Godspousery Notes No. 1: Support in times of Anxiety.

 Yesterday, I did the grocery shopping for the first time in the last year and a half. I did it because Beloved was completely exhausted from running errands at o' dark thirty for some relatives. So, I took the shopping list and headed out. I was nervous about it because it is the weekend of Black Friday and I'm a social phobe. I was also nervous about driving because of the fact that my astigmatism makes headlights look like starbursts and sometimes make me temporarily blind when I'm driving at night. With sundown being around 4pm now, I had a tight time table and multiple stores to hit.

I'm pretty sure that the random acts of kindness that I ran into as my nerves were beginning to ramp up weren't quite as random as they seemed. When you're involved with a chaotic deity, randomness becomes suspicious when it follows a pattern. In this case the pattern was a combination of people complimenting me on my hat and just moving out of the way right as I was approaching from behind. They didn't see me coming, I didn't have the cart with a squeaky wheel, and there was no indication that anyone around them noticed me. I did warn them as I passed behind them that I was there, because they were so focused on their shopping that I didn't want to startle them. Most of them didn't respond. It was a little eerie because most people respond when I do that with either "Oh! I didn't see you there!" or "Ok, thank you."

I was able to find just about every major item we needed at the discount grocery store. It was a good thing because when I saw what the prices were at the regular grocery store, my jaw just about hit the floor. I had an abstract knowledge that the price of things  had been going up but actually looking at it was an entirely different experience. I was power-walking through the grocery stores because I was uncomfortable. When I was forced to slow down, I encountered people who randomly offered me compliments on my hat or my mask with the roses all over it. I made a point of being as polite and pleasant as I could be despite the urge to just move on as quick as I could to get away from strangers.

It was an uncomfortable experience to be out grocery shopping. I could feel Loki with me, just walking along. He pointed out that the store had a set of black cable knit sweaters. I almost stopped and bought one but I had milk in the back of the car that needed to get home and into the fridge. Today, he's been encouraging me to call the salon and set up a hair appointment for next weekend and insisting I really should go pick up one of those sweaters before they're out of stock. At this time of day, that'd mean part of my drive home would be at dusk. I guess I could do it because it wouldn't be full dark and my vision wouldn't be completely screwed by someone having their high beams on. But I'm real leery of the concept.

It going to be hard in a few weeks when I have to take the car for some appointments and possibly be driving at night to get Beloved from work. I have a problem. My night vision has been steadily getting worse over the last few years. And my astigmatism is enough to fuck that up badly too. Unlike some idiots that I'm related to, I'm not going to get a pair of sunglasses to wear when I drive at night. Because I know the problem isn't the brightness of what I'm looking at as much as there's something physically not right in my eye. Sunglasses isn't going to fix that and it will make it an order of magnitude harder to watch for wild life running out into the road.

After I had gotten all of the shopping done and was home, Loki said he was proud of me for going out on my own for a longer time than I had in just about a year. I think that Loki kept nudging nice people into my path to give me encouragement to keep going. He does things like that.

Godspousery Notes: I've lost count, time to reset the counter. :)

 Where do I begin? I have been struggling with mental health stuff for about half a year now. I've been struggling with sleep for about the same length of time. Now my seasonal depression is kicking me in the teeth and we've got all the wonderful stress of the holidays going on. On top of that, I came to the sad conclusion that my night vision is bad enough that I simply can not drive when the sun is down. This severely restricts my options in going out to do stuff.

On one hand, I kinda knew this was coming down the line because my night vision has been degrading for a while. On the other hand, I'm really upset because I feel like the world has gotten smaller and I am yet more trapped in my own home by circumstance. Loki and Freyr have done their best to comfort me and assure me that this is not an awful thing. It's really hard though, because I've developed a fear of going blind after the experience about 3 years ago when my blood sugar was high enough that it screwed with my vision and everything was blurry.

Beloved assures me that since I've got my blood sugar and other matters under control, I shouldn't fear going blind anytime soon. He suggested that laser surgery could possibly fix my astigmatisms (I've got 2 in one eye and 1 in the other.) and maybe even help me regain some of my night vision. I am just really sad about this and how much these vision issues have negatively impacted my life. I love astronomy but with my night vision problems, it's harder to see the stars (never mind the light pollution makes my eyes have problems too). It just about makes me want to cry.

