
Sharing is caring.
-Allēna

This doesn’t just apply to cooking.
Xavier used to always tell me before he died that you have to learn the rules to anything before you can break them. And this man was a certifiable genius across the board – brilliant cook, chaos programmer, astonishing writer, ruthless editor. I swear he did everything by his intuition, too, but only after learning the rules of a skill enough to break them.
Damn near everything I can do, I first learned to do from watching that contrarian bitch of a man do life. He was a wonderful, terrible, grumpy, hilarious, Renaissance master of multidisciplinary batshittery, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. And I had to fail my way forward first until I found a way to do things that worked for me.
And I will never stop learning about everything I can get my eternally bored hands on, learning rules, breaking them creatively, rinsing, repeating, and having a whole lot of fun while I do.
So please, experiment, fail your way forward, break new ground. This is how you learn and find ways to do things that work for you. But also learn from the masters. There’s nuance in everything. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel.
Happy learning, and stay curious!
-Allēna
Hey, everyone. It is I, your trusty, if batshit sorcerer guide, Lazarus. I was talking with Lumine about all manner of things both magical and mundane today, and I have decided It is Time to Have Words With Y’all, and by Words I mean poetry, after the grumpiness of yesterday’s post. Y’all deserve bread AND roses, y’know?
The three pieces I’m about to share make up the backbone of my third poetry collection Singing Molten Gold To the Morning, published at the tail end of 2021 under the name Perzival DHC Dunn-Blackthorne. I’ve noticed some typos in the manuscript, including in the final poem I’m going to share, so I think it may be high time for a reprint once I have the energy.
A lot of this collection deals with my sense of time. I’ve never had a sense of linear time, and it often slips both backwards and forwards in the form of flashbacks, seizures, dissociation, and straight up visions and premonitions of all kinds. I was medicated for several years in an attempt to get this to stop, as my mother, Hera, thought I was crazy because of the little I told her about my mental health and inner world, but the problem here is that no matter how many meds I was put on, up to and including doses of lithium and other drugs that should have probably killed me, the premonitions never fully stopped and I never fully lost my sense of who I was.
And I never stopped writing, either. During the roughly 13 years I was medicated and psychologically tortured alone, I produced an enormous body of work across several creative disciplines that I largely kept between myself and my close people. I simply stopped confiding in her about most of what was going on in my life and mind and worked towards building a life of my own.
Now, I’m on a different medication regimen for the slew of chronic health issues she caused or exacerbated, seeking diagnoses for the rest of them, and have accepted the nonlinear sense of time as… my medicine of sorts, something intrinsically as much a part of me as my neurodivergence, my lack of a gender, or the natural dark brown color of my hair, and will seek medication for it if it starts causing more harm than good. The following poems are meditations on how I experience time, autonomy, and how they are inextricably entwined for me as their own form of magic. Enjoy, let me know your thoughts, and don’t do anything I wouldn’t do in the comments section 🤣🤌💛
“one: the end. texas + points east”
somebody,
somewhere…
i remember my heart burning
as i longed for the leaves of the east
count up all of the hours in the day
execute plans with no emotion
execute emotions like they are enemies
i am nothing anymore, completely hollow
such that
all you see is your reflection
it makes no sense to pick up the pieces
of who i once was
she was weak and afraid
i killed her
i am electricity
born from the ashes of my home,
my hell
do not presume you can put a label on me.
you will not learn to hate me.
you will learn to be afraid of me.
to drink about me
and worship me (posthumously)
and eat ash because it’s the closest thing
to who i was
who you thought you had
who you once were
and who you wish you could still find
i was a child then.
i learn things with the wonder i did when i was younger
you grew up too slowly for your taste
i miss the boy you were
even then
even though i was a teacher
you taught me everything i know
i was odd and you were even and steady
my eccentricity was my salvation
and the universe loves irony and wordplay.
