The Lair of the Emerald Serpent

It's scary to think that it is exactly 14 years since the Serpent's 'birthday'. It seems like centuries ago but only yesterday.
The magic is long gone but the memories remain.

It was a stinking sizzling 37c today and oh so very tempting to be a lazy snoozy serpent and abandon the annual rituals. Sometimes I wonder if the whole purpose of festivals and rituals is to provide some sort of external structure or deadline to override the lazy lousy inner beast.
Well it certainly worked and it was worth the effort.

Of course there was an added incentive to visit certain sacred sites due to last year's unexpected interruptions to the scheduled program.
In some strange way, not so much the fact of not being at Cottesloe Beach to watch the last sunset of 2014 but simply being unable to watch the last sunset at all because the faint and sickly yellow blob of the northern winter was hiding behind a hundred grey clouds, it was as if the year had never really ended.

So the annual ritual consists of a visit to a certain old lunatic asylum which has been converted into an arts centre. It used to involve a picnic with a bottle of Wynns Cabernet, water crackers and camembert, a quill and bottle of emerald ink and most important of all - a bright shiny new green notebook.
The wine and cheese picnic got left at the Lair for later in the evening since it is a waste of good wine when the day is so hot as well as just being another heavy thing to haul around.

A bright shiny new book to read has also found its way onto the list. This year it is "Wake" from Elizabeth Knox which I managed to snaffle for 3 silver sickles at the charity shop a few months ago. It got rave reviews about six months ago.

So I got as far as one paragraph of this entry when the Keeper of the Keys came to do the lock up ritual at 5pm. But it was a good omen to start in such an auspicious location. That was the main point since hunting and pecking with a horrid tablet keyboard is too much hassle when there's the nice Big Mac serpent friendly keyboard lurking at the Lair. The Big Mac had its 6th birthday last Wednesday and the warranty has long ago run out. It's still doing well and had a much longer shelf life than the ibook got in 2005 with its pissy 256kb memory that was slow as a snail by 2009.

It was amazing how it was like another world within the walls. The plane trees had lost half their leaves but it was quite cool and breezy and not nasty and muggy like it had been when I had set out on the visit. This is largely due to the sea breeze which comes in the afternoon, removes the doom and gloom and lifts everyone's spirits immensely.

It is a day for indulging in nostalgia, for squiggling and doing all the plotting and planning for the new year and review of the old that most folks save for New Year's Eve and New Year's Day.

Last year's little black book also got switched over for the bright shiny recycled diary from 2011. January and February are one day out thanks to the pesky leap year but the rest is just fine. I had been using an old 2009 model for 2015 until I got tempted by the pretty Moleskine diaries reduced to the very tempting price of $3. I bought a couple of extras for 2020.

Tomorrow there is more sizzling weather forecast so the morning will be spent watering the weeds and devising devious means to keep them alive. There's also magic beans to be planted which will provide shade for some of the more sensitive baby trees.

2015 was a very productive year in the Serpent's Garden and 2016 is going to be even better.

There's the serpent settling in for a serious night of gloom, doom and squiggling only to find our favorite station - Radio National channeling not Late Night Live nor the Book Show but Queensland local radio replete with weather reports and never ending disaster stories of some very scary and serious weather

There's Izzie whingeing about a mild breeze in the Garden of Arcane Delights that kept blowing our precious cards all over the table while over east the table itself and anyone sitting on a nearby chair would also be up in the air with a whole bunch of trees and nearby garden sheds joining them

Coincidence then that swords seem to be the suit of the day. Looks like the message is never to ignore the power of the invisible

So did enjoy a whole bunch of rituals this afternoon and nostalgia for the anniversary of the serpent incarnation but delayed for one month for the day that is in it ;)
But came to the conclusion that the garden of the lunatic asylum is not a place for playing with tarot decks if the game involves making lots of pretty little piles in an attempt to introduce true randomness since the serpent is such a lousy hand at shuffling

From now on will limit any readings or story plotting to drawing no more than 3 cards at this place and stick to squiggling, reading, doing puzzles or other less weather sensitive activities

Was musing about something that happened at work today. Or rather - the tsunami wave like presence of aggression, defensiveness, fear and plain stupidity emanating from a certain person that was so strong that anyone tuned into those sorts of channels could pick it up from across a very large dining room
Still struggling to find a word for it that does not sound all new age and kooky.
With a bit of ruminating began to realize that it has rather a lot to do with the whole NLP arty farty names for the main modes of perception
Most folks prefer one of the three. Funny how they assume that no one's preferred sense of perception could possibly be smell or taste. Guessing they are too limited and local in range to be of much use for a human.

Izzie used to think of herself as a predominantly visual creature and this was probably so for many many years. But it all changed in January 2002. It was then that the serpent became sensitive to what new age folks of visual inclination call auras but what we prefer to describe as sensations of squishiness, scratchiness, glowing toastiness or a dark damp soul sucking tunnel
An old folks home is the perfect place to pick up on such things as so many of them have lost the ability to put on a mask or shield to hide the inner core of light or dark or whatever it may be.

Was talking to a coworker about the crazy creature emanating these strange and overpowering vibes of nitpicking, defensiveness, fear and overwhelming negativity. She'd also been on the receiving end of the uberbitchiness. But she mentioned something in passing that suddenly made sense of it all and totally spooked the serpent
But will have to save that for a locked post

But been dipping into the strange loopiness of a recent Douglas Hofstadter book and becoming all nostalgic for another that explored similar themes first read way back in 1998. Slowly a whole bunch of disparate pieces of a very strange puzzle are falling into place and it is truly strange and weird indeed