The Sad And Strange And Wonderous Day

In my previous post, I wrote about taking photographs as I wandered through an increasingly mystical day downtown. The interesting thing about these photos is - it seems to me, anyway - that as the atmosphere became increasingly mysterious, the quality of the photos changed as well. Usually we perceive these things with the mind or the eye, but the camera, not so much. But this time, it was if some unknown quality was affecting the photographs. I felt this was sufficiently curious to deserve a post of its own. (Plus, the original was long enough already.)

In regards to my obsession with capturing the unseen, I feel this is as close as I've ever come to succeeding. 

The initial photos weren't bad, exactly, but they weren't good either. They just were. Like the one above. Or this one:

 ...and here. (though this apparently impossible to photograph door is the local equivalent of the church that doesn't want to be photographed, though that's another subject for another time.)

It was after I'd followed the pointing finger down the alley that things began to go strange. 

Perhaps this photo shows the faintest hint of being different.

The cracks in the pavement. Becoming a tiny bit weirder.

A lone sequin, like a tiny piece of sky.

The strangeness is in full bloom here, can you see it? 

There is something disorienting here, as if the rocks are shadows and the shadows are rocks.

'The shadows of the scattered leaves assumed a depth and vibrancy that seemed hyper-real."

This humble water meter cover (which has been there since I was a child) suddenly presents an intriguing optical illusion.

"a lens flare had created two spectral shapes on the steps."

Into the ravine

The looming figure.

 The watching landscape.

Whether others can see anything unusual in these photos, I can't say, but I do feel they came very close to capturing that certain amorphous quality. 

The Life Instinct And The Realm Of Old Gods

Freud's concept of the death drive had been on my mind a lot lately. In this time when the spirit of Thanatos is slashing its way across the land, too many good people are being taken down by it. Perhaps it's the combination of stress and lack of support that is causing even the young and strong to succumb. Perhaps it's hopelessness, or the sense that this enemy is too big to fight. Whatever the case, I'm losing count of the people who have died or developed a serious illness in the last few months. It doesn't take a genius to see that something is terribly wrong.

This morning, my cousin by marriage, Jeff - the dearest, sweetest person imaginable - was the latest casualty. He'd managed to fight against illness his whole life, even against seemingly insurmountable odds, but as his hope began to dwindle, so did his strength, and the rising tide of health problems overcame him.

All this, sadly, is no surprise. It's well known that just about anyone who must deal with a destructive environment suffers because of it. And right now, these destructive elements seek to pervade every corner of our lives. Even throwing all my witchcraft at the problem had hardly made a dent.

I was thinking about this as I went out today. I was testing my new Polaroid camera (and of course carrying my digital one). Not that going around taking endless pictures necessarily helps matters, but it can take your mind off your troubles for a moment. The challenge of capturing the ephemeral is not nothing, Not for me, at least.

In town, the signs of inevitable change were everywhere. The parking lot at the movie theater where I used to roam is now paid parking. In the street, I realized that tourist season was now year round. Numbers of well-heeled visitors sneered as they walked by. I had to wonder why they had come. To look down on the country folk? To get away from it all, only to find it lacking?  A few people walked by, preening with all their might. I wanted to tell them that their preening was no good here; there was no one much to notice them. But they were too busy preening to notice me at all.

Of course, I was no different, lurking in the alley with my camera. All of us looking for distractions. Perhaps from different things, but having told my share of fortunes, I know very well that all human concerns fall, basically, into matters of love, spirituality, health and wealth. Or, to put it more broadly, life and death, and the accoutrements of both.

Such a belief may seem too dualistic to some; after all, aren't creation and destruction just part of the same process? This may be true in the great scheme of things, but facing the day-to-day struggle to get by tends to narrow one's focus a bit.

It was an uneasy feeling as I wandered the streets, waiting for my pictures to develop. Always wanting more - peace, grace or just simple acceptance, even - but not being able to get it. The hard and judgmental eyes upon me triggered the same feeling it always did - the need to please, to be suitable, to be what others wanted, even though I knew it was impossible.

