Circle up team. I've got a short one for you for reasons that shall be elucidated in due course. Forgive the straightforward and under-flourished writing, the only creative style available to me right now is an amalgam of black humor and sarcasm and it tastes like bitter molasses, salt, and sambuca all threw up on a street corner covered in the discarded underwear of the homeless.
    Still feeling the feels from the events of 2 weeks ago, topics for a blog post were not easy to come by. So I did what any self-respecting magical practitioner would do: I let some digital renderings of screen printed images on card stock tell me what to write about using a tarot-bot on discord.
    Because I was too lazy to shuffle my actual cards. Because life is challenging right now. Because I’m grieving and I wanted a robot to tell me what the cards meant so I didn’t have to engage my intuitive or cognitive faculties. Quit judging me Deborah, your husband left you for your brother and you cried for sixty seven consecutive days and drank at least four bottles of wine on every one of those days. And until this moment I didn't say a fucking thing, so shut your wine-hole. Comparatively, I am thriving.
    Alright, the query was; what should I write about this week. Here’s the spread: 3 of swords (Lord of Sorrow), The Wheel of Fortune (Lord of the Forces of Life), and Queen of Wands (Queen of the Thrones of Flame).

    I used The Hermetic Tarot because, even filtered through a digital tarot-bot, this deck reads marvelously for me. I recommend it over just about anything else for daily reading practices. Unlike the Thoth deck, which tends to skew negative for me and focus on more big picture, karmic, epochal type trends and energies surrounding the query, The Hermetic Tarot gives me solid, accurate readings about the actual issues in question. As evidenced above.
    I read that spread as “Write about what you’re going through and how you’re getting through it, genius.” Here’s why: 3 of Swords pretty obviously suggesting the pain and sorrows of two weeks ago, The Wheel of Fortune suggests the transience of all states and the coming of fortunes new, The Queen of Wands suggests courage, determination, and joy, and looks to me like a grotesque lion-headed phoenix rising from the flames.
    So, thanks a bunch tarot-bot, I guess you want me to write about my sorrow and how it, and everything else are just temporary states to eventually be overcome by joy when we die and either wake up in another dimension realizing that life was all some kind of crazy video game, or merge back into the source of all things (heaven?) maybe to be reborn, or everything goes dark and that’s it. I find only two of these options palatable or realistic and it should be fairly obvious which two. Speaking of palatable, the idea of writing about what I’m going through again sounds about as palatable as using my tongue to wipe someone else’s ass. So I shall ignore the sagely advice of the tarot-bot and, instead, write about what I’m doing to stay sane.

    Reading. Lots of reading. Some frivolous book purchases. Extra matras, prayers, and meditation. Research. Lots of research. I’ve been learning about new systems of magic and jailbreaking them down into usable bits to try later. The past two weeks have mostly been spent caring for my wife and myself and trying to keep my mind occupied so that it stays the fuck out of my grieving process. As a card carrying member of The Crustacean Crew, I feel things deeply and often for longer than is healthy, withdrawing into my protective shell, tuning out my mind and ego and allowing my natural healing process to do its thing. When the feels hit hard I do my best to feel them and acknowledge them without wallowing. Reminding myself that my life is, on the whole, amazing and that I have been through more painful and more harrowing situations more times than I care to count helps. Taking care of my body with nourishing food and exercise and sleep. Though I must admit, sleep has been in short supply. Applying talismanic oils from Sphere and Sundry when it’s felt right (mostly Son of Apollo, Sol in Leo, and the new Venus in Taurus Empress series). That’s it really. I’ve not done any magic to banish grief or anything else. Just doing my best to respect what comes up and stay positive. Which sounds gross, I know, but it’s all I got.
    Love y’all. See you next time.

    Huddle up, you mystical, magic-matted merkins. It’s gonna be a short post this week and I didn’t want to write it.
    Some really challenging shit happened last Monday. Painful, uncomfortable, draining, devastating shit. The essence of this shit is for myself and my loved ones to know, all you need to know, dear reader, is that it fucking hurt to go through and I imagine it will hurt for a while longer.
    This pain and the way it’s being processed and coped with now as opposed to ten years ago got me thinking about what it is to deal with pain in a “healthy” way. This is also the only thing I felt I could write about with any sort of integrity at the moment. So enjoy a brief rundown of how to cope when life gets painfully challenging.   

