/yesod

Category: divination

  • nemesis

    Talking with my wife today about recent events, particularly those involving our daughter. Making plans for when the exorcism should be performed, discussing when she might be able take our daughter out of the house for an hour or two. So I can work.

    She remarks that we should time it with the next full moon phase. Personally, I don’t necessarily see that as a requirement for this particular sort of entity but we’re in this together, she knows what she’s talking about, and it can’t hurt to check when the moon will be full next.

    Eight days away.

    So we have to keep it tamped down for about a week. A few simple cleansing rituals, push it back into the corners and make sure not to give it anything to gain strength from — no negativity, fear, stress.

    Fair enough.

    Starting in on some work at the office, Spotify’s “Your Discover Weekly” playlist queues up a song I haven’t heard (or even thought about) in almost two decades. Shriekback’s “Nemesis”.

    I have a faint memory of seeing the video for this song on MTV, recalling a vague sense of unease and dread that it instilled in me — the feeling that something dark was being invoked.

    “No one move muscle as the dead come home.”

    Okay then. Thanks Spotify but if you’re going to be like that I think I’ll just go with Sirius XM for the rest fo the afternoon.

    The song playing on Sirius XM is, you guessed it, Shriekback’s “Nemesis”.

    That’s… odd, I think to myself.

    And then the next song is Depeche Mode’s “Blasphemous Rumors”.

    After that, it’s INXS “Devil Inside”.

    Makes you wonder, wonder, wonder…

  • sick girl

    My seven-year-old daughter has been sick for a couple of days. High fever, probably the flu.

    She woke up tonight, sometime around 9 o’clock, frantic and consume dwith a fear that she could not (or would not) articulate.

    Glassy eyed, staring… Looking from my face to the face of her mother… She would not answer our questions.

    What’s wrong?

    Are you going to be sick?

    Did you have a bad dream?

    Her hands shook. Her feet trembled. She did not answer.

    Finally, after much questioning, she said “Tomorrow. I’m scared of tomorrow. The flashing lights.”

    Unsettling.

    Maybe it was just a dream. Night terrors that she inherited from her mother or for me.

    But I pray she didn’t inherit something more from me, that intermittent precognition that sometimes comes to me in dreams.

    In my mind, her half dreaming words made me think of nuclear war.

  • danger

    A kitchen, a house in the country — dry and dusty, very little greenery.

    A little boy with dark hair and a baby face sits at the kitchen table playing with an old wooden birdhouse.

    I see a yellowjacket crawl sluggishly over the back of the birdhouse. Inside I see the telltale paper comb covered with more yellowjackets.

    I shout a warning to the boy — he is my son in this dream — and he laughs at my fear. I command him to take the birdhouse out of the house.

    He does grudgingly.

    I turn to see a girl — his sister, my daughter in the dream — sitting on the floor by my briefcase. She is playing with another hunk of honeycombed nest. She digs her finger into a hole, tearing at the gray papery mass, and draws out a still pupating larva. 

    She tells me it’s safe.

      
     

  • David

     My assignment for the magazine put me into his inner circle, where I could sit and observe first-hand what his life was like. I had five days with him.

    It was fascinating. 

    He was remarkably laid back and kind. He answered my questions thoughtfully and, to my eyes, didn’t try to hide any of himself behind a facade.

    I particularly remember his delight when “Satellite of Love” came on, he sang along for a bit.

    “That’s one of my all time favorite songs,” I told him.

    Smiling, he said “Well, I didn’t write it..”

    The biggest surprise were the young, cynical and utterly ordinary guys who made up his inner circle. I could tell they resented my presence there and caught one of them sneering, weasel like, on more than one occasion.

    …when I woke up today, I felt a lingering sense of wonder and gratitude for having the opportunity to spend that personal time with him.

    And then, looking at my phone, I saw the news.

      

    I don’t know why I dreamt of him.

    I puzzle over it.

  • interpretation

    Lovecraft on the Interpretation of Dreams

  • Sunday nap

    …there are three children playing at the curb, jumping in and out of a deep puddle of mud and dirt. The oldest of these, perhaps eight years old, stops in the midst of bossing the other two around and turns as he notices me…

    …and a man’s voice tells me “Look to the world around you…” as I wake up, wondering where this dream or vision came from.

  • afternoon nap

    Mind wandering around as I waited for sleep to come, dozy logic moving from Macon Leary to Edward Gorey to Ernest Hemmingway . . . then, the image of a local highway, the flashing lights of police cars against the pale winter sky.

  • blood

    [This is directly transcribed, without changes or edits, from a journal entry dated June 19th, 2002]

    You wake up with blood in your ears, you wonder what it means.