open letter to the pied piper

going through and changing all the proper nouns and so on to lowercase letters is a pain in the ass, but so is being alive in general. hail jesus and also satan. trigger warning for the usual suspects.

im about to go break a bottle of whiskey in the desert somehow, if i still have the energy after i post this. whoever knows what the future holds, anymore.

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pied piper, if you can hear this, it’s 2019, and i hope you’re pleased with yourself.

no one watches over us. our parents are missing, in body, mind, or soul; they stare through us, glassy-eyed, seeing not a child but a burden. Jesus hides behind stained-glass windows, where pastors promise us brimstone and hellfire. makes it difficult to have a real conversation. the wages of sin, of shy sapphic touches and mexican ditch-weed passed between shaking, scraped-up, badly painted fingers. Holiness is as aloof as the aurora borealis; we live in the desert. some people are willing to wait their whole lives to see proof of the beautiful rumor with their own two eyes, instead of on a northerner’s instagram. we’re children, but we’re not dumb; we know we’ll never see it ourselves. our elders assure us we’ll never manage to leave the South for good. they seem pretty damn pleased with themselves for being so sure of that.

we go where children aren’t allowed to go, late at night, we walk through dark alleys to avoid patrolling cops enforcing curfew. Nobody watches over us but the moon. we are all silvery pales and deep inky darkness, the night sky reflected on human flesh.

you will never feel this electric again, the way you do the first time you smoke weed beneath the stars, ducked into one of the shadows the streetlamps cast, during the intermission of a garage band concert two blocks away. between the adrenaline from the show and the high and committing a felony within a mile of the police station, you feel not invincible but luminescent. knowing your family members who are known felons would beat the shit out of the kid who’s getting you high only makes it better. years older than a child but held hostage in a high school that never teaches you anything interesting until you’re old enough to be kicked to the curb for not stepping in line, all you can do is take your thrills where you can get ‘em and enjoy the company wherever you can find it. that’s the moment you make your decision, although at the time you think it’s just a realization. living here in west texas is like being in prison or the “disciplinary alternative education program” where my friends used to get high before they went in, and offer me a hit or two before the teachers showed up, and i would turn them down because i didnt need the fucking headache; it’s not so bad, except that they won’t let you leave.

i told my mom that a pedophile had just moved into the neighborhood, and she told me to go ahead and walk to DAEP anyways. she didnt want to wake up in the morning and drive me. she told me not to skateboard there and not to carry a knife. i did what the fuck i wanted to, on the way to and from the place where they let me do my school work and then read all day until it was time to leave. i was never good at skateboarding, but people kept telling me to wear a helmet. to this day, i still go around without a helmet on my head every time i’m on wheels. shocker, i know.

loneliness, anger, fear grow inside us like termites gnawing at rotting wood. the town elders assure us Christ alone can save us. we are living even as we devour ourselves and each other and any chance at salvation, we become empty. when we breathe air whistles through us, stinging the rotting places we can still feel, chilling the empty parts. we listen to the strange melodies of breath entering and exiting us, strange half-alive half-dead harmonicas. our pain molds the music we make the way a guitarist tunes her strings. when the stars align just right, one or two or three of us will sit together as we drink cheap stolen whiskey or smoke cheap weed and cigarettes, and we will tell each other about the strange elation of emptiness and the slow, never-ending grinding of worms and maggots making lunch out of our insides. we will tell each other it actually doesn’t hurt that badly, but it does always hurt. if we’re lucky and move slowly and don’t startle each other, sometimes, we’ll sit together beneath the stars and share stories as we share vices. if all goes well, we learn we are not alone. there are other queers and witches and goddamn hippies and devil-worshiping rockers among us, even here, twenty feet away from our neighbors who love to call the cops on us.

no matter what happens, we sit in some safe place outside of our houses at night, waiting for the Devil to show up and offer us everything under the sun as he tries to get us into his van. so long as we’re together, we just laugh in his face and keep drinking. i guess the town elders were right. aprt of us definitely died there. part of us continues to die there. the town elders continue to kill their grandchildren by insisting we will be buried in the same graveyard as them. i’m starting to remember all the things i thought i would forget forever, and i gotta admit: wherever it is that i die, i’m not gonna regret not attending their funerals. if they wanna be buried in their hometown so badly, that’s their prerogative. i’d rather let you kill me on the streets of a city they all told me i’d never stay in. i’d rather become a ghost that haunts the streets of the city of angels than be buried in the same dirt as my great-grandmother.

pied piper, im 21 now, and i’m still one of the children who look up towards the moon, exhale smoke in his direction, a small quiet prayer with no return address: have mercy on us. don’t judge so harshly. we are still young, after all.

-have you had enough yet? have you collected your fee, or should i keep talking?

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We cleared a space for him to sleep in
And we let the silence that’s our trademark make its presence felt
Come on in, we haven’t slept for weeks
Drink some of this, it’ll put color in your cheeks

little red

hopefully i’m done posting poetry for today. i’m trying to get my hands on a list of all the American representatives currently voting to approve a state of emergency in order to let a little-dick waste of space build a useless wall, so that we can all get this Execration Party Started, but that’s gonna take a few days at least. anyways, here’s the first fairy tale rewrite poem i wrote! if i’d written it a year or two later it would’ve been part of the “if you can hear this” series, and i really like it, so i’m gonna retcon it in now. 

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“in my version the wolf makes a quick getaway with little red riding hood slipping, traumatized, out of his innards, covered in blood, covered in horror

the ax-man walks her back home and tells her to stay out of the forest but

but at night little red stares up at the ceiling of her log cabin house and her insides burn with fury. they burn with the memory of the slick warmth of that wolf’s stomach, the wolf she trusted, the wolf who lied and swallowed her whole. they burn with the knowledge that she has lost the woods and the freedom she once had to sprint through them, innocent, laughing, fearless. they burn with the knowledge that she now carries worldliness and distrust and her running is not for joy, now, it is for terror and as she thinks of the wolf that did this to her, her insides burn with a promise.

and so as little red grows up she starts to take a liking to axes, eavesdrops at the conversations of local hunters and trackers for years. she finds axes small enough for her to carry and learn to swing, pretending she is just gathering firewood, speaking to no one of how she sometimes thinks that she herself is an ax being sharpened by time and anger and the sound of a wolf howling in the dark forest where she can no longer stray without her heart beating in her ears and her skin growing cold, warning of terror

one day, when she feels ready, she re-enters the woods, her woods, where she has been too afraid to travel for so long

and at first it makes her sick to even go past the first line of trees but she goes back, day after day, each time getting a little further because she knows the wolf is still out there

until one day that very wolf looks up and sees the meal he lost, sans red cloak (terrible camouflage) but with an ax in her hand and when he sees her smile he runs -or rather, he tries–

but little red had always been the faster of the two

and when she returns to her home, triumphant, she wears that wolf’s fur as her new cloak, and what do you know-

it’s red, too.”

