An Introduction to Chaos Magic(k) (ROUND 10)
Let's workshop this story about a gullible and pained, hypocritical and disturbed, young shit-poster adrift in modern life, seeking agency and meaning through the warped frameworks available to her.
An Introduction to Chaos Magic(k)*
Might we call her “damaged”—or just a “fractured mosaic,” a “living glitch,” like so many others in the digital era? Early twenties gone like mist on a mirror, the rest sliding frictionless like a silken slip for yet another photographer (predictable even when female); eyes of a war-torn dreamer bloodshot beneath a Sponge-Bob baseball cap, that gift-shop relic from Universal Studios (Nickelodeon’s last summer before puberty); LA’s gaunt beauty sculpted by missed meals and Starbucks (and the sleep-ravaging cortisol stoked by such chisels of hunger artistry); a tarot card (an afro-crowned ebony Queen of Pentacles, her witch sigil) inked on her caramel thigh in that mere sailor green of mustachioed hipsters—behold her. The self-styled “metaverse brujita”—IG bio “Coder Botanist Gamer Divinator Brujita”; CashApp, flitting throughout the cyber ether and especially in DMs, “$blaxicanbruja”)—sits poised on her Moon Pod, a $400 beanbag masquerading as mental health care (or, in more Amazonian light: “the zero-gravity seat of anti-anxiety” best suited for when—to quote her, like the company—“adulting gets tough”).
Sunlight spills across her one-room world, her close reflection caught in the floor mirror—a full-length leaner whose baroque frame of faux patina (coppery green) works with her scrapbooking interest and aesthetic: the enchanted forest of tea-cup fairycore meets the farmhouse oxidation of steampunk vintage. She gazes—like a hand mirror between thighs—deep into her glassy pupils, as if desperate to land upon at least some little asteroid of authenticity in a belt of curation stark against the void. The wavering of her pupils, zooming unignorably in and out, wrestles her fragile Zen.
This is only her maiden try at the “mindfulness ritual” meant to “uncage the little girl” and “purge self-loathing.” What she really hopes, beneath the Gen-Z(odiac) haze rising from such hackneyed phrases of TikTok humbug, is to ward off the bitter bile toward what, more and more in tweets on the absurd jest (or, in her words, “the trainwreck”) of being “born just to suffer,” she suggests is reality itself, not just capitalism (her daily-stated foe) whose cruelty alone—and so pushing aside even “The Unbearable Whiteness of Amerikkka” and its local expressions (“The Unbearable Whiteness of Hiking”; “The Unbearable Whiteness of Cinema”; “The Unbearable Whiteness of Math”)—suffices for the middle-finger rigidity of her central vow: “I’m never having kids.”
A stick of palo santo smolders. She intends the sacred whisps, lemony and licoricey pine, to exorcise the residual guilt (and taco-fart) energy from a Grubhub barrage that had spiraled into a rabbit hole of self-loathing hours dissolved in a same-old-same-old sativa frenzy. It began with shitposting on a manga subreddit.
hot take: one piece = colonizer propaganda. STOP simping for WHITE SUPREMACISTS!🙄
fullmetal brotherhood mid af
why tf all isekai MCs mayo? 🤮 just end me fam
the way Bleach fetishizes Japanese spirituality for yt weebs. peak appropriation 🤮🤮 kubo canceled🤮(ichigo has big cancer energy tho ngl)
a FUCK-YOU reminder: slice-of-life-anime addiction doesn't erase privilege, sweaty 💅a K-On! body pillow can't save you
PSA: your fav shounen = circlejerk toxic masculinity. die mad about it
Shinji Ikari is LITERALLY ME. useless bisexual disasters ✅ daddy issues FOR DAYS ✅ depression naps 24/7 ✅ pisces rising ✅ “get in the fucking robot” = “get a job” ✅
Eiichiro Oda is actually 3 tanuki in a trenchcoat. wake up racists!
villain thiccness tier list: S++: Dio's cake / F---: literally everyone else. do better!!
