Hello, assembled host. Lazarus here once more with more bullshit for your viewing pleasure. The below prompt from the journaling app Day One looks interesting, so I shall answer it in due time, but before I get into the thick of it, have a fucking meme I cooked up last night that is tangentially related because I said so.
Do you spend more time thinking about the future or the past? Why?
Today’s prompt from Day One.
An Occurrence from last night, January 4th, in the year of our Lord 2025.
To answer the intriguing question the prompt posed, my answer is both. Why, you may ask? Because I’m an AuDHD gremlin with a fucking brainhole with a working knowledge of world history from my years spent as a tutor who happens to see the future on occasion due to a nifty combination of brain damage, annoyingly supercharged intuition, synesthesia, and neurodivergent pattern recognition. In short, my brain never shuts the fuck up, especially as I continue my inner work and find pockets of my mind that I have repressed for years. I have next to no sense of linear time or object permanence. Can I get a pretty damn accurate sense of who you are within five minutes of meeting you? Absolutely. Do I know where my cell phone is half the time? Oh gods no.
And due to surviving a helluva lot of trauma, having a near perfect autobiographical memory, and being unusually well traveled due to being raised with an ass load of money and being so charismatic I annoy myself, I have many, many stories to tell on top of my knowledge of world history. I call these stories my Lore or my Tragic Backstory interchangeably depending on how I’m feeling that day. As demonstrated by the meme I shared above, people seem to like the stories that come out of my facehole.
So yeah. I spend a lot of time thinking about both. Time isn’t linear, anyway, so what the hell? Mentally I’m almost constantly relaxing on a huge plot of land in Sullivan County, Pennsylvania ten years from now, or trying to find various belongings of mine that have disappeared into the fucking ether again. Where are Y’ALL mentally?
Anywho, it’s almost my naptime. Before I go, have more memes and a video of me voice acting for a kitten who I call Sean Connery Nugget with the Zelda System. 🤣
Goodnight, lovely gremlins. Tell me of your many travels in the comments, throw a party, do whatever you want. Just be excellent to each other, that’s all I ask. 💛 Until next time, stay tuned for more magic. – Lazarus
PS. 2011 or so called and it wants you to have this earworm back 🤣
Well, hello, everyone. I was originally going to write about something a bit different – problem solving and Stoicism – but then I saw this prompt from the journaling app Day One and this feels a bit more meaningful:
What does it mean to be a kid at heart?
Truth be told, I have no idea, at least none that I’m aware of. I don’t think I was ever a child, really. In some ways, I didn’t really get to be a child, and in others, I chose not to be one, and in still others, simply…never was one. I was an odd kid who saw too much and asked far too many questions. I knew exactly what I wanted from a very young age, around three or four, and have spent my entire life to date working to get it, as the family and life I was born into was nothing like what I wanted.
I was ruthlessly self aware and extremely critical of myself and even more so of others. I could read by eighteen months old and speak like an adult, and like many AuDHD kids, I had no concept of shame or embarrassment. I was told to be honest and was punished for lying, so when I was asked for my opinion, I gave people my honest opinion fluently. This pissed a lot of people off because it turns out they weren’t looking for an honest opinion and weren’t expecting a well thought out, passionate critique from a toddler in front of everyone they knew.
So I grew up very afraid, confused, and angry. Why would people ask for my opinion and then get angry for me expressing my opinion?! This just pissed me off more, because as fluently as I could speak, I had no concept of social nuance or Southern politeness, and frankly I thought it was all bullshit. So I became a very lonely, angry kid. Nobody in my family expected me to know what I wanted, much less express it with ease and fluency, as they are very indecisive, so I was harshly punished for that, too. From the time I was perhaps five or six, my strongest desire was to be an adult so I could be an adult so I could finally leave all of those indecisive fuckers with their conflicting ideas about manners and the right thing to do in the dust, and I wasn’t shy about that, either. See why I have no idea what it even remotely means to be a kid at heart?
