Fall 2024//New Roots

In early May of this year, I was fired from my job unexpectedly. It was right around the first anniversary of buying my house. Despite how stressful I find hosting gatherings and the shocking new development that I had no idea how I would afford my life for the foreseeable future, I decided to have a very small housewarming, inviting only the few people I had come to feel were true and reliable friends here. The whole thing was kind of a disaster! I was really glad I only invited my real friends over to bear witness to my total failure at grilling. We couldn’t even get a fire going above 250 degrees; the charcoal I bought just wouldn’t light. When I first moved back to Cleveland and was staying with CLE magazine founder, Jim Ellis, as I searched for a house, we were grilling all the time and we never had a problem, so I didn’t realize I had a lot to learn yet about fire science. Standing by the grill with Jim, looking at Stephanie and our now late friend, J. Guy Laughlin, I acknowledged that I needed to “master my element.”

As time passed and I worked with the “tapes,” I realized that all of my 2024 seasonal mixes would be fire sign babies born during Mercury retrogrades. Spring is always an Aries. Summer was a Leo. And this is my Sagittarius. Clocking in at two hours, thirty-three minutes, and twenty-eight seconds, it’s a nine in numerology, which is the position of Sagittarius in the Zodiac and the Hermit card in tarot. 2024 was a Strength year and now we are buckling down for a Hermit year, so it’s fitting that the energy enter here, in the last weeks of the year. This Sagittarius season is all about trusting the path that unfolds as we walk it. It’s the longest mix I’ve ever made. It’s an odyssey. I’ll try to help you understand its signs and signals.

The first third or so of this epic narrative was composed leading up to and then also along the way of a road trip from Cleveland to DC that I went on September 9th-10th to see the legendary underground duo, Kicking Giant. I took my room mate, who I believed was my best friend, because we had both had a difficult few months and I thought we could benefit from an adventure and deserved a reward for getting through everything. They had been generous, reliable, and helpful during some really rough times, so I wanted to thank them for that. It’s been very difficult for me to make friends I can truly rely on back in Cleveland, so having that was an extraordinary relief. Unfortunately, though, over the course of this trip and the time back in Cleveland immediately following, it was revealed that this person had a predatory obsession with me and had been keeping their extremely strong desire for me secret. They stalked me and followed me to two cities. They studied my mixtapes to learn exactly how to try to manipulate me and encroach further and further into my world. They were very patient and insistent through my many periods of being concerned about their behavior and cutting them out of my world for a while. They laid in wait until I was desperate enough to ignore some major red flags because I was so tired, so sad, and so vulnerable.

So, the beginning of this tape was composed with this sick and dangerous person hiding in plain sight in my life, and they were pretty involved in the development of the first third. I started noticing in the earliest days of composing this one that the theme was getting set around the idea of the past coming to the center, reappearing…Nathan McLaughlin’s “Fold to Past” opening into “New Roots” from the recently reissued album Peril and Panic by the Intima. I told this person about how I met Themba and Nora from the Intima after the band had broken up, in France in 2005, when I was 18…how I was hanging out with them on the beach of the Mediterranean Sea instead of being at my high school graduation. How this really was my past coming back into the present, how I never knew the Intima were so sick, because they were just so humble and didn’t mention that the band they used to be in were incredible and that I should hear their work ASAP. And I really was seeing “the future through the fumes” with this intro. Kicking Giant’s “Alien I.D.” actually communicates a lot about the situation: this person wasn’t just sexually obsessed with me, she wanted to be me. “Can I borrow part of your life?” … “Because I’m a narcissist and I need to use your life and your love and your friends and your personality and your subjective reality, because my actual existence is a fucking void.” A really fucking dangerous void.

If you have been following the tapes, you can hear this person hijack my mixtape life narrative in the end of the spring tape, where I asked them to do the French translation of “Song of Childhood” from the 1987 film Wings of Desire and voice it at the end of the tape with me doing the English translation. A big theme on that one was the past being dead, which is a narcissist’s dream. They’re also not capable of creating their own systems of meaning in their life, so my publicly available sonic universe of meaning-making has been propping up their reality for years at this point. It was a big deal for me to invite them into it–a much bigger deal than I understood it to be. I knew that the amazing bootleg of “Why Can’t I Be You?” was exactly correct and crucial, the pivot-point to that whole tape, but I couldn’t figure out why, because it actually connects to something which was hidden from me at the time: Aoife’s desire for me and more specifically their desire to be me.

