An Introduction to Chaos Magic(k) (ROUND 15)
scent of the day: Maruyama, by Prissana
Maruyama (2019, Prin Lomros)—a medicinal-botanical vetiver fragrance with the spice-cupboard antiquity of a hermit living untouched in a mountain forest that, were it not for his foraging presence (talking aloud as he fingers all walks of undergrowth and overgrowth), is too naturalistic (too bereft of fairy whispers and unicorn fog and luminous moss) to be called “enchanted”—
opens with a hippie-garden cud of apothecary roots and herbs (sweet-pine marjoram, apothecary-hay blue chamomile, peppery-undergrowth angelica, petting-zoo spikenard, musky-vegetal ambrette seed, savory-celery lovage root, nutty-rooty vetiver) that, for all the muddle’s summertime mugginess, emits—as if it were dry ice—a mountain-brisk vapor (absinthe-tarragon artemisia, eucalyptus-mint camphor),
the lunar-blue-auraed pulp of medicinal-meets-culinary pesto murk—after being, as I picture it at least, smeared against knobbled cuts of high-essential-oil wood (smoky-vanilla amyris and dry-gin cedar), wood that seems to have been smoked in a rose-herb head-shop incense from the Led Zeppelin era of Tolkien-aesthetic counterculture—
left to radiate a meditative botanical aroma of thirty-five-percent arid sagebrush and sixty-five-percent earthy underbrush (herb-fern-stem-vine-grass naturalism that makes a joke of Synthetic Jungle) somehow tinged—either due to an unlisted immortelle or, much more likely, just the nutty-caramel sotolon aromachemical common to immortelle and fenugreek as well as to the umami-loam lovage here—with both a booziness (aged-sake from the sotolon-ambrette combo, although gin-tinged from the angelica-cedar-artemisia-camphor combo) and with the strange spiced-maple saccharinity of an autumnal confection (an apple-cider sweetness that, although coming out boldly an hour or so in as the intoxicating marjoram dies down, luckily does not get too loud for too long)—
the overall result being a vegetalista-vetiver fragrance that, in centering a very medicinal-herb and smoky-straw form of chamomile (German chamomile, whose apple character is much more recessive than what we get in the Roman variety I know from tea), displays a spiritual kinship to Narjis Noor (this is to chamomile what Narjis Noor is to daffodil) while it also displays an aromatic kinship with Sunshine Man (a sweet-bitter celery swirl: herbs, cedar, sotolon) and also Fat Electrician given how it builds their shared minty chlorophyll (olive-leaf-based in Fat Electrician) and maply sweetness (syrup-glazed-chestnuts in Fat Electrician) upon vetiver, but stands above these two (definitely above the latter) by what almost seems like a sweetness-curbing dose of the celery-and-herb forward Yatagan (one of my favorite musky bitter forest-floor fragrances of all time) or what is likely just the parsley-celery facets of the lovage root that I am starting to see as a co-star note here (boosting, especially with the help of spikenard, the apothecary aspect of the fragrance and yet adding a warm and spicy sweetness you would not expect from a green frag);
the overall result being, in other words, a garden-and-flower fragrance that, although difficult to see (at least in terms of notes) as related to Hokkaido’s Mount Maruyama from which it gets its name (the cedar and artemisa, along with the aged-sake impression from the lovage, the only real connection I can tell), is easy to see as the signature scent of a reclusive herbalist (perhaps, to draw the Japan connection, we might picture a Yohimbo-looking yamabushi, a mountain ascetic) who walks the walk when it comes to his belief in the hidden powers of plants to heal not only the diseases that have been here before humans (arthritis) and exacerbated by humans (Lyme disease) but also the diseases that would not be were it not for humans (phossy jaw), someone who might lament how humans have disrupted the longstanding homeostasis on Earth but still is wise enough to know that the disruption is nothing but nature’s own doing since humans and even their powerplants are as natural as bees and bacteria.
*Let's workshop this story about a gullible and pained, hypocritical and disturbed, young Twitch streamer adrift in modern life, seeking agency and meaning through the warped frameworks available to her.
**Worked on the ending in and the alternate realities segment today.
An Introduction to Chaos Magic(k)*
Might we call her “damaged”—or just a “fractured mosaic,” a “living glitch,” like so many artifacts of the digital era? Early twenties gone like mist on a mirror, the rest sliding frictionless like a silken slip for yet another photographer (predictable, even when female)—here she sits, a cyber romantic rife with bloom, on this afternoon of late Spring. Eyes of a war-torn dreamer bloodshot beneath a Sponge-Bob baseball cap, that gift-shop relic from Universal Studios (Nickelodeon’s last clean summer before the lamb vindaloo of puberty panties)—take her in, curation her defense against the ontological void.
LA has worked on the girl from childhood: gauntness sculpted by skipped meals and Starbucks, twin chisels of hunger artistry stoking that sleep-ravaging and carb-ravenous cortisol notorious for pulling enough stubborn fat gutward to make a liposuction future a matter of fate. A bantu-knotted Queen of Pentacles (ebony sigil of wealth and fertility) inked on her thigh in that mere blue-green of fouled anchors popular among mustachioed hipsters (Portlandia Popeyes whose deckhand flannel makes them as work-boot-worthy as Springsteen), the whole tarot card too huge and too janky not to beckon a horizon of regret out of the haze—behold our witch, a harvest of nerves awaiting much more than the knife: IG bio “Coder Botanist Gamer Divinator Hechicera”; CashApp handle, circulating in the low orbit of DMs, “$blaxicanbruja.”
Our self-styled “metaverse malvada” sits poised on her Moon Pod, a $400 beanbag masquerading as mental health—or, in more Amazonian light: “the zero-gravity seat of anti-anxiety . . . best suited for when,” so speaks the company to her heart, “adulting gets tough.” Sunlight, beautiful amber through the prescription bottles of her mother’s insistence (“Are you taking your pills?”), slices across the one-room world. Her reflection, close to touching the original, pulses for her like psilocybin in the floor mirror, a full-length leaner from a shopping trip with her rock of a mother—a true queen but whose whiteness, having grown beyond just 1990s “uncool” and into 2020s “problematic,” renders such regality unseen (indeed, nearly indictable to see) even as her sperm-donor of a father, a deadbeat “King” who gets off on making store clerks stretch to gather his loosie quarters, bops down the block one cop bullet away from becoming a city-center statue.