–I never liked how the story ends in deus ex machina

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I’m here to file my report as the vixen of the wolf pack;
Tell Patient Zero he can have his rib back

Open Letter to Icarus

since i’m Posting, i’m gonna go ahead and add the first one (of three) of these i ever wrote. it was also the first poem i ever read at an open mike, in case that sweetens the pot for anybody.

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“icarus, if you can hear this, it’s 2016 and i’ve just been given my own set of wings. freed from my own prison, for so long i’ve had to watch my step and lower my eyes, keep my voice reasonable and be careful. careful, always careful. always waiting for the fallout of accidentally sounding too bold.

they say the young think we’re invincible. icarus, i feel like soaring up above all reason and daring gravity to take me down. i want to feel the sun burn me alive -or is that just the burn of too many shots of whiskey down my underage throat, sitting in my stomach- i know the dangers. i know i carry the burden of my parents’ mistakes. i know the fall would kill me. i know i’m not immortal. but i can’t make myself stop. i ought to glide but the sky is so beautiful, so empty and inviting. i’m so tired of it all being denied to me. is our temptation really the idea that we could become divine? or is it just that we can’t stomach the word “no” anymore, the chains are gone but our minds are still full of them, maybe the heat will melt them away when my medication can’t seem to erode them and my therapist can’t talk me into believing they aren’t there.

icarus, my arms are tired. my soul is heavy and my father was not as good a craftsman as yours. his own wings were clipped and i’m feeling somewhat giddy and icarus, maybe some part of me wants to fall. drowning would be so much easier than this aching, constant struggle to stay in the air. i may as well see how high i can reach first, if the waves will claim me one day anyways.

we have both spent so long paying for our parents’ sins. we have both dreamt of freedom but forgotten to remember the burden of our own weight. what waits for us on the shore, anyways, icarus? a decade of classes i’m not interested in for a degree that may make me a hypocrite and a mountain of student loan debt? a lifetime of loneliness because we never learned how normal people act, we never understood how to connect to those raised in happy homes? icarus, is the burning we feel the wax melting down our limbs or is it the anger in our bones that may never really disappear. i, too, want to fly up to Heaven and demand whatever deities are responsible to answer for their choice to ignore my prayers, night after night, year after year. i’m used to defying those more powerful than me, and if they choose to strike me down, well, it looks like i’m heading that way anyhow, doesn’t it?

is the burning we feel, but ignore, the sun warning us we’re being reckless, is it the cigarette smoke at the back of my throat that i inhaled just because i could, is it the wanderlust and impulsivity telling me to blow all my cash and get wasted and get into cars with strangers, try new drugs i know my brain can’t handle, kiss strangers with bad intentions and let them coax me into a fall from grace. is it the way i’ve cut myself off from everyone who cares enough to tell me i’m being irresponsible, i have too much of a life ahead of me to waste it here because I started breaking the law again and no one wants to hire a junkie. is it the aching of the places where i’ve started hurting myself again just so that i could feel. am i on my way down, icarus, am i following you to our fate because i, too, have never been able to tell when it’s time to back down?

i don’t know. i don’t know. when people think suicidal they think of deadened eyes, not a Cheshire grin looking for a good time. they think giving up looks like stillness, not straining yourself to reach a height others may never dream of. icarus, i’ll try to learn from you. i’ll try to watch myself and stay below the clouds and maybe even land gracefully one day, when i finally reach land, if these half-melted wings and this broken soul can manage it. maybe i’ll survive after all. maybe one of us can make it out alive.”

–if you can hear me, tell Pandora I said hi and that I don’t blame her for wondering. I would’ve opened that damned jar too.

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Look who’s digging their own grave
That is what they all say
You’ll drink yourself to death

Open Letter to Cain

please nobody read this and think “oh so smarmy hates me personally,” or “oh smarmy is trying to make Jewish figures into kemetic figures” or any shit like that, i’ve literally been mad at Cain since I was a 6 year old Christian and i deal with #emotions by rewriting Raquel’s fantastic “Sisyphys if you can hear this” poem that still makes me cry like a baby every time i read it.

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“Cain, if you can hear this: what the fuck is your problem? I don’t even want to tell you what year it is, because it’s too late in history for two hunters with siblings they’re supposed to be watching out for to need to explain to each other why killing your brother is unforgivable where lying to God isn’t.

it’s 2019. I never went hunting with my cousins or friends. It seemed cruel, and then it seemed necessary but a cruel thing to take joy in, and then it seemed like a boy’s club where no one really wanted me in, and then it seemed like a weird, boring, expensive way to waste a lot of time and have a lot of meat to process. We can walk into a supermarket and buy fresh, healthy meat anytime we want these days, Cain (that is, if you have the money, and if the latest crazy, racist tyrant hasn’t de-funded the organizations that keep our food safe so that he can have money to build yet another pointless wall that no one but him wants or needs). Our ancestors killed so many wolves that today, our ecosystem relies on human beings killing deer for sport, to make sure they don’t overpopulate and wipe themselves and many other species out, for lack of any natural apex predators who are willing to hunt them for food. In church they told me not to be friends with people who weren’t Christians, because you never knew who might be a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

People who have never met me are nervous around me because I remind them of you, Cain, but I never blamed my brother for the cruelty of my father. We never tore each other apart just because we could and I was mad at God because I knew he would prefer a sweet and brilliant daughter or a smart and funny son to the angry, boisterous queer I was. Cain, my sister told me she tried on my dresses when no one else was home and I was overjoyed she knew who she was so soon. My little brother has more friends than I ever will and I can’t stop laughing at his Youtube channel. I’m not like you, Cain, not where it counts, and my brothers were never really Abel; they were just kids. We all were. So were you, I guess, but did you really have to use a rock?

I don’t know, man. They used to tell me the moral of your story was to be slow to anger, meek enough to inherit the Earth. I don’t think they really read your story at all, Cain; they forget the part where you walked away and never came back, and through your endless tormented wandering, created the kingdoms that today’s pastors talk about in such loving terms. The same kingdoms they’re quick to defend “in the name of God” if you suggest breaking a law or a window may be better than letting a cop take a life. Cain, when you hear them tell the story of the first murderer and hope it scares us all so much we never get angry or fight back, I hope you hear it and laugh a little, for once.

