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Solo acoustic cover - "Mercy Street"

I've been playing guitar for a few months now, as well as singing more regularly after literally years of not doing so much at all, but I haven't recorded myself that much, nor have I done a ton of playing in front of other people. Been really feeling this song lately, though, for a whole host of reasons - some probably easy to guess and many others not - and I figured what the hell, why not. Then I was fairly pleased with it, so I figured what the hell, why not share it.So here you go. It's maybe not my most favorite Peter Gabriel ...

The Turner Diaries: wrapup/six months later (preview)

Unlocked for general people, a clip from my much longer ramble on my final thoughts, half a year after the fact, on my Let's Read of The Turner Diaries. Specifically in here I'm talking about Turner-style extremist ideology in a post-midterms context and how we're seeing it not only in violent accelerationism but also in just regular ol' politics.And it's freaking me the hell out.You can unlock the longer thing and everything else for only $1 a month.

A reading: "The Library of Babel"

Hello, lovely supportive people.For Christmas this year I got myself a new microphone, in part in advance of the eventual audiobook of The Hands of Maggie Fate but also just because I've been doing audio production for a while and I felt like I was at a point where I needed to level up that part of my equipment. I got a Rode NT1 - which I'm very pleased with - and to inaugurate it, I figured I'd do another Jorge Luis Borges story since I do really love reading his stuff.So here, without further ado, is "The Library of Babel"...

MANOS: 2 Hands 2 Fate - prologue

(As I said on Twitter, this is a Serious Horror Novelization of the very bad film MANOS: The Hands of Fate. It is ongoing and should be considered a rough draft. Updates (probably) will be weekly and locked to supporters after this.)PrologueHe no longer remembered a time before the house, before the pain, before the Master.He no longer remembered that he once remembered. At some point the years ran together like muddy water, and he forgot that there was anything that he had forgotten. A smile, a sound sleep, the taste of sweetness, a clear sky�...

everything is changing

First two episodes drop May 3rd. Patreon supporters get the first three episodes May 1st.(Music: "Messier 45" by Stellardrone)

Soon.

Now that this is unlocked, a few points of information.Yes, this is really happening for real this time. This is not a standalone preview; this is a clip from the beginning of episode one of season two of Gone. Given that last time I previewed the second season I didn’t have much concrete completed, this time I wanted to wait until preproduction was completed and actual production was well underway before I shared anything.So what’s completed? The season—all eleven episodes—has been written. Two additional voices have been cast. Recordi...

"Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" - a reading

Because I haven’t done one of these in a while, and because this is a writer who’s been on my mind a lot of late, here is a reading of Jorge Luis Borges’s stunning short story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”.I want to apologize for any embarrassing pronunciation fuck-ups in here. I did look stuff up where I was unsure but I bet I got something wrong.Music is by Ben Seretan, Lee Rosevere, and Sergei Cheremisinov. Cover photo is by Rob Wanenchak.

On the messy nuances of "belief"

Join me (and distant children, and cicadas, and a plane) in the patio Writing Grotto for a ramble on how I've been thinking about what it means to me to believe something and why in my opinion we often think about it in the wrong way from multiple different angles.

The Turner Diaries, chapter 23: the storm is upon us

[image credit: ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP](A note because this is going up unlocked: this is about the fucking Turner Diaries. It deals with some ugly shit, although I’ve tried to minimize how explicit the ugliness gets. Proceed with care.)Well, here we are.“The Day of the Rope” is probably the climactic event this book is best known for. It’s certainly one of the most memeable parts, which is why you see it all over the fucking place—or you do if you pay attention to at least rightward-leaning conspiracy theorists. It gets thrown ...

The ocean is on fire

(I wrote this in about 45 minutes, read it through once, and I have no idea where to post it so I’m posting it here.)The ocean is on fire. I have seen several versions of that sentence in the last ten minutes. All of them make sense and none of them do. I scroll past each one and I read them silently and aloud at the same time, forming the shapes of the words with my lips and tongue without putting any sound behind them, because when you say something you make it real so perhaps this is a way to try to reckon with it without taking that final...

Light of the Shore

As part of my ritual practice this Midsummer—my first Alban Hefin, or Light of the Shore in Welsh, the time when the connection between earth and sky is at its peak and the apex between one season and another—I did a number of things: stayed up all night to keep a candle burning, did sun salutations, performed a ceremony invoking and honoring the goddess Áine, did some moderate feasting (plan to do a bit more), and also said a series of prayers at sundown yesterday, sunrise this morning, and sunset tonight. Among them was this one, said at...

