life

Ghost Hunting in Cape May

June 4, 2024June 3, 2024 J.Leave a comment

Hello (and a relaxed and happy Pride Month to all of my fellow LGBT+ people)!

I am freshly returned from a brief trip to Cape May, NJ. My Handsome Assistant and I wanted to take some time to be near a beach for a bit, and managed to time things so we would a) have nice weather, but also b) be there during the “off season” when accommodations are generally a lot cheaper and easier to get. Fortunately for us, the stars aligned and we got a very nice room in the Angel of the Sea bed and breakfast.

(And when they say “and breakfast,” they mean it. You want breakfast? There’s fresh fruit, fancy breads, and three different entrées to pick from. Feeling snacky? There’s tea and pastries in the afternoon. Want to relax in the evening? There is wine and mountains of charcuterie. Even after you check out, you’re invited to return later that day to enjoy the amenities.)

A view of a pink Victorian house at night. It has "gingerbread" details and a scalloped roof and is lit with strings of cafe lights.

The Angel of the Sea even comes with its own ghosts. It’s a very old building that was actually kind of… cut in half and transported to its current location. As a result, parts of it aren’t very accessible — think the narrow hallways and steep staircases you get with historic buildings — but are super haunted. As many as four ghosts have been reported to make an appearance there. There’re electrical shenanigans, shaking beds, and mysterious phantom coughs.

A photo of a picture on a wall. It's a very old, oval photograph of a sad-looking woman, in an ornate gilt frame. — Our room even had a complimentary Grandma.

I brought my ghost box, figuring it’d be interesting to mess around with during our downtime. I wasn’t able to get much on the scanner, but we also didn’t experience anything out-of-the-ordinary in our particular room, either.

We did meet a gentleman named Gary who was there with his wife. Gary was a lot of fun — always enthusiastic and down for a conversation, where he’d flit from subject to subject like a hummingbird. We talked about all kinds of things every time we ran into each other: history, haunted places, music, life, death, rehab, and more. He told us a story about someone close to him passing away. Even though this person appeared to have flatlined, they turned their head, looked into the empty doorway of their hospital room, and asked, “Which way do I go?” before they passed.

Even if you don’t find a ghost in your hotel room, places like this are generally home to absolute treasure troves of fun and interesting paranormal stuff. You’ve just got to know where to look.
(Antique stores. The answer is antique stores.)

I have made the weird and occasionally embarrassing habit of going into antique stores, finding someone who works there, and straight-up asking them, “If you had to guess, what object here would you say is the most likely to be haunted and/or carry some kind of terrible curse?”

Idk. A sheep maybe? It has bright pink eyes and its mouth gapes open in a silent scream.

A small portrait mug of a sinister looking man in a top hat.

A ceramic statue of a deranged looking clown riding on a displeased pig.

Several antique and vintage dolls, including Raggedy Anns and Andys.

A plastic perfume bottle top of a woman, possibly a bride. The plastic is yellow with age, giving her a blank-eyed stare.

(If I had to guess, it would be any one of these things. Did you know the original Annabelle doll was a Raggedy Ann? Fun!)

As it turns out, antique stores are usually not super busy and are full of dead people’s stuff. I have yet to meet an antique store employee who has not jumped right in to talking about the weird stuff that goes on there at night. Some are more skeptical, but most of them will eagerly tell you about all of the things they’ve seen or heard.

For example, Antiques Emporia is home to the ghost of a little girl. She rearranges things at night and opens the packaging of vintage toys.

Capt. Scraps in Ocean City has even been the subject of a professional paranormal investigation. Multiple customers, on several separate occasions, have reported the sense that there was something there. Eventually, an associate of one of the owners brought in a full team with EMF readers, scanners, and the works. While investigating, they were able to decipher the words “Henry. Fire. Dog.” It was later discovered that a local antiques dealer named Henry had lost his shop, his dog, and his life in a terrible fire. Some of his paintings ended up at Capt. Scraps, and Henry decided to come along with them!

A painting of a black-eyed woman in a large hat. The background is indistinct and abstract, and the colors are very bright. There's a large red flower in the foreground. — I don’t know if this was one of his paintings, specifically, but something about it really struck me and I had to get a picture of it.

This store also has its share of shadow people, odd phenomena on security cameras, and the general “sense” of a ghostly presence. It’s a really neat shop.

So, while I wasn’t able to get any recordings or paranormal experiences of my own, I did come away with lots of stories.

