Children. Retirement. Savings. Responsibility. Things of interest in the pursuit of fulfilling the needs of not just our happiness, but with that, those of the external other that is your partner. To live for not just your interest but in the joys of being with that someone as well or else you become a lost soul in the sea of the strayed. Which I don’t fully believe yet is something proselytized to no end.
I love the city of New Orleans because it is a city of Life and Death. A place alive with its lively jazz music – an improvised style historically crafted to embrace the feeling of the moment – and sweeping all-spiritual juju, summoned by imbibing in the spirits. The absinthe bottles to ever clear the clairvoyance of our perception that New Orleans has always felt like a place to ramble on absolutely about absolute nothings, which is not unlike what I'm doing right here.
In the short time that I’ve spent in this city, besides getting heinously drunk – or Cahssay’d as the locals have called it – I have now tried all the local cuisine, done the French Quarter tours, and visited many museums, atop checking out a few local hauntings and cursed places. I visited these places out of morbid curiosity and personal interest, coming from a former Goth kid gone Emo turned Scenester, now just shy of middle age for any of these hipstery labels to feel relevant now.
Tomb of still-living actor Nicholas Cage in New Orleans' oldest cemetery.
Adventuring the city included visits to the most popular attractions of the spiritual including a cursed ghost mansion of atrocities, a convent hosting a series of vampires, and the grave of the Voodoo Queen. On our first day, we found a three-hundred-year-old European mirror at an antique store, whose frame was finished about the edges with a pair of dancing Phoenixes. Creatures who in ancient Egypt, depicted rebirth within the flames. It was the death of who we were as people from before. The beginning of something new. And the embrace of the people we were going to be, which is what I was happy about with the newly married couple.
This was sort of the feeling I’ve been having this entire trip with me leaving The Workprint, my little entertainment journalism outlet I helped shape after 6 years, and of course, seeing the end of this Blog right here. I do feel like many chapters of my life are closing at the moment but I also do think this is making room for brand new stories.
See, I’m at a point in life where I feel connected to something beyond my control. I have a greater sense of purpose now, which as mentioned in my previous posts after finishing my first comic book, makes me sharper in pursuit of what I want to value within my life. This is good, as I’ve been feeling like I have been needing a change for quite some time. At the moment, I have a new Comic Book I am working on called ‘Dead on The Inside’. It is a different take on the zombie genre equal parts love letter as it is, satire. Atop of this, I am also ghostwriting a book about recruiting, pitching a few stories, and working on a screenplay pilot for a company hoping to get picked up by Netflix. So yes, this year, will be my busiest, and I’m sad I cannot share it here. Though I can promise things are happening for me.
I can’t think of a better place for this new phase to begin than down in New Orleans. A place built upon the abandoned graves of the dead, spawning life anew in the Bayou. When I visited the Tomb in Cemetery #1 of Marie Laveau, a woman of legend whose life inspired not just Voodoo but the city itself and a whole sea of art and music, I couldn’t help but feel like I was meant to make a wish on her spirit.
The sayings tell stories of her being almost like a D'jinn of sorts, etch XXX on the tomb and ask a deal with her soul and the spirits of the Earth for any wish in return. Which I wondered, if it would be worth it, to ask for strength to make something great that’ll stand the test of time.
I realized of course, that despite liking to write about the paranoia of the paranormal – I’m actually, not all that into the practice. Just the ideas behind beliefs. Which, I promise, if you follow me on this next leg of the adventure, is where the magic will be made. Those things will happen soon in my life as a storyteller.
And the world will feel ineffably changed.
I’ll leave you with this. In the 13th card in the tarot deck, lies the death card. It is one that I often draw by chance quite often in these ‘psychic’ readings. 13 is also, by coincidence, my lucky number. If you know me personally, I probably have also shared with you that wherever I go, death often seems to follow. So as a result I'm a bit obsessed with death and the beyond. Yet, as dictated in both Boolean logic equations which form the basis of modern computing, and even, the philosophy of Daoism: every iteration of something hosts a concept of NOT that thing in itself. So with every death comes rebirth. The start of life anew. Or as that drunken bar tune goes…
“Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.”
So here’s to the end of ATBWriters and the beginnings of something else entirely.
Thank you to Mary Fan for letting me be a part of the club.
This one is for all of you. That we may start the new year with humble beginnings that shake the foundations of our very world -- for the better.
Cheers.
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