tfw no yandere gf to threaten my worthless existence ಥ_ಥ (12th house in Aries problems)
y'all really out here simping for Sailor Moon when she POSTER CHILD yt feminism smfh
Eren did nothing wrong. FUCK this place! said what I said. 😤rumbling 2022 let's goooo
Then it all slid, and with iceberg-calving momentum, after a stinky round of endorphin-desperate lip-bite clit smacks. It slid into lashing out at “toxic yts” she takes no care to understand but calls “problematic” (mainly because their chess-playing brainpower grates against her own insecurities), lashing out by flagging tweets and tremble-typing venom (same lip bite) on her customized thocky keyboard from a troll account whose amygdala bio, although (or is it because?) puked out in haste, nails the nihilistic tonality of her knotted heart in near haiku:
People lie, leave.
Everything ends. Everyone dies.
Nothing matters.
Such actions (rinse-and-repeat SOS only worsening her TMJ), sad as they sound, are exactly what—so she herself would say (in what, for the uninitiated, is but astrological word salad)—any moody Aries with a twelfth house ruled by Aries would do given the “trauma” of being haunted by past-life love: unable simply to sit with her heartbeat, unsquirming; unable simply to accept her heartbeat as her, unalien.
Kid Cudi’s “By Design,” on its eighth reverberation, Spotifys from her iPhone Mini (rose quartz under rhinestone), last night’s kohl smudged around leaden eyelids—bruise-like halos framing ruby sclera. This siren song of self-discovery and amor fati serves as the ethereal cornerstone in the soundtrack to her life’s film. It is a film in which only she—auteur and star—can play the lead. The screenplay she long ago began plotting out (granularity reaching even into camera angles and lighting effects), stressing—who could resist?—the wholesome bits (like how in third grade, in accordance with her notion of student-of-the-month code, she quietly red crayoned the name of her rival on the ballot card, accepting her one-vote loss with an angelic smile and a hug for the newly-elected class president; or like how in second grade, and with not even a hint of poking fun, she rallied her clique to shower the class “dork” with valentines, there with a toothy smile in the background as always like Zelig) yet cutting the sordid bits (like how, not always in private, pussy- and pudendum-dipped digits, slick with intentional hints of shit, trace and retrace that OCD path up to her quivering nostrils; or, speaking of sniffs, like how—no less than twenty times a day, especially when concentrating at the keyboard—she rubs her lips with the back of her index and middle fingers, parting them with gooey-tacky clicks (like a roach scurrying across tile, audible only in dead quiet) to reach the stale wet on their inner sides, and then rubs those fingers against her nostrils, back and forth in feline self-soothing, to savor the way her mouth biome smells against open air; or like how one time, several really, she thought about diazepaming her cat and then hanging herself; or like how as a tween sitter she would pinch the toddler’s nose with her chronic pussy fingers and CPR blow down its throat, watching unease cloud its eyes as it burped up distention; or like how in stores she would slip away from her blind cousin for minutes on end, pubescent panties soggy—yes, that same fierce and forecasting lip bite set in stone—as his panic crescendoed clutching the bouncy-ball cage; or like how she climaxes hardest when picturing herself a calico-gowned slave torn bloody while being choked under halitosis whispers of “filthy nigglet” and “ooh, monkey bitch likes it”).
In the film this song will echo muffled from another room, coming on right after the MTV Unplugged versions “Zombie” by the Cranberries and “The Man Who Sold the World” by Nirvana. She will be shown hunched on her depression-filthy toilet (knock-kneed) as she passes what in truth had been a late clot, but what the film will reimagine as the blastocyst of a scuzzy modeling agent who called her skin “caramel” and who, before everything faded in the restaurant, seemed a cookie-cutter Sagittarian: gregarious, affable. Two full Strathmore sketch pads, awash with charcoal spurts of psychography, lay out what on screen will spasm as mind-splintered flashbacks to a Beaujolais-wine dinner laced with more than just civet-musk whispers (“You got potential in this industry”):
street curb, car horns, muted laughter, backseat, black;
slow zipper, cloth ripping, black, defecation feel, black;
ceiling twirl, more ripping, “Stinky slut, huh?,” black;
shit taste, air hunger, “All the way!,” pool stench, black;
sour vomit, black, “Gotta get you cleaned up,” black;
cold dawn, car door, “Gotta watch them drinks,” black;
cruel sun, “Last stop,” car door, black, “Out, come on”;
fawn-buckling legs, black, bathroom-tile piss puddle;
head of thick soup, black, curled-up shower screams.