Zach Bush, (Con)spirituality, and the Grift of Fear

In which I talk in somewhat rambling terms about spirituality, reality denial, and the fear of death, inspired by some excellent commentary on an interview with wellness influencer and conspiritualist Zach Bush by the Conspirituality podcast.Reference: Conspirituality episode 29 - Bro Science

practice resurrection

Spring Beauty (Claytonia virginica) from my walk todayAs soon as the generals and the politicoscan predict the motions of your mind,lose it. Leave it as a signto mark the false trail, the wayyou didn’t go. Be like the foxwho makes more tracks than necessary,some in the wrong direction.Practice resurrection.— Wendell Berry, “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front”Why is the Gospel story of the Resurrection important to me? Why is it so resonant? Why do I hold to it?In part because I see it everywhere.I’ve written several times now ...

If there ever is a Sunday

Of the three days that culminate this week, I think Holy Saturday is commonly glossed over. After all, it’s the day when not much happens; it has none of the acute drama of Good Friday and we aren’t yet at the chocolatey celebration of Easter Sunday.But I feel like out of the three, it’s actually the one that should most resonate with the here and now. It’s the most liminal, the most unsettled; beneath the hush is a deep, lurching, depressed anxiety.The Disciples sleepwalk in despairing terror through that liminal day. They’ve lost ev...

for God so loved the world

(The cross I made of holly wood that hangs above our door)A Crucified God is the dramatic symbol of the one suffering that God fully enters into with us—much more than just for us, as we were mostly trained to think.— Richard Rohr2020 was painful for me in ways that have virtually nothing to do with the pandemic.I have Oral Lichen Planus. Its causes are not well understood, and my impression from my research is that there’s actually some disagreement in the medical community regarding how to categorize it. The general thinking appears to ...

Fiction: This Anger’s Deeper Than Sleep

Turner Tuesday is getting postponed to next week; I have a couple of pressing deadlines in the next couple of days that are making the prospect of wading into that literary hellscape nearly unbearable. In its place, have another piece of something dark and angry and fairly hateful, not in the Turner Diaries way but in the way that my fiction often tends to be.A while back, when the articles about the nightmare of being a Facebook content moderator started coming out, I was taken with the idea of how capitalism often outsources the most miserabl...

It is a sprout, well budded-out

Today is Alban Eiler, the spring equinox, and I found myself thinking over and over of resurrection, which is a topic I intend to return to in greater depth at Easter. But for now I’ll say that today—and for many days before now—I’m seeing it everywhere. It’s bursting from the trees and the honeysuckle and from the bulbs in my garden in a way that seems both unstoppable and inevitable.This has been an absolutely nightmarish year. A year, indeed—I have now been in almost total lockdown for over 365 days. It doesn’t get easier. Some...

A Prayer for Which No Words Exist - part three

[image by Pulkit Kamal]This will be the last unlocked installment of this book; subsequent posts will be locked to supporters at the $1 level, which is the only level. So if you like this and you’d like to support what I do and you aren’t already doing so, there’s that.(And if you‘re coming to this fresh, let me strongly encourage you to follow the tag back to part the first and acquaint yourself with the AO3 tags/warnings.)12Time is a muddy puddle. It’s tainted with gasoline, swirling iridescent, color bleeding into color. But the se...

A Prayer for Which No Words Exist - part two

[image by Pulkit Kamal]I posted the first part of this a good while ago, and then for some reason—as often unfortunately happens with me—I never posted more. So here we are again, because as I said in the initial introduction, I like this too much to do nothing with it.As I originally planned, I’ll post the next couple parts in addition to this unlocked and the rest will be locked to supporters. I’m intending to post every Friday. Let me once again strongly encourage you to go back to that first post even if you read it already and refr...

The Turner Diaries: unexpected hiatus (darn)

Unexpected and hopefully not long. Basically what’s happened is that I lost access to the edition of the book I was working from, which was hosted on archive.org. Apparently they took it down for being, you know, a fucking hate bible, so honestly I can’t fault them for that. It does mean that I have to dig up another ebook edition somewhere, hopefully one I can actually download, and I will be damned to the very pits of Hell before I shell out a single dime for it.I’ll do some searching tonight. I trust I’ll find it pretty quick. In the...

Imbolc: welcome Spirit, welcome Brigid

I wanted to write a little something for Imbolc the way I have for the other festival days, but I’m finding I don’t have much to say. Not that I’m not thinking and feeling a lot, because I am. But while my feelings for the other days were the kinds of feelings I felt compelled to get out there, this feels a bit different. Everything seems quieter and more focused inward, which makes a degree of sense given what this festival is about: the breathless hush between winter and spring, when the darkness is receding but the coming burst of life...