I sighed and followed the pointing hand of the faded Diamond Disc sign down the alleyway.  At least it would be quiet back there. Indeed, there was no one in sight. Just the usual cracked pavement and interweavings of light and shadow. A small whirlwind kicked up the fallen leaves and traveled playfully across the lot. Naturally, I followed. Among the gravel, a bright shimmer of blue caught my eye. A lone sequin, like a tiny piece of sky. Lost from who-knows-where. Suddenly I understood. It was not only a sequin. It was a gift.

If this whimsical thought is not enough to alert you, I was beginning to feel a bit....not strange, "strange" is the wrong word. Nor weird, either, although it could be truthfully stated the feeling was both of these things. No, it was that light, bubbly sense of a joyful presence that I tend to call magic, though that word has some unfortunate connotations. Of course, magic comes in many flavors. This one was my favorite, a sort of mystic champagne.

The bland grey lot by then had become unaccountably beautiful. The cracks in the pavement seemed like intricately crafted designs. The wind had developed a personality all its own, skidding along gutters and hiding under bushes. Oh, I can hear the skeptics now, saying that I'd anthropomorphized the environment or some such thing, but never mind. These moments come along rarely, and one doesn't ask questions, unless one intends to kill it dead.

Having taken enough photos behind the alleyway, I followed the wind out to Mill street. I have a lot of childhood memories associated with this street, not all of them good. Now, however, I was charmed by the cozy houses, the colors, the perfectly aligned edges of the picket fence.

I stepped over the place where the sidewalk always cracks, no matter how often they pave over it. The shadows of the scattered leaves had assumed a depth and vibrancy that seemed hyper-real, as if the leaves were floating just above the surface. Such a little thing to cause so much wonder.

Near the railroad crossing was the thing I'd been expecting with some trepidation - a set of 3 steps leading up a hill. The trauma steps, I said out loud. My mother had led me down them many a time on the way to see her boyfriend-that-I wasn't-supposed-to-know-was-a-boyfriend. She would always pretend we were going somewhere else, but when we reached these steps on the way to his workplace, that was the moment I knew we were really going to see him instead. It was a queasy memory at the best of times.

Even so, I aimed my camera at the spot and looked through the viewfinder. What appeared there made me smile. A lens flare had created two spectral shapes on the steps, one larger, one small. I laughed outright, relieved somehow. Between the steps and the sun and my camera, my memory seemed to be acknowledged, despite the passage of time.

By then, I had used up all my polaroids and the sun was sinking, so I began to make my way back to the car. It was so quiet as I approached the corner or Mill and Bridge, just the sound of wind in the trees. Everything felt sealed off, secret, contained. Even the two elderly men chatting outside of the vine-covered cottage seemed to be in on it. The back gate at the Dollie's old house swung open slowly as I walked past, then shut itself again. The wind, of course. Yet, it all seemed part of the enchantment.

I was nearly to the car when I saw something distinctly unusual, and it took me by surprise.  It looked almost like a long shadow stretching to an arrow-like point in front of me, but brilliant gold and shimmering. I checked the sunlight, but the angle was all wrong for it to be a sunbeam. I checked for reflections, as it looked for all the world like a reflection of gold foil. I moved about, but the light - while it seemed to move with me - continuously pointed to the northwest.

Getting my bearings, I realized that when a golden arrow shows up out of nowhere on a day like this, you probably ought to follow it. I passed my car and kept going. When I saw the marvelous vine covered ravine ahead, and the looming figure with the sun shining through, I suddenly understood. The bubbly, joyous presence was Jeff, finally free from his tormented body, and he had brought me to here to this realm of old gods.

