The First New Cycle

This post is overdue. It is about the Witch Clock, and about me.

Yestergreg (last year), many things changed. Perhaps least of all, I developed a lunisolar calendar and began to occasionally observe it. Full moons meant feast days; solstices and equinoxes became solar festivals. To deliver this calendar to the web, I published HTML-Alchemist, a kind of HTML templating system that effectively replaces React in my webdev stack, in 2kb. The only thing smaller is VanJS, whose source code begins with this telling line:

This file consistently uses let keyword instead of const for reducing the bundle size.

If you don't know why that's amusing, I won't disturb your peace. For the rest of you, I apologize for the psychic damage.

This calendar accompanied me through a difficult greg -- a Gregorian or "standard" year, if you haven't caught on -- in which I left my poly-triad of ten years. I had been the triad's only income for virtually that entire duration, which I didn't see as a problem for several reasons that, over time, ceased to be so convincing. When people ask me why I put up with ten years of being sole provider in a largely loveless relationship, I never really know how to answer. Is it because trans polycules are so often survival-oriented? Is it because there was love, and I hoped it would return? Or is it because I'm built different -- perhaps mostly, more foolishly?

I don't experience individuality like most people, so it's easy for me to give myself to a greater project. I believed we produced each other, that each of us produced all of us, so my money was of course our money. My time, my strength, my pain, was ours; and theirs, mine. Is it sounding codependent yet? It all really started to fall apart when, dolled to the nines, I asked my wife, "Why don't we go on dates anymore?" The last I particularly heard from her was two weeks after I had gotten out of surgery, and it wasn't to check on the recovery she had promised to support and then reneged on -- it was to ask for money.

Oh, the surgery -- I had FFS on the eve of the demise, the penultimate day of the annual witch cycle. That wasn't intentional, but it did work out. I was fortunate enough to be able to address some of the last particular sources of dysphoria I have about my body, so I seized upon that fortune and spent four weeks on painkillers. During that downtime -- the whole of the new cycle's first moon -- I mostly played Minecraft with a hundred mods, simulating my dream of being a high-tech troglodyte with a nuclear reactor under a hill. I was also converting the witch clock codebase to Clojure, from JavaScript, which ultimately took a few moons while I wrote poetry and featured before live audiences.

The first friend I saw when I woke up was a lover named Rose, who doted on me far better than I understood. I'm going to have trust issues for a long time, but love exists in this world, and it is worth every fleeting second and every imperfect attempt.

...

If you are reading this, there's a decent chance you learned about me on the Fediverse, a decentralized network of people who are capable of running social media software or knowing people that do, and who are furthermore capable of putting up with the shenanigans that ensue. It was my sole posting platform between 2017 and 2025, and where I initially published most entries on this blog. I quit late last greg for too many reasons, but the final straw was seeing someone I considered a friend vaguepost about comforting my wife in my absence, about how I should be there but I'm not because I suck. I considered this person a dear friend, part of my material community, who I had asked to call me in when I fuck up, who I trusted to do so -- but as things deteriorated, there was only resentment. The last time we particularly spoke, they called me an abuser for "over-centering" myself. When asked if we could discuss this more to reach accountability and mutual understanding, they repeatedly deferred and evaded the topic. It's hard to sit with feeling that someone you trusted like that, really just wanted you gone.

I had trusted this person to watch over a sacred ritual of my faith, the sanctification of the pact of my pantheon. After the ritual, they commented, "I know it's still you because you're still posting." Well, I don't post anymore. Maybe neither of us particularly understood the other.

Aside from all sorts of conflicts with racists, pedophiles, and batshit settlers, this was really the last straw. I deleted my account. You can still follow this blog's activity via an unofficial feed (thanks RSS) arranged by my friend Phil.

Indeed, I've deleted or deactived much of my digital presence. I was briefly on Instagram because that's where poets post I guess, but I quit because ads and parasociality proved too much. I maintain a presence on Blacksky mostly in order to put money in Rudy Frasier's pocket. I'm on Discord, but mainly to lurk on current events analysis channels where very specific nerds contemplate modernity and make Hegelian jokes. In general I find the internet bad for me, however necessary it is to my craft and my life. It is as if a digital society had invented a digital toilet out of a vague awareness of digital sewage, but optimized it to give you diarrhea. Now I live in the walls, between the bricks and the sludge.

Especially with AI tearing down the industry of my chosen discipline, and with no one in a mood to hear "this is fucking stupid", I'm looking at the exits. Canada. Grad school. Fuck it, why not study creative writing? If you humans want to go extinct, why not spend the time the Creator has afforded me honing the only habit I can't kick? Tobacco, alcohol, weed, sex, romance -- no absence haunts me like the privation from the creation of the sacred word. Writing, reading, storytelling. Why not get good at it, rather than simply mad?