I’m still mad at you. Brothers and sisters are different. They’re the only ones who you’ve both known your whole lives.”

-Tell the Devil I said to stay the fuck away from my family; we’re not afraid of him anymore, either.

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The best ever death metal band out of Denton
Will in time both outpace and outlive you

Un-Enchanting Everything

I’m still intending to wait until the end of the year to make any Official How-To Posts involving the Outlaw Dead and my work with them; but I just figured out that this part of the ritual is a time-sensitive, and thought hey, the first day of March is a good day to post this; after all, spring is all about getting rid of winter and welcoming new life.

Please read all the way to the end before doing any magic inspired by this post. There’s Symbolism and Myths and shit I wish I had known before I agreed to this…I can’t honestly say it would’ve stopped me, but it might’ve saved me some time and unnecessary pain.

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I never expected to actually have any spirit guests for more than a few hours, much less the number I ended up getting, which seems to be easily in the hundreds. It took me several weeks to realize I was haunted at all, and having never done any spirit work on this scale, I didn’t have any idea what to do about it. Back in the day, I always just went around saying cryptic Bible verses and otherwise doing my own vague horror movie/Wikipedia-influenced idea of what an “exorcism” is, as a weird stealth-mode execration of any negative spirits or intent, wherever I lived. It was the only way to get Christians to allow any cleansing, grounding, or sanctification to take place in their homes without suspecting the Devil was really behind it, because something something witchcraft something Catholics are Satan somehow something something, and then I would have to deal with Actual Demons and Actual Satan that they would summon with their goddamn religious paranoia (incidentally requiring a net gain of way more witchcraft from me) in order to keep their little Christian house in order, and well…. it was just a bad time all-around, let’s leave it at that. With the Outlaw Dead, I ended up having to condense them into anchors, and then organize the anchors into factions.

I wasn’t, and am still not, and refuse to attempt to be, prepared to run a hospital or a guidance counselor’s office. I made it clear I was running a hotel, and I was only running it until the Outlaw Dead saw fit to move it. They seemed cool with that; Outlaws like to roam and make their own decisions. Every couple of days they would bother me and instruct me through tarot to give them jobs; too much inert energy built up, it had to be released somehow. I gave them whatever jobs I could think of; some helping the planet, some helping other Outlaws, some helping random people I’d never met, and a hell of a lot helping me.

I got the quickest results I have ever seen, from offering to and petitioning the Outlaw Dead and Set specifically. As I type this, I’m pretty sure I’m still getting results; although I do intend to offer to Wepwawet tonight, in hopes of getting hired at a specific, convenient location. But, the fact remains that staying in a liminal space for as long as I have, is dangerous. I remembered that other people had done this ritual with me, or similar rituals elsewhere similar to this one. I decided that I’ve got to let people know how to shut this shit off, or at least how I did it, ASAP. I refuse to give anyone involved in this ritual free reign to meddle about in other people’s lives without their full, informed consent. Several gods who got involved with this ritual after I did it were not pleased with that decision, but I am going through with it anyways. My priority is still the life and well-being of myself and my human family, not any god or otherworldly spirit. Gods are welcome to help, especially if they’re keeping me from running full speed off a cliff…but it seems that most of the gods involved have been doing a hell of a lot more than innocently “helping” me, so…Cest la vie. This is why you shouldn’t get involved in witchcraft or spirit work if you refuse to accept that gods may not have your best interests in mind, and are prepared to take the necessary precautions to protect yourself from their schemes.

I was told to just allow the magic around me to run its due course. I did so, until, around the end of February, when I realized “going with the flow” had become a threat not only to me, but to those around me. It was time to start swimming. And before I could swim, I had to cut ties to my life preserver, or anything around me that made me think, on any level, that I had a life preserver. (In the same way that no one is more tightly bound than those who falsely believe they are free, no one is in more danger than the person who falsely believes that they are safe.) I wouldn’t be able to go in any direction that I actually wanted to go in, if I still believed I could just go limp and arrive somewhere safe; and so, I began execrating anything that looked like a life preserver, or like it might be attached to a life preserver.

I learned as a lifeguard that most people can swim much farther than they think they can, for days at a time, even; the trick is not to panic and to know how to float when you’re tired. And if you’re the type who jumps into the deep end to save other people, the trick is to remember that one victim is better than two victims, and know when it’s time to kick the drowning person off of you and save yourself. So yeah, I knew it would hurt, but I was surprised how much. I knew I would need time to recover, but I was surprised at what I could get done while recovering. And I knew it would be difficult to purge my life of the wolves in shepherd’s clothing, but I was surprised how easy it was during the process itself -after the first blow, almost painless, in fact. The goal at this point is to release all of the built up energy, as painlessly as possible, without causing yourself a bunch of unnecessary grief over the things that deserve to die.

I’m going to let most of the leftover energy get consumed by the Outlaw Dead and channeled into jobs for me and the living Outlaws. I’ll let some of it slowly exhale into the world around me (through Set, Artemis, Pan, and the Outlaw Dead) as I go about my daily, mundane, human routine. I’ve designed my wards in such a way that they are fed by the natural energy around me, from solar power to electric power to magical power. I change the particulars of them every couple of months, as soon as I start to get uncertain feelings that things are eerie for no good reason. I’ve assigned a few of the OD to keep track of my wards for me; to rebuild, clean, and occasionally scramble the magical “codes” being used to perform certain functions. Only Set and the Outlaw Dead have my permission to pass through them, and I’ve done my best to make it very unpleasant to try to do anything in my home without my permission.

I’m making this post as a kind of “Cover Your Ass” statement; anyone who needs to, will know how to actually get rid of anything trying to hijack this (for me, apparently, still ongoing) ritual with their own agendas. If it doesn’t work, I’ll have to think of something else to try and keep me and other Outlaws safe; but for now, I’m gonna try to give it a month or so, and see how my current methods are doing before I try and incorporate any more “friendly advice” into…uh, whatever this actually is.