Oh, of course it's pareidolia, I hear you skeptics say. Just a tall, spindly vine-covered tree in the evening sun. That you see a towering feminine figure with the light of the world inside of her is purely a quirk of the human brain. And it is, of course. But I also know that it was much more than that. The thing about being a witch is that you can know that both things are true.

I examined the fantastical shapes of the trees and hollows, the elaborate weaving of branches, I felt the power than emanated from this place, this piece of wasteland, disregarded by all. I watched the tall reeds as they swayed, and understood that this was where the spirits of this place could reside, unmolested. The tall regal figure watched over them all.

I also understood her meaning. That the only thing that can fight the terrible drive toward destruction is the life instinct itself. No distraction or displacement or even spiritual power can touch it unless it's rooted within that force we carry like an inner sun. Strike the match inside of you. Light the lamp. Send it out into the darkness that hangs over us. Only then will Thanatos fall.

These were the things that the old gods taught me, on the sad and strange and wonderous day that Jeff Michael died.

Midnight, Again

Somewhat inspired by Karissa Lang, I spent Friday midnight out by my altar rock, trying to think of something to say to the voice recording system on my computer. I had been thinking of trying this, but knowing that I would struggle to be even remotely natural or interesting, I put it off. However, listening to Karissa gave me a little push. I mean, I could sit around envying people who do things, or I could at least make an effort to do things, too.

Even if it sucks. Which it does. But no matter. Here's a little snippet of my midnight rambling. Just a snippet, because even though I'm making an effort not to demand perfection from myself, I'm not going to pretend anyone could stand more of my voice than that, either.

Listen here

(Sorry for nearly stage whispering though most of this, but it really was quiet outside, and I didn't want to disturb anything.)

Just After Midnight

12:20 AM on the second day of the darkest month of the year.
A chill runs through me, as if a shadow has passed over, or a door has been opened somewhere.

Outside, all is silent. The big dipper sideways in the northern sky.

Perhaps it's just the landscape breathing. Perhaps.

We'll see.

Liberty Hill

I swore that when it got dark and cold I would tell this story, and since it's 28 degrees and black as pitch outside, I guess the time has come. This all began long before the terrible winter of my aunt's murder, but it shows that even then, I understood that the land held a profound and dreadful power.

1.

The tale begins many years ago, when I was little girl and my parents' marriage was on the verge of breaking up. Not that I knew this is any official way - my parents didn't talk about such things - but I knew it as a sick feeling in my stomach, a sense of the precariousness of everything I knew as my life.

My sister's wedding that September had brought things to a head. With only me left at home (and too young to have much say in the matter) my mother began a pattern of taking day trips to various places, usually a tourist attraction somewhere within a hundred miles. Possibly she was taking these long drives to think, more likely she was doing it to punish my dad by disappearing to parts unknown. Whatever the case, the effect was that I ended up being dragged from one end of the hill country to the other, visiting a variety of caverns, Presidential homesteads, candle factories and granite batholiths in the bleak and barren landscape.

Now, the thing about the hill country is that in the bright light of summer, you might be able to convince yourself that it's friendly, or at the very least benign. In the autumn and winter, though, all bets are off. When the sun goes in and the clouds loom and the limestone no longer fills the air with reflected light, the land reveals its true nature, a place so desolate it can drain the life right out of you.

It was in this atmosphere  - the greyness, the nausea  - that we visited the international sculpture park at Liberty Hill.

It was one of the rare times my brother was with us, and I suppose it must have been his idea. He was working on his second art degree at that time in San Marcos, and perhaps it had been suggested as a place the students should visit. At any rate, it was a long drive  - more than 80 miles according to the map. I sat in the back of the station wagon, facing rearwards, watching the road unwind endlessly through the bleached horizon.

I wish there was a way to describe how bad it felt, how utterly wrong it all was, but then again, perhaps it's for the best. Suffice it to say there was nothing good about this moment (the lightless cold, the frigid wind) nor in the future (would I have to go with mom to see that man, the one she was having an affair with, which I knew all about even though I wasn't supposed to know?) My helplessness made me feel that I would shatter into a million pieces.

