Wannabe Herbalist

I kill plants.

Not on purpose - I just seem to have inherited my mother's black thumb. (She once melted a cactus. No, it was not plastic.)

However, in my new apartment I fully intend to try my hand at growing a few again anyway. Okay, so I managed to murder a terrarium... and an air plant... but our friend G-Star also killed an air plant, and he has a shitton of houseplants. Anyway.

10 Best Plants for Apartments.

10 Best & Easiest to Grow Herbs

DIY Self-Watering Herb Garden for Apartment Dwellers

PBP: It only RHYMES with 'witch'...

I've mellowed out a lot in my old age. I look back at some of the shit I used to rant about, and I smile indulgently or roll my eyes. Who was that girl? So angry! So intent on dispelling misinformation! So determined to prove that she was right, goddammit! Yes, young!me was one of those poor fools who engaged in arguments on the internet, about paganism and magic no less, and who honestly thought you could win.

Yeah.

Dumbass.

I'm older now, and I've come to realise that 90% of the time if you meet someone happy in their ignorance? They're not going to listen to a goddamn thing you say if it contradicts their preconceived notions. Facts will be paid attention to only if supports their idealised reality. (This is of course not limited to the occult community. Durr.) So in general I try not to engage with people who are borderline trolling, making dumbshit statements that are supposed to make them look intelligent and formidable.

But every so often... there comes a person who just makes you stop and go...

Look, I'm not here to educate the whole world on HOLY TRUTHS OMFG(tm) or to piss all over somebody else's belief system. You think the whole world was shat out of the Cosmic Gila Monster's asshole? More power to ya. Hell, it might explain a few things. But when you engage other people in debate on a forum or in the real world, you can't expect that stating ideas as fact instead of theory will go over terribly well. And you cannot realistically expect people to believe a fucking word you say when you keep claiming knowledge while you display that, in fact, you don't know shit.

I may have been a mouthy little bitch when I was younger, but at least I knew when to shut the fuck up and say, "yo, I really don't know what I'm talking about."

In occult circles, you always find at least one person who refuses to do that. There's always one guy or gal who will doggedly brag about their SPOOKY POWERZ that 90% of the time have to do with raising and binding nasty entities (demons, 'dark fae', djinn, fallen angels... whatever sounds cool, really) while at the same time displaying an almost magnificent lack of understanding of what any semi-proficient magical practitioner would consider occult basics.

The motivation for pulling this sort of stunt tends to be pure ego. The sort of person who does this shit (and I have known some personally) is the sort who wants desperately to be considered highly intelligent and powerful. Whether the root cause is poor self esteem, parents who didn't hug them enough, or whatever, the end result is always annoying, and sometimes frustrating to the point of causing perfectly decent human beings to start swearing at their computer monitors.

So, I suppose if your goal is to make people lose their cool? Good job! You did it, you won! GO YOU.

But, ultimately, the only thing you prove when you persist in insisting you're an adept when you clearly couldn't magic your way out of a paper bag soaked in hobo urine is that you're a moron.

Not much of a victory, that.

When I was younger, I would try to tease the truth out of the tangled web of over-inflated claims. I would argue tirelessly, convinced that deep down everyone wants to learn and grow. These days I find that yes, I'll still engage, but only up to a point.

Because sometimes, you gotta figure the only appropriate response to stupidity is bitchface.

Psycho.

Photo from AbraCadaver by Jess Desaulniers-Lea.

Unless the cottage is made of candy.

On Sunday, while waiting for the rest of our Call of Cthulhu group to show up, I was talking to my friend Chris about us moving. He generously offered to help out by driving the rental truck, and I thanked him, adding that I was doubly pleased because that meant I wouldn't have to ask my stepfather for help.

"What, is he a jerk or something?"

"No, not generally, but he is SO annoying." I went on to explain that every time we've moved my stepfather has looked over our apartments and bitched about something: the ceilings are too low, you don't have a lot of counter space, and HOW much are you paying for rent? It's that last one especially that he picks on.

Chris asked how much we'd be paying for our new places. I told him. And he looked at me and said, "uh, yeah. City prices. What does he expect?"