We also found a lot of shops that were right up our alley. Good Scents has a ton of local art and jewelry, candles, soaps, and incense. (We picked up some soaps, massage oil, and a box of “smokeless” Hinoki cypress Japanese incense.) Best of all, it’s quality stuff — not the kind of smells that immediately make my throat puffy and make me feel like someone is driving nails into my face.

They also had one of those boards that you can draw on with water. Usually, you use them to write little notes or affirmations. Because I am a giant obnoxious child, I used it to draw a rushed, ersatz Dickbutt. (Don’t worry, I didn’t leave him there for impressionable childs to see. I drew over it.)

Guardian's storefront. There is a chain of copper bells and a wooden image of an angel on the front door.

Guardian is another delightful place to stop if you enjoy metaphysical shops. It’s small, but well-stocked. It has some tarot and oracle decks I hadn’t seen anywhere else, and a very nice selection of books. (I picked up one that I can’t wait to review here.) When we checked out, the proprietor had us choose cards from an oracle deck — we read the affirmations and she had us keep the cards as a little bit of positivity.

We also went on a bit of a hunt for vegan cupcakes. We’d managed to find plenty of meat-, egg-, and dairy-free meal options for me, and tons of fresh seafood for my Handsome Assistant at places like The Mad Batter (like their seitan hot wings and vegan tostadas) and Good Earth (which had an amazing cauliflower steak with chimichurri), so finding vegan restaurants in Cape May wasn’t a problem at all.

The outside packaging of Fruition's Gay Bar. It's primarily purple and depicts several anthropomorphic animals: a bear in drag, a deer bartender in a rainbow scarf, and a small beaver dressed as Rosie the Riveter.

My Handsome Assistant also brought me some fancy chocolates, like the Gay Bar. It’s pretty much an Old Fashioned cocktail in chocolate bar form, and it was delightful. I’ve had boozy chocolate before, but mostly just those little chocolate bottles filled with rum. Nothing really cocktail-inspired and uniquely flavorful like this.

We did eventually find Chocolate Face, a bakery that had vegan cupcakes. The chocolate ones were even oat- and nut-free, so they ticked all of my “weird dietary issues” boxes. This was about twenty minutes from where we were staying, so we decided to poke around at a couple of neat looking shops we’d seen on the map.

And buddy, we were not prepared.

Just look at this idyllic-ass nonsense.

A photo of tiny cottages surrounded by brick paths and immaculate gardens. Lanterns hang from a large tree in the foreground, and the buildings are surrounded by flowers. — Don’t mind Longcat. He is protecting a stranger’s identity.

I thought it was going to be a couple of strip-mall type shops clustered around a parking lot. I was so wonderfully wrong. It was Woodland Village.

It was like… I don’t know. Little fairy cottages. Pricey goods, but not of the cheap, souvenir variety. All of this stuff was high-end. Handmade art and sculpture. Handmade clothing with vegetable-dyed fabrics. Handmade gemstone jewelry. Fine gemstone specimens. Handmade incense. Upscale men’s clothing. Teas. Perfumes. Spices.

Another view of Woodland Village, showing a gazebo, brick pathways lined with flowers and trees, an old-fashioned wheelbarrow full of plants, a set of wooden Adirondak chairs, and a shop in the background.

In Red Door Gallery, I wanted to show my Handsome Assistant a pour-over coffee funnel in a beautiful, glazed ceramic. While I reached for it, I clumsily knocked over a small sculpture of a sheep. We thought he was okay, but, sadly, one of his ears was knocked off in the fall.

Obviously, I was going to bring him home and fix him.

Once we’d finished shopping, we brought our purchases (mostly handmade cat toys for the dummy squad back home). I set the small, broken figure on the counter.

“He was a casualty of the fall, but it’s okay. I can repair him. I have the technology.”

“You… really don’t have to do that,” the proprietor said.

As it turns out, she was the artist who made the little figures. She didn’t want us to buy him just because he was broken, and insisted we pick out a whole one instead. I thought they were cute anyhow, so I did — even though I felt bad about the little sheep with his broken ear.

“Can you fix the broken one?” My Handsome Assistant asked.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she explained. She said she’d likely end up throwing him away.

My Handsome Assistant came over and whispered to me.

“Okay, would you really rather have the broken one, or the other one?”

“I mean… They’re both very cute, but I am going to feel terrible if the broken one ends up in the trash.”

