Day #3 of My Life As a Fright Mask

Drought! Plague! Pestilence! Worst corn crop in two decades. Figures. I know! None of you reading this are actually here, are you? This is my own personal hell, where my favorite grain of all time dies in the soil, right? See, if I were someone else, it would have been the BEAN crop, or an apple tree blight or something. But because it’s me, it’s the corn crop!! Ahhh, it all makes sense now! We’re in a hell of my own personal intent!

OK, fine. Maybe you are here. But I’m sure this is my fault, too; another arm of my own peculiar gypsy curse. Not sure what I’ve done to the gypsies, since I’m pretty sure I don’t know any gypsies, but maybe one of them can clear up the confusion.

Delayed awareness: two entries ago I was commenting that the only way I could think of to stop my biting the inside of my mouth every two and a half seconds was to viciously slap my own face, as hard as I could. I wasn’t doing that in public, I was, however, doing it at home. To the degree that I had ugly self-inflicted bruises on myself. Well, I have to admit that it worked. My face was so bruised and swollen from the self-abusive face punching that I stopped biting myself. But it took me a little while to realize: I’m on steroids.

Correct that: I knew I was on steroids for the Bell’s Palsy; I didn’t realize the effect that steroids has on women: murderous rage. Agression. Hostility. Short-temperedness. At one point in my self-directed rage, I had asked, "Why am I acting like this?" And I heard a voice from someone, somewhere, calmly: "You’re on steroids." Startled, I went and looked it up on Web MD. Yup! Those were the effects of steroids on women!  I realize I’m short tempered and crabby to begin with. Steroids just made it 100x worse.

Personally, I think that I need a better Day Book to learn from. On August 11th, I went and looked up the day on my three daybooks. The Pagan Books of Days is completely empty for August 11th. The Real Witches’ Year talks about the color orange.

This was from the Witches’ Book of Days:

"Puck Fair. Dress in boyish clothes and with your female friends enjoy a night of playful masculinity!"

After 2/10ths of a second’s contemplation: no, no, non, nyet, not happenin’. First of all: why would I do that? Second of all: why would any of my female friends want to do that? Third: what exactly IS "playful masculinity"? Grab my crotch and yell "Gotta get me some o’ THAT!" at passing bimbos? With my luck, one of those passing trollops would have taken self-defense classes, see me as a threat to her safety, and level me with a well-placed kick in my non-existent nuts. I already have enough physical health problems. Grab a basketball and head for the courts? I’m five feet, two inches tall! I can’t even see the basket, much less be able to dump a ball into it! Fourth: what are "boyish clothes"? Jeans? Most women already wear those. A jock strap? How weird and uncomfortable. And fifth: um ..... no.

I’m still not sure why the writers of this day book saw the 11th as a bizarre cross-dressing event. Not my thang, sorry. Luckily, Wikipedia has another version of the Puck Fair:

Every year a group of people go up into the mountains and catch a wild goat. The goat is brought back to the town and the "Queen of Puck", traditionally a young school girl from the local primary schools who crowns the goat "King Puck". The "King" is then put into a small cage on a high stand in the middle of the town square which signifies that the festivities may begin. The pubs stay open until 3.00 AM, which is a legal exception due to the fair as all bars in Ireland normally must close at 2.00 AM, this is a source of contention for the local police ...

Scholars speculate that the fair's origins stems from Pre-Christian Ireland, from the Celtic festival of Lughnasa which symbolized the beginning of the harvest season, and that the goat is a pagan fertility symbol.

Now, I have no intention of torturing and imprisoning a wild goat. I am a Capricorn, so have some idea who the "pagan fertility symbol" is. Not quite sure what to do as far as celebrating Puck Fair Day, though.

See, this is what we’re missing. The quintessential Daybook Writer. Damien was a genius at this – if you go through his prison journal, it’s much easier to use that as a Daybook than some of these dumb books. DAMIEN!!! Write a Daybook!

He was best at the preparation, or the anticipatory side of things. Because he saw things so far ahead, he would be perfect at saying (for example): "You’re going to need a carnelian crystal 4 weeks from now. Look for an occult store or an online vendor and buy a ...", or "Prepare your grocery list for the Harvest Feast next week. Here are some ideas."

These other books spring things on you without warning, and you don’t have the advance notice to celebrate things properly. He could also connect his passion, the Tarot, to his Daybook.

(*sigh*) Well, in the meanwhile, until Mr. Signpost figures out that the world is in desperate need of his talent for writing daybooks ...or Tarot books as well ... I’ll have to continue with mine. He was also saying that he wanted to do Tarot readings. Fortunately for him, I’m still completely set against going back to Salem for anything, so he’ll never get the opportunity to do a Tarot reading that practically screams, "She’s under a contagious curse! Step back! Very carefully! And now ... RUN LIKE HELL!" (I wonder how that would show up in a tarot reading, anyway?)