The vision thing is the latest in a series of running problems. Over the course of one week, I developed an allergy to latex, shellfish, and Aleve. So, I can't use dishwashing gloves now. I can't eat my favorite soup any more (clam chowder). And I can only take Tylenol (or its generic counterpart) for my intermittent migraines. Let me tell you, Tylenol is about as useful during a migraine as spitting into the ocean. It's next to useless with my arthritis, but I try anyways. That week I got angry with Loki who held up his hands and said, "Hey, this isn't mischief. This is your body hating you, again." So, I got weepy and upset over the fact that my meat suit is malfunctioning, again. He tried to cheer me up with jokes and stuff, he really did try. It's just hard to accept that my body has a laundry list of issues that just are getting worse as I get older, it seems.

I've got someone I care about in a bad situation that I can't do a damn thing to help. I can pray, but that's about it. The awful part of it is the fact that I have been running into flashbacks to past trauma because of a number of things. This started about half a year ago and just hasn't stopped. My psychologist has been wonderful about doing his best to help me. When Loki, Freyr, or Beloved notice that my brain weasels are getting out of control, they remind me that I have another dose of anxiety medication to shut them up. The flashbacks to past trauma have ranged from emotional ones to completely reliving the experience. (Fortunately, the last one only happened once so far.)

Freyr has been leaning on me to do more self-care. Loki's been throwing things that help that process into my path (like the random discovery of a lotion that is specifically for diabetic skin that is sensitive and I don't react to it at all). I've been struggling with it. Last night after my shower, as I was applying lotion to pretty much everything, I felt like a greased sausage. It was humiliating. My super dry skin was very itchy. The places where I had cracked skin was sore and the places where there's skin buildup was extremely uncomfortable. I mentioned how I felt about all this to Beloved. He gently chided me that I wasn't a greased sausage but a woman with a skin condition.

As I was in the process of trying to get some rest, I got a stern talking to from Loki about my 'exceedingly uncharitable and inappropriate' comment about myself. I was firmly reminded that negative self-talk like that is not acceptable and I had to knock it off. Communication with Loki and Freyr has been alternating between stuff like 'hey, are you ok? you can talk to me," affectionate stuff, and stern reminders that negative self-talk and neglecting my welfare is unacceptable. When I was really upset about how somethings weren't going quite right in my relationship with Beloved, the two of them told me that I was going to talk to him about it or there was going to be a consequence.

The last time I ignored them on something important like that, I found myself in a position where the issue was right in my face the whole time until it got fully addressed. So, I talked to Beloved. Had a meltdown over the fact that I have emotional needs at all. And got reminded that I was raised in a household where basic needs like eating were treated as reward/luxury items for me rather than necessities and punishments for having needs happened on a regular basis. It was a hard day.

I'm just trying to keep my head glued together. Loki's been attempting to cheer me up and get me to shrug off some of the depressive symptoms. It sort of works for a little while and then it doesn't. Freyr's been really big on how I need to take better care of myself and kinda using the carrot and a stick approach when I dig my heels in about refusing to do so.

Somehow in all of this, I wrote a devotional for Loki. It's up on Amazon as an e-book and a paperback. The paperback has more stuff to it. 

Godspousery Notes No. ???

 They're begging me not to do it. I'm so tempted to start starving myself again. Eating the bare minimum of what my carb load requirements has dropped my A1C from 12 three years ago to 6.4 as of my last appointment. Stress has been making my fasting blood sugars creep up, aggravated by the 'dawn phenomenon' where people have their body producing more blood sugar to wake them up in the morning. I feel like I can't eat a proper meal anymore. Breakfast is a small cup of yogurt and a 1/4 cup of granola. Lunch was sandwiches and salads. But as I find my brain getting bad again, I've turned to nutritional bars that hit that bare minimum threshold of carb requirements.

I'm not doing the keto diet. But I am devolving back into disordered eating. I am struggling to make myself eat in front of people. Those nutritional bars allows me to wolf down food before I have to put together food for the kids. It's the knot in the rope I'm holding on to so I don't fall back into that hole. In the last three months, my weight dropped by five lbs. It's not because of miraculous activity. It's because I realize that I've been doing this thing for the last three months.

I just am so tempted to just go back to eating the bare minimum I need to stay alive. Diabetes has cut so many foods out of my life. All my comfort foods are gone. All of the replacements for those comfort foods are gone now too because my texture/flavor sensitive family can't handle them. I'm sick of fighting to get the kids to eat. They're underweight because of their medication. I have tried a diverse number of foods and they keep resisting them.