A pair of small, polymer clay sheep in front of a blue glass bottle and a needlefelted Amanita muscaria.

Sure enough, he went back to the cash register and asked if, since the broken one was likely to be tossed anyhow, we could have it.

So, a bit of glue and patience later, I now have two small clay sheep in my kitchen, and a partner who is very understanding of all of my strange bullshit.

We also stopped in Summer Studio Avalon, which I probably could’ve spent all day in. It was just filled with gorgeous, handmade things. (I got a rutilated quartz, moonstone, and pyrite bracelet, some incense, and a pair of flowy teal pants that I am probably going to live in from now on.) There was beautiful embroidery, handmade incense, artwork, accessories, sculptures, crystals, all kinds of the exact sort of things I could happily spend an inordinate of time looking at and/or smelling. The proprietor was also very nice — we got caught up in a conversation about writing things, painting, and the fact that rainbow moonstone isn’t actually a moonstone and is more like a white labradorite.

A photo of a store display. There are perfumes, flower crowns, pressed flowers, books, and clothing.

We also stopped in Northeast Man, mostly for my Handsome Assistant. I found some really nice shirts and a solid cologne (Duke Cannon’s Bourbon, which he bought and I have been sneaking from him because it smells excellent and is the exact way I want to smell forever), but everything fit me in a less “mysteriously androgynous” way and more in a “fourth grader wearing their dad’s shirt” way. Most of the things there weren’t quite my Handsome Assistant’s aesthetic — more “Boat Dad” than “Office Druid” — but there were some really nice, high-quality pieces that suited him very well.

Since the Angel of the Sea is about a half a block from the ocean, we spent some time doing sunset beach walks. The weather was gorgeous, and the slanting golden light made the crests of the waves seem to glow. We also came upon a very large (and extremely deceased) horseshoe crab, which my Handsome Assistant had never encountered before. (He’s from a landlocked state, so his experience with wild marine life is somewhat limited.)

We also kept an eye out for trash, like we always do. There really wasn’t much — I think we picked up two cellophane wrappers and a water bottle, all told. It was very clean, especially compared to some beaches and hiking trails we’ve been on.

The intact shell of a large horseshoe crab on the sand.

Fortunately for my Handsome Assistant, we did stop at the Nature Center of Cape May. We watched gulls and ospreys overhead, listened to the songbirds on the balcony, and admired the large, live horseshoe crabs in the marine lab.

Am I disappointed that we didn’t find any ghosts ourselves? Not really. It would’ve been interesting, but I’m fully satisfied with the experience that we had. Even during the tail end of its “off” season, Cape May was a lot of fun. Woodland Village was great, the abundance of antique stores (and antique store ghost stories) was awesome, the food was fantastic, and the beach was beautiful.

A person sitting at a white wicker table on a balcony. They're wearing sunglasses and a blue grey tanktop with a wing motif. They're smiling. In the background, the sea is visible.

An image of a person with a green bandana and black tanktop. They're smiling. In the background, there's a tall, Victorian spire lit with cafe lights.

life

Fortunately, he also loses his sunglasses a lot.

January 12, 2024January 11, 2024 J.2 Comments

Someone STOLE the goshfucked CAR.

Okay. I admit. I can get a little lazy when it comes to warding things. I didn’t do anything to protect the car. I’m not even sure I could’ve made that much of a difference, considering my Handsome Assistant apparently owns what could be considered “the most stealable car in America.” Now, there are aftermarket updates to make cars more secure, but we only buy used cars and were unaware that this particular model came with the equivalent of a flashing neon sign that says HI!!! STEAL ME! :)))).

I’ll be honest. I don’t like cars. I never have. I love road trips, but if it was possible to do them entirely by train, I would. There are multiple reasons for this:

My first significant experience was my mother’s Oldsmobile Firenza that used to stall out at every intersection, once got the interior rained on so bad that it smelled like vomit for a decade, and used to make me dizzy and carsick the second I sat in it. Even when it wasn’t moving.
My second was wanting to eat/play with icicles like the big kids could. The only one my tiny little five-year-old hands could reach was a kind of lumpy, grayish one growing on the muffler of my grandma’s car. I snapped it off, licked it, and became violently ill for three days.
My third was the time I thought a car accident had turned my dad into a zombie.
My fourth most significant experience with motor vehicles was being run over by one.
My fifth was dating someone who managed to wreck multiple cars over the course of a two-and-a-half-year relationship.

