Peace By The Balloonatic

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

*All I have to do is say I just can’t and lo and behold, readers chase me around the room with slippers going “we sent you guest posts.” My bad. they have. I just couldn’t find them. Partly because mostly asleep.”

Peace by the Balloonatic

I have never been a big fan of horror, whether on the screen or in a book. I grew up in the 70s and 80s outside a small town in northern Ontario with a movie theater that let you in regardless of the movies ratings and watched movies there and on TV that I really wish I hadn’t. I think it happens to people with vivid imaginations – we can place ourselves inside the story and it feels too real. So my memory is filled with clips of a giant sea turtle dragging a man entangled in a rope down to the depths, an unkillable Chuck Norris rising from some waters and visions of a car with my name chasing someone into a dead-end alley – all the way to the end. 

I will never forget my first year of university, when I was going home for Christmas. I bought my Dad an autographed copy of a Robert Bateman coffee table book of wildlife paintings, that I knew he would love. The book store had a special sale, and because of the cost of the book for my Dad, I was allowed to choose a free hardcover book for myself. I was heading back across the country on my first ever plane trip, so I chose a book that looked like it would be peaceful and relaxing. It was “Silence of the Lambs.” I ended up starting and finishing it in one day. I couldn’t put it down – not because it was that good, but because I knew my imagination would come up with something worse. 

That’s how I feel now after hearing about the tragedy of the Titan Submersible. I picture myself in there with them. What were they thinking and doing while waiting and hoping for rescue? Were they angry and yelling, fighting amongst each other? Blaming each other, themselves and the company CEO who was in there with them for the decisions that led to their predicament? What would it be like, to be trapped in there, hoping for a miracle that you knew was unlikely to ever happen? Were they raging against the dying of the light? Or were they able to find peace and closure before their deaths?

I think most of us have made choices in life that we regret. We can spend way too much time looking back through the past, trying to pinpoint the moment, the decision, that led us down into the depths of despair and grief. The “What if….” What if hadn’t moved away from home and halfway across the country? What if I had chosen a different major in university, or attended trade school instead? What if I had said yes to that blind date my brother was trying to set up? What if I had made a different choice in a partner, or chosen to stay single? We make bad choices all the time. Fortunately for most of us, those choices, while they may be tragic, are not fatal. We can recover from bad choices and learn from them and move forward. And if we are fortunate, we can overcome the results and find peace in the world instead of horror. 

The road to peace, like the journey to joy, often comes from trips down through valleys and pits of despair, horror, pain and grief, where we keep slogging onward with our heads down against the storms raging around us. We climb up, inch by inch until we break free and are on the peaks where we can see the sun again and can look back and see the rainbow of promise and hope. While I would like to forget the horrors, bad memories and hard times in life, they serve a purpose in helping me to appreciate the moments of peace. So when I look back and remember not just those clips of horror from tv and movies, but also the daily fears and struggles, I will also remember long walks in meadows, finding flowers and hidden creeks, lying peacefully in the grass and dreaming of a future that I am living now where I have found peace.

89 thoughts on “Peace By The Balloonatic”

    3. Yes, I’m pretty sure that was it. I remember watching it on TV while visiting with friends of my parents while my parents were out of town.

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  2. If it’s any comfort to your imagination, the implosion happened so quickly that the passengers never had time to be afraid. One second everything seemed normal, the next second they were instantly gone. So you can stop thinking about them sitting there in the dark waiting for rescue that would never come: they were spared that emotional torture, at least.

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      1. implosion happened so quickly that the passengers never had time to be afraid. One second everything seemed normal, the next second they were instantly gone.
        ……………….

        True (or not, because how will anyone ever really know) that is the official tag. They were fine then implosion and dead with no chance to know that anything was wrong.

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        1. You’ll notice I didn’t say “may have” happened. We can be certain because of the implosion sound recorded by a US Navy ship that was nearby, listening for the sound of potentially-hostile submarines. They didn’t release the info until some days afterwards, once they realized just what it was that they had heard — but they recorded the sound of an underwater implosion at the right time and in the right direction to definitely be the missing submersible. The debris found underwater was also consistent with an implosion. And we know how water behaves at those depths, too: if a sub implodes, the water acts like a giant hammer blow, crushing everything instantly.

          In this particular case, there’s no doubt or uncertainty as to what happened. Exactly which part failed is still unknown (it was probably the viewing hatch, but it could have been the carbon-fiber body), but that’s the only unknown. What happened after the part failed and the sub imploded can be known with certainty, because we know what has happened to other subs that imploded at similar depths.