    The certainty of not being able to express this sentiment any better has crashed over me like a tsunami of liquid LSD and left me standing stark naked and bewildered at the brilliant, mad simplicity of that statement. Nonetheless, I must press on.
    Ten years ago if something as painful as this had happened to me, it would have meant a large withdrawal from the bank, a massive purchase of murderous narcotics, weeks or months spent completely numb, and then, when the money ran out, another large withdrawal. This time in the form of three weeks with no sleep, uncontrollable weeping, truly impressive projectile excretions from all orifices and the certainty that my veins had been pumped full of furious, electrified fire-ants as my limbs twitched and writhed in agony.
    Today dealing with the pain is sitting with it and feeling it but not allowing myself to fall into wallowing and depression which, for a person of my temperament with a penchant for depressants and a love of Jeff Buckley, is a very fine line indeed. Turning my formerly existential/nihilistic tendencies around and realizing that whatever happens in my life is exactly what is supposed to happen because the events in my life are always unfolding towards my highest good has been incredibly helpful. Knowing when it is OK to take a break from processing the pain and have an edible and relax and recuperate has been an invaluable tool this last week.
   
    Life is fucking weird.
    Not to worry, I'm a pro.
    Thanks Uncle Hunter

    Sorry for the lateness of this post, it would have been posted last week on Wednesday only, a giant kingfisher pecked me into my duvet cover and then a frog stole my shoes. I’ve only just managed to wriggle out the bottom of my bed, tearing my last clean pair of jodhpurs on a magic hedgehog. Luckily the frog left me my slippers and a life in which shoes and jodhpurs optional.
    To make up for my fecklessness I present to you part one of a long as post about astrological magic and magical magpie-ism. So circle up you miniaturized mercurial manta rays, you pulchritudinous potato poems for another journey through time and space...

    A little less than a year ago in late March just as we in the USA were realizing that the shut down of the entire world also included us, I was called, quite loudly, to begin researching and preparing to make some astrological talismans in the style of The Picatrix. Astrological talismans and talismanic materia have been on my radar for a few years now thanks to Handsome Man-strologer Austin Coppock and his brilliant astro-sorceress wife Caitlin who run Sphere and Sundry. Making said talismans and materia had crossed my mind but, given my complete lack of astrology training and limited understanding of the ensorcelling required for the ritual, I figured it would have to be a project that some future-Tyler would sort out after present-Tyler did a whole shit-ton more research and learning. Not the case. As usual, going with my gut and studying the things I was nudged/called to study totally worked out because, as you will see below, I “randomly” stumbled on to an amazing magical election. Using the prayer and praxis from the Picatrix and some prayers and TEK from Drawing Spirits Into Crystals, and borrowing some of the beautiful wording from Jyotish planetary prayers I called forth, invoked, and petitioned the spirits of Mars and Venus as well as the angels and intelligences of their spheres and had them empower some talismans.

    David Bowie, Marc Bolan, The Glitter Twins: Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, Sir William Blake, Greg Traw, Sarah Eisenlohr, The Avalanches, Daft Punk, Justice, and Beck. These are all excellent examples of humans who borrow shiny bits and pieces from the world at large and recombine them into something completely new, something greater than the sum of its parts. A beautiful chimera, unique and futuristic, cobbled together from the glittering refuse of the past. These masterful, majestic magpies unmake and take apart the world we take for granted, they strip it down to its component parts and then they take the bits that speak to them and create the Frankenstein monster of the motherfucking future from the bombastic bones of the past.

Greg Traw's psychedelic magic masterpiece the Dracxiodos Tarot

    All this is to say that while I appreciate the skills stances of grimoire purism and reconstructionism just as I appreciate the skills and stances of classical musicians; there is certainly value in traditionalism and reconstructing the rituals, and or concerts, of the past. It’s just not the way I roll. My whole life has been spent experimenting with what the different combinations of skittles in the packet taste like, adding brown gravy to my kalbi ribs and mac salad, and bravely combining drugs to test for synergy in the test tube that serves as my brain.

    David Bowie has been a roll model/crush/idle/idol of mine for way longer than is appropriate. So it stands to reason that I would end up a musical, masticatory, and magical magpie as well. Magic is a living tradition and one of my favorite parts of being alive is innovation and finding what works for us as individuals, taking what we need and leaving the rest. Developing our own unique ways of being true to ourselves in whatever we do: magic, music, filing TPS reports, writing, delivering mail, dancing, eating, cooking, or masturbating seems like as noble a reason for living as any other.
    Alright, in typical Myrrhkwood fashion, we started down a path headed for a clear and easily reachable destination and have become waylaid by the shiny fairy lights. That is, however, the very nature of the forest and Myrrhkwood is about as foresty as a forest can be: it may in fact be the forestyest forest that ever did forest… Damn it’s dark. Where did that trail go?
  