Cars and I have always had a wary, distant, reluctant alliance, at best. It has never really worried me, though. If anything, it seems appropriate. I’m too blind to drive, and I’m strongly against the idea of car-centric societies. It makes sense that cars’d have it out for me.

A large orange cat lays on his side in a sort of crescent shape, with one paw arching over his head. His tummy looks incredibly soft, and a pair of small, snaggly fangs peek out of his massive dumbass face.
There are no thoughts here. Purely vibes. — I don’t know what picture to post with this. Here’s Pye, being a massive arcing chungus in my Handsome Assistant’s office.

Anyway, all of this is to say that I was gently woken up early Wednesday morning by my Handsome Assistant going, “Hey, Jeccas? Do you remember if I… did anything weird with my car yesterday?”

“Buh?” I replied.

(Because I have been mind-poisoned by the internet, I did not initially think “did anything weird” meant “parked it somewhere unusual.” My imagination went somewhere far worse, but that’s neither here nor there.)

Anyway, it turns out someone’d stole it. If there’s a thing I dislike more than cars themselves, it is having to have basically any contact with police ever. Now a car was making me do that thing. Even if all we wanted was for insurance to cover the loss, we needed a police report. Butts.

The same orange cat, photoshopped underwater. He appears to be wearing a snorkel and a pair of swim fins. — Here he is snorkeling.

The whole process pretty much turned my Handsome Assistant into Liam Neeson from Taken. He took his motorcycle out for a ride, half to calm down and half to see if he could find the car himself.

“They say that most stolen cars are found in the same area,” he pointed out.

He was only gone for a minute or two before he came back.

“You know, I just remembered something…”

My Handsome Assistant is both handsome and helpful. He’s very smart, good at his job, and a caring, attentive, equitable contributor to our relationship. He is, however, extremely forgetful. Between that and my own memory deficiencies, it’s amazing we haven’t burned the house down making pancakes yet.

Take his sunglasses. When he started working for his current employer, he had to make a few wardrobe upgrades. Not just suits and ties, but smaller things — a watch. Nicer shoes. Sunglasses. He started with a pair of Ray-Bans, which he constantly lost. Once, they were found in the attic by Pye, who firmly insisted on pointing out these weird, boring objects that very obviously did not belong in his play space. Now, he’s also got a less-fancy-but-paradoxically-much-more-expensive pair of prescription sunglasses.

To avoid losing them, he invested in some trackers. As long as they’re nearby, or at least near other trackers, he can see their location on his phone.

Since he only really uses his sunglasses for driving, he keeps them in his car.

The car that got stolen.

The same cat, now photoshopped into Michelangelo's "The Creation of Adam." — Here is Pye posing for Michelangelo.

Within minutes, he had found an entire location history tracking the car’s journey to an adjacent county. On the highway. Every house it had parked in front of.

After a few more minutes, he was triangulating locations and planning a sneaky drive past some of the places where the car had been.

“Please tell me you’re not going to try to steal it back.”

“No, no,” he assured me, “That’d be a bad idea. Besides, then I’d be driving around in a car that’s reported stolen, which would cause problems.”

He didn’t find the car itself, but he came back with a map of all of the places it could’ve conceivably been hidden overnight. A cluster of bushes. A covered driveway. Under a bridge over a small creek bed.

The same orange cat, now pictured cresting the water with a small whale. — Here he is with a whale.

Anyhow, the car was found yesterday morning. We also still have the (very fancy) rental that the insurance company provided for 50 days, so that’s neat. It’ll be a few days (the police still haven’t processed the original report) before he can fill out the paperwork to get it back, and we don’t know what kind of condition it’s in, but it’s found.

The tracking tag tracked the car all the way to the tow lot.
Thieving jerk never even noticed the sunglasses.

Skyline Drive

July 26, 2021October 30, 2023 J.Leave a comment

I didn’t think much when I posted a picture of a cool rock. (It was columnar basalt, which always reminds me of some surreal, alien landscape out of Kenshi.)

“Hey,” a friend replied in not-those-exact words, “There’s a neat example of that not too far from us.”

“Oh sweet,” I approximately replied, “Where?”

And so that was how my partner and I ended up loaded with snacks and music, navigating our way down a gorgeous scenic drive through Shenandoah National Park. When I say scenic, I’m not messing around, either — it was gorgeous, the kind of beauty that pictures can’t really do justice.