So, after a family meeting, the menu is now hamburgers on Monday, tacos on Tuesday, meatloaf and potatoes on Wednesday, rotisserie chicken on Thursday with potatoes, and fish sticks on Fridays. Saturdays are 'cheat' days where fast food is acquired. Sundays are family dinners at the in-laws which tend to be defined by my father-in-law's pickiness about food being too spicy, looking weird, or has too many vegetables. And he's vocal about his pickiness to the point that he's bitched about my cooking to my face. I was good and I didn't flip the table over. I seriously thought about it. His comfort foods just happens to look a lot like what the menu that's been assembled for the week. So, I can't escape it.

Very little on this menu is diabetic friendly. So, I am only going to eat small portions. I can't help it because if I eat a 'normal' portion, my blood sugar spikes. I am just going to have to learn to ignore hunger again. Freyr is just about in tears over this because he's deeply worried that it's going to have catastrophic effects on my health. Loki is toweringly angry with me for not saying anything during the family meeting about my dietary needs.

But, I can't do this business of cooking multiple meals every day at a given meal time. I tried. It didn't work out. I can't apparently make food that would theoretically hit everybody's dietary needs (because the kids need high carb and high protein diets to gain weight) because what I make is disgusting to the rest of the family. Beloved said, "Let's do a family meeting and get the input from the kids on what they'll actually eat." So we did that. As it went on, I realized, nothing I could say or do was going to change the outcome.

I used to love cooking once I got past the emotional trauma of being psychologically abused over my skills as a housekeeper and cook by my parents. Now, I dread it. Nothing I made was good enough in my parents house. If something went wrong, it was my fault, even if the error was a misprint in the recipe. For twenty years, I was told that I was a terrible cook and all of that is coming back up now with my kids being like they are about the food. And with my husband's tendency to pick up fast food because what I made for dinner doesn't appeal to him, and then I find the bags in the garbage with the leftovers of what I cooked.

I gave up on leftovers as something to eat the next day. Because I was the only one who would eat them. And when 90% of what you cooked is left, it's depressing. Things are just getting worse on this front every day. I'm sitting here incredibly hungry because I skipped my afternoon snack so that I didn't eat too many carbs. Lunch is just about always peanut butter spread across diet flat-bread when it isn't one of those nutrition bars. Either case, my dietician would say that it's not ideal. 

Which is really fucking funny because she's the one who got me started back on this bullshit. When my old glucometer bit the dust, she was telling me to restrict my meals and eliminate snacks to get better numbers on my 3 year old meter. Never did it occur to her that the problem was the meter. I went in for my regular appointment with the doctor, just about in tears, explaining that I was a recovered person with an eating disorder that's threatening to come back because of what the dietician was directing me to do. It was the doctor who asked me how old my meter was. He was astonished and horrified when I told him and immediately prescribed a new meter and accoutrements. My readings now are half of what the old meter was reading.

But, I can't get that woman saying that I need to have a fasting blood sugar of 90 out of my head. When I have a fasting blood sugar over 120, I eat less than 30 carbs for breakfast in an effort to force that number lower when the medication kicks in. On a given day, my total carbs now is around 150. When I stress eat, it's cheese or meat. I've given up on fruit, even as part of a meal, with the exception of the dried apricots which I calculated is 3 carb per apricot. I allow myself 4 at most as a snack, that's 12 carbs when according to the prescribed diet my range is 10 to 15 carbs for a snack. My total carbs for a meal is 30 to 45. If you're doing the math, my total carbs are pretty low.

I can't talk to Beloved about this. I get so upset that I just start blubbering. I'm humiliated. I am defeated by this. Loki keeps telling me to tell Beloved that this is going on. I can't though. He's carrying the weight of supporting the family on his shoulders. He's working at a job that's barely afloat, primarily because of his efforts. I can't add this to that. I just have to figure out a work-around. But I can't seem to think of anything because the damn eating disorder and all that disgust with myself that was literally beaten into me for eating by my parents gets in the way.

The last three months have been real hard. I haven't been sleeping well for about a year now. It's gotten real bad over the last three months to the point that my psych has put me on a second antipsychotic because of its sedative effect (I'm on one for my bipolar II with psychotic features, which is working and at about the highest dose they give.) With the sleep problems, I am more prone to c-ptsd problems. With the c-ptsd problems, I am more prone to eating disorder problems.