My stepfather has lived his entire life in Chilliwack. While today you can in fact call it a suburban city, it still contains many farms and long expanses of sweet fuck all. It's the country.

I hate the country.

Last month my sister and I went to the 'Wack for a few days. I think we were there five in total, and by the end we were both about to go batshit crazy. I mean, yes, I got to go on nice little nature walks through what forested area still remains up on the mountain but... damn, man, there's nothing there.

I think there still exists a weird expectation that witches all yearn to live in a cottage deep in the woods. Which sounds great on paper, but if there's no WiFi out in those woods I'm not fucking going for anything but a visit. It's not even that I hate nature, I just love modern convenience.

My new apartment is in the West End, which means it's much closer to the ocean and to Stanley Park. Stanley Park is huge - it's a little over 400 hectares, and most of it is just forest. Walking through the park is actually one of the things I love to do and rarely get to, right up there with wandering around the Museum of Anthropology. And the ocean... that remains the one thing I missed about Kistilano when we moved to East Van. And although even here you can see the water, it's not remotely the same.

(Yes, I hate the beach in summer, but I love the water. I also don't swim. Go figure.)

I understand, Spider.

I think that our environment plays a part in our magic, but no one place is inherently better than another. I'd die in the desert, but the scorching sun and dry winds might inspire someone else. Some people really do want that cottage in the woods, and more power to them! I'll mail-order shit from you, how about that?

Me? I like the city. I like being able to walk down the street and eat food from countries I'll most likely never visit. I like having the luxury of purchasing supplies and not having to make them all by hand. (Jesus, if I had to make a knife or something? I'd land my dumb ass in emergency.) I like being able to walk through the woods, and smell the ocean breeze and then catch the bus home and turn on the heat. I like light-up signs and bustling crowds, even if I do sometimes want to stab people in the eye. (But, honestly, I need a little bit of rage to keep me going. Sad, but true.)

All these things are what stimulates my magic. And I'm cool with that.

Oooh!

MIT currently is offering its course materials for free. So, you know, if you ever wanted to take a course in 'The Supernatural in Music, Literature and Culture' now might be a good time to check this shit out.

West End Girls

A while back, I did a little sigil shoaling. One of em came through today: a new apartment that I can afford in the West End.



The best part? My sister's going to be my neighbour.

Voodoo and I have been talking about moving lately, because we're fed up with our landlord's insane wife, and the fact that there has been construction on the building the entire time we've been living here. (Which is nearly two years by now, I think.) We had originally been trying to get a two bedroom in the same building as our friend Sweet Pea McGee, because she and her boyfriend have the most amazing apartment. Sadly we never heard back from the landlord, and so we started looking at other options.

My sister and I have lived together a long time, and we were seriously considering each getting our own space. Our dream was to get different apartments in the same building.

Last week we went to check out a bachelor just off Davie street. It was cramped and with a roll-out bed, which I may have found funky in my twenties but now? Fuck that. Because we were early for the viewing, we took a stroll around and I pointed out a lovely older building covered in ivy with a 'for rent' sign out front. There was a one bedroom available immediately. So Voodoo set up a viewing for herself today.

Can you guess where this is going?

A second apartment is opening up Feb. 1. So my sister will live up on the third floor, and I will live on the first. The bedrooms are very small, but the building is from the 40s and has all the original hardwood. Also? Fireplaces. Not wood burning ones, but still. They are absolutely beautiful. This is going to be my living room.

So. All the comfort and convenience of having your best friend on site without any of the "goddammit, Voodoo, stop leaving your socks everywhere!" bullshit.

The landlord also seems like the coolest dude ever. He's a retired firefighter, and he told us stories about weird tenants past that included Satanists ("great tenants, though!") and people who owned snakes, and others who had a four-foot lizard. Which means we will in no way be the weirdest renters, which is oddly comforting.

Very exciting. Although of course now I'm spending hours on Apartment Therapy...

PBP: A is for Astrology

Pagan Blog Project 2013

"...but, you know how Libra men are."

"He's a Cancer, right? Ah, yeah. The whole... scuttle scuttle. Pinchy, pinchy! Thing."