If you’re doing anything similar to what I’m doing, I highly recommend you come up with at least four or five magical “jobs” to assign any ghosts who consent to work with you, to do…until they get bored, and feel like leaving, at which time you ought to do your best to help them get to whatever afterlife they will consent to go to. Try to craft your spells in such a way that when they leave, there will still be some sort of magical device (think a lever or pulley) or code (like a computer) to continue to perform the function. That ought to work (as wards) for a matter of months; someone will eventually figure out how to pull the spirits off of their jobs and siphon the energy away until they can break the small machine or code you’ve made, but that takes time and energy. Most entities would rather just kiss your guardians’ asses until they’re allowed in; and if you’ve made “No one may contact me without my consent” one of the Outlaw Dead’s rules, and got Set to sign off on it, unwanted visitors will be fucked unless they can convince your friends that they ought to get an audience with you.

It won’t make you 100% safe, but it’ll sure as shit make you safer. It’ll give you a slightly better chance, in the grand scheme of things, of keeping unwanted guests the absolute fuck away from you. Some would say that a slightly better chance isn’t worth all of this trouble. I would say that it’s better to be paranoid than busted, or dead. When the game you’re playing is for your own survival, a 1% better chance is worth goddamn everything. ‘Cause in the end, there is only one thing we say to the God of Death: Not today.

So remember, Outlaws: read up on local laws. Try to keep all your shit on a misdemeanor level, or make sure you keep your shit put up, hidden, and locked away in such a way that requires a difficult, inconvenient warrant to get into without lawsuits. Don’t believe what you see on Brooklyn Nine-Nine or any other pro-cop propaganda show; most cops would rather just issue a warning, or put you in jail for a few days, than go through the trouble of dealing with a criminal who both knows the laws they’re tasked to enforce better than they do, and is 100% willing to sit in jail and wait for a lawyer for a few days. Pretend you’re playing poker and you have the ultimate ace in the hole: the knowledge that everything they say is just a way to get you to say something they can use against you. First, ask them “Am I being detained?” Then, if you must, ask “Am I being arrested?” Then, if you must say, “I do not consent to search and seizure”. Then, if you must, say “I want to excercize my right to remain silent and not to be interrogated without a lawyer present”. Then, don’t say a word until they either lock you up, or give you the damn lawyer.

This applies to Astral Cops as well; for what it’s worth Djehuty is a fantastic lawyer who is almost always good for some advice, and incidentally, makes a really good Phone-A-Friend for these sorts of situations. I’ve never heard of him turning down a job opportunity just because it comes from outside his pantheon, either.

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The Spell Part

Burn Set’s candle or incense. Mark something green as Osiris. Thank him for the life he brought you, and for leading by example in his death. Tell him that he may not take any of the Outlaw Dead with him who do not consent to be taken to the Duat for judgement. Remove his anchors from your property, no matter what he or anyone else says, and either give them to a friend or bury them. Osiris is now in the Duat; your home is the domain of the living.

Mark something as Ra’s icon, thank him for keeping the planets in orbit and the plants growing; then either turn the icon around, or put it away. Close all the curtains and doors, turn off the lights except for the candles. Declare your space the domain of vampires, werewolves, and outlaws.

Declare the rules that all who share your space with you must follow if they are to be allowed to stay, and explain why the rules are that way. Allow Set to get rid of whoever refuses to either leave or consent to follow to your rules. (I made a point of summoning many different traditions’ psychopomps every time I set rules like this. This makes it more complicated, and means I have to deal with way more bullshit paperwork and politics, but also means that the Dead get several choices other than my rules or Set’s rules. I highly recommend anyone working with the Outlaw Dead do this whenever possible; you don’t want to work with a bunch of ghosts that are bound to you by threat of Set, or give Set a bunch of pissed off Outlaw Dead who’ll remember your name when they get to the other side. It causes more long-term problems than it solves, trust me on this one.)

Execrate Osiris’s link to Set, to the Outlaw Dead, and to you. Name the link whatever is holding you back from the mundane life that you need. Burn the execration and let the smoke fill this dark space.

You will need to be careful about falling into other myth cycles. You are working with the Outlaw Dead, under the supervision of the god of foreigners; that doesn’t preclude you from every pantheon’s gods, entities, or myth cycles. Following the story of Egypt into Greece or Rome or Mesopotamia or all the way to Northern Europe can be very dangerous. They all have good reason to fear and hate any descendant of Egypt, just as Egyptians are wary of the god of foreigners. Keep your eyes peeled, and be clear who you’re willing to work with at all times. Don’t be afraid to ask Set or the Dead to help you tell unwanted guests to fuck right off.

Burn incense to the Outlaw Dead and Set for as long as possible. Declare that the space is their domain, and you give them your permission for them to protect you from anything that tries to hurt you or your goals while you are within it. Keep the Outlaw Dead happy. Music, food, games, drinking, other mind altering activities of various types and sometimes ambiguous legality (the U.S. is a big place with many different state laws regarding many things), throwing a party, watching TV, writing stories; all are acceptable forms of entertainment.

Pile everything you own that is in any way enchanted onto the altars, either Set’s or the Outlaw Dead’s. Many other entities may show up and demand to be represented, either as one of the Outlaw Dead or as a deity next to Set (and whoever else is on your altar; I ended up with many of the NTRW, Isis, Athena, and One-Eye, who was hiding behind Batman. I’m pretty sure One-Eye only came because I specifically told him not to, and kingly types tend to go out of their way to do things I ask them not to do, just to prove that they can. Again, cest la vie). Be prepared for arguing and politics, but somehow get everybody represented, fed, and negotiated with until everyone agrees to either stay and obey either to you, or the Dead, or Set; or leave you and the Outlaw Dead in peace. (I have several other representatives from various pantheons and traditions here, including the Ghost of Tom Joad and probably Jesus Malverde, once I get the appropriate materials to officially, respectfully summon him and ask him for some favors. I’m not sure if I can safely do this because of my role as a boundary-crosser, or because of Set’s, so uh, bear that in mind.)

Check for spies by execrating your enemies, burning the execration, and smoking up the space. I used Set’s ritual cup, but you can use any container you please. Tell your guests that you will execrate all spies and that no spies may remain. Once you believe it, once again get everyone present to agree to a contract/spell regarding how you would like them to behave in your space, in your service, and in the service of Set. Make it clear that if any of them start to make problems for you and your mundane life, you will begin execrating “problems”; but make sure that everyone has their choice of psychopomps to leave with anytime they please. Anubis, Hermes, and Jesus should be enough to get most of them, if you don’t have any specific requests yet.

