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.

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  • “Guernica” Part 2: Allēna Declares War

    Hello, everyone! My name is Ellie. As you may have read, I am one of the super-admins our this disaster system. I am still sick, so this post may read as incredibly sleep deprived. Or loopy, take your pick. In any case, I am going to pick up where Eight left off and discuss Allēna’s harrowing “Guernica” Part 2. If you missed yesterday’s post and you’re looking for that, it’s right here. And as always, the poem in full is part of our second poetry collection, Singing Molten Gold To The Morning.

    This section is a kick in the soul. I’m just going to be honest, we couldn’t read it aloud for years without crying. It made for some very odd performances. Allēna makes some very powerful declarations here and in many ways foreshadowed Eight’s Operation: Dead Hand. Both Eight and Allēna wanted to get away from Hera. However, it wasn’t until Dead Hand was complete that we completely broke away from her, and we haven’t had contact with her for the past year, thank the gods. However, she does directly tap into her rage here for one of the first times in her life, and the results are something else.

    In order to best show you these results, I think Eight’s approach yesterday was excellent, so I’m going to continue doing things his way. First, I’m going to show you a video of Eight performing “Guernica”, Part 2. Next, I’ll write the text of the poem out for you. Then, I’ll analyze it for you. Without further ado, let’s do this thing!

    “Guernica” Part 2

    Eight’s performance of “Guernica” Part 2.

    The Poem’s Text

    “Guernica” Part 2

    thresholds are for brides

    and i was a bride once

    but that was a moment and

    i wore a dress as red as blood

    people asked why i did that

    i know why i did that now

    i didn’t know how else to say i was angry

    when my mind was taped shut and i was

    kept in a fog 

    damn those pills!

    damn the nightmares!

    damn that house that should have caught fire

    with all inside!

    i am not the crazy child kept in the attic!

    not anymore

    i am the human unchained,

    i am the one that walks free!

    i have doors now

    i have miles in my pockets

    i can and will lock you out. 

    and there’s blood on their hands

    they kicked a child 

    they should have loved the child

    but when they dropped the bombs

    the empty house of my mind caved in. 

    but the structure is stronger than that

    i am stronger than that

    and this is me calling it what it is….

    you make your own hell, 

    i say to the bombers

    i say to the horrors that i experienced

    some people see battlefields

    i have seen a mind turned inside out

    i have been trapped in my own body

    i have seen my innocence die before me

    and i’ve shouted into the hole of loss

    and i’m still hearing the infinite echo. 

    i don’t know which is worse.

    you make your own hell, 

    i say to the demons i fight

    your hell is not mine, 

    your chains are not mine, 

    i am not your wall to punch.

    i’m not a pewter cup to drink from and laugh with

    your hell is not mine

    not anymore. 

    this is me calling what it is…

    hell. 

    and i enter it on my own terms. 

    not yours, 

    not anymore. 

    Allēna wearing her wedding dress "as red as blood" as was mentioned i "Guernica" Part 2.
    Allēna in her wedding dress red as blood, as mentioned in “Guernica” Part 2

    For Context, Allēna Is A Born Anticonventionalist

    Practically from birth, Allēna was a fighter who was determined to fight convention and expectations that were placed on her without her consent. She hated the fact that women had very little power in the church she joined when she was 14 after very thorough research (she is a Byzantinist and avid scholar of early Christian history, after all).

    So she charmed all of the men in power so thoroughly that I’m convinced they might have let her get away with anything she wanted to so long as she could explain well enough why she had done it. She charmed damn near everyone else in multiple congregations, as well, so much so that many people cities away would go to her if they needed anything.

    The Mormon Social Nexus

    Everything and everyone passed through her. Eventually she knew hundreds of people in five to ten states who would go to bat for her if she needed them to. All while committing what would be for most people in the Mormon Church tantamount to social suicide. But it wasn’t, not for her. She had hundreds of people in her pocket. And it wasn’t like she was using them, she genuinely loved them and many of them still love her, despite her now openly being a Pagan gremlin.

    “Guernica” Part 2’s Seeds

    Her wedding to her first husband, Fang, was no different. They were married in late 2018, and Xavier, our father, had been dead from an aggressive brain tumor for nearly two years at the time of the ceremony. In that time, Hera had completely lost it and had gotten tired of Allēna’s fiery nature and had subjected her to severe mental and emotional abuse and medical neglect. We aptly compare it to a DIY version of the now-declassified CIA experiment MKUltra in order to make us more compliant, easily suggestible, and weak. It very nearly worked. Fortunately, we are all very stubborn and have a very resilient brain.

    The pills Allēna mentioned in the poem were prescribed for bipolar I, which we didn’t even have. We were autistic, plural, and extremely traumatized. We later learned that we were on the highest dose of one of those meds that our excellent psychiatrist in Alaska had ever seen, and she’d been practicing at that point for longer than we’d been alive. Allēna, completely gutted by losing Xavier, and seeing no hope in living, fell into a deep suicidal depression, which she met Fang in the big fucking middle of.

    Rush Job

    She saw herself attempting suicide within the year if she stayed in Texas, Hera was hurting her so badly, and her fate in Alaska with Fang would be unknown, but at least she wouldn’t have to stay in Texas anymore. Allēna and Fang wanted to eventually marry, but not immediately, setting a wedding date of April 8, 2024 once they were engaged. However, Hera didn’t want us living in sin, so she threatened to cut off our lifesaving health insurance if we went to live with Fang unmarried. So, medicated into a fog and pushed into a marriage she was unsure if she even wanted yet, yet still mad as fucking hell, she settled for her favorite skillset, one she knew would drive everyone up the fucking wall – malicious compliance and bucking the hell out of convention.

    A Dress As Red As Blood

    The wedding came together in three months, during which time Hera and Allēna had an explosive argument in which Hera spat “you’ll be someone else’s problem in three months, anyway”, which inspired Allēna’s iconic folk-punk song “Someone Else’s Problem”. The result was a dark, almost cowgoth ceremony that Allēna dictated down to the last detail on a shoestring budget, since Hera had spent all but forty thousand of the millions of dollars she’d inherited upon Xavier’s death. Allēna and Fang were married beneath an Osage orange tree per her orders, a nod to Xavier, who had taught her all about them.

    Like the Osage orange tree, which we affectionately call the “offensive tree of the forest” for its stubborn nature and tendency to drop things on people who are beneath them at random, Allēna would not be moved and blindsided the guests with a few bold choices – a bright red wedding dress, the song she walked down the aisle to, and the song that she and Fang left after the ceremony to, though that was more her brother Blue’s choice. She walked down the aisle to “First Breath After Coma” by Explosions in the Sky, a band from Texas like her, and the newlyweds walked out to “Ring of Fire” by Johnny Cash. Blue was the emcee, and he did a damn good job. That dress would later appear in “Guernica” Part 2.

    “Guernica” Part 2 As A Declaration of War

    Once she moved to Alaska, she was able to process more of what Hera had done to her and how fucked her childhood actually was. She reasoned that she should have every right to be angry, Hera had hurt and betrayed her repeatedly, violated her autonomy, and tried to neglect and abuse her into a blank slate that she could finally reshape in her own image.

    Hera and a large part of her family had destroyed any chance she had ever had at normalcy beyond what the stroke did to her. She wanted her innocence back. It was time to reclaim what was hers. Her voice, her power, her fucking birthright. So by the old gods, she was gonna fucking claim it. She boldly asserts herself and her autonomy with that iron will of hers,

    “I am the human unchained. I am the one who walks free. I have doors now. I can and will lock you out.”

    The “doors” line and the next few lines are significant. She was quite literally kept in an attic from 2017 until she married Fang The entrance to her sleeping space – I can hardly call it a bedroom – was merely a staircase that opened up to the rest of a very open-concept house. Allēna didn’t even have a bed. She had to sleep on a window seat. Hera wouldn’t allow her to do anything to make the space more private or even more personal. Blue had a room, however. He had a private bathroom – that Allēna had to use – and had all the autonomy and freedom he wanted. He didn’t even have a curfew, and Allēna did.

