Dark Sentiments Season 10 — Day 22: Keeping Watch

| October 22, 2019

Another rite of passage piece with echos of last season’s Willie and the Bear. The term “traveller’s lantern”, perverted to Hunter’s lantern here, and not to be confused with Hunter’s Moon, refers to a time when safe travel was denied to the average bloke between the last quarter, through new, and to the first quarter of […]

Dark Sentiments Season 10 — Day 21: Holding the Night at Spearpoint

| October 21, 2019

The eye is the primary sensory tool of the Human animal. Coupled to a brain predisposed to seek out patterns and sift them through a sieve of instincts and memories, the sense of sight is and always has been instrumental in keeping us alive. But it has weaknesses that become most evident when darkness falls, […]

Dark Sentiments Season 10 — Day 19: Who Gets Into Valhalla?

| October 19, 2019

I first introduced expert in all things Old Norse, Dr. Jackson Crawford, in last February’s A Long Winter’s Night — Ascent to Spring Edition: The Cowboy Hávamál. We already know HOW you get into Valhalla — the hard way. Tonight he’s back with the answer to that other burning question — WHO gets into Valhalla? […]

Dark Sentiments Season 10 — Day 16: Of Hand Operated Head Bludgeons and Throat Mallets

| October 16, 2019

It was an afternoon in the late 1970’s when I attended my first, and so far only, estate auction, inside the lofty, creaky confines of an ancient Halifax auction house. I was there in the company of two friends with whom was shared an interest in antique instruments of mayhem, and the newspaper listing for […]

Dark Sentiments Season 10 — Day 15: The Hour That Never Was

| October 15, 2019

A foundational part of our animal nature is a hefty dose of healthy opportunism, and it pains me to see it practiced on such an amateur level among humans these days. So here’s a lesson. The Hour That Never Was By LFM Consider now the question of what happens after death, What phantasmagoric wonders might […]

Dark Sentiments Season 10 — Day 13: Weep Not for the Willfully Blind

| October 13, 2019

“Man is the ultimate apex predator by design, and our footprint upon the world bears this out without question. Yet the Human brain, with all of its baggage, regards the world no differently now than it did when riding astride the skull of our cave dwelling, fire building, flint knapping ancestors.” ~ Dark Sentiments Season […]

Dark Sentiments Season 10 — Day 12: Predator and Prey

| October 12, 2019

I am the mirror the kitten doesn’t see As it stalks the other. Its efforts exhausted in reaction To only what it, itself, has done. I am the dream that makes real all that you see in me, And I remain unseen As you believe in the lies you tell yourself, Absent thought. ~ I […]

Dark Sentiments Season 10 — Day 11: Perennial Weeds

| October 11, 2019

“A label can be a physical object that, when applied to another object, conveys important information about it. What it’s made of, how to use it, how long it may be kept, and the best means of storage before use or consumption. Things like that. These sorts of labels abound in today’s world and are […]

Dark Sentiments Season 10 — Day 10: After the Apocalypse

| October 10, 2019

In keeping with the spirit of this season of Dark Sentiments, enlivened by the general air of gloom and doom casting its shadow across the land, we’ll be taking forays into an ever so special genre straddling science fiction and horror. I’m speaking, of course, of the post-apocalyptic tale, and this will be the first […]

Dark Sentiments Season 10 — Day 9: Wetiko

| October 9, 2019

I have come to know that my Esteemed Friend Master At Arms James Keating and I are joined at the spiritual hip, and so it came as no surprise when late last August he emailed me some articles on the Wetiko. If you come here often enough, you will know that I have previously written […]