Honey, fuckers like me are why stress induced cardiomyopathy exists. But gods, will he have a good time….
-Allēna
#chaosgremlin #relationships #actuallyautistic #actuallyAudhd #polyamory #sorcery #gremlinry
Tag: sorcery
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A short post, I think.
Hey, everyone. I have very little brain power right now, but I wanted to drop a mental image/vision I had in the sort of twilight state between sleeping and waking earlier while I was trying to nap. That failed miserably, as this image freaked me out so badly that I haven’t really been able to calm myself down since. I saw the phrase “mene, mene, tekel, upharsin” written in red on a public bathroom wall in a nearby grocery store. This phrase originally appeared in the book of Daniel in the Bible as a warning to the king Nebuchadnezzar that his days as ruler were about to come to an end. I believe it’s also the origin of the modern phrase “the writing is on the wall”. I often see things in that sort of twilight state, but this was not the sort of thing I was expecting my brain to conjure up. I’m an ex Mormon who had a special interest in the Bible for many years, but I haven’t thought about the Book of Daniel with any degree of seriousness since before my first marriage, and given world events, this is a strange thing to see/start thinking about suddenly.
I don’t like this, and have a splitting headache now, which often accompanies the times I See Shit. So I’m going to attempt to pass out now. Happy early 11/11 portal day to all who plan on observing it tomorrow, and here’s hoping there’s no more weird shit in my brain for the time being. I need a good night’s sleep.
Your very rattled sorcerer,
Lazarus.
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Full Circle?
Hey, everyone! Lazarus here. I’m writing this post a bit later in the day than I would like, but sometimes shit happens and I have no energy until late and I have to put my energy level and available brain cells (or lack thereof) first. That’s precisely what I ended up doing.
Today has been an odd one, especially mentally. I spent the majority of it alone as both Zelda and Emerson were away at work, which gave me plenty of time to think. Zelda sent me some money to pick up vapes for both of us since the tobacco I’ve been smoking requires me to often nearly burn my thumb to light my pipe or burn it outright, and I’m really not a fan of doing that. (Don’t get on me for smoking, it helps me get my tired ADHD brain in good working order, and I’m pretty sure my various chronic ailments will take me out before anything nicotine related will.) As I was walking to the excellent shop where my partners and I pick up most of our vapes and related paraphernalia, it felt almost like being lost in a memory. I’m not sure if it’s how I’ve been feeling lately and what I’ve been exploring of late, but it felt similar to being back in Alaska in October-November of 2019, some five years prior during my first marriage.
My marriage to my first husband, Fang, was strange in many ways. He wasn’t home often due to the fact that he poured his everything into his career as a systems administrator where he worked an hour away, and when he was home, it wasn’t pleasant. He would either spend his time deep in video games with our housemates or fighting with me to try and get me to do shit he wanted that I didn’t consent to by any stretch of the imagination.
He wanted to be far more active than my body could handle at that point and to clean up after him and the housemates simply because I didn’t work outside of the home, despite the fact that I was working two jobs at that point, just largely from home, and was very prolific creatively when I wasn’t working. I had fought my entire life for my independence and autonomy and was not having it.
We had two very different ideas of what we wanted the relationship to look like, and it turned into a protracted power struggle. So I came to relish the long stretches of time when I would be alone, as it afforded me a measure of freedom I had never gotten to have before. Before shipping off to Alaska, my mother, Hera, kept close tabs on me, even when I was away at college, and I had begun extricating myself from her that summer and was a good 4,000 miles away back in Texas.
So by October of 2019, I had a great deal more time and freedom on my hands than I had ever had before and was beginning to explore what that meant for me for the first time in my life at 22. Fang was controlling, sure, but he simply wasn’t around often enough to stop me from building a life of my own. I began doing just that that summer, and didn’t stop as autumn approached.
I had spent the last several years examining my faith, and was fairly certain by that point that I wasn’t a Christian, at least not a typical one. This deconstruction eventually led me to start exploring kitchen witchcraft and divination, and I started blending my own teas and made my own divination system that year. At that point, things like Tarot hadn’t interested me yet and wouldn’t for another several years. Many other aspects of mainstream witchcraft made me deeply uncomfortable, and I would come to find out later that many of these things were actually closed practices that belonged to cultures that I was not a part of. They were unsettling for good reason!
I was also beginning to examine my trauma in depth for the first time and come to face to face with much of the extent of what my family had done to me. It was actually what had led to me attempting to extricate myself from Hera that year. It failed when she threatened to fly up to Alaska that winter in a message to Fang, and she continued to be in league with him long after I left in 2020.
Now, however, I have far more ACTUAL freedom and am striving toward a life that actually works. My partners know it would be foolish to attempt to control me. I don’t stand for that bullshit, I made that clear to them from the jump, and disclosed my disabilities and need for a lot of rest up front, as well, so they don’t push me harder than I can handle.
I’m doing my best to not just keep Hera and the toxic people in her life that enabled her bullshit out of my life, but unfuck my own toxic bullshit as well. Trauma explains poor behavior, but doesn’t excuse it, and I don’t take bullshit from myself or anyone else, and do my utmost to take accountability when I’m in the wrong, even if the other party doesn’t mind what I did.
I do a lot of shit that I don’t like and try and do better, even if the other people around me don’t hold me to that high of a standard, weren’t harmed, what have you. If I don’t like the outcome of what happened, I learn from it and do whatever I can to grow from it. Full stop. I didn’t do that when I was 22.
Additionally, I’m still exploring my craft, just at a deeper level. Everything I do rides the line between the mundane and the magical, and if I can’t find a scientific or academic explanation for something, I turn to the metaphysical or spiritual for answers. Conversely, I like to try and find answers for what I’m exploring spiritually in science, as well. I was basically raised by scientists and doctors, but I’m also an intuitive person with a fascination for pretty much everything and hoard knowledge of any kind like a dragon.
So yeah. Here’s to the next… How long has it been? Five years? Yeah, I think it’s been five years now. Linear time has never been my strong suit, haha. Stay tuned for more magic, and I will see you beautiful people next time. Happy Halloween, Blessed Samhain, whatever y’all happen to observe 💛
Your faithful, if eternally confused by the passage of time, sorcerer, Lazarus
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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
crashattend. 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