New Year’s Eve Ditties Assorted

| December 31, 2022

It’s all over but the pyrotechnics and we are here at this singular point in what seems customarily and repetitiously perilous times with two bits of rhyme for your edification. I have kept both simple to facilitate ease of consumption notwithstanding the reader’s state of inebriation, and they will remain enshrined here for return visits […]

A Long Winter’s Night — 2022 Edition, Day 2

| December 22, 2022

Winter, in latitudes where sub-freezing temperatures can occur, brings with it harsh realities that only frantic and organized preparation in the months prior can meet with any hope of success, leading to the passing down of parables such as the story of the ant and the grasshopper, and the legend of the Wendigo. This is […]

Dark Sentiments Season 13 — Day 26: Musings on Shit Storms

| October 26, 2022

I long ago adopted the policy of placing gravity on observable outcomes and not on what people say about their involvement in them. I recommend you start doing that too. Another thing I adopted long ago was a sensitivity to how often I’m provoked to say, “Welcome to Canada — The country where nothing is […]

Dark Sentiments Season 13 — Day 25: Life and Death

| October 25, 2022

“I attended elementary school at Lunenburg Academy, a massive, brooding, castlesque pile completed in 1895 on a windswept hilltop in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. The school grounds are bordered on two sides by the Hillcrest Cemetery, and my walk to and from school passed first in front of the local funeral home before following another two […]

Dark Sentiments Season 13 — Day 24: A Sort of Duel

| October 24, 2022

The concept of Armageddon isn’t an invention of nuclear armed modernity. For those of us whose formative years were incubated in the warmest parts of the Cold War, Armageddon in those days looked like a short, sharp, war not unlike the one so recently ended back then, but that played out not in the span […]

Dark Sentiments Season 13 — Day 22: Der lästige Kavalier

| October 22, 2022

It was long enough ago that I can’t remember when I started referring  to them as “Fruit Flies”, but it’s become part of the LFM family lexicon. They’re males, generally older but on those occasions when not, youth is mixed with social ineptitude yet no lesser amount of self-entitlement, and I commonly find them buzzing […]

Dark Sentiments Season 13 — Day 21: Of Thorns and Roses

| October 21, 2022

“The thorn defends the rose, yet it is peaceful and does not seek conflict.” As you will surely know Goode Reader, I make little attempt to keep my appreciation for cold steel and those who deftly wield it any kind of a secret around here. Tonight, please join me in revisiting a representative rhyme from […]

Dark Sentiments Season 13 — Day 20: The Watchstone

| October 20, 2022

In the spirit of Stonefall, tonight’s Dark Sentiment reflects on another case involving rocks moving around with outside assistance, mixed with a little imaginative historical interpretation. The actual stone on which this is based, pictured above, is the largest of a small cluster of “glacial erratics” — stones picked up by advancing glaciers in the […]

Dark Sentiments Season 13 — Day 18: Melancholia

| October 18, 2022

Money’s like a crop that can Be sown and reaped anon. Time is as a bottled dram, That, once it’s drunk, is gone. ~ Waste Not Your Dram ~ (Excerpt) Pissing your life away and regretting it in your dotage is a recurring theme in both art and life.

Dark Sentiments Season 13 — Day 15: An Eyeful

| October 15, 2022

“For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” ~ 1 Corinthians 13:12 (KJV) Modern technological society is obsessed with surveillance, both the doing of it and the having it done to you. And so […]