A Veil
or: halloween and election night
This week and the next five after that, on Cool Zone Media Book Club, me and Robert Evans and Io and Hazel are playing Pathfinder (think D&D but better) with Jason Bulmahn.
The past few weeks on Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff I’ve been covering the ancient world. For Halloween I covered druids, then this week I covered the Gallae, the trans priestesses of ancient Rome.
I’ve been hard at work writing again the past little bit, and I hope I’ll have more announcements about that soon. In the meantime, thank you all for being here. I can’t easily express my gratitude that I get to spend so much of my time at my art.
A Veil
Halloween night, a close friend of mine dreamt of civil war. They dreamt of desperately scouring heartbroken and glassbroken cities for their friends.
Halloween night, I dreamt that too. I dreamt of living in a city where ballistic helmets felt necessary to walk outside, where driving anywhere required a convoy and spotters. It’s not out of character for me to dream of war and apocalypse, to be clear. The night after, ash and paper fell from the sky during what otherwise would have been a standard “I’m an adult and suddenly stuck in high school again” stress dream.
But those dreams are spreading, as whole new fears spread.
Last night, of course, other fears receded. A socialist was elected mayor of the US’s largest city in a landslide. I’m skeptical of politicians, as I suppose most people know. I’m skeptical of the system that seems to corrupt even the most ardent Leftists, and I’m skeptical of Mamdani’s ability to deliver on his promises. What I’m not skeptical about was the turnout. What warms my anarchist heart is to see people all across the country prove that outright fascism is, if nothing else, unpopular.
Don’t get your electoral news from me, I beg of you. I still think what we do every other hour of the year says more about who we are than what we do in the voting booth. But I’m grateful to see that, so long as our democratic institutions hold together, “starve everyone and kidnap people and destroy everything” is a losing platform for political parties.
Still, we dream our fears.
Halloween night I dreamt I found the largest magpie I’ve ever seen, dead by the side of the road, being eaten by smaller birds. Magpies have always been omens—a group of them is called a “tiding,” after all—but they’ve always been especially important to me, since that’s been my nickname for twenty years now.
In my dream, I was trying to explain all of that, why I was terrified to see one dead beside the road, to my companion. But they didn’t have time to listen, because we had places we had to be, and quickly, because artillery was firing and everything was about to be destroyed.
It wasn’t a subtle dream, but we don’t live in subtle times.