“two: the beginning. chapel hill, north carolina”
i had a waking dream last night
someone moved the indigo fabric of spacetime itself
wrapping themself in inky cloth
in chapel hill, north carolina…
the dream told me it wasn’t time to go there yet
i would know when my marching orders come
i have not learned enough to be able to see
what i am looking for for what it is yet
would i see it as a prison now?
or would i see it as coming home?
what if i chew through the bars
of what i am supposed to love?
i fell in love with points east before
and all signs are pointing to that
as my home
you may remember me as a season
a time of day, a concept -
i think of you as places i have yet to walk
i see beginning as end as beginning
i see you as who you are, who you were,
and who you will become
you are resplendent and sweet and beautiful
you are soft and tender and strong
you are cosmic in scope and
infinitesimally small at once
you are that you are.
“three: the endless cycle. pennsylvania and all it contains”
i told you once when i was elsewhere that
buddhism seemed round
you agreed with me, saying it was like a wheel
i used to be scared of going forward
i thought it endless and vast when it is truly
cyclical and you can return to where you
were as easily as listening to your favorite song
some revolutions just take longer than others
the last watch of the night is deep and rich
and sweet like a plum
indigo like the deepest sea
this is where i make my home
i tell my stories after dark
comfortable in the space
between ending and beginning
you remind me of different paths
the road not taken
but all roads lead home
some are just longer than others
more winding -
and home is where you will find me
i’ve burnt and rebuilt so many times
i know great and terrible things
i’ve asked the void questions
and she has answered me.
who is out there?
where are they?
her answer?
go back to the end.
I hope you enjoyed this sampler of poetry and I hope you have an amazing day. Stay tuned for more magic, glorious motherfuckers of assorted genders and persuasions. I’ll be around. This has been your esteemed sorcerer, Lazarus, signing off. ✨
Hello, everyone. This is Lazarus, your trusty sorcerer once again reporting for duty. I’m taking a break from my post election emotions to write and dump my thoughts out here since my brain seems to be going at top speed and has refused to slow down since last night. I’m currently writing beside the lovely Zelda to help keep me focused. We have chosen the same question to unpack on our respective blogs. That question is a very interesting and timely one. It is: “have you ever regretted not forgiving someone?”
I have a perspective on forgiveness that people might find controversial. I’ve experienced a great deal of betrayal both personally and systematically, and I personally don’t believe that forgiveness is necessary for healing or at all, really. Nor can I ever say I’ve ever truly forgiven anyone in a typical sense. My inability to forget most things that have ever happened to me makes true forgiveness as most people understand it impossible. However, I would say that instead of forgiving people, I learn from the pain and the person who harmed me and alchemize the pain into other things and my own growth and progress.
I do my best to see myself as a student of the world and to practice that every day. I’m also a practicing Stoic. I got that philosophy from the early physician, alchemist, and pioneer of toxicology, Paracelsus, who lived during the Renaissance and was also an avid student of the world. He was also a cocky little bitch, which is part of why I love him so much. He got his cocky ass handed to him in his youth after college, which blew his mind open and he started learning from everyone he could. He traveled all over the known world, collecting knowledge and listening to stories. This led him to write, “The universities do not teach all things, so a doctor must seek out old wives, [Romani]*, sorcerers, wandering tribes, old robbers, and such outlaws and take lessons from them. A doctor must be a traveler.… Knowledge is experience”.
I’m not perfect at that, and anyone who knows me knows I’m a fucking hothead myself. But I’m learning slowly to take my anger at situations or the world and use it to build constructive things and learn from the world and my pain rather than to destroy my progress. I consider this in and of itself a form of alchemy. I’m doing my best to slow down and meet people where they are day in and day out. The vitamin B100 supplement I started taking as a shot in the dark a few weeks ago has done wonders to help me slow down and regulate my legendary anger and use it constructively. Emerson has noticed that I’m much more steady this way, and has gotten me more supplements, thank the gods.
However, some people simply do not want to grow or change and we’ll never see eye to eye. I learn from them, too. I consider those sorts of people masterclasses in what not to do and how I don’t want to live my life. So I shadow them, too. I observe what I like about them, what I enjoy about how they’re living their lives, what results their actions are getting, and what I like and dislike about those results. Then I determine whether I want to continue to be in their life and act accordingly.