She stares into her own pupils. The glass, a you-are-here tarred by blunt smoke, and the frame around it, baroque with faux patina (that verdigris bloom of leaky plumbing) burnished in random spots as if real bronze, together hold in miniature the whole escapist aesthetic that bulges her many scrapbooks with neon lichen (Temu) and clock gears (Hobby Lobby) and nymph stickers (Etsy): the enchanted forest of tea-cup fairycore (mossy roots, mushroom bark) riveted to the farmhouse oxidation of rustic steampunk (pitted brass, oiled leather) to form the very cottagecore ethos of tinkering curiosity she embodies more than just through her wardrobe ethics (closet of Goodwill finds and free modeling garments she upcycles and sells as her small fight against the exploitation and environmental damage and shoddy craftsmanship—pieces unraveling, clasps breaking, after two wears—of fast-fashion) or through her green thumb (balcony garden bearing the green diversity of stem cuttings and seeds pooped by the SoCal crows she lures with in-shell peanuts)—her sim-self across several metaverse nodes, in an identity performance meant to coax Plato’s heaven to rain “jefa energy” down into her meat world, even more aligned to that visionboard sensibility of cannabinoid slowness and Earth-first intentionality (her avatar in “Afro-Solarpunk,” a low-pop GTA server of optimal oxygen levels from plantlife incorporated into all architecture, owns both a BOHO thrift-shop in Rockford Hills, which is modeled after ASOS (escalators and all) and doubles as a fashion-show venue, as well a compound of hoop-wire greenhouses out in Grapeseed, which hosts a music festival every summer).
She gazes deep into herself as if into something erotic but tinted with shame (like a hand mirror between thighs), desperate to land upon at least some little asteroid of authenticity in a belt of curation stark against the void. Her pupils waver. They zoom in and out—the fragile Zen of the TikTok exercise, a search for the “inner child,” already collapsing even with the little ditty the self-healer is supposed to repeat to stay locked in: “In reflection is where you meet your face and in surrender to discomfort is where you meet your pain.” But this is only her maiden try at the “mindfulness ritual” meant to “uncage the little black girl within” and “purge self-loathing.” What she really hopes, beneath the Gen-Z(odiac) haze rising from such hackneyed phrases of influencer humbug, is to ward off the bitter bile toward what, more and more in tweets on the absurd jest (or, in her words, “the trainwreck”) of being “born just to suffer,” she suggests is reality itself, not just capitalism (her daily-stated foe) whose cruelty alone—and so pushing aside even “The Unbearable Whiteness of Amerikkka” and its local expressions (“The Unbearable Whiteness of Hiking”; “The Unbearable Whiteness of Cinema”; “The Unbearable Whiteness of Math”)—suffices for the middle-finger rigidity of her central vow: “I’m never having kids.”
A stick of palo santo smolders. She intends the sacred whisps, a coniferous snap of lemon peel and star anise, to exorcise the residual guilt (and fart funk) from another broken promise to self: a Grubhub barrage that had spiraled into hours dissolved in that same-old-same-old sativa frenzy of self-loathing, self-loathing displaced incompletely on purpose because it felt best to keep her true target on the edge of her ken—nowhere more marginal and, save the timing dictates of climax, nowhere more central.
A manga subreddit, she knew she should not have clicked, served as the antechamber to the rabbit hole. She had felt the need for nastiness building even before the tacos. Pressing her gamer headphones over her ears as if in noise-canceling prayer, she had tried to swallow it back. For the anesthesia of just one gush, she knew, would derail her day into a stinky bender of mess making, a greedy binge of pain exportation. Scrying through her YouTube playlist (“Focus”) as if mere synthesizer ambiance could derail her fate, she picked a track of isolationist darkwave called “Cryo” whose thumbnail image was of some futuristic facility (as much some cylindrical building as some sleeping giant) silhouetted behind the slate blue wash of a polar blizzard backlit by a sun not deep enough below the horizon for any daring soul to need a flashlight.
A brooding bass drone (an ominous purr of machines related presumably to cryogenics) underneath the ethereal threnody of wind through vents and the reverb clacks of distant footsteps down a polished corridor (as if for ears drugged into a twilight sleep)—an arctic haven, however perfect for keeping the zombie hordes of her horror games at bay, if anything only welcomed the more spiritual enemy within. The cognitive cocoon (the electric blues and radium greens and ultraviolets of Tron abstracted into sound) filtering out external chaos, she watched herself jump with the dexterity of toxic focus one subreddit to the other—each time, the theta waves of the track emboldening the beta waves of Mercury-in-Gemini wit between her ears, another failed last.
hot take: one piece = colonizer propaganda. STOP simping for WHITE SUPREMACISTS!🙄
fullmetal brotherhood mid af
why tf all isekai MCs mayo? 🤮 just end me fam
the way Bleach fetishizes Japanese spirituality for yt weebs. peak appropriation 🤮🤮 kubo canceled🤮(ichigo has big cancer energy tho ngl)
a FUCK-YOU reminder: slice-of-life-anime addiction doesn’t erase privilege, sweaty 💅a K-On! body pillow can’t save you
PSA: your fav shounen = circlejerk toxic masculinity. die mad about it
Shinji Ikari is LITERALLY ME. useless bisexual disasters ✅ daddy issues FOR DAYS ✅ depression naps 24/7 ✅ taurus rising ✅ “get in the fucking robot” = “get a job” ✅
Eiichiro Oda is actually 3 tanuki in a trenchcoat. wake up racists!
villain thiccness tier list: S++: Dio’s cake / F---: literally everyone else. do better!!
tfw no yandere gf to threaten my worthless existence ಥ_ಥ (12th house in Aries problems)
y’all really out here simping for Sailor Moon when she POSTER CHILD yt feminism smfh
Eren did nothing wrong. FUCK this place! said what I said. 😤rumbling 2022 let’s goooo
From there it all slid, and with iceberg-calving momentum punctuated by stinky rounds of endorphin-desperate clit smacks—mean motherfuckers, venomous thwacks of an Aries with a Scorpio Mars, mixing lewd lip bites with a malvada moue. It slid into lashing out at “toxic yts” she takes no care to understand but calls “problematic” (for a tangle of reasons irreducible to how their chess-playing brainpower grates against her own insecurities), lashing out by flagging tweets and tremble-typing venom (same lip bites, same cream) on her customized thocky keyboard (backlit with the desaturated pastels of Miami Vice, a chalky candy of flamingo and periwinkle and seafoam) from a troll account whose amygdala bio, although (or is it because?) puked out in haste, nails the nihilistic tonality of her knotted heart in near haiku.
People lie, leave.
Everything ends. Everyone dies.
Nothing matters.
Such actions (rinse-and-repeat SOS only worsening her TMJ) should be, so she herself would say (word salad only for the uninitiated), no surprise coming from an Aries with a twelfth house ruled by Aries: the sign that resembles the female reproductive system; the name contained by the word “ov-aries.” Such actions are, indeed, all but guaranteed from an Aries who—given the “trauma” of being haunted, since she was the littlest of girls, by past-life lovers from equatorial climates too warmblooded to be reined in by taboo—is unable to sit with her heartbeat, unsquirming; unable to accept her heartbeat as her, unalien.