    To be continued…

    2020 just couldn’t let us leave it behind without one last fuck you. One last slashing of the tires, brick through the window, flaming pile of dogshit in the passenger seat, a small man reported missing then left bound and gagged in the trunk while it trained a bird to shit on the bridge of your nose, and called your mother and told her that you actually missed thanksgiving to get high with your friends. 2020 ruined the times square ball drop with the fierceness and panache of a lion in platform high heels winning RuPauls drag race by eating half the contestants with its dick tucked.

    I’ve never really cared about the NYC NYE nonsense. My early new years eves were spent with my family trying to stay awake while watching the disney channel’s NYE programming and, after I had discovered the blessed anesthesia of drugs, my adolescent and adult New Year’s plans usually consisted of experimenting with said anesthetics. The juxtaposition of wholesome Disney childhood and train spotting adulthood is a solid representation of my life as a whole: my two favorite movies being The Princess Bride and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I was told once that being able to hold two diametrically opposed thoughts in one’s head at the same time was an indication of intelligence or he might have said it was an indication of a chemical imbalance. Who remembers?

    Moving on. If any of you missed the absolute Hindenburg that was NYE 2021 live coverage do yourself a favor and click this link and come back.
    Now that you’re back or, having already seen the most depressing thing ever because you watched it live, are in the process of setting your hair on fire to cleanse your brain of the nightmares it has induced, let me point out something that struck me as horrifying beyond all reason. There are more wacky-waving-inflatable-arm-flailing-tube-men celebrating in times square than there are living human beings. When our plastic alien overlords watch whatever footage of this night that survives the great, wiggly uprising they will mark NYE 2021 as the moment that the wacky-waving-inflatable-arm-flailing-tube-men began their takeover of the USA. Herding the humans into pens and making them wear large madhatter-esque top hats emblazoned with Planet Fitness logos to brand them the property of their capering captors, as the wacky-waving-inflatable-arm-flailing-tube-men danced, flailed, and jeered from the sidewalk creating an hilariously impenetrable border.

    The few people there were in that human zoo were forced to smile and dance to sad harmonica music and old standards as the cameras panned between a grand total of 25 people over the course of the 5 hours of live coverage from Time Square. Shunning the typical Jock-Jams associated with New Years Eve in fear of provoking their inflatable captors, the music played that night seemed to vacillate between psych-ward-sleepy-time music and a suicidally depressed robot learning to play the harmonica. When the ball dropped, the plastic poo-bahs amped things up by playing the classic Sinatra jam, New York New York, followed by Somewhere over the Rainbow by Israel "IZ" Kamakawiwoʻole.
    The prisoners in their little pens were constantly sprayed with experimental hallucinogens and anti depressants and military grade amphetamines from the wacky-waving-inflatable-arm-flailing-tube-gaurds to keep them placid, smiling, and dancing for the cameras. Which, again, had only 25 people to cut to.
    Thanks and praise be to our plastic Planet Fitness overlords and their wacky-waving-inflatable-arm-flailing-enforcers. All hail the Boneless Old Gods of Planet Fitness!
  
    Best. New Years. Ever.

    Got a quick one for you this week so push in and don’t be shy you delightfully desecrated, semi-sentient, Christmas puddings while I reveal to you the genius that is… Blub Week.
    But first, some history; Blub Week, as it is formally recognized today, began as a way to combat the anxiety, pain, anguish, and pre-pubescent, radioactive, roaming scooter gangs of toilet paper pirates that swept through the western world this year. It began, in June I believe, out of sheer exhaustion, having woke up one morning more drained and lethargic than when I had retired the previous night due to the immense and terrible vibes this year shat into its greasy hand and smeared all over everyone's face. On this fateful morning, I shambled from my bed and flopped down next to my equally exhausted, much better looking, wife upon the couch and declared, “I need a Blub Day”, not knowing that Urban Dictionary was well ahead of the game by defining “Blub” as “cute, chubby, or lethargic”.
    Throughout the unmitigated diaper-fire that has been 2020, the Blub Day has become a staple of self-care in our household and, being that I am still here clacking on this keyboard and not hanging from a slowly spinning ceiling fan with a needle in my arm, a dick in my hand, and my pants around my ankles , I believe it has been a total success.

