damn, it's good to be a skald.

In a completely ill-considered/life-embracing Halloween night foray to two parties, a hostess-with-the-mostest had an outdoor open mic and personally encouraged me to read some of my poetry. I told her I'd read only one 'cause poetry's always a hard sell, and I had just one poem that was this year's blue moon occasion appropriate:

[it's actually written to be performed & read aloud, so imagine me tuning bunny ears with my hands, speeding up my reading as the car comes, hands giving a loud single clap to indicate the roadkill, the change in tenor as I say "but they fuck alot", and my existential downshift as I gesture upward to the moon to finish.] 

Not that the open mic was a competition (though on some level it always is [and there was a really super terrific interpretive lip sync sign language number]), but after reading I was the only one the crowd asked for an encore from after the applause, which I gave them.

It felt good to be loved for my words, to own a room, to give a shared experience and get that energy back in adoration for that gift in real time. Thanks Shanna for goading & giving me that opportunity.

Damn, it's good to be a skald. 

#   #   #

While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him.

so, about your dating profile ... .

Hey there, prospective person. I'm honestly glad you're interested enough to decide to make an effort to homework me and it took you here.

So if you're hoping for me to mutually swipe you right/superstar you/heart/smile/wink/message back or any of the other possible digital approvements, I'm going to address the following all-too-common facets found on most dating profiles:

All those emoticons & icons. Maybe emoji are the modern shorthand hieroglyphics of the texty new millennium, but fuck that girl, use your words. Words are sexy like a silk smooth sonnet or fun as freeverse. Seduce us with your personal expression.

Filtered photos are like wearing a stocking mask to rob a convenience store for its fountain drinks of sugar love. Nobody wants to get robbed this way. If honesty is your foundation, then mushy/blurry high-impact filters are no way to start a relationship.

Sooooo much makeup. If it all goes well, you're going to be seen in the morning. If the moment of judgment comes after the business, then odds are you're not going to get a repeat customer. Have confidence & security enough to post something with you not wearing a whole five pounds of slap on your face. Less is more.

That duck face. Cut it out. This relic of late aughties emo/scene selfies somehow still endures, and it is not cute, nor winning, nor transmissive of how anyone really looks. The duck face isn't used IRL outside of this one single dated cyberconvention to express reactions in any context, so unless you're actually an emo/scene gal, just stop, delete, and please exit your bathroom or car to go take a for-real picture.

Those GIF-y Instafilters. On Instagram you've got an endless roll to selfie-indulge in, but on your dating profile, you don't. There's this limited and bullet focus chance you've got to attract a person (which is why you're there, yes?), so choosing to overlay yourself as an animated dog, or with Harry Potter spex, or Wayfarers you can't afford, or rainbows passing straight through your ears, all tries to indicate fun but ultimately works against you. Anyone can use those, it's hardly original. Either compose/find a photo that shows you're for-true fun, or hey, even better, write about how exactly you are fun-fun which will be far more attractive than detractive.

Your theme of Lil Mosey's Blueberry Faygo. This begs the question if Spotify selects this track as a default, or if there's some SEO-boosted digital dating advice article that states most people swipe right to that, but it's baffling that like 1 out of 5 people have this as their profile's anthem. It's not a good song. And my observation that it's somehow a pop cultural lowest-common-denominator shows anyone's lack of individual merit in selecting it. Same for anything by The Weeknd, or most of Post Malones' tracks (excepting that Spiderverse soundtrack one, but still that's not really reaching for something distinctive). There's an endless jukebox of choices, go find the one song that is you and not everyone else.

Your "I'm an open book" isn't an open book, and you probably couldn't write much less be a book if you tried, which you haven't. I've written a book and that's no task for anyone who can't even adequately form three paragraphs about themselves. And if there's not enough inside of you to compile those few paragraphs then it's not a relationship you need, it's self-improvement.

If you want a partner in crime, I want plans for a scheme that will set us up for life. Show me your flawless criminal genius, and I will drive the getaway car. Let our togetherness raid the world like Vikings and beat this system for good.

