#NEISvoid #chronicfatigue #MECFS #poetry #songwriting #wordvomit #spilledink
-Allēna
Tag: songwriting
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A Journey To The Center Of Myself
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 ✨
Fediverse Reactions
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Yay, PTSD Art For The People!
Hey, peeps. This is Allēna. My PTSD is kicking my ass today, but at least y’all get cool art out of it. We appear to be that special kind of creator that gets even more inspiration when our trauma comes back to kick our ass, taking us from decently prolific to FUCKING ON FIRE creatively in order to cope with the emotional pain of it all. Today has been no exception. First up is a poem that spilled out of me this morning before I went back to sleep for about three hours:
Let’s set the scene
The year is 2019
I wake with the dawn and simply try and breathe -
You give me tools and time and I will build my way through this rage
I will sing and chew my way through the bars of
this cage
Five years later and I still can’t sleep
I still feel stuck with the cards close to my
concave chest
When will the craving subside?
When will I stop hungering for more?
Nothing short of everything?
They couldn’t take my mind
No matter how hard they tried
They couldn’t strip me of the things I’ve seen
They could never quite dull the hunger in my eyes
The dawn breaks anew and I lay in a room
still trying to spread these battered wings
surrounded by nothing but windows…And then I got inspired again this evening and painted what my synesthesia makes of “Didn’t It Rain” by Songs: Ohia, one of the songs that sonically shaped our album Metacognition. The PTSD attack is pertaining to the events that set off the hot streak that caused Eight to write and record the bulk of Metacognition, so I figured painting a song that he had on repeat at the time would help get some of the emotions out, and it did. I wasn’t present during that time, so I’m essentially having to process someone else’s trauma right now and all I know to do with it is make art and talk about art. I feel like a mess, even though logically I know it’s pretty damn healthy to process shit this way. Here is the painting for y’all:
Didn’t It Rain by me. I’m not really okay, y’all, but I deal with shit like this regularly enough that I know how to get through it safely, and y’all get cool art in the process. I’m over at Emerson’s currently, but once I’m back at Sheik’s I or whoever else is in front will probably drop some more spare room roaring on here. 💛
Fucking flashbacks.
Anyway…
Stay tuned for more magic!
-Allēna, your traumatized, if hyper-prolific, super-admin. Fuck PTSD up the ass with a Joseph cactus. 😭
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Nostalgia
Hey, everyone. This is Firrian, once again on the acting captain hot seat. Unfortunately, we seem to have made no headway in the sleep deprivation department, so this should be a rather short post if all goes well. I’m fucking exhausted. That said, one of my headmates, Tindwyl, was talking with a new friend of ours about nostalgia and that got us thinking.
Nostalgia? Never Heard of It. Or Have We?
Initially we couldn’t find anything we were nostalgic about, but then the Shins’ cover of “We Will Become Silhouettes”, originally by the supergroup the Postal Service started playing on our excellent East Coast themed playlist, and that gave me an idea. We are nostalgic about some things, just not the things most people are typically nostalgic about. We don’t miss family Christmases or vacations with our brother or anything like that. We have far too much Tragic Backstory for that sort of thing. Tindwyl has even taken to calling this blog our incident report because of how much we talk about our complicated lore here. My poor headmates.
Give Up
That being said, we do feel nostalgic for the spaces we made in childhood and young adulthood by ourselves for ourselves and our friends. These were sacred times and places nobody was allowed into except by our decree. Listening to that Postal Service album I mentioned is one such example. We are a strange combination of resourceful Luddite and tech wizardry because for the longest time, we were forbidden from accessing the internet on weekdays when school was in session.
So we learned to get around that shit in any way we could because we need music to function. This turned into a fully fledged obsession with hoarding hard copies of media. We’d listen to Pandora Internet Radio on the weekends and on vacations from school obsessively, and then check hard copies of whatever we liked out at the library so we could listen to music on the go using a portable CD player from maybe 2002 at the earliest. No internet needed.
We must have checked Give Up by the Postal Service out twenty times. We were fucking addicted to this record. We’d often hole up in a bathtub that was empty save for a thin blanket in the summers and devour entire novels in the summers while listening to that album over and over while the cold ceramic cooled our very heat sensitive body off. I find it hilarious that we were playing an album called Give Up over and over because I assure you, we had most certainly not given up.
Give Up by the Postal Service, both an object of teenage nostalgia for us and also a major source of inspiration as Allēna learned to produce music. This Place Is A Prison, But Our Nostalgia Sure Isn’t
Another very sacred place that holds a lot of nostalgia for us is our creative process. Allēna, our host in the body’s teens, wrote her first real song when we were only eleven and quickly set her sights on recording music in a studio. Not only that, but she wanted to produce it all herself. So by the next year, she had put together a demo her own damn self that she’d recorded by hand in her house on her laptop using Sony Acid.
