Happy Easter! I forgot it was Easter but then remembered after I had walked all the way to the coffee shop, which for a heart-stopping (EXAGGERATION) moment I believed to be closed. Luckily they do not respect the sacrifice of our lord & savior, though, so here I am, drinking coffee and restructuring a paper on musical postmodernism or something!
Easter is perhaps chief among the holidays that fade in importance as you cross the invisible line between girlhood and womanhood. Unless you actually believe in God, I guess. But I go years and years without ever once thinking of Easter, though it was once such a HUGE day. My parents made a really big deal out of Easter. We’d wake up in the morning and there would be a “nest” of that awesome super-green fake plastic grass at the foot of our beds, filled with presents. One time I got a rad pink sweatshirt with a unicorn on it; another time I got Thriller (“And another time I got a rubick’s cube and 1985 calendar” LOL). Then we would go downstairs and get our baskets and go fucking EGG HUNTING. My parents love that kind of thing. Hidden treasure. My dad used to go all over our property hiding treasure and then he’d write elaborate riddles for how to find it; they took all day to complete and were super frustrating but awesome. Remember the big plastic eggs filled with jelly beans and the smaller plastic eggs that would have a quarter or a chocolate coin or something. And then the weird feeling of finding the dyed actual eggs that you remembered dyeing, now become somehow alien and interesting in their new life hidden out-of-doors. And then 3 months later the dog shows up chewing on something and it’s an egg nobody ever found, either that or a dead bird.
Speaking of dogs, this one has started “marking.” Any advice desperately welcome. He doesn’t do it in the house but he pees outside on stuff he’s not supposed to. Somebody’s backpack; another dog; a guy’s leg. He sniffs for awhile, then lifts his leg. This is a new development. Finally reading up on it I think it makes sense, as he’s just turning 3 and is finally becoming a full man. It turns out you’re not supposed to let them pee whenever they want on walks. You’re supposed to control their peeing even then. You make them pee before the walk, then don’t let them pee during the walk. This is supposed to reinforce that YOU SAY when they can and can’t pee. But how will this ever translate to him behaving politely when off leash at the dog park, or inside someone else’s house? For now we are not going to the park, we are doing careful leash walks, trying to see if we can get the marking behavior minimized. Any other advice? GOD
I am reading this book THE TERROR, which is a billion pages long and is a horror story. Don’t spoiler it for me, I haven’t read anything about it! But I want to tell you one spoiler, which is this awesome, brilliant turn the story takes. So it’s about Endurance-style ice ships in 1847, stuck in the ice in the Arctic. They’ve been stuck there for 2 full years and it’s very frustrating. Then suddenly one day they start being stalked and picked off by what they take to be some kind of gigantic mystery ice bear. Every once in awhile the men down below will hear a shot, a scream, and when they run up to the deck there’s just a smear of blood and maybe somebody’s hat or gun lying there. Damn this crazy ice bear! Then there’s a part where the captain of one of the ships realizes that the scuffling and clawing sound people have been hearing way down deep below in the ships guts, which are 20 feet below the water line and encased in solid ice, are NOT the sounds of the ice creaking and groaning but are actually the sounds of something–presumably this crazy ice bear–trying to get in at them. Like it’s tunneled down through 20 feet of ice and is now clawing at the ship. So this is obviously some kind of truly epic bear.
BUT THEN: The turn! Two crew members disappear in smears of blood, and the rest of the crew searches for 12 hours all around the boat but in vain; the two dudes are gone. But then like a day later, the watchman sees a figure slumped against the stern of the boat, and goes to check it out, and what he took at first to be a man sitting there is actually TWO men–below the waist it’s one of the missing guys; above the waist it’s the other. Like whatever took them has actually ripped each one in half, and stuck them back together, and brought them BACK, and propped them up in lifelike form. So this ice bear in one sentence is revealed to be no bear at all but some sort of demon or supernatural monster or something, and the situation has gone from dire to pants-shitting levels of intensity for these poor suckers stuck in this pitch-black ice.
I’m only like 40 pages in so maybe the book will get shitty (or too scary to continue reading) but I just think that is such a good turn. Good job, Dan Simmons!
In conclusion, I really think everything wrong with the Western world can be encapsulated in the fact that we have thought it awesome to sail ships up to the Arctic (/the amazon/the moon) and just ram into ice over and over again until we are stuck and frozen and then live on the ships maniacally rubbing our hands together and dying of scurvy until years later when the ice melts and we can keep ramming our way to the Northwest Passage so we can claim it for God and England. TALK ABOUT MONSTERS
HAPPY EASTER
