“wow, sure is humid,” you say, looking around. everyone agrees. this is the 8th day in a row you have said this. it’s always humid. everyone knows it’s humid. there’s water everywhere. you’re drowning

a nervous hum rides over the school students, everyone murmuring. the voice of one comes up, “it’s going to get in the 20s to 30s tonight. school might be cancelled.” everyone’s hoping. it’s so cold. everyone’s cold. please help

it doesn’t snow.

“there’s a tropical storm watch,” somebody in your class says. nobody’s surprised. there’s always a storm watch. it’s raining. somebody laughs in the distance. nobody cares

when you awoke, you stepped outside, numb to the cold winds suddenly howling against your body. you bundle up, ready for the cold day and the cold rise of the sun. 9 hours later, you arrive outside in the heat of the afternoon. it’s 79 degrees. the sun beats down on you, laughing at your misery. the wind is non existent. the humidity sits in the air, stifling and wet. this happens every day, but nobody learns.

a student stands up, looks around. he’s committed, and confident. “obamacare,” he says, “is the leading problem of today’s society.” fuck, you hate that guy.

there are two different types of people in your school. half have thick southern accents and plans to go to college in state. they have few plans beyond that. they’re planning on going hunting this weekend. you ask the other half where they plan to go to college. “anywhere,” they say, “anywhere other than here, please, god. please let me leave, i want to leave. save me, god.” you agree.

when you were in middle school, you heard the sound of girls laughter echo around the classroom. you ask what they’re laughing about. they smile and gush, “me and all my friends went to the church youth party together yesterday.” you are scared

 There is water in the air. It clings to your skin and clothes. You are drowning, and unable to escape the all consuming flood.

 Your back yard is a jungle. Pre-historic creatures roam your lawn. You haven’t seen your youngest sibling in a while.

 The mark of a native is red welts. Chicken pox of doom. Demonic insects that travel in swarms, carrying away small animals and leaving chaos in their wake.

Every night you sit quietly on the floor, motionless. You don’t hear them approach, but you feel them crawl across your skin. If there is no pain, you’ve finally befriended them. Perhaps now you and the spiders can live in peace, together.

Your mouth is fire, your hands are fire. Your skin melts and falls into your plate of oceanic remains, cool relief amongst the flames. You dare not speak, you eat quietly, terrified to be branded a demon from the north.

There’s a tear in time and space below the Mason-Dixon Line. Flags of rebellion fly from suburban homes, flags of war, indicating an unwavering believe in outdated ideals. The state is trapped in a temporal loop, unable to progress. Facts are useless. Hope is pointless. Long live the confederacy.

I fear the reaper, the man who will set sweet fields aflame, torturing us all. I can’t breathe. Corpses litter the highways. Perhaps this year will be my last

- You slap a mosquito on your leg. You slap two mosquitoes on your other leg. There is a buzzing in your ear. You slap 4 dozen mosquitoes. There are too many mosquitoes, you feel faint from blood loss.

- Springtime is here. Its rained 15 days in a row. Roads are blocked, you cannot leave your house. Vines are appearing under your door. Steam is seeping in from the hot concrete outside. But how is the concrete still so hot? You question, its been raining so long.

- There is Jazz music playing outside. You’ve gone to investigate but can see no source of the sound. There are beads on the trees, there are beads on the sidewalks, there are beads on you! Where did the beads come from? No one knows.

- Every day you go to park your car, until one day there is a truck in your spot. The next week there are more trucks than cars in the parking lot. The week after there are no more cars. Wait. What exactly is a car. Have you ever even seen a car? You drive a Ford F150 with a duck sticker on the back.

- Your first year of college you get TOPS. The next year you don’t. The third year your college gets replaced by a walmart. You are a welder now.

You used to know how to get up the bayou, down the bayou, and even across the bayou. Since the drought, these are no longer valid directions.

The local man wants to “ax” you something. You realize he doesn’t have a question. He has an actual axe.