These are actual words that have come out of my mouth during conversation. Worse, these sorts of comments are not at all uncommon for me. For the most part, I do not make mention of magic at all if I'm not in the company of other practitioners, but when it comes to astrology? Oh, yeah. I say a lot of hippy-dippy sounding bullshit.

I am not an astrologer, let's get that right out on front street. I have heard the arguments that horoscopes are nothing more than reading a list of shit and picking out the comments you agree with. I couldn't begin to explain to you why a bunch of stars and planets affect human personality. But what I see, personally, is that they sure seem to do so.

Because I do not have in-depth knowledge of the subject, I can only look at it this way: people are like wine. (Of course I have a booze metaphor.) The time and place of your birth affect the way you turn out. You have a vintage, if you will - that's your zodiac sign.

art by Lisa Weber

Most people know their sun sign. I'm a Libra, myself. But astrology is a bit more complex than that - there are ascending signs and moon signs and different planets... To find all that shit out, you need a natal chart. You can get one done for free at sites like Astrolabe, although some of the componets still seem sort of esoteric at first glance. (Nodes? WTF?)

So, me, I'm a Libra with Gemini ascending, a Leo moon, and Venus in Scorpio. That makes me an indecisive, fair-minded loudmouth who primps in every reflective surface and is obsessive in love and crazy about sex.

I assure you that is all lies and slander, of course.

One of the best books I've found for getting a grasp on things like rising signs is, weirdly enough, Darkside Zodiac. I got my copy in the bargain bin at Chapters years ago, and it remains the best book to have on a coffee table at a party. Aside from being sarcastic and nasty, the book explains very concisely what rising signs and moons et all are, and how they affect your sun sign. (That's not why it's great for parties, though... it's great because people get drunk, look themselves up, and get offended.)

My other go-to books for astrology are Linda Goodman's Sun Signs - a classic, really -  and Sexual Astrology. ...which is also a good coffee table book. You can have Capricorns go, "I do NOT fuck armpits!" if you're lucky.

This Christmas, I bought my mother a predictive chart for the year from Deacon Millet. It's huge. I mean, monstrous. I of course don't know what it all says, but from what my mother's said it seems pretty spot-on so far. An astrological reading is something I've never had anyone do, but the concept is certainly intruding and I can see the merits in having one done every year as a sort of road map for the year.

In terms of horoscopes in newspapers... I treat them all like junk, honestly. Except Straight Stars - that column I read every week and pay attention to.

So. Astrology! Like wine!

"Yeah, and while we're at it, let's just clean the whole fuckin' house."

This morning while walking from the bus stop to the office, I saw a piece of graffiti that depicted a guy with a can of spray paint whose label read, "boredom makes you do crazy things."

It was a lovely piece - one of those done on paper and then pasted to the wall. My sister informed me one of our co-workers did that sort of thing, and then we started talking about the book graffiti artist and how sometimes you just want to create magical things for the world. This segued into us agreeing that 2013 is the year of doing shit.

No more talking about what we'll do later, no more waiting around for fortune to hand us what we feel we deserve.

In the immortal words of Seth Green in Idle Hands: "No, no, no, no Kevin Costner speeches alright? Let's just go."

I'm hardly the first one to jump on this train -  Deb at Charmed, I'm Sure ran 'New Year, New You' last year (the prompts are still available if you want to do them) and it seems a lot of people on my blogroll have decided to stop making excuses for themselves over the past year. Now, it's all well and good to feel revved up in January - the trick is to keep our asses going the rest of the year.

So, what crazy things do you want to get up to, huh?

Kill! Kill!

Okay, Aldo. I understand that you lied to me, and that my boots are not being shipped form Richmond, but rather from Quebec...

But where the fuck are my boots?! I wear heels at work but you know... in the morning I don't always need to wear my rainboots. Normal flat boots would suffice. Also I want way-too-on-trend-fake-biker-boots. 'Cause I'm tough. See?

LOOK IT'S ME MAKING NANA MY BITCH!

My Varla costume at Halloween again, obvs. That bottle of Kraken rum to the left there was mine.  None of it came home.

PBP: A is for Altar

My first altar was a cardboard box in a closet.

