We were watching the part in Hemlock Grove where Roman’s thirst escalates into despair when we paused the episode to get refreshments, and as I grabbed the bottle of apple cider vinegar, I thought – in my deep thoughts way, you know – I can see feeling that way about apple cider vinegar.

What would you call a vampire who needs apple cider vinegar rather than blood? I realize now that the question sounds like a joke asking for a punchline, so of course Callaghan would reply with pommepire (“pomme” being French for “apple”). And of course at the time I was engaged in the delicate operation of pouring the vinegar into the spoon to deposit into my flask, so when I burst out laughing, the vinegar went everywhere. Note to self: don’t ask farcical questions out loud while performing tasks with precision. It will never end well.

There’s a fine line between a farcical question and a joke.

Hemlock Grove brings up other very serious questions. For instance, how does a werewolf get its human eyes back after they pop out during transformation and its wolf-form eats them, along with all of its other human parts? I suppose everything just regrows. Hemlock Grove never shows us that part… at least it hasn’t so far.

This is one of the many interesting things I’ve learned about werewolves from Hemlock Grove: during the “turn,” the person’s human body tears apart as the wolf emerges. The fully transformed werewolf devours the pieces, shreds, eyeballs, and organs of its former human shell. (CGI has done wonderful, gruesome things for the cinematic arts.)

For some reason, it’s the eyes that interest me the most in this process. Turning back into a human automatically generates a new human form, and it’s the same form you had before… but is it? You may look like a carbon copy of your former human self, but is your body the same body you had pre-werewolf? The eyes. If you needed glasses before you turned for the first time, did you generate a set of 20/20-perfect-vision eyes when you turned back? Or did your eyes regrow with the same vision deficiencies?

Of all the mysteries in the universe.

Sometimes, I’d rather spend moments pondering imaginary monsters than the real ones on two feet who impact our lives… and of the latter, I mean the ones who are not serial killers.

It’s like how an ambulance quietly rolling up the street and stopping before a house is more chilling than an ambulance screeching around the corner with alarms blaring.

Friedrich Nietzsche said: “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”

(1/21/2019)

I took this selfie yesterday in the slight chill with its sunny, windy haze. As usual, the pic’s untouched. I love the way the crystal pendant around my neck pulled the sunbeam down into it.