Open Sorcery

Open Sorcery is the world of Lazarus Halliwell.

Excellence and batshittery, done on purpose.

I’m Lazarus. I make art, music, poems, plays, and magic for the quiet, brilliant, broken ones. If that is you, welcome home. I adopt your kind.

[Subscribe to my email list and I’ll send you a track I don’t remember recording.]

More about me here.

Please note that, with rare exceptions, any and all names mentioned in this blog are pseudonyms except our own. We want to be able to speak freely without doxxing anyone.

Blog

  • I tried (another) experiment today.

    I took half a magnesium supplement again  and my body had a… typical reaction?

    I did this because I noticed that my heart was hurting last night for some strange reason, and in most people, magnesium evens out heart rate and calms them down. I’ve been worried about having another cardiac event since my last seizure in the wee hours of July 7 of this year when my heart rate shot through the roof after smoking weed to manage severe lower back pain, which triggered a chain reaction.

    Thirty minutes later, I was on the floor convulsing for some 25 minutes and I don’t remember most of July. I would not like to repeat that incident, thank you very much. So I’ve stopped the weed since then and attempted the magnesium again today (which I last took when I was smoking weed like a motherfucker, so that might have had something to do with my strange initial reaction to it). The initial reaction in question was a strong spike in blood pressure and heart rate that induced the migraines it was supposed to prevent. I hadn’t begun my vitamin B experiment or my ibuprofen experiment yet that I can recall, either, which may have contributed, as well. Hell yeah, science in my brainhole!

    Anyway, shortly after I took the magnesium supplement, I fell BACK to sleep for around another much needed 4 hours. I went to sleep at around 4 AM last night and woke up at 9 AM initially, took my meds, and after hanging out with my partner Zelda for a bit before they went to work, I fell back asleep and frankly don’t quite remember passing out. It was nice. So I think I might take the magnesium at night tomorrow since it appears to help with sleep when I’m not literally high on life, lol. My heart feels better and I do feel calmer.

    I have no clue what I’m going to do for the rest of the day. More sleep, since I’m effectively nocturnal at this point? Possibly.. that sounds nice.

    -Allēna

  • Well, I had therapy yesterday…

    this session actually felt productive.

    I’ve been wondering for a long ass time why I write the way that I do. It feels like I’m possessed much of the time. Once I start on a project, I find it very difficult to stop, and if I’m not working on a project, even if there is no specific creative urge, it induces paralyzing anxiety. I feel like I constantly have to be working on something or else I feel like I go (more) insane, start climbing the walls, what have you. I’m a perfectionist about my work, too – if it’s not up to a very high bar that LITERALLY NO ONE ON EARTH is holding me to but myself, I panic and find it very difficult to share it.

    I’m also VERY rigid in other areas of my life. I am severely anxious about a lot. I have a damn near pathological need to know as much as possible, especially if it might possibly involve me, no matter how mentally taxing learning all of this information might be day in and day out. I feel like I have to know. Additionally, I feel like I have to be doing something about what I know, lest the doomspirals begin in that way, as well. I hold people to very, very high standards as well because if they fall short, it makes me VERY anxious, like my life could fall apart at any moment, someone could get hurt, etc..

    I’ve been like that for as long as I can remember. We all have.

    I talked with my therapist about much of this yesterday and he said that it sounded like I was describing obsessive-compulsive disorder. Initially he recommended seeing a psychiatrist about it, but I reminded him that due to my trauma with all of that (see: all of my posts about my mother DIYing MKULTRA with psych meds, etc.) and the fact that while it does suck to create this way, writing and creativity is my lifeline. I don’t know what I would do without it, and I am processing a lot of my trauma when I write. So ultimately we determined that that probably wasn’t the best idea since it wasn’t necessarily harming me and in fact doing more good at this point in time.

    So, that’s my confession for you all. I quite likely have OCD and it’s the root of much of my creativity, perfectionism, and a whole lot of other shit. It feels less like a death sentence to admit that than I thought it would.

    Until tomorrow (or the doomspirals will get me, haha),

    -Allēna

  • like an inkblot

    I attended St John’s College in Annapolis, MD for my freshman year of college. My dad died at the beginning of second semester. I was a young eighteen, already struggling deeply with depression. I didn’t think I would live to see my eighteenth year, and losing him fucking gutted me. I spent the remainder of the year an angry, lonely ghost. It broke me to such a degree that my headmate Eight took over as host for the first time in my system’s life, setting off a power struggle that would persist for many years to come.