Put all of the icons up. First the Dead’s (I had to organize them into six different factions, and each have to be put up in a certain way to remain “appeased” and not pick fights with each other over goddamn nonsense), and then the gods’. Leave Set’s up until you’ve cleared up everything else, including whatever organizing and cleaning you need to do to turn the space back into a mundane one –your mundane living space. Ask Set to clear out any remaining entities, thoughtforms, or other traces of magic. Anything left in your space that has not been either cleansed and reprogrammed with your intent, covered up, put away, or binded either by you or Set can be used as a way to spy on or manipulate you without you realizing it. Protect yourself first, and then the Outlaw Dead, and then ask Set nicely to deal with anything else that’s bothering you.

I’m confident he’ll be up to the job.

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The thing is, part of being an “outlaw” of any kind (even the kind that doesn’t actually break the law, but rather, is just socially assumed to be “a criminal/outcast” of some sort) is that you almost always have what I like to call “Automatic Enemies”. They’re not necessarily people you’ve done anything to harm, or who have done anything to you (although obviously you need to not be a dick to avoid having extra enemies; hopefully that goes without saying, but this is the internet, so…). Most of them are actually genuinely nice and decent people; some of them might even be your friends, or believe themselves to be your ally. The thing is, at the end of the day, some part of their psyche believes that you are inherently inferior, or inherently dangerous, to them and their “way of life”. No matter what their conscious mind believes about you, their subconscious believes you are an enemy; and consequentially, they will treat you accordingly. This is because, throughout history, the most dangerous thing on the planet Earth is a bunch of nice and decent human beings who believe that they must harm other human beings (usually of lower status, usually “outlaws” of some kind) in order to remain “nice and decent” themselves.

You know the types. Cops, security guards, authority figures of all kinds. White allies. Straight people who have tons of gay friends. People who’ve never been to prison, never known anybody who went to prison. People who’ve never been homeless, never known anybody who’s been homeless. People who offer endless words of affirmation to the neuro-divergent and different, but balk at the idea that they might be seen publicly supporting someone “crazy” or “weird” or “mean”. People who cite Martin Luther King Jr’s speech about having a dream and tweet about how #LoveWins and make goddamn plastic straws of all things a part of the public #discourse on climate change, but who spit on the legacy of Angela Davis, Maya Angelou, the Black Panthers; Marsha P. Johnson, Act Up New York, Oscar Wilde, Emma Goldman; and the people in the United States who have served time or are currently serving time for “environmental terrorism”, the U.S.’s favorite turn of phrase for “people imprisoned for fighting environmental injustice”. In a word: privileged. I’m starting to believe that this social privilege (in the sense that activists talk about as a way of clarifying the social power dynamics of race, class, gender, sex, etc) is a greater spiritual threat to “Nice and Decent Human Beings” than any variety of outlaw, no matter how vile, could ever be.

I’ve been told numerous times that “subtlety is not my strong suit” and been unfavorably compared to a “bull in a China shop” on multiple occasions. I’ve also been told numerous times that I’m OMGZSOGIFTED!! and “in touch with the spirits” and an “old soul” and all kinds of other woo hippie crap that I can still only 50% believe in at any given time (scientific materialism/secular humanism is a hell of a drug, to be completely honest; my head still hurts when I look at the pictures I have on my phone and try to figure out some possible way that magic isn’t real after all, other than everybody’s current favorite “Smarmy (And Any Other Witch Who Claims To Get Results) Is Just A Crazy Person” theory). Right now, I think what’s actually going on here is that most people speak way more “social languages” than they realize, and are caught off guard when they’re faced with someone who speaks some languages they don’t, or who speak very little of the one they speak. Sometimes your inability to speak the languages they do, or your ability to speak languages that they associate with past enemies, makes you an Automatic Enemy of people around you, whether they like or not, and especially whether you like it or not. All you can do then is cut your losses and protect yourself however you see fit, and using any means necessary.

Sucks, huh? Well, I don’t think that should really come as a surprise to anyone. “Outlaws” (whether actual enemies of the state, or queers, or crazy people, or “difficult” women, or “sissy” men, or people practicing a non-Christian faith in a nation being slowly consumed by Christo-American 21^st century fascism, or anyone else who’s ever been stuck as an outsider due to forces outside of their control) know exactly who they are and where they stand most of the time. It’s a gut feeling. If your gut is telling you that the tide is turning and people you thought were friends have become Automatic Enemies, listen to your gut before your “enemies” (even the ones who act friendly to your face) decide how they want to let you know. Their first priority will be their ego, convenience, and reputation; no matter what they say, you as an outlaw need to understand this and act accordingly, in order to protect yourself from harm.

For example, I recently ate at a Chik-Fil-A with another LGBT+ friend of mine who is also visibly queer. There was what appeared to be a high school sports team of some kind already sitting there when we sat down. They laughed and jeered at us; one of them did this (very unoriginal, in my own dramatic gay opinion) kind of “gay” voice and made the “f*ggot” sign language at me as they asked their teammate for a napkin. I laughed in his face, went and sat down, and ate my food as I smirked and waved at them, making eye contact whenever possible, making sure they knew I was watching them be homophobic and that I wasn’t embarrassed or afraid of the homophobic shit they had, or might, say. One by one, they all sat down, nervously ate their food, and left without a word to me or my friend. It worked because they looked at me and saw a girl, and the last thing any homophobic high school kid wants is for their homophobic high school friends to see him get punked by a girl. The trick is: even when you’re outnumbered 20 to 1, you can still win; you just have to know the right pressure points to aim for. For homophobic idiots, you push on homophobia; they will fold in order to save face with other homophobes, whether you can actually take them or not. It worked in West Texas, and it works here in The Big City, too.

The gods wanted me to let them stay and influence me in my home for as long as possible. I threw them out as quickly and painlessly as I could, all but the one who had actually agreed to help keep me safe: Set. Heru is only allowed in my space with bindings (which he agreed to long before we ever talked about it; more on that whole situation later). I’m happy to help the gods with whatever their bottom line is, but mine is the same as it always has been: Stay alive. For me, right now, that means way less magic; and even then, only the magic that I need.

This applies to mundane actions as well: cut loose the dead weight. Sometimes the dead weight is something you love. Sometimes it’s relationships. Sometimes it’s ideas about yourself or your life.