My memory of the town of Liberty Hill itself is vague - I recall an old, ramshackle town, seemingly derelict in a way that that did not seem merely empty, but frightening.  The sculpture park was something else again. Very modern, very abstract. Curving, hulking shapes shining whitely in the gloom.

I left my mother and brother to argue among themselves and lost myself among the artworks. I was very young and did not understand why the sculptures didn't look like what they were named, or what they might mean, or why  they disturbed me so. They were only stone shapes, after all, and yet, the combination of the sculpture and the bitter wind and the nature of the land itself filled me with a horror that was beyond me to express.

Finally I sought refuge behind a statue called Tierra Madre. After studying it for a while, I could begin to see the shape of a woman curling around on herself and felt better for being able to understand. Of course, I know now that Tierra Madre means Earth Mother, but didn't then. I only knew that I felt safe there for the moment.

The last thing I remember about Liberty Hill is my mother's voice, faint in the wind, shouting at me to come on, but I didn't move. They had to come find me.

2.
If the trip to Liberty Hill was the first hint of seasonal depression to come, then the December murder of my aunt cemented it as an incontrovertible fact. Winter was a thing to dread and fear, and aside from a few isolated moments over the years, it was true. Rarely would anything good come in this time and place, and even if it did, despair kept most potential pleasure at bay.

Things were somewhat better when I moved from the hill country to the coast; winters were still cold, yes, but there was not the hostile landscape, there was still an ambient light. Coming back here after nearly 20 years was tough. Being reintroduced to that particular kind of gloom was tougher still. Intolerable, to tell you the truth.

No matter how I tried to cope, the reality of my surroundings intruded. I tried everything, from remembering in small doses (such as writing the above-linked Girl Who Was Witched Away) to trying to block it out entirely. None were especially helpful, and always I'd end up in the back in the abyss.

In the late autumn of 2016, again feeling desperate, I hit upon an new idea. If there was no way to block the bad memories, perhaps replacing them would work. I would pick one of my few good winter memories and focus on it intently, inhabiting it as much as possible. Don't think about the miseries of childhood. Don't think about Liberty Hill.

I chose the memory of meeting my ex-boyfriend, Michael, the man I'd almost married. It had been a bitterly cold and dark December day when he'd swept in and carried me away. Michael, bless him, was crazy about me, and for all his flaws, the memory holds a special place. For a month, I'd put all my mental effort into recreating the feeling of that time, dragging up every half-forgotten scene.

Writing When Dark Comes At Six was part of this effort - I'd even returned to the place where we'd met (on another, suitably frigid day) to take the photo for the post. And then there was the rest of that story, of course, How he'd taken me to meet his family, to their endless stream of parties, how he moved me into his house almost immediately after he'd managed to pry me out of my girlish floral dress.

In the first few weeks, while we inhabited that glorious, secretive bubble that new lovers do, there was a lot of things to learn. Not the least of them was that Michael was a wealthy man from a wealthy family, and like many such people, irresponsible with money. He kept his cash in a gold clip, which he was constantly losing. There was always a kerfuffle at some club door or another because he'd lost a wad of bills, only to have the clip turn up in some odd place, like a camera case or a gumboot. It was funny, but also quite astonishing to me. He managed to casually lose more money than I'd ever possessed.

Lying on my chilly bed in 2016, I marveled at this once again. Michael and his money clip. Michael, the buffoon, who'd bought me a car because he thought it would look nice with my hair. But I'd married for brains, not money, and there would be no beating back winter with luxury items now.  I closed my eyes and resurrected the memory again.

When I woke up an hour or two later, I spied something shiny on the bedside table. With a growing sense of disbelief, I realized it was a gold money clip. Where had it come from? No one in the family had ever owned such a thing. It was disconcerting, how this object had seemed to have jumped from my memory to the waking world. It could hardly be true, and yet, there it was. As if  I'd willed it into existence, a sign that I was finally overcoming the worst of the past.

