Finished watching “Twin Peaks: The Return” (aka, season three). I almost stopped watching it early on. This is clearly Lynch at his most experimental–and that’s not why I watch TV. When I watch TV or movies, I’m just looking for entertainment; I do intellectual activity elsewhere. (I say this only as a description of my own habits. Yours will obviously be different.)

I stuck with it, though, and I did feel much more engaged by the end. There are certain images that will certainly stick with me. But I seriously doubt that I will put in the work to comb through the series and interpret it.

In short, it’s worth watching if you’re invested in Twin Peaks. There is plenty of material there if you want to work on your own interpretation. But I will warn you that Lynch is uninterested in fan service; in fact, he seems to be opposed to it. You’ll get one or two satisfying story resolutions but you will end the series with a whole lot of questions.

I visited a few southern Indiana mounds last Friday. Taking the last visit first, I went to the Angel Mounds site in Evansville. I highly recommend it if you’re in the area. The indoor museum was recently renovated and the videos are all well done. I recommend that you visit outside of school hours (the place gets a lot of field trips) since it allows you to walk the grounds in peace and imagine the lives of the people. I won’t post any pictures because none of mine are as good as you can find on the site linked above.

Angel Mounds is the site of a Native American settlement on the banks of the Ohio River; at its height there could have been a thousand people living there. It was abandoned in 1450 for reasons that are unclear. The mounds are man-made and, in this case, are structural—to elevate certain buildings. They are not generally burial mounds, as the others I visited that day.

Sugar Loaf Mound in Vincennes was well maintained. A sign gives a phone number you can call for an audio tour. View of the mound from two angles:

And a welcome reminder that this is a sacred site:

Both Sugar Loaf and Pyramid Mounds appear to be natural (not man-made) mounds that were subsequently used as burial sites. Both are near the Wabash River.

Pyramid Mound was a little harder to find using the maps app. I recommend inputting the coordinates from this site into your maps app and then navigating your own way there. The turn by turn directions will lead you wrong.

This site was frankly a bit depressing. It is feet from a heavily used highway and was almost destroyed by that road’s construction. Thankfully they noticed in time that it wasn’t just a normal hill. It’s also very close to a noisy granary. There are piles of brush everywhere, maybe left over from the time when the road was built? In short, it was clearly neglected and had none of the peace of the other sites. It was a stark reminder of both past and present violence against Native American sacred sites.

I’ve moved my ancestor shrine back downstairs where it can be in a more actively used part of the house. Left to right:

• A bell used by my maternal grandfather to start Sunday School, which he oversaw for 30+ years.
• Picture of my dad holding a fish, standing next to the 1977 GMC Caballero which passed from my uncle to my grandfather to my dad to me, until I decided it was a bit too cumbersome for an heirloom and sold it. I have better pictures of my dad but he loved fishing so this feels more appropriate.
• My dad’s Thompson Chain Reference Bible, with some laminated family obituaries laying on top.
• In my mind, anytime pictures of known ancestors are set out, the unknown ancestors are honored implicitly. Nevertheless, I put my (perhaps German) peasant couple on the shelf to more explicitly stand in for unknown ancestors.
• Bibles of my maternal grandmother and paternal great-grandmother, plus the latter’s glasses.
• My maternal grandparents, who died when I was ten. They are some of those rare people that seem to be universally regarded as something like saints.