The body shot. Where in your carousel of photos is it? While I'm sooooo definitely a face person, that fine face is attached to a whole being, a complete package, and you can't make a fair physical chemistry judgment about anyone without that full body picture. If it's because you have a weight problem, then maybe you should ease off on the weekly pizza. Not saying curvy girls can't look good, but you have to give us a look to begin with.

Remember that hiking was used to get place to place, not as a fun activity. While connecting with the majesty of nature's a redemptive & renewing thing, it tends to happen on a meditatively personal & individual level inside oneself. If I'm going to get sweaty with you, there are far better options.

And for people who all say they love to travel so much, somehow I bet that's more wishful thinking than your actual life recreation. None of that's cheap, believe me, I know. Pick your destinations wisely because odds are you'll never be able to afford nor see it all. And destinations never stand still, like a postcard, they change while you're away, so factor that into your unrealistic pie-in-the-sky travel budget.

"Netflix & Chill" is lame. I would probably sit on the Chesterfield with you to watch something, but we'd have to make out a little somewhere in there. But hey, fucking like to read. Books are sexy, they make you sexy. With each page you turn, you earn. It's a mentally proactive neural activity. New ideas, new ways of thinking, the gift of experiences/histories/possible futures -- it's the most rewarding of mediums, and if you like that, then you're already brilliant.

What I really, really, really find dismaying about the broad cyberavenues of online dating is that there's so much no, which I suppose is a large part of the reason behind this piece. It's like this whole universe of no you never knew existed. You'd think that in increasing the dating pool to a potentially global amount of people than you'd normally never run across in local meatspace would then give you tons more worthy candidates to choose from, but this is so not the case that I've encountered. Even moreso, I wish there were even finer granulations of criteria to scythe down this huge haystack of mega-chaff as it seems the few delimiters that influence the algorithms still sling all this time-consuming non-harvest of no at you.

This unforeseen dearth should just reinforce my self-worth, letting me know that my selectivity & relationship experience only confirms that I'm emotionally intelligent enough to know what I want. But it also lets me know how incredibly lucky I've been so far to date way, way, way more than my fair share of wicked smart, exceptionally beautiful, and joyously compatible women, given how very, very few are actually out there, at least ones that can convey that in the above context of a dating app/site. I sincerely hope dear reader that you are one of these brilliant exceptions, and that you

find me here.

[hardly the best Lichtenstein-styled homage, but you're artistically literate enough to see that, right? Right.]

#   #   #

While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him.

my not-Purge.

The dark beauty of The Purge franchise is its personal questioning that if you were annually granted 12 hours with which to commit any crime with impunity, wouldn't you seize that opportunity? The world is replete with imbalance & unfairness, with injustice & shortcomings. There's a not-so-fine line that separates murderers from vigilantes, thieves from robin hoods, the traitor from the patriot. These constructs are overlays that shift with the tides of history and sociological contexts. You put on the hat, you believe in the ideas of that costume, you arm yourself, and if you're victorious, then those are the terms that tend to endure. You have essentially purged your obstacles, and someone once said that for your dreams to become ascendant, one has to destroy the dreams of others for its fuel. So beautifully grim, so mercilessly direct, but is that violent fulfillment true?

So I went to The Breaking Point to Purge. My father died a couple years ago, around the same time my separation & subsequent divorce occurred. And late last year a breakup unexpectedly happened to me. There's a compounding of anger from these three things inside myself that I've never experienced before, in a way that is so not who I am, yet I can't argue with the very real pain level of loss & vulnerability I feel from those experiences. And the catch is if I let that anger go, then the sadness of it wins, so anger seems to be the default coping mechanism, but that's obviously a holding pattern and not a solution. My left-brain thinking's that if I could fully unleash my anger and go somewhere to destroy things with impunity, that I could purge myself of those feelings, level out and become myself again. Or even transcend the societal limitations of civilized behaviour, become a berserker, and gain a level of superhumanity, maybe. I'd tried acupuncture over the past month, but instead of blissing out like everyone else in the room, I'd mostly felt varying levels of emotional/energetic discomfort, even being inflicted with a serious hangover headache after a session, and I felt done with it. Instead of my body passively being subjected to sharp objects, I'd decided it was time for the objects to be subjected to all the brute force my body could actively generate.