Droning underneath, as always now, was that contrabass of revulsion at how dark her gums are, that dysmorphic hyperfocus whose grip has only tightened since that one high school evening when she pored over old photos of a little girl too naïve to restrain her squinty-eyed cheesings. But the latest iteration of the song, many octaves above that baseline thrum, sent her mind lurching: from nice thoughts about how striking her eyes look (even without her typical green contacts), to humbled awe at Jupiter’s crimson tempest (unbelievably Earth-sized), to an idea—a half-baked epiphany—she was just about to scribble down had not a stark shadow from a cumulous cloud, a trick of light mistaken for her dad, made the idea (and the plan to jot it all out) dissipate in the equally sudden return of light. Typical her, though, she had forgotten that she already had that forgotten eureka—tweeting its very tune (not even a month back): how “with so damn much of Earth’s oceans unexplored, for all we know they harbor giant swirling galactic portals”; and how “the Bermuda Triangle might be one such gateway sucking in ships and even planes”; and how “perhaps aliens will invade from the depths like some zombie hand of God to smite humanity for its sins. #SeaMysteries #GalacticGateways #BermudaPortal”—hashtag incantations perhaps meant to summon a thrill ride, even one whose woodchopper end means freedom from her skin?
Before “By Design” echoed through the space, first the loop had been “Almeda” whose volume increase she timed with an overdose application of the Santeria fragrance chanted by Solange throughout: Florida Water, Lanman and Kemp’s citrusy-bergamot cinnamon-clove eau de cologne (created in the 19th century by Robert Murray) whose celebrated spirit-cleansing and evil-shunning powers perhaps rival the ghost-transistor occult powers of Parker Brother’s Ouija Board (created in the 19th century by Elijah Bond). Slapped out of her sulfurous rut of anger by the song-plus-scent synergy of BIPOC pride, next the loop had been “Head Over Heels” by Tears for Fears—a love song seared into her psyche by the iconic school-grounds sequence in Donnie Darko (a turn-of-the-millennium cult film, set just after Regan’s America). Our brujita had rented it with friends (in the spirit of the subreddit “im14andthisisdeep”) right around the time self-harm hospitalizations among the first generation of non-free-range kids—already rewired by social media before puberty—began their still-climbing spike into today’s world: chronic cortisol and chronic sleep disruption; chronic exposure to unrealistic bodies and ideas; chronic use of chronic to dampen the algorithms that have students scream in seizure fits over campus speakers they never even have to see and that have them so intolerant of my-truth dissent that professors—well, at least those unfortunate to have “colonialist skin” (or other “supremacist optics”)—find themselves purged for tweeting links to “wrong think.” Our brujita does not recall this song, an ominous cover by the Digital Daggers, playing during the Season 10 finale of Degrassi as Eli—the swoop-banged emo guy to whom she wrote several fan letters—waited for Claire at their special bench. Nor does she recall her babysitting uncle playing it years before as she cat-walked white Barbies with an imaginary dad (who visits to this day, too chokey in recent years for her to resist rapey clit thwacks) inside her “blanket palace” between the sofa and the loveseat—this anthem drawing her gaze from the slit entrance to behold a dreamlike montage (over two minutes): students dressed alike and gossiping, dancing impossibly fast and then impossibly slow, snorting substances at their hallway lockers (all captured in the scrutiny of a Steadicam eye corkscrewing through a menagerie of intensive purposes alien for a girl still in kindergarten).