    I Have Doors Now

    When she got to Alaska, she fought Fang for a space of her own and won. The showdown occurred in the summer of 2019, around the time she wrote “Guernica”. This was fierce argument in which he threatened to take away her health insurance if she didn’t stand down. He was taking a leaf out of Hera’s playbook, and she was pissed and terrified. Fortunately, her friend told her to call his bluff and see what happened. He was indeed bluffing, and now Allēna had an office of her own. This was a profound relief. She could finally be herself in her own space and have a measure of her own life now. To me, that shows in the poem. Now, for what must have been the first time ever, she could enter hell on her own terms, if she chose to at all.

    She cut Hera off for a time around the time she started writing “Guernica”, and this was a profound relief. Finally, freedom was within her grasp. All that was left to do then was to heal the damage that had all of Hera’s bullshit had done.

    She also cut off most of Hera’s family, and this was a scandal for them. This is why I sort of subtitled this post “Allēna Declares War”. It ignited a powder keg of bullshit the family still wasn’t over by the time Peri left Fang in 2020. The first time Allēna cut off contact was such a big fucking stink for them and so out of the ordinary that it pushed Eight into creating and completing Dead Hand. Heaven forbid people have boundaries and autonomy! My gods, the world is going to shit!

    Final Thoughts on “Guernica” Part 2

    How’s that for a kick to the damn soul? “Guernica” Part 2 always hurts me so good. I love it when people actually dig deep and be real with the world. Pretense sucks. Anyone can put on a mask and play a role, that’s easy. It takes true strength to be honest and open with the world about your story, and those are the people I admire. I really think Allēna opens herself up to the world here, and in my opinion, that’s true beauty. That is good poetry.

    What do y’all think? The comments are yours as long as you be kind. And as always, stay tuned for more magic – and “Guernica” Part 3!

    -Ellie Ulvaard, Your Faithful, if Sleepy, Super-Admin

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  • “Guernica” Part 1: Allēna’s Visceral Masterpiece Begins

    Hello, dearest gentle motherfuckers of the Internet. I hope you’re having a wonderful day. This is Eight speaking, and I am here to talk about one of my favorite poems Allēna has ever written, her enormous seven part piece “Guernica”. This poem appears in full in our second collection of poetry, Singing Molten Gold To The Morning. Today’s focus in particular is gonna be on “Guernica” Part 1.

    This hell of a poem is a seven-part ringer that was inspired by a lot of her own trauma and Picasso’s landmark anti-war painting with the same name. At the time, she felt pressured into making her trauma into beautiful art. She felt that people wanted her to smooth the pain over to make it pretty and less visceral. And she was sick to death of having to walk on eggshells in her own creative process. She wanted to write a piece that captured the horror that the original painting made her feel. So she used the painting and the events that inspired it as a framing device.

    An image of Pablo Picasso's shocking 1937 painting Guernica, which inspired "Guernica", Part 1 and the poem as a whole.
    Guernica by Pablo Picasso (1937), the painting that inspired “Guernica”, Part 1 and the poem as a whole

    Because this poem is so rich and hits so hard, we’re gonna write a post for each part. Whoever is in front that day will break it down for y’all. We’ll also include the poem’s text and a video recording of yours truly performing it. So let’s jump in.

    “Guernica” Part 1: The Performance

    A video of yours truly performing “Guernica”, part 1.

    The Text and Breakdown

    “guernica” part 1.

    26 april 1937..

    i don’t know what i do best anymore

    except turn pain into something beautiful

    but what about the horrors of it and not the glory?

    i want to take what i feel and not what i say

    turn it into something 11 feet tall and 25 feet wide

    but my hands are little

    my hands are little and no paintbrush is small enough to catch

    all the detail

    i’m tired of walking over thresholds of bombed out

    buildings or a half built house

    i’m tired of only seeing rubble

    i’m a builder, damnit

    i’m supposed to build people up

    i’m supposed to help

    not have nightmares like flashbacks that crush me!

    so i dare myself

    now –

    put your own oxygen mask on before you

    drop that bomb

    and then stay awhile

    before flying away. 

    What Does This Thing Actually Mean?

    Before she ever started writing this poem, she looked into what inspired Picasso to even paint such a shocking thing in the first place. She found that he’d painted it in a frenzy as a response to the Spanish government ordering the near total obliteration of a village called Guernica in Basque country during the Spanish Civil War.

    The bombing was completely unprovoked. Guernica wasn’t a military target. Most of the men were away fighting in the war, leaving women and children behind. The nearest military target was miles away and was completely untouched in the attack.

    Yet, the government had bombed them so thoroughly that the roads were choked with rubble and the remaining citizens were unable to flee. Naturally, Picasso was horrified, and out came this incredibly shocking painting in response. ThoughtCo published a brilliant article about Guernica if you want to read more about it in depth.

    This reminded Allēna of much of what she and her headmates suffered at her family and then our now-ex husband’s hands for the duration of our entire life up until that point. All we’d ever wanted was to be left alone to do our thing without being controlled or harmed. We only misbehaved when the people around us refused to honor that simple request.

    We’ve always been very emotionally independent, while these people were very codependent and toxic. As a result, we were emotionally, mentally, and physically abused for most of our life. So when Allēna came across this painting while researching for a tutoring session later that day, she felt seen for one of the first times in her life in the subjects’ agony and grief. She, too, was enduring unimaginable pain that she could only paint, write in verse, sing, and scream out.

    On Taking What She Felt, Not What She Said In “Guernica” Part 1

    Our family also went to great lengths to attempt to silence us so that we wouldn’t out them for the terrible people most of them were, so we were often sick and in a great deal of emotional pain and terribly lonely with no idea how to articulate our suffering to another person outside of music and poetry, which Lēna learned to write in code to get past Hera’s ever-watchful eye. Her 2017 album Mago, which I helped work on as a kind of passive influence, is an excellent example of such coded work. It sounds like a Broadway musical or some kind of vaudeville piece to the untrained ear, but if you know what all we’re talking about, it’s absolutely fiery and damning.

    I’ve embedded Mago below so you can listen without even having to leave this page.

    But by 2019, when Lēna wrote this piece, she was tired of having to think and write in code. She felt like she was drowning in what was left unsaid, so this was her effort to start talking about everything that had happened to us. She broke free from Hera for the first time a bit later on 5 July 2019. Her successor, Peri, would leave our ex husband a bit over a year later. She told our story, and it paid off.

    Final Thoughts

    I’m really excited for Part 2. I or whoever is out will talk about Part 2 tomorrow. If you thought “Guernica” Part 1 was a kick to the soul, just you fuckin’ wait. I both hope and don’t hope that “Guernica” makes you feel seen, because if you feel seen in this poem, you’ve absolutely Seen Some Shit. But if you HAVE indeed Seen Some Shit, I hope you feel seen and less alone as you read this. As always, stay tuned for more magic, because this time, magic is definitely imminent.

    -Eight, Your Faithful Super-Admin And Bastard

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  • What Excites Us These Days

    Hey, everyone! This is Ellie here once more. It’s been a very long week, and I seem to be getting sick. As such, I was kinda feeling unmotivated to write on here today. So I decided to challenge myself after looking at some very cool journal prompts and write about what excites us as a system currently and what we’re looking forward to. Even though things are crazy over here and it feels like there’s barely enough time to breathe over here often, lots of exciting things still happen. Expect a short-ish post since I am so tired. I’m sorry!

    What Excites Us? A Good Soundtrack, Always

    First and foremost, music always excites us. Many of us in the system struggle to tap into my emotions without music playing. Every alter in the headspace that has fronted so far likes to create to music. We often struggle to identify what we’re feeling unless we can find music that sounds like the emotion we’re experiencing, as well. We build playlists for every mood. When we need a boost, we absolutely have playlists for that! Our headmate Chaos even crafted a playlist that helped us on our mad dash out of Texas in 2021 that was specifically designed to pump us up, keep us focused, and keep us moving. It’s called Songs To Implode Things To and you can listen to it on Spotify here. I hope it inspires you as much as it has my entire system.