Tonight – my obsession is in the United States, in Minneapolis.

Day #2 of My Life As a Fright Mask

This morning the squinty-eyed, snot-dripping, drooling fright-mask gimp – which is to say, moi – tried out a breadmaker she hadn’t been able to use, mainly because Kohl’s had re-boxed a defective machine and re-sold it to her. No dough kneading paddle.

Yes indeedy, yer Southern Baptist capitalism ideals hard at work in Kohl’s Department Store, boys ‘n girls! Screw the gimp and go straight to heaven! I’d finally found the time and energy to buy a replacement paddle off of eBay. The first loaf is underway. I’m still not convinced it will work properly, but we’ll see.

In any event, the second of the two Lammas feasts was last weekend, so the "home baked fresh bread" part of it was for that.

While doing that, I tried to teach myself to drink coffee in a diner without horrifying the other diners. I knew I looked like Stevie Wonder what with the head twists getting my mouth situated around the cup. Still dribbled, though. Kept saying, "F**k me," which ended up sounding like "uck knee" because I was having such problems with "f"s and "m"s, but fortunately, the only two people near me were grandparents, both of whom seemed to be hard of hearing. "Son of a itch" is also problematic, what with the "b" no longer pronounceable.

No drugstores carried a flat eye patch, only hard, plastic convex ones. I bought headbands to hold a satiny eye pillow over the right eye, in order to keep the eyelid closed, as I was having such bad reactions to adhesives. CVS only had eye bandaids.

I tried one, and within 3 minutes, the adhesive had begin to liquefy in the high heat and run into my eye, which couldn’t close. The chemical burning was appalling, and I frantically ripped off the bandaid, taking a lot of my eyebrow with it. Thinking: I know women who would pay a mint for an eyebrow wax like that – again, I’m not one of them. Yes, that was me in the CVS parking lot, muttering, "Uck knee, uck knee, uck knee!" while staunching the eyebrow bleed-out.

I swear, in a very short period of time I will look just like a browless Norma Desmond. Well, on one side of my face I will, anyway.

Later on, I got a call from one of my co-workers, based in North Carolina, who happens to be a nutball christian. I love her, but her condescension towards every other religious practice but her own is ... well, it’s sickening, really. Jesus himself never acted as disrespectfully towards others as she does. Her POV: iffn ida only axe Jaysis innew my hort, he’da healed me bah now!

I yell non-stop for ten minutes about any deity who blackmails deformed gimps just so he can pocket their membership dues, until I hear my friend laughing. I’m not sure if she’s laughing because I’m so measurably predictable, or because I sound just like Daffy Duck with my deformed mouth. "Dethpicable!!!" Fine. Now she can happily go tell her pastor she battled with a lisping heretic and score some brownie points. I need to learn not to pay self-righteous, condescendingly rude christians any mind. Really. When she insults MY deity, I hang up on her.

I have come to make the lower realities like the higher realities, and the outer realities like the inner realities. I have come to unite them in this Temple Space, where they reveal themselves through images and symbols.

Gospel of Philip, 69:1-4

Images and symbols. Hmmmm. See now, that’s the Jesus I could respect – the mystical and intelligent one from whom one might learn something worthwhile. 99.99999% of his followers strike me as your basic retards, or sex-starved pedophiliac demons. I swear, he’s probably hanging around doing regular Homer Simpson impressions - (clapping one hand to his head and yelping "doh!") – every time one of his followers does or says something that proves one (dumb as a doorknob) or the other (sex-starved sicko). Guy’s gotta have one hell of a headache by now.

It does make me think of Sekhmet, though. Sekhmet, the only deity who has ever healed me of anything. She’s never demanded that I "axe her inno my hort", but she’s one of those powerful deities that isn’t standing around waiting on me, either. I have no idea why I didn’t think of her first when I came down with this miserable palsy. Ever since the cancerous tumor on my forehead arrived, and the non-stop series of disasters and heartbreaks which followed it, I haven’t done much as far as "religious studies" go. I can barely remember the invocation ceremony. True, I didn’t need an invocation when she healed me of my lifelong phobia without even blinking, but with that, I was being told that either I lost the phobia or I died. With Sekhmet, I’m always mindful of her personality: she fully expects me to do what I can to heal myself before I invoke her. Otherwise, she regards me irritably as incorrigibly lazy. She’s not my handmaiden; she’s my deity. She’s the Blazing Eye of the Sun, the Lioness of Courage. I really love Sekhmet.