The dead keeps rising from the ground. They are still dead, but no longer in their graves. The town suggests mausoleums with locks; they can’t risk it.

The lady at the dinner asks if you want a coke. She actually gives you a coke. A swarm of cicada scream.

The smell of honeysuckles fill the whole parish, but you dare not taste them. Too many people have been enticed by their smell. They never returned.

You sit down to dinner. Your Paw-Paw tells you not to eat “the dead ones.” You realize you aren’t eating crawfish. It’s too tender.

It is your turn aunt’s turn to bring the king cake. She couldn’t find a plastic baby. She stills a live one from the nursery. She bakes him alive.

You reach out for the beads as the crowd presses around you. The dark man intentionally pushes you. The float doesn’t notice the slight thump.

•Hot sticky summer that make your skin feel like the fly paper you hang on your porch. You’re half convinced it’s buzzing the same way too

•the groan of the trees and the singing of the insects show that there is a storm coming. A dog barks in the distance as you listen for the crackle in the grass your grandmother told you to listen for.

•you laze about by the waters edge scaring your friends with stories about witches and voodoo queens that live near by who eat puppies and kittens and the occasional child. They laugh and ooh but it’s been a month since you last saw your cat’s kittens.

•the storm comes at night, you shut the windows tight and plug your ears to the howling of the wind and rain. Something is out there in the rain calling for you.

•after the weather you find an odd collection of things washed up on the banks of the water. Tin soldiers dressed like the loosing side, a bandaid tin with rusty screws and nails, a bone of something that one of the older kids claim is a finger. You keep them all.

•you visit grandma and she serves you stale cookies (the humidity this summer ruined everything). She says something but you barely notice over the screaming of the insects.

•on your way home you slip off and onto the hot payment landing just near a collection of small crosses. You realize you landed in a tiny animal graveyard. The bones of snakes and frogs and turtles as well as a rabbit or two lay just inches from your hands. You pick up your bike and cry the rest of the way home.

you spend five minutes trying to pass up a truck going thirty in a forty-five. ten minutes later you watch a truck coming up behind you going sixty in a forty. the truck won’t pass you. the grill is reflecting the sun right in your eyes. it’s the same truck. all the trucks are the same truck.

halfway through august you start to cringe. lsu merchandise triples in stores. all anyone wants to talk about is football. you open your mouth to have a conversation about something and only three letters will leave your lips. 

you see billboards going up for someone running for office. their last name has a ‘th’ in the middle and ends in a consonant. the consonant is pronounced like a vowel and the ‘th’ is a puff of air that smells like tony chachere’s. the politician has probably slept with three people half their age in the last month.

you start to assume no word is pronounced like it’s spelled. you develop a fake french accent to accommodate yourself. you go out of state and discover you can’t stop pronouncing ‘eaux’ as ‘oh’. no one can understand anything you’re saying.

your friends from other states find out you live in south louisiana. jokingly they ask if you ride an alligator to school. you open your mouth to reply no and three tiny alligators crawl off your tongue. you look down and your car is an alligator. the road has turned into a swamp. you have fifty mosquito bites on your stomach alone.

it rains every day for three weeks. you forget what the sun looks like or that the pavement was dry once. when it stops raining you begin to cry. the rain has seeped into you. you can’t escape the wet.

the meteorologist says it will be fifty degrees. you go outside in a sweatshirt and jeans that you sweat through in five minutes. you discover he meant it would be fifty degrees at seven a.m. but it’s already nine and the temperature has gone up to eighty-five. 

Crawfish shells rot on your picnic table out back. They’ve turned a light pink color and flies buzz around everywhere. When you look again, they’re gone. The buzzing and the stench remain. They will never leave.

Your dog has eaten a frog and foams at the mouth. “Another poisonous one.” your father remarks, washing out your dog’s mouth as your mother calls the pet clinic. This happens daily. You wonder if your dog is really still alive.

It is hot in church on Sunday, and you question why you went. You are not a religious person. You try to ask one of your friends later, but cannot. Everyone here goes to church. To stay home is blasphemy. To stay home from church is a death sentence.

