Stranger Things spoilers and ripeners

And anyhow at the end of it (the Four Years in the Desert), starting a new stage by reflecting on it, rededicating it to these friends short of making it just an account of sketches of them--a day of overwhelming housekeeping, hoping I’ve kept track of everything in the move, more or less, and in the midst of sorting through to arrange the writing docket, that word housekeeping reminds me of Dr Robinson, her Housekeeping and her Gilead, and whether the library would consider doing it for a Big Read? (In fact they are reading The Tsar of Love and Techno)

As foreseen, as with the neighborhood and jobs so far--everything in Spokane, except the pawn shops and police sirens poking through to remind you of the Upside Down--Gilead is an amazing book, well worth a city reading together. The pine-shrouded mansion next door emitted the sound of an organ the other evening, the neighbors on the other side are constructing a vine arbor. Their black dog howls along with the sirens. Their lawn was being redone by a company called Living Waters, and the farmers’ market for Emerson-Garfield,  hosted in the parking lot of the Extended Learning Dept of the community college there at Lincoln and Carlisle, had a booth called The Father’s Table with vegetables, and all sorts of programs for diet and lifestyle being peddled across from it. So good that you keep looking around wondering, what’s the catch?

In the case of the show Stranger Things, which has been a sleeper sensation--Steph found that picture of the lady who dressed her sleeping baby as El with her eggos--something that sticks in my craw is the final confrontation with the monster in the science classroom, when she is drained from mental violence and Mike promises her they’ll go to the dance together and everything will be OK: Is this the prerogative of love and faith, to demand and to make promises beyond our power to keep--going down slingshotting, David and Goliath--which then triggers the sacrifice, necessitates the separation and the salvation, or is it the weakness and the lie at the moment of the promise that makes her say goodbye? Then the Judas, or Lando, still believes and perhaps even keeps in contact with her, while the saved boy hawks up corruption and conceals it still.

Great show, borrowing wholesale from a whole culture and repackaging it all in a compelling new arrangement, very close to its sources in EarthBound, Stephen King, and Spielberg, but moving the flame ahead in some tangible way, revindicating belief in the mystery: the X-Men, the X-Files, digested and acted upon, so that they’ll be reinterpreted anew--deepening the culture, fertilizing the earth, the spiritual topsoil. So with Robinson, moving the art a step further...