By thirteen, she’d secured a record deal and was recording in a studio with a producer she observed extensively. When she wasn’t in Dallas shadowing him and recording with him, she was researching techniques, building her own bedroom studio, and experimenting with her own production style with the things she was learning. She let very few people see her process, as she was a very anxious perfectionist and secretly worried that her work would never actually be good enough.
Her mother didn’t help with that, either, and she didn’t want what she was making criticized to pieces before she even had a chance to finish it. Nonetheless, by the age of sixteen, she’d created enough work she was proud of to release an extended play that she’d made entirely herself, Fletcher Coming Home. However, due to her soul crushing anxiety and perfectionism, she delayed releasing it officially for another two years, instead releasing a handful of singles first to test the waters. Her childhood was a prison, one almost entirely unworthy of nostalgia, but by the gods, she was going to write, sing, and fucking claw her way out of it if it was the last thing she did.
The Luddite Gift
An unintended consequence of giving the born fighter Allēna such a restrictive childhood is that the girl was both relentless and clever and refused to let her lack of Internet access hold her back from making friends and being social. It gave her both unprecedented managerial and administrative skill and taught her how to use her time wisely.
She couldn’t market her music online, obviously, so she shamelessly plugged it to everyone she met, both in school and at church. People were drawn to this brilliant, reclusive enigma and wanted to both know and hear more. In the absence of social networks, she built a real world network of people that she was deeply invested in and who were deeply invested in her.
She showed off constantly by performing live at church any chance she got, which brought her powerful voice to new audiences constantly. She was a charismatic force of nature offstage, as well, and church became a refuge that she looks back on fondly for the real world social aspects of.
Legendary Partying With Greater Efficiency
When this involuntary Luddite finally joined the ranks of social media in her mid teens, everything simply became bigger for her and more efficient – and easier to hide from her parents. Her already massive social circle tripled in size as she got older, and as she threw parties with her brother, she took a risk and merged all of the different smaller groups of people she ran with. She learned something interesting here.
Many of her friends got along swimmingly, even if they had never set eyes on one another before in their lives, and these parties quickly became the stuff of legend. She heard from her friends’ parents on several occasions that an invitation to these parties was highly prized and many of their children had met close friends there that they would never have met otherwise. Allēna discovered that she had a gift for connecting people and helping people of various backgrounds find common ground.
She was a brilliant organizer and people saw that. She could get wallflowers front and center playing Twister with people who were complete strangers five minutes prior. Shy anime nerds found fast friends in gregarious library assistants while sparring with sticks from the pecan tree in our front yard. This is our nostalgia. We created it, and it is ours.
Conclusion
Okay, I seem to have lied about this being a short post, haha. I don’t mind. This is totally worth it. I have no clue what the next post will bring, but I’m excited for it, whatever it is. Stay tuned for more magic (and incident reports)!
Firrian, Acting Captain
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Intuition + Queer Shit: My Host As Seer
Hi! My name is Firrian. I appear to be the current acting captain of the Ashley system as the current most able fronter. I also appear to be stuck in front because the body is very tired. So I am not going to write about “Guernica” for the time being. We’re risking burnout if we continue with that one. Instead, I am going to talk about a little something-something Eight foresaw a few years back at the tail end of 2021 in honor of Pride Month. You’ve probably learned a fair bit about that old bastard by this point. He’s an Enneagram 8, vastly intelligent, as you may have gathered, and has Seen Some Shit in his time. But what you may not have known is that his intuition is off the charts. He’s also very, very queer.
This near-inhuman intuition is unique because Eight quite literally sees things. So while I mean he’s Seen Some Shit as in he’s been deeply traumatized, I also mean that he’s Seen Some Shit as in he has prophetic visions, as well. I’m not exactly sure when the visions started, as the system has had prophetic dreams since we were very young. We actually saw Milwaukee in our dreams despite never seeing a photo of the skyline or visiting here from the time we were perhaps three years old. Castor had a dream set outside a restaurant here twenty years before we’d ever set foot in this town. We’d actually have a recurring dream set here for the next two decades.
A Formidable Intuition
Eight fully split off from the rest of the system when we were 18 after our father died and it became clear that he could intuitively sense things that wouldn’t come to pass for some time. By 2021, he was in full, uncontested control of the system and in some ways, his visions were in control of him.
