wine, guns, and ways of knowing
Tonight I hosted a 'cocktail class for the Women’s Club at Edison House. I wore a long-sleeve, boat-neck black dress, black heels with little black puffs at the toes, red hose, and a tall black witch hat with two kinds of fringe that I hot-glued to it.
I spoke so quickly that the entire presentation on glow wine was only around 10 minutes. But also … I had to make the drink before the class began, so all I had to talk about were the properties of the ingredients, for which I read the scientific name, the associated element, and the magical properties.
I also mentioned Bacchanalia, worship of the god of wine, Dionysus, and the original reason that alcohol was referred to as “taking spirits.” A super beautiful androgyne was in attendance who looked like Christine and the Queens. French queer vibes.
Accidentally pronounced Uranus like YOUR ANUS multiple times but recovered by making a joke about how one of the spices, ‘star anus’, held properties of inducing psychic visions and lust. Tee-hee.
I also had a weird day at work today before hosting the class because I found a fucking GUN in cello boy’s backpack.
Evan brought my rollerblades in today (I left them in his car after we skated down Bridal Veil Falls two Sundays ago) in his black backpack. I opened the front pocket of the only black backpack I saw, thinking that if it wasn’t Evan’s, then at least I would be able to quickly determine so by a quick glance at its contents.
Then a fucking capital G GLOCK. The only other people in the office were two of the managers, one being the bar manager, and I just instinctively said, “Um, why is there a fucking handgun in here?”
He ended up getting pulled into the office and spoken to, after which he was energetically so off toward me, which leads me to believe that the bar manager told him I had found it. I honestly hate the men on my bar team. They’re ugly and sexist. One has made blatantly racist comments about Black people. One’s breath smells like his tonsil pockets are filled with years of fossilized, rotten food particles.
But still, lest we forget, cello boy has drunkenly screamed in my face in the street downtown at 2am because I “ditched him at a party” that we didn’t attend together, then left me in the street with a dead phone to walk home by myself. He then told people at work that I played him and said we fucked when we didn’t. This all happened in the 24 hours following me candidly and kindly explaining to him that I didn’t feel as though he enjoyed my efforts in getting to know him and thought it best if we remained good work friends (i.e. he wouldn’t be authentic or open with me and wanted to make sure I knew that he wasn’t “easy” to win over, and that hurt my feelings and wasted my energy).
So the Glock owner is a smug Bob-Dylan-wannabe-genius-fallen-monarch-archetype with repressed anger issues who lies on his dick and continues to bring absolutely hot stinking garbage vibes into my space any chance he can. Not great. Not sorry I never fucked him, but he definitely tries to make that my problem.
Whatever. I’m going back to school in January, after which I will have 18 credits maximum (approximately 6 courses) to complete my teaching degree in Spanish.
Then at that point my primary source of income will make me more than I make now, provide me with excellent benefits and a consistent schedule, and it will mean that I am teaching a subject that I have been passionate about for decades and will continue to be passionate about for decades to come. Not to mention my classroom will be mine alone to instruct, and I won’t have to experience so much of the hideousness of the human ego when confronted with my witchy powers of discernment and seduction. Lol. Also,
WHO BRINGS A FUCKING GLOCK TO WORK! AND SETS IT ON THE GROUND IN HIS BACKPACK IN A HIGHLY TRAFFICKED SPACE!
merde!!
How I needed that. As I have said ad nauseum lately, I am full of so much rage. I’ve just experienced glimpses of being free, being present and tearful with joy. And these days I feel like the collective consciousness is putrid with the ugly philosophies of capitalism, patriarchy, control, power, dominion, ownership. Saying so in such terms sounds like an AI-generated leftist opinion editorial, void of any real meaning or poetry. But the effect that these philosophies have on our bodies—and by bodies, I mean the mind, the Spirit, the aura, the intuition and telepathy that binds us to each other and to Nature, all the aspects of the individual and collective “self”—is far too real.
I feel it in my own body as real tension. When I move my body and release the tension, the thoughts spill out of me like tears. I can understand which thing is being held where in my body.
Ohhhhhhhh, feel it, oh feel it, feel it, my love. See what you’re doing to me …
I’d like to lean into that understanding of the body, which is currently helped by not taking anti-depressants, and even soon be able to translate it into the understanding of the same in other bodies through reiki. It would be a great place to utilize the healing powers of touch and non-touch. I have avoided reiki seriously because I am still untangling the effect of hyper-rationalism and a highly academic upbringing. I am academic and sometimes even feel that I was, like Oscar Wilde, a queer, highly-educated and cosmopolitan dandy man of the Victorian era in a past life. Hyper-rationalism is the path that initially saved me from life as a cult devotee. * shiver * So I will always find value in those ways of thinking.
But in addition to those ways, and especially as I am magnetized to exploring the metaphysical, the unseen, the underworld, and all things which are up to this point entirely unknowable with any certainty, I lean heavily into philosophies which are more abstract, cosmic, astrological, or folkloric.
I no longer attempt to justify to the imaginary professor in my head why I believe in the placement of the stars, the meaningful and coincidental recurrence of symbols, sounds and words, and why I value these on a much deeper level than rationalism. Anyway Philosophical traditions are all essentially mythologies by which we seek to justify and untangle the impossible knots of morality, or individual and social values. The idea that one’s belief must be equally or similarly yoked to one’s knowledge in regards to truth is a familiar refrain in Philosophy, but the general arc of that approach tends towards defining the only “sure” knowledge as being a conclusion or solution found through logic puzzles, the math of language.
As far as my years in collegiate Philosophy courses have led me to believe, applying logic puzzles to metaphysical questions seems more like the mental equivalent of a caged dog chewing at its leg, rather than an in depth venture into what the underbelly of the soul wants to know. Maybe the biggest flaw in seeking greater knowledge through philosophizing is that it by nature exempts us from experiencing the “data” of the present experience, and that is an essential space for knowledge.
The body as a vessel knows both the past and the present simultaneously. It reaches sensible conclusions without thinking. Run away from that predator. That person seems trustworthy and safe. Animal bodies have done this for eons, even communicating with other bodies, enemies, lovers, children, bringing us to the point at which we currently stand.
Yet the Western paradigm wants to push us out of our bodies and into our minds right at the precipice of a new frontier.
Even right now I’m doing the MOST mental acrobatics, when I could be stretching or making strange shapes with my body in the woods.
But it’s in my nature to THINK MYSELF TO DEATH. And typing helps me to declutter my mind in the same way that stretching moves toxins out of the body. I’ve written enough here to finally get myself tired enough to sleep, at 4am.
XO,
Lady Baudelaire