    I would later write of that period in my life around a year later: 

    "my father
    they say
    i had a father once 
    i can’t forget his eyes
    green olives from the top down
    and this man i do not know
    may have created me 
    but i hope he won’t keep me 
    for his own
    i am not even my own
    and i keep telling the same
    old stories to new people

    i wish i could make myself new
    i wish i could bring him back
    i wish none of this shit would
    have ever happened
    i wish that the olives had never 
    gone 

    oh, stranger 
    take this cup from me
    will i die if i drink?
    blessed are the poor in spirit
    for they will inherit a life i
    do not want
    nonetheless
    not my will but yours"

    Now, the interesting thing about the way they do things at St John’s College is that there aren’t any final exams. Instead, all your instructors gather in a room at the end of the year and tell you what you did wrong and what you did well. They call this unique form of humiliation the “Don Rag”. It was fair to say that I was absolutely not a good student, especially considering the circumstances, and they did not go easy on me. That being said, my seminar instructors said something that’s stuck with me for the past decade. It was something to the effect of, “even if they can’t make it through a full class or can do nothing else, they show up.” Many of my instructors echoed the same thing, including my Greek instructor, who had told me earlier that year that I show up even when I look like I want to be blotted off the face of the earth.

    That’s something I take a lot of pride in. I do my utmost to show the fuck up, no matter what shape I’m in. I don’t give a flying fuck if I have to come up with 17,000 workarounds in the process, if I want something, I show the fuck up, I put in the work and I get it. And I love a challenge.

    Many people thought I would kill myself that year and in the years to come. My writing and my friends saved my life. I hated myself, and that was apparent in nearly everything I did. But I lived, despite not wanting to. My depression is much better now that I’ve gotten out of Texas, stopped pushing myself so damn hard, and I have better medical care. I’m tremendously thankful for that.

    So here’s to showing up, again and again.

    -Allēna

  • on being mostly nocturnal…

    nighttime is really the only time I get to myself these days.

    This post was first published on my Substack.

    Hello, everyone. I want to preface this by saying that I have absolutely no fucking clue where this is going. I started a draft of this post in the Substack app, but the links were being odd, so I am starting over from the web editor and seeing where the night takes me.

    Before I began that draft, I reread the zine I dropped in June, easy to hate like everything you love, and started listening to the companion playlist I made, called I think you made me hate this city, and started thinking about why I wrote the damn thing at all.

    easy to hate’s cover.

    For starters, I was really, really fucking pissed off at the state of the world, and still am. I was at the tail end of a five year and some long divorce process that I address in the poem “the jailer”, and I was stuck in a deep flow state, often in the wee hours of the morning, screaming my thoughts out on paper, kinda like I’m doing now.

    I felt like everything in my life was in shambles, and, desperate to regain some internal sense of control, I wrote like my life depended on it. I’ve written my way out of holes like that for years.

    I’m also often up for most of the night most nights doing what the fuck ever, whether I’m writing rambles like this, crafting zines like easy to hate, catching up on messages, watching shows, or reading fluffy fanfics. It feels like a fuckload is expected of me during the day, I go nonstop, and the wee hours of the morning is the only time I get to myself to just…be and have time to do whatever I want and actually feel like I have time to be a functional person. Nobody needs me at 2:27 AM (the time I’m writing this), and if they do need me, I know it’s truly dire. In a time when I still feel like I have very little agency over my life, this is heaven.

    I think I’m gonna leave y’all with a few lines from “20 January 2025”, one of my favorite poems from easy to hate:

    "I hail from the hellfire that raised me
    and the shadows that granted me solace 
    Black as the Pit from pole to pole 
    And I thank whatever gods may be
    For my unconquerable soul."

    Go forth and carve some time out to relax today. It’s rebellion.

    -Allēna

    Fediverse reactions

  • mk interviewed me for its blog Debate Me Bro!

    We talked about my zine Field Notes From a Colder Time, neuroqueer zine culture, and how it relates to anarchist organizing praxis as a whole. I really enjoyed this conversation!

    Read it in full here.

    -Allēna

  • I made this last night.

    It’s based off of my poem “the light spinner”.

    “the light spinner” is available in full here.

    -Allēna

    Fediverse reactions

  • Out in the county with Emerson. We’re picking up…. blankets????

    Wish us luck, lol! I’m running on about 4 hours of sleep and no food..

    -Allēna

  • I wrote this at the jazz open mic last night.

    I see, I hear, I learn, I
    bend myself in pretzel knots and
    unfold my mind longhand

    I traded the fire and brandy autumn leaves
    for you and instead we squeeze every drop
    of juice we can from this town with gusto and
    verve.

    I might die tomorrow as my hand cramps and
    my heart races in time with the drums in the
    gallery, but in this moment, I couldn’t be
    happier.

    I grew up with these sounds, asking myself if
    silence was indeed the question, peering through
    twelve bars and howling over blizzards
    (January 21st, 2016 comes to mind)

    I became louder than choirs,
    louder than bombs, louder than
    death itself

    but with you, I learned to cherish the silence
    cherish the vulnerable, unfiltered
    drop my volume, drop my sword, my armor,
    my fire
    and here, in this town, with you in this gallery,
    I see,
    I hear,
    I learn.

    -Allēna 8/29/2025

    Fediverse reactions

  • I didn’t mean to get overthrown…

    This piece was inspired by my poem “migraine”, which is published in full here.

    -Allēna

    Fediverse reactions

  • I did a truly badass thing tonight.

    Enjoy. I feel like I finally did it justice.

    If you’re interested in reading more, “to dance with a cyclone” is the opening ringer of my 2019 poetry collection of the same name.

    -Allēna