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          1. sub imploded can be known with certainty, because we know what has happened to other subs that imploded at similar depths.
            …………..

            Okay. No qualifier. Amended: “They were fine then implosion and dead with no chance to know that anything was wrong.”

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          3. They’re pretty sure the carbon-fiber-composite cylinder imploded, and the viewport was blown off by water-hammer effect. They haven’t found any actual pieces of the cylinder, not even small ones. It seems to have been pulverized.

            Fiber composites are not meant to be placed under compression. The fibers give it great strength in tension, but under compression you’re pushing on a mesh of threads. There’s nothing to resist the pressure except the epoxy.

            What happened? Most likely, a weakness in the cylinder caused it to deform, concentrating stress at the weak point, and the whole thing collapsed like a beer can with a redneck balanced on top of it. The end domes were EACH exerting about 11,000 tons of pressure on the cylinder. I’ve seen estimates that the implosion lasted anywhere from 2 to 5 milliseconds with energy equivalent to several kilograms of C-4.

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            1. I am over 50, though never military, and didn’t get much in the way of engineering training (and that in the school of life experience/hard knocks) so the CEO would likely never listen to me say how stupid an idea the design was of this thing was. Add that they went deeper than the builder was willing to test it too, if paid (and they were not paid, so they rated it for an even shallower level) and sorry for the others in there, but you had to be willingly ignorant to sign off on going down for that.
              At least it was quick.

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              1. Oh, it sounds as if the CEO was willing to ignore anybody who didn’t go along with his idea, no matter how qualified said person (or groups, etc) were. Sounds like he was struck by The Good Idea fairy and wasn’t going to let reality intrude on his dream.

                I gather that the fired safety guy had plenty of background to say things were going to get ugly. I also read that in a previous trip, the hull was starting to make noises that were not encouraging.

                I feel sorry for the 19 year old. He didn’t want to go, but according to family, wanted to make his father happy. The rest, they were fools.

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            2. Don’t forget the cold weakening the bonds between the epoxy and the fibers themselves. Not to mention the scourge of electrolysis if you used substandard metals. If you mix the wrong steel in fittings they can dissolve in salt water. It only takes one little weakness for the water to get in under those pressures. Then there is the fact that it was built on the cheap. I could easily see someone trying to save a buck here and there making that mistake.

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    2. That does make it slightly better. Definitely different than how it was portrayed in the media at the time.

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      1. Until they found the sub debris field back tracked the now recognized sound of the implosion the media had no clue. As usual media beet feet to speculation before any facts were available. The searchers and experts would only admit to having lost contact, and they didn’t know why contact had been lost. They had hope on non-catastrophic failure, in which case there was X hours of air available. Because catastrophic failure meant the occupants were already dead. But until proof of catastrophic failure or time ran out, they had hope. Proof of catastrophic failure (implosion before getting anywhere near the bottom) was found before time ran out.

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          2. I got an impression that the Navy had a really good idea, but it sure was convenient that the search for the missing sub distracted from yet another of the revelations with respect tot eh Biden Crime Family. Suspicious cat is suspicious. (H/T Sundance & CTH)

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          3. I don’t know about beet feet, but I think there were some red faces once the circus came down.

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    3. Yes, I’m pretty sure that was it. I remember watching it on TV while visiting with friends of my parents while my parents were out of town.

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  3. I have an uncomfortably vivid imagination – so I have carefully avoided horror movies, and even horror novels, because I can … see in my mind … everything.
    This after being scared to bits with an old movie version of “The Fall of the House of Usher” when I was at a sleepover at a friends’ house when I was about ten years old. I had bad dreams over those visuals and what it suggested for years.
    I actually saw only about two-thirds of “An American Werewolf in London” as I saw it with a kindly male friend who alerted me to when I should close my eyes and put my hands over my ears.
    And yes – I think now, from what I have seen on line – that the implosion of Oceangate was more or less instantaneous.

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    1. I’m glad I’m not the only one! I will sometimes faint when my imagination is overcome. It’s a little better now in my 50s, but I still avoid it. And for darker books, it is possible if it’s read rather than audio.