The whole chart is important. Our witch is not ruled by darkness, at least not any more darkness than any human. Moon in Pisces (deep empathy), Venus in Pisces (selfless love), Jupiter in Cancer (nurturing generosity)—the celestial bodies place the biggest heart in the center of her being, the whole chart together entailing a person no stranger to self-sabotaging bursts but rooted in a radical enough to bedridden her in remorse. On her Twitch streams, for example, she will repeat—like compulsive tick, pushing the line on too many times—her regret of having to poison a tree or kill anything resembling a cat as part of the game’s mission: “Here we go again? Why can’t I just fucking give it love? I can’t get a ruby for that?” And she walks the walk. More than one Mother’s Day now she has gathered her friends up in a van to buy up all the flowers from street vendors and then, after freeing up the day for at least a few Mexicans in a country that hates them so much it would wall them out, bomb important women in their lives—especially the ones this same society, this orange-is-the-new-white society, says are not real—with surprise bouquets. Her darker actions, however puppeteered by forces impersonal to anything human or earthy, do have practical mundane import. These few and far betweens, offsetting her norm of smiling care, serve to vent that deep frustration she feels from seeming to get nowhere with all her smiling care, that deep frustration that tends to build up when impatience has her overlook (so she has put it in the confessional moments of many manifestation videos) that the universe has been fulfilling her desires but only in a more trickle form—the best form since, in her words, “I’d freak the fuck out if I got all my wishes at once. That’s how I am.”
Kid Cudi’s “By Design,” on its eighth reverberation, Spotifys from her iPhone Mini (rose quartz under rhinestone), last night’s kohl smudged around leaden eyelids—bruise-like halos framing ruby sclera. This siren song of self-discovery and amor fati serves as the ethereal cornerstone in the soundtrack to her life’s film. It is a film in which only she—auteur and star—can play the lead. The screenplay she long ago began plotting out (granularity reaching even into camera angles and lighting effects), stressing—who could resist?—the wholesome bits (like how in third grade, in accordance with her notion of student-of-the-month code, she quietly green crayoned the name of her rival on the ballot card, accepting her one-vote loss with an angelic smile and a hug for the newly-elected class president; or like how in second grade, and with not even a hint of poking fun, she rallied her clique to shower the class “dork” with valentines, there with a toothy smile in the background as always like Zelig) yet cutting the sordid bits (like how, not always in private, pussy- and pudendum-dipped digits, slick with intentional hints of shit, trace and retrace that OCD path up to her quivering nostrils; or, speaking of sniffs, like how—no less than twenty times a day, especially when concentrating at the keyboard—she rubs her lips with the back of her index and middle fingers, parting them with gooey-tacky clicks (like a roach scurrying across tile, audible only in dead quiet) to reach the stale wet on their inner sides, and then rubs those fingers against her nostrils, back and forth in feline self-soothing, to savor the way her mouth biome smells against open air; or like how one time, several really, she thought about diazepaming her cat and then hanging herself; or like how as a tween sitter she would pinch the toddler’s nose with her chronic pussy fingers and CPR blow down its throat, watching unease cloud its eyes as it burped up distention; or like how in stores she would slip away from her blind cousin for minutes on end, pubescent panties soggy—yes, that same fierce and forecasting lip bite set in stone—as his panic crescendoed clutching the bouncy-ball cage; or like how she climaxes hardest when picturing herself a calico-gowned slave torn bloody while being choked under halitosis whispers of “filthy nigglet” and “ooh, monkey bitch likes it”).
In the film this song will echo muffled from another room, coming on right after “The Man Who Sold the World” (Nirvana’s Unplugged version). She will be shown hunched on her depression-filthy toilet (knock-kneed) as she passes what in truth had been a late clot, but what the film will reimage as the blastocyst of a scuzzy modeling agent who called her skin “caramel” and who, before everything faded in the restaurant, seemed a cookie-cutter Sagittarian: gregarious, affable. Two full Strathmore sketch pads, awash with charcoal spurts of psychography, lay out what on screen will spasm as mind-splintered flashbacks to a Beaujolais-wine dinner laced with more than just civet-musk whispers (“You got potential in this industry”):
street curb, car horns, muted laughter, backseat, black;
slow zipper, cloth ripping, black, defecation feel, black;
ceiling twirl, more ripping, “Stinky slut, huh?,” black;
shit taste, air hunger, “All the way!,” pool stench, black;
sour vomit, black, “Gotta get you cleaned up,” black;
lavender dawn, car door, “Nasty little drunk,” black;
cruel sun, “Last stop,” car door, black, “Out, come on”;
fawn-buckling legs, black, bathroom-tile piss puddle;
head of thick soup, black, curled-up shower screams.
Droning underneath, as always now, was what perhaps made her so vulnerable to being witch-pilled by manifestation influencers in the first place: that contrabass of revulsion at how dark her dark gums are, that dysmorphic hyperfocus whose grip has only tightened since that one high school evening when she poured over old photos of a little girl too naïve to restrain her squinty-eyed cheesings. But the latest iteration of the song, many octaves above that baseline thrum, sent her mind lurching: from nice thoughts about how striking her eyes look (even without her typical green contacts), to humbled awe at Jupiter’s crimson tempest (unbelievably Earth-sized), to an idea—a half-baked epiphany—she was just about to scribble down had not a stark shadow from a cumulus cloud, a trick of light mistaken for her dad, made the idea (and the plan to jot it all out) dissipate in the equally sudden return of light. It did not matter anyway. Typical her, and unhelped by the uptick in sessions of screaming into pillows (not her only purgative form of self-medication), she had forgotten that she already had that forgotten eureka—tweeting its very tune (not even a month back): how “with so damn much of Earth’s oceans unexplored, for all we know they harbor giant swirling galactic portals”; and how “the Bermuda Triangle might be one such gateway sucking in ships and even planes”; and how “perhaps aliens will invade from the depths like some zombie hand of God to smite humanity for its sins. #SeaMysteries #GalacticGateways #BermudaPortal”—hashtag incantations perhaps meant to summon a thrill ride, even one whose woodchopper end means freedom from her skin.
Before “By Design” echoed through the space, first the loop had been “Almeda” whose volume increase she timed with an overdose application of the Santeria fragrance chanted by Solange throughout: Florida Water, Lanman and Kemp’s citrusy-bergamot cinnamon-clove eau de cologne (created in the 19th century by Robert Murray) whose celebrated spirit-cleansing and evil-shunning powers perhaps rival the ghost-transistor occult powers of Parker Brother’s Ouija Board (created in the 19th century by Elijah Bond). Slapped out of her sulfurous rut of anger by the song-plus-scent synergy of BIPOC pride, next the loop had been “Head Over Heels” by Tears for Fears—a love song seared into her psyche by the iconic school-grounds sequence in Donnie Darko (a turn-of-the-millennium cult film, set just after Regan’s America). Our brujita had rented it with friends (in the spirit of the subreddit “im14andthisisdeep”) right around the time self-harm hospitalizations among the first generation of non-free-range kids—already rewired by social media before puberty—began their still-climbing spike into today’s world: chronic cortisol and chronic sleep disruption; chronic exposure to unrealistic bodies and ideas; chronic use of chronic to dampen the algorithms that have students scream in seizure fits over campus speakers they never even have to see and that have them so intolerant of my-truth dissent that professors—well, at least those unfortunate to have “colonialist skin” (or other “supremacist optics”)—find themselves purged for tweeting links to “wrong think.” Our brujita does not recall this song, an ominous cover by the Digital Daggers, playing during the Season 10 finale of Degrassi as Eli—the swoop-banged emo guy to whom she wrote several fan letters—waited for Claire at their special bench. Nor does she recall her babysitting uncle playing it years before as she cat-walked white Barbies with an imaginary dad (who visits to this day, too chokey in recent years for her to resist rapey clit thwacks) inside her “blanket palace” between the sofa and the loveseat—this anthem drawing her gaze from the slit entrance to behold a dreamlike montage (over two minutes): students dressed alike and gossiping, dancing impossibly fast and then impossibly slow, snorting substances at their hallway lockers (all captured in the scrutiny of a Steadicam eye corkscrewing through a menagerie of intensive purposes alien for a girl still in kindergarten).
