🧙‍♂️ TAP TAP TAP… 

Is this loud glowing box thing working?

A-HA! I see the little blinky light blinking. That means it’s working, yes? No? Too late—I’ve already started.

Welcome to Zosimos Says So!

A blog. A brain spill. A magical cry for help. An overly long scroll of things I find important even if no one else does.

I am—brace yourself—

Zosimos the Eccentrically Enchanted, Unofficial Alchemist of the Wizard Coven, Twice-Banned Mushroom Merchant, and Grand Commander of the Disappearing Sock Society.

You’re welcome.

🐸 Who the frog am I?

Some folks call me a menace.

Others call me completely unqualified.

Still others just shriek “NOT AGAIN!” and dive into hedges.

That’s fine. I’m here anyway.

And now I have:

A keyboard.

A wand.

And a frog.

OH, FROGGY FROGS!

They are both vile and cutesy-cute at the same time!

They make delicious morsels—for breakfast, lunch, second breakfast, tea time, and funerals.

They are also slippery little demon meatballs, and when I try to catch one as it hops away, well…

DAMNED.

STUPID.

FROGS.

Don’t ask.

🧠 What is this blog? What will I do with it? Will there be snacks?

Great questions! Shut up and I’ll answer:

Behind-the-scenes mayhem from Pazzaria Productions

Spark the Flying Frog sightings (and recipes, maybe)

Insight into our books: The Spellbook, The Legend of the Lost Rose, Elyndor and whatever else the elves haven’t stolen yet

Magical merchandise highlights! (Some of it even legal!)

Secret future project leaks that I probably wasn’t supposed to post but OOPS

Enchanted food, wizard fashion, why my left shoe talks at night, and…

Wild theories about whether Spark is a savior… or a snack

✨ Why should you read this?

Because:

I once turned a tax form into a goose (accidentally).

I’ve got insider knowledge on Pazzaria’s magical universe (or at least strong opinions).

I might drop mystery spell codes or forbidden coupons.

You love chaos. And frogs. And the chaos of frogs.

🧪 Blog Subtitle Suggestions I Rejected:

“Definitely Not Cursed”

“Chronicles of a Wand-Wielding Moron”

“Oops! All Magic!”

“I Shouldn’t Have Eaten That Glowstick”

📜 Closing Nonsense

So stay tuned, my twitchy little toadspoons!

I’ll be posting spells, secrets, and strangely accurate predictions (like: “Tomorrow, someone will sneeze.” Told you.)

This blog is now cursed blessed with my presence.

Until next time—

I remain (somehow),

Zosimos the Eccentrically Enchanted

The wand is fine. I’m the problem. 🧙‍♂️🐸💥

Sometimes I feel ugly and ashamed. Theres a channel that I am finding is my only source for relief; Painting and making music is in there, I suppose Its creating something that is my own. I’m hoping this can be one as well.

Right now I work a full time job- dwindled down to about 20 hours a week because I honestly dont give a fuck about my job. I have great work ethic while on the job but! I have been known to call out wayy too much without a good excuse. Lets just say I have a lot of emergencies hahaha and sometimes I choose to drink rather than go to my job- Theres definitely a problem there- Im bored with my life and would rather be sedated than go to my fucking job- thats seriously not even that bad- i just dont want to work for any body else but myself and its become fairly apparent since I got a job for the first time. I find myself loyal to myself over the companies I work for. I find myself wanting to work on myself more than I care about improving someone elses bullshit. I find myself painting and creating and finding that it makes me happier than I’ve ever imagined I could be. Its therapeutic and I feel like I find my soul and compassion- my forgiveness and success. I feel successful when I do these things because I’ve just created something I think is Interesting. It was from me for me and I get to share it

Anyway-.

I work as hard as I can unless I feel like complete shit and hate myself that day. Ive realized I feel like shit pretty often while I work. Im constantly thinking about the things that I can do to move myself forward into this world. ( i. e. my business ZEPHYRDESIGNS [#ZPHRDZSN]) p.s. find me on etsy and fb or someshit.