You plant radishes in the spring. Rain washes them away. Rain always washes your radishes away. You always plant radishes in the spring. Everyone does.

“Don’t pick those magnolia flowers.” your neighbor warns as you walk your bike down the driveway. “They’re bad luck.” One lands on him as you look up at him. You don’t bother to look for him tomorrow and stay alert for more. No one wants to be chosen by the magnolias.

There are little villages that you pass through on your way to larger towns and cities. They’re surrounded by a mass of fields, or small patches of swamp and wooded areas. You never see any cars, and there are never children playing in the yards. There are dilapidated swing sets, and lawn chairs scattered around the property. The lawns are cut. The houses are well kept. You start to wonder if there are people living there at all. Or why they aren’t living there.

Around November the leaves are falling from the trees and littering the ground with a mass of yellow and brown tattered foliage. There is a cool breeze and the smell of old moist soil surrounds you. The sun sits low in the sky and you cannot hear anything besides the crunch of fallen leaves beneath your feet. So you have to constantly check your surroundings to make sure you aren’t being followed. Paranoia is swelling in your gut. Momma always said not to go into the woods by yourself. Let alone when it’s getting dark out. You shiver down to your feet, hair bristling in the back of your neck. You swear you saw a whisp of white lace over your left shoulder.

In the boat on the way back up the bayou you listen to your father and uncle speak lowly. It had been a sweltering summer day. There is a shrill screech that carries out into the night. The mild humid air makes your skin feel colder than it should. “That’s a screech owl”, Daddy says. Goosebumps feel like somethings crawling on you. There is breeze, but the water is too still. “Doesn’t sound like any screech owl I’ve ever heard”. They blow it off. But both men seem weary, and seem to clutch their guns a little tighter than they had before.

You see small service stations along old highways some nearly 40 miles from the nearest town. They’re small rickety buildings with a glowing OPEN sign in the window. There is never a public bathroom. They sell snocones and other seasonal treats. The cooler always has milk and water, they have animal heads mounted on the wall. The owner is always the cashier. You stop in once, and when you are headed back that way they aren’t to be found. It’s like the small shack was never there.

Did this when I should have been working. All those American Gothic posts seem to require a deep lifelong knowledge of the place, but I’ve moved around my whole life. So here’s some little snippets of local/outsider gothic from places I’ve lived.

Okalhoma - You and your friends go swimming at the local lake. You dig up plastic containers, glass bottles, and chunks of asphalt from the bottom with your toes. Your friend tells you the lake is artificial, created when a new damn flooded a small town. You imagine all the buildings still down there. You imagine the streets whose asphalt you are now prying up with your toes and skipping across the surface of the lake. You imagine the animals, the homeless or stubborn people, who did not get out before the floods came. You wonder if their bones might not still be there, under the chunks of broken asphalt. Your friend gets bacterial vaginosis and you don’t go back to that lake.

Central Florida - Everything is brown. It is always either winter and everything is dead, or summer and everything is dead. The only thing that grows is the kudzu, slowly consuming, reclaiming, any building not ritually divested of its clinging vines. And the watermelon in their fields, carefully watered and tended and nurtured, for on them rests the livelihood of the community. Everyone loves and praises the watermelon, competes to grow the largest. The regular commercial watermelon are the size of two year old children. The competition watermelon are more than three hundred pounds. Their rinds shine brilliant emerald with the affection showered upon them. Except this year there’s a trucking strike. Everyone talks about it but no one seems to no the details. Why are the truckers striking, why haven’t their demands been met? No one knows where the truckers have gone, but the consequences are clear. The watermelons are ripe, but there’s no one to carry them out of the little towns and away to the places where they can be sold. Those precious pampered watermelons rot in their fields, unharvested. The smell is intense and too sweet, more like rotting meat than fruit. The people in town watch the watermelon die and contemplate how hungry they will be by the time winter rolls around again.