The fraternal co-owners of the local rage room were so stoked I showed up with my loadable workout hammer that they took this picture of me ready to clobber things for their social media:

Yeah, total Purge coveralls, paintball mask, and construction site gloves, all practical safety appurtenances, plus you have to sign a waiver just in case you get hurt. I'd paid $10 extra for 20 glass bottles. They gave me like 50, so there would be glass, oh yes, much glass.

Pairing my phone's Viking Metal playlist with the room's bluetooth speaker, the brother gave me a quick rundown of the implements on the table just inside the door that were available: varying lengths of pipe, a small sledge, a claw hammer. Short of hitting the walls, ceiling, or camera (yes, they keep an eye on you, and if anyone's in the lobby, your rage room antics are on an external monitor above the door), everything else was fair game. The room's major features were the corpse of a water heater, a dinged but not defeated safe, the skeleton of a smashed large screen projection TV, a martial arts practice torso, a hairdressing mannequin head, an old large server case, and a huge tire, all either at the slopes of or somewhere on three small hills of destroyed rubbish, like a mini-apocalyptic landscape. 

Once the door shut, for the next fifteen minutes I could just beat anything in sight to oblivion. Amon Amarth's Versus The World ramped up and I fucking went to town, whirlwinding my hammer into the tire as hard as I could, beating the water heater like a dying elephant that dared to charge me, surgically striking hinges & welds on the iron safe to challenge its surfaces, crushing the side of a PC case into a dish-like object, becoming the wrecking ball to the remaining skeleton of the TV, hitting the makeup head right in its stupid face across the room into its upper corners like I'd just decapitated a battlefield opponent. 

Cresting the wreckage heaps, I turned and quested for more things to hit. The slopes of these proved somewhat unstable, my feet sometimes sinking into layers of jagged plastics and some sharp-edged ruined objects, which made me realize if I did this again boots would be more sensible protective option, so I had to mind my balance and ankles as I sought out new targets in the room.

And it was the bottles that were the most satisfying. I made them explode in mid-air with deadly accuracy, set them on top of the tire to tee-ball it into glittering snowflakes, threw the fragile containers at the walls and ground to comet tail into traceries of bright fireworks, smashed their shining curves with my hammer neck down into the floor until they shone no more. This was recycling at its finest, the noise of shattering a wonderful symphony of finality, the high bell glissando of instrumental vessels which would never hold anything again, their completeness irreversibly converted into an unexpectedly delightful schadenfreude.

There were only two moments, maybe less than ten actual seconds of that whole quarter-hour where I connected with my feelings, screaming & weeping & raging with anger, but the focus of the rest of the session turned out to be purely physical, instead my mind calculating the hows & methods of strikes & blows to greatest efficiency & degrees of effect, maximizing the experience to do as much evidenced damage as I could to the microcosm around me. It was more like a good workout than anything, and seemed more like I'd been at it for 45 minutes as opposed to just fifteen. I did leave with the endorphins from the exercise of it, the praise of the brother owners, and the achievement of getting to sign the wall as a participant in the shared commercial ritual of contained brutality, which was something, but not what I came for.

My father is still dead. I am still divorced. And, in a weird way that outweighs the other two, there isn't a day that has gone by where my heart does not mourn, uselessly re-negotiate, or miss so very deeply my last relationship.

I wish I could've beat those things out of my head & heart, used the experience as a modality for healing and self-care, but the purge didn't work for me. I find my feelings are more concrete than other people's, and far more substantial than all that glass or metal, which makes their quality resilient & stronger. My sadness is more profound, and my love more real. This presents a difficulty and a blessing which cannot be purged.

#   #   #

While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him.

all the red rings.

The new car's bluetooth digitally grabs my phone, pulling a random track out of the playlist a thousand deep:

And the mercy seat is waiting
And I think my head is burning
And in a way I'm yearning ...

