Michael M. Hughes

Apr 8, 2024 | michaelmhughes.medium.com | Michael M. Hughes

(written 2012)Just the two of usNot yet looking up. Waiting for totality. Lunar or SolarNever can quite remember What kind of eclipse. Now, she says. Look now. And we look. Pupils enlarge. No words. Just seeing. A hole. A haloof fire surrounding a void Impenetrable. The Sun is the samesize as the Moon in the sky she says. Why is that? (Above and belowsaid Hermes Trismegistus are one and the same)Exactly the sameHow in the world could that be? What are the chances? I don’t know, I say. Just chance. Randomness.

Jan 19, 2024 | michaelmhughes.medium.com | Michael M. Hughes

Watching the penultimate episode of True Detective tonight, I had another Carcosa moment, when Nic Pizzolatto’s fictional world seemed to intermingle in a flat circle with mine. Early in the episode, Cohle and Hart are holed up in Cohle’s Carcosa-fied storage shed (yellow door, naturally), Rust plays a videotape stolen from a hiding place in one of Reverend Billy Lee Tuttle’s opulent homes.

Jan 19, 2024 | michaelmhughes.medium.com | Michael M. Hughes

Two episodes into the series, True Detective dropped a reference to one of the strangest, most compelling tales in the canon of weird fiction: Robert W. Chambers’ The King in Yellow, a collection of short stories published in 1895. Knowing this book is key to understanding the dark mystery at the heart of this series. This collection of stories has influenced writers from H.P. Lovecraft and Raymond Chandler, to Robert Heinlein, Grant Morrison, Neil Gaiman and George R. R. Martin.

Oct 18, 2023 | thebaltimorebanner.com | Julie Scharper |Michael M. Hughes

Roland Griffiths, a Johns Hopkins researcher credited with reigniting scientific interest in psychedelics and demonstrating that a compound derived from “magic” mushrooms can help people struggling with depression, among other conditions, died Monday at his Baltimore home, his daughter said. He was 77. “He brought the scientific method to psychedelic research,” said Anthony Bossis, an assistant professor at New York University’s School of Medicine. “He was the ultimate scientist.

Oct 11, 2023 | thebaltimorebanner.com | Michael M. Hughes

I don’t watch a lot of TV, but I do dip occasionally into cable news to fill my brain with the latest dystopian horror. When I did recently, I got extremely annoyed by the commercial for the shingles vaccine — shown several times an hour, it seems — where an overly dramatic, alarmed guy repeats, ad nauseam: “Shingles doesn’t care.” As with the ubiquitous Lume Deodorant ad (I swear, I never want to hear “butt crack” coming from my TV again), I immediately hit the mute button.