I discovered “Risky Changes” by Bionic Boogie cooking this spicy tomato and eggplant stew to a recording of a Larry Levan set from the Paradise Garage. I initially heard the lyrics as “shut the door,” when it is actually “shot in the dark!” I thought it represented the havoc we were planning to wreak on the music and music journalism industries with our Terminal City project, as we were actively planning a political action to do at the claire rousay show at Convivium 33 in late September, but that’s right around the time that this person’s behavior got upgraded from a little concerning to extremely concerning. “Shot in the dark” is better for my Sagittarius baby and the “Risky Changes” do still extend to the cultural wrenching I am planning to do with Terminal City, as well as things like risking legal problems locking this dangerous person out of my house at my mother’s insistence. (When the cops came by a few days later, I explained that mothers supersede the law when it comes to matters of domestic safety…that having spent a whole summer of my life dealing with terrifying things due to a partner’s mania, because the cops never showed up quickly enough to serve him his papers, so that I could get an order of protection, I had zero faith the police or legal process would protect me from harm in this situation.) I also like that it’s this old disco song, but they insist they’re “fresh and hot” and will “show you what we got”…the past coming back in both fresh and hot. I worked so hard to get the version with the additional forty-five second instrumental break and it was worth every second of effort. (Actually, I worked pretty hard to get you all the greatest versions of all the disco songs on this one. Because of me you can listen to the incredible Bernard Edwards bass solo in “Everybody Dance” without advertising disruption and you’re extremely welcome to that.)

It’s hard to imagine something more intimate I could do with someone than share my love for and knowledge of music from DC with them on this dream DC road trip. I’ve had plenty of sex that was considerably less intimate than this is to me. The vibe of the road trip gets palpably darker and reveals more of the darkness lurking in the moment as we ride, until night is descending on Appalachia and we’re about to almost run out of gas in the middle of the Pennsylvanian wilderness where there is often 30-50 miles in between highway exits (Hoover into Lungfish.) When we get back to Cleveland, we are supposed to have a night of potting mums and carving Terminal City pumpkins to the spooky Americana sounds of Quix*o*tic, but I don’t want to do anything with Aoife, and the only Quix*o*tic and White Magic songs that are resonating with me are dark, discordant, ominous, and revealing of the truths about to be unveiled.

Then, as usual, I start emotionally regulating with dance music. I had this insistence about me at that time, despite all of my discomfort. I wanted to look beautiful and feel confident and enjoy my body, get back into dancing. Dancing so hard all night long was so instrumental to my healing; it really opened up all this space inside of me that had previously been blocked and forced me to learn how to communicate my needs and desires with strangers who would approach frequently, how to take up creative space and have energetic influence on the world around me. The Production Buyer of Smart Bar in that period (2014-2016) called my work on the dance floor “clearing some space,” and that’s how it felt both internally and externally. Dancing and dance music are sacred to me for this reason. This person really lost their ability to hide their desire for me during this disco period, acting out in extreme ways, and even made the argument the following day that maybe they lost control of themselves because the music we were listening to was so sexy. But “Everybody Dance” by Chic and “Don’t Go Lose it, Baby” by Hugh Masekela are not sexy songs, they are songs about surviving through music, using music to emotionally regulate, which is all I was trying to do by listening to it. They are cheesy and optimistic and pure. Using dance music as an opportunity or excuse to violate my sense of safety is completely unforgivable to me.

I told this person to give me total space for a few days, even though they still lived in my house. They completely lost it, texting my friends endlessly to try to get insights into where I was at and what I was considering…even texting my ex, whose phone number they only had because he agreed to help them bring their car to Cleveland…and who had no idea what was going on, because we do not communicate daily or even weekly. In this time, I met Stephanie out at a rare soul and funk night her friend was DJing, and while I was drinking and crying at the bar talking about difficult, soul-baring shit with Stephanie, her friend dropped this incredibly rare funk jam called “Move Me” by Chemeez. They only made 50 promo copies of this one, which is such a horrific tragedy. It’s one of the best songs I have ever heard. It really kept the flame of my soul glowing during this extremely dark time, held me to my own high vibration, and reminded me of what love really is to me.

And then it’s time to get in before the rain. Or before this person gets back from whatever they are doing away from my house right now.

