrying out rough justice and using the Bible as an excuse?  The movie opens by defining the word “theophany”—an appearance of God.  The nun insists that they’re innocent, so Lola adopts them again at the end.  Many scenes here resemble The Omen, but overall the movie is unnerving.  And the tension doesn’t end when the credits roll.  In many ways this is a textbook example of religion and horror.  And like most matters religious, what you believe, in the end, is up to you.

Let Me Explain

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One of the reasons, I believe, that people said I was such a good teacher is that I explain things.  Clearly and thoroughly.  Living in a nation that has never really valued teachers, I have come to understand just how rare clear and thorough explanations are.  In April, within one week, we had two urgent household repairs that both required financing.  Even though I experienced sticker shock both times, I listened carefully as this was explained.  Both times it was explained poorly and I had to put multiple calls in to each of the lenders after the fact.  I can’t tell you what this does to my blood pressure, but I can say I’m glad I had Cheerios for breakfast.  One of the services wasn’t even performed in the way that it was explained.  In any case, I wrote all the more detailed explanations down.  I learned that companies don’t send you any verification that you’ve paid off a loan anymore.  At least we haven’t received one.

I was doing okay with this.  Blood pressure back to normal.  Then I received a letter from the IRS.  This always raises blood pressure, even before opening the envelope.  In my experience, it’s never good news.  In this case it was an identity verification request.  Okay, that I can handle.  But then I found something unexpected on our 1040.  You never want to find something unexpected there!  We’d paid a professional to do our taxes for us, and all we had to do was sign on the dotted line (actually, sign the screen with your finger).  I ticked taxes off my to do list back in March.  Here it was May and I was finding an irregularity on my professionally filed taxes.  I called the vendor.  I soon learned that how this was being handled simply hadn’t been clearly explained in the office.

I hope that I’m a reasonably intelligent Homo sapiens; I can tie my own shoes and I can figure out how to get to Manhattan on fairly short notice, from two states away.  What is obvious to me is that many people of my species are not good at explaining things clearly and thoroughly.  I’ve worked for employers who’d rather see costly inefficiencies remain in place for years rather than hire a trainer who can explain things clearly.  I’ve left more than one HR office more confused than I walked in.  Why is it that we eschew good explanations about things like financing and taxing?  Last year I was scammed by a guy who, despite his moral deficiencies, explained things clearly and thoroughly.  He was lying through his teeth, but he could and did explain things.  What I’m wondering is why legitimate businesses can’t do the same, only with the truth.

KK from OS

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It was probably a silly reason—the misspelled word—that kept me from watching Killer Klowns from Outer Space.  That, and the bad taste left in my eyes from Morons from Outer Space.  Then I noticed it was leaving the streaming service in a matter of hours.  Killer Klowns came out during that liminal period between finishing my master’s and beginning my doctorate.  It was a time of not much money (some things never seem to change) and we didn’t go out to a lot of movies.  I was preparing to move to Ann Arbor at the time since my wife, fiancé at the time, lived there.  And I wasn’t watching much horror then.  Killer Klowns is sci-fi horror and comedy horror and I was expecting it to be much worse than it is.  Camp, yes.  But camp played sincerely by the actors (apart from the purely comic roles).  Given the many people these days who are afraid of clowns, it’s fairly easy to see what the film has become a cult classic.

As the name implies, the klowns are actually aliens who fly around in a spaceship shaped like a circus tent.  They kill and consume people using standard, but deadly clown props.  The curmudgeonly police officer Mooney doesn’t believe any of it while his partner, Dave, is willing to listen to his ex-girlfriend Debbie, who witnessed the klowns and saw a couple of their victims.  The ship lands in a closed amusement park where Dave, Debbie, and her boyfriend Mike find them.  Several other people are killed along the way, but not with the gore that many horror films use so gratuitously.  Although the plot is farcical, it’s nevertheless well done.  It winds up with a happy ending, at least for the principals.  Many of the others wind up encased in cotton candy.