Orlando area Florida - The seasons are different here. There are only two. Hurricane season and drought season and of the two drought season is worse, when the heavy rain of hurricane season is boiled off the earth into heavy, cloying humidity that seems to drown you in the air. Two weeks after the hurricane record heat descends and your neighborhood still hasn’t had power restored. A tree fell on your neighbor’s house and killed their six year old, who you saw playing in the street in her nice church clothes just a few weeks ago. Though the food in your fridge is spoiled and rottingand your bathtub is full of drinking water and you feel like you are boiling to death in your own skin and your family is sleeping on the floor in the living room to share the negligible chill of a cooler full of ice- the congregation still gathers in the tiny one room Pentacostal church next door to wake you up with singing on Sunday. It finally rains, and your mother tells you to drag rubbermade tubs into the yard to collect the rainwater. She cries and screams when, after, she realizes you put the tubs under the eaves to catch the water running off the roof and fill the tub faster. She says this makes the water dirty and undrinkable. You don’t understand why, but you dump the water out anyway and spend the last of your money on a pallate of sixteen water bottles that costs nearly sixty dollars. The heat only grows. The neighborhood cats start disappearing. You suspect their succumbing to the heat, until you find one in the parking lot of the episcopalian church down the road, its head beaten in with a palm branch. The heat breaks. Power is restored. Life goes back to normal. Until next hurricane season.

- “so, are you going to the parades this weekend?” No, please. The chaos. The noise. The drunk people. The last thing you want to go to is a mardi gras parade.

- you hear on the news that the temprature may be below freezing tomorrow. They may cancell school. You pray that it will be, because school is awful.

- there are two kinda of people in your school. The kids who want to go to LSU or Tulane, the ones who don’t want to leave the city. The other ones, like you, would rather be anywhwrw but here.

- on good friday your parents had a crawfish boil. They have one every year. Your family gossips around the plastic trays, peeling the red shells off of the white meat. You suck the head of the crawfish in order to get all of the flavored juice out. Your father laughs. “Thats a real cajun kid right there,” he says.

- humid. Its so, so humid. The wind is your best friend, but it never comes. Any day where you go outside and its breezy is a blessing, especially in the summertime.

- you dont want to go to mass on sunday, but everyone goes to mass on sunday. You were never as connected to your faith as your parents. You once tried to wear jeans to mass and your father yelled at you. To not go is to betray your family. You get changed into your sunday best and go, despite the fact you hate it.

- cicadas scream at night as you try to sleep. You just want to sleep. The bugs continue to scream.

- while at a seafood restaurant, the waitress asks if you want a coke. You say yes. She actually gives you a coke instead of asking what kind. You feel blessed.

- you spend the weekend with your Maw-Maw. You always found her language a bit strange. She called the sink a “zink”, she “makes groceries,” and when you talk to your friends online they find it strange too. Still, sometimes you find yourself saying you’re “going by” a friend’s house instead of going to their house.

Louisiana is such a liminal space. It feels like it’s aging faster than the rest of the country while perpetually stuck in the previous decade. While you’re there you feel like time passes more quickly because everything and I mean everything is deteriorating and in just awful condition but you also feel like you’re stuck in the past because everyone is poor and the politics are so corrupt nothing gets done and everyone still has a dated mentality and looks 10 years older than they are. The radio stations are always playing music that was popular 5-10 years ago. Maybe it’s the smoking. Maybe it’s the infections everyone gets from bad teeth. Maybe it’s the prison time. None of the store logos are updated. You can still find little mom and pop shops that license the names of stores that ceased to exist years ago. You can always tell when you’re driving in Louisiana. The roads are a bumpy patchwork of different surfaces riddled with potholes that have been filled by a guy shoveling asphalt into a hole in the wee hours of the morning and potholes that keep reappearing in the same spots. Remains of depression era farms crumble by the side of the road because no one has the money to bulldoze or restore them. The homes that aren’t falling down are either trailers with a yard or brick ranch styles whose inhabitants inherited it from their parents or grandparents who built them when they themselves were young.

