Strange Vodoo (an essay of sorts)
2004-06-15 - 5:07 p.m.

Living is alchemy. Breathing, in and of itself is not the object of life, it is not our purpose, but yet it is something that everyone must do, in order to continue living. Whether we realize it or not we are all magicians, alchemists, shamans, visionaries. In the simplest effort there is intention, and intention is the spark, your actions are the invocations.

I myself practice chemical voodoo. I wake up early morning, or on my worst days, at midday, and enter my ritual space. It has not been clensed, blessed, or purified. Sometimes I will light a stick of sandalwood or jasmine to cover the cloying scent of three day old cat litter and three grown cats. But more often then not I just plunge foward into the spell without giving it much thought. I open the tiny bottles, saying a silent prayer to the little gods at Wyeth parmacueticals, as I shake two capsules of venlafaxine into my sweaty palm. I open the tiny box and pop out two white pills of escitalopram, turn on the tap, injest the concoction, and smile to myself. The morning ritual is complete, the forces of nature and the spirits of chemistry have been summoned to my side. And now I can go feed the cats.

The pills sit like in the bottom of my empty stomach, and within an hour they are weaving through my thick midwestern blood like snakes. I grin, becoming serpetine. I know that with this magic, I have silenced something loud within myself, even as I hear the molecules hissing. I understand that I wouldn't have survived this long, had I not been an adept preistess. The rest of the day spreads before me, and I go about living not really conscious of how much it has taken to get to this point. I wash dishes, do laundry, go to appointments as if I did not have magic to thank for the relative ease of it all.

There are other things to, that I do to keep myself sane. Of course I do the things managably mad people often do--I collect, I collage, I read, I write. I am surrounded by charms and talismans against the evils of of boredom and the dangers of apathy. Little plastic butterflies stare from wooden, second hand shelves where faeries play. Rocks I've gathered collect dust in a fishbowl next to the tiny brass bell I use on the rare occasions on which I meditate. My decor suggests a casual zen, or an intellectual nervousness which is quelled by the presence of an ever expanding library. Without the power of these objects, my inner world would colapse and my brain would loose the particles that bind it into a whole. So, with my pills, potions, rituals, and sacred objects I stumble through the world as an accidental polytheist.

A practicioner of strange voodoo.

yesterday - tomorrow