Comedy horror always has the danger of devolving into schlock, but Killer Klowns somehow manages to avoid that without taking itself too seriously.  Visually, the colors used add to the appeal.  The horror/fun house of the ship’s interior encourage viewer interest.  While the klowns are difficult to take seriously, they are scary-looking, even for those of us with no inherent fear of earthly clowns.  For a movie from the late eighties, it manages a lot without CGI, making it somewhat impressive in the effects department.  That title, with its misspelled word, gives the viewer a good idea of the silliness in store.  It manages, however, to make it scary when it needs to be. 

Going Some Place?

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I recently had to drive to the Philadelphia Airport to drop off/pick up some folks.  Here in the Lehigh Valley I’m roughly an hour north of the city of brotherly love.  Like most sentient drivers, I’ve come to rely on GPS navigation.  Dropping off my parties turned into a nightmare of congestion.  The GPS solidly insisted that the turnpike, 476, was the “fastest” way.  One thing AI doesn’t understand is how people behave.  The flight required dropping off a couple hours before that known as “rush.”  476, once yet get near Philly has several pain points where traffic merges on from several ramps onto an already crawling stream of traffic.  That’s human behavior—never considering that the “longer time” route might actually be quicker.  Or at least a touch easier on the blood pressure.  Of these thousands and thousands of people, relatively few were going to the airport.  Once I got home from a journey that Al told me would be two-and-a-half hours, round trip (which was actually three-and-a-half), I began looking for alternate routes for pick up.

Pulling up the usual map app on my laptop, the only route shown was the turnpike, clearly not designed for this volume of traffic.  Not being native to Philadelphia, I don’t know my way around very well.  Then I began to lose trust in Al.  Interstate 95 also goes right by the airport.  I force-dragged the route over that way.  The estimate? Maybe fifteen minutes longer than the turnpike.  AI doesn’t understand that people who know the turnpike is a bad idea at this time of day will take it anyway.  It is the “fastest” way to where you’re going.  And who wants to waste time?

Me, I’d rather not shave off so many years of my life.  I’m not so foolish as to suppose I-95 would be much better, but with the “real-time” facts added in, it might very well save some time, and gray hairs, to go the somewhat longer, slower route.  Al didn’t even want to tell me that was an option.  Who could possibly want to go on at a slower pace, for mental health reasons?  Even en route it will try to reroute you back onto “the fastest” way that it clearly misunderstands.  I remember driving in Newark, Seattle, Boston, Chicago, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, and, briefly, New York City.  Those who write algorithms are missing something basic.  Human psychology plays into this in a major way.  Al is not human nor does it “think.”  It calculates.  As for me, I calculate that the slower way may just be what the doctor ordered.

Bad Start

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I’m not too proud to admit to reading books for young readers.  On a recent family night we watched the 2004 film, A Series of Unfortunate Events (not for the first time), and I realized that my memory of the books by Lemony Snicket was hazy.  Since we bought and read all the books for my daughter, I pulled The Bad Beginning from the shelf and read it in a couple of hours.  Although it was published over a quarter century ago, it is still fresh and it stands as one of those books (and series) that defied convention and presented stories that were potentially disturbing for children.  I have to admit that another of my motivations in re-reading this was the suggestion that perhaps on another family night we might start watching the Netflix adaptation, which, as I understand it, is better than the theatrical movie.

The movie, of course faced a dilemma.  There are thirteen books in the series—too many to comfortably fit into one film.  Each individual book, however, is too slim to fill out a feature-length presentation.  The decision was made to blend the first three books together, beginning and ending the show with the events from The Bad Beginning.  If you’re not familiar with the series, even if you don’t have children, the books are an entertaining read.  Snicket, who was later revealed to be Daniel Handler, is quite a clever author and there were a couple of points that had me, well, snickering out loud.  In any case, I’m given to understand that the Netflix series tackles this conundrum of too much/little material by being, ahem, a series.

A brief summary of The Bad Beginning may help if you’re still undecided about reading it as an adult.  The three Baudelaire children, Violet, Klaus, and Sunny, are orphaned in a fire.  Adopted by their scheming uncle, Count Olaf, they are immediately put in peril as he tries various ways to get at their parents’ fortune.  Since Olaf is a thespian, he devises a plot to hold a wedding between himself and fourteen-year-old Violet in disguise as a play.  The plot is foiled, of course, by the children.  The book ends by letting the reader know that the orphans are still in danger because Olaf has escaped and remains at large.  That would take quite a lot of padding to get a feature-length film out of it.  It works quite well as a brief book for young readers.  I was impressed at both the set-up and execution when I first read this many years ago.  And I liked it again the second time through.