Like a spell, the surprise blindsides me, and I'm in a kitchen I remembered from long ago. The redhead is uncorking her two-buck chuck like it's the finest. She climbs up an uncertain stepstool to get her fancy plated goblets with the relief of grapes on them for us, her well-proportioned Italian posterior centering the balance of her fae Irish form, barely keeping her from falling down like a beautiful disaster. The reels on the tape player turn slowly, the white teeth in the spools grinding forward toward a foregone end as we smile at each other. Nick Cave continues rasping out his ballads of murder & seduction, the listener uncomfortably attracted to the ouroboros of the idea that both those things swim in the same dark, warm water.

[she looked something like model Laura Schuller {photo by Marc Laroche}.]

All the red rings of hair my eyes cannot help but follow around and down, and I am lost, so lost in their warp & weft woven to crown this actress, a sketch group comedienne, this woman of talent who decided to come to a holiday party with me. And then there we were, at her place.

The stained livingroom couch has a gypsy fringe throw, and she drops into my lap like a gift. Our mouths are sour with her cheap wine. We walk the goblets into the bedroom. The fancy party clothes drop away in slow rounds of lingering movements.

Three hours later she tells me, "You fuck like the Devil." I whisper, "And you love like a pale, beautiful angel." The hours continue.

Somewhere during a breather, this important life changing moment happens, where she says, "'Bill'?!? Guillermo is soooo much better. You should take it back. Be Guillermo."

After, we lay there and talk of magick, and talk of curses, and talk of dreams, and talk of secrets, until the birds of dawn join our conversation, their song finally letting us drop into sleep.

I would call her later, asking if she wanted to watch Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet, thinking our shared love of literature and her stagecraft could coo together over the spectacle. Many voicemails, but she would never answer. I saw it with someone else, who didn't appreciate it at all.

She would later go join her boyfriend in California, her future husband. I would get an email a few years after, with a subtle admission that perhaps her marriage was an ill fit. I never answered.

Between that unrequited pair of communications but before her intended move, I starred in a friend's poetry reading performance trio onstage at Club Congress, The Drunken Poet's Highball Hour, where 60 people I knew showed up just to hear my two poems. I'd mailed her a flyer. A heart milagro pinned to my jacket's lapel buttonhole, the emotional boutonniere that I would've unpinned to gift her in the audience during my reading. She doesn't show up to hear me speak the words to everyone:

"I would have gone.
I would have gone." 

Years later, at an unexpected nightclub encounter, she tells me between tears of regret that she scripted a character based on me in a play she wrote.

Somewhere outside of time, there's a version of me on a stage, my hand pressed to the small of her back, my fingers wedded in the red rings in the curls of another her, and we are together, still kissing.

[For Kimberly, who gave me the gift of my name.]

#   #   #

While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him.

my dog & I attempt to enter the underworld.

After writing about my cryptid sighting in 2017, my dog & I then decided to take a short hike in 2018 to look at the quarried out pit area on the east side of "A" Mountain. Most nights we'd hear bands of coyotes yipping and howling as though in a red toothed revel over their latest capture of a cat who'd wandered too far from home, imagining them tossing about streamers of feline entrails, celebrating as if they'd somehow reclaimed a natural dominance over the land that will never be theirs again.

As we topped the rise and looked down we saw a startlingly unexpected thing, something displaced from pre-Conquista Mexico, a thing more belonging to the architecture of Tenochtitlán: an Aztec portal into the earth.

What. Is. That?!?, I thought, my mind reeling.

The sun maybe gave us about 15 minutes of light left, and we shuffled circuitously around and down, but then we couldn't locate what we'd seen, somehow finding ourselves in a different pit, as though the mountain itself had folded its atemporal secret up into an extra-spacial pocket to hide it away from us that day. The light guttered out over the mountain, and we decided to come back another time.

Digital homework that night confirmed that the two distinct hollows were quarries and, much later, earmarked for a mountain architectural housing enclave proposal that never got off the ground (which by today would be worth quite the fat stack of cash in the comparatively gentrified Menlo Park/Sentinal Peak area). Now, these two pit-like arenas seemed to be this weird no man's land, the lower North hollow strewn with large rubbish, mattresses, blankets, empty food tins, snack bags, and other signs of regular vagrant occupation, while the upper South hollow shows signs of Thunderdome-like motocross activity, bike treads & donut circles a testament to something larger going on, maybe a local chapter of The Lost Boys daring each other to feel alive again during their long nights of immortality between victims, along with the mysterious Mesoamerican doorway in the northeast wall.