    We’re very neurodivergent, so music makes the body and the brain feel very good. Songs we like make every cell in our body feel alive. Many of us in the system are also synesthetes, and have strong associations between sound and color due to our stroke. One of my fellow super-admins, Allēna, actually painted music as she saw it in her synesthetic mind’s eye in college and wanted to create an entire multi-sensory modern art exhibit. I would love to create that exhibit at some point still.

    One of Allēna’s song renderings, Love Comes Tumbling (2016) after “Love Comes Tumbling” by U2. Music definitely excites us, as do creative projects.

    Speaking of Music, Add Songwriting to the List

    We don’t just listen to music! We write and produce it, as well. It’s immensely cathartic to us as well as exciting to play, perform, and record our original songs and arrangements.

    Performing is always a rush. It took many years for us to believe in our skills, but now that we do… oh damn, are we on fire. We were even doing some recording today for our sixteenth record. We’ve been recording for years, and the feeling of when a record starts to come together STILL never gets old. We know when we have a viable record at a definable point every time, and it’s different for each one. We wrote about how Eight knew his masterpiece Metacognition was ready to emerge a few days before he recorded the bulk of it a day after reading a single line. It’s stuff like that. We had a similar moment with #16, working title Australis, a few months ago with the lines “Every time we fight I imagine you leaving/It hurts less and less each time I fuckin’ see it.”

    But Wait! There’s More

    We’ve noticed that slowness and consistency have been exciting us more and more. Exhausting shit has been happening for years straight, and we’re increasingly attracted to things that give us the freedom to rest for once. You know that old stereotype that your body starts to hurt and you’re dog tired by the time you’re thirty? That happened to us by the time the body was fifteen or sixteen. So what excites us now is absolutely not what excited us in our teens and earlier twenties when we were still trying to pretend we were abled and superhuman and didn’t need help from a fucking soul.

    Simple Fucking Alone Time

    One of the things we never thought would excite us and yet very much does is very simple – alone time. Eight is one of the only extroverts in the head, if not the only one, and so alone time or one on one company with someone we deeply love and trust absolutely excites us. Especially if we manage to get everything on our to-do list completed beforehand and we can unwind for the rest of the day. It’s lovely. We never stopped being very fast readers and can still devour entire novels in under a day if we have the energy to do so. Now, about that one-on-one time…

    A Good List, Not a Long List

    We don’t have many people we trust enough to hang out with in person, but if we do trust a person that much, odds are they’re very energizing and yet soothing to be around. We tend to meet people virtually first since we’re essentially housebound and are definitely agoraphobic, so it’s easier that way. Many of us can get a good sense of who a person is intuitively that way without having to deal with the terror of an initial in-person meeting. Plus, with COVID still going around, even if we weren’t disabled, we would still want to be cautious. These soothing, safe people excite us, and we love talking to them however we can. We love our people, chronic fatigue and disabilities aside.

    Final Thoughts

    This is a short list of some of the things that excite us. I want to come back and write more in depth about some of the things I wrote about here, but for now, brain fog demands that I wrap this post up. One of us do our best to post tomorrow, but depending on how we feel, we might not be able to. I hope you enjoyed this post nonetheless, and as always, stay tuned for more magic!

    -Ellie Ulvaard, Super-Admin

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  • The Enneagram Type 8: My Experience

    Hey, everyone! My name is Eight. I’m one of the super-admins here, and I’m here to talk to y’all today about one of my all-time favorite topics ever, the Enneagram of Personality. I’ve loved this personality typology system since my good friend Delta introduced me to it many years ago. There are nine basic types in this system, and my type, where I get the “Eight” nickname from, is the Enneagram Type 8.

    The Enneagram Institute has a great overview of my type, as do several other websites, teachers, and coaches. However, I’ve noticed during my years of study that not much of the literature about the Enneagram Type 8 is written by 8s themselves. As a result, we get a very bad reputation among the Enneagram community as ruthless bullies, master manipulators, self absorbed egotists, and just all around assholes. I suspect that many of these authors once ran afoul of a Type 8 or two, or possibly even betrayed one of them, hence the terrible reputation we get. Spoiler: you betray us or one of our people and it will not end well for you.

    And yes, some Type 8s can be awful. But that applies to any group of people. So I’ve come here today to hopefully clear up some of the mystery surrounding the Enneagram Type 8 and talk about what it’s like to be one.

    The Enneagram Type 8: Hard Shell, Soft Underbelly

    There’s a lot of debate in the community as to whether Type 8s are simply born like this, or if there’s some kind of inciting incident early in life that makes them that way. I can’t speak for everyone else, but I can say definitively that I practically came out of the womb the way that I am. Since I was very little, I have always been a fighter, and have been stubborn as hell for as long as anyone can remember.

    I value my autonomy higher than anything else on this accursed rock, and will go to great lengths to preserve it, and will go out of my way to undermine people who try and control me when I didn’t consent to take orders from them. I am, and have always been, the boss of me. My biggest fear is of being hurt or blindsided when I’m vulnerable and in need (like, it’s my deepest, yet most unconscious fear), and betrayal will make me incredibly cold and angry. I will completely stop caring about what happens to a person who has betrayed me after they do so, and it’s even worse if they hurt or betray one of my people.

    I struggle to open up to people about anything that I consider important to me, and it’s pretty common knowledge that nobody knows me completely, as much as I would like them to.

    The Boss of Me

    I’ll push harder and longer than most people anyone have ever met if there’s something that I want or if there’s an obstacle in my way, and I’ve been like that for as long as my headmates can remember. My colleagues have written at length about us surviving a massive stroke and then clawing our way out of Texas kicking and screaming.

    Yeah, the success on our side was mostly my doing. And there’s no way I could have done that without enough iron-willed determination to fight Death himself multiple times. And lemme tell you – in a crisis, that’s a major advantage. I don’t care what happens to me or my body, I WILL get to safety and I WILL give anyone who stands in my way a VERY bad day in the process. My path out of Texas was so batshit insane on purpose because I knew the people in league with my abusers would never want to follow me.

    What Happens in Peacetime?

    In more peaceful times, however, this often works to my detriment. I struggle a lot when there is nothing challenging me. Think of me like the human version of an Alaskan Husky dog. I, like a Husky, don’t know what to do with myself if my life isn’t on fire or I am bored, and will often cause some bullshit and push the people I love away without meaning to when I’m stressed or out of my element, such as in close relationships where being emotionally vulnerable can make or break your relationship.

    My relationship with my beloved husband Emerson actually suffered greatly for the first year and a half we were together because he is far more emotionally expressive and emotionally based than I am, and I struggle a lot with emotional vulnerability.

    Inner Work, More Emotional Vulnerability, And No-Bullshit Therapy For You, Mountain of Madness!

    I, as is typical for the Enneagram Type 8, prefer to do things, not talk or feel. As a result, I wouldn’t tell him how I was feeling or where my head was at, and he couldn’t give me what I wanted in the relationship. It was a very please, for the love of the gods, help me help you type of situation, and I wasn’t being very helpful at all. I’m in therapy to and have an amazing, no-bullshit, straight-talking therapist who will call me out if I’m in the wrong, but will also celebrate my wins with me. I need both of those things in a therapist, honestly.

    Because of all the work I did both internally and in tandem with Emerson, I am far more open and transparent with him than I’ve ever been with anyone. It was absolutely and utterly terrifying. I cried more during that healing journey while struggling to open up and reconciling my terror of being seen with my desire for love and a healthy relationship with him than I probably ever have before. But I wanted it more than anything, so I fucking did the work.