Augmented by the flashback pop on GTA radio stations, in consort with Netflix’s Stranger Things and Black Mirror (the “San Junipero” episode, in particular), this melody of friendzone infatuation stretches her nostalgia well before her time: to a time—its trends, events, songs around which people dated and lost car keys and jobs and had children and died and watched TV like now—when her mom was (inconceivably) just a kid. From that mullet-and-hairspray heyday, its culture grasped at best in filtered shadows (like humans trying to visualize a hypercube), phantoms crowd her YouTube and TikTok favorites like the stuffed animals in her ceiling hammock: card catalogues and trapper keepers and floppy disks (but no Oregon Trail dysentery); post-E.T. token arcades and Members-Only photobooths and neon-overkill food courts in malls of acid-washed jeans; retro sunsets and grainy pixel art (but no Garbage Pail Kid stickers on bedroom doors slammed shut, like Walkman ears, to parental static); staticky analog synth (but neither the snaps of Polaroid flapping nor the cough-inducing hiss of overdosed Aqua Net); Atari beeps and boops on a wood-paneled TV in a wood-paneled basement (but not the actual clicks of the joystick); Rubik's Cubes (but no slap bracelets); leotard aerobic competitions (but not the Jane Fonda workout tapes); NES’s 2d Mario (but not the blowing on cartridges); “Be Kind Rewind” (but not the vetting hell of obtaining a rental card, or the temptation to peek behind the forbidden curtain, or the shame of carrying the preggo VHS up to the sixteen-year old clerkess); Nancy’s “Just Say No” (but not Arnold going “Whatchu talkin bout, Willis?"); the anchorman’s grim “It's 10 PM, do you know where your children are?" (but not Saturday morning’s “After these messages we’ll be right back”); phonebooths (but no phonebooks); Care Bears (but no She-Ra or claymations like Gumby and the California Raisins); the futurist cityscape of Blade Runner glowing down upon Madonna’s lace gloves and Jackson’s moonwalk and the shoulder-pads of Brat Pack glitterati altogether in a Tron-like laser tag eternality. Less Than Zero in particular, one of the few relics she has actually touched, stands out for how it bottles her imagined LA of yesteryear: Reagan-era coke lines, Spader and Robert Downey Jr. hickeys—a time slice of excess and ennui crystallized in celluloid amber.
The more important reason it stands out churns hot as magma, yet too beneath the crust of hashtags for her to verbalize. It speaks to something primitive in her—as do Soundgarden’s flannel grunge and Tarantino’s murder mayhem (and even just the fleeting sight of the many knee-scraped unleaded-gas latchkey kids now limping into the weed shop for arthritis relief, for insomnia). “Pro-woke” and often “speaking truth to power” (tweeting “Can’t believe #geriatrics run the US / Go to the damn light already you #victimizers / Let #GenZ #decolonize the US into #safespace for all/fsfsfsfs lol bye”), she would never frame it this way. Deep down, however, it reminds her—like wolves might mollycoddled poodles in their crochet sweaters, or like tribespeople might air-conditioned urbanites in their pocket pussies—that we were not always the wussies of Nietzsche’s prophecy (hooked on constant comfort and reassurance, acting as if the world owes us, interpreting anything unnerving as worthy of cancel-culture vengeance). It reminds her that we were not always nurtured in grade schools that ban the mere making of snowballs let alone the “toxic masculinity” of tossing them (even just in play with a consenting friend); that being “traumatized” was not always trending like the latest TikTok macarena; that we were not always flea-like tattlers eager to “call out” every minor infraction against our right not to be offended (the right of all rights in our safe-space era). It reminds her that we were not always so medded out by pre-k, so helicoptered by guardians giving out first-place trophies just for showing up, so hooked on screens and the dopamine of likes, so easily “triggered” (“outraged,” “displaced”) by jokes and harsh truths that we see to it that even those once culturally-sanctioned to trigger us (comedians, teachers) lose their livelihoods for doing so. It reminds her that we were not always gung ho to “dismantle,” “cancel,” whatever unsettles us—or whatever we might semi-pretend unsettles us (given our age where victimhood equals valor). It reminds her that we were not always so bitter about “barely surviving in a yt world” that does not always “validate our feelings” or “affirm our truth” or “center our concerns” or “recognize our lived experience”—so bitter that we openly flirt with self-harm to validate our professed victim narratives, perhaps hoping for rescue by “glitter families” who would never traumatize us with “non-affirming” feedback.