Sometimes it’s literally taking a knife out and cutting your medications in half so you can get the right dose while you wait and see if you’ve gone through the right processes to get your goddamn American publicly-funded healthcare, only to find out that just as you suspected, they were intentionally wasting your time until it was almost too late to do anything to actually help you. Also, sometimes, you forgot to call one of the 20 healthcare-related phone numbers you’ve been assigned to keep track of by the people who run the phone service you have to go through in order to access said healthcare; so you’ll likely have to go and look through a bunch of paperwork in order to get the number you need to call to see if you have to go through the process of getting a prescription again. This process involves going somewhere where you have to put all your possessions in a bag, take off your shoes and socks to let these strangers put them up so that you can’t run away, and piss in a cup to prove you’re not on any unapproved drugs. You have to tell insensitive strangers things about your personal life that you wouldn’t tell a significant other until you’d been in a relationship for months at the very least. You have to allow doctors to talk down to you and generally treat you like you’re an idiot while you try to communicate your symptoms and needs, because they’ve read a book or two on your condition, and they believe that since you’re crazy, you can’t speak for yourself. So they’ll assign you whatever diagnosis is most convenient for them and whatever mood stabilizers and anti-anxiety pills their insurance will cover. Then you’ll have to deal with the pharmacies and whatever ridiculous prices they want to assign to medications that everyone knows are not worth even a fraction of the cost.

And then, your friends and family will roll their eyes at you when you don’t have your shit together or when you express any kind of frustration with your situation and the shitty, intentionally-broken system you have no choice but to deal with in order to stay alive. People who’ve never had to go through this process themselves, or haven’t had to in decades, or have a friend or two who’ve gone through it and so they think they know how difficult it is, will look down on you as you’re dealing with this process, regardless of what part of it you’re currently dealing with, or what you’ve done to get through the process so far, or what obstacles you are actually dealing with in order to deal with this flaming fucking garbage pile of a healthcare system.

They do this because, in their mind, you still haven’t figured out how to do what their families required everyone to know how to do by late childhood (in order to save the adults involved time and money, of course). In objective reality, nobody alive is good at dealing with this system, because the system was designed to be difficult enough that most people will, somehow, fail -either because they get frustrated and give up, or because they get a new job and it’s easier to just pay for the overpriced insurance, or because they allow themselves to be convinced that using public healthcare makes you a lower class of person than people who are in some insurance company’s pocket.

People older than you will assume it has something to do with your smartphone, or social media, or how “entitled” every young person today automatically is, regardless of your actual material conditions. Doesn’t matter whether technology or the way you use it has actually prevented you from getting healthcare or not; old people have been encouraged, their entire lives, to blame every young person’s problems on new technology. Consequentially, there is very, very little that any human person, even someone their same age, can do to convince an old person that a young person’s problems cannot be erased by just selling their smartphone and using the, like, $150 from the sale to buy “healthcare”.

People your age -the ones with parents and families who are making sure they have health insurance, anyways- will talk shit about your “work ethic”, or your parents, or otherwise find a way to imply that the situation is 100% your fault because you aren’t working hard enough. When you talk about what you’re going through publicly, people will assign you the role of “victim” and insist to each other and to you that you want that role. People do this because enemies of outlaws know damn well that one of the best ways to shut someone up about the shit that life is dumping on them, is to convince them that speaking frankly about the shit the world dumps on them constantly means that they, somehow, wanted it to happen. It’s victim-blaming 101, and if someone’s doing it to you, it usually means that they’re desperate to shut you up or discredit you somehow…because they fear the things that you might say about them, their actions, and the system that they are invested in protecting.

What can I say? Capitalist authoritarian groupthink is one hell of a drug, and at the end of the day, life just sucks sometimes. And it’s not the “universe” or the gods getting back at you for a mistake or an insult, and it’s not just a “hard lesson” that you have to learn in order to grow up, and it’s not just “the way of the world” and you have to accept it in order to be a better person. As someone whose life has sucked for like, 95% of its duration, I’ll let you in on a secret: to get through a shitty life where you’re constantly on trial for things you didn’t do or things you never had control over, you need to lower your standards and allow yourself to enjoy whatever shitty last meal the warden decides to give you, and hope that someone out there is still trying to get a judge to reconsider the evidence and postpone your sentence.

And you might as well make the guards’ lives hell while you can, right? It’s not like being polite is gonna save you, no matter what shit they talk or how hard they kick you when they know they can get away with it.

(By the way, I’ve noticed that no one seems to like the “write a letter to a prisoner” option I keep recommending as a part of the rituals I’ve been doing. You’re missing out; writing to political prisoners and donating to their commissary is a valuable act of friendship and camaraderie with someone who has very, very little access to true friends or comrades. It takes maybe an hour of your time and can function to make some of the worst times of someone’s life a little bit brighter. And if you choose to write a letter to an ally of Set or the Outlaw Dead in their name, I’m sure that they’ll find some way to repay you for the favor.)

It’s only after you go through this entire process that Heru can be summoned and sit on equal footing with Set in the ritual space. Even then, to share this space with Set and the Outlaw Dead, he must be given some entities to agree to work under him; these people must be bound by either you or Set not to spy for Heru or anyone else in Heru’s pantheon. They must be given a list of things they are not allowed to do, by threat of Set, even if they are ordered to do so by others. They must be given plenty of breaks from Heru and plenty of opportunities to safely leave Heru’s domain and return to yours, to be put back with the rest of the Outlaw Dead and assigned new, different, jobs. Heru’s opinion on this part of the process is almost completely irrelevant; your priority is to make sure the Outlaw Dead are not bound anywhere against their consent.

I will be spending the next Osirian Mysteries with Dionysus and the Greek pantheon, to see if they can get the job done with less extraneous bullshit politics that I’ve never cared about (and still don’t). The NTRW have until September to change my mind (I strongly suspect that Set picked Dionysus for this purpose when I was 16, and it just took me until now to catch up. I would like to take this opportunity to point out that lies of omission are still lies, and anyone who wants me on their side needs to decide real quick whether they want to lie to me or not; I tend to assume anyone with a long answer to a short question is just stalling for time before they give the wrong answer -and I tend to act accordingly). I suggest anyone who’s interested in following along at home decide where they want to be the next time they die; or, the last time. Try to make sure that’s where you’re at by 2020. I’ve got a gut feeling that something big is about to go down.

Then again, I’ve been wrong before.

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Rise with the moon, go to bed with the sun
Early to bed, and you’ll miss all the fun
Bring your wife and trouble, it will never trouble you
Make her a member of the Midnight Crew!

 

A Bad Dog

Massive Trigger Warning for this one (animal abuse, trauma, child abuse, misogyny, uhhh, just TW In General I Guess) Also, it would behoove you to read Devo’s “A Good Horse” posts (X X X X) as this post was not written necessarily as a response to those posts, but it would be lying by omission to not mention them here.