Augmented by the flashback pop on GTA radio stations, in consort with Netflix’s Stranger Things and Black Mirror (the “San Junipero” episode, in particular), this melody dripping friendzone infatuation stretches her nostalgia well before her time to a time (its trends, events, songs around which people dated and lost car keys and jobs and had children and died and watched TV like now) when her mom was (incredibly to conceive) just a kid: that big-hair time, and its culture—which she grasps, like humans trying to form a picture of a hypercube, only by its filtered shadow (when she even does at all)—of card catalogues and neon malls and token arcades, and of reticulated sunsets and ET and Members-Only jackets, and of trapper keepers and the Oregon Trail game, and of staticky analog synth and grainy pixel art; and of Polaroid flapping and Atari joysticks clicking, and of beeps and boops in wood-paneled basement dens, and of acid-wash jeans and Garbage Pail Kid door stickers, and of Madonna’s lace gloves and Jackson’s moonwalk, and of “Be Kind Rewind” and Nancy’s “Just Say No,” and of little Arnold’s “Whatchu talkin bout, Willis?” and of “It’s 10 PM, do you know where your children are?” and of Care Bears and Walkmen and Aqua-Net coughing, and of claymations like Gumby and the California Raisins and of the ditty “After these messages we’ll be right back,” and of the futurist cityscape glowing in Blade Runner, and of shoulder pads and MTV and Brat Pack glitterati. Less Than Zero, in particular (one of the few artifacts of which she has direct experience), stands out to her, bottling as it does her LA as she imagines it once was: Reagan coke lines, Spader and Robert Downey hickeys.
Although too unconscious for her to verbalize, it stands out to her, more importantly, because it speaks to something quite primitive in her—as do as well Nirvana grunge and Tarantino mayhem and even just the fleeting sight of any one of those knee-scraped unleaded-gas latchkey kids now limping into the weed shop for arthritis relief, for insomnia. Pro-“woke” and often “speaking truth to power”(tweeting “Can’t believe #geriatrics run the US/Go to the damn light already you #victimizers/ Let #GenZ #decolonize the US into #safespace for all/fsfsfsfs lol bye”), she would never put it this way but deep down it reminds her—like wolves might mollycoddled house dogs, or like tribespeople might air-conditioned urbanites—that we were not always wussies hooked on constant comfort and reassurance, acting as if the world owes us, interpreting anything unnerving as a violent affront worthy of dire vengeance; that we were not always nurtured in grade schools that ban the mere making of snowballs let alone the “toxic masculinity” of tossing them at a friend; that being “traumatized” was not always trending; that we were not always so anxious “call out” people—tattle—when our right not to be offended is violated; so medded out in pre-k and helicoptered by guardians giving out first-place trophies just for showing up; so hooked on screens and the dopamine of likes; so “triggered,” so viscerally “outraged,” so “displaced” by jokes and harsh facts of reality that we see to it, yes, that even those once culturally-sanctioned to trigger us(comedians, teachers) lose their livelihoods for doing so; so gung ho to “dismantle,” “cancel,” whatever makes us—or that we semi-pretend (understandably, given our time where victimhood means valor) makes us—unsettled; so bitter about living in an unswaddling “yt world”(whose rough edges do not always “validate” our feelings or “affirm” “our truth” or “center” how we “self-identify” or “recognize” and “foreground” our “lived experience”)that we openly flirt with self-harm and, yes, even suicide to prove the veracity of our professed victim narratives(perhaps in hope to be rescued by “glitter families” who will never hit us with “non-affirming” feedback).
Our brujita—yes, “dime-a-dozen” we might say— follows the palo santo with a bundle of sage twigs, their hallowed smoke—intermingling with her scent of cocoa, copper coins, and vaginosis beef—“purifying the space,” “purging negativity,” while coaxing green into her life. Part-time as a dispensary tech pays McDonalds wages. And few but tumbleweeds roll through her Depop page, which sells “vintage, preloved, and reworked” clothing (upcycled y2k tube tops that say “Angel” or “Chula,” tweed skirts, calico prairie gowns, servant frocks, cheetah-print rompers, dragonfly cheongsams, steampunk corsets, sexy slips from the nineties—all modeled by her: one hip often dipped low, forcing the IT band of the jutted other to smoosh the bursa over her greater trochanter chronically enough to make non-avatar runways an Ibuprofen burden in ten years; her forearm serpent fork-tonguing her left hegu, that dime spot between thumb and forefinger on the dorsal side of the hand, which she believes(and finds) does kill pain anywhere when acupressured. Few really order anything from her Redbubble shop listing iPhone cases that say “Chula” and “Babygirl” along with Tamagotchi stickers, or stickers (often with associated images, like nail-polish bottles) that say “Treat Yo Self,” “Blk Love,” “Cyber Bae,” “Witch in the Streets, Switch in the Sheets,” and “Shy in the Streets, Freak in the Sheets” or stickers—most commonly—of retrofuturism as captured in the cyan-and-magenta-dominant neon pallet of Blade Runner, vaporwave aesthetics of futures that never came to be: perfectly polished black-to-midnight-blue wireframe flatscapes of glowing gridlines (fuchsia, mystic violet, steel blue) converging at a horizon where, below a firmament of dot stars, hovers a phantasmic triangle outline of radiant cyan, white smoke, and ghost white; a sixteen-bit supercar, like a Ferrari Testarossa, with rear-window louvers reflecting the fuchsia of a “Tokyo” skyline at Super-Nintendo dusk, red taillights oozing a halation trail in the subtle haze; a midnight blue Malibu palm tree as foreground to a huge outrun sunset with a color gradient from Indian red on the bottom to golden yellow, its bottom half cut by thicker-to-thinner lines(the gradient here: brick red, burnt sienna, tomato), simulating its partial dipping below the horizon as if sinking into a pixelated sea of electrified mist. Few more than a hundred follow her wellness woo on YouTube, where she vlogs on various matters: chakra teas, marijuana strains, horoscopes, bitcoin, and lately how to use gaming worlds for manifestation. “Having our Sims avatars live out,” she tells viewers (her spin on the Goddardian belief that to assume you already achieved x helps make you achieve x), “our dream romances and careers and experiences—that can literally séance such possibilities into reality. It can do so better than role models even. Because our avatars are versions of us, rather than some strangers on social media. I have role models that own property and compost and all that. But it hits different when I see my digital self already owning property and composting. Think about it like fake it until you make it. And see, and here’s the big thing—it matters what your target is. It’s not this desired outcome or that—the super specifics. The deepest manifestation aims to pull into reality the person who would get those outcomes just by how they live. Our avatar makes that person clearer in our minds. That clearer picture helps us live in a way where we make choices just like it.” And the clientele for her solo-and-nipples-only Only Fans, an account she has not logged into “in like a year,” are cheap. Hers are at least, made up mainly of boys ready to fall for anyone—let alone a melanated Gen Z Bambi-eyed in cosplay wigs whom, over years of Twitch-streaming herself playing GTA, they watched with Cheeto fingers change from Emo-Scene (jagged-hair over one eye Hot-Topic eyelinered in high-intensity obsidian, Cosmo-driven texting of flirt emojis to crushes; Cosmo-driven whispering so boys will lean in) and now to botanical-divination pre-med dropout (face echoing an aging uncertainty as to whether her recent dates have been culminating in rape).