It was a painted cardboard box, thankyewverymuch. Black, of course, with a silver pentagram painted on the top. I had a dollar store incense burner and dollar store incense to go with it, and that went on the box along with a candle or two and my athame. (By which I mean a letter opener.)

I was sixteen years old, living in the Bible Belt, and I habitually wore fishnets and combat boots*. I'd just finished Bucky's Big Blue, and it said you needed an altar. A cardboard box seemed better than nothing.

Except even at sixteen, I knew it was pretty ghetto.

Now. I'm sure there are a lot of people out there for whom a cardboard box with a badly drawn star on it is perfectly serviceable. Hey, I did use mine... it was just that the entire time I did I couldn't help but think, "holy shit I want better." Maybe it's because I'm a Libra. We like things to look pretty.

In the first apartment my sister and I lived in in Vancouver, we had a HUGE altar. It was an old dresser, painted black (sensing a theme, here?) with pretty much every witchy thing we owned piled on it. This monstrosity was kept in the living room. There were also a bigass Celtic wall hanging on the wall behind it. At the time, it all seemed very romantic and gothic. In retrospect... well. We were in our twenties! The whole apartment was ugly! The couch was velvet and the bathroom sink fell off the wall!

I've had several altars since then, most of them quite small. Not cardboard boxes, but generally very small tables or the tops of old radiators. The apartment I currently live in has ample space, but with the exception of the ancestral altar, I have moved all my various magical spaces to my bedroom.

I no longer have a hardon for Celtic knotwork. I've expanded my decor to something besides 'black' and I'm at a point where I can afford to buy myself decent quality supplies.

Hilariously, my altar is back to being a dresser. My working altar anyway - the space that I use for magic and for the bulk of ritual and offerings. It's kept quite clean both because it is my dresser, and because I like things to look tidy. I keep most of my supplies put away, but certain things are left out: my mortar and pestle, the slate pentacle I bought years ago in Aldergrove, my Morrigan candle, and a cigar box full of sigils.

A good number of my supplies are kept in a cabinet in the corner. More pertinent to this topic is the top of the cabinet, which is used as another space for ongoing spellwork.

The top of my bookshelf, behind the door, holds more devotional objects: a statue of Ganesh, the crow skulls my grandfather Jimmy carved, and on the shelf below a statue of Thoth. (By the Tarot books, natch.)

My bedside table functions as an altar of a sort... it's where I keep my journal, and whatever I happen to be reading. It also has Dream of the Endless in the corner, keeping an eye on all my nocturnal wanderings. He and the little Wicked Witch were gifts - from my sister and mother respectively. Maybe not magical in the occult sense, but special to me.

Pictures and more after the jump:

drunk too much, and I said too much...

Well.

I'm sad to say I didn't make the cosmic jump to hyper-consciousness on December 21, there.

'The Invisibles' by Grant Morrison

2012 sort of sucked for a lot of people I know. There were some wonderful highs, but the lows were some of the worst I've experienced in a long while. Either way, it's over now, so let us turn to the future with open hearts, bright eyes, and fabulous shoes, darling.

I spent an awful lot of time doing cleansing work in December. First there were some less-than-ideal situations to mop up after, and then my sibling unit was walloped with some nasty intent, and I managed to catch some of the fallout. I also engaged in more spirit work this winter than I probably ever have before. Some of this was awesome, and some of this was an exercise in seeing what exactly I can handle when it's pushing back at me.

Something important that I've made particular note of recently is the need to do some sort of drawing-in work after you spend a lot of effort cleansing and banishing. You know, you go through all that trouble getting rid of the shit, so why leave a blank space for MORE shit to pile up in? Draw in money or love or peace or whatever turns your crank.


The Pagan Blog Project has started up again. Although I completely dropped the ball on the last several letters, I've decided to try again. Because I am persistent/stupid. I may take it a little more lightly this time around, so I don't wind up blowing off as many prompts. I also highly, highly suspect I'll only do the prompts every second week. But fuck it, I want to blog more often, not feel guilty for not doing my homework.


Smart people!

Saying smart things!


Well. Since I am, as a matter of fact, working again, I'm going to cut this ugly bullshit rambling short so I can get into bed.

Have a song for the New Year, kids. Mwah.