Bonus: Louisiana Gothic

Everyone here harkens back to a past you’re not sure really happened. You don’t remember things being that way, but maybe they were different here.

The only malls in the state are dead malls and no matter where in the state you stay, the closest one is always an hour away. You can drive for what seems like all day but when you get there only an hour has passed.

Eventually, you’ll reach a metal building that contains a lingerie outlet and a Lee jeans store. You didn’t think there was a store for Lee jeans but here one is. You’re not sure if this is what the locals were referring to but you could see it from the highway and it was on the right side for you to just exit and immediately be there.

When you get in, you don’t see any other shoppers or even any employees. You are sure this building is really here. But the next time you look for it, you won’t be able to find it.

The woods around you also have an ethereal, ephemeral quality. It feels like some sort of magical entity is lurking in the shadows, waiting for you to stop and wander into their domain out of curiosity. You often see pieces of tires by the road. Is that all that remains of their victims? You don’t want to know.

I'm like. Forgetful to the degree that I cannot keep a thought in my head for more than 20 minutes unless I'm actively stressing over it. (I blame my frankly. Poor mental health)

So if I just write the shit down and go about my day I have no issues with detachment.

I only bring this up bc as someone who has fucking AWFUL mental health it's hard for me to even hold a job currently, much less have these nice vibrations and all this regular manifestation stuff. And focus, oh god it's so hard to focus and visualize head empty only know eat hot chip my guys. I figure it might help others who tend to hyperfocus on their desires but dont actually try to work towards them bc it's too stressful/too few spoons/ ect.

Just listen to music that makes you happy and wiggly (not nessicarily super high euphoric vibrations that's too unrealistic to expect everyone to acheive this imo), write your intentions down

In present tense i.e. "I have/am _____"

In the confidence that you already HAVE it. (I read something about the law of assumption rather than loa, meaning in endless universes there is one where you DO have these desires already, you're simply making choices that lead you to gain them) so like. You do already have it. You DO deserve it. And it HAS already happened, in one universe or another. Why not tell the universe that you deserve it in this reality too.

Avoid negative keywords i.e. "I do not suffer" "I do not have" "i repel" "i lose" "i want" "i try" "i will" "i hope" ect.

Instead use helpful words like "I release toxic people from my life easily" "I am at a healthy weight" "I attract people who have my best interest at heart and love me" ect.

Be specific but not intricate, leave it open ended for the universe to work with better, avoid deadlines. "Jerry Brown takes me on a date at the museum of art on Saturday." Vs "I have fun, happy dates at the museum of art with someone who has my best interests at heart and is genuinely caring and romantically attracted to me."

But yuh. Just get wiggly, make the best out of your wording, trust that in some way, somehow, you already have it and leave them within a realistic parameter. Write that shit down. Close your notebook or what have you, and move on with your day, just. Fucking forget you even wrote it down (this is the exact reason I write it in a physical notebook and place it somewhere I dont rlly pay attention to it like with my college books unless it's to write in it.) Dont open it again. Dont re read them. Dont look at it. Your manisfestations are out there. It's already working the second you close the book/app. You dont open the oven every 5 seconds to check on the cake yknow?

Please dear gods. Drink water. Water is so important. It helps with headaches and shit and just generally improves your health.

I like to write my manifestations before I start my day, bc I get distracted easily throughout the day and I avoid thinking abt it rather than at night where I cant sleep and stress the most bc I'm stuck in my head.

And lastly, put effort into working on it.

You want to lose weight, start working out. No, I dont mean suddenly start lifting weights and completely change your diet. I mean DRINK YOUR FUCKING WATER (yes, even you) and take a walk. Not a jog. not a run. A walk. Work your way up as gradually as you can manage. Sure, make the best choices in diet when you can, but sometimes you're not in charge of what your family buys/can afford, but if you have to choose between ramen and cereal choose the option that suits your goals better (are you more worried about cutting out sodium, or sugar).