Consider one of the many worlds (one of the many total ways things might be) that never perfectly coincides with the real one however close it edges. Our brujita’s counterpart here in this alternative reality is not in every detail the brujita we know. Yet she remains similar enough in habit and fear, in desire and outlook.
The overlap is stark. Her counterpart too alternates between weed and her vape while nibbling at the skin of her lip, especially the hard bits when she forgets to drink enough water. She too pinches her nose, as an adult, before going underwater. She too checks the “raised by narcissists” subreddit with the regularity of a ritual, as if it could confirm something essential about her condition. She too watches, each night in bed, “lucky-scoop” TikTok livestreams in which Chinese women seated behind roiling rice tumblers and shoveling out A-minus crystals, towers and spheres—/sa-fears/ (drawn-out pronunciation and sultry tone right out of the dragon lady handbook). She too plans, always planning but never quite finding the time, to take curanderismo classes on Coursera. She too searches, “truffle hunts” would be the more accurate phrase, for trauma bonds online. She too cuts off digital friends at the first whiff of dreams failing to match reality, emboldened to regard challenge as toxic by her culture—a my-truth culture exactly similar to the one we see in the real well-to-do West where testicular injuries among female athletes rise each day on a real Earth of mammals bent by evolution toward shortcuts and tribal affiliation.
The overlap is rich. Her counterpart too dissociates at the edge of intrusive thoughts. She too believes her mood is largely shaped by, if not a complete function of, Mercury’s position. She too—needing wedges between her thighs when she lies on her side—sleeps with plushies that have long since needed a good wash, so long that—bracketing the undercurrent aroma of moldy basement meets marijuana—there are many sections whose initial fatty-acid tang (yeasty and musky in the right way to be picked out as vulva) has devolved through all the stages back to olfactory neutral: vinegar ferment (forgotten kombucha of an artisan known for challenging animalics to his releases), lipid oxidation (old penny thumbed with rancid nose sebum), musty decay (cardboard in an attic). She hides crystals in other people’s rooms, placing them under pillows in the manner of a crucifix in a demon-haunted world (as if they might ward off unnamed forces). She burdens those close to her with her hyper fears. She avoids driving in city centers due to mistrust in her ability to parallel park.
The overlaps sinks down even to the fraught relation to her body. Her counterpart too slaps her clit purple—mouthing “Beat it the fuck up”—when she gets overwhelmed, as if sensation could override the surge of feeling or at least pin it to something definite. She feels that her body is too unanchored to her, that its animalism is too shocking for subtantial incorporation into any stable sense of self; too menacing in its odors and cravings and vulnerabilities, in its girlie-fantasy-breaking pimples and cellulite, to count as under her control. She prays—with stubborn precision—for intimacy somewhere between being untouched and being used up, a middle ground between two extremes that almost meet together—in a kind of horseshoe theory—in neglect: that of, on the one hand, getting no sex despite all her overkill signals (coating her lips with lipsmacker lube in a provocative way full of creamy skin-smacking pops, touching his leg, and even having to resort—blowing the whole point of not wanting responsibility for the desired degradation—to taking on a sultry tone as she says “I love when a man puts his thumb in my ass as he fucks me”) and that of, on the other hand, being treated as a dumpster despite not letting out one clot of what has been dumped (called mean names—“Why you stink, bitch?”—and told she cannot sleep over or even take a shower before getting kicked out). She prays, to tune things more precisely to her ideal, for that cuddle-afterward cranny between use-me-abuse-me dickdowns and the check-if-that-was-okay-after-a-good-slap-or-loogie-to-the-face dickdowns.
And yet, however much she too tries to force her life into the shape of a screenplay (both through retrospective editing and future decisions best for film), her counterpart is not entirely the same as our brujita. She breaks the mold by maintaining an anonymous Instagram account dedicated to her eating disorder, its description carrying a Simone de Beauvoir quote misattributed to Betty Friedan: No one is more arrogant toward women, more . . . scornful, than the man who is anxious about his virility.” Her side hustles include not just those of our brujita: dog-sitter and clinical-trial subject. This young lady also serves as a haloperidoled Horror-zine editor who, on the afternoon of this zoom in, types out a call for “transgressive submissions.” She wants gut-punching Lovecraftian submissions especially from nonwhite and nonhetero writers. She wants “visceral testicle kickers” that “throw a middle-finger up to conformity.” Her warning is stark, however. “Unless the author wants to be blacklisted here and reported to all affiliated magazines, all material—without exception—must be inclusive”: it should be prefaced by trigger warnings if containing elements related to cultural appropriation or misogyny; it should contain BIPOC characters only if the author is BIPOC; it should depict neither neurodivergent characters striving to become neurotypical nor any animals getting injured (not just in the submission itself but across the body of the author’s writings “no matter how deep into the past”).
The differences accumulate with pressure. Even so, how her counterpart thinks and behaves in these worlds seems to say something about her. Does it not say something about who she is here, in this world, that in many of them she has already jumped out from an artificial cake, topless just like in that Seagal movie Under Siege—tight nipples yet to have been sex-sucked beyond the little-yearling diameters they share in actuality? Surely it sheds some light on the core of who she is that in many of this tighter set of worlds, the “Seagal set,” she then—still smeared with frosting and smelling to herself like the EZ-bake oven of her childhood (a distracting daydream for her job, one that would have made her more money if she revealed it)—dances for bills at some bachelor party. Fed shots, she dance and dances into escalation: a hand job for one persistent tipper whirling into hand jobs for most of the others who, feeling left out on what they convinced themselves came with the party package, demanded entry into the hotel bathroom as well, reeking of booze and musk and stomped cigarettes—her self-flesh dissociation in the pulse of dance music, unmuted each time the door opened, keeping intact her self-identity through all the sadistic hair-tugging by middle-aged sausage-nails cutting into her scalp.