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Set showed me a collar again, on Balls Day 2019, as we were joking and celebrating. He seemed nervous and excited, talking about the designs, the decorations on it: “It’s going to be difficult no matter what, but I thought maybe if you like how it looks…” He trailed off when he saw me staring at it, probably because he noticed how my eyes were drawn to the collar the way they have been drawn to weapons people have pulled on me, or on other people when I was nearby; my eyes glancing periodically back to the wielder of the weapon every few seconds, to gauge intent, before being pulled back to the weapon itself, as surely as the gravity of the Earth attracts my feet.

Set stared at me for a moment, and then said quietly, “Nevermind.” He put the thing away, immediately giving up on whatever it was he had planned (at least, for now). He didn’t seem angry in the slightest; just sad, and tired, and helpless.

I wasn’t expecting that. I looked at him curiously.

“You’re not ready,” he said by way of answer. “Look at yourself; look how you’re looking at me. You barely saw it, and you’re already…switching.”

He means I’m switching “modes”, reflexively; a trauma response. While my rational, human mind may tell me that this is something many people do as a part of consensual sex games, or consensual power exchanges as part of agreements between them and their deities, or in a more metaphorical sense, something almost everyone does as a regular part of being a functional adult in this world of property rights and wage labor and omniscient, omnipotent surveillance states and oligarchical control of the planet’s future…despite all the reasons and rationalizations and historical precedents and hypothetical justifications I can and have come up with as to why this should be okay, on a basic, primal, emotional level, this is not okay. It cannot possibly be okay for someone who loves me to “collar” me and control me by way of a leash, or the threat of a leash, or the commands a dog’s owner gives its pet.

Whenever I see a collar offered to me, I begin transforming, whether I want to or not, into a dog who resents its master so much that it will not cooperate. It will not allow itself to be touched, petted, praised, or otherwise bribed with treats and affection. It will not go in the direction the leash is pulled without throwing every single ounce of muscle and effort it has into resisting, even if it knows that effort does little to deter the one holding the leash. It will not trust, it will not obey, it will not learn, it will not befriend. Not out of pride, as most people seem to assume is the underlying motivation when a human acts this way; but out of a bone-deep, animalistic fear that comes from understanding that whoever is doing this to you cannot possibly genuinely love or respect you. (Many Big Name Polytheists and born-again Evangelicals talk lovingly about the “fear of God”, its alleged ability to humble you in such a way that you become a wiser and kinder human being because of it, but I firmly believe that the people who say these things have forgotten what real, genuine fear feels like.) The beast I become in these moments will resist every threat, every beating, every bribe, every attempt at reconciliation. It will snap at any hand that gets close enough to its mouth and attack anything that gets too close to it. It will not even consider the possibility that they mean no harm, because it knows that the things they do that they consider to be their right or even their responsibility as the dog’s owner, in reality, hurts it in a way more profound than any of them, having never been on the wrong end of the leash themselves, could ever comprehend. (Or maybe they do know, and just don’t care. The difference between the two, from its point of view, is so small as to be negligible.)

What’s more, it does not resist so viciously because it imagines that its rebellion might someday be rewarded in freedom. There is no light at the end of the tunnel, no illusion in its mind of hope, no sanctuary to be found. The beast that controls me when my god lets on that he wants to “collar” me, has already given up on freedom. It does not believe there is any path from where it is, to where it wants to be. It believes that if it submits, it may be pampered and live the rest of its life in a gilded cage, slowly growing to accept being used against its will by creatures who obviously see its true nature as beneath contempt, slowly forgetting what it is and pretending to be something else in order to gain a slightly more comfortable prison. It believes that by resisting, it is only inviting a stronger collar, a stouter leash, a crueller hand controlling it. It believes that it is only delaying the inevitable, horrible, lonely end: eventually the dog’s owners will give up, decide it is a bad dog after all, and send the dog to be put down. The dog’s owners will mourn for the good dog they hoped to turn the bad dog into, and they will complain at the time and money they wasted trying to turn the bad dog into a good dog, and they will tell each other that next time, they will be careful to only buy a good dog. They will be careful next time to buy a puppy from respectable, reputable breeders rather than a rescue dog who had, clearly, been turned into a bad dog by its previous owners and circumstances.

I stopped writing this, wanting to take a break and walk around, listen to music, relax a little. I found that the rain has picked up from sprinkling to drizzling, and walking around listening to music right now would be miserable. I left the door to my trailer open, getting a little wet from raindrops blowing in my face, scowling at yet another convenient coincidence: to avoid the rain, I will be staying in the haunted trailer, continuing to type about the trauma of spending so long as a young, crazy, queer anarchist in communities that believe G/god(s) have the right to abuse humans “for their greater good”; authority figures have the right to abuse those of low status to “maintain law and order”; that white people have the right to abuse People of Color/Jewish people “to defend the border” or “to defend our culture” from outsiders; men have the right to abuse women and queers so that they can “feel like a man”; adults have the right to abuse children so that the children learn to “respect authority” and “know their place”; and all have the right to abuse the animals and the plants and the earth in order to maintain short-term profit.

From the Southern Baptists to the public schools, from online pagan spaces to the oil boomtown I grew up in, from the Texas Panhandle where I grew up to the MAGA-hat infested city I now live in, from the people who have held my leash here on Earth to those who have held it on the astral, it seems that all my enemies have this in common: they believe their authority gives them the right to ignore the choices I make about my own life, and instead, enforce the choices they make about my life. And so long as I know that Set is bound by Ra, I physically cannot convince my animal self that it is safe being bound, in any way, to Set. And so, no matter what Set does to make it better, no matter how he scratches me behind the ears and tells me “Good girl” and does his job as my deity to keep me healthy, safe, well-fed, and entertained…he cannot take me on walks. He cannot teach and direct and train me the way he needs to, because even if he decides to do it the hard way; collar me by force, let me exhaust myself trying to get free, and then grimly, brutally show me the way to get food and comfort is by obeying him, even then, he knows I will not cooperate. I will glare at him, the deity I love and believe in wholeheartedly and trust implicitly in many other contexts, and I will let him try everything he can think of to gain my cooperation, until he eventually gives up and sends me to the pound, with all the other bad dogs, to await euthanization in a small, cramped, smelly and lonely cage.