    So what is Blub Week? The best analogy I can come up with is the week in between Christmas and New Years when I was still in primary school. No school, no schedule, no pressure, just playing with gifts, watching holiday movies, relaxing, and eating leftovers, decompressing from the crushing anxiety of the horrendous, blood orgy that is public school. Blub Week is a week to let go of the stress and bullshit of the year while making room for better things to come. So far it’s been amazing; we’ve ordered in a bunch of great food, hung out with wonderful weirdos, we’ve watched all our favorite Christmas movies at least twice, we’ve played with most of our new toys, we’ve done magic journeys and read tarot cards, and we have made time to heal from the actual trauma of this year and prioritized our wellbeing by rescheduling commitments.
    So this year, as a gift to all you beautiful freaks who successfully made it through the weirdest year on record, I offer you Blub Week, the best end of year tradition since human sacrifice went out of style. Take some time to take care of yourselves because the world needs your weird now more than ever.   

Spider Jerusalem is a close personal friend, and hero of mine

    I love Christmas. There. I said it. I fucking love Christmas. I am a Christmas unicorn. I’m not exactly sure why people automatically assume that a weirdo magical star-man with a penchant for virulently contagious vitriolic rants and SARS-potent spite for things that are outdated and oppressive, or offend his delicate sensibilities, can’t also be full of virulently contagious Christmas cheer. Well here’s hoping that you are either fully innoculated against my choleric Christmas contagion or, like me, are already suffering from crippling sugarplum syphilis because Daddy Chrimbo has come early and he’s delivered the traditional gifts of dried Amanita muscaria mushrooms, reindeer piss, and a Christmas rant about Christmas. So gather round because Santa Claus wants some lovin’.
    Usually, to celebrate the rebirth of the sun and the birth of sweet baby J, and to kindle the spirit of the season and remind folks that they have an actual spark of divine light and stardust inside them I find a reindeer, feed it powerful psychedelic mushrooms and follow it around with a jar until it begins cavorting like it’s off its face on drugs and collect the piss it sprays everywhere once it looses control of its bladder. Upon completion of this harrowing task, for it is no laughing matter to be kicked in the head by a reindeer while trying to get high, I steal swiftly out of the petting zoo and get to work.
    Firstly, I don my traditional Christmas garb by slathering my body in a bucket of goose fat. Then comes a drinking game I call “visit the local mall whilst wearing nothing but said goose fat and some giblets and have a large swig of reindeer piss every time you successfully slip through the greasy fingers of your would-be captors”. After a quick stop at home to reapply the traditional and protective Christmas grease it’s time to get to work.
    Sliding down peoples chimneys while naked and out of my tiny mind on hallucinogenic reindeer wee can be challenging at the best of times, but it’s worth it. I’m not really bothered by Santa’s whole not-being-seen rule whilst delivering joy to the world. I hope to startle people awake from their drunken Christmas dreams after sliding swift and smooth and nude down their chimneys and crashing into their, hopefully, cold fires in a mangled and giggling soot-covered tangle of contorted, gangly limbs. Unfolding six and a half feet of naked, greasy, skeletal drug-fiend amidst a roiling cloud of chimney soot and floating embers is enough to fill even the grinchiest of home owners with enough Christmas spirit to send them reeling backwards into spasms of terrible delight and Yuletide catatonia.
    While the occupants of the house are still stunned and comatose with Christmas cheer, I quickly drop off gifts of dried mushrooms, loose change, and haribo gummies, and fill all the mugs in the house with my powerfully potent psychedelic piss. Then, borrowing a move from Kurt Russel (the best film star, and Santa who ever lived), I place my index finger against the side of my nose and, in a swirl of smoke and sparks, burst into coal-dust and fly back up the chimney, with care, to continue Kringle-ing the city until dawn.

These nightly excursions go on for weeks. From the day after Thanksgiving until Christmas day and sometimes even up until Easter, depending on the ambient levels of Christmas spirit and my supplies of goose fat and reindeer wee.

    And that, you wassailing weirdos , is what Christmas means to me.

