I wasn’t into horror growing up. Being raised in a Baptist household meant that the genre was generally off-limits to prevent exposure to “spirits” and other potentially morally corrupting subject matter. This meant sneaking to watch Saw and Insidious and Paranormal Activity with friends, and praying there wouldn’t be any nightmares, because you can never
grief was never really a part of my life until fairly recently. wait that isn’t true i think. grief was much easier to ignore until fairly recently. i have never been a stranger to loss or disappointment; after all, it is a condition of the human experience. usually any expressions of that were limited to
Each year during the weeks preceding my birthday, I have an existential crisis. Not in an “oh-shit-I’m-getting-older-and-thus-much closer-to-death” way as youth is never a sanctuary for death; the last three years have been proof of that. Instead, these episodes are more of an “oh-shit-the-passage-of-time-is-an-absurd-thing-and-as-it-continues-all-that-is-happening-now-I-will-eventually-come-to-look-back-on-with-nostalgia” thing. Despite these I feel more settled in my skin now
In the Before Time, one of the first texts assigned to me during undergrad was Milton’s Paradise Lost, a retelling of the Fall of man. I’d already heard the original version of this story a thousand times as a child raised in a Southern Baptist church and consequently, had a very poor opinion of “the
A Recreation of Frame 352 of the Patterson-Gimlin Film, Trokon V, 2023 Since childhood I have always been fascinated by the outlandish. Particularly, the notion of the mundane coexisting with the not-mundane- the possibility that somewhere below the surface, or hidden deep in a cave, “magic” and monsters were waiting to be found. I read