I'm a fucking mess. I'm posting this on the blog that only two of you read. I'm not going to do something stupid. I'm just struggling and venting. I know that if I put this on any of my other blogs, there'll be drama somewhere. I'm going to try, again, tonight to talk to Beloved about my eating issues. I really don't want to find out what Loki would do to inform Beloved that I'm back on that bullshit again. And I don't want Freyr to cry over me. It hurts. And I know that Loki's anger at the situation is covering up his pain and concern. Because, that's what he does with me in the dynamic that we've got.

So, that's what's on my mind and why I haven't posted shit in forever. My brain is in a bad place. I'm not depressed but I'm not well for so many reasons. That, however, is something for another day.

30 days for Freyr - Roadblocks.

 I've been desperately trying to keep up on my writing but failing left, right, and center. I've been having some problems over the last several weeks. Three weeks ago, I put my back out and I was out of commission for a week. About two months now, I have been having severe problems with insomnia. This is having a negative impact on my ability to focus to write or do much of anything. The apartment is kinda a mess again because I've had the attention span of a goldfish. Throw on top of this, for the last three weeks I have been having difficulties with my C-PTSD and experiencing a lot of intrusive thoughts and flashbacks at random with great frequency.

I'm working with my doctor to get these things resolved but I know that this is not a case of 'Take this pill and you'll be better in a week.' But, it is making things like devotional writing hard. If you follow me on Tumblr, I'm a bit irregular in my morning little prayers right now. I'm stressed out and dissociating on a fairly regular basis. My problems sleeping make me more prone to doing that. I'm not entirely sure why.

Last night was the first night in the last two months I got something that resembled a full night of sleep. I only woke up twice and that was to get a drink of water. All this stress has my blood sugar running kinda high in the morning and I've been stress eating stuff like cheese. I think the only reason why this post is not gibberish is because I got more than 4 hours of sleep last night. I'm also on my second pot of coffee. That magical potion that turns me from a zombie into a semi-functional person.

Freyr has been concerned. Loki's been concerned. Beloved is concerned. The only ones who are not concerned are my kids, who don't really know what's going on because I do my best to mask my symptoms around them because they find them distressing. Which is exhausting. I don't know what the solution to this problem is going to be. I just hope that all of this doesn't land me into an depressive or a manic episode. Either would be real bad right now.

But that's why I haven't been posting. Because my brain is shit right now. I don't even know why I can't sleep. I fall asleep ok but I keep waking up after a large chunk of my bedtime medication wears off. The other night, I woke up six times in a row, despite taking the melatonin as my doctor advised. I think the fact I slept last night is based on the fact that I was so tired I was literally stumbling over my own feet.

30 days for Freyr - Day 4

 I love him for his generosity and kindness. I love him for how he takes care of his people (and often those who are around them as well). I love him for how good he is to the world and doesn't ask anything for it in return. I love him for the way plants grow and bloom in his presence. I love him for how he is always encouraging me to be my best self. I love him for how he loves me.

30 days for Freyr - Day 3

 I know that he is with me. I know it as surely as I know that objects on Earth fall at the velocity of 32 ft/s/s and that the Sun rises in the East. But today was a bad brain day. I'm heart sick and terrified of things from the past. It makes my head full of noise and shutters my 'second sight'. I just want to cry but I can't because of past trauma. Freyr tells me on a regular basis that there's no shame in my tears. He tells me that they're as natural and necessary as the rain. And that I shouldn't fight so hard to stop them from falling. But pain and psychological agony keep me stone-faced because I was taught as a child that crying was weakness and weakness was always punished. Some day, maybe, I'll be healed enough that I can cry. Today is not that day. At least Freyr understands that and has never told me that my tears (shed or unshed) were weakness.

30 days for Freyr - Day 2: A poem

 Pining for Autumn's beauty
Gazing upon a skin-shed
Holding a hollow skull
Life is fleeting
So it is that I must go
To transform
To transcend
To the little death of the seed
So that the mighty oak may grow

30 days for Freyr - Day 1 (really late)

 I am not well right now. I put my back out around the middle of last week picking up a stupid piece of paper. Life's been busy and a pain in the neck because it's been hard to have the focus to write anything, anywhere, in any format. Now, I have to rest my back and sit or lay and pretty much do nothing until this spasm goes away. I'm hoping that it'll be a week and then everything's fine. The pain is pretty much managed by the Aleve and Tylenol. The muscle relaxer is helping me a lot too but it's making my brain run a bit slower and I feel kinda spaced out (like with Benadryl sans the out-of-body sensation).