Naming Birds

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I’m no Jane Goodall, but I grew up loving animals.  I still do.  I’d spend many hours poring over animal identification books.  When I was young I could tell a crab from a lobster from a crayfish.  I knew moths from butterflies.  Megafauna?  I had it covered.  One thing, however, eluded me.  Bird identification.  Now, I can tell the obvious ones apart, but ornithology seems to delight in making the trade difficult.  For example, I was on a walk with a couple friends in May.  We spotted a small bird—smaller than finch size but larger than a hummingbird.  Short tail.  Its coloration was an unusual shade of brown.  We got a good look at it.  Back home I pulled out my bird identification books.  Nothing like it.  I tried online, even Cornell’s famed ornithology lab website.  According to all the specs what we saw doesn’t exist.

The problem with birds is that they come in different colorations.  Most bird identification books and sites focus on the males.  They tend to be more colorful and their identification is easier.  Not only that, but young birds’ plumage often changes as they mature.  This is such an issue that some bird books warn the would-be watcher not to try to identify by the color.  You should look for things like eye-rings, beak shapes, and that tiny spot on the tip of the tail, when seen in flight.  Right.  After a couple of days of searching in my spare time, I gave up.  Given how small it was, this was likely a juvenile.  Which sex I have no idea.  It bothers me when I can’t identify what I see.  The world is full of such wonderful things!

Many years ago in Scotland, some friends willingly crawled to a cliff’s edge with us on a rainy day in the Orkney Islands.  We’d come here to see the puffins.  Puffins nest on cliffs overlooking the sea.  They have colorful bills and are similar in looks (but not physiognomy) to penguins.  We were rewarded with a view of a cliff-full of sea-birds, including puffins.  I often ponder, living inland now, why the bright, colorful birds tend to hide.  I know, I know—predators.  But still, I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen an adult male oriel with their bright orange plumage, despite living in an area where they’re listed as common.  Birds can be so coy.  Maybe that’s why dedicated bird watchers have such passion.  I love animals.  The problem with birds is, despite hours with books and websites, some of them I just can’t identify.

Gothic South

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Southern gothic has a certain appeal even to northerners.  Casting about for a weekend movie included in one of our streaming services, A House on the Bayou suggested itself.  I hadn’t heard of it before, but it bore the Blumhouse brand, so I gave it a try.  In this age of digital production, it is the equivalent of a “straight to video” release.  The story is a bit confusing but the atmosphere is creepy and most of the acting is good.  Spoilers may arise from this point on.  John is having an affair with a younger woman and Jessica has found out.  She insists that if John wants to save their marriage he has to agree to a vacation with her and their daughter Anna.  Down on the bayou.  Once they get there both Jessica and John’s passive aggression towards each other is on show.

A couple of locals, eighteen-year-old Isaac and his Grandpappy, stop over.  It’s pretty obvious from the beginning that there’s something off about the pair.  Isaac clearly has supernatural powers and soon begins to threaten the family.  It turns out that John, knowing Jessica would insist on coming to this house, had pre-hired Isaac and Grandpappy to kill Jessica and make it look like a robbery.  Thing is, Isaac and Grandpappy have moral fibre.  They lock John in a hidden room with a demonic coyote that eats him.  And they burn his lover to death.  Jessica and Anna, who still love John, want to save him and after Jessica kills Grandpappy and Isaac, goes to the police.  It turns out that there is no house on the bayou and they all know about Isaac and Grandpappy, who are still alive, because they’re beings who kill evil-doers.

While not a great movie, this is one that’s heavily invested in religion and horror.  Morality is defined, according to Isaac and Grandpappy, by the Bible.  There is some confusion in the plot, however, when Grandpappy denies Isaac is his grandson and the locals seem to say he is.  Isaac implies that he’s the son of the Devil.  Grandpappy says Isaac never ages, but he tells John he’s 21 and has been in the Army (he tells Anna he’s 18).  Although he protects morality, Isaac attempts to abduct Anna to “marry” her, although she’s only 14.  There’s a good attempt to integrate religion into this horror, but as often happens, the religion is inconsistent with what it claims to be.  I’m not sure how many viewers pay attention to such things, but some of us do write books about it.  Overall, it is passable southern gothic for a rainy afternoon.