    The Current State of Things

    Now, I feel safe enough to fully drop my guard around him. I’m working on doing the same for others who have proven to me beyond a shadow of a doubt that they have my back. I’m also working on mitigating how bad things get when I become stressed or overwhelmed, because both Emerson and I have noticed that I try and take projects over even if they aren’t my responsibility to ensure that they are complete and done right. There, I still need to do a lot of work on letting shit go, lest I steamroll everything, burn bridges, and exhaust myself in the process. I am impatient and often frustrated, so I’ve been working on breathing deep and slowing down. Not my circus, not my monkeys. That’s what I have to tell myself, anyway.

    A Word of Advice to Partners of Enneagram Type 8s

    In the same vein, if your partner is an Enneagram Type 8, you will not get them to change by attempting to force, coerce, beg, or cajole them into doing so. If they truly, genuinely love you, call them out and ask them to change. If they want a relationship with you and value you highly, they’ll do the work. We’re very self motivated people and we pursue what we want relentlessly. We are also allergic to bullshit, can usually read people very well, and can catch people in lies like we’re in the fucking CIA, so if you know what’s good for you, just tell your Type 8 partner the truth with no sugarcoating, short, straight, actionable, and to the point. Trust me, it’ll go a lot better for you.

    Closing Remarks

    Don’t tell anyone, but in my experience, Type 8s are actually very sweet and some of the kindest, coolest people you’ll ever meet once you get to know them and actually earn their respect. Me? If you think I’m cool, awesome. If you don’t? Your loss. I think I’m cool, haha. In any case, I hope you enjoyed your stay on my batshit website, and as always, stay tuned for more magic!

    -Eight, Super-Admin, Enneagram Eight, Dipshit

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  • Moxie Food + Drink: An Insider Perspective

    Hello, gentle reader. My name is Hannibal. I am the main protector alter of the Ashley system. I see that my colleague Renn reviewed his favorite headshop the other day, and I am going to follow in his esteemed footsteps, though my review will be…how shall I put this? Different. Much different. We’ve lived in Milwaukee for about three years and we’ve eaten at some shady restaurants here in our time, and have heard some bad things from the staff. We’re a system full of social butterflies, and kitchen staff talk. So we have become a clearinghouse for a lot of the local gossip and we know where to frequent and where to avoid. But none of the dirt on the other restaurants compares to a supposedly upscale “speakeasy” in Whitefish Bay, a northern suburb of Milwaukee, Moxie Food + Drink.

    Is What You’re About To Tell Me About Moxie Food + Drink Hearsay? Possibly. You Be The Judge, Though.

    Much of what I shall tell you we heard directly from one of the kitchen managers at Moxie Food + Drink themself, our ex partner, Zelda. This restaurant struggled from the ashes of a now defunct restaurant owned by the same couple that owns Moxie, Trouble and Sons. Trouble closed due to supposed “staffing issues”, the probable cause of which I shall discuss in a moment. Much of the staff from Trouble transferred to Moxie after Trouble shut down, and the owners are still paying on the building that housed Trouble, and the same staffing issues that plagued them still haunt Moxie, and the owners are cutting corners wherever they can in order to stop this remaining venture from going under. This includes things that will be absolutely illegal if they don’t fix them soon. I’ll cite them in a later paragraph after I discuss the staffing issues.

    Now, About Those Staffing Issues…

    Word from Zelda has it that the owners are extremely nepotistic and play favorites. If you aren’t their favorite, they bully and undercut you and seemingly try to get you to quit so that they don’t have to pay you unemployment. As a result, there’s a high degree of turnover. If you are their favorite, you can do no wrong. However, the owners are fickle and their favorites can change completely arbitrarily. They’re constantly trying to hire more people, and the pay is horrible because again, they’re trying desperately to keep their business afloat. No wonder they have staffing issues. My sisters in Christ, it’s almost like YOU CAUSED THEM!

    Zelda has also noticed that they have a tendency to promote their current favorites and leave the rest of the staff to drown. However, since money is so tight, they don’t even have the money to even support their favorites.

    For example, Zelda is one of their current favorites. They work them to the bone. At one point recently, the owners scheduled them for three weeks straight without a single day off. And then when they did finally get a day off, they kept getting called in because the kitchen is so eternally short staffed.

    Additionally, the owners asked Zelda to earn their ServSafe certification. They did so, took the test for it and everything. However, the owners still have yet to pay for them to get their official ServSafe certification as promised. It has been several months at this point, and he’s still received nothing.

    Now For The Real Fire: Moxie Food + Drink’s Future Federal Labor Board Violations (Assuming They Don’t Clean Up Their Act)

    Dearest reader, you recall how I said that money was tight for the owners because Trouble closed down? They’re going to be in heaps of trouble with the Federal Department of Labor if they don’t pay Zelda and Zelda’s co-manager significantly more by July 1 and even more than that by January 1, 2025, per a new rule by the Biden-Harris Administration this year. However, per their contract, they are not eligible for a raise until next February at the earliest.

    Zelda is also required to work far more than their contract requires because their co-manager gets even more special treatment from the owners (see: nepotism) and is paid hourly and doesn’t work more than his contract says he should, often leaving Zelda hanging in the process. Zelda is salaried and often works far more than the fifty hour cap that their contract dictates, covering shifts for an already deeply short-staffed kitchen. I am not certain if that is legal or not, but they’re certainly working themselves to death.

    What About Moxie Food + Drink’s Food? Is It Any Good?

    Eh. I’m not a fan of a lot of Moxie Food + Drink’s menu. Granted, they have to cater to the rather bland upper class Whitefish Bay palate, but seriously, I can only stand about three things on their menu, and two of those things are desserts, which aren’t even made in-house. The other is their short rib, which is actually delicious. So they get points for that, at least. I want to learn to make a better short rib, though. I bet I could improve the recipe pretty easily.

    Before you ask about their alcohol, I wouldn’t know. I don’t drink. The system has been sober for about six months. Zelda would know, though. If you see them around, you should ask. They’re a somewhat functional alcoholic in the loosest sense of the term, and they often show up to work late because they’re hungover and drank themself into a stupor the night before. I don’t know if they’ll even get a raise with that kind of behavior, though they seem to be the most competent person in Moxie Food + Drink’s kitchen. Now that is a scary thought..

    Conclusion

    If I could give Moxie Food + Drink negative stars, I would. The dirt on this place is richer than six feet up a bull’s ass, though. If you have too much money to blow, enjoy bland food, and want a good laugh at an obvious sinking ship, eat at Moxie.

    As always, stay tuned for more magic!

    -Hannibal

  • “Do You Practice Religion?” Well, It’s Complicated..

    Hi! Four here. I’m one of the alters in the Ashley system. WordPress suggested a prompt from a journaling app called Day One, which we are using for this post. Although the question is complicated for us, I’m gonna do my best to answer it. The question the prompt posed was “do you practice religion?”

    We all have a very complicated and difficult relationship with religion. We’ve gone through numerous phases in our spiritual journey, and I would say that short that if someone asked me “do you practice religion”, yes. Yes, we do. However, that wasn’t always the case. We have gone from being atheists to Mormons to being a flavor of Christian we couldn’t define to being literally fucking deified to Pagan and a system of practicing sorcerers. I’ll talk about it all in sequence, then open the floor to questions at the end.

    Do We Practice Religion? To Answer That, I’m Gonna Have To Tell You A Few Things First.

    As you’ve probably gathered by now if you’ve been following our blog for some time, we have a LOT of Tragic Backstory and Lore. It’s like that on the spiritual/religious side of things, as well. We were raised in what my headmate Allēna calls a “house divided”.

    A House Divided

    Hera, our mother, was a quietly devout Methodist coming from a LOUDLY devout Southern Baptist family that converted to Methodism as a sort of compromise between our maternal grandmother (who is NOT a Baptist by any means) and our maternal grandfather, who is such a devout Southern Baptist that he’s more devoted to bigotry than the actual faith itself.