Now, you may ask what this misfortune has to do with Freyr. It's really simple. I'm posting here for the whole world to know that he was right. I got cocky and stopped making time for my exercises for my back after I fell about two years ago. Then the pandemic came along and I pretty much stopped exercising all together. The entire time, Freyr was gently telling me I really needed to do at least some yoga to strengthen my core muscles. I hate yoga because the stretching is painful for me to do in 90% of the poses and most of the poses make me lose my balance.

Cue last Wednesday when I stooped to pick up a partial sheet of loose leaf paper one of my sons left on the living room floor. I went to stand back up and it hurt. Being a practical woman, I took some Aleve. It still hurt. Thursday morning, the Aleve had worn off and my pain was a 9 out of a scale of 1 to 10. The last time I had a 9, I was in labor with my youngest son and Beloved cracked a joke which made me laugh during a contraction. As I am typing this, Freyr is reminding me that if I don't put my glasses on soon, I'm going to give myself a headache. So, I'm going to listen to him and put them on. Because failing to listen to him combined with my natural clumsiness equates to misfortune. (And Loki pinning my ears back for not being more careful.)

Pandemic stress is hard on a necromancer.

 I'm writing this here instead of my other witchy blog or my personal blog because I think it fits here better. I don't know.

We're a year and a half (a little over actually) into this pandemic business and I'm frayed. I am struggling on the spiritual level a fair amount because of the fact that I'm pretty isolated geographically from the pagan community that I was participating in before this thing hit. I was just coming out of my shell and stuff. Then Covid-19 arrived on the scene and everything went to shit.

Around the time of early January 2019, my guides and all of my ancestors were telling me not to do divination for the upcoming year. We all know what kind of a shit show 2019 was. I came out of 2019 worn out and confused by why the dead were so many and so restless. Now, I understand. The constant static of a ton of psychic voices was cacophony in my head to the point that I was a little worried that my depression medication wasn't working properly.

Under the guidance of the All-Father, I put up wards around my home to keep all but my familial dead out. Gradually, the psychic pressure of the restless dead reached a point that going out of the house was a literal headache. At that point, the wards got extended to include the entire property and a ward got attached to my medical id bracelet. It went from noise to silence. Again, I was left wondering if my medications were working properly.

I still feel them out there. The lost souls looking for their route to where they're supposed to go. There's so many of them. There's more than just human souls that are in this position. The mass deaths that have happened over the last three years have left an imprint. This imprint on the psychic level of reality isn't going away anytime soon. But, like any other hollow space, it fills up. In this case, with spirits.

I'm a necromancer. It's my thing to talk to and generally deal with the spirits of the dead. Has been since I was a small child (and I suspect it runs in the family). Shutting down this part of myself has left me feeling out of sorts and like I'm missing something vital to my being. But, I'm being cautioned against opening up because we're not done with this pandemic. The warnings I get is that this is going to get a whole lot worse before it gets better.

Those warnings set off my anxiety issues. Add to that the legitimate reasons to be anxious about Covid-19 and its possible influence on my family, you just get an emotional mess. Now, the stress of all of this got to the point where my sleep was screwed up. That's very bad for a person with bipolar disorder. It is equally bad for a person with posttraumatic stress disorder. I happen to have both in spades. So, my doctor put me on medication to help me sleep and tweaked my other medications to help me with the anxiety (and attendant depression). 

Here I am, a little over a year and a half later, I still feel that psychic pressure. When I go out, it's like static electricity all around me. It's only gotten more intense as time has gone on. I veil and that static like feeling is pushed back. The problem is, the people where I live are not ... tolerant of anything that looks even remotely Islamic. The veil style that provides the most shelter for me is the headrail, which looks identical to the shyla because there's only so many ways you can wrap a bit of fabric about your head. 

I wear kerchiefs but it isn't the same. I'm working on trying to come up with ways I can both not be overwhelmed by the restless dead's need for someone to point the way and still be psychically active. Right now, the only thing that I can do with out something going haywire is basic divination. But, even that is getting a little weird. Which means the pressure on the wards is getting higher. Which isn't surprising.