It was a mystery how it had got there, until I tracked down my teenage son. He'd been messing around in the backyard rockpile, he said, when he'd spied a weathered green box among the rubble. The clip was inside, and he thought I might like it. He brought the box out of his pocket. When I looked inside, I felt a surge of horror as well as disbelief at the name on the lid.

This had gone from disconcerting to not funny awfully fast. First, an object like the one in my memory appears, now the name of something I'd been trying to block out turns up along with it. The Cosmic Joker was at it again. This required a thorough examination, so I pulled out the velvet insert from the bottom of the box and found a little paper slip.

It contained the name of the shop where it had been bought, called Things Remembered.

The Cosmic Joker had hit a home run.

...

I've given up trying to figure out who the clip belonged to, or how it came to be in our rockpile at all. Perhaps, as my great-auntie had once told me in a dream, "things materialize."  Perhaps it meant, as a friend said, that I owned the narrative now.  Maybe it was gift from the landscape itself, as a reward for my sheer persistence, and to remind me that its power isn't always a terrible thing.

I put it in my purse, and it's turned out to be good luck since.

There's only one thing left that continues to mystify me - the signature on that slip of paper. No matter how I try, I can't make the letters form themselves into a name. But that makes sense, really. the ineffable forces of nature would have an enigmatic writing style.

15 Degrees Of Scorpio

Thursday, November 7, the exact midpoint between the autumnal equinox and the winter solstice. 

I was drawn outside in spite of the damp and found the landscape full of secrets. Roaming stags and swirling leaves. The susurration of the wind in the trees. I walked until I was numb with cold, but it hardly mattered. Vast, shadowy birds swooped through the low clouds and vanished. Messengers from the other world, it seemed.

Photos and video are only thin copies of a place, never capturing the spirit itself, though I suppose it's one of the few ways we can take something from nature without stealing. All the same, I'm glad I have this, the memory of the grove on a chill November morning. 

At the threshold of the darkest part of the year. 

The Eve Of All Hallows

The costume was supposed to look like a black jaguar and not something reminiscent of The Wicker Man, but sometimes the landscape decides for you.

Happy Halloween.

Organized Noise

Three days before Halloween, and I was ill, just out of the hospital where I'd watched them carry a black-shrouded corpse past my door. 

You've got to keep an eye on that line between life and death, you know, it can be thin and wily and move faster than you'd bargained for.

The shapes in the security monitor are little more than organized noise, but the one in front is surely me, a violet shadow over my eyes, beyond a veil of a different sort.

Purple Sage, Grey Sky

Cold, but luminous.

The Passage From Summer To Winter

A time of dreams and forebodings.

Moody Street

Funny, the things that come to mind as you're on the edge of sleep. The immersive flashback, the vividness that emerges from fatigue-frayed reality.

In my memory, we are walking down Goodwin avenue, my husband, our kids and me. It's mid-October, and we're on our way to the pumpkin patch at the church on Moody street. It's not very long since we'd moved to the gold house, and it's nice to be in walking distance, though our youngest is still inclined to complain. The late afternoon air is cool and crisp and all the neighborhood is decorated for Halloween. Wrought iron and gingerbread strung with scarecrows and lights and leaves.

It's all so beautiful, and yet. I am sad.

It doesn't matter. I laugh and run ahead. My misery is like distant thunder on a clear day, conveniently ignored until it's too late.

 It's a fraud, of course, but then we all have our role to play.

At the church, we pick a number of suitable pumpkins, bearing in mind that we'll have to carry them home. I remember how the orange stripes in my sweater coordinate with my chosen gourd as if I'd planned it, how the boys' forest greens and maroons all pull together as if we'd conspired to look like an ad.