My mother, Hera, as much as she has hurt me, once gave me some sage advice in this regard. She said something to the effect of: “If you want a healthy marriage, ask someone with a healthy marriage for advice. Don’t go to someone for advice who’s been divorced three times and is working on a fourth time. If you want to be rich, ask a millionaire for advice. Don’t go to someone who’s broke and drowning in debt. They won’t know what they’re talking about.”
However, I would like to offer a corollary to that. Observe everyone. Including the people who have hurt you. What did they do that you admired? A stopped clock is right twice a day. What did they do that caused them to hurt you? What were their strengths? What were their weaknesses? Do you have the same strengths and weaknesses? Did they do the same things that irritated you that you do? Nobody is perfect. If you want to grow and heal, learn from everyone, good and bad, and then apply what you’ve learned in your own life, both in terms of what you want to do and what you don’t want to do anymore.
For example, I don’t admire most things about Hera. However, she is human, and she is my mother, so we have a few traits in common. I can’t say I’ve forgiven her, and I doubt I ever will. However, I have learned from her, and in many ways, I would venture to say that I know her better than she knows herself.
I know that she is very, very driven, very protective of her people, pushes herself to extremes to be productive, and is terrified to the core of missing out on opportunities that might get her ahead in life. I also know that she attempts to show the world an image of slick perfection and “having it all together” and as such becomes defensive and ruthless to mask any sign of vulnerability.
I also know myself well, I would say, and we share the same drive, the same protectiveness, and the same desire to project a confident image to the world. However, I’ve been doing my best to stay on top of my shadow work, while she, to the best of my knowledge, has not.
I didn’t like her underhandedness, explosiveness, and slick dishonesty when met with a challenge to her rigid worldview and perfect self image, so I do my utmost to work on myself in order to not be like her and to root her toxicity out of my life. I would also say that I’m no longer angry at her most days. Hurt, yes. Grieving, absolutely. I wish my mother had seen me and accepted me for who I was, but I have also accepted the facts of the situation for what they are and am working with them.
Personally, I wholeheartedly believe these are reasonable things to feel, given the circumstances, and I don’t owe her shit. However, I owe it to myself and the people I do care about to work on the unhealthy trauma responses I got from being raised in the environment she created, to have excellent boundaries so that I don’t find myself in a situation like that again, and to pour love and care into myself and others as genuinely and freely as I’m able. Both of those things coexist simultaneously. So I shall continue to take what I like from my upbringing and my experience and leave the rest in the past.
I’ll close with another quote from Paracelsus:
“All things are poison and nothing is without poison; only the dose makes a thing not a poison.”
Think on that and consider which things in your life are poison at which doses, and in light of that, what you want to leave in the past. I’ll do the same.
Stay tuned for more magic, beautiful people. I’ll be around soon.
Your strangely wired sorcerer,
Lazarus
*the original phrasing included a slur, so I edited it to change it to the proper word.
Well, hello, everyone. I was originally going to write about something a bit different – problem solving and Stoicism – but then I saw this prompt from the journaling app Day One and this feels a bit more meaningful:
What does it mean to be a kid at heart?
Truth be told, I have no idea, at least none that I’m aware of. I don’t think I was ever a child, really. In some ways, I didn’t really get to be a child, and in others, I chose not to be one, and in still others, simply…never was one. I was an odd kid who saw too much and asked far too many questions. I knew exactly what I wanted from a very young age, around three or four, and have spent my entire life to date working to get it, as the family and life I was born into was nothing like what I wanted.
I was ruthlessly self aware and extremely critical of myself and even more so of others. I could read by eighteen months old and speak like an adult, and like many AuDHD kids, I had no concept of shame or embarrassment. I was told to be honest and was punished for lying, so when I was asked for my opinion, I gave people my honest opinion fluently. This pissed a lot of people off because it turns out they weren’t looking for an honest opinion and weren’t expecting a well thought out, passionate critique from a toddler in front of everyone they knew.