You know how when the landscape is uninterrupted for far enough, you can see the way the hills fade to blue in the distance, and the shadows of the clouds moving over them? I live for that.

We even stopped for a bit of a hike at Compton Gap, where the columnar basalt was. The entrance to the trail showed a picture of it, but we weren’t able to find the specimen itself — the trail branched, and I think we ended up taking the wrong fork. Not that I minded at all. The air was fresh and sweet, the trail was quiet save for the song of birds and bugs, and everything was a fresh, deep green so intense, it almost didn’t seem real.

There was a small mushroom friend (a Russula, I think), bright orange trumpet creeper, and some very busy insect buddies — including a spicebush swallowtail and an American bumble bee!

The drive was long enough that we were in the midst of golden hour on our way back. The sun painted the clouds shades of pink and lavender, and the light took on that warm, comforting, well… golden tone. We paused at all of the overlooks to soak it up, relishing the warmth radiating from the granite rocks, and the cool, fresh breezes all around.

We’re planning on going back in the autumn, when the leaves start to change. It should be amazing!

Witchcraft

And so I made a safe travel charm (since the gremlins were already handled).

April 4, 2019March 30, 2019 J.2 Comments

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“Hey, mind doing a tarot reading real quick?”

I’m kind of used to this — my S.O. and I swap readings on the regular. If he has a decision he’s unsure about, he asks me to pull a few cards. I do the same if something’s bugging me. It’s a helpful way to get some insight that we can’t really get by reading for ourselves.

See, he’s wanted a motorcycle for basically ever. He’s taken riding classes, shopped around, and kept his eyes open for deals. This time, he was messaging me from a dealership. He’d found a used bike at a decent price, but wanted to know more before making the commitment and dropping the dosh.

I pulled a few cards — strangely enough, one of them reversed itself before I could flip it to see what it was. (I often arrange my deck so it’s all upright, and watching the card slowly spin in place until it was perfectly upside-down was super bonkers.)

Temperance reversed, and The Magician.

Buying the bike wouldn’t be sound judgment or a good monetary decision, but it would be the manifestation of something he’s wanted for a long time. The cards he’d pulled before asking me indicated that buying the bike would take a load off of his mind, but waiting would offer a new, better opportunity.

He decided not to buy. (I was pretty relieved, gotta say. I trust his skills, it’s just everyone else on the road I’m concerned about.)

Sure enough, not long afterward, he was hit with the perfect opportunity to get a great bike. Its last owner bought it new last winter, but now he has to move overseas. So, my S.O. managed to snag a nearly-new bike in fantastic condition, with the exact specs he was looking for.

… Which meant that I had to make a charm for safe travel. He’s got a bell, but there are worse things on the road than gremlins.

Historically, travel was always fraught with peril. If there weren’t highwaymen, there were rough roads, storms, injured animals, broken axles, and worse. Even today, it’s not exactly a breeze — most accidents happen within a few miles of home, and longer journeys have their own set of problems. (Trust me, I know. I managed to get run over less than a block from my house as a kid, and someday I might type out the story of how I got stuck on a stranded train in the Utah salt flats seated behind a guy who was on the lam after shooting a dude.)

Long story short, there are a ton of magical measures to help keep you in one piece on the road. Since this is a bike he’s planning on using to commute in the city — weather permitting, of course — I thought this charm was the best way to help keep him safe. Hopefully, it’ll also keep his bike safe, so we don’t have a repeat of the time our car got hecked apart by bad gas in Mississippi!

An Amulet for Safe Travel

For this, you’ll need:

Dried comfrey (especially the root)
Dried feverfew
A square of red (protection) or yellow (travel) fabric
String or ribbon
Malachite
Black tourmaline
Any other safe travel charms you’d like to include

I performed this spell on the full moon, during the equinox. Travel doesn’t always leave us room for picking the most auspicious day for spellcasting, so feel free to put this amulet together whenever you need to. Good timing is nice, but not required.

Set up your ritual space as you usually do. Hallow the space, cast a circle, open the gate, call the quarters, you do you.

Combine the herbs, using your projective (dominant) hand. As you do, visualize them filling with energy — enough to extend beyond the amulet itself, to surround whichever vehicle it’s placed within. Place the herbs in the center of the fabric.

Empower the stones as you usually do. If you don’t have a preferred method, hold them in your projective hand. As with the herbs, visualize them filling with warm, protective energy. Place them on the herbs.