Rocky Ground

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When I begin to lose my sense of wonder, the natural world grounds me.  I’ve been an amateur rockhound for many years and I sometimes wonder if it’s because I grew up poor.  The idea that you can just pick up something valuable on the ground has a treasure-hunting aspect to it.  Movers, I’ve discovered, dislike rock collectors.  My collection is quite small, and most of it not on display.  The danger is that I’ll be wanting to pick up more interesting rocks.  Like much of nature, rocks are amazing if you look closely at them.  And when the mania hits, it takes all my attention.  We all know that gemstones tend to be small, but perhaps it’s the fact that they look very little like their finished state in the wild makes them intriguing.

This interest was recently rekindled by a visit to the Lehigh Valley’s local cave, The Lost River Canyon.  As with most local attractions, it takes some time to get around to them.  We decided to go during the recent heat wave since caves maintain a constant temperature, generally in the fifties, and during the height of the wave the outside air temperature was double that of the cave thermometer.  Caves often have rock shops associated with them because being in a cave will trigger the rock-hounding gene.  And I suspect I’m not the only one to whom this happens.  Like many preserved caves, Lost River Canyon was an accidental discovery and was later purchased by a family that has been running it as a tourist attraction ever since.  I left inspired to find my rock tumbler and get it rolling again.

It’s difficult to say when or how such obsessions originate.  When my daughter was really into dinosaurs I started looking into geology.  The next thing I knew I was a member of the Wisconsin Geological Society and was going on field trips to collect.  When I lost my job at Nashotah House I seriously considered enrolling in a geology degree program, put off by the fact that calculus and chemistry were pre-requisites.  I was a hopeless humanities major and advanced math just doesn’t psit well in my psyche.  Part of me wonders if the fascination doesn’t go back to Genesis.  Geology was the science that tolled the death knell for any kind of literal six-day creation.  When this rock madness hits other interests can, if I’m not careful, be shunted aside.  It’s important to feel grounded.

Made to Order

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Like those who’ve commented on IMDb, I watched Tiago Teixeira’s Custom because of its brief 77-minute showtime and its horror label.  An artsy film, it feels kind of unfinished.  It’s clearly a movie about demons, but it doesn’t give enough to really figure it out.  Jasper and Harriet are young artists who are having a difficult go of making a living (something we all recognize as true).  They decide to try making custom erotic films for the internet and this brings them to the attention of a mysterious benefactor who pays them 10,000 pounds for each film made to his specs.  They have to shoot on VHS, and once the film begins rolling, and a strange chanting starts, they fall into a trance and don’t recall what they did.  They’re instructed never to watch the tapes, but when they do what they find disturbs them.  Jasper tries to find out something about the purpose of the films (they’re not posted anywhere) only to discover that they are somehow laced with the Key of Solomon.  In case you haven’t read Holy Horror, the Key of Solomon is a grimoire for summoning demons.

At one point, the friend who brings them this gig asks Jasper what his idea of Hell is.  Jasper says being stuck, not able to move forward.  Towards the end of this short movie, Jasper is shown being stabbed by Harriet, something he experienced at the beginning of the film (without showing who’d stabbed him).  The implication is clearly that he’s stuck in a loop.  He’s reliving being attacked—maybe fatally wounded—by his girlfriend.  At one point their patron asks him if he knows who Harriet’s sleeping with when she’s not home.  It seems, between the demons and the nightmare scenario, that Jasper is in Hell.

This strange, little film engages religion and horror.  At one point, the friend who brings Jasper this job, says that the saints were the original perverts.  He mentions some mutilations in the lives of a few saints, including St. Lucy of Syracuse, who is often shown carrying her own gouged-out eyes.  This brought to mind The Nun II, a film released some six months earlier, that also involves the same eyeless saint.  There’s no doubt that the stories of the saints are good fodder for horror.  It seems that one of the reasons such stories were told was to evoke just that feeling.  So Custom is a film that engages religion and horror.  The connection with demons isn’t made clear, but they’re obviously part of the story of one artist’s personal Hell.