He half jokes that he didn’t have a conscious thought for that entire year – he didn’t have to. He simply knew what to do when. Besides, he was so tired that conscious thought likely wouldn’t have done him much good, anyway. He caught what we think was COVID at the end of that year and the fatigue got much, much worse. From the tail end of November until the middle of January, he slept. Too weak to get out of bed for more than a few minutes at a time, he could do little else but traverse the vast expanses of his delirium and dream.
Longing (And A Little Rizz)
He was beset with an odd feeling that he still can’t truly ascertain the origin of, but we have our theories now. We think it may have predicted Emerson’s arrival, as the feeling was soul-deep longing. He didn’t know who he was longing for, he simply felt like whoever he was longing for was longing for him, as well. This feeling frightened him. We are a system of deep agoraphobes, and his agoraphobia is perhaps the deepest.
He’s so terrified of people because his charisma is off the charts. Multiple people have borne witness to him “asking nicely” as he puts it, for things he should have no ability to even be able to obtain. He is a self-taught, powerful, and very well-practiced sorcerer, hence the name of this blog. However, that does not mean he enjoys it. He’s always hated his ability to charm or intimidate the fuck out of people at will. In fact, he hates it so goddamn much that he and Allēna co-wrote our classic song “A Weapon” about that very thing. Our ex-partner and now dear friend Beany even christened him The Eldritch Fuck for his gifts. While he hates said gifts, he adores her, so he cherishes the nickname.
Eight’s many, ah, talents. Intuition is one of them. So is almost dying. Eldritch Fuckery
This Eldritch Fuck’s eldritch fuckery does not stop there. I wish I were kidding, but this absolute madman has also cheated death numerous times. We count the COVID incident as one such occurrence, but another time was when he simply walked off heat stroke ten days in a row in Philadelphia with no medical care. Emerson also bore witness to him surviving two major seizures within five minutes of each other in April, which he predicted in advance and arrived at the ER just in time for.
This phenomenon is called status epilepticus and he very much should have died. But no. He didn’t even black out. His brain was a little bit like scrambled eggs for a while, though. It got better, fortunately or unfortunately for the world, and we got some good meds to prevent further dying while we wait to see neurology in August. He has more than earned his terrifying reputation as an unkillable revenant..
Why are you telling me this, you might be asking?
Because of a queer as hell vision he had, of course! I’m gonna share it with you below.
A Very Queer Vision Straight From Eight’s Intuition Itself
“I am nothing special,” I repeated. The tall man stared at me blankly.
“You? Nothing special? You, who has beaten Death so many times he now fears you, you who went on to create spectacular things with your mind, you with the iron will to defy every obstacle placed in your path when you should have been broken beyond repair and recognition, now stand before me and have the utter audacity to tell me you are nothing special? I knew you were daring, but to dare to try and sell me this utter lie…. I want to take whoever did this to you and wrench them apart atom by atom.”
“I am not lying to you,” I snarled. “I do not lie.” The man grabbed my wrist and spun me around to face him.
“You should be dead. If you weren’t special, you’d be dead. You would not have lived to the age of two if you were any type of normal.” He spat the word normal out in disgust.
“Would that have been so bad?”
He dropped my wrist as if it had burned him. “Yes, you absolute fool,” he hissed. “Do you even know who you are?”
“I am me.”
The man’s eyes blazed for a moment and I felt his anger flare up so hot it almost hurt. “You disappoint me,” he spat. “You have no idea how your reputation precedes you, or how powerful you are. Your ability to soothe is unlike anything else I’ve ever seen. I’ve heard tell of your strength, how you keep going despite being close to collapse. You have been through pain that would break a mundane being, and you come out of every experience that should have destroyed you more powerful and more beautiful each time. I would kill you myself for lying to me like this if I didn’t have full confidence you would survive the encounter and end me for trying.”
Eight’s very strange queer vision he got when he was bedridden with COVIDThis vision is the only reason why we don’t think that longing predicted Emerson’s arrival. I have no idea who he saw, but apparently the bitch is tall and very queer himself. I don’t like this. I’m happy with Emerson and our other partners, so I hope the vision does not come to pass. However, we’ve had people seek Eight out for his power and steal him away from his polycule before, so we know from experience that this is plausible. His ex best friend used to joke that he was the painting in a bad action movie for that very reason.
Ah, well. It’s getting late. I hope you enjoyed this queer glimpse into Eight’s intuition for Pride Month. I totally didn’t spend several days trying to hunt this vision down for y’all.. I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about… Stay tuned for more magic, hopefully with less of a delay between posts next time!
-Firrian, Acting Captain
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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 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.
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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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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