    Our father, on the other hand, came from a a family of physicians, scientists and bohemian artists and was a militant atheist. Our first host, Castor, took after his father in everything, and as such was deeply skeptical of any form of religion from a young age. However, he had an enormous, all consuming special interest in Greek mythology, which ultimately turned into an appreciation for spirituality in every form he could find.

    Castor’s Guiding Intuition

    He was also deeply, innately spiritual. He was wary of most of his family and our close family friends for very good reason, as we’d find out later that many of them weren’t good people. Interestingly, all the people that we found bad things out about were people that Castor had avoided like the plague. The kid just wanted to do his own thing, read his books, listen to his own intuition, and mind his own business, and many of his family members found that odd. He didn’t conform to their ways or anyone else’s and wouldn’t follow orders blindly the way they wanted him to. He asked too many questions and spoke his mind in everything. It got him into heaps of trouble with his family and his teachers, but it also meant that he never lost access to his intuition or his identity.

    Allēna, the First Among Us To Actually Practice Religion

    When Allēna took over from Castor as host and primary fronter at eleven years old or so, she was just as tapped into her intuition as he was, with just as much devotion to seeking out the truth, asking questions, and speaking her mind if something was important to her.

    Never Cross an Angry Byzantinist, and Don’t Invite One To Church, Either

    One of Allēna’s great passions is studying history, and she loves the Byzantine Empire with all her heart. With that, she amassed a great deal of knowledge about early Christian history in high school and knew more than most that dear GODS it’s a hot mess.

    She disliked many branches of Christianity because she thought that the Nicene Creed was bullshit and nothing more than a political compromise that an emperor made who had no fucking clue what he was doing and even less authority to do it. Not only that, but it had no basis in scripture whatsoever and therefore rendered the entire foundation of those faiths invalid. So when her friends at her very religious homeschool cooperative would invite her to church, she’d politely decline as best she knew how. (For better or worse, that woman has no tact now and had even less then).

    Faith? What the Hell Is That?

    But she was curious and still wanted to see if she could even believe in God, horseshit aside. Spoiler: it didn’t go well. She DID find a church that didn’t believe in the Nicene Creed, but unfortunately for her, it was the Mormon Church. When the missionaries taught her for the first time, she felt they’d finally portrayed God in a way she could understand.

    To Practice Religion As An Autistic Academic

    Before we go on, I should tell you that we are very autistic. Emerson refers to us as savants, it goes that deep and we are that rigid. As a result, we cannot do anything unless we are under the impression that we understand it completely. The Mormons asked a LOT of blind faith from Lēna, which is something neither she nor anyone else in our system have ever been okay with. We cannot operate on blind faith. We’ve tried multiple times and it frightens us so badly we shut down. We trust no one and nothing fully except ourselves and never have, and this quickly became a problem.

    She asked so many damn questions during her Sunday school classes that I wouldn’t be surprised if her teachers had to draw straws when determining which teachers got which students. The teacher who drew the short straw got her and all of her miles of questions. She asked and asked all the questions she could because she approached a high control faith that expected a lot of blind trust from its followers like an academic. When she never found answers that satisfied her or even made sense to her, it broke her heart.

    The Bright Side

    Even though being left essentially empty-handed broke Lēna’s heart, it made deconstructing the religious trauma converting to Mormonism had left her with a whole helluva lot easier. Because she wasn’t fully emotionally and spiritually attached to the Church or their practices, she was better able to examine what she wanted to keep from their theology and what she didn’t really resonate with and leave it behind.

    Did She Practice Religion As A Member of The Mormon Church? Up For Debate. Did She Practice Her Power Moves? Hell Yeah.

    She also gained a lot of experience in playing the system as a member of the Mormon Church. Many alters in our system have an innate ability to see who is actually in charge wherever we are and the real hierarchy within an organization, and Lēna is no exception. She absolutely used that gift to her advantage here. Women have no real power in the Church, so she allied herself closely with men who were generally very smart like her and were second or third in command of her congregation or of her local group of congregations.

    She charmed the HELL out of them as well as everyone else around her, and learned how to throw legendary parties that kids told all of their friends about. Everyone wanted an invitation to one of her parties. Because of all of that hard work, her reputation as a social connector and a hard, dedicated worker and innovator who knew how to get fucking RESULTS MASSIVELY preceded her, and I suspect that she could have gotten away with anything she wanted to if she’d so chosen.

    An Unconventional Darling

    These people gave her anything and everything she wanted. Even though she had no power on paper, she had power over the people in power and they owed her a lot of favors. She broke convention and barriers at every turn and they still loved her for it, which was practically unheard of in the Church. Most members are shunned for being different, while she was embraced for it.

    While Allēna deconstructed her faith, she wrote a quadrilogy of haunting albums, one of which we recently recut. It’s called Primrose Path, and it’s equally a statement of doubt and of faith. I’ll embed it below:

    By the time our first marriage ended, however, we were already setting off on a different path…

    Open Sorcery

    We fell heavily into divination practices during our first marriage in Alaska. Lēna designed her own set of oracle cards while half asleep based off of several symbols that meant a lot to her spiritually and had followed her throughout her life. She found that she had never lost that intuition fully throughout her time as a Mormon or while she was deconstructing her Christianity, and not only that – she had powerful psychic insight.

    This only grew as the years went on. When Eight moved here to Milwaukee, he discovered witchcraft and chaos magic and that many of the things we’d been doing innately for years were actually established practices with names that witches and magic practitioners had been doing for centuries. And not only that, but he was good at it. He just needed to learn how to use it intentionally. In fact, we named our blog Open Sorcery and have a variant of that as our username in several places because we don’t see that our magic as a thing that we should hide. Instead, we try and share our gifts with magic and everything else. But we still thought something was missing.

    Crowd-Sourced God Complex

    We felt like some deity had been contacting us for years, but in the meantime, a joke Eight made backfired terribly and his followers on the Internet worshipped him as the one true God for years. So a possible answer to the question “do you practice religion” is BITCH! I AM RELIGION!

    Jokes aside, it made Eight and many of us deeply uncomfortable and some people on the periphery of the cult accused him of having a god complex. He fired back, “if I do, it’s crowd-sourced!”

    I wish I were kidding about this part, but alas, I am not. We did end up finding out which deities were trying to reach us about our destiny’s extended warranty, though.

    Hello, This Is Bastet With Loki, Dionysus, And Associates. We’ve Been Trying To Reach You About Your Destiny’s Extended Warranty

    I find it very interesting that we had to claim our magic to some degree before any deities claimed us, but that’s been our experience with a LOT of Pagan deities. They’re collaborators. They expect respect, but they respect you in return and don’t judge. We work pretty closely with Bastet, Loki, and Dionysus, and keep the channels open in case anyone else wants to reach out. We also work closely with our recent ancestors who’ve passed on, especially our paternal uncle, paternal great aunt, several great-grandparents, a distant great aunt named Florence, and a few others when they make themselves known. Our ancestors like to talk shit about each other, which is pretty funny unless we’re trying to focus on reading our tarot or oracle cards. Then we need them to shut up for five minutes, please and thank you. But we love them and talk about them often.

    What about y’all? Do you practice religion? Do you have a crazy spiritual journey like ours? The comments are yours to talk about this stuff, just please keep it respectful.

    Much love, and as always, stay tuned for more magic!

    -Four, That Guy of the Ashley system.

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  • Milwaukee’s Best Headshop (In This Disabled Guy’s Opinion)

    Hey, everyone! This is your favorite paper pusher once more, Renn. We promised the people variety when we started this blog, so variety they shall have. We’ve written a lot about our Tragic Backstory and our disabilities. While this post should piggyback off of that, I’m gonna keep the whinging to a minimum today. Instead, I’m gonna fucking GUSH. We deal with a variety of weird chronic illnesses that we often have to treat ourselves because specialists take fucking FOREVER to see their patients. As a result, we have a rather tragic nicotine problem and are pro-level stoners. This makes finding a top-quality local headshop a necessity. Our favorite, and in my opinion, Milwaukee’s best headshop, is Closet Classics on North Avenue.

