Open Sorcery

Tag: East Coast

  • The Art of Finding Ways (Or Making Them)

    Hey, everyone! I’m currently writing on here as my love Hawthorne works on their story back East as a form of body doubling in spirit. I’m a bit tired and they’re Writer’s blocked to fuck, so knowing that the other  is writing is helping both of us get shit done. I did similarly with Zelda yesterday and Emerson a day or so prior as they worked on their respective blogs.

    It’s pretty effective, as we’re all neurodivergent as hell over here and working on projects simultaneously helps keep everyone on task, even if we’re not in the same physical space, like Hawthorne and I currently, or even doing the same thing. Hell, I often simply hang out with Emerson and Zelda and either tell them stories from my youth or teach them things from history while they catch up on household tasks that I couldn’t do due to my myriad disabilities and help that way.

    That brings me to what I want to talk about today – creative ways to solve problems and get shit done, especially when there’s lot of obstacles in the way, you’re fucking exhausted and overwhelmed, or, like me when I was at my lowest and had to start learning these skills, you’re almost entirely bedbound and at worst, in essence, alone. Hopefully if you are reading this post because you need it, your circumstances are less dire than mine were. But for the sake of the lesson, I’m gonna teach you with a true story from my life because that’s what I know best.

    So, when I need to tackle an extremely large and overwhelming problem with a whole lot of moving parts, the first thing I do is work to accept the problem as it is. I touched on this in my post from the other day about suffering when I talked about the radical acceptance element of that. I can’t really fix a problem if I’m still refusing to accept that there’s a problem OR refusing to deal with the problem head on. This sometimes takes awhile, I will freely admit that. I have to get tired of my own bullshit and tired of suffering before I’m ready to radically accept that there’s a problem and actually face it head on. But once I’m there, it’s go time. I’m analyzing every angle, trying to see what part I’m playing in the problem, how I can do better, what I can do differently, etc..

    Here’s a concrete example. In December of 2021, I was bedbound following what was likely a decently severe case of COVID that I ended up having to frontier treat on my own because I was living in an Airbnb in the middle of a Wisconsin winter and I was terrified that if the host found out, I would have nowhere to go and be out in the cold, literally.

    I had been fucking sick as a dog most of the latter half of that year and had most likely gotten heat stroke so many times while living out in Philadelphia doing door to door sales that summer that both my heart and brain were a bit… Ah.. Cooked to a degree that the heart damage showed up on blood tests in the ER. One thing led to another, I ended up in Wisconsin, and I got sick again. I slept for the better part of several weeks. I needed to find some way to pay for another month in the place at least, and to not perish in the interim. This was years pre-integration, and Eight, the alter in charge at the time, went hard. So I reasoned in my feverish cotton ball brain that now was not the time to be shy about my needs, terrified of vulnerability though I was, and took a leaf out of one of my partners’ books at the time. I started posting asking for donations, stating clearly that I was waiting on my SSI interview for my disabilities and and would appreciate any help I could get.

    With days to spare, my online community pulled through. I was feverish and inexperienced and I would highly recommend NEVER pushing yourself so hard that you end up a feverish lump in a Wisconsin Airbnb having nearly heatstroked yourself to death ten fucking times over, but I was allergic to asking for help until I had found myself in a massive fucking pickle and I spent years trying to do better in that regard. I had to relearn to walk after that, and I hit an enormous wall beginning in about April of 2022 once things got a bit more stable. Had I remained silent in my pride, I wouldn’t have survived that, honestly.

    As time has gone on, with my partners gently reminding me to rest and helping take care of me, I have realized that the extent of my hyperindependence itself is a problem. I’m not sure how finding myself in pickles like that didn’t illustrate it for me, but I think I was so delirious and doing shit on my own was so normal up until I crashed in ’22 that I really knew nothing else.

    It’s been a gut punch to my pride to delegate so much of my life and needs to others, but conversely, I am fucking disabled, and hyperindependence is what disabled me so badly in the first place. As time goes on, that’s been the biggest thing I’ve been coming up against and detangling these days and finding new ways or making them to cope with – the slow death of the notion that I must do everything now or do everything myself or  I will not receive any form of favorable outcome.

    I want to do all the things. Gods, do I want to do all the things. In many ways I miss the active, athletic life I had in my teens and early twenties, but I wouldn’t trade that for what I have going for me now. So that’s an acceptable trade, in my opinion. And what with things like the vitamin B100 experiment I’m doing, I might be more athletic again someday. But I shouldn’t push to do that before my body is ready and safe or else I risk going back to square one, and that would be ass. So let’s not.

