Simon & Schuster – yadadarcyyada

The supernatural has intrigued humans for all long as anyone can remember, but does anyone think of their side of the story? Do supernatural creatures ever get a chance to just kick back and enjoy life?
They seem too busy conjuring, hunting, and doing evil to just enjoy the little things. Maybe they should visit a supernatural spa, take a long supernatural walk, enjoy a stunning supernatural sunset, or read a supernatural book, give themselves a supernatural break.
Instead they enrage already angry mobs, dodge bullets, arrows, demon hunters! Avoiding being burned at the stake or getting a stake through the heart! Avoiding the sun, salt, garlic, silver, conflict with others in various realms – there’s a lot of avoidance behaviour there.
Just seems exhausting.
They must feel like saying, Supernatural Calgon take me away!
They just don’t seem like they get a lot of time to themselves.
So they’re creepy but are they happy?

None of that explains why we like the supernatural, superstition, mysticism, religion, etc. so much.
Does scaring ourselves let us come to terms with our fears in a sort of safe mode?
Can we sense the supernatural in the natural world and we’re trying to make sense of it?
Perhaps it’s the illusion of control? To believe in supernatural causality, that somehow one thing causes another to happen without any natural process between them, perhaps it’s comforting.

In the spirit of Halloween I’ve been reading creepy and kooky and sometimes even spooky books, including The Bane Chronicles by Cassandra Clare, Sarah Rees Brennan and Maureen Johnson (Margaret K. McElderry Books/Simon & Schuster), a sort of spin-off from The Mortal Instruments series where Bane (not one of my top characters at least in this series, but these historical follies were amusing), an immortal warlock goes on a supernatural bar hop scavenger hunt through time. I got a chuckle from the inference that he’s the reason we have the idiom, Bane of my existence…hmmm, I suppose that could refer to Batman’s Bane as well. But I digress…

Of course, reading this made me wonder even more why we can’t get enough of stories of: warlocks, witches, zombies, aliens, demons, demon hunters, ghosts, angels, monsters, fallen angels, werewolves, vampires and other supernatural beings?
Do we need to put a face and a name on the things that go bump in the night?
Try to calm the inner turmoil caused by our fight or flight response?
Or is dressing up at Halloween and scaring ourselves with movies, books, TV now merely entertainment?

This Halloween think of our supernatural friends…I know they’ll be thinking of you!

We humans seem to have a love/hate relationship with Mother Nature. It’s like we’re either breaking up or making up and both seem equally violent and nasty.

1. We love nature, but only if it’s pretty or convenient.

2. There are many things in nature that want to kill us or eat us. That includes other humans.

3. You’re born with 300 bones, but by the time you’re an adult you have 206, and we’re so fragile, even a swan can break those bones.3. A lot of things in nature want to use us as unwilling hosts, sort of like Alien, but with less Sigourney Weaver.

4. Whether or not you believe in climate change, it sure seems like our climate is changing and not in a fun cartoony way.

5. There are things, most we can’t even see, that want to infect or poison us. Badly done naughty toxins, parasites, bacteria, viruses, etc., badly done.

6. Humans have tried to adapt to nature, but we discovered money and power and got really distracted.

7. There are eels that can give off a charge of over 600 volts. And they probably cost less than hydro.

8. No other creature in nature sleeps on it’s back, except humans.

9. The Amazon rainforest produces over half the world’s oxygen supply – we should keep cutting that down.

10. Nature has given us the means to heal as well. If we don’t destroy what can help us first.

The good news for Mother Nature. She won’t have to put up with us for much longer. We’re doing more to ourselves than she ever could. Sadly, we’re trying to take her down with us.

The book Mother Nature Is Trying To Kill You is scary, but interesting and even amusing at times as Dan Riskin Ph.D. (Discovery Canada and Daily Planet) guides us through the 7 deadly sins of Mother Nature’s eccentricities. Some new ideas, some recycled, but all thought-provoking.