Our brujita—yes, “dime-a-dozen” we might say— follows the palo santo with a bundle of sage twigs, their hallowed smoke—intermingling with her scent of cocoa, copper coins, and vaginosis beef—“purifying the space,” “purging negativity,” while coaxing green into her life. Part-time as a dispensary tech pays McDonalds wages. And few but tumbleweeds roll through her Depop page, which sells “vintage, preloved, and reworked” clothing(upcycled y2k tube tops that say “Angel” or “Chula,” tweed skirts, calico prairie gowns, servant frocks, cheetah-print rompers, dragonfly cheongsams, steampunk corsets, sexy slips from the nineties—all modeled by her: one hip often dipped low, forcing the IT band of the jutted other to smoosh the bursa over her greater trochanter chronically enough to make non-avatar runways an Ibuprofen burden in ten years; her forearm serpent fork-tonguing her left hegu, that dime spot between thumb and forefinger on the dorsal side of the hand, which she believes(and finds) does kill pain anywhere when acupressured. Few really order anything from her Redbubble shop listing iPhone cases that say “Chula” and “Babygirl” along with Tamagotchi stickers, or stickers (often with associated images, like nail-polish bottles)that say “Treat Yo Self,” “Blk Love,” “Cyber Bae,” “Witch in the Streets, Switch in the Sheets,” and “Shy in the Streets, Freak in the Sheets” or stickers—most commonly—of retrofuturism as captured in the cyan-and-magenta-dominant neon pallet of Blade Runner, vaporwave aesthetics of futures that never came to be: perfectly polished black-to-midnight-blue wireframe flatscapes of glowing gridlines (fuchsia, mystic violet, steel blue)converging at a horizon where, below a firmament of dot stars, hovers a phantasmic triangle outline of radiant cyan, white smoke, and ghost white; a sixteen-bit supercar, like a Ferrari Testarossa, with rear-window louvers reflecting the fuchsia of a “Tokyo” skyline at Super-Nintendo dusk, red taillights oozing a halation trail in the subtle haze; a midnight blue Malibu palm tree as foreground to a huge retrowave sunset with a color gradient from Indian red on the bottom to golden yellow, its bottom half cut by thicker-to-thinner lines(the gradient here: brick red, burnt sienna, tomato),simulating its partial dipping below the horizon as if sinking into a pixelated sea of electrified mist. Few more than a hundred follow her wellness woo on YouTube, where she vlogs on various matters: chakra teas, marijuana strains, horoscopes, bitcoin, and lately how to use gaming worlds for manifestation. “Having our Sims avatars live out,” she tells viewers, “our dream romances and careers and experiences—that can literally séance such possibilities into reality. It can do so more powerfully than role models even, which makes sense because our avatars are versions of us, rather than some strangers on social media.” And the clientele for her solo-and-nipples-only Only Fans, an account she has not logged into “in like a year,” are cheap—hers at least, made up mainly of boys ready to fall for anyone, let alone a melanated Gen Z Bambi-eyed in cosplay wigs whom, over years of Twitch-streaming herself playing GTA, they watched with the Cheeto fingers change from Emo-Scene (jagged-hair over one eye Hot-Topic eyelinered in high-intensity obsidian, Cosmo-driven texting of flirt emojis to crushes; Cosmo-driven whispering so boys will lean in)and now to botanical-divination pre-med dropout (face echoing an aging uncertainty as to whether her recent dates have been culminating in rape).
