Bonesdrawstuff

last night I was thinking about bees and how dumb it is that science hasn’t given us genetically modified pet bees yet

Ranch Romances Feb 15 1957

I'm four hundred pages in on the Three Musketeers and so far Athos's lackey Grimaud has uttered only one line of dialogue, which is to call D'Artagnan, at the time wearing a floral dress and sneaking into Athos's antechamber, a slut

Companions of Christmas, day 6: The Krampus

The Krampus was a rural giftgiver who would deliver presents to good Alpine children, but the naughty ones? Well, he'd stuff them into his basket and take them back to his lair, where they would be forced to spend the next year making toys for good kids.

They'd be released the following Christmas, but even so, a year spent toiling away in the clutches of the Krampus was a pretty terrifying prospect for the children of western Austria, southern Germany, northern Italy, and Bohemia.

When word of this Santa Claus fellow started getting around, kids in these regions, terrified of the Krampus, started writing Santa letters asking for his intercession, and Santa obliged. He and the Krampus had a rumble, and Santa successfully shackled the Krampus with the chains that had once held St. Paul of Tarsus.

Bound by the magic of this holy relic, the Krampus was forced to accompany Santa for the next few years, and in observing his captor came to see that his punitive approach to kids wasn't the best way to ensure their good behavior or long-term character betterment after all. Thus reformed of his kid-beating, kid-stealing ways, the Krampus was released by Santa, but he asked to retain the chains so that they would always remind him of how the best way to put right kids that are straying from the path of goodness, kindness, and charity, would be to practice those tenets himself.

I was rewatching Mike Flannigan’s MIDNIGHT MASS on Netflix, and I thought I’d do a portrait of one of the characters from the show: Father Paul (played by Hamish Linklater), one of the most interesting and rich characters to grace horror fiction in many, many years.

If you haven’t seen Midnight Mass, it’s like most of Flannigan’s other offerings: profound beauty and hope wrapped inside a surface of truly terrible horror. As a meditation on faith and also on guilt, and death, I think it’s a really spectacular work. If you haven’t watched it, and aren’t adverse to scary stuff, I’d highly recommend it (on Netflix).