    No Conventional Good Stuff? No Problem!

    As you probably know if you’ve lived here awhile, conventional recreational marijuana isn’t legal here, and many legislators and lobbyists have no idea what the holdup is. It’s common practice to blame the lobbyists. In the meantime, many headshops supply the people with variations of the Devil’s Lettuce that are legal under the 2018 Farm Bill as a loophole in states where conventional recreational marijuana is not yet legal, like THCA, THCP, HHC, and others – and this is where Closet excels.

    And before you ask: no, I was not paid to review this place. Yes, I am indeed high on an edible from this place. I ate one before I started writing, hahaha.

    Emerson and Allēna found Closet pretty late one night when she was running low on her Good Shit. Both Lēna and Emerson were thoroughly impressed with Closet’s selection, fair prices, and business practices. She bought a hybrid vape, if memory serves, and when it turned out to be defective, one of the owners gave her an additional vape for no extra charge. That alone earned Closet a new regular customer. PLUS THEY HAD DOGS THERE THAT DAY!

    Milwaukee’s Best Headshop, the Prettiest Glass Pieces

    We love ogling at their glass pieces when we come in there for our medicine runs, as we call them. Many are handmade, and while many of them are far out of our price range at the moment, they DO offer layaway, which is fucking cool. We could stare at some of these bongs and pipes for hours. They make our very autistic crow brain happy. I talked with the owners about some of them and they said that many are handmade locally. So when you buy one of these very cool shiny objects, you are supporting local artisans as well as these chill as fuck owners.

    You know that old question “if someone gave you fifteen grand, but you had to spend it in fifteen minutes, where would you blow it all at”? Truthfully, I’d probably go there and buy all their pipes and a hefty bit of their exotic flower. It’s delicious. Truly Milwaukee’s best headshop.

    Speaking of flower…

    The Most Delicious THCA In This Fucking Town

    We have smoked a lot of weed in our time. Some of it was gross. Some of it was mid-tier. And some was very nice. Rarely, however, has a strain been so delicious that we want to smoke our entire stash in one sitting, and all but one of those amazingly delicious strains have come from Closet Classics. The one other amazing strain like that came from a shop in Delaware, so that one doesn’t really count here.

    These strains are STRONG, too! We’ve had shit from here that isn’t even super exotic or expensive that knocked us on our ass so hard we slept for hours. It’s great for our pain and insomnia. They also have THCA edibles that we get for our pain because they’re easier to dose for us.

    I am glad I have even a modicum of financial sense because if I didn’t, I would be thousands of dollars in debt due to the deliciousness found in this sacred establishment. I need to ask if they offer the entire store on layaway…

    What About Accessibility?

    At this point in the post, you’re probably wondering if the damn place is even accessible if you are also disabled like us. And I am here to tell you that it depends. We live pretty close by, so it’s pretty easy to get there on foot for us.

    Sadly it isn’t wheelchair accessible, though. On days where we would need our chair, we usually ask Emerson to go grab our order for us. If you use a wheelchair and do not have someone like Emerson in your life, I’d recommend calling the shop to see if you can order something in advance and whoever is working that day meet you outside the shop to give it to you. While we have not tried that exact thing yet, the owners have accommodated other needs of ours and are very kind. It would never hurt to ask with these guys. They don’t bite.

    What About Nicotine? I’m Not a Stoner. Is It Still Milwaukee’s Best Headshop?

    If you aren’t a stoner, the only thing Closet doesn’t have is loose-leaf tobacco. They have nicotine vapes and pipes, but sadly no loose-leaf tobacco. However, we love the vapes they have and we get all of our nicotine there, too. Their prices are great on the nicotine side of things, as well. We ended up getting a 10,000 puff nicotine disposable vape today for $16 and change – and it makes us laugh because it’s Bruce Lee themed as well as officially licensed by his estate. It’s so random to me that the legal ghost of Bruce Lee broke into the nicotine business, but it never fails to make me cackle.

    Conclusion

    If I could buy everything here, I would. If I could attain the sheer level of cool that the owners seem to have reached, I would. If you’re disabled and you are looking for pain relief at fair prices from a small business with people who’ll treat you right, go here. If you smoke the Good Shit and like beautiful glass pieces and great vibes, go here. If you smoke nicotine and you want tasty (and arguably occasionally fucking hilarious) vapes, go here. Take this old crazy cripple’s word for it and get your ass to Closet!

    -Renn, Master of Paperwork and Ceremonies

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  • Food for Thought

    Hey! My name is Ceryse. I’ve taken over for the day at Renn’s request. I’m a little deep-thinking introverted spitfire who’s just as fond of cussing as he is, fortunately or unfortunately for y’all. Today’s deep thoughts are the result of weeks of contemplating that very thing – thought itself. I’m calling this post “food for thought” because I hope that it’ll both get you thinking as well as it will get you thinking about how you think and what you think about.

    Curation, then Creation

    During Eight’s complex, multi-phase Operation: Dead Hand, he got the entire system into the habit of posting consistently on social media for the first time ever. He had to – he was essentially building an army of very vocal followers with which to visibly challenge his mother’s and her family’s control, something that would shake the family up from both within and without for years to come. That feat required engaging with that audience as early and often as he could. He couldn’t let writer’s block or a lack of inspiration stop him. He had to be able to conjure content on command daily, his very life likely depended on it.

    But how in the world did he pull something like that off?

    Renn mentioned the microblogging website Tumblr in his post about Dead Hand, but that wasn’t all. He made an effort to surround himself with things and people that never ceased to give him that food for thought and inspiration he needed.

    Food For Thought: the Appetizers

    While we were still living in Alaska, Peri made a new Facebook account and made sure to only follow and add people who made her feel inspired. Allēna had not done that with her profiles in the past and often ended up leaving Facebook for days to weeks at a time because she never felt like she was good enough for her own fucking timeline. It was horrible.

    By that point, she’d been depressed for a good half decade, and this did her absolutely no favors. She felt like everyone else had left her behind in life or was in far worse places than she was, and there was no relief from the despair either in her head or in her surroundings. So when Peri took over, she was determined not to make the same mistakes Allēna did.

    Looking back through her memories, those initial posts she shared are some of the funniest things I’ve ever read. This was late 2019, and she was going hog-wild making fun of New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day as concepts. She was also boosting her self confidence by posting about everything she’d managed to accomplish every day, and found that she was actually far more capable than anyone had ever given her credit for, herself included. That practice helped her begin to dismantle all of the lies her family had told all of us practically from birth and blaze her own trail.

    The Next Course: Rewiring the Brain and Finding Inspiration and Food For Thought in Rest

    Once we were back in Texas and Dead Hand was well underway, shitposting was not Eight’s only concern. He stumbled headfirst into stoicism quite by accident because he wanted to master his emotions rather than them mastering him. So he threw himself into Stoic training to make himself more resourceful and resilient during the worst of Dead Hand, using breathing exercises to keep calm even under intensely terrifying situations.

    He got so good at this over several months that he learned how to use his previously crippling panic attacks and anxiety as fuel to focus, something he wasn’t great at before such rigorous training. He found a pleasant and unexpected consequence of that training – if he let his mind wander while doing his breathing exercises to music that made him feel something and rested, he would come up with some truly amazing ideas for essays, fiction, even music.

    Dead Hand’s Gift: Metacognition

    Operation: Dead Hand may have bought us our freedom and taught us how to pull inspiration from near thin air, but it also pushed us past our breaking point in many ways. Eight had planned on writing an album about his mad flight from Texas, and that album finally came into fruition late in 2022. Close to half dead and sucked nearly dry of every bit of energy the bastard had, he let the entire album spill out of him however it wanted to come out. He had never fully written an album of his own before, songwriting and production was mostly Allēna’s thing, but he was worried that he’d die if he waited much longer for further expertise or inspiration.