Covid-19 jumps and mutates incredibly fast. It kills easily and in a horrific way. It's a terrifying disease. The mass deaths it's caused is warping reality a bit because there are so many restless souls. I pray that with the Hunt season, those souls will all be brought to where they're supposed to be. At the same time, it feels like Hunt season from 2019 never ended.

July for loki post no 19: i surrender.

 Enough stuff has gone sideways over the last two weeks, I just give up. Apparently I am doing to much or trying to do too much or something. I don't know. I just know that I've been having things proverbially go explody left, right, and center for the last several days. I'm tired. I'm frustrated. And I just can't fake a smile and push on. 

No idea what that means for all the stuff I have to do. Loki keeps telling me to open my hands and let the pieces fall. Whatever pieces I'm holding on to, I'm just letting drop. I don't have the spoons for all of the drama. In other news, thieves suck and I want my planter back so but I can't have it back because it's evidence now. I was going to get some flowers and put them in it and I was going to take that strawberry planter and put the ton of spider plant babies into it. But some moron stole a big planter full of dirt and a mostly dead rosebush and my strawberry planter. 

*sighs* This shit is exhausting. I don't know wtf the message is, if there even is one. Who the hell fucking steals a two cubic foot planter full of dirt? Seriously? I guess the flowers I get to have are the ones I either make out of yarn or buy from the store. 2021 sucks.

July for Loki post no, 18

A Litany for Loki (from my new book)

Hail Loki

Hail to the Friend of the Traveler

Hail to the Sky-Treader

Hail to the Cunning One

Hail to the Scar-Lipped Speaker of Unwelcome Truths

Hail to the mischievous Lie-Smith

Hail to the Tale Spinner

Hail to the Thunderer's Companion

Hail to the Dweller within Victory's embrace

Hail to the Net-Maker and the Salmon

Hail to the slayer of Otar of the waters

Hail to the thief and restorer of Sif's hair

Hail to the Father of Monsters

Hail to the Mother of witches and trolls

Hail to the Bound-God who walks free

Hail to the Lover of Angrboda

Hail to the Blood-Brother of Helblind

Hail to the Curious One

Hail to the Friend of Humanity

Hail to the Guardian of the Hearth-fire

Hail  to the famed son of Laufey

Hail to the Champion of the outcast

Hail to the Giver of Strange Gifts

Hail to the Wolf's Father

Hail to the Watchman's Bane

Here's the link if you want to buy a copy. It's a short read. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B099NX9HLL

July for Loki post no. 17

 I have been slowly feeling my mood drop as we move farther away from the summer solstice. I am pretty sure it's my seasonal affective disorder beginning to rear its head. This morning, as I was attempting to write in my journal, Loki said to me, "It's not too early to break out that special light and start using it." I've been resisting the urge to do so because I just feel like a fool sitting there with that 'happy light' running when the sun is in the process of rising. I was considering bickering with him about it when he reminded me, "If you can't make your own neurotransmitters, store bought it fine. If you can't get enough sunlight, a sun lamp is fine. Think about your plants and grow lights."

So, this argument in place, I have to figure out how I am going to fit in 30 min of time with the 'happy light' where it's the only major light source in the room at the correct angle. I don't know how I'm going to do this. My apartment is laid out terribly and the one room that would be ideal for that doesn't have enough outlets or a table for me to put the light on. Ugh. I hate being wrong but I hate even more not being able to implement the solution to the problem that I was in denial about. I'm sure that Loki will have some kind of idea, he's crafty like that.

But yea, SAD sucks.

July for Loki post no. 16

 So, Beloved and I get back from visiting his elderly parents. As I go to get out of the car I see that his travel mug of coffee from the day before is sitting in the cup holder. I pick it up. Instead of finding the usual handful of change sitting in the bottom of the cup holder underneath the mug, I find a calcified chicken nugget. 

Beloved's confused and then he starts howling with laughter. He says to me, "Hey, babe, I think your boss gave you a chicken mc-fuck-it." It had been an exasperating day. I was about to say something to the effect that I was out of fucks to give. Then this happened. I tossed the chicken nugget out into the wild so some feral cat could have it.

"Well, there goes my last fuck," I said. Beloved exploded with laughter. The boys, who were out of the car and on their way into the house at the time were very confused by all of this because they didn't hear the conversation.

Flame-Hair, supplier of fucks when you run out?