I'm lucky. I know I'm lucky, even my jeans proclaim it. The silver four leaf clover jingles as I walk. My hair is in two long braids (to quote Collette) like reins. Oh, yes, the symbolism is amusing. As if my jeans are chiding me for my unhappiness, as if my hairstyle hints at how little control I have over my own life. Moody street, indeed.

The truth is that I have secrets, which are both not as bad as and also worse than anything you are thinking. They weigh on me as I trip along in my braids and boots. I laugh and chat and feel so heavy I wonder if I can even make it home. But I do.

At the house, we line up the pumpkins on the front porch steps, one for each of us. After dinner, it's time for homework and baths and bedtime, and eventually I find myself back outside, alone. My secrets make me reluctant to sleep, if only because I don't want to wake to face them.

I stay up late reading under the hexagonal light, and when I finally do sleep, I dream of a dark hallway with a broken mirror at one end. Bloody Mary has escaped, as well as her sister in white. The are coming down the hall in their old-fashioned dresses, their faces veiled, hiding a horror of which I can't speak.

White Mary stands in front of me, silent and eerie, her veil moving with her breath. She reaches toward me and I wake just as the world turns red.

I sit up knowing my future, the shape and color of it, at least, the same way that secret sorrows are sorrows because you already know how they end.

There is some knowledge you are not allowed to escape, not then and not now, even in the frayed edges of your sleep.


Note: the events described occurred in 2006.

That night, I'd been reading a zine called Bloody Mary's Cool Little Sister, which no doubt inspired the arrival of the Marys in my dream.

Spirit Of Place

Down by the playground, this ancient guardian abides.

The Edge Of Autumn

Just days before the equinox and blazing hot. Autumn merely a celestial notion.

I'd been expecting a package and news had reached my ears that it had been delivered that very afternoon. Fantastic. With hope in my heart, I walked down the road. 

It was the same walk I'd dreamed of once long ago, and though now I was wide awake in the sun, a subtle hallucinatory quality had  nevertheless begun to steal across the land. 

Most of the time, it's not so obvious that this place is on the edge of the desert. In the brutal last days summer, though, with no soft greenery to cushion it. a barren moonscape reveals itself. Layers of memory (it seemed to me) had become exposed like rocks jutting above the surface, the bleached and jagged bones of the earth. 

I remembered my father, my siblings and the neighbors we'd had, and the games we'd played, among the limestone outcroppings that had their own names and the dry creeks and river bed. The agave, a huge, old towering thing, reached its spiky leaves to the sky. The needly hooked tooth edges snagged my attention, the way things do when the world goes strange.

Yes, the landscape was feeling restive, and really, who could blame it? It had been a relentless season

I was halfway down the road and the wind was picking up. Shades of the old dream again, but this time the wind was scorching, hot enough to distort the air. It rattled and hissed and shook the trees. Soon, like the dream, it began to howl. 

No sooner had I reached the place where the two roads met than I felt it, that mysterious, indescribable sense of another reality overlapping my own. I stood there for a while, half-hypnotized by the spinning vents on top of old Mrs. Kirtchner's house, wondering what it was that I felt, and how to even talk about it. But all I could articulate to myself was that I was standing at the edge of Autumn.

Well, hang around a crossroad long enough and you are bound to discover something.

My package was in the mailbox. What was in it? Eh, just stuff. A red herring, as red as my dress in the equinoctial wind.

I walked back home, once again full of knowledge that was beyond me to explain

Dustlight

It was the dead end of summer, the dry heat so dense you could lean on it, almost. It had been that way for a while; dust rising on Union street in the glaring sun.

I was more than a little wilted by 3 PM when I started up the front steps. If not exactly dizzy, at least a little out of sorts. Perhaps it's no surprise that between the second and third step, I felt time fold over on itself.

There I was as a child, walking up the steps to the hobby store on the self-same street, and the steps of the church hall, and the door of the Hermann Son's lodge for dance class, and swinging around the railings at the old convent with Karen, and playing hopscotch downtown as if these memories lived in a place made of summer heat and I had just wandered in.

