A Day to Forget

“I invite positive energies and love into my life and relationships.”

An Exotic Dancer Demonstrates That Her Underwear Was Too Large To Have Exposed Herself, After Undercover Police Officers Arrested Her In Florida

Dorothy Counts – The First Black Girl To Attend An All-White School In The United States – Being Teased And Taunted By Her White Male Peers At Charlotte’s Harry Harding High School, 1957

Austrian Boy Receives New Shoes During WWII

Jewish Prisoners After Being Liberated From A Death Train, 1945

The Graves Of A Catholic Woman And Her Protestant Husband, Holland, 1888

A Lone Man Refusing To Do The Nazi Salute, 1936

Job Hunting In 1930’s

German Soldiers React To Footage Of Concentration Camps, 1945

Residents Of West Berlin Show Children To Their Grandparents Who Reside On The Eastern Side, 1961

Acrobats Balance On Top Of The Empire State Building, 1934

Mafia Boss Joe Masseria Lays Dead On A Brooklyn Restaurant Floor Holding The Ace Of Spades, 1931

Lesbian Couple At Le Monocle, Paris, 1932

The Most Beautiful Suicide – Evelyn Mchale Leapt To Her Death From The Empire State Building, 1947

The Remains Of The Astronaut Vladimir Komarov, A Man Who Fell From Space, 1967

Race Organizers Attempt To Stop Kathrine Switzer From Competing In The Boston Marathon. She Became The First Woman To Finish The Race, 1967

Harold Whittles Hearing Sound For The First Time, 1974

Me now: Infinity War is coming out next week

The comedy in the show came from the family’s “odd” lifestyle, rather than from infighting and petty bickering, or worse, as was common on other shows of the time, thinly veiled references to spousal abuse. They didn’t make fun of each other or act like their children were creatures from another world. Were they strange and outside of social norms? Yes. Were they united in creating a loving home and being good, supportive parents? Absolutely.

These two support and adore their children, care for an aging mother and an estranged brother, put family before everything, and they love each other, wholly, fiercely, without reserve. They are every bit as much in love after at least a decade of marriage as they were the day they met.

It’s nobody’s surprise that many of the aesthetic and thematic elements of The Addams Family in its various incarnations are influenced by Gothic tradition (not goth, that mostly came later. And not Goth, that was much much much too early), and I think Gomez’s words are a dead bullseye in terms of Gothic mentality.

“Make her feel like she’s the most sublime creature on earth”

The sublime is a recurring theme throughout Gothic literature. Although the word (like “awesome”) has lost a lot of it’s original luster over the intervening decades, sublime doesn’t really mean elevated and lofty (or even heavenly) as it’s often used today, but rather something possessing the power and grandeur to induce awe and veneration in the mind of the beholder. Although less than divine, something sublime possessed a wildness and power that transcended human ability to control…or even to comprehend.

Sublime is standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon leaning as far as you dare over the railing and still not being able to see the canyon floor below. Sublime is warrior-queen Galadriel being tempted by the One Ring. Sublime is waking up in the middle of the night in the heart of a wild thunderstorm.

“Make her feel like she’s the most sublime creature on earth”

Gomez isn’t advising Fester to treat a woman he fancies like a princess, or even elevate her to pedestal of angelic nature (who’s idea was it to equate femininity with purity anyway? What a laughable and historically damaging idea. Shame on whatever dead (probably) white dudes promoted that!)

Gomez is advising Fester that if he truly loves a woman he must do everything he can to remind her of how she’s an untameable force of nature who’s grandeur brings him to his knees in awe and terror. Just like Morticia, for Gomez.

I’ll sign off with one of my most favorite quotes of all time, because it feels suddenly very relevant:

“When I find myself surrounded by so much beauty, I feel as if I am the eye of a hurricane.”

When I worked in fast food for minimum wage, they would yell at us and lecture us about “stealing” fries and burgers (while we had to throw out TONS of food every day) as though the giant billion-dollar corporations of McDonald’s and Sonic couldn’t afford to give their employees something to eat (while not even paying us a living wage).

Now I work at an upscale restaurant (it’s fancy, like celebrities eat there fairly often) and not only do I make WAY better money but they give us 2 free meals a day (eaten on the clock) and they’re GOOD. Today I got baked cod, spring rolls, rice pilaf, stir fry, and mashed potatoes and eggplant. Oh, and free espresso and juice. From this restaurant owned by a local man who is in no way a billionaire.

Earth was doing just fine with a mostly nitrogen/carbon dioxide atmosphere and everyone was happy to go on living in anaerobic bliss and then cyanobacteria suddenly hit the scene, altered the atmosphere composition so that there was a ton of oxygen gas and killed practically everything (97% or more of all species on earth).