she says bring it on down. bring on the wave.

so this was july: zoetic’s 31/31 challenge, from which i emerge with a guaranteed spot in the project anthology and 30K words targeted toward a book-like project. because i could not just say “huzzah, i’m going to write a book!” because that’s gone so well the other times that i’ve tried it (please note: it did not go well any of the times that i tried it). no, i am much too willfully pomo genx obtuse for that. i worship anne carson as deity, you know. though there’s also a degree of: if i sneak around the word book, if i set out to instead fill in the negative space around a book instead of arrogantly shooting off with the intention of writing a book, i might be able to trick myself into writing something that other people would consider to be a book. so: this.


then there’s this. you hear about this?

ellicott city is gone. i mean, i know there is still a place on the map that is named ellicott city, and there are people who live there and work there and own property there. and it’s an incredibly wealthy little district, so i can’t imagine the restoration efforts will be anything short of top notch. but it is not going to be the same place i’ve been going for the last ten years. i can’t process it yet. damn.

and i had tentative plans to talk to their CVB for my october piece.

yeah.

i was in ritual during that storm, which was a new and strange experience: working magic with a large group including several people i don’t or only just barely know during a significant weather occurrence of the type known to make me a little crackly with psychic energy under normal circumstances. i called air: i used a pilot pen. i uncapped the pen and wrote my invocation into the air as i spoke. lightening punctuated every phrase it needed to punctuate. thunder echoed every dread-edged premonition. i know i’m not in a good place to assess my gut feelings about Where Things Are Currently Headed In Our World, but my guts have been giving me trouble for a few weeks, now. i'm starting to think it's a microcosm talking to the macrocosm kind of thing.

then ritual ended and the main road in to our venue had flooded out: but i didn’t call water, so i didn’t feel too responsible. still sat on I-83 a half mile from our exit for an hour and a half, but one ellicott city youtube piece shut my complaining mouth up pretty damn quick. two people died in that flood. one of them was a thirty-eight year old man. ben's thirty-eight. there would've been more fatalities if civilians hadn't been forming human chains out into the roaring waters to pull people out of their vehicles.

dear paul: it's been a year.