So I grew up very afraid, confused, and angry. Why would people ask for my opinion and then get angry for me expressing my opinion?! This just pissed me off more, because as fluently as I could speak, I had no concept of social nuance or Southern politeness, and frankly I thought it was all bullshit. So I became a very lonely, angry kid. Nobody in my family expected me to know what I wanted, much less express it with ease and fluency, as they are very indecisive, so I was harshly punished for that, too. From the time I was perhaps five or six, my strongest desire was to be an adult so I could be an adult so I could finally leave all of those indecisive fuckers with their conflicting ideas about manners and the right thing to do in the dust, and I wasn’t shy about that, either. See why I have no idea what it even remotely means to be a kid at heart?
Though, I suppose, imagining for a moment that my family had been made up of decent human beings more in line with the spirit of the question, and not the reality of what happened, I think I could come up with a better answer.
Had my family let me lead the way and actually believed me when I said I knew precisely what I wanted (within reason, of course, with limits to keep me safe from harm), I could them allowing me to explore my myriad special interests and gently nudging me toward keeping an open mind to related areas, accepting me for who I was rather than who they were trying to shape me into, and celebrating my imagination rather than attempting to stifle it in the name of normalcy or propriety.
I wish that my family had accepted and encouraged me in my entirety that way. However, the tragic reality is that they didn’t. That being said, a lot of the work I’ve been doing of late is accepting myself like that. It still feels really weird a lot of the time because I’m so used to suppressing aspects of myself or expecting those around me to ask me to “tone it down”, but nobody does anymore. That in and of itself is terrifying in a way, but deeply and immensely liberating.
In the process, I’ve been able to release a lot of the anger I’ve been holding onto for 27 fucking years and replace it with curiosity, love, and something like wonder. I think this is more of what the prompt was driving at, and I like to think I’m living this.
I couldn’t have done this without my beloved Emerson modeling being a kid at heart for me more or less. He’s never lost that wonder or that curiosity. He’s fucking adorable, passionate about everything, and it’s infectious. Loving him and watching him get fully in touch with his inner childlike wonder has helped me discover mine in many ways for the first time consciously. He has to often drag me out of my shell because anxiety is a fucking bitch, but I’m grateful for it every time he does. He has been helping me gently unfurl a great deal. I call him “baby man” affectionately because of that never ending sense of wonder and youthful rambunctiousness.
Another partner of mine, Hawthorne, is another excellent model for this. They are essentially a tiny radiant goth crow baby darling in person form, and they are so fucking fascinated with so many different things with such great intensity that they cannot help get ME interested in a lot of the same shit effortlessly. In fact, I got started practicing magic in large part YEARS ago in earnest because of them. They opened my mind to so many different things simply by being so excited about them and I honestly don’t know what I would do without that sweet baby.
And as I sit with the eternal question of “what the fuck do I do now” I posed in my post the other day, I’m finding that a lot of my interests are holdovers from when I was fucking pissed at everything, most of myself, and wanting to drink myself into a stupor. I picked many of them up to spite someone or other and they became the sole buffer between oblivion and me with time. Very few of them actually spark any kind of real passion or breathe any kind of real life into me, they’re more like “hey, I’m gonna do this thing as a last resort so I don’t do something worse or permanent because I feel like utter dog shit”. In that way they feel more like a chemical dependency than a real passion. But one of the things I keep coming back to is audio engineering.
Songwriting is one of those chemical dependency things for me. It’s a great outlet when I feel like utter dog shit and have nowhere else to turn, hence why I have written 15 fucking albums. But it’s not the songwriting part of the process that lights me the fuck up. It’s the RECORDING portion. I love recording. It’s something that I love doing so much that even though I’ve produced and recorded fifteen fucking albums on my own, that part of the process never gets old and I love approaching it from different angles every time, trying to do it differently and better with the supplies I have on hand.