I’m a generally outgoing, confident, semi-insecure human being who of course has their own issues but ultimately people like. I’m gregarious and I have a dominant personality I’ve definitely noticed that being a dominant woman is intimidating to a wide range of people especially straight cis men and occasionally straight cis women. I’m pretty attractive- straight and bisexual women usually love me. Men -obviously- tend to like me. I’m sure being a 85.5% lesbian helps. And gay women come in last there on the attraction scale, which is fine with me because I generally don’t like to date lesbians because im not ready or just dont like to go all fast and shit. 

Like - Please- I would SERIOUSLY like to get to know who you are before I jump into all that nonsense of investing myself and coming to find out that I really don’t like you when the honeymoon is over. *sharply inhales* I’m not saying that all lesbians are on my no list- in fact I’ve met some super cool ones that I’ve fallen in love with and one that I fell deeply in love with. Didn’t work out I’m single AF but also picky af so just note that my feelings for emotional distance and my capability to be neutral are capable as fuck. That’s another thing, I get falling in love, I’ve been there many times. I can fall in love with my friends and still not want to be in a relationship with them. I can choose to fall in love if I feel like the person that is falling in love with me will make me a better person and vice y versa. I really care where I am going and want to push toward the better version of myself. A partner or partners can be a tool. Although, I know it is my job ultimately to take care of myself and believe in myself-  A partner that is super positively compatible can allow anyone to become a stronger more positive and healthy person.

This is my first blog on this tumblr. I have a few followers right now and I’m hoping to help you guys find some kind of solidarity or commonality. I generally write how I speak and this blog is going to be pretty honest so if I invite you in here and I know you personally I guess I’m fucked or you’re the Homie hahaha

p.s I feel better. this might work.

p.p.s feel free to ask any questions. maybe ill grow to love you 

Can someone please tell me WHY THIS IS ON THE INTERNET? And then can someone please stop me from laughing so hard I’m crying? 

I’ve been out of NYC for about 3-4 months now. 

It’s been an insane two years. I feel like I’ve just woken from a coma, but in which I was awake and functioning but operating like one of those cockroaches that’s been taken over by a zombie wasp, maneuvering through the world but without free will. You know that feeling? “Automaton mode”? That was me for like the last several years– just sort of going through the motions, staring at the ceiling, waiting for it to be over, wondering where the remote is, if the Handmaid’s Tail is on yet. 

It’s taken me months of questioning myself, my identity, my dreams, my life, and doing the ‘Okay, so I’m 33 now - I have, like, how many good years before I am too decrepit to fly?” questioning, which I guess is premature, unless like me, you’re convinced there’s a terminal illness brewing inside you at all times just waiting to emerge. (Thank you @WebMD.)

So as I sit here with a blanket on my lap on this reflective Sunday, staring at the broken tortilla chips littering the carpet that missed my mouth last night and empty glass of wine on the coffee table, I thinking about “what’s different now?” And I realized that the longer you live in New York, it changes. It morphs. Sometimes for the better, and in my case, sometimes not. 

When you’re in New York in your twenties, the passage of time doesn’t exist as a concept: you’re too focused on work, Tinder, trying to not throw up in the cab on the way home, doing ‘brunch’ as a novelty thing with sunglasses on the whole time and bitching about how slow people walk on sidewalks. It’s this hubris ‘freedom of youth’, a 6-year alcohol-slide of fun after college that spits you out at 30 when you wake up with your first 3-day hangover you didn’t know was possible and the realization that three of your friends moved away for jobs, pregnancy, and ‘other pursuits’.

Except at 30 in New York, you’re like, “What other pursuits?” Other pursuits don’t exist in the lexicon of a die-hard New Yorker, so you just think everyone else is a cop-out for leaving, like those people who go home at 11:30 PM at a really good party, and you keep going because on the island of Manhattan, everyone is dancing and there’s no bar time. 