Perhaps the greatest violation this person committed is tricking me into giving them access to my emotional world, but if you’ve been following this series at all, you know that I live in a house that I bought in full with a legal settlement from the person who abused me sexually and otherwise for eight years of my formative childhood. After the night I locked this person out of my house and began having the worst PTSD of my life, I found myself unable to sleep the following morning. I decided I should go down to the basement where they were living and start packing their things; that it would be easier to sleep when all of this was over. I was just throwing all of this stuff into boxes, not looking at any of it, until I found an open notebook and the page exposed was full of tarot readings about me and their relationship to me, and this revealed a whole notebook mostly focused on obsessively searching for signs from tarot affirming their obsession with me and their idea that I would eventually realize we were supposed to be together even though I am (very unfortunately) extremely straight and only attracted to masculine, cisgendered men. I have tried to avoid this reality at length, because dating women and trans people is honestly a much better time on the whole, but I have had to accept its truth. And not only is that my sexual reality, but I feel very strongly that being in a deeply healthy and loving partnership with a man is very important to my healing.

So, originally, I had thrown all of these little journal-looking books into a box, just trying to make the presence of this person lingering in my house disappear as soon as possible, but after I found the notebook of tarot inquiry relating to me, I soon after found a notebook full of endless drafts of a letter they wanted to write me explaining their true feelings, beginning years ago. Letters they never gave me, because they knew if they communicated their true feelings towards me, I would create extremely firm boundaries with them, which would limit their access to me and my world. So, they accepted a more limited relationship with me temporarily, but their feelings did not subside, and they just became more and more convinced that I just really don’t know who I am and what I want…more convinced they know these things better than I do. I dipped further into journals and found evidence of the stalking, following me to Chicago, and lying to me about it. Extremely predatory entries describing how they think they would have to make me resist them sexually, but what they really want are my emotions. Obsessing over the aspects of me that are like them: being Irish, having dark features. Fetishizing every aspect of my identity. After reading this, I felt completely unsafe in my own home and the Verizon wireless network was down for what ended up being two days, so I went to stay with a friend and brought all of the journals and all of my pets and barely slept for days.

While staying at my friend’s place, I discovered what could only be called a pedo journal, even being written in a journal intended for young children. What I found in this journal was a person who seemed to be experiencing personality shifts while writing, who was obsessed with both their spouse and their child, wanted to be their spouse and their child, didn’t seem to understand causality at all, and seemed to be pretty clearly sexually grooming and abusing their very young daughter, herself a Sagittarius.

This mixtape is dedicated to that child and to “all the real angels,” which is a reference to a shirt this person would wear and may still be wearing that reads “ALL ANGELS ARE TRANSSEXUAL.” I first noticed it at the Black Eyes house show in Chicago I very unfortunately attended with them. My brief engagement with the journals revealed a person who believed that they could escape their wrongdoings by becoming a woman: no longer being an evil man, but a divine goddess. At one point, they needed emergency estrogen, and I did leave it in the driveway for them, but with an important message written on a bill that came to my house when I had told this person not to come to my house. I knew they had been to my house, because they had chosen to write “return to sender” on a bill which came for them. Legally, they had every right to be there and to take their mail. They only wrote “return to sender” on it and left it in the box for me to see as a demonstration that they were violating my boundaries and that I should not feel safe on my own property. So, I put this piece of mail (featuring their birth name in the address) on top of the half bushel box of estrogen with the mailing address featured in the little square frame; when you pull it out, it reveals their “RETURN TO SENDER” violation and then a statement in my handwriting: “THERE IS NOTHING YOU CAN INJECT THAT WILL TRANSMUTE THE EVIL AT YOUR CORE.”

This whole story is so twisted and it really made me notice how desperately we need nuance in our cultural conversation. All of this happened during this peak election season insanity. It’s difficult to discuss this, because there is such extreme polarization around issues of trans rights and the trans community are in so much danger. The far right has created this narrative of the transexual predator boogieman and used it to create all of these laws that are causing so much harm. In response, the trans community just bands together from all of their isolated locations online to support anyone who identifies as trans and assume anyone in disagreement with them for any reason is transphobic and hateful. Maybe Aoife is really trans, but maybe Aoife is using trans identity to hide and hurt more vulnerable people. What’s certain is that this person is extremely mentally ill and dangerous. We have to accept and acknowledge that predators exist in all communities. We can’t be afraid of acknowledging the truth. We have to pay close attention to truly love and protect and look out for each other. So many people told me after the fact they could tell this person was a narcissist or that they seemed problematically obsessed with me, but for some reason only one person ever voiced awareness or concern to me.