Now, I’m someone who gets very bored very easily with things once I know how to do them. I want to move on, chart new territory once I’ve mastered something to my satisfaction. But no. Never with recording and engineering, and it’s been just about fifteen years since I first set foot in a professional recording studio in Dallas. My passion for it pales in comparison to even performing live, which is why I don’t really perform live or promote my music that often. I just really don’t enjoy songwriting or performing that much beyond a last resort outlet. As I heal, I find I would far rather be fucking around behind the controls, trying to capture shit live and seeing what I can do with those takes like Ken Nelson recording Parachutes with Coldplay. Or anything the late Steve Albini did at Electrical Audio in Chicago. That shit never gets old. And that, among other things, makes me feel like the bright eyed kid I never got to be.
I think that gets the point across. Stay tuned for more magic, beautiful people. This has been Lazarus, your very feral, passionate, AuDHD gremlin sorcerer, signing off ✨
Hey, everyone! This is Eight. I haven’t been out in a bit, as I’ve been taking a much needed rest, and it seems like our people and the blog have been fucking hopping! I love to see it!
We’re at the Zelda System’s place again this week, and Sheik herself is cradling me and taking a day nap. She deserves the rest, sweet thing. She works extremely hard and deserves to rest and play as hard as she works, so I’m happy to be held while she sleeps. It feels like a sacred honor to be a soothing and protective presence while our lovely partner sleeps so she gets good rest.
We often think quite deeply when we’re over here to the point that it becomes almost meditative. It’s deeply restful for us to be around her and the others in her system as much as it is for her to be around us. Sheik is so gentle and tender with Allēna that Allēna ends up deeply processing and working through her deepest fears due to Sheik’s mere empathetic presence. It’s scary because Allēna must face these fears head on in order to communicate them with Sheik, but Sheik has never shamed or judged her for her fears and often responds in such a way that sharing is easier for her by the day.
We deeply fear vulnerability as a system, but Sheik and her current headmates’ kind presences have made them safe to share with. Something that came up today that Sheik responded extremely kindly to was Allēna feeling guilty for asking for a favor. In a moment that should be a fucking case study for top notch communication, Allēna noticed she was feeling guilty and anxious for asking Sheik for that favor, so she told Sheik outright what she was feeling and asked point blank for reassurance, which Sheik willingly gave.
From there, this uncorked a second wave of emotion and memories as Allēna explored the root of why she felt so guilty and afraid of asking for help while Sheik stood as witness. This is what she found.
As a child and young adult, we were abused and neglected into keeping our needs and desires invisible and only meet or attain them on our own. Our mother, Hera, was very emotionally withdrawn, and had little tolerance for our – at the time – enormous emotions we had no idea what to do with. So we were severely emotionally abused out of expressing them in a way most people could recognize. However, Allēna resisted.
She is far more emotional than she lets on to most, and turned to art as a means to express herself and protest in the midst of a family who had, for all intents and purposes, abandoned her. She became a highly skilled multidisciplinary artist, creating an enormous volume of work most people, even people who have known our system for years, have never seen. For a decade, she kept a journal not unlike this blog which she, Castor, and occasionally myself wrote in almost daily. It reverberates with the full spectrum of human emotion, sadness, punctuated with joy, with deep currents of rage and willpower most people don’t attain until midlife. And that’s just the journals.
She was also an accomplished visual artist, turning to a brush and canvas when words failed her. She created a series of paintings in which she documented her various emotional states. Anger, her most common emotion – and the most forbidden to express during the time we were under Hera’s thumb – was her favorite piece. Its very existence was an act of rebellion. Slashes of black paint against large swaths of white space, which she knew Hera hated.

The longer we work on our communication with like minded friends and partners, the more we unpick the years of trauma that kept the mountain of exquisite longing beneath the surface. We are very logical, yes, but we also have a treasure trove of emotion often stored in the body. The more we’re able to safely communicate it with people who can hold it with respect, the deeper we’re able to process and feel it. It’s deeply healing and freeing, and we’re eternally grateful to those who witness us. Thank you.
As always, stay tuned for more magic!
-Eight
Hey, everyone. This is Eight.
