Sunday, Jan 29: Protest.
Tuesday, Jan 31: Hung with friends, watching them buy supplies for their Physical Art Doings at the art store. Impulsively buy cool mirror with dragon on it. Seriously it is fucking rad, it's circular and has the dragon splaying across it, dividing it into a ying/yang sort of pattern.
Thursday, Feb 2: finally unbox cool mirror. Contemplate places to put it. Come to vague decision, don't feel like nailing anything up. Leave on floor in foyer.
Friday, Feb 3: the inner Magician vaguely wonders if it's really a good idea to leave this mirror right at the door, reflecting the energies being filtered by the big picture of the semi-divine version of my dragonsona that's hanging on the inside of the door. Other things like “hanging with girlfriend” and “buying some magic chocolate with high THC and CBD content because my throat hurts when I smoke and there is no way I'm doing the Trump regime sober” distract me from this. There are ten little chocolates in the bag; I will go through them over the next few days.
There is pretty much no point in the rest of this journal entry where I am not at least a little high, until the last day.
Sunday, Feb 5: Late at night, the inner Magician feels compelled to ward the studio and the living room. She tries to do the bedroom too but is unable to, despite having discovered that my phone makes a much more powerful magic wand than the goofy water and glitter filled thing I normally use for that – she's just Out Of Power. Then she insists on sleeping in the living room, curled up in the giant beanbag chair with the new shipment of Mardi Gras doubloons on the floor next to it, and the empty doorframe covered with the sheet from the bed I'm not using that night. There is no way, she insists, she's sleeping in a room she can't ward tonight. She also insists that we wear the dragon tail. It is all very cozy, and mostly feels like a whimsical way to deal with the snow happening outside. Except for that one moment where the Magician is convinced we tried to put on the aspect of the dragonsona and she was half-dead. I chalk this up to being Really Stoned at the time.
I should at this point perhaps note that the living room is very very Dragon Themed. Cosplay wings hung over the door, my dragonsona painted on the bookcase, a pile of doubloons on the floor next to a comfy nest… combine with the projector and speakers, and it's a good place for a lady who likes to pretend to be a dragon to relax and feel at peace. Seriously, dragon friends: go on eBay and find people selling boxes full of Mardi Gras doubloons, they are cheap enough to scatter a lot across the floor, and walking through them every morning and feeling them shift and clink under your bare feet will make you so happy deep in your cold little reptilian heart.
I do not leave the living room for more than about one hour total over the next two days. I assume this is an instinctive reaction to the snow, and the fact that this room is the easiest to keep warm in the entire apartment. Phone and Magic Sketchbook end up in there with me (normally they both live near the door, charging). Monday, I spend in a lazy, dreamy haze, and get a little work done on Parallax and play some video games. But mostly I just kinda doze in the Dragon Hibernaculum and listen to some Grimes albums mixed with a few Angry Powerful Lady tracks, on endless repeat. Tuesday, the XWB shows up. I wear the dragon tail and little else (a black shift and a pair of bondage wristcuffs is pretty much it) for large amounts of these days. The wings over the living room door get knocked down when I need to adjust the bedsheet, and end up on me without any real conscious thought for a while too. On Wednesday, I have to leave for a previously scheduled appointment and fart around downtown afterwards; I go to Columbia Tower's observation deck and enjoy being higher up than almost anyone else in Seattle (it's the third floor from the top of the tallest building in town, including the Space Needle) despite it being too cloudy to see much of anything. Being in the chill quiet of the nearly abandoned observation deck, looking down on everything, felt compelling; I sat with the Magic Sketchbook working on Parallax for an hour or so, but I think I spent at least an hour just looking down on the city. In the evening, I hang out at a cafe with the ex-with-benefits and discover that drawing sigils in the Magic Sketchbook when in public is a… complicated experience. And that the Magician really does not want to do this when the Sketchbook is out of airplane mode, or plugged into a cafe power outlet. She prefers to work on this thing to the absolute end of the battery, and not even show it on screen while it's plugged in. (The Sketchbook cooperates in this by being balky and needing a reboot after being plugged in and woken back up from hibernation. Which is coming to be all too familiar – the Wacom stylus drivers stop working about one time out of five times I take it out of my bag even when things are utterly mundane.)
Sometime that night the Magician insists I do a quick google for the feng shui implications of a mirror in the foyer and oh holy crap did I break the wards on my apartment by leaving that funky oval mirror with a dragon cutting it in two in there I think I did. After some fretting I go cover the mirror and feel a lot better. I go to sleep, then wake early and spend a while lying in the beanbag chair next to the ex-with-benefits (who was visiting that night) contemplating how to renew the apartment's wards. The XWB wakes and leaves; I do this magical act I've been planning. It's a revisiting of something I did not too long after moving into the place, consecrating the studio as A Place Art Happens In, and calling on the spirits of some of my influences; it is idiosyncratic as fuck, bears only the slightest resemblance to most people's ideas of “a warding ritual”, and I give absolutely zero shits about that because the Magician passionately believed it would work while I was doing it and that's pretty much the core of How To A Majgickq if you're a goofy chaos witch cartoonist like myself. (This will probably backfire if I ever get involved in Serious Majgickghxal Duels or something.)
When I'm done, the faint smell of Dubious Meat I've been mysteriously catching in the foyer for a couple days is gone, and the whole place feels more mine again. I'm happy being in any room of the place once more, and have no qualms about leaving it to go have breakfast, then hang out with the girlfriend again. I'm probably going to sleep in the living room again tonight, but because I want to rather than feeling like I kind of have to. When I got back from being social I danced around in glee, crowing about how every inch of the place felt like it was mine again.
The Magician is pretty convinced I made a big mistake, wounded my most powerful servitor, hid in the most easily defensible room of the apartment doing things to help said servitor regenerate, and probably recovered from it before anything bad happened. The rest of me is pretty convinced I got really stoned and hid from a cold snap in the easiest room to keep warm. I should note that these two explanations are not necessarily mutually exclusive. But I was pretty fucking stoned all this week.
Once upon a time I would have laughed at myself for even beginning to think about the Magician's version of this week. But then I started smoking a lot of marijuana and drew a Tarot deck, and life just kinda got… a little weirder.
I am also going to have to get a curtain to hang in this door more permanantly than “bed sheet draped over chin up bar”. Because holy shit this room is super cozy when there's something in the empty doorframe, and I want my sheet and chin up bar back. (The door is in the closet, I felt like having A Door That Closed created the wrong flow between the rest of the place and a room that most people would make a bedroom, if they weren't using the room they'd make a living room as their art studio.)
Anyway. That was my second and third week of the Trump regime. It was very strange and I may have been temporarily recreationally insane during it.