Siesta

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“Lazy” isn’t an adjective that most people who know me would apply.  I tend to be fidgety and can’t really sit still at work.  I have a body and I want to move it.  I have an active mind and I need to keep it stimulated.  The recent heatwave over the long Fourth of July weekend, though, enforced laziness.  We don’t have central air conditioning.  Some kind family members bought us a couple floor units for our bedrooms so sleep is technically possible when our bedroom nears 100 degrees in the late afternoon.  But during such sweltering conditions, we spend the day trying to move as little as possible.  Even stepping into a cold shower is difficult when the pipes have warmed up so that tepid is the best you can hope for.  I’ve got a lot of writing projects going, but quality work is difficult to do when the air is so hot.

I see the wisdom of the siesta.  When I volunteered on the archaeological dig at Tel Dor back in 1987, the digging ceased around noon.  Afternoons were too hot for physical labor.  Most people napped.  In hot climates around the world the siesta is necessary as well as practical.  Late capitalism assumes everyone’s in air conditioned offices and has abolished the idea.  It’s the kind of enforced laziness, however, that descended on me during the heat wave.  I’d be reading my book or watching a movie when I’d wake up to find the story quite different from what’d been filtering through my mind.  Or the movie having something going on that seemed to have no precedent.  It was okay for a day or two, but I started to grow restless.  There’s still lots of stuff to get done.

Weather extremes, meteorologists tell us, will only continue because we refuse to curb carbon emissions.  I do remember hot summers from when I was a kid, but the thermometer climbing up into high fever range for days at a time never happened.  Given my age, one thought that recurred during life under the heat dome was that perhaps this is what retirement (not in the cards) must be like.  Retired friends tell me that they’re busier than when they worked, but I do have to wonder if the timing is a bit more open.  The 9-2-5 relaxed a bit more.  It’s not that I’m lazy, but sitting in front of a computer all day earning money for someone else means the siesta’s not permitted.  And when it’s so hot out, it should be.  Otherwise fevered decisions follow.

Photo by Florian Siedl on Unsplash

Sun Shines

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The world is a much stranger place than we are taught in school.  Even as a kid I was drawn to the weird and uncanny.  Yes, I was teased by others.  The mocking response is one that is intended to bring outsiders to conformity.  Nobody likes being shunned.  A friend, knowing my continued interest in the unusual, sent me a piece that mentioned, among other things, the Marian apparitions at Conyers, Georgia.  On October 13, 1998, while I was ensconced at Nashotah House, an event took place of which I’d never heard.  It was similar to the “miracle of the sun,” known worldwide as part of the phenomenon witnessed by between 50,000 and 70,000 people at Fátima, Portugal.  Both events included several solar anomalies.  The Catholic Church, always reticent toward modern miracles, didn’t claim Fatima as an official one.  In 1998, on the farm of Nancy Fowler in Conyers, the phenomenon was repeated in front of 100,000 witnesses.  Interestingly, the Wikipedia page on the apparitions doesn’t mention this.

News reels and Polaroid photographs (which can’t be tampered with) show something clearly unusual happening with the sun.  There are videos on YouTube that present these.  I’m always a bit skeptical of any modern videos, however, since so much can be faked.  There is no source whence the curious might go to find a rational, but not debunking, description.  Mainstream science dismisses such things out of hand—they can’t happen, so they don’t.  Faith-based treatments are also suspect.  The fascinating thing, to me, is that I was at a religious, quasi-Catholic institution at the time and heard nothing of it.  Television reception at the seminary was notoriously poor, and although the internet existed, the seminary had not yet jumped on the bandwagon.  At least not to the point of say, getting news online.

The article my friend sent was making the point that when large crowds of credible witnesses see something we should pay attention.  With events that don’t regularly repeat—the problem of occasional phenomena—setting up scientific observation doesn’t work.  For instance, ghosts tend not to show up when actual scientists (not those who play them on television) set up equipment.  One conclusion is “that’s because ghosts don’t exist.”  Another, however, is that they don’t act on cue.  And scientific experiments take both time and money and aren’t wasted on things that have a high probability of not showing up.  Our world is full of weird things like this.  All of us have had something we’ve brushed off as “just one of those things.”  But when 100,000 people see something, I’m curious as to what it was.