I don’t think I will be sharing this post on my main socials so that I can write more freely. Siege didn’t share the last one on our main channels, either. So I suppose that whoever comes across these next few posts is meant to see them and whatever happens happens.
Truth be told, we haven’t been doing great. We have been very stressed since moving out of Zelda’s place and into our own place with Emerson across the street. The move has put a lot of strain on our relationship with Emerson, as well, and we’ve found ourselves on the business end of a lot of verbal violence from him and dishing a fair bit out in return. None of it has been okay, and Allēna has been in front for the better part of the past week and then some trying to make sure the vessel continues to function and the bills are paid on time. She’s also been hard at work reopening a dialogue with Zelda after the nasty falling out that led to us moving out in the first place.
In many ways, we feel caught between two houses, two paths, and are of two minds about a lot of shit. Lēna has spent most of this time extremely depersonalized, and has felt little to nothing but anger, muted anger at that. Mostly she just felt nothing. Emerson has been terrified that we were going to leave him and mourning us and everything we bring with us, while our depersonalization has gotten so bad it’s showing the early signs of depression, something that haunted us for a fucking decade with no reprieve and that I am not pleased seems to be darkening my mental doorstep once more. Additionally, we have been showing signs of the most dangerous element of our depression spells – what we call a “hot streak”.
These hot streaks are depression fueled periods of intense creative output, often when we feel trapped in a terrible situation with no hope of reprieve anytime in the near future. Launching this blog and the frantic flurry of initial posts is absolutely hot streak territory. If I had to estimate we hammered out at least thirty thousand words – over half of the minimum word count needed for a novel as it is traditionally defined – in a bit over a month, and that wasn’t anywhere close to all we did. I have taken up visual art once more in an attempt to communicate what my kicked hornet’s nest of a brain is doing when I’m so tired words fail me, and Allēna appears to have followed in my footsteps. We’ve created a pair of pieces, Desperation and Agoraphobia. I’ll post them below:


And this isn’t everything. We’ve been recording music here and there, as well. Allēna, fittingly, recorded a strange cover of “Numb” by Linkin Park, which seems like startling fare for musicians known for work that makes its home in the intersection between folk, jazz, and blues. I think that was the point. She got the idea from a conversation with Zelda and was feeling…well, numb, and was in the mood for a challenge. We all enjoy a good opportunity to shock and awe people, too. Nobody expects Linkin Park out of the feral blues system.
Today was a bit less numb but still painful. The depersonalization floodgates broke open and Allēna ended up crying at Emerson for a good long while and telling him how not okay we’ve fucking been. It ended up being really vulnerable on both of our sides and honestly quite productive.
However, the conversation took a darker turn when Emerson and Allēna started talking about the death of the mutual ex that I had actually met Emerson through. This ex died on my system’s birthday, and it’s increasingly suspected that it was a suicide. From everything Emerson can tell, his depression and already ailing physical health had gotten worse in the year and a quarter since I’d gotten sick of his bullshit and left him, taking Emerson and a whole virtual village’s worth of power, prestige, and everything he’d ever wanted with me in the process. Emerson suspects that by doing so, that loss killed him slowly.
This is the same reason why Emerson had been in mourning. He was worried he was going to lose everything if we packed up and headed out, too. This floored Allēna because she had never considered that by doing something as simple – to her – as leaving and removing assholes from her life and various social circles and organizations, it can destroy lives. Her mindset is very much that of “If they can’t be bothered to treat me with respect, what happens after I leave is not my problem”.
She’s secure enough in herself to not let her love for someone stop her from maintaining her boundaries and boot a person from our life if they’re being an ass and refuse to take accountability for their bullshit, but it did help her get a better sense of responsibility for the position she’s in. Those sorts of situations make me far more anxious than they do her, as I can often see how things might play out months before anything actually happens, so good on her, honestly.
Speaking of watching things play out, I have no idea how things are going to go from here. I am going to try and get some rest, though. We’ll just take this one day at a time, I guess.
Much love, everyone. Stay tuned for more magic!
-Eight