July for Loki post no. 15

 I keep having emotional flashbacks to trauma from when I was a kid over the last few days. Loki sat with me last night and told me, "Just because they feel real doesn't mean that they're happening now." I got very upset when he told me that. I asked him then if what I experience with him and Freyr are just simply manufactured by my broken brain. Loki reminded me of the time I was inpatient for a suicidal episode including psychotic features. After I had gotten a dose of Haldol to quiet the auditory hallucination of my mother screaming at me to kill myself, Loki said quiet calmly, "Can you hear me now?"

I just about wept with relief. I was terrified that my mystical experiences were all hallucinations after the first bout of psychotic experiences about ten years ago. Haldol is a serious business antipsychotic. It shuts down that part of your brain that is putting out the garbage information that's telling you something is there that isn't. It has a few odd things about it, like going from absolute panic to feeling like you're wrapped up in a warm, heavy blanket and your heart rate slowing down. But, I knew that with the Haldol I was going to get relief from the screaming. 

Then Loki spoke up. Suddenly, I understood that all of my mystical experiences were real. He was with me, even when the place turned into utter chaos later at dinner time. It wasn't like a full scale riot. But the moment the full moon cleared the horizon, chairs were getting thrown, people were shoving each other, and I was trapped in a corner cowering behind a table, praying that the violence was going to stay on the other side of the room. As I was there, Loki was with me telling me that I was going to be ok and I just had to focus on my breathing so I didn't hyperventilate. Eventually, the hospital staff got the dining room under control. I came out of my hiding spot, shaking but doing my best not to show fear. When they sent everyone back to their rooms early, I was relieved. I laid down in my bed and just faced the window and prayed that it wasn't going to happen again.

Loki sat at the foot of the bed and told me that everything was going to be ok. One may ask, where was Freyr in the midst of this. Well, he was standing between me and the brawl. Later, when I was in my room, he was standing at the doorway. And as I had been pacing, Loki was on my left side as Freyr was on my right, just quietly bearing witness to what I was doing and dealing with. I think the reason why Loki spoke up and was focused on calming me down is because I've known Loki longer and was more likely to listen to him.

But, yeah, that was a thing that happened.

July for Loki post no. 14

 I should have put this in the last post, but here's the book cover. It's out under the pen name I use for my religious oriented and spiritually oriented writing. Here's a link if you want to grab a copy: 

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B099NX9HLL

July for Loki post no 13

 Nothing like having life get in the way of blogging. Somedays, I feel like I should give up but those are particularly bad days. Mainly, I've been busy trying to get through stuff like my eldest son having an emergency dental appointment on Tuesday and family business on Wednesaday. The apartment is a disaster with laundry piled up everywhere and a stack of dishes waiting to be done. On the other hand, I finally finished the Lokean devotional I was working on and got it published.

Working on that project was an experience and a half. Loki put in a lot of input on how he wanted me to assemble the thing. He insisted that the Lokean rosary (he insisted it was a rosary, not prayer beads) be the first thing people encounter in the book. So that wound up at the beginning. I can't help the anxiety that this is going to rile a lot of people up and get me a bunch of hate. Loki, however, assures me that this is going to be fine and I have more to worry about the Aristasian's coming out of the woodwork to bitch about my work on the Clear Recital: Children of Déa Version. 

I checked on KDP to see if there'd been any book sales of any sort this week. Some eager beavers decided to pick up copies of the Lokean devotional and someone read it all the way through in one sitting. Now, it's not a long or a hefty book. Coming in at a mere 20 pages, you can get through this pretty quickly. I was just surprised that as soon as I posted the link to the sales page, there were to purchases. I figured it'd take a week or so for that to happen. I've only started the marketing process.

It is my hope that this devotional gives other Lokeans a jumping off point for building their own devotional practices. I honestly don't know why Loki wanted a Catholic style rosary but that got in there. Maybe to introduce people to the concept that the can repurpose prayer traditions from their former faith. All I know is that I just hope this helps devotees of Loki feel more secure and comfortable with their practices. Loki assures me that this book is going to help people, and that's all I want.

July for Loki: Post 12

 He laughs and it's music to my ears no matter what form he takes. Loki is just someone that I adore. He's been with me through horrific times and wonderful times. He basically threw me at the love of my life, going 'NOW KISS!!' when we were little more than kids. Loki's been the source of humor that carried me through some horrible shit when I was a kid. Loki's sense of humor is dark, sardonic, and hilarious. He is the one who cracks jokes at a funeral about the dead guy in the box that make people giggle despite themselves.

