Everyone has a relationship with money. Usually we can’t get enough of it. A funny thing begins to happen as you acquire more of it too: it slips through your fingers faster! That’s because you’re paying off debt acquired when you didn’t have it, are upgrading your equipment for the future when you expect not to have it, and in the end spend enough of it away to guarantee that you won’t have it in the present either. For me money has been much less about give and take as it is for most, and I’ve been frugal since the day I was born. I remember having a big pink plastic piggy bank with a curly rubber tail that I’d wind around my little fingertips while wondering how many pennies, dimes, nickels and quarters were shoved in there. How many more could I fit? Would I ever fill the jar? It was over a gallon in volume and fill it I did.
I was seven years old when I first started my first business. It wasn’t a lemonade stand—that sounded really stupid: sitting out in the sun next to a slowly warming pitcher of lemonade when even I had been ordered not to accept food from strangers. Oh, no. Of course it had to do with cleaning because I am and always have been extremely particular about organization. I called it, “Ave’s Household Cleaning” (except it was my name not my pen name!) and it was essentially an elegantly designed effort to get my parents to pay me for doing my own chores. By age twelve I had invoices. I had a logo. I had some bizarre system where I’d look at a room and decide how expensive it was going to be—and for some reason I claimed I charged off of square footage when I had no real ability to eyeball such a thing at such a young age so I actually did what any seven-year-old would do: I made things up. It sounded official enough, and my parents thought I was cute so they actually paid me what I asked for…and when they didn’t I got to learn how to negotiate, a skill that would take me far in the modern world when I fast forwarded a few decades to the present date where I am furiously collecting my purse onto my arm and turning my back on a company that has finally snapped my very last straw. There is a certain type of sensation that only lovers of books understand. It happens when the spine cracks gently and the perfume of toxic binding glue, ink, and crisp paper rises into your nose, and for a moment your eyes close against your will and ahhh, suddenly there it is: the smell of a fresh, new book. All of that information within just waiting to be discovered, all of those wonderful pages just begging to be turned and fingerprints pining to be smeared over the cover can transport you—even if just for a moment!—and only if you’re a book lover, a person who understands this acquired flavor of bliss that tolls your brain to salivate faster than Pavlov’s mutt. There is another type of sensation that comes to those who are perhaps cousins of this breed of human specimen, and it happens with a different type of book, a specific book, a book that in all intents and for all purposes was sold to its steward in a painfully blank state. Journals, I’m talking about journals now. Imagine what can be written on those pages. Imagine what adventures could be hand in the way of fiction or in margin doodles. They are the vaults of memories and experiences, of emotions and of logic, of puzzles and peculiarities. Journals, my dear friends, are whatever in the Hell you want them to be, and that is more than just a little bit exciting.
It was last Wednesday afternoon when I lifted my eyes from my computer screens and saw the friendly receptionist’s glossy smile curving down at me. I knew what she wanted, I had heard her ask the office next to mine—her voice carries, and that doesn’t seem to be the worst trait for a receptionist to have. I let her ask the question anyway, even though I had known the answer several years before she incepted it. “We’re looking for volunteers for our annual Salvation Army event,” she informed me in a cheery tone, and I let my brows curve with false intrigue. “Last year we all took shifts at the mall and we’re planning on doing that again next week since it was such a huge success!” I’m so glad you’re so excited, Rebecca. Enjoy that enthusiasm, and don’t let me pop your bubble. I inform her that while I’m very grateful for the opportunity, I am not interested in participating in this one. She doesn’t need to know my opinion on the Salvation Army. She thinks I’m a good little Christian girl after all, and her surprise is evident only until I match her smile and return to work—this conversation is over, sorry: not sorry. I won’t be guilted into bell-ringing for a cause that I don’t believe in. I’m not going to get into it with her. I’m not going to explain how they discriminate against the needy that they claim to serve, and I’m not going to get into all of the reasons why “Salvation Army” is a laughably good name for an organization built on a cornerstone of hypocrisy.
This one is for the adults out there, so if you’re underage, check your fake ID at the door. You recall recently that I posted about your first enchantment in Lesser Magic and I pointed out some of the things that you should be aware of when you’re meeting somebody for the first time. I talked about what a handshake should look like if your target fit the example, and I briefly brushed on the sort of behavior to exhibit if you wanted to take a spin at being me and being successful in my world. By the end of it you may have come to agree with me that Lesser Magic is far underrated by many of the Satanic population, and I tend to feel at times that those who write it off the most are those who fail the most at utilizing it. There is much more overall to consider when you’re playing a role, and Lesser Magic really can sometimes feel like an act with the entire world as your stage. Done in real-time on a road constructed by bricks you’ve painstakingly laid in the past, there is no reason why you shouldn’t be able to get an Oscar for your performance if you only take the time to learn about your subject and understand what’s going on behind the curtain in Oz.
|
Who is the Witch?
Once I called myself a Christian, then an atheist, and a Satanist. At the end of the day, I'm just a person who is living her truth one day at a time. I'm interested in religion, its effects on the mind, the occult, and more. Learn more about me on the about page. Hellish History
November 2021
|