Graveyard Dirt

One of the coolest talismans that I've made.

Deer antler pre consecrated and suffumigated multiple times as a talisman of Jupiter, blessed with holy water and Psalms. The symbols were painted with blue nail polish last Thursday when the planet was conjunct Venus near the Ascendant. Later on the same day at Jupiter's hour it was properly consecrated with four blue candles, frankincense, palo santo, brown sugar and Haus of Ophidious' 4th Pentacle of Jupiter Oil. Jupiter and its intelligence were petitioned with lenghty prayers from the Picatrix.

 It has nothing to do with Satan, Mama. It's me.

PARIS–ÉDIMBOURG is inspired by the Scottish Highlands, where vast expanses of green dotted with crystal-clear lakes are surrounded by rugged forests. Featuring crisp notes of juniper berry and cypress paired with the smoky, peaty scent of vetiver, PARIS-ÉDIMBOURG is suggestive of the untamed lands to which Gabrielle Chanel would retreat with the Duke of Westminster. [...] A mysterious fragrance, distinguished by the tension between freshness and obscurity. Notes: Cypress, Juniper Berries / Lavender, Cedar, Vetiver / Musk, Vanilla

29 years ago today, I met my Scottish boyfriend-turned-husband face-to-face for the first time at O'Hare Terminal 5. Little did those two Star Crunch-tossing 17-year-olds know they were meeting their future spouses that June afternoon… 💍

To celebrate the anniversary, I went sample-diving to find something suitable for the occasion and found Chanel's Paris – Édimbourg at the bottom of our untested bag.

("Our" because this perfume thing is something of a shared hobby, although he's largely content just testing, while I'm compelled to test and then word-vomit every thought that crosses my mind.)

Let's experience Olivier Polge's (the nose behind this scent) interpretation of the Scottish Highlands...

Blue-green zingy-fresh. The way wintergreen gum hits with the first few frosted chews, or the way freezing air nips at the depth of your lungs when you first step outside into the cold - that crisp, icy freshness that reminds you you're alive.

As the perfume settles on the skin, the rugged blue-green freshness of the great outdoors shifts from the heather-clad hills of the Highlands to the traditional clothing worn there. Paris – Édimbourg transforms from a place into a thing, becoming a faded perfume scent-stain absorbed into a tweed jacket.

I'm feeling a little cagey about the dry-down because I can easily see the coniferous blue-green going soapy, or, even worse, Lynx-y (a bit of Scottish humour for you). It feels like you're delicately straddling the threshold between perfume and bath product, and the weight threatens to tip towards the "cool mountain air" abyss of men's shower gel.

One jasmine tea, a leftover chicken madras lunch, and a thirty-minute kickboxing workout later, I find I was right to be apprehensive about that blue-green freshness. I was slightly off with the bathroom product prediction, though - it hasn't gone soapy or shower-gel-like, but chalky like toothpaste and crisp like "cool mint" mouthwash.

(Right room, wrong activity. 🤷)

“Golden Silk Orb Weaver” denim jacket and hand-embroidered appliqué patch by Glenn Davis/DoomNGlam on Etsy

"Birds and Flowers" by Olia Fedorova. Hand embroidery, intervention into old embroideries, 2025.

Embroidery project that depicts birds and flowers that share the names with russian weapons, thus changing the associations Ukrainians have with them.

Source details and larger version.

The Orchid’s Dream, 2026 , watercolor & gouache

✨ “Not forever on Earth, only a little while here…”

I finally finished this painting that I’ve been working on since 2020. The original watercolor thumbnail I did was done pre-2020, if you can believe it. Sometimes art takes its time, and sometimes it takes time because it’s sitting on my easel neglected while I work on higher priority work for years. I’m going to miss this strange thing looking over me while I work, but I think it deserves a frame and a wall… and perhaps a better view than my greasy, shrimp-mode goblinself working.

This piece was inspired by a dream I had, though the details are buried in some journal which I’ll have to dig up for the full write-up on my process creating this painting. Prints are in the works, I highly recommend my newsletter if that’s something you’re interested in.

'June Roses'(1898) by Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh (1864 – 1933).

Pencil and water-based colour on paper.

(Note: writing this response with Capitals™ bc its long and kind of hard to read otherwise, I’m trying to do that more with my longer posts)

Either an ecological event or a superorganism, depending on how you look at it.

To explain this. like. we do not ‘know’ what a lichen is. We know like, what they are, or at least we’re getting increasingly closer to finding out everything that makes up a lichen, but lichenologists have really struggled to define it as like, A Sole Thing. Botanists and mycologists of the past thought lichens were primarily fungi, because when you dried one out and weighed it, most of the dry weight was fungus; this is why today we still name lichens based on their fungal components, while it turns out that the give and take of all organisms in a lichen are pretty much equal.

It’s a symbiotic relationship, we’ve known that for a long time, but now we know, for instance, that some fungi can pair up with different species of algae to make different lichens. How can we reliably name something after it’s fungus if that fungus can pair up with different things to make multiple different ‘species’? And as of 2016 we know that lichens can have up to four different players: a fungus, an algae, a yeast, and (in some families) a second fungus, previously thought to be parasitic on the lichen itself. 

I will personally argue that lichens are an ecological event. To me, this theory gets down to lichen reproduction, which is….completely off the shits. 

Lichens can reproduce in a few different ways, the simplest ones being 1. a piece of lichen breaks off and lands in a fitting environment, creating a new lichen that’s a clone of the mother system, and/or 2. a lichen has special organs that release specially-made ‘mini lichens’ that have the main components packaged together into little ‘spores’ (these organs are called isidia and soridia, and look slightly different), creating a similar result to #1 with a clone of the mother system. 

Now, you may be wondering: ‘But lichens have sexual structures. can’t they have like, Lichen Sex™?’. Which. Like. This is where it gets wild, because it ties back to the ecological mystery of how lichens ‘make new lichens from scratch’ so to speak. 

The thing is, those sexual structures don’t have the components paired together. They only produce sexually-made spores of the fungus, and if these spores land in the right conditions, they won’t form a lichen, they’ll form a non-lichenized version of that fungus. So, conventionally, as we currently understand it, the way for them to form a new lichen would be for two compatible spores- one algae and one fungus, or like, one algae and one fungus or one yeast, we don’t know how those other components fit into the equation yet– to meet in the right conditions, under which case the pair recognizes each other and starts to spontaneously go down an entirely different developmental path to become a lichen. Keep in mind that lichen and algae spores are like…everywhere in the air and in the world around us, just the majority of them don’t find the proper growing conditions and die, so this does happen enough to make all the lichens we see on a day to day basis.

But. There are agonizing mysteries about this process. For example:

-We do not know how the algae and fungal spores, when they meet, know that they’re compatible in the first place. Like, on a cellular level. 

-We do know that after a certain point, the organisms involved are locked into their developmental path. They need to meet at an extremely young age (as spores) to become a lichen. If a mature fungus and a mature algae meet, nothing happens, even if they would have been compatible as spores.

-Science, to my knowledge, still has not yet been able to replicate the ‘lichens being made from scratch’ process in a lab. The spores will recognize each other and start developing on a microscopic level, and then they’ll just….stop developing and die, which is why we can only produce new lichens in a lab by growing sterilized fragments from old lichens. Whether or not we’ve just been like, missing all the ‘ingredients’ and you need a yeast or second fungus or something to finish the process, I have no idea.