I've shed a thousand skins since then

How hell-bent has this month been? Enough that I forgot to announce that my poem "Sheela-na-Gig" is now available in Weird Fiction Quarterly Fall 2024: Masquerade. It was my first sale to the market, directly inspired by a request by ashlyme for a poem about a Green Woman and almost certainly a nine-month response to Alex Garland's Men (2022). Contributors to its astonishing and extensive lineup include Adam Bolivar, Duane Pesice, Kurt Fawver, Sumiko Saulson, Ngo Binh Anh Khoa, Colleen Anderson, Scott J. Couturier, Daniel Braum, Michael Thomas Ford, Maxwell I. Gold, Denise Dumars, Rhys Hughes, Jayaprakash Satyamurthy, Hayley Arrington, Can Wiggins, LC von Hessen, Christopher Ropes, Erica Ruppert, and dozens more. Check it out! If I could unmask to be someone less surreally exhausted, I think it would be fun.

What a thing tae hae a war if ye canna hae a dance

I am having a predictably heightened case of the phenomenon where spending any time on FB feels like constant exposure to a bad take machine, so instead of starting fires on other people's walls about everything from genocide to A Canterbury Tale (1944), I am transferring my most constructive reaction to a less data-scraped space. Just tonight, I have seen a wash of people sharing this meditation by Elizabeth Gilbert, which turns on the key image:

There are times when everything seems cloaked in darkness. You long for the light but don't know where to find it.

But what if you are the light? What if you're the very agent of illumination that a dark situation begs for?

That's what this bus driver taught me—that anyone can be the light, at any moment.

It put me in immediate mind of Laurence Yep's Mountain Light (1985), which I always feel I should have read in elementary school right after The Serpent's Children (1984) and in fact can't remember reading until somewhere over the Pacific en route to Hawaii during the spring vacation which followed the April Fool's Day Blizzard of 1997:

"I think you have the right instincts. You just don't act on them." The Gallant put a hand behind my neck so that I couldn't look away from his eyes. "Listen to me, boy. The Light is more than a pun on the name of an old dynasty, just as the Darkness is more than a pun on the name of the Manchus. There's a whole world of darkness around us that's trying to put out the Light in each of us. There's a light in you. If you could only learn to let it out, you could do anything."

It was strange. I hardly knew the man; and yet, for a moment, I thought I could see the Light burning inside him—like a candle flaring into life within a paper lantern. And I felt as if a little spark of that Light passed between the two of us.

Tiny cleared his throat as if he were pleased with the Gallant's thoughts. He seemed to be a man of few words, but he meant them when he did speak. "So restore the Light."

"Banish the Darkness," I agreed.

"Maybe we could continue the discussion on our way out of here," Cassia said, and broke the mood.

I have for the last couple of days had my internal soundtrack intermittently set to Wilson & Swarbrick's "The Ballad of Jack McLaren" (2014), although the version I am currently listening to comes from a virtual concert for Burns Night 2022. When I wanted to know more about the history behind it, I ended up reading Wilson's Soldiers of Song: The Dumbells and Other Canadian Concert Parties of the First World War (2012). spatch and I recently rewatched The Wipers Times (2013). It doesn't go over well at the time, but one of the first real things Squeaky says in Mountain Light, in context of the revolution he ran off to join, is a variation on Emma Goldman: "But if you forget how to laugh, you won't remember when we've finally won. And then what kind of life will we have?"