I start poking food into the right corner of my mouth instead of my left to strengthen the muscles on the dead side of my face. At the grocery store, I bought a box of those chintzy imitation New York soft pretzels. They’re nothing LIKE New York’s soft street pretzels of course (Damien! You’ll miss the pretzels!), but they are somewhat chewy once you nuke them for a minute or so. Chewy’s good. Chewy gives your face muscles a workout. I take all of my medications on schedule. I spend short periods of time without the eye pillow, to practice moving the eyelid. I begin to prepare an invocation. I watch Cinema Paradiso. (If you’re wondering what that has to do with anything, pay attention to the muscles in your face when you scrunch it up and start crying pitifully at the end of the film. That film slays me, every time.)

Sekhmet is a great healer, sometimes called the Great One of Healing, and her priests and priestesses were known as the greatest healers in the land.

In honor of Damien’s infectious excitement about the upcoming Harvest Moon, I downloaded Rosemary Clooney’s version of "Shine On, Harvest Moon" (there are maybe a handful of women singers whose voices I can tolerate – Rosemary Clooney is one of them) into my iPod and am listening to it.

"Witchcraft has always been a religion of poetry, not theology."

Starhawk, The Spiral Dance, Special 20th Anniversary Edition, p. 32

The sonnet cycle returned. Just when I think I’m crawling out from under the curse I’ve been under, I’m proven decidedly wrong. People I work with have commented on it ("You really do seem to be under a run of very bad luck!") My boss’s boss hugged me (he NEVER does that) and then asked jokingly if I needed him to kill a few chickens for their entrails – it made me burst out laughing, actually, until I wondered how HE knew about the age-old method of identifying and then lifting curses. He’s a scientist!

In a way, it made me feel better ... I no longer felt like I was being overly narcissistic and self-pitying. So many other people had noticed the serious run of accidents, injuries, surgeries, disasters, heart-breaks, odd illnesses, one right after the other ... it wasn’t my imagination at work. It FELT scripted, far beyond coincidence. People would say, "I’ll pray for you," and it was all I could do not to scream, "No! Don’t!" because that always made it worse. I just reeled from one horrible moment to the next, without much of a pause between disasters. The agoraphobia wasn’t a mental aberration – it was perfectly logical. Every time I turned around something horrible was happening.

It certainly felt like chaos, but I couldn’t find an explanation for it. Still can’t.

Woman with Two Faces ... the Curse Continues

I’ll try to recover and get back to my Daybook in Progress tomorrow, but in the meanwhile ... the next disaster ...

(left:  "Woman with Two Faces" (reversed), Pierre R. Lespes, Brooklyn Art Project)

My right eye won’t close now and the eyelid has to be taped down. I have a skin allergy to the tape, which is leaving big red welts on and around my eye, and disfiguring my eyelid, which is now sagging and purple. I can no longer smile. I dribble water out of the right side of my mouth when I drink because I can’t hold the right side of my mouth closed. I can’t open the right side of my mouth wide enough to eat anything, so have to poke food gingerly into the left side and hope it doesn’t fall back out. Worst of all: I can only flare one nostril in indignation, instead of two, and boy, if that doesn’t interfere with my catalog of facial characteristics, I don’t know what does.

Delayed results of the facial surgery? Probably not, but who knows? Stroke? No, but everyone thought so at first – there’s nothing I love more than being rushed into emergency rooms as a "code red" with an oxygen mask slapped over your face. Lawrence Hospital, my usual nemesis, actually reacted pretty "emergency-ish" on Monday; I was impressed. Triage nurse looked at me, frowned, said, "Smile at me". I did, and she tossed me on a gurney and rushed me off for a cat scan, assuming a stroke was in progress. Another nurse rushed in and slapped an IV in a vein – they all expected to be pumping clot-busting drugs into me any second now.

Diagnosis for the reason I woke up with half of my face completely paralyzed? The reason I am now the woman with two faces? Bell’s Palsy. Bell’s f**king Palsy. On top of everything else.

Came home from the emergency room (again) looking like a distorted and terrifying Halloween mask (again), depressed as hell and ready to jump out the nearest window ... again. I should probably - again - confess that I live at ground level, so that’s really not as suicidal as it sounds, and actually involves climbing up a small stepladder to wiggle out the window and sprawl on the ground at eye level outside the window. So no, it wouldn’t have killed me, injured me, or even scraped my knee. It was the principle of the thing. I mean, it was obvious that the Sky Sadist was killing me off in increments, why not make it easier for the freaking SOB?