And so, when Set brings out the collar and I stare at it like its very existence is my agonizing death sentence, Set does not become offended at my lack of faith in him and his methods. He just stares at me with an almost incomprehensibly sad look on his face, the look of bitter learned helplessness, his emotions an eerie mirror image of my own. Even the physically strongest, most powerful, most forceful god in our pantheon cannot force the trust that a truly loving, respectful, functional bond between us would require, any more than I could force Set to manifest in front of me by the sheer power of will and faith alone. It isn’t a matter of me not being “pious” or “holy” or “reverent” enough to accept the “cruel lessons” one must accept in order to find the alleged beauty and justice and necessity of “sacred” slavery to the gods; it just doesn’t work that way.

And as surely as the animal part of me knows that were Set to collar me by force, the path he would try to walk me down would eventually end with Set defeating it either through fundamentally changing it to what Set wants it to be, or by sending it to be killed for failure to fall in line; as surely as the animal part of me knows that, the part of me that has spent years getting to know Set, knows that Set would despise the spoils of that victory. I believe wholeheartedly that my understanding that Set is sickened by the very idea of doing that to someone he loves, is a greater testament to my faith in him than any attempt to force myself to be “a good dog” could ever be.

Maybe the next time I “die” for the NTRW and their machinations and dreams of some Greater Good that they will only allude vaguely to when I ask them about it directly, maybe next time, this is the part of me that will die: the bad dog. Maybe it will die and I will find that, actually, I am somehow okay with this after all -or at least, willing to pretend to be, in order to cling to whatever life they will allow me to have. Maybe it will take ten years or ten lifetimes, but eventually, maybe they will find a way to kill the bad dog and save the good devotee. Maybe I, with my puny human brain, just could never understand the big picture well enough to understand that what seems to me to be obvious evidence of the most callous kind of abuse -the neglect of my spirit- is actually, somehow, an act of love.

Maybe, but somehow, I really, really doubt it.

The rain has let up; I’m going to get high and go listen to music and, hopefully, forget all about this for a little while.

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But the best you’ve got is powerless against me
And all your little schemes break when they come crashing up against me

Rest In Power, Opportunity

Alternatively Titled: A response to Guante’s A Pragmatist’s Guide to Faith

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Opportunity, we crafted you with all the care the modern space station could muster. We hoped and prayed and labored and did a truly unholy amount of math. We put you in a big metal bullet, strapped it to a ridiculous amount of explosive material, and lit the fuse. We sent you rocketing through the void of space, a distance further than we can really comprehend, just to get you to a rock a little further away from the sun than our rock. We knew that Mars was freezing cold and the home to terrible storms. We knew you were too far away for us to ever fix you. We only asked you to stay alive for three months, to send us pictures of that strange new world, one we know we probably will never walk on but still can’t sleep at night for wondering what it looks like. Three months were all we asked for, all we built you for.

It’s been fifteen years. How the fuck did you do it, Opportunity? How did you stay alive? How did you, all alone on the cold and vicious red planet, manage to outlast the Bush presidency, all the time sending us videos and pictures and maps of a place untold generations only ever knew as a star that was sometimes particularly bright in the night sky? How did you move over 45 kilometers over the rough and unforgiving terrain, how did you keep yourself moving for so long on those shitty tires, powered by the dim light of the distant sun alone? We only built you to last three months. These days human beings can expect to live to be eighty or ninety years old, but we are all in awe of your decade and a half.

You were supposed to see if water had ever been there and what the dirt was like. You found the bones of an alien underwater lake. You found rock surfaces that had to have been altered by frost or water, and recently, in modern times, even! You found places where Martian water had touched Martian magma and been vaporized. You sent us pictures of the paths left in Mars’ body by wind patterns now lost to time. You sent us pictures of meteorites, still sitting in the same places where they originally fell from the Martian sky, where they’ve been untouched by anything but the Martian atmosphere, ever since. You sent us evidence of an ancient acidic lake on the planet’s surface. You showed us that life was habitable on Mars for millions of years; just because we got here too late to see for ourselves doesn’t change that. Life could have happened there’ maybe it did happen there. Maybe it could happen there again. We know it all thanks to you and your late sister, Spirit. The human race is forever grateful to your discoveries.

Today, February 13, 2019, they said that a gigantic dust storm got you and you’re almost certainly dead. The last thing they sent you was a goodbye song from Billie Holiday. Maybe one day we will colonize Mars, and if that day ever comes, we will brave the giant dust storms for the chance to find pieces of you, the visitor the human race sent to a planet we longed to visit but could barely see in our night sky.

Friends of mine once explained to me that in Shinto, objects are thought to have sentience, emotions, and possibly even souls if they’ve been around long enough. I tried to be polite, but I didn’t get it. To me it was ludicrous to treat an inanimate object as though it could feel pain. It’s a side effect of being, as my junior high school debate teacher once called me, a child of chaos: you don’t let yourself care about the objects you own when you know that you don’t really own them. You don’t let yourself mourn for broken things when you know anything might break at any moment, when you know it because you watch it happen all the time. Sometimes it’s hard to move past the habits that pain leaves behind, even once the pain is mostly gone.

But when I read your story, Opportunity, I understood; you have blessed me with not just the knowledge of the surface of a new planet, but also, a greater respect for the way of life of millions of my fellow human beings, both dead and alive. Only a deeply self-centered and shallow understanding of the concept of “life” could leave you out of its definition. Opportunity, the one who outlived the most optimistic of human expectations. Opportunity, whose story made me remember vividly when I lived in Georgia, wasn’t even old enough to be in kindergarten, and longed with the single-minded unreasonableness of a child for the first career I ever seriously considered: to be an astronaut. To leave the planet and explore space, to chase after the irresistible call of a place no one else has seen yet. To share the sky with the stars themselves. Some would say I’m more alive than you, Opportunity, but you have surpassed even the wildest dreams of my youngest, most foolishly ambitious, most newly, vividly alive and aware four-year-old self. I pay homage to you with this letter, the fantastic machine that is either buried or will soon be buried by the dust of Earth’s redder, colder sister planet.

From today until the day something finally manages to make the the electricity keeping my heart beating cool and die. From that day until the day the last human being breathes their last. From that day until the day the sun explodes. From the death of our star to the eventual heat death of the universe, the eventual cold lonely darkness that will consume existence itself when entropy finally, inevitably defeats the light. From today, until a time with no day and night, until the end of all things: we will remember you, Opportunity, and thank you. Thank you, for refusing to go gently; may you inspire us to do the same.

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Well, cars break down and people break down
And other things break down too
So lets go
Down together