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

  • Challenges

    Ah yes. An interesting prompt.

    What is the biggest challenge you will face in the next six months?

    Staying alive, in all honesty. We live in a hellscape and I’m under a lot of stress right now being a repository of knowledge and stress buffer/mediator for a lot of people. It’s so bad right now that I don’t know how I feel personally about a lot of the situations I’m the human DMZ in, and I am currently too exhausted to try. Alexithymia and chronic fatigue are bitches and a half.

    I’m still trying to care for myself as best as possible in all of this, finding a balance is just…. Difficult. It’s one of the reasons my phone is eternally on Do Not Disturb. It gives me some semblance of artificially manufactured peace and quiet amidst all the chaos.

    I think in another life, I would have made a great emergency medical technician.

    -Allēna

  • Do it. You know you want to 🤣🤣🤣

    I amuse the hell out of myself sometimes.

    Inspiration for this dumbshit comes from a conversation with Doom Guy from earlier… It gets funnier the more I watch it…

    -Allēna

  • The 27th anniversary of our stroke is today.

    We call it Brainhole.

    Mirthy Brainhole to you and yours.

    There may be cake today. TBD??

    -Allēna

  • Object impermanence thoughts..

    When we were younger, Xavier would often help us clean up our room and things because we would find it extremely overwhelming due to the sheer amount of crap we had (and frankly didn’t need or want in hindsight) and the fact that we would forget where we put the shit we did want five minutes later.

    So he’d have us make up our bed and use it as a staging area, gently but firmly guiding us through sorting our things into piles of shit to throw away, shit to file in certain cabinets, and generally keeping us on task as a body double. It was much easier to clean that way.

    He wouldn’t yell, he’d crack jokes and tell stories, he was a great person to clean with. He himself was neurodivergent to shit and his office was quite often a wreck, but the man was a goddamned genius and he was one of the only people who could motivate me in particular calmly.

    Memories of cleaning with him are some of the only fond memories of doing chores we have. Most of the rest are very traumatic and unpleasant.

    I got to thinking about cleaning with him because I just dumped my afternoon dose of meds out on my bed to see what I was doing better, using the bed as a staging area like he used to do with me..

    I miss him.

    -Allēna

  • Regarding boredom..

    These prompts, have been going OFF lately. Here’s today’s.

    What bores you?

    Well, I am an AuDHDer, so, in short… Pretty much everything after a point, fortunately or unfortunately. My brain is hardwired for two things, as best I can determine, and those things are patterns and novelty, such that after I get used to something, I can tune it out. It can, in every meaningful way, cease to exist to me.

    That skill has served me very well during situations where I was being actively abused – I would memorize my abusers to such a degree that I could work around them and they’d be all but nonexistent to me. In situations where I actually give a shit but things are just moving too damn slowly for my brain that processes shit at roughly the speed of the manhole we accidentally launched into space, it’s a helluva curse and I would rather die than be stuck in whatever situation I’m in waiting. Patience is not my strong suit. So I tend to live in my head a lot to pass the time.

    The one consistent exception to this is when something pisses me the fuck off. Then it’s eternally interesting and it’ll get stuck in my head until I solve it. I cannot count the number of special interests I’ve gotten into because someone told me I couldn’t ever do them.

    I am a contrarian little bitch who finds ways or fucking makes them…

    -Allēna

  • Y’all, I’m tired.

    I’ve been doing medical research all day.

    So it’s time for me to just come out and say something.

    I want a snake. A pet snake.

    There. I said it.

    -Allēna

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  • What’s this? Another prompt I want to actually take somewhat seriously?

    Who are your favorite people to be around?

    People who are straightforward, honest, and the only bullshit they give me is the joking kind. Preferably, they can see shit about me that I can’t, and can do shit that I can’t without making me feel like shit for it. They don’t talk my ear off constantly about meaningless shit and believe that words have as much power as actions and use both in tandem.

    I’m very picky about the people I surround myself with, and it’s a high bar because I have made peace with solitude most days, being mostly housebound and all, to the point where if I prefer being alone more than I enjoy spending time with a person, I simply won’t engage with them if I don’t have to. I am too tired and have too much shit to do (as well as people I actually like) to pay the people I dislike much mind. My energy is precious and I don’t have much of it. So I do my best to use it wisely. My favorite people get that and go to great lengths to help me protect the little energy I have.

    I’m not proud of a lot of the way my life has gone, and there’s a lot that happened that’s entirely outside of my control. However, I’m damn proud of the fact that I picked great people.

    -Allēna

  • This sounds like the beginning of a bad joke, but…

    Guess who has 1.33 functioning hands, just woke up, rolled over, and Googled “how to win a Pulitzer” and is now probably going back to sleep now that she understands the submission procedure?

    This bitch ✨

    I’m so tired despite taking my head honcho migraine meds when I finally collapsed at about 3:30 this morning , but hey… At least I know how to (possibly) win a Pulitzer now 🤣

    -Allēna

  • “my first madness” – new poem!

    This poem has been rattling around my brain for about the last six hours or so, and it finally spilled out of me in full. Enjoy!

    ****

    in the beginning, I craved –
    and desire was my first madness

    I tirelessly desired everything I
    could sink my curved little hands into

    I desired everything the world told me I would never have –

    and now, I have everything

    I only feel ancient, tired, and hungry when I starve myself of that immortal craving

    tell me that desire for desire’s sake is evil and I will show you how I creak like an
    old house without it

    and flow like water with it

    and ask, have you never wanted something so bad you were willing to bleed sunlight
    for it?

    -Allēna

  • I picked the wrong day to have Do Not Disturb off. Every notification ever… So that’s going back on and I’m going back to sleep. Night night everyone… -Allēna #NEISvoid #chronicfatigue #MECFS #naptime #eepy

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