The Druid’s Prayer: a closer look

(Taken by me on a trip to southeastern Poland. Filters, obviously.)I want to talk for a second about the Druid’s Prayer, because I’ve been thinking about it since I learned it.The Druid’s Prayer is a prayer composed by the bard Iolo Morganwg around the beginning of the 19th century. There are actually six versions of it in Barddas, the original text in which it appears, which means that Druids will often move it around and adapt it according to their needs; flexibility was baked-in from the beginning.Here’s the version I say:Grant, O Go...

On Christmas: it’s all good

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. — John 1:14God loves things by becoming them. — Richard RohrIn Christianity, much is usually made of the notion that Jesus was born to “save” humankind through some kind of substitutive blood sacrifice. I don’t entirely share the dim view that many take of that wildly problematic doctrine, but I will say that I think it is at best a bit of a wrong turning, a bad place to seat one’s spiritual emphasis. It certainly doesn’t resonate a huge amount with me.But Jesus does.Why Jesus? For me,...

still in the darkness

Tonight I’ll keep a fire burning until dawn.Which actually requires a lot of wood, and I always underestimate how many smaller pieces and kindling sticks I’ll need, so there was I was at 10:30 PM on Yoolis Night, splitting logs and listening to Alexander Shaia talking about Advent and the Solstice and darkness, and he kind of low-key blew my mind.Here’s the thing about literal darkness: it’s not bad. It’s not evil. It can be scary, and it may not be your own personal preference, but it’s as much a part of life as the light, and this...

The Fourth Sunday of Advent: all shall be well

There’s always something uncomfortably presumptuous in writing about pain.I mean, I think there should be, because pain is one of the most simultaneously universal and subjective aspects of human experience. We all feel it, and yet no one’s pain is identical and no moment of pain is perfectly identical to any other. When you describe pain, there are opportunities for profound connection and fellowship—you sit with other people and talk about your pain and you see nodding heads, and maybe you even hear someone say “Oh, I thought I was th...

A Pagan holiday tree blessing

Those Pagans who choose to bring a live tree—mine is specifically a Christmas tree but this works for any winter festival day—into the house at this time of the year might want to express special reverence for it. Not only is it sacred in and of itself and a guest in your home, but if you cut it, it will eventually die, which means you’ve asked it to make a sacrifice for you.This year we went to a tree farm to cut our own rather than going to a lot so I could sit with it for a moment and ask its permission. Once we brought it in and decor...

The Third Sunday of Advent: therefore do not worry

do you think there is anywhere, in any language,a word billowing enoughfor the pleasurethat fills you,as the sunreaches out,as it warms youas you stand there,empty-handed--or have you tooturned from this world--or have you toogone crazyfor power,for things?— Mary Oliver, “The Sun”(Note: I think this actually might be part one of a two-part piece, this one starting in a tightly focused place and the next ending in a much bigger place next Sunday before the Solstice, so stay tuned for that.)I fucking hate waiting.Which makes it a little unc...

The Second Sunday of Advent: a little child holds sway

Deep within the still center of my being may I find peace.Silently within the quiet of the Grove may I share peace.Gently within the greater circle of humankind may I radiate peace.— Druid’s Peace PrayerDruids are peacemakers.This isn’t true only of Neo-Druidry—or we have reason to believe it’s not. Historical sources regarding ancient Druids are frustratingly sparse, and they themselves left no written records at all, at least none that have ever been found. But in the sources we do have—mostly from Greek and Roman writers, especia...

The First Sunday of Advent: preparing the way

I made my own Advent wreath this year.It’s actually not the first time I’ve done that. I’ve bought a frame and candles and fake evergreens decorated with fake berries and balls dusted with gold glitter (which I’ve then had to place on a high shelf where my weird cat can’t get to it because for some reason her favorite holiday snack is fake pine needles). But this is my first Advent as a Druid, my first liturgical year inthis weird marriage between Paganism and the enchanted Christianity of my childhood.So the wreath I made this year w...

A Prayer for Which No Words Exist - part one

[image by Pulkit Kamal]When I finished writing this in the fall of 2019 I had no idea what the hell to do with it.I sensed that it wasn’t publishable—or that I was very unlikely to be able to sell it—at least not in its draft form, but I had no idea how I could go about making it so without rewriting the entire thing. Which I didn’t want to do, because I actually kind of liked it as it was, or at least very nearly as it was. I felt like shopping it around to publishers would require dramatically changing it, and yet I wasn’t inclined ...