Sitting next to her snake plant, in the bloat sweatpants of actual reality on this actual afternoon, our witch (she/her, but if born only five years later they/them)—yes, “gullible” we might easily say—pulls deep on a Presidente preroll of sativa-dominant moonrocks, setting up a thick French inhale to catch in a messy-sexy mirror selfie for her Tumblr. Her Tumblr, whose theme she HTMLed and CSSed to look like a pixel-art rendition of her actual desk (but with plum shades like #dea4ee and #ce94df), serves as a manifestation board mainly of images: fanned-out hundreds, Schiaparelli haute couture, black cats, tea leaves, druzy gems, seven-day candles, old bridges of moss stone over rainy-day streams, dried hinojo sticks for gas and bruised cervixes, dried hamula for gallbladder pain and carpet burns, dried diente de león for heartache and vulvodynia, dried barba de elote for urinary tract infections, dried yellow dock root for Bartholin-gland cysts, dried sangre de drago for sores and anal fissures, cash emojis, plant emojis, crystal-ball emojis, Hello-Kitty jewelry, purses, tiaras, makeup gear, Dior, Chanel, Gucci, Jimmy Choo, Louis Vuitton, a somewhat-braggy record of her rare modeling gigs, fat stars “gorgeous” on red carpets, perfected pouts, stills of anime girls in Lolita panties with heart eyespulsing, the occasional manacle, kinky scenes of shirtless men dad-chokey and yet not too rough—and, yes, emoji spells of her own concoction. Crystal ball, candle, cash, credit card, two houses (one without a tree and then one with a tree) closed by candle and crystal ball—that is a spell, for instance, for financial freedom and a home. Crystal ball, candle, scissor, flame, bridge and then flame, scissor, candle, crystal ball—that is a spell for cutting ties with all negative things or people.
Our Cali girl is a witch. Do not judge a book by its cover. Yes, she likes to underpaint her lips (close to the center bud of a Tokyosynth geisha that cannot but invite images of a young Harrison Ford for all who know) and in photo shoots she takes on a face that unifies what otherwise might seem competing aesthetics (the over-it-already valley girl lifted right out of Clueless, the space-cadet pothead, the traumatized-into-autopilot victim who cannot bring herself to eat), a face she has devoted hours practicing in the mirror: a kuudere blankness (the closed mouth and thousand-yard stare of a porcelain doll) that, smackdab in the overlap between bratty boredom and gloomy detachment, seems meant to challenge suitors to try their best to shake the rich inner life out of her and get some juices flowing, which might even involve—at least least in her case and depending, of course, on how long the whole stoic act is kept up without her looking for an excuse to leave the car—a surprise lurch for her throat followed by “Panties the fuck off” orders under the florescent glint of the glovebox knife. Witches come in all shapes and sizes.
She is not your typical Maine witch her same age (call her “Hagatess”), holding mugs with wrist-warmer hands in winter and dancing with hobbit feet in flowing hippie skirts the color of dried hemlock needless and of iron-rich clay indicative of her menstrual smell. They might share a lot: self-harm, direct (another reason for the wrist warmers) and indirect (a lot of drinking); bouts of mania (cycling and cycling) where they find themselves going about humming and singing and casting spells (especially against white males who accept that the orange scourge at the helm can ever say anything right) all under the watch of their cats who know the pattern by now. But they are different in important ways.
Both might have talisman necklaces of bone and leather. But our brujita, too close to Kardashian gravity, is more likely to have it hanging on the wall than wear it around her neck as a signature. And she definitely will not have picked these items from a carcass found as she twirled across roads and through blueberry fields along the way to gather eggs from a neighbor farm. Both burn herbs. But she will not have hung them to dry while tending some sooted hearth, at least any one realer than 8k.
Both of their gossip will almost always orbit around who is problematic. And while white men will always be the ultimate culprit in each of their cases (no matter the exoticism of the issue), she is more likely to start and end on those white gamers who still streamed on Twitch even on the day meant for “BIPOC voices only.” Never will the pathway to white-male demonization begin with bear tracks that have be circling the property.
Both care about animals. But she does not go out on turtle rescue missions in a tattered headscarf reminiscent of wild summer berries or a rising harvest moon—and she would have chosen a better-looking cat than the one with just one eye. Both have cars and rarely drive them. Be she never had her trunk brimming with maitake pulled from the base of oak trees. Both identify as feminists. But she does not keep massive bush smelling of goat farm (lanolin meets costus meets Assam oud)—more pleasant than it sounds, except for the fact that it is spread through the ass like in Armenian porn.
Both resell used items. But she is not going out too any physical yardsales (unless it is on vacation or something)—and it will be not the broken tables that draw her eye but the clogs. Both love food. But the rare occasions when she cooks are framed as “adulting” (pre-spiraled zucchini noodles with a jar of Rao’s Marinara is her go to)—never are you going to get out of her roasted apples alongside liver pate from a neighbor’s chicken or even gazpacho (let alone because it is the end of tomato season).
Both have called crisis hotlines and have been in periods without a period from malnutrition. But she has a vast amount of followers on her various apps, as well as a proud-to-be-black cultural gratitude to fall back on. And powerlessness against fast food has made it such that her malnutrition has never gotten so bad that she missed more than one in a row—let alone for six years of what turned her face into a jack-o-lantern, very close to the hag stereotype from Grimm through Disney.
Both might photo dump. But hers will be mostly be online (pussy-print thirst traps you are a perv to shoot loads at or even just ogle at too long), usually not physical photos in a physical fire in a private ceremony to declare the old self dead. Both will watch birds. But she has never had to wait for wild turkeys to cross the road, not sure which way to go (like squirrels) before scattering in each direction—one or two actually taking flight in what seems like a keg of beer that had spouted special-ed wings that send them crashing into trees like out of control helicopters.
Both like cemeteries. But she does not visit one at least once a month and has never been to ones so old that the headstones are eroded to nubbins and only list male names (the women only “wife of” or “daughter of”). Both—especially considering who the president is—get real depressed (and, in fact, both say that they really only feel feel human for a couple of weeks out of the year, a cruel tease before the plunge back into misery), where washing up can be a chore and where festering in filth can actually feel safe (given both their histories with locals treating them like blowup dolls after a blackout bender). But she has too much face time with people—and too many girlfriends who are like “Tch. Girl, we goin out!”—to hold out for weeks on stinky end.
Both have devoted a lot of time to the bottle over the past decade—white supremacy cited, in both their cases, as the biggest factor. But she has never experienced any noticeable liver damage on blood tests or suffered from painful and unsightly ascites and pretty much always stops before the point of blackout. Both have gotten suicidal. But she would fold on her bluff before the point where a wellness ambulance came with such scrutiny that the explanation for her blood loss required her hospitalization: dressed in paper scrubs and lifted to a jail-like part of the wing where medical staff and security alike have no qualms about sticking their fingers deeper than what could be chalked up to the struggle.
