third eye semi closed
What is there to see? The air feels full of spiritual miasma – murky and yet clear. We're here in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch of vibes and we know exactly how we got here and all I know is we have to start cleaning shit up if we want to get out of it.
It's strange to not feel the urge to reach for any divine tools during a time like this. It's an urge that's always been there for me. In the melee of adolescence I played with Ouija boards, went ghost hunting wand subsequently tried to exorcise a friend who we thought was being haunted. In the depths of covid lockdowns and anti-police protests I found a coven of sorts, if a mystical tech start up making a podcast can be called a coven. We read tarot every day and called on dead icons, I organized rituals in my apartment on the full moon, I burned wishes on candles and filled my hot pink cauldron with their ashes. I shuffled the tarot cards and tried to find the pattern, tried to find the answers, reaching out into the abyss for any guidance.
Now I feel like I know what's going on (which is classically a sign that one doesn't know anything, but whatever) and what I need to do. I feel clarity. Perhaps I don't know exactly how to get out of it, but I know that there's something rotten in our world – a pattern of extraction, a rise of white supremacy and authoritarianism – people clinging for order in the chaos and doing so by drawing partitions that excise the most interesting of us out from public life. There's a big sign on the wall that says slutty, melanated, undocumented, shiny monsters leave now or we'll make you leave. I feel like we should leave and drop a lit match on the way out. All of us can play outside instead.
Michelle tells me she was born under a Sagittarrian stellium which has created a relentless optimism that makes her think everything is going to be okay even if everything says it won't. I don't think I have a single placement in Sagittarius but I, too, am cursed with ruthless optimism. I believe in something better than this, I can see past the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, I can see past the scapegoating and the racism and the violence perpetuated all around us. Maybe its because I'm surrounded by optimists and pessimists alike who keep trying. Who keep working and believing and building and fighting for the better world. Maybe I don't reach out for the rituals, the tarot, maybe I don't ask the universe what's going on because instead, I'm reaching out to the human beings around me and I can see them reaching out to me. Maybe I am humbled every day by my friends who clean the houses of strangers, who feed their community, who work to build housing and fight to build more trains. Maybe, despite it all, despite the fact that this shitty fucking world keeps trying to kill everyone on Earth, I have faith.
Two weeks ago, I wrote about plastic skeletons and the Saw movies and being a coward about Halloween decorations for Autostraddle. I promise it still holds up even though Halloween is over. Next week, I'm writing about broken ankles. It will be funny and sexy (I think!)
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