    This week, you glorious sparks of the divine, pulsating, cosmic trash-fire, I shall be rambling about eclipses. Specifically what a series of eclipses can do to a broken and neglected life.
    Open on a college town in the Pacific Northwest circa 2009.
    The writer’s life has gone completely tits up: no job, no life, few friends, only source of income is the buying and selling of illegal narcotics, existential beliefs are getting more nihilistic by the day, massive drug habit, suicidally depressed, and sleep deprived. Heroin withdrawal and cocaine psychosis have become integrated parts of his personality; tall and emaciated, but somehow oddly charming to those few humans he still interacts with. Things are going about as well as can be expected, our intrepid hero manages to get his fix most days as he burns bridge after bridge and isolates himself from any hope or lifeline. Even at this point, he knows that all this is building to something terribly final. Our anti-hero is going to go out like so many of his favorite musicians: smacked up and cracked up and alone. His genius cut down in its prime.
    At least that was the romantic horseshit our star and lovable, junky-idiot used to paint his life with. The main problems with that depiction being: our hero is not now and certainly was not at that point any sort of genius, even as a bullshit-artist (which was his sole talent) he was only ranked among the best in his small town and would never have survived among real top-tier bullshitters, and he had not produced any evidence whatsoever of this supposed genius.
    Enter the Cancer-Capricorn eclipse cycle.
    Fuck.
    Eclipses, in this writer’s humble and under-informed opinion, are about transformation. Explicitly, the sort of blow-up-your-fucking-car-while-you’re-inside-it-because-you-neglected-to-get-the-oil-changed transformation usually associated with the Tower card in tarot. The clearing away of old structures, relationships, habits, coping mechanisms, people, cars, money, belief systems, limbs, trust funds, etc.. If, like the writer in 2009, your life is a fucking shambles built out of lies, drugs, and broken coping mechanisms then the clearing away of those structurally unsound and massively dangerous slums can be uncomfortable and dramatic.
    The areas of life being swept clean by an eclipse depend largely on which houses the eclipses of a given cycle are occurring in within one’s own birth chart. Here’s a quick and dirty breakdown of the houses and their meanings for those of you who don’t know and an easy site to get a free birthchart with interpretation for those of you who would like one. How vigorously the sweeping is done and whether or not the broom is actually a nuclear bomb depends largely on prevailing astrological influences, how the life in question is being lived and the level of adaptability currently at the disposal of the person living said life.
    Smash cut back to 2009.
    Our beloved, fucked up, junky loser totals his car at 8 in the morning after staying up all night doing drugs and arguing with an ex at her parents house. Lucky to be alive (he put out the driver’s side window with his head and the airbag didn’t deploy), he gets lucky again when the owner of the tree into which he wrecks his car comes out of his house radiantly high on meth and wants nothing whatsoever to do with the exchanging of insurance info or the calling of cops.
    Star wipe to one and a half year depressing, junky montage of disappointed parents, no transportation, no money, and lots of intravenous drug use. Set to whichever the saddest Jeff Buckley song is, maybe “Lover You Should’ve Come Over”.
    Fade to black.
    Fade up on a cold and snowy Christmas season 2010. Curtis Mayfield’s “Pusher Man” plays as our writer, driving a new car, high as fuck, pockets filled with drugs and cash enjoys the last fun time he will ever have on the hard stuff.
    Hectic party montage, lots of glitch hop, hotel rooms full of well dressed junkies, film speeds up as two weeks go by in a blur of bad decisions.
    Smash cut to black.
    Fade in on our hero, alone in the grossest apartment imaginable: used needles, empty baggies, rotting food, cat shit, and bills are piled up everywhere. The only “clean” areas are the couch upon which we find our writer and the path from the couch to the bathroom. Looking very frail and feverish, we see his arm is swollen to four times the size of its opposite and his fingers are beginning to turn purple. Delirious with fever and pain, he picks up the phone and calls his mom for a ride to the hospital.
    Fast forward through a heartbreaking hospital scene, rehab, move in with girlfriend from rehab, relapse.
    July 17 2017.
    After purchasing a large amount of drugs and going to his parents’ house, his parents being out of town for the week, our hero proceeds to inject all of them in hopes of relieving the vast amount of inner turmoil, anxiety, depression, fear and shame that accompanies not being on drugs all the time. Nothing happens. No relief. Panic builds and a serious bout of cocaine psychosis and paranoia strikes leaving him locked in the top floor office with a loaded gun talking to himself. Suicide looks like a very good option.
    And then something spectacular happens.
    With the gun cocked and in his mouth he hears a voice. Not the whispering voices trying to scare him into pulling the trigger. A pleasant voice, a clear and sonorous voice with a warm and slightly effeminate British accent, spoken as if through a modest smile. An image flashes into focus of the scene he will leave his loved ones to find if he pulls the trigger. It is an utterly brutal scene that will remain with him forever and does not need to be described here. The soothing and utterly charming voice says, at the same moment the image is presented, “We can’t very well do that now can we, darling?”.
    Flabbergasted and assuming he is in the presence of capital-G-O-D, he asks the only question his drug-addled brain can put together: “wait… you’re gay?”  
    At which the spirit laughs and, in the same fantastically charming hybrid of David Bowie and Freddy Mercury, responds, “I’m everything, darling”.
    Our mind-blown and mystified mess of hero puts the gun down and calls his saintly girlfriend. She mercifully decides to keep him out of the psych ward and then drives him around town for three hours as he physically pulls the hair out of his head while raving about seeing demons on every street corner.
    Fade to black.
    Our hero wakes up the next day feeling fucking superb and not wanting to shove narcotics into his body for the first time in a decade. That feeling persists to this day.
    Roll credits.