[Of course I read this as a kid.] 

What took us so long to follow up on the weirdness we'd seen those couple years ago, I'm not quite sure (well, actually my Map of Midgard project), but last weekend was when we finally decided to get to the bottom of this strangeness. We'd texted this girl to come with us because who wouldn't want to join Team Handsome at the MSA Annex for slightly overpriced Japanese food served out of a reclaimed train car as a possible last meal, followed by a possibly fatal foray into the unknown depths of the earth? But she proved unresponsive (she's a pretty busy bee, really [though we'd later learn that she didn't actually understand our super-daring but obtusely-worded invitation -- I totally blame my dog's lax editing skills]). And she might've just held us back, or been the restrictive voice of reason and tried to talk us out of it, so maybe that was for the best. Her loss anyhow during a life-less-lived in her journal version of the afternoon because there was no way she or anyone else was doing something so fearlessly bold as we: Buddy & I would return rich with treasure, or crowned with the glory of experience, or be too dead to care, having fought & bit our way into Valhalla together instead!

Armed with my 68-pound American Bully, a cruelly edged tactical flashlight, and an oversized griptape wrapped meat tenderizer I usually keep in the car "just in case", we sallied forth like the true duo of adventurers we are. And again, even approaching the area from the east, nonchalant & uncaringly passing the "no trespassing/24-hour camera surveillance" signs on the way towards that foothill, we still got directionally confused and ended up meandering through the lower northern quarry first anyhow where a young but crazy looking woman stood in a strange pose at the rim, while a half-seen male chopped at a thick palo verde and its undergrowth with a machete, probably making evening shelter for them both. Or maybe a hiding spot for her soon to be dead body. Keeping a watchful eye on each one of them, we came up and out over another lip of the south pit to get our bearings.

Going up another grade, we noticed light dirtbike tracks going forward, and given that's something we'd spotted before, we followed them into the upper southern quarry. And there the doorway that evaded us so long ago appeared:


Like a brightly coloured flower meant to lure insects into a carnivorous mouth of no return, there it was, this thing that defied belonging, or at the very least implied possible Central to North American merchant trade stops half a millennium ago. As we got closer, we saw no ancient pigments but modern spraypaint, yet to select this motif as opposed to the usual artless tags or bubble letters or profanities was still startling. And there was the roundstone:

This sinister Aztec-styled roundstone with a dismembered woman on it is based on an actual archaeological find, the Great Coyolxauhqui Stone, excavated at the base of the Templo Mayor, Tenochtitlan, which was the ground zero for major Aztec sacrifices. The mythology goes thusly: Coyolxauhqui, the moon goddess, rallies 400 of her star brothers to kill their shamefully now-pregnant by unknown means mother, but one of the stars warns the unborn child beforehand. When they show up for the matricide, the unborn child springs to his mother's defense from the womb, the fully grown & armed war god Huitzilopochtli. Huitzilopochtli butchers his siblings, grabs his now decapitated sister's head, and tosses it into the sky where it becomes the moon.

There quite possibly were ceremonial re-enactments of this myth at the temple, complete with human sacrifices to show the bloody triumph of the newborn war god. And the duplicate of this roundstone in front of this portal at a site out of anyone's direct view makes one wonder if it's employed in similar surviving or revived religious circumstances. (Wait ... were the hacking bladed man & posturing woman in the other hollow a priest & priestess of Huitzilopochtli?)

Looking closely at the roundstone, I spotted no blood, nor did Buddy take an interest in the stone, and he probably would've smelled any sanguinary traces which I might not have been able to see, given his 5 million more olfactory receptors at work, plus his bloody martial past as a would-be fighting dog by his first owner. The stone turned out to be a steel banded round of concrete, like a still connected springform cake pan.

And then we finally approached the portal:

I turned on the flashlight, took a firm hold of my hammer, and went inside. The truth of all my above anticipation is that my imagination is usually far more baroque that what I tend to encounter. There was a single room with rough irregular raw black rock walls, a pair of "Dress Code" clothing store stickers on the inside of each doorpost, and the unfortunately common unreadable urban bubble tag at the rear of the room.