I toyed with the enticing idea of taking up smoking again, just to calm myself down, except I didn’t have any cigarettes. Also, since I can’t coordinate my lips enough to suck on a straw, I’m pretty sure trying to smoke would be a waste of time anyway. (*sigh*)

But I had come home, looking for perhaps a little comfort and escape, but doubting now that I would ever find any comfort. Or escape. The only person who could have comforted me had dropped dead. The agoraphobia I was battling after the disasters leading up to Jim’s death returned suddenly – home had once felt like the only safe haven there was; now it was the place where my face had twisted in on itself in the midst of sleep. Agoraphobia and somniphobia collided. Fear of leaving the house, combined with a fear of sleeping while I was IN the house. I picked up the headphones again and went back into sonnet cycle mode.

I also discovered that, coincidentally, all sorts of fraudulent communications had impacted BOTH of the only two people I really paid attention to anymore, and both of them had felt compelled to say  something about it on the same day. Not that I believe in coincidences.

Piero had to release a brief video saying, "I’m not on Facebook; I only have one Twitter account, don’t pay attention to what people are saying." His was actually pretty calm ... and I had no idea what people WERE saying, so was confused by the announcement until someone explained it to me.

Damien’s was a series of angry tweets about people apparently spreading rumors saying that he didn’t like his supporters – or something along those lines – and HE was obviously pissed off. I don’t know what incident provoked Damien’s explosion, since I have no contact with any of his supporters; I do know what provoked Piero’s video: a fake twitter account – which I’d seen but already figured out wasn’t him a long time ago. Apparently, the fake Piero had recently tweeted, "A REAL fan would only pay attention to the music and not to whose face was prettier!" – which was SUCH a hissy-fit, girly-girly thing to say, you had to laugh.

Think about it. He’s a teenage boy. A teenage boy would have thought, "Actually, a REAL fan is a gorgeous chick with oversized boobies who would ride the mechanical bull for 24 hours without stopping and not assume it meant anything permanent," but he never would have tweeted it if he wanted to maintain his teenage girl fan base. Which – and trust me when I say this – I’m pretty sure Piero does. I would have burst out laughing had I seen it when first posted, because really, any guy posting something that ridiculously girly would have been banned from the testosterone club for life – I can’t believe that anyone actually thought that was him. (Also, the fake Piero tweeted that nonsense in Spanish, which was another obvious giveaway: he’s not THAT fluent in Spanish. Plus, even taking into account that he’s a teenage boy, he’s not that stupid.)

Needless to say, while I’m still dribbling things out of the side of my mouth, and while I keep biting my tongue and the inside of my mouth, and while I keep viciously slapping my own face in a desperate attempt to get myself to wake up and pay attention and stop biting the f**k out of myself, and while snot is still running out of one nostril because I can’t sniff it back in, and while I cannot close one eye, and have big red welts all over my eyelid due to tape allergies, yes while all of that is going on, we will NOT be returning to any search for a soul mate any time soon, unless I decide that I really enjoy making myself miserable. The effects of Bell’s Palsy can last anywhere from a few weeks to forever. Anyone wanna start a betting pool on THAT outcome?

And see, this is how sadistic and evil and vicious the Sky Sadist is: all of this happened exactly one month before seeing Piero in concert for the first time ever, and in a seat so close he can actually see me from the stage. I won’t be able to smile, to cheer, to sing along ... nothing. Only have the use of one eye, so won’t be able to see him well. All I can do is drool on my shirt and dribble snot out my nose.   Can you HEAR the demonic guffawing from the Sky Sadist, bruthahs and sistas?? Can ya jes’ HEAR it? Yeah, so can I. Sounds very Pennywise-ish.

The Next Wave of Death IV

I awakened this morn with a face ripped in two:
half stone, half love; twisted and torn, a betrayal.
I cried out in fear but could only keen and wail
at unfamiliarity, the horrid view.
This is the expected Salem face, bitter brew;
self loathing; my old comfort is worm food, stale
and of no use; I would unsheath a blade, impale
the death-mask face if one would guide my hand anew.

The first face would have looked into the eyes of my
love in a short time. The second face, the ruin,
slack-eyed, lip-twisted, lidless visage, out of tune,
is the one he will look down upon and despise.
Four weeks remain until disgust spears my cocoon
until shatterment, and my beating heart excised.

©Snake’s Trail, 2012

Deep, deep breath.

Okay, so after posting the comment about the Minchiate Tarot (see last entry, 29 JUL 2012), Damien posted this morning:

People always ask me what I want to do in the future. Really, it comes down to this: writing books and teaching the tarot. I love the tarot. It's my passion. It kept me company when I was on death row. (3 AUG 2012)

I should ask him about the Minchiate Magus one of these days.