    “Cool story and all but what in the fuck did that have to do with eclipses?” Well, I’m glad you asked that, tired-literary-device; let’s shove some dates into the story above and see. December 21 2010, when I was partying my way through the holidays, there was a lunar eclipse in Cancer in my second house. January 4 2011, when that party was screeching to a halt due to scarcity of funds, there was a solar eclipse in Capricorn in my eighth house. I have no doubt that that one-two punch is what sent me, dying of a blood infection, to the hospital. Luck and my fancy, British guardian angel kept me here with all my arms and fingers intact. Then we had a solar eclipse in Gemini on June 1 2011 in my first house and a lunar eclipse in Sagittarius on June 15 2011 in my seventh house of partnerships (bless her heart she had almost as rough a time as I did). And then to cap it all off, on July 1 2011 there was a solar eclipse in Cancer.
    As far as I can tell there wasn’t much else going on astrologically for me during those times so I, for the sake of this post and convenience, shall be blaming the total destruction of my terrible, junky life on the eclipses of 2009-2011. And I shall be crediting the glamorous and charming British spirit with the snatching of my life back from the abyss.
    The good news is this; if your life is not a giant ball of neglected, junky cat shit then eclipses don’t have to be life-changing, horrific bummers of psychosis and bad decisions. We just passed out of the Cancer-Capricorn eclipse cycle and I had no issues at all. Or at least no issues like I did in 2010-11. I mostly stayed inside during the eclipses and chanted mantras or slept but I know folks who magically harnessed the power of those eclipses and used that dragon energy to power some pretty cool shit. Not my jam at the moment, but it seems to work for them.
    I was going to go into remediation measures and the nodes and all that but honestly I would mostly be quoting the Coppocks so I shall link to Austin Coppock's stellar page (bad pun, boooooo) as well as his wonderful partner and super badass Kaitlin at Sphere and Sundry's post about south node remediation.
    That’s all for this week you glamorous, galumphing, galaxy-brained glory-bees. Stay as joyful as you can in these crazy days and I’ll see you next week.

    I’ve got a short one for you this week and it comes with a disclaimer: if you are easily offended by intimations of wrongdoing by the folks in charge, foul language, hyperbolic but/and completely accurate reportage about the state of the system, I suggest you set the device you’re reading this on ablaze and duct-tape a pair of horny scorpions to your eyeballs and think about your life choices.

Like this guy

    Here’s a great example of why I would love it if the bloated and rotting corpse of our long-dead and parasite riddled empire would implode under the weight of its own corruption and decay: the Washington state unemployment system. During the first round of p(l)andemic bullshit, the system was overloaded with new claims and it was an appalling bureaucratic wet-dream; filled with rape-clowns, Dutch angle camera work, rusty filing cabinets, miles of red-tape bondage ropes, and dim, flickering, fluorescent lighting, to click through the questionnaire before the session timed out and you were forced to start again while, at unemployment headquarters, the bureaucrats swimming in self-hate and atavistic ecstasy at the suffering of the people all finished at once and ritually drowned an out of work electrician in their acid bukkake rain. We were told that hundreds of millions of dollars were paid out to Nigerian hackers who defrauded the state. And now during the second shut down 7 months later the head of the unemployment department is under investigation for embezzling funds (sorry Nigeria looks like it was actually a terrible white lady who stole millions from her constituents and not your infamous hackers). And now, somehow, with seven months to upgrade, the website is even worse than before, adding splintery wooden buttplugs and Carolina reaper lubricant to the nightmare. To successfully fill out and submit a claim I had to pray to every spirit of mercury, to Ganesh and Garuda, Dakshinamurthy, and Durga and the Ashwini twins and stay up until two am on a fucking Wednesday to get it through. (Praise be to the Divine Creator, Archangel Raphael, Hermes, Mercury, all the other spirits who helped—Mercurial and otherwise, Ganesh, Garuda, Dakshinamurthy, Durga, and the Ashwini twins, as well as saints Cyprian, Justina, and John the Baptist)