Not wanting to give up in the face of general appearances, for twenty minutes I pulled & prodded at black rocks in the walls, gazed hard to see if light or vision made it through the cracks, looked for a secret switch to activate the counterweight inside the rock wall to swing open the secret door, or a pressure plate step to plunge us through a chute into a party of kobolds to fight.

Barring a chthonic encounter, I then took a long second examination of the room for the treasure I'd hoped for. Peering down, a single Lincoln head penny awaited my scooping it up. I figured one copper piece from our adventure beats none, so I took it home to the silver piggy bank retirement horde.

Having gone, I now know what's there. Yet this experience raises some questions.

So our great underworld adventure wasn't there on that day ... but then, if you think about it, blasting out one little 6' x 6' room on the other side of an actual door frame someone bothered installing and decorating in naïve Mexica-revival ... it's alot of trouble to go through, right? For what or whom? Deal is, seeing the site, it feels like a front door, a sort of hideous welcome mat. Maybe through some metaphysical peephole they saw me fearlessly armed with meat mallet and the bully dog and weren't going to open, no sir, no how, that Buddy & I were more trouble than we were worth, that we would've taken the dwarven gold, or charmed away their dark elven princesses, or made off with a priceless magic item that they couldn't afford to lose under any circumstances.

So yes, there's still something suspect about that tucked away portal and the possibilities it implies in tandem with the other underground legends regarding subterranean networks under Tucson. Maybe next weekend we'll find a way in. Stay tuned.

#   #   #

While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him.

the sweetness of a dream.

I was in a yellow Cadillac with the Korean DJ Girl, but it was a dream, so it was and it wasn't her at the same time in that half-certain well-it-couldn't-be-anyone-else way people in dreams aren't and still are who they are. Bench seats with the piping around roll 'n' tuck 1960s cream & red leather upholstery. We sailed along a highway as though on a cloud, sometime late at night, the dark isolating us, the headlights the only indication we were moving, the amber glow of an incandescent dashboard adding to the golden celestialiality of her skin as she drove. In the dream, I'd completely forgotten her pronounced antipathy towards cars, but maybe it was the undeniable comfort of the caddy that had compromised her.

[photo of Minji Money by Jamie Nelson.]

Moving next to her, I tentatively pressed into her lithe body, feeling the warmth beneath her dress. She exhaled slowly, looked half-sideways, and smiled, saying, "You know, it's been a long time since I actually cared about which pair of underwear I'd bothered to put on for anyone." Her eyes then completely left the road, head tilting, lips pressing into mine. We didn't care that for the next minute we weren't looking at where the car was going -- the caddy's firm boatlike alignment would take care of it all for us.

And then I woke up, smiling, for the first time in months.

It felt just as good as a real kiss, even better than some, her statement's sure thing intentions reassuringly comfortable and rewarding in its promise, a certainty of things to come.

It made me forget for a second the absence in my life. And the ability of the dream to make me feel this way makes me ask the question: If my mind can generate an experiential reality, or even if it can tap and let me into a quantum/parallel reality, then how much of a lateral concentration would it be to invoke that in the waking world whenever we need to? Would the technique require a particular meditation, or trance, or ecstatic movement, or lucid intermediary borderline semi-wakefulness, or some combination of the above to willfully breach that emotional barrier into the headspace that can just create its own internal gratification, or an external projection, or a borrowing from an actual tangential alternity of what a person needs or wants or desires?

From a Heathen Worldview, are these the Alfar either indulging us or becoming wrangled by us into the shapes we would most like to see? Or are we incidentally performing a subconscious mental galdr that makes fylgia forms from us and for us? Or are we actually picking a more attractive thread from the tapestry of Wyrd itself to follow? If engineered by our Gods or ancestral spirits, are these emotionally real pockets of dream experience meant to inspire us to greater deeds in this world on an interpersonal level? Or is there a technical elskamantic process to be found just inside of all this to mold the world into the shape of our very heart?

All I know is that I really, really want that kiss again.

#   #   #

While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him.