Consider the infinite alternate realities beyond ours. Consider, more narrowly, the many worlds between, on the one hand, the actual world where our brujita is the same—and so pinches her nose to go underwater and daily checks the “raised by narcissists” subreddit and nightly binges “lucky-scoop” TikTok livestreams of Chinese women shoveling out A-minus crystals (towers, /sa-fears/) from rice tumblers for US buyers and plans to take curanderismo classes on Coursera and seeks trauma bonds online and digitally cutting friends when dreams fail to match reality and dissociates in the face of intrusive (stab) thoughts and thinks Mercury’s position determines her mood and sleeps with plushies long in need of a good wash and hides crystals in her friends’ rooms and vapes and bites her lip skin and slaps her clit bruised and cannot parallel park and burdens those close to her with her hyper fears and feels her body is too animal, too unanchored to her, too menacing in its odors and cravings and vulnerabilities and girlie-fantasy-breaking pimples and cellulite, to count as under her control—and, on the other hand, the world where, although still obsessed with corralling her life into a screenplay, she has for her eating disorder an anonymous IG whose description is a Simone-de-Beauvoir quote misattributed to Betty Friedan (“No one is more arrogant toward women, more . . . scornful, than the man who is anxious about his virility”)and where her side gigs include clinical-trial subject, dog-sitter, and haloperidoled Horror-zine editor calling for gut-punching Lovecraftian submissions especially from nonwhite and nonhetero writers who depict neither neurodivergent characters striving to become neurotypical nor any animals getting injured across the body of their writings).Now, for whatever it might be worth to mention, in many of these possible worlds near her own she has already jumped out from an artificial cake(topless just like in that Seagal movie Under Siege, tight nipples yet to have been sex-sucked beyond the little-yearling diameters they share in actuality)to dance for bills at some bachelor party (a hand job for one persistent tipper whirling into hand jobs for most of the others who, feeling left out on what they convinced themselves came with the package, demanded entry into the hotel bathroom as well, reeking of booze and musk and stomped cigarettes)—her self-flesh dissociation in the pulse of dance music, unmuted each time the door opened, keeping intact her self-identity through all the sadistic hair-tugging by middle-aged sausage-nails cutting into her scalp.
Sitting next to her snake plant, in bloat sweatpants, our witch (she/her, but if born only five years later they/them)—yes, “gullible” we might easily say—French inhales a sativa strain from a cone (Raw-brand)to snap a messy-sexy mirror-pout selfie for her Tumblr. Her Tumblr, whose theme she HTMLed and CSSed to look like a pixel-art rendition of her actual desk(but with plum shades like #dea4ee and #ce94df),serves as a manifestation board mainly of images: fanned-out hundreds, Schiaparelli haute couture, black cats, tea leaves, druzy gems, seven-day candles, old bridges of moss stone over rainy-day streams, dried hinojo sticks for gas and bruised cervixes, dried hamula for gallbladder pain and carpet burns, dried diente de león for heartache and vulvodynia, dried barba de elote for urinary tract infections, dried yellow dock root for Bartholin-gland cysts, dried sangre de drago for sores and anal fissures, cash emojis, plant emojis, crystal-ball emojis, Hello-Kitty jewelry, purses, tiaras, makeup gear, Dior, Chanel, Gucci, Jimmy Choo, Louis Vuitton, a somewhat-braggy record of her rare modeling gigs, fat stars “gorgeous” on red carpets, perfected pouts, stills of anime girls in Lolita panties with heart eyespulsing, the occasional manacle, kinky scenes of shirtless men dad-chokey and yet not too rough—and, yes, emoji spells of her own concoction. Crystal ball, candle, cash, credit card, two houses (one without a tree and then one with a tree)closed by candle and crystal ball—that is a spell,for instance, for financial freedom and a home. Crystal ball, candle, scissor, flame, bridge and then flame, scissor, candle, crystal ball—that is a spell for cutting ties with all negative things or people.
Seated still, she rotates her SpongeBob hat to the back and leans in to exhale on Pothos, her black longhair cat—tail wavey in a sun slice among the stuffed menagerie (a velvet-patch rabbit, an eyeless teddy bear, a unicorn whose once-sparkling horn sags like a captive orca fin, a ragged plush dragon pilfered from a sleepover friend, and other animals tinged with testicle musk) on her bed (twin-sized, its duvet an heirloom quilt not passed down).The exhale sways the pheasant-feathered dreamcatcher (handmade by drunken Navajos) and a dream satchel (fringed nubuck with a color print of a mighty buffalo)hung to recharge in the full moon slated for tonight—garnet, amethyst, sodalite, mugwort, chamomile inside: chamomile to calm her mind and ensure falling asleep, mugwort to help morning recollection of her dreams, sodalite to help avoid panic attacks and nightmares, amethyst to help remain in deep sleep below dreams, garnet to help keep down intrusive thoughts of suicide.
