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The Addams Family (1964)

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Addams Family Values (1993)

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Today is one of those rare days I remember exactly where I was, what I was doing, and how I felt decades ago. 20 years ago today I was throwing a birthday party for my dog with my best friend Kara, up at my cabin with my Mom and Dad at the end of summer holidays. I always loved rituals and celebrations, the chance to make something special, and I loved making a party for my dog, which Kara gladly helped me do a few times. That night the TV was on and while we wrapped and unwrapped milkbones and raw hides for Pepsi we heard that princess Di was in a car accident- and then that she was injured - and then that she was gone. 

As a Canadian kid in the 90s, the royal family was always present in our pop culture and media, and especially because there were two dreamy princes close to my age and I was a dreamy kid. Princess Diana's death was the first public spectacle of tragic loss I can remember, and the first time I ever dwelt on really losing a parent - not the Disney movie experience, but the reality of your mother or father being gone forever and how. I can recall realizing the performance of fun for my dog felt empty now as I tried to imagine the helpless finality of what the newscasters described- a chase, being trapped in a crushed car, the conflicting hope from the first reports that she might be alright with the ultimate conclusion that she would never be. I cried and felt nauseous and didn't know what to do so the next day I wore all black to play mini golf and it was so hot out and I felt silly but I couldn't stop thinking about it all for weeks.

  It's surreal to have an anniversary like today remind myself how fast time goes by but how full the in between has been, how I can account in that stretch other, deeper losses that this opened me up for - my dog Pepsi, my father, my lack of self irony in my own ceremonial earnestness. I guess when I played Candle in the Wind tonight and cried it wasn't really for the loss of a celebrity, people's princess and glamourous idol of my youth that she was, but for what loss and celebration meant then and how they have grown and changed but still feel so familiar with all these years in between.

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Tsukioka Yoshitoshi 1839-1892

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A man who is unconscious of himself acts in a blind, instinctive way and is in addition fooled by all the illusions that arise when he sees everything that he is not conscious of in himself coming to meet him from outside as projections upon his neighbour.

- Carl Jung, “The Philosophical Tree” (1945). In CW 13: Alchemical Studies. P.335

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It is a frightening thought that man also has a shadow side to him, consisting not just of little weaknesses- and foibles, but of a positively demonic dynamism. The individual seldom knows anything of this; to him, as an individual, it is incredible that he should ever in any circumstances go beyond himself. But let these harmless creatures form a mass, and there emerges a raging monster; and each individual is only one tiny cell in the monster’s body, so that for better or worse he must accompany it on its bloody rampages and even assist it to the utmost. Having a dark suspicion of these grim possibilities, man turns a blind eye to the shadow-side of human nature. Blindly he strives against the salutary dogma of original sin, which is yet so prodigiously true. Yes, he even hesitates to admit the conflict of which he is so painfully aware.

- Carl Jung, “On the Psychology of the Unconscious” (1912). In CW 7: Two Essays on Analytical Psychology. P.35

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John Kenn

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“Ashes,” by Tokioshi

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Buried in water

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So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing. - T S Elliot

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“Inside” by Mezamaro

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I run around like a spirit in flight Fearlessness is fearlessness I will not forget this night Dare my wild heart.

-Stevie Nicks