Sluggish

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If you enter into it with the spirit of the thing, Slugs is actually better than you might expect.  You have to expect that it’s going to be hokey and outlandish, with bad acting.  With all of that in the assumed category, it’s a passable horror film.  I was surprised to learn, in the opening credits, that it was based on a novel.  That makes me almost curious enough to read it.  Set in a small town in upstate New York (Ashton), the movie is about carnivorous slugs.  There’s an incipient humor about the idea and although no planned laugh-out loud moments permeate this film, there are plenty of incredulous snort opportunities.  The local health inspector is the first to cotton onto the fact that the slugs are attacking, but even he doesn’t believe his own wife at times when she points out their unusual behavior.

There’s a lot of running about and trying to get officials to do something about it, but who takes slugs seriously?  Meanwhile the gastropods eat the town drunk, a gardener, a young couple making out when the parents are gone, and are responsible for the death of a local developer.  That leads to the gore required by the tale.  Finally the health inspector teams up with the local sewage inspectors and a high school science teacher who figures out a way to blow up the slugs.  In some respects the movie resembles Evolution at this point—using a pumping truck to spray the invaders with a chemical solution that saves the day.  The best friend of the protagonist does get eaten by the slugs while trying to save the town, but otherwise there’s a happy ending.

This is a bad movie but it’s better than many “so bad it’s good” features.  Some competent work is done with special effects and the story itself is laughable (I don’t know about the original story).  I have a weakness for innocuous creatures turning dangerous—it’s one of the more interesting applications of existential horror in a world full of different types of animals, plants, and fungi.  (And occasionally even minerals can attack, cue The Monolith Monsters.)  As a kid these were the kinds of movies, in addition to the usual vampires, werewolves, and mummies, that helped me cope with an uncertain world.  There are those who find Slugs profoundly bad, but I’m not among them.  Is it great?  Not by any stretch.  Is it worth watching for free when you have a spare moment?  Certainly.  If you get into the spirit of the thing.

Scary Scripture

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The question’s not as simple as whether chocolate and peanut butter go together.  What is it with horror and the Bible?  A number of us have explored that question in book form, but probably the most prolific is Brandon R. Grafius.  His Scared by the Bible is a mapping through terrain that will feel foreign to some: if you live for the beach in summer, why would you fly to Antarctica to visit the South Pole instead?  Part of the reason is clearly that the Bible isn’t the rainbow-and-unicorn book that it’s often made out to be.  Some parts—not a few—are pretty scary.  That’s Grafius’ entry point into how horror and the Bible are surprisingly compatible.  Interestingly, we had similar starts down this path.  A Bible given to us by a grandmother when we were a child, and the determination to read it.  My world was a bit more hellfire and brimstone than Grafius’ but we’ve ended up near the same place.

Often I thought, as I was reading it, “Are people going to get both these references?” (i.e., both the biblical story and the horror movie being cited).  After all, many Christian denominations still teach that horror is not helpful at best, and satanic at worst.  I just wonder how many of us there are who never found watching horror a spiritual problem.  I grew up thinking about death a lot.  Part of this was because Evangelical children’s literature raised the question of where would you spend eternity if you died today.  Seriously, some of the stories I read, along with Dick and Jane, still scare me today.  Religion often uses fear for its own purposes.  So does the Bible.  Grafius comes down to this at the end, asking if it’s intentional on the Bible’s part.

It seems to me that this is an important question to explore.  Religion has been weaponized through fear since at least the Reagan years.  More recently it has been aimed specifically at us “evil” liberals and our “culture of death” even as conservatives rain bombs on Iran.  We desperately need to understand religion’s now very intentional use of fear to retain power.  People are afraid.  They have reason to be.  Generally it’s not the emotional issues politicians hand-pick to garner votes.  Yes, the Bible is a source of fear.  Horror films are often also a source of scary thoughts.  They do have a lot in common.  We just need someone to come along with an open jar of peanut butter to run into someone eating a chocolate bar.