    One afternoon in December, he sat down in our apartment’s bathroom and sang the opening lines of what would become the system’s fourteenth album, the one he thought would be our last, Metacognition: “They say the night you left us, you cashed out in Indianapolis with nothing but a cell phone in your pocket. I’ve been that haunted before, that scared of failing before, why did I survive while you did not?”

    In truth, we don’t have any fucking idea why we survived. But I, for one, am glad we did. I want to leave you, gentle reader, with a few questions: if you’re a creative, where do you find your inspiration? Where can you get more of it? What ways can you rest? What are some ways you can allow your mind to wander? Who or what can you unfollow to make your social feeds more inspiring places?

    As always, stay tuned for more magic!

    Ceryse

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  • From the Ashes – Shitposting Our Way to Freedom

    Hey, everyone! This is Renn once more, back with more True Life Stories for your reading pleasure. Today’s tale is of our rather dramatic rise from the ashes of trauma and the bullshit we left behind we left behind in Texas. Expect lots of curse words and dark humor, as is our specialty. So if you don’t like curse words and real talk, this isn’t the post or blog for you. And if you want to hear more of our lore/tragic backstory, you should check this post out before reading further.

    If you read this post’s title and thought to yourself “there’s no fucking way a person could shitpost their way to freedom”, bear in mind that we thought there was no fucking way for us to pull it off, either. But buckle up, fuckers, because the tale I’m about to tell is completely true, though it is full of quite a bit of tasty high drama.

    From the Ashes of the SuperWhoLock Trashfire on Tumblr c. 2013-15

    Before I go too much further, I should explain that we’re veterans of the website Tumblr during the days when it was the Wild Wet on there and there was no censorship to speak of. It wasn’t until Yahoo bought it in 2013 that there were any kind of content filters or censorship on the site. Allēna, host of the system during our teens, joined in 2013 at the tender age of 16 or so during the heyday of SuperWhoLock, three fandoms who dominated the conversation at the time she joined and were fucking WILD. Tumblr became more of a cesspool as time went on, but it remained a formative influence on her humor and the way she wrote.

    So when she married our first husband and moved up to Alaska to escape our toxic family and build a better life for herself than the one she’d been born into, she had high hopes. Sadly, these hopes were not to last.

    Restless in the North, 2018-20

    Our first husband, Fang*, was cold, controlling, and almost never around. When he was around, Allēna didn’t enjoy herself. So Lēna and the alters who came after her threw themselves into creative endeavors to keep themselves entertained. However, they struggled to find their creative voices or even projects and communities that they felt encapsulated who they were as people and their values.

    Allēna herself started two blogs, Byzantines and Button Downs and Order and Discord, but felt very limited by the blogging advice she found online. Everything she found said to find a defined niche and write content and posts around that one thing. She couldn’t do that for the life of her. Even as a single alter, she is a multitude of things and struggled in college for that reason, as well. She couldn’t just pick ONE niche.

    Still, Allēna felt compelled to write her blogs, poetry, and later, fiction because she feared that getting her work seen was the only way she would support herself. She was in her early twenties and was already disabled and chronically ill. Fang wanted her to work a traditional job, even going as far as to say the tutoring business she’d started and built up from scratch was merely a “hobby that paid”. She couldn’t, and nearly killed herself trying. She went dormant late into 2019 from stress, grief that Fang wasn’t the man she’d fallen in love with, and severe burnout. Peri, her successor, brought us out of the ashes of our misery in Alaska by returning to her roots.

    From the Ashes and Back Again – Peri’s Tale Begins

    Peri finished work on the first installment of Allēna’s audio drama series The Third Prophecy in early 2020 and self published it. Titled Lavender and Scissors, Allēna got the seed that later turned into the biting dark comedy that Peri ultimately presented to the world from studying the Byzantine Empire in high school and laughing at Tumblr posts.

    Over the course of nearly the next decade, Allēna shaped and re-shaped her idea into a smart, funny, multi-generational epic that drew from the horrors she had experienced, the offbeat comedy that anonymous and often neurodivergent Tumblr users wrote, and watching our father, Xavier*, face death with grace and humor. In other words, she had a lot of experience with both comedy and very bleak situations, seeing as a master at both bleakness and humor raised us.

    It’s also important to mention that Peri began work on a sequel to Lavender, but work on that stalled in February of 2020 after she wrote a scene that hit so close to home that no one could touch it for another four years. That’s probably a good thing, as much of the story predicted the system’s future and much of the world’s for the next half decade. We still struggle to work on that sequel, even though we love the story with everything we have. It simply hits too close to home for a number of reasons. She described working on it like she was being possessed by the play itself – she simply could not stop writing it. The story practically told itself.

    Bedbound (But Not Alone)

    By April of 2020, the COVID lockdowns were in full swing. My system was already full of old pros at social isolation by that point – neither Allēna nor Peri had many friends in Alaska, and the way Fang behaved made it very difficult for either of them to make more. The only friends they had they made online, and many of them were thousands of miles away.

    Fang saw us as exclusively his, and would blame us if anyone even looked at us in a way that hinted they wanted us. We know now that what other people do is not our responsibility, but we didn’t know that then. Allēna was stuck and lonely, and Peri even more so. Everything took a turn for the worse when Peri developed crippling, unexplained abdominal pain that was so severe that she could barely stand for more than five minutes without screaming and crying. The isolation would have taken a turn for the worse if Peri had been any less determined than she was.

    Peri realized early on into the lockdowns that she was in a rather unique position. Not only did prolonged social isolation not really faze her – we had spent most of our life alone in some form by that point, anyway – Allēna had tutored exclusively online from the start anyway. When the schools shut down toward the end of the 2019-20 school year, Peri found herself up to her eyes in clients. Not only that, but Fang had fallen into a deep depression at the end of 2019 and lost his job, and so Peri and one of her housemates were the only ones with jobs for months of the lockdowns. Fang no longer had any legitimate say over what she could and couldn’t do with her money.

    In Position

    Tutoring kept her busy, but not quite busy enough. She threw herself deep into writing a novel that many people still consider our masterpiece, The Secret History of Doloras. She started writing it because one of her favorite clients dared her to. We consider it the sort of fantasy novel we’ve always wanted to read, but have never been able to find, so we’re writing it.

    As if that wasn’t enough, she started an accompanying role-play Discord server called Many Worlds that features not just the planet Doloras but every world that we’ve ever made in our stories and began livestreaming and making visual art, as well. All of these projects made her much more confident, and in July of 2020, though she was still in extreme pain and things were still heavily locked down, she appealed to two of her oldest friends and a few family members to help get away from Alaska and Fang. They answered. On July 12, 2020, she left Alaska and returned to Texas, thinking she’d finally risen from the ashes of all her pain and that the worst was over.

    Operation: Dead Hand – Eight’s War (2020-23)

    When Peri returned to Texas, there was a slight problem. Her period was late, and she suspected she was pregnant with Fang’s baby. She thought that that was very unlikely, however, since Fang had said on several occasions that he was sterile due to a genetic illness, so the chances of her being pregnant at all should be slim, right? Turns out she was wrong, and her suspicions were correct. She was indeed pregnant.

    Her mother, who’d always been allergic to human emotion to the point of being extremely abusive and who owned the house where she was living with her paternal grandmother, was already trying to control both of them, and it was about to get much worse for them both. We’ll call her mother Hera. Hera wanted Peri to get back with Fang, and even went so far as to believe his side the story about everything. She also suspected Peri had lied about Fang’s abuse, and began to try everything she could to get the two of them back together, and failing that, Fang full custody of Peri’s child. Peri wanted nothing to do with either of them. Remember: she’d married Fang to get away from Hera and her shitshow of a family. But Peri had no idea what to do and fell into a deep depression.

    When Hera found out that Peri was depressed, she organized an intervention to attempt to seize control of Peri and the fate of her unborn child. Brokenhearted at the blatant betrayal, she consented to go to group therapy to get the family off her ass and went dormant soon afterward. Eight rose from the ashes in the wake of that fuckshow, and quickly put a plan in motion.

