Will You Create Chaos With Me?

It was hard to not love seeing Hades the Lord of the Underworld on one knee proposing to Zelena the Wicked Witch of the West with this line in Sunday's episode of Once Upon A Time. One can see theme weddings in the near future based on this ... but I digress. Sunday night's episode "Sisters" gave us background on Regina and Zelena (technically half-sisters, Cora the miller's daughter is their mom) first meeting as kids, and while that meeting went well -- Zelena used her magic to save Regina's life, and she was the only family member who could as Cora's magic caused her predicament -- Cora didn't like them being together so she wiped their memories of ever meeting. And in the Underworld this episode, once they actually stand in the same room before they can magic each other out of existence, Cora restores them, which turns out to be HER "unfinished business", the code word for leaving the Underworld and proceeding into a great white light.


The Christian implications of that we could spend the rest of this post on.


And that's just ONE of the plots in this single episode! Martha and I watched this after getting the kids in bed and nicely snoozing. Then she tuned into an episode of Project Runway All-Stars and it's not that I don't like or pay attention some of the shows she watches after getting home from a long day at both her current jobs, Trinity and Burger King, it's that I need to learn TO NOT SAY A WORD. AND DON'T ASK QUESTIONS. Seriously, I didn't realize I was being insulting or offensive with that, any more than I realized I was being ... I don't know, annoying that I laugh or cry in the same places when I watch a movie more than once when I'm supposed to know what's going to happen. When I was forty-four I must admit I expected to be more in control and knowing what I was doing, being someone people listened to and who had a reputation to build on, someone who's looked up to.


There are days I feel that is just so flying apart.


"Lavender Moon has been serving cherry pie and coffee to the passengers of the late-night bus for twenty years. But she has always wondered just where that mysterious bus roars away to." So begins the back cover description of Troon Harrison and Eugenie Fernandez's story Lavender Moon (ISBN 1550374559) where the title character trades places with a retiring bus driver and takes the bus as far as she can go and sees and does so many things along the way. It's a short and engaging and incredible story, and in a manner of speaking it takes Lavender back to where she started. We can follow that; sometimes our entire lives are traveling back to the beginning, but hopefully unlike Inigo Montoya we don't have to be fall down drunk to appreciate that.


And then there's Loki.


Not the millennia-old Norse god of mischief from Norse -- and here where I live in North Dakota it's Norwegian -- mythology, but rather the Marvel Comics adaptation of him. Half-brother of Thor the god of thunder, and in practically every incarnation the "founder" of the Avengers. In the original 1960s comics Loki lured the Hulk into a rampage and Thor goes to stop him. A few other heroes get the message and assemble against Loki when the truth comes out. In the Marvel Cinematic Universe he's the first main antagonist of the team, and in the October 1998 comic story "The Coming of the Avengers" (ISBN 0785106723) Thor gets recalled to Asgard from a winter-plagued Earth yet chooses to stand with some of that alternate Earth's heroes against his father Odin's wishes. And Loki's trying to manipulate it all.


But he's no Rumple.

Back to the beginning, David