Her clear quartz pendant (resin), wellspring of clarity, dangles free of her chest as she leans in—paused, stuck. Its machine facets refract LA sunlight into the Bacardi, one sip left (to avoid guilt). The bottle stands beside a jar of bentonite-clay face mask and her bible Liber Null, the defining book on chaos magic. It sits open (spine up),highlighted pink and green and blue as if homework—margin stars and all, especially on the passage she finds most moving. “Put a brick through your television; explore sexualities which are unusual to you” [(“!!!!”)]Do something you normally feel to be”—the words here pen circled by page-slicing pressure—“utterly revolting” “no matter how extreme” [(“No matter how” she writes)].
An insight snaps her from what she, well, does not recall in its demand to be written down. Worried it will pass, she pushes aside another key book Babalawo (source, however, of guilt since she keeps falling asleep on it), to take up her diary, ignoring another source of guilt: the card sticking out of it. (That card is a love spell to herself, Venus petitioned for solidarity. “I embrace who I am,” it says in her cursive. “Love is my birthright. My words are a spell. Remember, the more I love myself, care for myself, the less I depend on love from others.” Once she purchases some rosewater from Amazon, yet another amount the countless things she keeps putting off, she can finish the ritual: voicing the words before bed in the flickering light of a rose-oil candle echoed in the mirror, then slipping the card, sprinkled with finger-flicked rosewater, under her lilac pillow until dawn, at which point she must kiss and hang it(by a ribbon of her hair threaded through the middle)in ample sun, most likely next to her teen photo, her “fat photo” (she calls it)—long a depression trigger but now, having lost all the flab, one of empowerment.
The diary sits on her lap, as if poised for opening. The resinous joint smothers itself out, propped against her crystal pipe—aventurine (green, for money)— kicked from her spell of guilt-burger shitposting. Below a desktop shelf holding books that range from the feminine-healing guide Sacred Woman and the #metoo historical novel Blood Water Paint to Junji Ito’s Remina and Uzumaki manga series, her PC-gaming monitor, flanked by unlit candles that say “Black Girl Magic,” displays a 3d avatar of herself in a black plunge-top dress, one hand resting on her iliac crest—hyperreal (but lacking eyebags and acne). She designed it with Blender, graphics software she hopes to use in the future for what she calls “metaverse fashion modeling”(where avatars navigate virtual catwalks in pixel couture, altering hues with each stride, fabrics coded to shimmer against real-time feedback of floating hearts and flowers).
Her diary, in the center a mini headshot of her from one of those girlie instant-camera reboots (green hair in two buns at the top like Chun Li, warm-pink lip gloss named “Nymphette A40” one rhinestone sticker below each lower eyelid), is zodiac-decaled and sharpied with positives—what she calls “Princess Energy Affirmations”— such as “Money comes to me effortlessly” and “I attract all forms of green into my life” and “My skin color and hair texture are pretty” and “Princess treatment is my NORMAL!” and “I’m the very definition of an IT girl” and “But I’m just too glam to give a damn” and “I know I’m meant for so much more” and “Abundance flows to me with ease” and “The universe caters to MY serenity."
With rare neglect of her reflection, high-stuck in the full-body mirror, in the diary—beneath two all-uppercase commitments to herself (“I will practice on Blender and Python daily” and “I will date myself, buy myself chocolate, and take myself to the movies”), followed by cramped scribbles of explanation to herself(“My standards are high because I already have everything I need” and “Napping is perfectly fine. Isn’t that what the great ancestors, in their slavery, wished they got a chance to enjoy?”), followed by a romantic goal (dropping acid in the Rockies with her future husband) preceded never by explicit discussion of her predawn suspicion that her dates rarely call back not because of a lack of beauty or plans or dreams, but because of a pettiness and a pot-headed depressiveness on top of a genital malodor that daily coconut oil and rosemary dabbed garlic cloves inserted before bed and fenugreek teas and apple-cider vinegar shots and prayers to Orunmila during calendula rinses and boric-acid suppositories and yogurt baths and goldenseal-slippery-elm-bark capsules, she fears, might only exacerbate—she writes:
Like literally, for real, I can be all in my head
delusional asf, like this shit’s just a dream.
The “delusional” are happier. Call it “irrational.”
Fine. But isn’t it rational if it improves my life?
The personas we develop are delusions anyway,
right? They keep us sane to go to work each day—
how else when the universe approaches heat death?
