neath luna

  • Yes, I am a donut

    Recently I have been revisiting my near-obsessive self-question what scares me? because I’m back to reading recent “horror” fiction and feeling the recrudescence of my childhood dream of one day becoming the next Edgar Allan Poe (which I had very early, attended by the thought well, if I can’t make them like me, maybe I…

  • What are friends for?

    I whine a lot, but I’m not going to whine and tell you I don’t have any friends. I do have friends. Unfortunately, none of the people I really think of as [close?] friends are close to me in actual 3D ‘meat-space.’ A grim fact I roll around in my mind far too often is…

  • Ah, Sweet Mystery

    Humans do love their mysteries — preferring them, in some contexts, to facts. This is something of a mystery, itself: while I expect many of us, if presented with the opportunity, would pay big bucks to learn the true identity of, say, Jack the Ripper, there are others — there are doubtless parts of our…

  • Blues Fell this Morning

    I came late to the country blues. I knew the song “Crossroads” from its incarnation as a hit for the 60s supergroup Cream; I thought I knew what the blues were because I was a teenager and was sad a lot and had listened to a couple of albums by Tom Waits. I was living…

  • That Damned Magpie

    Decades ago in undergraduate school, I was working on an independent study project about the Swedish dramatist August Strindberg (1849 – 1912). People generally know Strindberg, if they know him at all, as something of a wack-job: he wrote groundbreaking (in that they sometimes incorporated a kind of “dream logic” and foregrounded aspects of the…

  • Completely fcuking tired of the Internet

    For a long time I’ve used an acronym, PRE, to encapsulate my sense of humanity’s relationship with the greater world: People Ruin Everything. If you are old enough, you may remember the excitement of the early Internet days (understood here is a sort of ‘general use’ sense of the ‘net: if I were being scrupulously…

  • Yes, You’re Evil

    This morning I was unable to stem the tide of bile rising in my throat out of loathing for Google: its crap Chrome browser recently (for reasons I’m not interested enough to pursue — so, yes, maybe something stupid I happened to have done) started insisting I use a profile, and since I am squashed…

  • Shark-n-Toro

    Nobody asked me, but I’m increasingly fearful that Guillermo del Toro has jumped the proverbial shark. I admit that I haven’t been completely satisfied by any del Toro film, although I recognize his skills and eclectic, wide-ranging sensibilities (I don’t like that phrase — maybe I will replace it). I allowed myself to get excited…

  • Of Horror and the Brain

    “Brains … brains,” squeal the undead. Sometimes, anyway. Considered either as a candidate for horror movie excision and subsequent separate-from-body life (in a jar or out), or as the subject of trauma (ref. my previous post), the brain is the most horrifying of organs. When I was a kid, I thought blobs were the scariest…

  • I would have been two years old …

    For no reason I can articulate, I’ve recently become interested in the assassination of JFK: I’ve been watching old coverage from the time (including the Zapruder film) on Youtube and trying to learn a little bit more about the event. In one of the videos I watched someone opined that every time one watched the…