This is Lord Garuda

    This amazing example of spirit teams in action and the horror of government in general seems to be a solid juxtaposition for 2020 as a whole: the entire previously stable material world shat the bed spectacularly for a lot of folks, with systems that felt solid and safe (like food and toilet paper supply chains and social welfare systems) crumbling as if they were made of tissue paper (that precious commodity) and held together with the dried semen left over from the drowning of sacrificial electricians, while the intangible took to the forefront and offered support and comfort. Of course the non-physical has, from the beginning of this flaming pile of covid fatalities of a year (still very low numbers in Washington with a 98% survival rate so the pile isn’t all that big) been harnessed as a weapon by those in power both politically and socially with fear and paranoia and social distancing and mask-shaming. It’s interesting that a country so opposed to the communism of the USSR reached immediately for the same fucking tactics of fear and self policing that they demonized as a justification their cold war but I suppose McCarthy, that fuck, did the same thing in the 50’s so it should come as no real surprise.

    The good news is this: the people in charge of weaponizing the non-physical seem to have a very limited idea of what is possible and luckily for us, the folks in charge of telling us what to do seem to, as a prerequisite for being in power, have had the part of the brain responsible for imagination surgically removed with a sharp blow to the head from a rusty hammer. Which leaves the field wide open for us to build a better 2021. So, as N’Sync so brilliantly put it in their criminally-underrated song: Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas, and Happy Holidays.

    It saddens me to write this but with “cancel-culture” as popular as it is right now and with this blog obviously being popular enough to warrant canceling due to any one of the sentences above I feel this disclaimer has become necessary: (Sometimes) I, the writer, do not truly believe that the (lizard)people employed by the Washington state unemployment bureau actually sacrifice noble, out of work, electricians to their Lovecraftian Elder Gods by drowning them in their super-acidic reptilian jizz. Nor am I writing this to make light of the people that have died of COVID this year like that guy who was stabbed to death and then listed as a COVID fatality or the people with 5 co-morbidities like obesity, full blown AIDS, liver failure,  drug overdose, gunshot wounds, etc, that died solely because of COVID. I simply enjoy using colorful language and hyperbole to really drive my points home. Think Hunter S Thompson writing in Rolling Stone that one of the candidates during the ’72 presidential race was addicted to ibogaine or any televised news outlet covering anything and you'll have a rough approximation of the liberties I've taken.