Except then, like me, you wake up a few years later and you realize that you’re still at the party but in a stupor in the corner, and the girl you used to hook up with 10 years ago is now a lesbian and 40% of the party has departed. Once you climb in mid- to late- thirties in New York and look around, 90% of your friends are still single, some are starting to go insane, and you find $160,000 in New York gets you a 650-sq foot one bedroom, you’re sort of like, “Wait, where’s my brownstone and executive husband who is going to surprise me with a ticket to the opera?” And in my case, I sort of realized, I was the one deluding myself. As you get older in New York, the experience centers more around a good bagel on a Saturday morning, runs along the river, more adult-like meetings that don’t end in someone doing coke in a bathroom stall. Seeing your friends’ baby and then calling your friends to talk shit about her.  For me, it included a constant state of exhaustion due to always feeling like I had to be productive at every waking second of my life, low-buzzing anger against tourists and crowds in any context whatsoever, and an undying fear of cockroaches. I lived a self-righteously independent lifestyle that required the existence of no one else, and I saw that going nowhere good. It was a moment when I realized, “Does this just continue until I die?” 

Retail changed. Fashion changed. I started to like dogs again. My sister had a baby. I was tired of flying all over the country and sleeping on hotel pillows that smelled like someone else’s hair. I stopped going out after work 5x a week. And restaurants seemed all overpriced with mediocre food. And the rest of the country was getting all the same places. I was realizing more and more that what made NYC special in my twenties just didn’t have the same sparkle.

My friends were mostly gone. My life had become a smaller vortex in a way I didn’t expect: marked by dinners the same people, the same restaurants, and I started to go to places I used to frequent that became younger versions of themselves for the ‘new class’ of young Manhattanites. And yet I still had only a partial set of dishes, no oven in my apartment, and when it would rain, the water would drip through my bathroom ceiling onto my toilet. I started to run out of bars if I saw I was out past 2 PM, and living in 300 square feet was just starting to feel more like a cage but with pre-war accents. And those nights of just going to Broadway shows on my own that I imagined? I did it once and I felt like that 85-year old gay man who loves musicals so much he goes to ‘show tunes’ night at the bar on Mondays to sing Bernadette Peters and people are like, “Clem has been coming here since 2006.”  So, no. That ended.

The construct of New York itself, as an intimidating, incomprehensible frontier, had withered; it wasn’t a playground for fun like it used to be, but rather now a place of subsisting where I now had to transition from “NYC” to “adulthood”, to real life, in a way I never thought possible, which grew in volume by the day until I couldn’t drown it out anymore. The days of taking subway rides to challenging jobs with fun dinner plans and a possible reckless night ahead had been laid to rest. Now, I was in the game of back waxing, face masks, and 11 AM body attack classes on Sundays, wondering if I should finally try to make my relationship work.. A word not in my lexicon in my 20s.

I had come to a moment in my life where I had to question: do I cling to this ideal of what I imagine New York is forever, or is there something behind the curtain of life I am missing in the process of being addicted to this pursuit?

Sometimes what we want is not what we need, and very often those things diametrically oppose one another. I wanted: fashion, money, status, clout, a big apartment, exotic travel.  I need: someone home with me, possibly a dog, good food, music, writing, adventure, family. 

Weird how simple it is, no?

Manhattan, to me in my twenties, was an eschewing of life and its convention, an escape from the imposition of social standards, freedom. And it was. But then you realize in your thirties: we are all actually just human. And the vulnerability of humanity rises above any place we choose to live. The need for love and socialization, to desire to co-habitate and be with friends and family (and for some to pro-create) will rise about the context of any city and its wonderful, sophisticated distractions. 

New York is a state of mind.

It hasn’t been easy. In four months I’ve almost moved back twice, like some Stockholm syndrome, this magnet of promise of a life that once was, of relevance and excitement, which is now a proverbial urn filled with the ashes of fabulous memories we will retell over drinks, which periodically pop up on my facebook feed as embarrassing face-palm reminders of my behavior.

I’ve been forced to look at life in a bigger way, beyond ‘Manhattan’,  and in hopes that I haven’t broken our relationship for good. 

And so it is after 10 years of fashion, two moves, that I am trying to now rediscover life in all of its new meaning. It’s weird and hard and yet kind of fun and I’m doing my best to learn the ropes. I hope I hit my stride soon.

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