A Black Brick

Today’s Horoscope Once all this ink dries it will become antiqueand perpetual—but your road does not endin a late jade lithograph of the east before west.Receive and overcome the lords of ruin, deaf gods,wastewater, and a closed eye undirected to the world.Escape from even a single minute’s pantomimeof docility. The stars reel and bind: do not forgetpity for three wool-capped men and the…

Monahdayeg is the Inultaru word for Monday – are you surprised, just a little, that jackalopes use what is essentially the old Anglo Saxon word, Monandæg, for Monday? I was. Today I hope to chisel away some of the curse of Mondays, a curse I inherited from my elders in the Arahdansdag-ba (an explanation for that word will follow presently). Icon Number Forty-Forty features a mask of Sathurvannu,…

Yes, you have seen this mask before, in an episode of Vraicking titled “Dreams of Krishna“. You also may have seen a version of this mask in one of the posters Yost created for Isona Semvashomky, the owner of the Black Clatter Café. Today’s post is one of our Geranium lake Properties retrospectives. I have been feeling nostalgic, of late, for lost worlds, for the early part of this century, and…

“There are special words that cannot be spoken but there are no words that cannot be shared.” Yost wrote this quotation in his Peter Max Notebook1 without an attribution. In the opinions of several expert fans of Geranium Lake Properties (plus two former heads of the GLP Archive and the current director of the Other Space Museum) this is a translation of an old (but not ancient) Jackalopian…

This one is for those of you who are feeling nostalgic for the look of Geranium Lake Properties when it was printed in newspapers. I hope you will enjoy the grayscale and muted color palette (the third and fifth panels are examples of the usual color brightness found here in Vraicking). Interspersed between the panels are quotes said by the Wostim Gheyt Illuworna in conversation with Jack Loki,…

If you have been reading here at Vraicking for a few years, you might know, if you have been paying attention to the calendar, that yesterday was a minor Inultarumet holiday called Carpe Capparis. I hope you told all your near and dear ones to seize the capers. You also might have figured out that today is Jarjella, or Jelly Jar Day, or Kafkugannee (there are no good reasons for these names, the…

I can accept that I am a mystery to myself (I could write a lengthy essay about that subject but not today) so I am not too surprised to be asking myself, without actually needing an answer, why have I not yet made a tag for onions? In the Geranium Lake Properties universe1 onions have a significant presence. They are not important, they are not ubiquitous, although some people would argue that…

From the Travelogue of Mrs. Haggard In the cities of Canopus and Xanadu, the patterof beggars drumming on the doors of your taxi,and the pounding of blunt rain upon a bitumenroof, are indistinguishable from the beating soundof a thousand long-winged swallows released. All Posts in the Two Poems Series About the Series

Needful Magic, No. 110 “Fool’s Cross” (more…)

Needful Magic, No. 108 “Fool’s Cross” If there was one opinion in which all jackalopes could agree, in regards to modern society, it would be their opinion that humans do not take enough time for holidays. Humans, according to the Inultaru, are especially needful of more holidays that acknowledge fools, idiots and enfants terribles. “Yes, you have plenty of feast days in which you honor your…

As we grow nearer to the longest day of summer, our planet is traveling farther away from the sun – we will be at our farthest point from the sun on July 6, the solar aphelion. The effect of the sun’s gravity will be at its weakest, so the earth will be at the slowest speed of its orbit. The slower speed makes the summer longer in the Northern Hemisphere, and the perihelion makes the winter…

An Ordinary Life Outside the Natural Sciences From our oasis in the geometriccenter of our appliance nationwe can peer through apertures,eat hard matter, fashion atomsinto dioramas and escape throughlies told since recorded historybegan quaking or crumblingor shifting backwards, constrainedin some kind of rude downfallor outlandish resultor southern divergenceor seventh inning stretch—a vast…

This evening, after sundown, arrives the dark moon, the time for Hecate’s Deipnon, in the continental west of the Americas. Coincidentally, over at Bluesky, it is that time of year for making sigils for the community’s summer solstice project. Yost and I were taught to spell her name with a “c”, not a “k”. I have considered bringing myself into alignment with the new scholarly consensus of…

…if your name was David Hockney.

I do not know if Yost was unaware that Pytra-Sennileda was an obscure mispelling of Pytra-Sennehliydar, or if he deliberately chose to use this antique error. Whether it was intentional or not, I can tell you that the Inultaru percieve Pytra-Sennehliydar as the demalion of marriage, plus the demalion of the coup d’etat. The Moss Folk give her additional qualities as the demalion of gingko trees,…

If I was a timely person, which I am, I should have posted this in the month of May, ideally on May 7. Alas, I am not an ideal person, nor do I try to be – an ideal person seems like a dreary thing, don’t you think, too much akin to Emily Dickinson’s famous frog. And since I do not have an admiring Bog waiting patiently, or breathlessly, or some other fabled adverb, for my every post… Never…

Some people say that Jiyorsoth-Incaunje must be a Fury, because she is the avenger1 of Henchmen and Redshirts. The Moss Folk have no problem with this. They say, yes, she can be a Fury, but a demalion is a person, and a person can be different people. In fact, the Moss Folk firmly believe that a person is always a collaboration of different personas. Personas who may (or may not) wear different…