Let my delusions be scarecrows. Let them frighten
any so-called “reality” seeking to devour my crop: ME.
To cast out demons, especially if those demons
are “realities,” requires a witch’s highest magic.
Black magic, white magic—I am the high priestess.
I am a witch. I will shut my mind from
realitiesno good for me to hear. I will hypnotize myself.
“They are just opinion. They’re Just OPINION.
My truth, my inner knowing, is all that matters.
I am my own mother. I am my own mother.
I am the programmer. My decisions, my style,
come from me, not from anything beyond me!
I do not exist as an instrument of anyone but me.
I am self-sufficient. My destiny, my fate, is my own.
I am too vital to the universe ever to decay for real.
Nothing can stop my victory over reality.
I will live in my own girlie-fantasy world:
skincare and shopping and lip gloss (all that).
I am the central Barbie in the universe.”
For real, it gets so easy, clear, once you accept
fantasy as the only real reality. GOD MODE.
Death, rape, war, divorce, dead-beat dads—
I’m the one who lets them be real or not!
*Author’s note.—
What I am about to say is perhaps already clear in the poem’s tone, which walks a fine line between empathetic portrayal and critical observation. At first I was iffy about the Gen-Z(odiac) character in “An Introduction to Chaos Magic(k),” a modern young woman trying to find herself amidst the cacophony of the digital age, traditional practices, societal expectations, personal insecurities, and self-imposed fantasies. I found it easy to write her off as one of those pathetic social-media bullies, quick in their outrage to condemn (the suburban cop callers of the digital age)—one of those who, even if it takes libel and slander, will report any account (especially if nonblack-owned) that “triggers” her or does not reflect her values. The type is now well known: one of those boilerplate my-truthers, faking fragility for power and attention, common on college campuses (especially since the political rise of Trump and the subsequent reaction on the left about the dangers of free expression).
Her Himmler-like love of astrology and healing crystals and tarot, all of which seem a cover for a depressive nihilism, are particularly upsetting. She seems to believe her antediluvian superstition is congruent with black power when in truth, as too with the liquor and drugs she enjoys, they are poisonous to blacks—and to all people whose generational oppression has kept them in an intellectual darkness that makes them susceptible to such scams. In her desire to be unconstrained, she even dips deep enough into the solipsistic territory of Shirley MacLaine as to declare herself a causa-sui God—as we see at the end of the poem. Two stomach-sinking quotes, which in earlier drafts served as epigraphs, ring in my mind each time I think of her.
I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time . . . . when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.—Carl Sagan (The Demon-Haunted World)
We stand at the end of the Age of Reason. . . . A new age of magic interpretation of the world is coming, of interpretation in terms of the will and not of the intelligence. . . . There is no such thing as truth either in the moral or the scientific sense. . . .We must distrust the intelligence . . . and must place our trust in our instincts. We have to regain a new simplicity.—Adolf Hitler (in conversation with Hermann Rauschning)
But even if the unnamed character is emblematic of US disintegration to pre-Enlightenment superstition (as China becomes the dominant world power), it is clear she is suffering and—shallow as all hell (uncritical, obsessed with makeup and designer handbags and shimmer mists and shoes, thriving on gossip and drama)—knows not what poison she spreads. Carl Sagan himself reminds us, in the same book quoted above, to restrain our tendency to poke fun at people like her.
[S]upporters of superstition and pseudoscience are human beings with real feelings, who, like the sceptics, are trying to figure out how the world works and what our role in it might be. Their motives are in many cases consonant with science. If their culture has not given them all the tools they need to pursue this great quest, let us temper our criticism with kindness. None of us comes fully equipped.
I agree with Sagan on this, as much as I fall short in my frustration. It grows easier to remember the humanity of this young woman as time goes on. I find my respect for her grow the longer she lingers in my mind. Her innocence is a factor. Her hard work is a factor. That she has dreams is a factor. That she wants to improve herself is a factor. Perhaps the main thing, though, is my belief in her potential to do much good in the world if she can break free of her addiction to this ethos of victimhood and vengeance and magical thinking that makes her, despite what she thinks, so unoriginal and toxic.