    From the Ashes, Back to Where It All Began

    Hera’s betrayal left Eight deeply traumatized and he struggled to feel like he could trust anyone. Yet, he kept meeting people who thought he was fascinating and beautiful and wanted to get to know him better. So he came up with a plan he thought would be foolproof and get people the fuck away from him while further playing into Hera’s belief that he was crazy. He went back to Allēna’s old stomping grounds – Tumblr.

    He began writing short text shitposts and skits similar to what he had seen there. Instead of driving people away, however, his followers turned into fans and became even more intrigued with what the bastard was doing there. Instead of stopping, he decided to continue with it, and he discovered his full influence when he asked his friends and family for help paying some bills he couldn’t cover on his own. His followers gave him far more than what he asked for. People loved him.

    When Hera continued pulling fuckshit, he started talking about everything she had done. His people responded, and they were PISSED. He kept shitposting in the meantime. This tactic terrified Hera, which was exactly where he wanted her, and she stopped trying to fuck with him directly for fear of pissing his army of feral followers off further. With that, he achieved the first stage of a plan he would later call Operation: Dead Hand – clear a path.

    During the next phase, he looked for jobs out of state. He landed one, a sales job in Philadelphia, PA. He still needed help getting there, though. So he reached out to his people for help once more, and they came to his aid. Four days later, he was on a plane to Philadelphia. We were free.

    Conclusion

    Thank you, gentle reader, for reading this far! I know this was a long, winding tale. If you enjoyed this story, give Open Sorcery a follow and join our community of like minded ferals such as yourself!

    As always, stay tuned for more magic.

    -Renn, Master of Paperwork and Ceremonies

    *names changed for privacy

  • My World in More Detail

    Hello everyone, and good evening. This post is going to be a bit more about me, my world, the people around me, and my system. My name is Renn, and I am another super-admin alter in the Ashley system. Ellie, who I work closely with, posted last time. She has taken over my mountain of paperwork. I hate paperwork, but I’m good at it. And with an influx of a thousand new alters in a very short time, the stack of paperwork we need to get through is IMMENSE.

    Two words – incident reports. The vast majority of the system hates a single alter named Soryn. He’s an asshole, and we don’t mind what he does as long as he behaves himself. He rarely behaves himself, however and my headmates keep kicking his ass. Every time this happens, there are EVEN more incident reports to do. This post itself may turn into one such report.

    Before I tell you too much more about my world, I need to provide some crucial pieces of context. For starters, my system is polyamorous. We have multiple partners at the same time, and currently we have a good solid baker’s dozen. We live with one of them, our spouse, Emerson* and an ex-partner, Zelda*. As you can guess, that’s complicated. Breakups are complicated enough when it’s two people breaking up, but three? That’s a whole other animal, and that animal is an asshole and a half. The three of us live in Milwaukee, up north in Wisconsin.

    An Expanding World – Bitches With A Backstory

    My system has lived in Wisconsin for about three years and north of the Mason-Dixon for a bit longer than that. We moved out of our birthplace in Texas in July of 2021 and have not set foot in Texas since. This is a good thing. Wisconsin may suck absolute ass, but anywhere is better than Texas, in my opinion. We were born there and wanted to get the fuck OUT from the time we were five. It’s highly unusual for a child that age to want to fuck off from the place they were raised, and we even heard comments about how weird it was growing up.

    Castor, the system’s first host, never, ever got homesick even once, and only got sad upon LEAVING his paternal grandmother’s house in San Antonio, not when his parents dropped him off. Ever. Our brother, on the other hand, was always very sad to see our parents go. Castor gave zero fucks. He thought they were annoying and was glad for a fucking break.

    We’ve often speculated on why we simply could not be bothered with our family of origin, especially since Castor’s lack of regard turned out to be highly justified – many of our family members on our mother’s side are proud bigots and generally not kind people. Could Castor sense that they weren’t quality individuals? Maybe. Equally likely an influence is the stroke we had at eight months old.

    The Brainhole – Gift or Curse?

    In 1998, when we were less than a year old, we had a massive stroke after being on heart-lung bypass for heart failure. For those unfamiliar with what heart-lung bypass is, it’s a machine that essentially breathes for a person, allowing their injured heart and/or lungs to rest. However, one night, there was a sepsis scare, and part of this procedure involves keeping the patient chemically sedated so they don’t have a fucking stroke. Well, as luck would have it, we have always been god-awful at staying down or knowing when to quit. So we fought the motherfucking sedatives, y’know, as one does. According to legend, by the time we were released, we were on enough Versed, Fentanyl, Valium, and straight up motherfucking DOPAMINE and ADRENALINE to knock every full grown male medical professional attendant taking care of us out for an untold number of hours.

    When they discovered that we were awake and had pulled our breathing tube out, they called our parents, who initially thought this was a good thing, as one of our treatment goals was to be able to breathe without the use of a breathing tube. This was ABSOLUTELY NOT a good thing. By morning, when our parents came back up to the hospital, the doctors informed them that we’d had a stroke. A huge one. Preliminary scans of our brain before the swelling went down estimated that we’d lost half of our brain, but as the swelling decreased, doctors found that we were only missing an eighth of it. The stroke took out the majority of our right occipital-parietal lobe and messed with a lot of things. My world was about to get a whole lot weirder.

    Things Fall Apart


    From the mental records and memories I have access to, we have a theory that my fellow super-admin Eight joined the system shortly before we had the stroke. Eight’s always been a fighter and is a very old soul with a knack for showing up in the nick of time. He’s widely regarded as a seer and has been prescient from infancy, shaping my world as I know it. He’s fucking STUBBORN and will fight practically to the death to get something he wants. As one of the original members of the system from infancy, he shaped our collective ways of doing things, which our parents very much didn’t like.

    Our mother was very much in favor of doing things HER way. We strongly suspect she’s just as neurodivergent as we are, and she controlled much of our life well into adulthood. She was very cold, manipulative, and after our father died, became an outright villain. Eight is absolutely his father’s child, so is our fellow super-admin, Allēna.

    Lēna takes more after her mother than Eight does. However, she has just enough of our father’s side in her to piss her mother and her family the absolute fuck off. Our mother’s family despises our father’s, so having a child that took after our father was practically unforgivable. Add to this fact that we were medically difficult to take care of and were very finicky and particular as children when they longed for easy-going children (read: children who they could mold into whoever they wanted), and it was a recipe for years of loneliness, abuse, and isolation.

    Want to hear what Lēna had to say about her childhood and growing up? She wrote this song about her mother. Caution: there are more swear words in this song than there probably are in this entire post..

    Turn That Shit Up To 13!

    The only thing that really made my world bearable was our nearly perfect visual and auditory memory and vivid imagination. We could pick up new knowledge quickly and easily (and still can), and we attribute this to the stroke damage, which we call the Brainhole. It occurred in the right occipital-parietal lobe of our brain, which controls sensory processing. As a result, all of our senses are turned up to thirteen and the knob’s broken off.

    Our intuition is supercharged and we can read people like books. We often scare people with how deeply we can read them. We can accurately guess people’s formative traumas because of our pattern recognition, and we don’t mind that it scares the wrong people off. If it scares them out of our life, that’s a pretty good indicator that they have too much to hide and will likely not be honest with us. That isn’t something we tolerate. Go lie to someone else. Not me. There’s no space for anything but honesty in my world.

    My World Nowadays

    Things have been really hard for a long time, but they have been getting better. I’ll probably post more about our Tragic Backstory later on, but I don’t want to drone on in a single post that’s likely well over a thousand words by this point. I really want to write a post about how we got from Texas to Wisconsin and met Zelda and Emerson – because that’s some incredibly spicy drama and intrigue right there. It’s an absolute shitshow and I think you’ll like it. We’re messy bitches, but our people love us FOR that, not in spite of it.

    Stay tuned for more magic!

    -Renn, Master of Paperwork and Ceremonies

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    *names changed for privacy