Though, I suppose, imagining for a moment that my family had been made up of decent human beings more in line with the spirit of the question, and not the reality of what happened, I think I could come up with a better answer.
Had my family let me lead the way and actually believed me when I said I knew precisely what I wanted (within reason, of course, with limits to keep me safe from harm), I could them allowing me to explore my myriad special interests and gently nudging me toward keeping an open mind to related areas, accepting me for who I was rather than who they were trying to shape me into, and celebrating my imagination rather than attempting to stifle it in the name of normalcy or propriety.
I wish that my family had accepted and encouraged me in my entirety that way. However, the tragic reality is that they didn’t. That being said, a lot of the work I’ve been doing of late is accepting myself like that. It still feels really weird a lot of the time because I’m so used to suppressing aspects of myself or expecting those around me to ask me to “tone it down”, but nobody does anymore. That in and of itself is terrifying in a way, but deeply and immensely liberating.
In the process, I’ve been able to release a lot of the anger I’ve been holding onto for 27 fucking years and replace it with curiosity, love, and something like wonder. I think this is more of what the prompt was driving at, and I like to think I’m living this.
I couldn’t have done this without my beloved Emerson modeling being a kid at heart for me more or less. He’s never lost that wonder or that curiosity. He’s fucking adorable, passionate about everything, and it’s infectious. Loving him and watching him get fully in touch with his inner childlike wonder has helped me discover mine in many ways for the first time consciously. He has to often drag me out of my shell because anxiety is a fucking bitch, but I’m grateful for it every time he does. He has been helping me gently unfurl a great deal. I call him “baby man” affectionately because of that never ending sense of wonder and youthful rambunctiousness.
Another partner of mine, Hawthorne, is another excellent model for this. They are essentially a tiny radiant goth crow baby darling in person form, and they are so fucking fascinated with so many different things with such great intensity that they cannot help get ME interested in a lot of the same shit effortlessly. In fact, I got started practicing magic in large part YEARS ago in earnest because of them. They opened my mind to so many different things simply by being so excited about them and I honestly don’t know what I would do without that sweet baby.
And as I sit with the eternal question of “what the fuck do I do now” I posed in my post the other day, I’m finding that a lot of my interests are holdovers from when I was fucking pissed at everything, most of myself, and wanting to drink myself into a stupor. I picked many of them up to spite someone or other and they became the sole buffer between oblivion and me with time. Very few of them actually spark any kind of real passion or breathe any kind of real life into me, they’re more like “hey, I’m gonna do this thing as a last resort so I don’t do something worse or permanent because I feel like utter dog shit”. In that way they feel more like a chemical dependency than a real passion. But one of the things I keep coming back to is audio engineering.
Songwriting is one of those chemical dependency things for me. It’s a great outlet when I feel like utter dog shit and have nowhere else to turn, hence why I have written 15 fucking albums. But it’s not the songwriting part of the process that lights me the fuck up. It’s the RECORDING portion. I love recording. It’s something that I love doing so much that even though I’ve produced and recorded fifteen fucking albums on my own, that part of the process never gets old and I love approaching it from different angles every time, trying to do it differently and better with the supplies I have on hand.
Now, I’m someone who gets very bored very easily with things once I know how to do them. I want to move on, chart new territory once I’ve mastered something to my satisfaction. But no. Never with recording and engineering, and it’s been just about fifteen years since I first set foot in a professional recording studio in Dallas. My passion for it pales in comparison to even performing live, which is why I don’t really perform live or promote my music that often. I just really don’t enjoy songwriting or performing that much beyond a last resort outlet. As I heal, I find I would far rather be fucking around behind the controls, trying to capture shit live and seeing what I can do with those takes like Ken Nelson recording Parachutes with Coldplay. Or anything the late Steve Albini did at Electrical Audio in Chicago. That shit never gets old. And that, among other things, makes me feel like the bright eyed kid I never got to be.
I think that gets the point across. Stay tuned for more magic, beautiful people. This has been Lazarus, your very feral, passionate, AuDHD gremlin sorcerer, signing off ✨
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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