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  4. I don’t mind light suspense Graham’s Krew FBI or other light stories where ghosts are helpful, or supernatural because of the heros, but actual horror stories? Um. No. The one for me was Relic. In fact when the movie trailer hit, hubby asked if we should mark it to go see. My reply was “Oh. Hell no. The book was bad enough!” Still haven’t seen it. Not going to. A book that once I started I had to finish no matter how late it was, even then I had nightmares off and on for months.

    As far as the path not taken. Really don’t have any (the whole home schooling child, but even that, it isn’t now, so not really). Have at least one where I look back and say “Thank God”. At the time incident was irritating. I was naive back then. If I’d gone along with the program, (didn’t so turned “irritating” by not giving in) I probably would be dead. Also not something I recognized as probable outcome then, or even for years. Did recognize as not right for me to do.

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  5. Some sources seem to indicate that they had dropped ballast and were ascending, aborting the dive before getting all the way down. Why that might have been and what level of anxiety might have been present is unknown. When the failure happened they say it would have been over in fractions of a second. Probably a blessing rather than 4 days in the dark waiting for the air to run out. That thought was giving me the horrors.

    R.I.P.

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    1. Some sources seem to indicate that they had dropped ballast and were ascending, aborting the dive before getting all the way down.
      ……..

      Haven’t seen that. Also haven’t been looking. It has dropped off the news except for the mention of possible lawsuits.

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  6. What angers me about the whole sub thing was the Navy heard it implode, and the administration let everything think it was a race to rescue them before the air ran out.

    That was unnecessarily cruel.

    By all means, do the search, there is always the possibility that you’re wrong. Or don’t announce you heard it. Opsec is a btch sometimes. But to wait until after the wreckage has already been found and *then tell the world we heard it happen?

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    1. whole sub thing was the Navy heard it implode, and the administration let everything think it was a race to rescue them before the air ran out. That was unnecessarily cruel.
      ……………..

      In retrospect, yes it appears cruel. But, as Robin Munn said “once they realized just what it was that they had heard”. The navy didn’t know for sure they’d heard the implosion, it also took finding the debris field to confirm it.

      I can hear the “discussion” now if the implosion sound had been recognized and reported immediately. It’d been “Okay. Where is the debris field? Huh? Should be obvious. There is no obvious debris field. Where is the debris field?”, “How can you give up? There is oxygen left. You don’t have proof of an implosion. You don’t know for sure the sound is an implosion sound!” And repeat again and again. You know it would happen.

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      2. That’s why I said finish the search, but going in with an honest “we heard a boom when they lost contact. We’re bringing in stuff to check where they would have impacted, and continuing the search until we know for sure all hope is lost” would have been far preferable the the who media ghoul parade we had.

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        1. That is if the sonar operator even told anyone, he may have just pushed it up the chain of command as an anomaly, and the ship may not have even know the sub was in the area at the time. Then when informed that a bathysphere sub went missing, the operator said “Hey Chief remember that anomaly the other day” and they made the connection. Sonar Tech’s hear an unbelievable amount of sound in the ocean.

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          1. Honestly, I suspect the delay was less “realizing what they heard and needing confirmation” and more “who can declassify this.”

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            1. This. I didn’t want to get into all the details so I didn’t mention that, but part of being certain what they had heard would have been “and make sure that the implosion we heard was actually the submersible that’s been on the news, and not some other underwater object which we might not be allowed to reveal knowledge of”. So once debris was located, they were able to be certain that it was unclassified and they were allowed to share what they knew.

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              1. There is always what you know, and what you can say, and what you feel comfortable saying, so you don’t get a visit from people reminding you its called the silent service for a reason.

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            1. It was heard on a ship in the area, Sosus wasn’t mentioned by the Navy in what I read. The Navy really doesn’t like to talk about certain things like Sosus.

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        2. an honest “we heard a boom when they lost contact. We’re bringing in stuff to check where they would have impacted, and continuing the search until we know for sure all hope is lost”
          ……….

          Just because I can intuit where they were coming from and why, doesn’t mean I agree. But I can guaranty the media response would be “How cruel. You don’t know. How can you take away any hope?” Cue deer in the headlight look. I don’t think the spoke persons for the ones searching could do it right. Personally, I’d prefer all information as it came available with all qualifiers. Or as soon as the Navy, in retrospect, decided they had sound of the implosion, that should have been told to the survivors, with the qualifier that there was no concrete proof, but debris was being looked for even as they looked for an intact sub.