Hold your hands over the herbs and stones. Say whatever words are appropriate for your situation — it doesn’t matter if they’re fancy or feel magical, what matters is that they come from the heart. State your intent for this charm. What kind of vehicle do you want to protect? What kind of hazards do you want to protect it from?

Draw the corners of the fabric up, so it forms a bundle. Tie the string or ribbon around the opening (I usually use a miller’s knot) to keep everything in place. If you have any other travel charms, tie them on as well. For this charm, I used a holed stone and a safe travel bindrune (made of raidho and algiz) burned onto a small slice of pine.

Keep the safe travel amulet in the vehicle or, if you’re traveling by public transportation, in a pocket or bag. Before an especially long or risky journey, take a few minutes to hold it in your hands and channel the protective energy.

life

Have Familiar, Will Travel. Part III: And then someone poisoned the car.

October 29, 2018November 19, 2018 J.2 Comments

Some things are unavoidable. As it turns out, occasionally accidentally poisoning your car is one of them.

Unfortunately, sometimes pipes burst, tanks leak, deliveries get mixed up, or janky gas stations in the middle of nowhere try to cut costs by selling gas with a prize inside.
(The prize is extra chemicals.)
All told, it’s not really that unlikely that you’ll end up with a bad batch of fuel that has the potential to turn your car into a very expensive, highly impractical paperweight.

We filled up in Mississippi, and again in Tennessee. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly where the trouble started — it’s not like we could call a gas station and say, “hey, you just broke my car,” and expect whoever answers the phone to just sort of agree with us, you know? Either way, we ended up en route to Nashville when the check engine light came on, and we started feeling a pretty serious knock.

We were on the highway, and not far from Nashville, so we looked up a mechanic in the area and got there as fast as we could. Several hundred dollars later, we had replaced all the spark plugs, tested the fuel for diesel several times, and were not really any closer to an answer. The mechanics were pretty awesome about everything, though, and did their best to get us back on the road as soon as possible. We managed to get home, driving the last seven-odd hours with our fingers crossed and me fervently hoping that the travel protection amulet I’d made also extended to car engines.

(It did. We limped it back to our apartment’s parking space just in time for the car to decide it was not going to start again.)

Another mechanic and yet more hundreds of dollars later, we managed to get the car running — after dropping the fuel tank, flushing it out, and accepting a very flexible definition of the word “running.”

If you’ve been in this situation, it is scary (in a very how-am-I-going-to-get-home-oh-god-isn’t-this-basically-the-beginning-of-House-of-1000-Corpses way), frustrating, and infuriating. It’s expensive to fix, and it isn’t even a problem you can try to avoid to begin with, unless you visually inspect and thoroughly test every drop of fuel that goes in your car. So what do you do if you end up with a tank full of tainted gas?

As it turns out, this:

Call your insurance company. Your coverage may handle tainted gas, but it’s important that you contact them before having any repairs done. Damage from tainted gas is not your fault, or a consequence of regular wear and tear on your vehicle, so it’s not really any different than any other damage someone else inflicts on your vehicle. You’ll have to be able to provide some proof that the damage was from contaminated fuel, though, so…
Narrow down where you got the gas from. This is important — save your receipts when you get gas. Always have the last receipt from the last place at which you filled up. We didn’t think to keep our receipts, so we had to go by a bank statement. It made the process a bit longer and more tedious.
Call the Department of Weights and Measures for that station’s county. As it turns out, they’re the ones with jurisdiction over this, and they’ll see what’s up.

It should be noted that, if you have a feeling you somehow ended up with diesel-tainted fuel, it is not a super great idea to keep driving your car. The longer you drive with contaminated gas, the more extensive (and expensive) the damage is going to be. We didn’t have much of a choice — the first mechanic said we’d be alright if we added some octane booster and let everything cycle through, and we didn’t have another way home.

All told, it was definitely one of the more nerve-wracking trips I’ve ever been on, and I once went on a cross-country train ride where someone died, four people got arrested, and we spent an extra twelve hours stranded in the Utah salt flats. True story.

life · Witchcraft

Have Familiar, Will Travel. Part II: Mobile Magic.

October 25, 2018November 18, 2018 J.1 Comment

Note: This post contains some affiliate links to things I think might be helpful or interesting to you. They allow me to earn a small “finder’s fee” if you buy something, at no additional cost to you. Thank you for supporting cool people who make neat stuff, and this site!

