Don’t be fooled by fake yellow flowers

Very early this morning, while in a hypnopompic state, my mind latched onto the word rail. Bill had been railing against me, I thought, and I had been railroaded — summarily declared guilty before even being informed of the charges. From there, my train (heh) of thought wandered to Rinbad the Railer, and before I knew it I had, still in the hypnopompic state, composed two new couplets for “With?” — going beyond the list of names given in Ulysses but continuing the pattern:

Brinbad the Brailler, lacking sight,

By touch alone could read aright.

Skinbad the Scaler wasn’t much

Like Brinbad. He had lost his touch.

In the morning, I was outdoors supervising younger preschoolers while their older classmates were having graduation photos taken.

A four-year-old boy whose English is precociously good brought me something and said, “Look, I found an octopus!”

It was a tiny yellow flower, less than a centimeter in diameter, with six long, thin petals.

“Are you sure it’s an octopus?” I said. “It doesn’t have eight arms.”

“It has six arms,” he said. “This octopus has six arms.”

It has already been established that the six-armed octopus (as in the Hydra logo) is symbolically interchangeable with the six-legged spider, and that both represent Ungoliant trying to disguise herself as someone Good.

Looking more closely at the “octopus,” I saw that it wasn’t actually a flower at all but a piece of yellow plastic. A fake flower.

This matches up most uncannily with an experience Bill reports in the comments on “The ladybird, the six-legged spider, and the dandelion.” Having decided that the dandelion (a yellow flower) was a Good symbol, he watched what he thought was the official music video for a song called “Dandelions” but was thrown for a loop when the video turned out to include scenes from a Spider-Man movie. Spiders are an evil symbol, so how could he understand this juxtaposition? Then he figured out that he was actually watching a fake music video for “Dandelion,” dishonestly pretending to be the official one. The spider was thus connected not with dandelions but with fake dandelions.

In the same way, I thought at first that Ungoliant symbolism was being tied to a yellow flower, but upon closer inspection I discovered that it was a fake yellow flower.

Just before beginning this post, I checked one of my email accounts, and it said I had one unread message, from the YouTuber Ceiling Fan Man. I had emailed him, remember, after discovering that he had started his channel on exactly the same day that my own ceiling fan had been destroyed by a poltergeist. Since my wife had perceived the geist as a gigantic spider, this seemed very relevant to the Ungoliant theme. Incidentally, the Chinese for “ceiling” is literally “heavenly flower.”

When I clicked, I found it wasn’t a new message at all but one I’d received and read on April 8, which for some reason was now marked as unread. The message said:

Wow, there are no coincidences. I am glad you found my channel. I thank you for sharing your story.  When we had poltergeist incidents here, we called on Jesus and it stopped.  I hope yours have stopped too.  God bless.

My best guess is that I’m being prepared for some future manifestation of Ungoliant under false colors, and that CFM’s advice will prove useful.

Although I seem to be “lacking sight” to see the big picture clearly, I’m hoping I can successfully feel my way through all this by touch alone, like Brinbad.

Or maybe I’m Skinbad. Who knows.