          Yes, I would be one of the survivors praying beyond hope that the sound reported was wrong until the debris was found. But that is me. I can be pragmatic. But I also can cling to what I want to happen even as I know it isn’t, until I have no choice. (Was that way with Thump’s illness.)

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      3. James Cameron tried to tell people on Monday about the implosion, but they didn’t want to hear it. The media circus was too convenient a distraction from Friday’s Biden corruption reports. By Thursday they figured they’d milked it for all they could get out of it, so “We found DEBIS! Oh, by the way, the Navy picked up the implosion Sunday morning.”

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        1. James Cameron tried to tell people on Monday about the implosion, but they didn’t want to hear it.
          …………………

          That I didn’t know.

          The media circus was too convenient a distraction from Friday’s Biden corruption reports.
          ……………..

          Wow. That is surprising. Not.

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          2. hell, the moment I heard they went deep and lost contact, I knew it was likely certain it was an implosion, and that was before I learned of the sketchy design of the thing

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            1. I wasn’t thinking implosion but when it was mentioned they couldn’t find a tethered sub, my response was “Oh dear.” May not have been able to pull the sub up by the tether, but they should have been able to follow the tether down to the sub. What would have severed that tether meant outcome was not going to be good, whether they made it to the bottom, which they didn’t, or not. Which is why I did not listen to the progress reports.

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        2. What I read was that he told people he knew that it was his considered opinion the sub was gone when it lost contact — but that he didn’t say so to media inquiries, not wanting to be “that guy.” But I did hear it from the media, so grain of salt and all that.

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    2. The Reader suspects ‘telling the world we heard it’ is a form of OPSEC. Sonar is not the Reader’s specialty, but he heard enough around the halls of the Great Big Defense Contractor to be convinced that the SOSUS system both triangulated and identified the sound and our adversaries know it. Spooning out a little information will keep the incurious media from digging at it.

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    3. Hearing what happened, realizing and
      confirming what they heard, and getting that knowledge through channels could be three different things.

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    4. the ocean is a noisy place. Heard a noise, and wtf? it wasn’t until after they figured what it might be, and they had to wait until it was confirmed that the sub in question had imploded before they could say they heard it. If they’d said “We think we heard it implode.” and then the search and rescue found an intact sub with oxygen deprived bodies, the S hitting the fan would have been spectacular.

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  7. My problem with most horror or slasher films is that they are so ridiculously farfetched that I find myself laughing when others are gripped by fear. It tends to annoy whoever I am watching with. There are exceptions, Silence of the Lambs being one, where the suspense is done well enough to reach me, but those really are the exception rather than the rule. Larry Correia’s Monster Hunter series is based partly on a reaction to some far-fetched aspects of the horror genre.

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    1. Chuckle Chuckle

      I’ve read Alma Boykins “Familiar Tales” series and in one of the later stories there’s a joke about what a Horror Movie would be like if two of main characters (of the series) were in the Horror Movie.

      It would be a very short movie as those characters are generally well-armed and have magic to back up their firepower/nasty blades. :lol:

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    2. Yeah, I find slasher films irritating and stupid. And don’t get me started on that Stephen King story with the killer clown. Oh, sure, a manifestation of existential psychic horror or something…it takes physical form at some point, doesn’t it? One character who has a gun and isn’t an idiot, and you’ve got a movie that’s only 10 minutes long and ends with literally a bang. And that’d be an improvement in every way.

      One sort-of-horror movie that didn’t get it stupidly wrong was Tremors. The survivalist gun nuts actually SURVIVE and make very good use of the guns. “Broke into the wrong goddam rec room, didn’t you!” (So much fun, that one is…)

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      1. The great thing about Tremors is that it starts as horror, until the characters figure out what’s going on, and then it turn into action-survival.

        Which is much more realistic, especially for the setting (remote – and therefore required to be mostly self-reliant – town out west), than your usual horror movie.

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    3. Yeah, that’s what the International Lord Of Hate says prompted Monster Hunter: “What if the Dead Meats in a horror movie weren’t a bunch of idiots? What if they were a team of well-armed badasses?”

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    4. My problem with most horror or slasher films is that they are so ridiculously farfetched….

      At the very least, Club Dread lampshaded it.

      How a killer can roam a small tropical island dressed like Death in “The Seventh Seal” and never be noticed is one of the many questions this movie answers by keeping the bar open 24 hours a day.

      — Roger Ebert

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  9. “…it happens to people with vivid imaginations – we can place ourselves inside the story and it feels too real.”

