Dark Sentiments 2014 – Day 20: An Aside About Cannibalism

| October 20, 2014

Back in the early 1980’s, a young man came to work for a company I was consulting for, and it fell to me to train him in the arcane arts of installing and troubleshooting security and fire alarm systems. I befriended him in  a mentor kind of way, and learned he had spent much of […]

Dark Sentiments 2014 – Day 19: A Few Words from Terence Hanbury White

| October 19, 2014

The world is at war. With everything. The world of humans strives for unbridled growth, and in so doing either sheds all care, or cooks up justifications for its extravagance, to the peril of everything that isn’t us. Religion is still being used as a reason to kill everyone else who doesn’t belong to “the […]

Dark Sentiments 2014 – Day 18: Privacy, Secrets, and the Sliding Scale

| October 18, 2014

If there is one very dark pit modern society is hell bent on careening headlong into, it’s the dangerous, dangerous, and I emphasize really fucking dangerous idea that demanding privacy is somehow suspicious, and tantamount to an open admission that you – indeed anyone who wishes to have it – must have “something to hide”. […]

Dark Sentiments 2014 – Day 17: A Question of Intention and a Matter of Degree

| October 17, 2014

Murder by poison has a long dark history. For example, whether historically accurate or cooked up by rivals, the Borgia family name is indelibly stained with it. Poison is less used today for killing things that walk on two legs for reasons well presented by Esther Inglis-Arkell in her article The Deadliest Poisons in History […]

Dark Sentiments 2014 – Day 9: Aubrey Beardsley

| October 9, 2014

The Valiant A ballad The valiant was a noble bark          As ever ploughed the sea, A noble crew she also had          As ever there might be. When once at night upon the deep          The Valiant did sail, Her captain saw a pirate ship          By the moonlight dim and pale. Then up […]

Dark Sentiments 2014 – Day 1: Welcome Back

| October 1, 2014

“Welcome, Dear Reader, to yet another season of Dark Sentiments; being our traditional 31 October days of musings, revelations, exposé, poetry, literature, visual arts, and myriad dark expressions of the Human spirit, all chosen from the sort most in the world have spent the past year trying desperately to avoid, or pretend into nonexistence.” ~ […]

Happy Birthday Mrs. Secord

| September 13, 2014

“The distance to the outpost by direct road was 12 miles but Laura feared she would encounter American guards that way and chose a roundabout route. She went first to St Davids where she was joined by her niece, Elizabeth Secord, and then to Shipman’s Corners (St Catharines). Elizabeth became exhausted and Laura continued alone, […]

Plenty o’ Fish

| September 1, 2014

On one sunny Summer’s day about ten years ago, the bountifully beauteous Mrs. LFM and I were shopping in the Halifax area when we decided a cup of coffee was in order. And so it came to pass that we pulled up in front of a coffee shop in the Bayer’s Lake district, facing the […]

The Centipedes

| August 30, 2014

Inspiration can strike anywhere at any time, and this is why I go nowhere without a way of quickly recording those transient thoughts that often turn into what you read here. My trusty and decidedly olde school field notebook is never far away, and when Mrs. LFM is with me, she is ever ready to […]

The Blacksmith’s Son

| August 16, 2014

The Blacksmith’s Son By LFM The Blacksmith’s Son arose one night From dreams of dark desire. He set the smithy lamps alight, And stoked the forging fire. He worked the bellows carefully, He tended every coal, Until each matched his passion, And the flame that seared his soul. When forge and passion burned the same […]