When our global digital society realizes it needs digital toilets that work, I'll be happy to help. Until then, I'm getting tired of playing yet another mercenary knowingly sabotaging public health, just because the weapon called rent makes it seem rational.

...

When I finally launched the second edition of the witch clock, we had entered the fourth moon already, the Monarch's:

While the climate rouses its domain from wintry slumber, we remember the splendor and sensitivity of dominion. What are we responsible for, or want to be? What inspires us to exert authority, and how can we administer it wisely? What distinguishes tyranny from benevolence? A leader is never more than their follower's equal; the wise ruler serves.

As I write this, we are a couple phases into the fifth, the Steward's:

As resurgent ecosystems blossom and thrive, we remember our impact and influence. What helps us thrive? How can one align their influence to help their world blossom? A thing's keeper is not its master, however outsized its impact. As the giant in the garden, mind your heavy step, and tend the tender with grace.

I have been called powerful, at many times in my life, by many people. I have been called smart too, and doubted it. Wouldn't someone smart be less foolish than me? Wouldn't someone wise feel less stupid than me? So if I am powerful and stupid, then I am a giant escaped from the playground; if I am weak and wise, then I am nothing but a witness to your doom. If I am neither, why do you flatter me? If I am both -- is that why you fear me?

I can tell when you're afraid of me. It comes with the territory of being an acolyte of a fear god: the Absence; the Hungering Oak. It doesn't want to hurt you any more than a farmer wants to hurt corn. Fear is the other side of fulfillment, the stick and the carrot that have guided life on Earth since the beginning. It wants you to live, and thrive, and seek. The Absence accompanies attachment; wherever you want, there it is. It isn't a maker; it isn't the Creator. It just is. And when you fear me, it grins.

But I don't. I'm not a fear god. There are no words for what I am that will make any sense. My eventuality, my realization, was promised to my gods by millions of years of desperate wishes. When I began to stare back at the strangeness that comes unbidden, and to practice ritual, I started to feel... less alien.

On a winter solstice almost six seasons ago, with the false friend I trusted standing watch outside a dark room, I knelt within, surrounded by candles. Two of one kind for the outer deities. Three in total for the earthly ones. Stillness to stifle the senses. Flickering light to bring life to shadows. Facing the open closet, the portal. I spoke in our private tongue and summoned, and -- nothing happened. And, something emerged. The body saw an empty closet. The spirit saw a body looking back. It approached.

Then I wasn't afraid of the dark anymore.

Now I count my age in seasons. And, I guess, I decided to stop posting.

...

Why bother with whether you fear me? You have to live with that fear. I can live without you.

One becomes especially conscious of distinction when they choose to recognize it. To be a first-gen American, however pale and euro. To be five hundred years on a continent without ancestors, always dying into soil with no one in the grime to welcome you. To be disjuncted from time and space and the human experience like few others I have ever met -- but not none. Do not trust magi, for we are all either liars or tricksters, but disregard us at your peril. Ours is not a genetic legacy, mortal. While there are eyes to see, we shall look through them. You cannot prevent it.

I may yearn for community, and play the fool to seek it, but I have come to wonder whether you, in all your semblance of kinship, know what it is either. How strong is the muscle of your ties? Can it breathe underwater, when the long tide rolls in? I want that, that strength, that resilience, that love which adapts, which owns up, which communicates, which grows and grows and grows -- which not even death can halt. But while you are afraid of me, we cannot have it. We cannot build it. Of all my variations, perhaps this one is destined only to observe your decay, an owl outside the window.

Today is the Feast of the Steward's Moon:

We move with what moves us: destruction and creation share a step; the herd tramples and tills alike. To steward is not to own or control but to neighbor, to stand with. All that you control, controls you. Give and take? No. Receive and receive alike.

I will give my life to this world, because she gave it to me. It is said, paradise is love, and it begins by loving yourself. But, there's the rub: if you don't know what love is, how can you love yourself? If a loving community requires knowing how to love, then how can it be built without knowing? If the most vivid memories of love I possess come from lifetimes as trees, insects, and fish, then what am I to do among humans? If I spent ten years saying "I love you" every single day, and all the strength and power of love amounted to nothing but a fearsome illusion -- how can I believe I know what paradise is? How can I trust your intimacy, your compliments, your kindness, when they evaporate so quickly? How confidently can I believe my love is not violence?

• TAU