    Anywho, my brain is getting tired from typing all these words. So I’m gonna go have some water with a bit of salt in it, as that seems to perk me up, maybe some lunch if I can coax myself into it, and I will catch y’all later. Stay tuned for more magic, people!!

    Your sleepy sorcerer,

    Lazarus

    Subscribe to Blog via Email

    Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

  • An East Coast Playlist Ramble

    Hey, everyone! This Ellie. It’s been a bit of a long day and a longer night, but things are quiet and calm as the sun is coming up. So I’ve put our cozy East Coast playlist on and am rambling here to get my thoughts out before I finally pass out for a while. I had an idea to write about the first song that comes up here and any associations that come up with it. The song that came on first was “I Wish I Was The Moon” by Neko Case, an exquisite and warm sounding folky song (I apologize for not being the most articulate at present). Fortunately, I have associations aplenty with this song via my headmate Allēna’s memories.

    Allēna with a rather frightening facial expression at age 17, about a decade before we made our East Coast playlist, but just around the time she discovered Neko Case.

    It All Started In Our Teens

    Allēna may have in fact wished she was the moon when she discovered Neko Case in the system’s teens (see: our Tragic Backstory and Lore) but we didn’t discover “I Wish I Was The Moon” first. Instead, Allēna heard a song of Case’s playing on our local public radio station back where we grew up in Texas, “Night Still Comes”. At the time, she was taking a break from writing the story that would later become her science fiction audio drama The Third Prophecy and preparing to revisit her post-apocalyptic novel 2029, which she had written entirely longhand some years prior when she couldn’t access the Internet during school days. As she reconstructed 2029 in her mind, she played “Night Still Comes” on a loop. She played the goddamn thing so many times, in fact, that our brother, Blue, loudly complained about it to anyone who would listen.

    2029 and Other Writings

    I will put it to you all bluntly, 2029 sucked ass the whole way down. There are no two ways about it. However, it was a fascinating concept she simply didn’t have the skill at the time to execute. Set in the nearish future in Central Texas after a massive solar storm takes out all of the power worldwide, it was chillingly prescient in a lot of ways, especially in light of the recent solar storms in the past few months, and considering that she began work on the story when she was only fourteen!

    She also later married a man she had based a character off of, Fang, who was an unhinged Doomsday prepper in the story. This ended up not being too far from the truth. When she revisited the story, however, she drew heavily from “Night Still Comes” and music like it, creating a very dark folk/alt country soundtrack for herself to listen to while she wrote. She followed this pattern for a lot of her later work, as well, using the music she loved to listen to as a tool to help with world building and to unblock her when she got stuck. I believe she made a grand total of four playlists while drafting the first Third Prophecy audio drama that we later combined into one huge playlist.

    With the first Third Prophecy audio drama, the musical tie ins went a bit deeper than simple musical accompaniment. While not necessary to understand the plot, several songs did play key roles in helping her shape the setting and determine where the story was going. One such example of this is a town called Sunday. She named the town Sunday in honor of a song she cherished, “Sunday Bloody Sunday” by U2. Now, I don’t want to spoil anything for you, but if you listen to the song and read the script (or listen to it once we have a production of it ready), you’ll notice some, ah, key similarities. These are intentional.

    What About The East Coast Playlist Itself? What Is That One For?

    If you recall, we’re practicing sorcerers. This playlist is, in simplest terms, a spell. It’s intended to manifest a move back to the East Coast over time. Eight made a mad dash to Philadelphia in 2021 and had to leave pretty shortly thereafter, but we keep getting summoned out there for one reason or another about once yearly and we miss it every day in the interim. So we want to move back there and stay there. The East Coast is home, even though we were born and raised in Texas. We feel like we’re in exile living in the Midwest in the meantime, and we hate it here, to be entirely honest.

    Yet, while we’re stuck out here, we are determined to make the best of it to the fullest extent of our ability. And if we hadn’t moved out here, we would have never met our beloved Emerson, so good things come even from shitty situations sometimes. He feels even more like home than the East Coast does, and he makes this place with its overly friendly people tolerable. He’s a very sweet baby.

    So three cheers for a very slow acting spell in the form of this delightful East Coast playlist! Hip, hip, huzzah! You get the picture..

    In Closing

    I hope any of this made sense. Having a brain that feels like it is filled with 85% cotton balls and 15% water has its challenges. Mostly in the form of wet cotton. Oh, hey, “Angelina” by Pinegrove is on, but that’s a ramble for a different day. Now, if you will excuse me, I have a snake themed rager in the headspace to crash attend. I mean, attend. You didn’t see anything. It wasn’t me, I swear!

    Stay tuned for more magic (and strange rambles), as always!

    -Ellie, Your Faithful Super-Admin