250 Years

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America doesn’t seem to be in a partying mood.  With more than the usual inanity coming from Foggy Bottom, and hot air being added to this heat dome, well, it might just be best to keep it simple.  Algae will grow, no matter what the self-appointed-divine say.  I remember a half century ago.  America seemed optimistic at its bicentennial.  Nixon was safely gone and Reagan hadn’t reared his fanged head yet.  It seemed like the country had a future.  These days, with more than regressive rhetoric, when emails from the Social Security Administration go out of their way to say how great Trump is, well, I think I’ll just stay home and watch a horror movie.  It’s less traumatic.

For me, as a kid, the Fourth of July was all about sparklers, black snakes, smoke bombs, and staying up late for fireworks.  Black snakes were these black discs about the size of a button coin battery that you lit with a match and the ash would fizz out the top into a “snake.”  It was an ephemeral thrill.  What we called “smoke bombs” were small colorful spheres that gushed colored smoke when you lit them.  We never played with anything explosive, but even the thought of these simple pleasures still brings a smile.  I haven’t seen anything like these trinkets (except sparklers) for many decades now.  I see from YouTube that they’re still being sold.  Almost as if the past fifty years never happened.  And staying up late to see fireworks only means being excessively sleepy at work on Monday morning.

I won’t be around for the tricentennial, presuming we survive what the Republican Party has up its sleeves.  I do hope things are more optimistic then.  I’ve been around long enough to notice the distinct difference in national outlook a mere fifty years can make.  I was born less than twenty years after the Second World War when everyone knew fascists were an evil to be avoided.  In just the last decade that has done a 180.  And we see what it’s like.  Our grocery bills are double what they were before our fearless leader took his post, claiming to make things better.  If I’m to believe the propaganda from the Social Security Administration things would be just rosy, could I afford to retire.  So our social experiment in democracy seems to have lasted only about two-hundred and fifty years.  Hopefully in another fifty what’s left of the United States will have come back to its senses or will have come up with something better than we have today.

Hopeful Weeds

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Our approach to our front garden has been to buy the perennials we can afford and hope the beauty of nature does the rest.  Nature, we quickly learned, loves weeds.  Tough, tenacious, even if not always pleasing to the eye, weeds may be the ultimate symbol of hope.  A friend of mine, now departed, used to say that a weed was just a plant where we didn’t want it to be.  To put a more lexical sounding spin on it, a weed is “a plant considered undesirable in a particular situation” (according to Wikipedia).  Opportunistic plants, but those with a strong desire to survive.  I have noticed, in our eight years in this house, that each year different weeds predominate.  We have a front lawn that is difficult to finagle a mower onto, so we put down ground cover and mulch and planted several store-purchased non-weeds.

Some of these survived, and others haven’t.  Some hung on for a few years and then died.  It’s difficult to say if we just don’t have green thumbs or if the brutal, full summer sun did them in.  Weeds, however, thrive no matter what.  And they find any location with the smallest bit of promise.  Tired of wrestling the lawn mower down the front steps, a couple years back I put weed-blocking ground cover on the verge.  I went to the hardware store and bought many bags of sand and gravel and some paving stones.  First the sand on top of the ground cover.  Then the heavy paving blocks.  The gravel covered the sand, and I pushed it off the paving blocks to make a somewhat pleasing, if simple hop-scotch track.  (I’m delighted whenever I see kids using it that way.)  I hadn’t realized that weeds don’t mind sand.

That first year was good.  The second summer, however, weeds had begun to sprout and grow, tenaciously.  Instead of mowing, I was now kneeling on paving blocks and pulling weeds.  Mowing took less time.  Still, the weeding can be done every few weeks rather than the weekly ritual with the mower.  I decided for our front garden that any non-spiky plant that was shorter than what we’d planted would be left alone.  There aren’t enough hours in a weekend—even a three-day one—to weed properly, not with books to write and a 9-2-5 breathing down my neck all the other days.  Not to mention the mowing and grocery shopping and other errands that eat up weekends like popcorn.  Still, fresh in from pulling the latest batch of weeks I have to confess that they give me hope.  All it takes is a place to settle down, no matter how marginal, and the will to survive.