    Definitely. I don’t watch creepy-horror movies. Just…no. My imagination can go wild enough without that kind of push.

    One of the most horrifying nightmares I’ve ever had came the night after reading Poltergeist when I was 12 (it didn’t help that I also got sick that night with some kind of stomach bug). It bothered me for weeks…and then, as a special treat at the end of the school year, my math teacher announced we were going to see a movie in class. That one, of course. I came prepared to read a book defensively or even hide my face and plug my ears. Turned out the movie was so pale and tame, almost lame, compared to the book and my (literally) fevered imagination that it didn’t bother me in the least. The whole thing was actually a good inoculation experience that expanded the boundaries of what I could mentally handle.

    Oddly enough, one type of horror story that I do like is zombie movies. I think it’s because they’re usually about confronting a problem and trying to solve it…and solving it almost always involves lots of gunfire, which I’m on board with. And somebody is going to survive; there’s usually some tiny ray of hope somewhere.

    As for could’ve/should’ve and shouldn’t-have things that haunt… There are some, but I don’t think this is the place for them. Some of them come with a measure of peace, others don’t…yet. (smile)

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  10. I might have had a phase centered around the Thomas Harris stories (although I have never read them, nor seen the movies/tv shows… It was a weird phase), so when I read “calm, peaceful story… The Silence of the Lambs,” I burst out laughing.

    I am sorry that you had to deal with that on what was meant to be a relaxing plane ride, though.

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    1. It didn’t even make it to the plane ride. I started it ahead of time and stayed up until the wee hours to finish it. Sigh. Don’t judge a book by the Title. After that my first plane trip wasn’t too bad, though.

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  11. I remember when I was about 12, ‘Day Of The Triffids’ gave me the willies. Bunch of ambulatory monster weeds with 10-foot-long poison stingers! Aaaaaah!

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    1. I didn’t know that was a thing. There’s a British guy who used to to whimsical little cartoon illustrations that were also a bit macabre, and he had a whole series on Triffids. I might have to look that story up.

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  12. “Wait Until Dark.”
    Best suspense film ever, even if not strictly speaking a horror flick.

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  13. I am so avoidant of horror anything that I confess to skimming/skipping most of these comments describing the films and scenes that traumatized the commenters. I probably will not read the new comments on this post tomorrow, either. Sorry. :-(

    Possessing a vivid imagination is most definitely NOT an unmixed blessing.

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  14. I’m somewhat tolerant of pre-Exorcist horror movies, especially Victorian-set ones, because they just come off as costume dramas with fantasy elements to me(1), and I’m usually down for that. I didn’t see much of them growing up due to my parents’ tastes, so they didn’t traumatize me for life or anything. Scariest thing I saw in theaters at an impressionable age was probably Wrath of Khan.

    Am kind of empathy-impaired where the Titan’s fate is concerned (except for that poor young adult guy whose father dragooned him into it), but this post draws a good lesson from the event.

    (1) there was in fact a mini-clique in late-60s/early-70s Britain, including two actors and one director, all frequent collaborators, who in interviews tried unsuccessfully to re-brand their horror stuff as fantasy.

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    1. The actual turning point in American horror film was a few years before The Exorcist, it was George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, which combined older gothic horror elements (everyone gathers at an old dark house, where horrible things happen or have happened) with the trends that would define horror going forward (explicit gruesomeness, rather than offscreen; modern setting; the horror is not confined to the location but implied to be everywhere; no character is safe).

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      1. True enough, but I was speaking of my own boundaries rather than the genre shift overall. There’s a fair number of outdated holdouts made in between Living Dead and Exorcist that I don’t own but do remember watching with some fondness; they drop off steeply post-Exorcist.

        If it comes to that, I don’t pay a lot of attention to American horror post-Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, unless Vincent Price is involved.

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  15. Too bad Balloonatic is anonymous (Though I readily admit I’m probably 200% wrong but I think she has red hair.), I find myself saying damnit it (Girl or boy, absolutely unnecessary to make up 47 extra genders.), horror, cute teddy bears, DMV clerks, etc., that we watched read or experienced, none the less, all, including the horror, led to now and…

    I can’t speak for you or you, and wouldn’t try to but, speaking for me, whenever I sit back, like I am right now, I’m glad for this now. This now would not exist except for those thens.

    Dang glad, good, bad, pretty, ugly, stupid, that they were.

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  16. There’s plenty of history to study if I want horror. For my recreational reading, I prefer happy endings.

