Salt City Sinner

  As 2021 slides gently into oblivion like a moonlit funeral barge on a wine-dark sea, let’s reflect! 2021 was a complicated year for me but even in the midst of the madness, books were – as they always are – a tremendous comfort. Let’s have a fond look back at the cream of the crop; the five best books I read this year!

 As 2021 crashes and caterwauls its course to a conclusion, I am obligated as a blogger (blogligated, if you will) to reflect on the year in review. I spent more time than usual in the hospital over the last 12 months, and as a result I had a chance to do even more reading than normal! Regrettably, not every book I dragged myself through was a winner.

  Perhaps you were lucky enough to grow up without a religious background. Perhaps your guardians were either hardened, borscht-swilling atheist Marxists or the type of enlightened freethinkers one might find at a local Universalist Unitarian meeting – you know, the type who let their children name themselves and pick their own spiritual path. Perhaps you did grow up with a hand-me-down religion, but perhaps it was Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, or any other religion available in this great big world.

  ( Author’s note: once one has spent enough time studying conspiracy theories, it’s inevitable that one feels the urge to conceive of a crazy-ass conspiracy theory of one’s own – just ask Robert Anton Wilson ! This is one such attempt.) The dread, black-clad soldiers of Antifa are known for their anarcho-communist claptrap as much as for beating up helpless old ladies, helpless old men, and (in general) helpless supporters of heroic underdog and TRUE President of the United States Donald J. Trump.

  In a parallel universe, a popular thinker like Thomas Frank correctly identified the problem currently tearing the US and much of the world apart. In this alternate reality, this thinker may have even been able to proffer a solution, given a keen enough intellect or the right insight. 

  Metaphors! You know them, you love them, you need them – but much like motor vehicles, semiautomatic rifles, and pet chinchillas, they are easily abused! 

  Why do people love horror? It seems like a bland enough question; we might as well ask why people like kimchi, or ghost peppers. Humans are endlessly delighted by stimulation, and as even a casual fan of BDSM can tell you, sometimes pleasure is sweeter when it’s been spiked (so to speak) with a little pain. Is that all it is? Are fans of horror indulging our taste for having our neurons flogged? Are horror nerds high on adrenaline the way an extreme sports enthusiast or roller coaster fanatic is? Or is there a deeper attraction – cold metaphorical bones beneath the twitchy flesh of scares-as-thrills?