Man, where do I start?

This trip came right when I was in the middle of a thirteen-day uncrossing. (It’s something I like to do periodically to ditch other people’s accumulated nonsense, in addition to regular clearing and protection stuff.) Fortunately, I was able to take it with me. This got me thinking — how do you perform spells or rituals on the road?

We were going to be gone for a week, so I knew I wanted to be able to handle whatever came up. Since we’d be in hotels every night, whatever I used had to be:

Discreet.
Transportable.
Smokeless. Not all hotels have smoking rooms anymore, and almost none have windows that can open. It’d be really rude of me to light a bunch of incense or diffuse oils in a confined, temporary space in a non-smoking room — what if the person after me has severe asthma or allergies? It’s one thing if I accidentally give myself a headache or trigger my allergies, but another thing entirely if I accidentally smoke out my cats or the poor unwitting soul who’s going to occupy the room after me. (Also, some places will heck of charge you if your room smells like smoke when you leave.)
Difficult for me to forget. This is saying a lot — I have a neurological disorder that makes me forget things very easily. I’m not even supposed to do things like cook, because there is a significant chance I will lose track of what I’m doing and burn my entire block down.

In the end, I settled on a couple of key items that I could use for pretty much whatever I needed to do.

Like a portable altar.

The altar structure I use only really needs three things: a tree, a well, and a hearth. These are somewhat malleable. The tree can be any representation of a tree, or even an upright stone. The well can be a cup. The hearth can be three candles. With a quartz point and three tea lights stored in a glass food saver, I had a tree, a well, and a hearth that could travel. (And I brought along a wand I made recently, so I could both have it with me, and see how well it traveled/held up to being in my purse for days at a time.) Score.

I also wanted to be able to do some more specific work in contexts where busting out an altar (even a portable one) and lighting candles wasn’t exactly… doable.

Continue reading “Have Familiar, Will Travel. Part II: Mobile Magic.” →

life

Have Familiar, Will Travel. Part I: “THEY ALL SAID I WAS MAD!”

October 22, 2018November 18, 2018 J.2 Comments

Note: I link to some products here, but I’m not getting compensated for anything. Trust me, I don’t think any of these companies actually wanted to be associated with this idea.

This was not the post I planned to write.

This was not the week any of us planned to have.

Let me start from the beginning.

Neither my S.O. nor I have family in the area. I left the house I grew up in pretty much the second I was legally old enough to do so, and have moved wherever the wind blew me more times than I can count. He left home for college and job opportunities, to pursue his dreams. The end result is that we’re here pretty much alone, though his family has always been just a phone call away when we needed them. Unfortunately, this awesome family sustained a terrible loss.

Tl;dr: With pretty short notice, we had to find a way to get to a funeral in Mississippi.

We looked up plane tickets — $857 worth of no luck.

We looked up Amtrak — 44-odd hours of no luck.

He didn’t want to be away from home for too long if he could help it. I didn’t want to leave our cats alone if I could help it. We’ve had them for a little over a year and, in that time, we’ve discovered that Pyewacket needs more daily mental stimulation than a human toddler, and Kiko has separation anxiety that will make her try to destroy doors and hit the road in a bid for a Homeward Bound-esque reunion. Since they are both rescues, we also didn’t want to put them through the experience of being taken and dropped off in a kennel-like boarding facility. We also haven’t had to use a sitter in the past, so we didn’t really have anyone we knew well enough to trust them with.

(By the way — If anyone tells you cats are independent creatures, laugh at them. Laugh the high, gibbering laughter of the mad.)

We love them, but they are weird, weird animals. Ultimately, we decided that the simultaneously-most-sensible-yet-most-ludicrous solution would be to take the cats on a road trip.
Yeah, I know.

Two cats. Five states. One car.

It should be noted that these nerds hate being in carriers. They had a vet appointment for some boosters and a general yearly checkup two days before we left, where they sat in the waiting room growling at each other, Pye hissed at everything, and the vet came right out and said, “Yeah, this trip? It’s a pretty bad idea.”

Nevertheless, I kept on keeping on with my dumbass plans.

I’m not gonna lie, this was a long, strange journey. My S.O. was a surprise pallbearer. We visited a rad occult shop in Memphis. Mississippi poisoned our car. I’m going to have to break this up to keep it from turning into some kind of novella.

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