Our witch admires the mushroom foraging of white witches like Hagatess. Her own mushroom foraging, not counting chaga online, stays mainly an idea—not just because she is “high maintenance” and in LA and spoiled by supermarkets but because she has a duty to honor her “baddies” and so feels the tug away from birch trees and into clurbs where knowing how to twerk black-girl magic is more important than telling apart the toxic Jack-o-lantern from the edible Chanterelle (not her friend but a mushroom). And besides, were she to forage, it would be for psychedelic triggers as opposed to literal food.
She has no hag neighbors in which to see what she will become, women who make artisanal goods for cats. She has a cat but she would be quick to draw the line, not taking in twenty especially not those with missing eyes (along with blind turtles too). She is more likely to play dress to impress on Roblox (or at least watch the most fagulous stereotype of a man play it) then build—yes, even in her mania—care packages for various people, full of tightly folded handwritten notes that tell any normie—before even readign what they say—to keep far away.
She is a cyber witch. She is a Neuromancer witch. She is a transhumanist witch. There is a divide between them. The buffer is best represented by the girls in the movie The Craft. They are chic like her and will go to Micky-D’s like her. And yet, unlike her and like Hagatess, they are still ready to go out in the wilderness and do seances. They will go out there into real wilderness, not some AirBnB acreage. They will go out nude together and, when it gets cold, form a snake tangle of masturbation among raised roots along the steep banks of a carcass stream—roots risen so high from the ground (their knobs looking like rheumatoid knees) that the trees they feed (quiet but alive like demented ents) all lean at satanic angles like they are trying to escape the poison of some animating blight below.
Our witch is a balcony gardener with a keycard in her pocket, not a forest gardener with a compass in the sun and moon. She is a programmer who might buzz her clit with a little purple pocket bullet while stuck in traffic, not a story-teller who knows—and for this reason could only be played by Charlotte Gainsbourg—where the stream bottlenecks over a granite ledge just right. She is an autoimmune wreck whose been on doxy for acne since she was a teen, not an autoimmune wreck whose pelvis has been ravaged porous and whose digestive tract has been stalled (Bell’s palsy of the gut) by tick-borne disease she tries to keep in check with foraged knotweed. She’s a sybaritic urbnanite who curates images of old blankets on her Tumblr, not an ax-sharpening woodswoman who has blankets passed down over generations of patchwork. It is the difference between ring light from Amazon and firelight from fallen trees. It is the difference between elderberry Emergen-C made on a moisture-control assembly line and elderberry salves made from what was picked out of thick hedges admired for both what they represent (boundary between field and forest, everyday and mystical) and for the “clues to enlightenment” that badgers and foxes give us by means of how they tunnel portals through and under them.
Hedges do connect them, though. For both are custodians of hedges—although one in a more literal sense: picking its medicine, keeping open its tunnels and in crossing might even take a breath in recognition that crossing is occurring. The hedge, as even the most reclusive old-timey witch should agree, is a metaphor such that to be a custodian of hedges is to be a custodian of in-between spaces. That is how she sees her programming code: it is a way to thrive in and maintain thresholds, places where the veil between the ordinary and the magical converge. Fixing bugs is to her like clearing a hole is to Hagatess. Password entries are like crossings. For her exiting cyberspace is like exiting the mystical wild. She sees healing, and finds healing, in being able to link from meat to pixel.
Seated still, she rotates her SpongeBob hat to the back and leans in to exhale on Pothos, her black longhair cat—tail wavey in a sun slice among the stuffed menagerie (a velvet-patch rabbit, an eyeless teddy bear, a unicorn whose once-sparkling horn sags like a captive orca fin, a ragged plush dragon pilfered from a sleepover friend, and other animals tinged with testicle musk) on her bed (twin-sized, its duvet an heirloom quilt not passed down).The exhale sways the pheasant-feathered dreamcatcher (handmade by drunken Navajos) and a dream satchel (fringed nubuck with a color print of a mighty buffalo)hung to recharge in the full moon slated for tonight—garnet, amethyst, sodalite, mugwort, chamomile inside: chamomile to calm her mind and ensure falling asleep, mugwort to help morning recollection of her dreams, sodalite to help avoid panic attacks and nightmares, amethyst to help remain in deep sleep below dreams, garnet to help keep down intrusive thoughts of suicide.
Her clear quartz pendant (resin), wellspring of clarity, dangles free of her chest as she leans in—paused, stuck. Its machine facets refract LA sunlight into the Bacardi, one sip left (to avoid guilt). The bottle stands beside a jar of bentonite-clay face mask and her bible Liber Null, the defining book on chaos magic. It sits open (spine up),highlighted pink and green and blue as if homework—margin stars and all, especially on the passage she finds most moving. “Put a brick through your television; explore sexualities which are unusual to you” [(“!!!!”)]Do something you normally feel to be”—the words here pen circled by page-slicing pressure—“utterly revolting” “no matter how extreme” [(“No matter how” she writes)].
An insight snaps her from what she, well, does not recall in its demand to be written down. Worried it will pass, she pushes aside another key book Babalawo (source, however, of guilt since she keeps falling asleep on it), to take up her diary, ignoring another source of guilt: the card sticking out of it. (That card is a love spell to herself, Venus petitioned for solidarity. “I embrace who I am,” it says in her cursive. “Love is my birthright. My words are a spell. Remember, the more I love myself, care for myself, the less I depend on love from others.” Once she purchases some rosewater from Amazon, yet another amount the countless things she keeps putting off, she can finish the ritual: voicing the words before bed in the flickering light of a rose-oil candle echoed in the mirror, then slipping the card, sprinkled with finger-flicked rosewater, under her lilac pillow until dawn, at which point she must kiss and hang it(by a ribbon of her hair threaded through the middle)in ample sun, most likely next to her teen photo, her “fat photo” (she calls it)—long a depression trigger but now, having lost all the flab, one of empowerment.
The diary sits on her lap, as if poised for opening. The resinous blunt—nuggets within coated in hash oil and dusted with kief—smothers itself out, propped against her crystal pipe—aventurine (green, for money)—kicked from her spell of guilt-burger shitposting. Below a desktop shelf holding books that range from the feminine-healing guide Sacred Woman and the #metoo historical novel Blood Water Paint to Neville Goddard’s The Creative Use of Imagination and Junji Ito’s Remina and Uzumaki manga series, her PC-gaming monitor, flanked by unlit candles that say “Black Girl Magic,” displays a 3d avatar of herself in a black plunge-top dress, one hand resting on her iliac crest—realistic in a lo-fi way, an indie way (but lacking eyebags and acne). She designed it with Blender, graphics software she hopes to use in the future for what she calls “metaverse fashion modeling”: avatars navigating virtual catwalks in pixel couture whose hues might alter with each stride, fabrics coded to shimmer in different ways against real-time feedback of floating hearts and flowers.