Murder in the Red Barn through She Keeps Bees covers the emotional space of the period immediately following locking this person out of my house. One of the things that helped reduce my PTSD symptoms was installing Ring cams, which is how I captured the recording of my USPS courier talking about his fervent belief in education. The acapella song “I Cleaned this House” from the new Diane Cluck album House Tears signals a shift towards reclaiming my house and my world from the filth that this person brought into it. Then we finally got the beautiful autumn weather and started making the house feel safe and cozy instead of terrifying and dangerous. Music for scenic drives in the beautiful Northeast Ohio woods and jumping in leaf piles. And through not allowing this person to tarnish anything I love, becoming stronger in every aspect from this experience instead of being broken by it, what could easily have been the lowest point of my life becomes “the highest point on the island.”

The closing song is one of many extraordinary bangers J. Guy has been composing on my “In C” wind chimes while protecting my house through this ugliness. I have felt his protective energy very powerfully throughout this experience. One of the mementos I received from his life is his Northern Wind Martial Science shirt, which has little figures of people doing martial arts on it with the words “the body must be protected.” I wore it to feel safe sleeping in my house alone in the earliest, most challenging nights of this upheaval. It brought me back to the idea of “Discipline” from the summer tape. I asked Stephanie to do Aikido with me and she said yes. I wore J. Guy’s shirt to the first class. I cried a lot during the class; it was one of the most emotional experiences I have ever had. You see, J. Guy was supposed to be my drum teacher. He called me his “first student,” because I was the first person to express interest, though my life got hectic and I couldn’t afford it, so it never actually happened. I received some of his drum heads, too, so I consider this my first and only lesson.

I want to live my life in the spirit of the part of J. Guy who wanted to live, and the kind of life he wanted to live. His mental health issues made it increasingly impossible for him to do, but it was the path of discipline. J. Guy never mastered his element; he got consumed by it. My own mental health issues might mean that I fail sometimes, but I don’t know…I’ve been alcohol-free this whole month so far, officially joined the dojo last week, have four classes under my white ass belt, stopped drinking coffee (???), just got a pretty nice home practice mat and started using this Bend app for stretching daily, and I’m planning to go to three classes this week since there’s no weekday class because of the holidays next week. I’m even planning to finally do the Complex PTSD workbook I bought so many years ago at this point with my new therapist. I’ve never had less than 3 days off between Aikido classes and I’m currently very sore for days after each one, so I guess I will see how that goes this week. Every time I go I kind of freak out on the way there and think about going back home, but I never do. I never have any idea what is going to happen there and I am required to engage with it. I can only leave the mat if I am sick or injured. Aikido is about being present and seeing and responding to reality even when reality is harsh and dangerous and that is the work that I most need to do, so I am doing it. I’m very sore, but I’m really genuinely happy. And I feel emotionally, mentally, physically, and spiritually the strongest I have ever been. My friend Rose did a 2025 tarot reading for me and all the swords came out for Aikido, so it would seem I am on the right path.

Edit, 12/25/2024: While reading Aikido and the Harmony of Nature by Mitsuge Saotome Sensei, I discovered what the coffee grounds reading was showing us…kannagara no michi!

Edit, 12/28/2024

I forgot to come back to the watercolor book combination tarot and astrology reading Christina Carter did for me last year. The ending is really beautiful and accurate and promising, so I wanted to include it here at the end, since I included the beginning in the first mixtape of this year.

You catch the energy, the message, acknowledge the shift. And take a new opportunity, say yes to it, something that you now realize you desire or possibly have desired in the past. This is a time period of a second new beginning. First being 2023 move to Cleveland, buying a house, etc. I feel a caution here, which is to observe the extent of usefulness of being singleminded. The purpose of it all is joy, inner joy. Winning without joy might be better than losing without joy. But joy itself is better than both. I think Summer 2024 is when you’ll be in full possession of really sticking the landing of all the complicated, difficult life tumbles you have perfected to your highest ability, as of now. A feeling of rooted accomplishment. And an eye to what’s the next phase.

You end out the year feeling solid. You’ve gotten to hand any of the aspects of life that have previously felt out of hand. (Both Queen of Pentacles and the Devil = Capricorn.) You live a nourishing relationship with the material world and your own living existence instead of one that seems extremely limited and in drudgery. Not that there won’t be difficulties. But the Queen of Pentacles’ mindset and experience is the opposite to the Devil’s. Bonds are voluntary and helpful. Love is cooperative. And hunger causes no shame.

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