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    1. That. Some actual disasters can be… oddly fascinating… but there is usually a lesson of “Alright, now we know not to do that.” Though all too many fall into, “We already knew to never do that. What the Flugelhorn were you thinking?!”

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      1. This. I started following the FIU pedestrian bidge disaster while I was on an eventful pre-operation medical visit (had an adverse reaction to a pneumonia shot that my clinic has no record of giving to me), and kept following it, including an even more post-op adventure (protip: if they put a gas bubble in your eye, changing elevation too rapidly can have some scary results. Temporary blindness in one eye was not on my bucket list).

        A couple thousand posts (on eng-tips) later with some really knowledgeable folks chiming in, and it became clear that the design and dealing with the obvious flaws was phoned in, in one case, quite literally. (The Engineer of Record “accidentally” put his phone in the laundry…)

        Just because the design looks cool (arguable for the FIU bridge, but that’s me) doesn’t mean t’s going to work. Carbon fiber in compression is about like unreinforced concrete in tension. (Smacks the Good Idea Fairy on the nose. We are NOT trying a concrete submersible!)

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        1. One of the really stupid things about that disaster was the ornamental cable stay tower that was planned. What a waste of materials.

          I can’t help but think that the entire stupid project might have worked if that part had been structural, and had been installed prior to the pedestrian deck, and hooked up as soon as the deck was in place.

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          1. Even worse, the part that failed first was built at a crazy angle to match the cable-stay look. There was some reinforcing steel in place, but most of it was placed badly and there were a lot of other connections (drains, mostly) that made a critical part of the structure hard to get right. Doing a proper job of reinforcing would have been harder, but doable.

            Suspicions are that the Engineer of Record (Denny Pate. Until this, he was world-renowned for bridge designs) delegated the relevant part of the design to somebody not fully trained, and never bothered to check it himself. When reports from the field came in that something was not right, he blew it off in a phone call. Literally he phoned it in. (“It’s just a pedestrian bridge. Let an underling deal with it.”)

            Part of the justice was that Denny Pate lost his PE cert and was permanently out of the business. Not sure how badly the engineering company got spanked, but they appealed the 10 year debarment from working on federal projects. They lost the appeal. No idea on any other lawsuits.

            IMHO, the contractor had a minor role in the disaster. There was a brief attempt at scapegoating the woman lead, but she had little to do with the fiasco. It’s one case where “just following orders” might have had sufficient merit. Not sure if a jury would have agreed. Stopped following the mess a couple years ago.

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      2. I’ve been reading – off and on – about the mine fire in Butte, MT at the turn of the 20th century. It’s fascinating history and engineering, but I have to read, go do something else for a few days, read, repeat.

        For some reason, reading about fire and people bothers me. Fire alone? No problem, I’ve got six environmental histories of fire and forestry and pyroecology, at least six. The Peshtigo Fire? Oh heck no. Once was enough. Hamburg? Martin Caiden’s book was more than enough.

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        1. Once heard a description quoted (might have been Vonnegut, not sure) of what the Dresden firebombings looked like at street level, in a lecture about something else. That was enough.

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        2. Peshtigo… there’s some nightmare fuel, yes. As it was in WI, it’s part of WI state history. Which, at least once upon a time, was the history/social studies of the 4th grade. Even ‘toned down’ it was still what it was.

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  17. I generally avoid horror. I’m OK with horror elements, and slasher stuff just turns me off. Psychological horror, and stuff like Lovecraft? Eh, very, very small doses if at all.

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  18. My imagination is far worse that anything “S. K. (he who never will be read again)”, has writ. When I would have to go into a scary place, like the basement of my grandmother’s Victorian, I would imagine the worst thing I could imagine, knowing reality would be no where near as bad.

    To know evil is real, and Heaven is real helps. We face dark villains. We are not alone. Picture Elisha’s servant, seeing the enemy surrounding the town, then having the angel armies revealed. My fav hymn is “How firm a foundation”, ” The flame shall not harm thee, I only design thy dross to consume, and thy Gold to refine.” I still have a lot of dross left, and the gold needs more refining.

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  19. During the second 3D-movie fad (1980s), I watched some horror movie with the 3D glasses off. Not because it was too ‘scary’, but because it kept startling me, which was more annoying than scary.

    The only thing I can think of that was “too scary” was a S.K. story (the book was “Seasons” something) that I read way too young.

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