Zodiac decals come with territory of diary keepers like her. And she is no exception. The outer cover reads “Make JEFA Moves” and in the center there is a mini headshot of her from one of those girlie instant-camera reboots: green hair in two buns at the top like Chun Li; warm-pink lip gloss named “Nymphette A40”; one rhinestone sticker below each lower eyelid. The inner cover is sharpied with positives—what she calls “Princess Energy Affirmations”:
“Money comes to me effortlessly”;
“I attract all forms of green into my life”;
“My skin color and hair texture are pretty”;
“Princess treatment is my NORMAL!”;
“I’m the very definition of an IT girl”;
“But I’m just too glam to give a damn”;
“I know I’m meant for so much more”;
“Abundance flows to me with ease”;
“The universe caters to MY serenity.”
Her reflection only gets stickier when high. She opens the diary, however, in an inspired liberation. She pays no mind, her mission stronger than ADHD, to the two all-uppercase commitments to herself: “I will practice on Blender and Python daily” and “I will date myself, buy myself chocolate, and take myself to the movies.” She does not try to make out the cramped scribbles of explanation to herself: “My standards are high because I already have everything I need” and “Napping is perfectly fine. Isn’t that what the great ancestors, in their slavery, wished they got a chance to enjoy?” Below them sings, in multiple colors of gel pen (blush pink, baby blue, bruise purple), her romantic goal—small but significant: “drop acid in the Rockies with my future husband.” But she does not trace her fingers overt the words as she normally might have: delicate in a reverie of wispy longing and then harder, with audible bruxism and clicks of jaw, as a physical means to stave off the old predawn suspicion that her dates rarely call back not because of a lack of beauty or plans or dreams, or even so much because the most intuitive of them can pick up her tendency to pettiness and pot-headed depressiveness, but rather because—mammals will be mammals—of a genital malodor that, she fears, her emo-era procedure (coconut oil and rosemary dabbed garlic cloves inserted before bed; fenugreek teas and apple-cider vinegar shots; prayers to Orunmila during calendula rinses; boric-acid suppositories and yogurt baths and goldenseal-slippery-elm-bark capsules) might have only exacerbated the issue—morphing not just the superficial weather but, especially considering the years of doxy, the very microbiotic climate of what almost any man, just looking at her in the store (not even yet seeing how it still has that baby-fat plumpness, that irresistible jiggle of cradle-robbing taboo) would be willing to cut off the tip of his pinky just to latch his mouth too as he jerked off.
Inside she fucks the lines. She fucks them like the foreplay. Her content is stereotypical Pisces Neptune: the boundary between reality and fantasy dissolved, like Ajax fizzed by sink water, into a dreamscape of anesthetic blue. But the delivery, bucking motions of erotic greed—that is all Scorpio Mars driven through Aries impulse: erratic spacing plus pen pressure that indents through several pages, even slashing through at the underlines and crossouts.
Like literally, for real, I can be all in my head
delusional asf, like this shit’s just a dream.
The “delusional” are happier. Call it “irrational.”
Fine. But isn’t it rational if it improves my life?
The personas we develop are delusions anyway,
right? They keep us sane to go to work each day—
how else when the universe approaches heat death?
Let my delusions be scarecrows. Let them frighten
any so-called “reality” seeking to devour my crop: ME.
To cast out demons, especially if those demons
are “realities,” requires a witch’s highest magic.
Black magic, white magic—I am the high priestess.
I am a witch. I will shut my mind from realities
no good for me to hear. I will hypnotize myself.
“They are just opinion. They’re Just OPINION.
My truth, my inner knowing, is all that matters.
I am my own mother. I am my own mother.
I am the programmer. My decisions, my style,
come from me, not from anything beyond me!
I do not exist as an instrument of anyone but me.
I am self-sufficient. My destiny, my fate, is my own.
I am too vital to the universe ever to decay for real.
Nothing can stop my victory over reality.
I will live in my own girlie-fantasy world:
skincare and shopping and lip gloss (all that).
I am the central Barbie in the universe.”
For real, it gets so easy, clear, once you accept
fantasy as the only real reality. GOD MODE.
Death, rape, war, divorce, dead-beat dads—
I’m the one who lets them be real or not!
*Author’s note.—
What I am about to say is perhaps already clear in the poem’s tone, which walks a fine line between empathetic portrayal and critical observation. At first I was iffy about the Gen-Z(odiac) character in “An Introduction to Chaos Magic(k),” a modern young woman trying to find herself amidst the cacophony of the digital age, traditional practices, societal expectations, personal insecurities, and self-imposed fantasies. I found it easy to write her off as one of those pathetic social-media bullies, quick in their outrage to condemn (the suburban cop callers of the digital age)—one of those who, even if it takes libel and slander, will report any account (especially if nonblack-owned) that “triggers” her or does not reflect her values. The type is now well known: one of those boilerplate my-truthers, faking fragility for power and attention, common on college campuses (especially since the political rise of Trump and the subsequent reaction on the left about the dangers of free expression).
Her Himmler-like love of astrology and healing crystals and tarot, all of which seem a cover for a depressive nihilism, are particularly upsetting. She seems to believe her antediluvian superstition is congruent with black power when in truth, as too with the liquor and drugs she enjoys, they are poisonous to blacks—and to all people whose generational oppression has kept them in an intellectual darkness that makes them susceptible to such scams. In her desire to be unconstrained, she even dips deep enough into the solipsistic territory of Shirley MacLaine as to declare herself a causa-sui God—as we see at the end of the poem. Two stomach-sinking quotes, which in earlier drafts served as epigraphs, ring in my mind each time I think of her.
I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time . . . . when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.—Carl Sagan (The Demon-Haunted World)
We stand at the end of the Age of Reason. . . . A new age of magic interpretation of the world is coming, of interpretation in terms of the will and not of the intelligence. . . . There is no such thing as truth either in the moral or the scientific sense. . . .We must distrust the intelligence . . . and must place our trust in our instincts. We have to regain a new simplicity.—Adolf Hitler (in conversation with Hermann Rauschning)
But even if the unnamed character is emblematic of US disintegration to pre-Enlightenment superstition (as China becomes the dominant world power), it is clear she is suffering and—shallow as all hell (uncritical, obsessed with makeup and designer handbags and shimmer mists and shoes, thriving on gossip and drama)—knows not what poison she spreads. Carl Sagan himself reminds us, in the same book quoted above, to restrain our tendency to poke fun at people like her.
[S]upporters of superstition and pseudoscience are human beings with real feelings, who, like the sceptics, are trying to figure out how the world works and what our role in it might be. Their motives are in many cases consonant with science. If their culture has not given them all the tools they need to pursue this great quest, let us temper our criticism with kindness. None of us comes fully equipped.
I agree with Sagan on this, as much as I fall short in my frustration. It grows easier to remember the humanity of this young woman as time goes on. I find my respect for her grow the longer she lingers in my mind. Her innocence is a factor. Her hard work is a factor. That she has dreams is a factor. That she wants to improve herself is a factor. Perhaps the main thing, though, is my belief in her potential to do much good in the world if she can break free of her addiction to this ethos of victimhood and vengeance and magical thinking that makes her, despite what she thinks, so unoriginal and toxic.
“We need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”—Kafka (against the safe-space cancel culture pushed by anti-art bullies, left and right)