Sometimes, Loki speaks through me. The experience of channeling Loki is probably one of the most intimate things I've ever had. Channeling can put you in the position where you're in the passenger seat of your brain observing what's  happening. It can also throw you into the trunk and leave you completely in the dark about what's going on. Loki, typically, puts me in the back seat as he is doing things and holding a conversation with me at the same time. The times where I end up in the trunk, it's always with a bit of warning before hand (unlike some deities) and he usually makes smart comments before it happens about my kinks. It's a weird experience to have him hitting the kink buttons before he takes over to talk to someone. When I come out of the trance, I'm frustrated but not at the same time and he's smug.

It's an experience and a half to channel Loki. Especially when it is his World-Breaker aspect because there's something of a D/s thing between him and I. Of all the deities that I have channeled, Loki is on the short list of the ones I trust completely because he's always taken care of me. There've been times where the handling was a bit rough, but in the end it always works out for the best. (Even that lesson where I fell down a flight of stairs and a snow shovel caught me. He resorted to drastic measures because I was being particularly hard headed. When I start heading down the path of being that hard headed, he reminds me about that little trip.)

July for Loki: Post No. 11

 Posting this one a day early because tomorrow is going to be busy.

On a more serious note, Loki isn't the cause of all of the Aesir's problems. Some of it is the Aesir doing dumb shit. For example, the prophecy that Fenrir, Jorgmundr, and Hela were going to cause the destruction of the Aesir got put into motion when the Aesir took the children from Angrboda. If they just left them alone, I suspect that things would have gone differently. When Baldur gains a degree of immortality from Frigga running all about Midgard asking everything not to harm her son (except for the young mistletoe plant), he should have kept that under his hat. Frigga shouldn't have talked about it. But, she did and Loki puts that dart in Hodr's hand to ensure that Baldur goes to her Thing.

Loki's mischief is not malice (most of the time). He's acting as the hand of the Norns in many cases. In other situations, he's bringing the solution to a larger problem by way of creating smaller problems. (Remember, the wall about Asgard is not complete for a reason. And that made a place where they could put the fire to burn Thjazi.) I tire of people saying that Loki's evil. I tire of people saying that he is the Norse Satan. Most of all, I am exhausted with people saying that Loki is "just a myth".

That, however, will be a rant for another day.

July for Loki: Post No. 10

 Y'all have seen the Norse crisis flow chart? Allow me to present another flow chart that works as well.

July for Loki: Post No. 9

 I don't know what to write because I've been so busy trying to organize the chaotic mess that is my home. Loki just chuckles at my efforts because the boys manage to undo them right behind me. Children are chaos engines. They don't tell you that. They say that they're cute and adorable. They say that they're bright and full of potential. They don't tell you if you give your 11 year old the slightest information about how mechanics work (talking about physics stuff), they will immediately build a catapult with out having seen one in operation before. They don't tell you if you give your 13 year old any information about relationships that it rapidly leads to awkward questions about sex. (Loki finds it hilarious that both Beloved and I are unsure how to explain it to the kid who wrote a 'romance' story in school that made his teacher blush. The son in question has refused to show me the story he wrote, insisting he needs to revise it and make it better. We're kind of dreading what better means.)

As Beloved and I stumble our way through parenting, Loki has been amused, given suggestions, and outright laughed at the situation as we're trying desperately to keep our cool and not do the same. Apparently we're hilarious as a family. Like the day we caught the boys trying to impress each other with the best insults they could think of. Vulgarities were flying and then they both went "OH SHIT! IT'S MOM AND DAD!" Beloved and I damn near died with the effort it took not to start cracking up. Flame-Hair was in hysterics. Stuff like this happens just about every day. I was not warned about this aspect of raising children. It is SO hard not to laugh when they're at their antics. And if you crack and start smiling or laugh, they'll keep hammering on the ridiculousness button until it breaks. (I swear they get that from their father, who's been attempting to assassinate me via jokes timed while I have been eating for over thirty years. Again, Loki finds it hilarious. Especially the time that whiskey shot out my nose. Whenever I start coming down with a cold, Loki suggests a nasal rinse with cheap whiskey as he giggles.)

But, yeah, kids = chaos engines. And that's why Loki love kids so much. They naturally just get along.