Having a very loose idea about what the fuck this site is supposed to accomplish leaves one wide open to the blank canvas blues. Do i post about magic and the magical things happening in my life? or what about a post on psychedelics, or for that matter drugs in general and their effects on the lives of the sensitive people that use them. How about another vulgar astrology post with a side rant about how fucked up the world is; and by the way, why the fuck should anyone, outside the rulers of this system, be concerned about it collapsing into a pile of rotten, corrupt corpses that, we the people, could use to stoke the fires of our great and beautiful ascent into the gods we’ve been programmed to believe we are not? Maybe a delightful, poetic romp through the blasted caverns and ethereal dream-light of the lunar sphere. Oh, who gives a shit? Why choose one when i could just take all of those things and smash them into the crack pipe that works part time as my consciousness in between shifts at the gas station, take a massive lungful and see what comes out of my firearms and breeze-fingers?
The full moon was last night and i haven’t slept, the combination of psychic city sludge and selenite filtered solar reflections always makes my insomnia act up. Lack of sleep has never distressed me as it has some of my peers, my first hallucinatory experience was somewhere around 9 and it was caused by being consistently and quite amusingly awake for 5 days. I was taking a shower before school taking careful stock of my preadolescent sanity and noticing the odd sensations that accompany being awake for that many hours when i noticed some movement out of the corner of my eye. When i turned, with no small amount of horror, to  confront the uncharacteristic ambulation of what had, up until that very moment been inanimate and quite lifeless objects i was faced with quite a scene: my shampoo+conditioner bottle, a sea-foam green Pert Plus, was gyrating in a way that instantly relieved me of all my fear and replaced it with a mirth to rival Midas (in those blissful moments before he hugged his wife and tried to have an apple) a crazed and cacophonous cackling rose up from my tiny belly and i watched with the glee felt mainly by the mad as the bottle danced and moved its lagoon-green curves to a song that only we two could hear. I joined in and danced until the water went cold.
Now before you write everything I’ve written off as the ravings of a mad man who has obviously been that way for a very long time, let me say this: crazy people can’t tell when they’re being crazy and although in that moment i could not have told you for sure whether the bottle and i were dancing to the music of the spheres in “official reality”, i was certainly still aware of the possibility that not sleeping for 5 days could effect a person in ways that might alter perception in strange ways, and i’m proud to say that nearly 25 years later i can still tell when i am experiencing phenomena outside of “official reality”. Though these phenomena do seem to be increasing in frequency the more i do magical things…
With a little luck, and that one simple act of lunacy (i’m quite certain that those 5 days must have been around a particularly powerful full moon), my life was ruined forever and now i am forever thinking that under the label of every cereal box and hair-care product there lies the soul of a dancing machine confined to inanimate stationary statuary solely by the static inflexibility and well-restedness of our modern western minds. Later that year in the fourth grade i was given, for the first time, the opportunity to choose a topic for a research paper or book report all on my own. The paper was titled: The Effects of PCP and LSD on the Human Brain. It’s lost now but my parents still remember it with a woeful shake of their heads as a terrible precursor to a life filled to the brim with narcotics, near-death experiences, narcotics, close calls, court fees, narcotics, speeding tickets costing them 2,000 dollars in one go and through it all a noticeable lack of jail time or criminal record. My fascination with different states of consciousness and the potential of psychic augmentation of said consciousness with substances usually outlawed and often prescribed by the powers that be still burns within me and will certainly be a topic of much discussion in future.
Laying down the crack pipe for a moment i must interject a small history lesson. There are not many drugs i would not take or have not already ingested in one way or another in varying quantities and with astonishing consistency but that, for the most part, is behind me and this history lesson is not meant to glamorize the life of a junky who inexplicably survived to tell the tale but to illustrate my abiding interest in chemical brain enhancement and give you a brief and horrifying glimpse into the life of the man you’ve chosen to humor. Roll the tape.
My first forays into drugs were mild but as far as i can tell from my rigorous research and painful interrogations earlier than most of the humans outside the weird spheres i prefer to occupy. Marijuana was a godsend to a terribly awkward and quiet boy who was bullied mercilessly for being awkward and quiet; no longer was i worrying about what anyone else thought about anything, least of all myself and the questionable fashion decisions dictated by household income and a preference for comfortable clothes. High school was full of booze, more marijuana and many mushrooms. The fact that i graduated in four years with a sophomore gpa of 0.35 is a mystery of math and statistics that i will never understand. The best thing about high school was that it ended… and that i had my wisdom teeth out and was (over) prescribed that perfect panacea: the princely Percocet who, in all of his operatic opiate opulence, turned all the keys and opened all the doors that had kept me apart from the rest of the world. More than anything before or since Percocet made me feel like i was home and safe and as confident as i saw the rest of the world acting. My college experience could be summed up by the word “more”. More of everything; life, human contact and drugs of new and interesting varieties with the constant insufflation of cocaine being both the high and low light of the whole shebang and ending with a severe bout of double pneumonia, three hateful roommates, and the loss of 25 precious pounds from a frame that could not afford the loss of even a gram. Needless to say things did not get better from here: my opiate consume ion increased until the new “war” on prescription opiates jacked all the prices up and forced me to switch to heroin. “Buy the ticket take the ride”. In 2 weeks i had purchased my first needle and there began a slow motion sprint to the bedrock and tragic beauty that awaits us all at the very bottom. Say what you will about self destructive tendencies, drug abuse, and thrill seekers of all sorts; there is no better way to find out who one is and what one is capable of than by taking a thing as far as it will go and then, when one finds the edge, jumping with a smile to see what lies at the bottom. Three and a half years later i had to decide, in the presence of an actual angel or God who, for the record, either is or sounds just like a cross between Freddy Mercury and David Bowie, whether i would die by the gun in my hand or try something i hadn’t done since i started smoking weed daily at the ripe age of eleven. That was nine years ago.

I love my life. I found the love of my life at the bottom and we’ve walked the hidden paths up the far side of the chasm together ever since. And even in this year of fucked up space-weather, atrocities, assholes, artillery, and otherwise, i wouldn’t trade my life or my past for anything.
Damn, that got heavy, I’m not entirely sure what this post was supposed to be about but there it is: a brief and fucked up history of the asshole on the other side if the keyboard. Maybe next time i will pick a theme and stick with it, but probably not. I began this post the day after the full moon and at the time of finishing it looks like its been nibbled in half by the persistent efforts of a whole hoard of interstellar rodents not quite believing that the crunchy exterior isn’t just some sort of protective shell surrounding a great glowing glob of gouda. In that time i seem to have lost the plot, but all these ramblings are just an ingenious plot to seamlessly bring us the the point: no matter what kind of awful shit the Powers or powers that be are perpetrating; it could always be worse, AND it can always get better, the choice is often more in our control than we are led to believe. We can always choose to smile as we fall and enjoy the ride. Who knows what grand treasures or mysteries await us on the way down or at the bottom, or what we’ll find on our way back up the other side?