I thought "the heat is a doorway" and though it only lasted a moment, I realized it was true.

Withered And Sere

It's the end of August and the earth is skin and bones. The air is on fire, the leaves have given up the ghost.

The feeling of lost time overwhelms me. I am lonely and heartsick and worn. I'm a moth in a lampshade, ragged wings burning.

Oh, but I shouldn't complain, it could be worse, so much worse, it's just being stretched thin in the heat, is all. The late summer blues.

I tell myself the loneliness doesn't matter, it's just my nature, and anyway how much of myself do I really need? No, no, it doesn't matter.

If I say it enough, perhaps one day it will be true.

Before Sunrise

One thing that's been a little different this summer is my morning ritual. In the quiet time just before daybreak  - most days, anyway - I make a small fire in a certain place, out of juniper and whatever other herbs that might seem to fit the needs of the day. It clarifies things. It brings focus. 

This summer has been one of successful witchery - so successful that I find myself confronted with that nervousness that comes so often in artwork, when your project goes from being nothing into  becoming something...a moment where you either press on or crumble in the face of fear.

I suppose it's good, to have that feeling - it means that whatever I make of this is up to me.

Squee

Given my previous post about Archie comics, I thought I'd share this nice little stash of 70's era digests that arrived in the mail today.

Scheme Supreme

Much to my surprise, this turns out to be the summer that my youngest child discovered Archie comics. One minute, I'm worried about his getting enough reading practice this summer, the next he's gleefully raced his way through 5 double digests with no sign of stopping.

Obviously I'm not one of those parents who think comic books are substandard material for teaching kids to read. Quite the contrary - I've been impressed by the speed at which his comprehension of even difficult words has improved. Anyway, I experienced it myself when I was just about his age.

I can even remember the moment it happened.

It was the night before Easter, and we were spending the holiday with my seaside cousins, which was always a thrill. Their house was very quiet at night, though, much more quiet than my own, and I despaired of ever falling asleep. My cousin was snoring away in the next bed so she was no help at all. On her bookshelf I spied a Jughead Jones digest - it was a bit worn and no doubt appropriated from her dad's bedside table (and really, if a chemical engineer like her dad could read comics, then who could find fault?) I opened it up and began to read a story called "Scheme Supreme."

I hardly knew who Jughead was or why all the girls in town were plotting against him, but the idea of a secret society (The United Girls Against Jughead or U.G.A.J.) laying out complex plans to prevent the spread of his anti-romance ways was very compelling. Even if the plans were a massive failure and by todays' standards, definitely not politically correct.

The eternal allure of the unobtainable man

Most of all, I liked the idea of the unobtrusively-placed red thumbtack that signals the meeting. Even at 7 years old I was fascinated with signs and signals. 

At any rate, I fell in love in love with Archie comics, and with Jughead and Betty especially (seriously, wouldn't they have been the best couple?) and they kept me company during those grim years at elementary school when I felt utterly alone.

For my son's part, he's thrilled to learn that Archie has been around for 80 years. This means he has 80 years worth of comics to read.

Now at least one of my kids will appreciate inheriting  my ridiculously huge comics collection one day.

Adventures In Orange

Gonzales, Texas, on a Tuesday afternoon. Wandering the quiet sun-bleached town. Remembering. Nothing special happened, no epiphany, just the slightest breath of the past, a faint scent to remind me of what it was like to look forward to something.

I snapped this in the mirrored window of a locksmith's shop ("space for rent", the sign said) because of the novelty of blending in with the color scheme.  It almost never happens, you know. I somehow usually manage to clash.

Gossip In The Grain

Late July. The corn is scorched in the field. The rustling leaves hint at secrets we are not yet to be told.

Season Of The Witch

It's high summer and magic is in the air. It's also overflowing my file folders, so it's time once again to share with you a collection of witchy gifs.  Enjoy.