but that probably isn’t true. Transphobes and asshats keep losing their shit about a hairy gremlin having the audacity to wear makeup in my comments sections, so every time they do, I do progressively crazier modern art inspired makeup looks and make a bunch of content with them. Yesterday I filmed more “apocalypse you” videos in lingerie, ehehe.
Today also happens to be one of the best days for manifestation for this entire year due to a Venus-Jupiter conjunction in Cancer and my Venus is in Cancer, so this feels especially potent.
Stay tuned for how that goes. I’m tired, y’all. Goodnight!
I also saw this prompt about small spells to do on your birthday, and half of an enormous poem formed in my head while I was taking my 30 minutes of boredom based on the suggestion to write a letter to yourself a year ago even though it isn’t my birthday. So I’m going to post it here for posterity’s sake.
“annus epilepticus”
you don't know this yet but the premonitions you've been having of your own death are true and a mere few weeks past your 28th birthday you will die - just enough - to touch the robe of any god you know when the subtle fire you've always been strikes you back and strikes you back again
you will hang on for just long enough for your kind partner to burst into the room cradle you in his arms and guide you, screaming in mortal terror, back into the light
you have never been good at dying but this will take you a hair’s breadth from death and you will bear the scars on your temporal lobe (and speech pattern) long afterwards to prove it
and whether it is by fate or some wild magic this will save your life in more ways than you will know
for most of July, you will not be able to speak coherently. you will eventually choke out your suspicion that the seizures induced Wernicke's aphasia, and everyone who knows you will agree with you, a cruel fate for you, but more importantly, you will come back… changed.
you will start writing better poetry. something about the way your brain burned and cracked will allow you to see things from a different angle, to look askance at language in a way you never did before. the partner that saved your life will convince you to start attending a poetry workshop held in a coffeeshop that july. the rhythm of writing and performing regularly amongst very talented wordsmiths will help break you out of your agoraphobia. one of them will take notice of the way you perform, noting its similarity to Shakespearean acting and encourage you to attend the open mic he runs. so you start performing at Linneman's Riverwest Inn again for the first time since 2023 at his personal request.
you will somehow muddle through your divorce proceedings on july 23, five years and 13 days since leaving your ex husband, and it's a miracle you will be able to do that since even getting out of bed to use the bathroom still feels like running a marathon, but you're so hell-bound and determined to get rid of this man that when the judge asks if the marriage fell apart due to incompatibility of temperament, you will shout ABSOLUTELY loud and clear as day into the microphone. (you will also show up hours early to the hearing. you don't want to miss this for the world.) when your ex husband replies, it's the most defeated you will ever hear him. spite has always been your strong suit. the judge will finalize your divorce, and then the question arises of who you will marry next.
you will leave the answer up to the two people you consider yourself married to already, a man who cannot lie and a boy who cannot tell the truth. in a rare show of generosity, the liar boy will concede to the honest man. he will live to regret that decision. you, however, will not.
as the months progress, it will become increasingly clear that despite your love for him, your relationship with the liar is built on sand. surviving your seizures will leave you with a new perspective on life and precious little patience for wasted time or undue stress, and the liar will waste your time and mess with your head. you will tell him he is killing you. he displays no remorse. you will scream, beg, plead, and stop short of borrowing and stealing to get him to listen. despite his damn near single-minded obsession with you that will make you feel like you're emotionally his hostage, he will not care about the affect he's having on your other relationships or your well being.
one very early fall morning, after you've spent the entire night in the emergency room with him and your fiancé, “heat above” by greta van fleet will come on. your fiancé will remark that it feels as though you are driving into a different timeline as dawn breaks. you, spiritual and full of subtle fire as ever, will respond that you feel it, too. your liar will say nothing.
finally, in november, after months of suspicion that he's cheating on you (despite being polyamorous!) he will get sloppy and you'll catch him when he forgets to turn his location off. this is your red line and you will dump him over it. to add insult to injury, he will tell you you're overreacting. you will know better than that by now.
despite your heartbreak, you will feel more free after leaving him than you have in months. you will compile a dossier of evidence against him and publish it to the world. this is when the mask and gloves come off and it will spark a months long battle of he-said-she said online. he will slander both you and your future husband. you will have even fewer regrets about leaving him.
one of the final acts you will do before moving out from the apartment you and your fiancé share with your liar is a manifestation ritual that will make you feel powerful beyond imagining - you will gaze into a mirror with your future husband while “heat above” plays in the background. you will picture yourself in red sunglasses driving down water street with more money and fame than sense, husband next to you. you pass your former lying flame on the street, roll down your window, wave to him like a queen, and ride on as if he had never meant a thing to you in the first place.
you will choose “heat above” as the song for your intentions for the year to come after how that ritual made you feel.
on January 5th, you will feature at Linneman's, your poetic home. you will write a brilliant bespoke set for the occasion, combining music, poetry, and references to shakespeare at the host’s request. the audience is small, but they are so engaged that they offer you a standing ovation at the end. you have nothing prepared for an encore, so you will offer them a story about your eccentric great uncle. it will go over the time limit, but not a soul will care.
you will marry your husband on January 23rd in the same coffeeshop that helped you work through your agoraphobia. the wedding will be incredibly small, but it will be the finest wedding either of you have ever attended. the poet who runs the workshop that got you writing again will write a special poem for the ceremony. your friend and frequent collaborator will travel all the way from Madison to attend. your husband's best man will travel all the way from iowa. your “gentleman of debauchery”, as they are called, is your dear friend who you will date a few months later.
you will wake up the next day in the fabulous hotel that your best man and a friend of yours who you met by chance arranged for you and your husband to find that one of the videos you posted from the wedding is going viral on instagram. it is your first look video, and no one, friend or foe, will quite know what to make of it. within days, it will amass millions of views. you will keep posting.
you will start to get inundated with direct messages from people who are fascinated with your body after you get an idea to post videos of yourself in lingerie that your husband found for you at a clothing swap, and because you are struggling financially, you will decide to start talking about your Patreon more. to no one’s surprise but your foes, you will get subscribers, enough to make hundreds of dollars in the first two months you talk about it. in the meantime, you will keep going viral.
a few weeks before your next birthday, on your regularly scheduled Internet travels, you will come across a creator who found out that she copes with mast cell activation syndrome and that she has been taking H1 and H2 inhibitors for it. you will tell your husband what you saw, and seeing as you've already been taking H1 inhibitors for some time, he will find you H2 inhibitors. you will take them as an experiment, and the difference is like night and day. you will feel as though you are emerging from a decade in a long, dark cave.
the change will frighten you. you will keep going anyway.
you don't know it yet, but despite everything - you will do more than your best this year.
How the eff it feels sometimes. I’m too tired to know where half of my ideas even COME from, they just hit me over the head with the poetic bonk stick and I compulsively HAVE to write them down. -Allēna #poetry #inspiration #channeling #amwriting #manifestation #automaticwriting #NEISvoid
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 Prophecyand 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!
