The Plainclothes Clown

I came up with a basic vocabulary for powerful chanted chaos magic sigils in a dream this morning. I just spent a few hours immersing myself in the process of creating what will be a very personal vocabulary.

The Intention Vocabulary comprises two lists, written in the standard alphabet and in Theban, which has both nouns and verbs. OpenOffice Calc randomly generated loads of random sounds, but actual words were selected from the lists and assigned to specific verbs and nouns.

The ranges of these verbs and nouns has been kept as short as possible, and the Intention words themselves divorced of any connection to the English terms, so for instance if I wanted to send someone an Intention to increase their bodily energies, I would use the verb cucus (INCREASE) from the vocabulary, followed by the nouns tetimi (BODY) and carema (ENERGY). I might make it cucus tetimi sebanu carema (INCREASE BODY HEALTH ENERGY), just in case the intention is misinterpreted and the subject develops a fever.

The sigil can be written down and crafted like any other sigil, or written down as a sentence using whatever syntax you like (e.g. Object - Verb or Verb - Object). The use of the Intention Vocabulary bypasses the conscious mind, while allowing the conscious mind to make the connections.

As well as writing down the Intention sentence and/or drawing the sigil, chant it out loud. Repeat the chant 108 times, until the actual words blur, and then bury the written / crafted sigil or write it in your Book of Mirrors / Book of Shadows / Grimoire to keep it going.

The intention words above were just examples. I've used other words in my real Intention vocabulary - I'm not going to print out these lists here. This is a personal vocabulary. I would recommend that you develop your own.

I really should write more about how ocarinas have changed my life, or something.

 What is a life, bereft of touch,




- by Alex Greene

 It was around 3am that I woke up this morning. The rain had well and truly stopped, and I could see the stars. The daytime sky is even clearer right now, as I type this.

Yesterday, I'd been woken up around 8am, and the sky overhead had been a dull grey, with a bank of cloud overhead covering everything but this dazzling strip of clear sky, a band of golden yellow on the horizon. But as I lay there, that solid grey cloud broke up and it all became dazzling through the window.

My dreams nowadays tend mostly to be of me doing things, rather than of me being chased; in one dream, I was housesitting in someone's place while the owner and her family were on an extended vacation. This was a favour to a friend, because about the only thing I would probably do would be to raid the fridge and use their internet extensively.

I noticed that the suburban home, which was in its own grounds, surrounded by tall, leafy trees, had some sort of connecting communal corridor to a door at the other end - which opened onto someone else's home next door. I spent the time exploring that other home, when I sensed that the neighbours were coming in.

And I was there, without their knowledge or permission, naked.

But then, there was this morning's dream - which was a lot more fun, until I woke up.

I was back to my old hypnotic tricks again, putting people under and enjoying watching them drop into trances, which is really easy, and I heard that a celebrity had arrived in town and I'd been invited to drop by the hotel where she was staying. The celebrity was an actor, Sophia Myles.

The next thing, sadly, I was awake, staring out at the night sky.

I was attending a convention in another town. It was north of where I live - that was all I knew. It might have been Scotland. There were no landmarks to confirm, save that some of the walls looked like mediaeval fortifications.

I'd been in this place before - a dream I'd had a few months back. At that time, I was in the back of a taxi, trying to get to a castle - but the driver insisted on taking a long, circuitous route through crisscrossing streets laid out in an American square grid pattern like city blocks.

In this dream, I was at the castle, and I met a woman called Lorna. She had short, dark hair, an oval face, and she was just an inch or two shy of six feet. She said that she'd come to the convention to meet the guests, and she rattled off some former stars of Game of Thrones and one or two of the extras who'd turned up in Star Trek: Picard as XBs. The actors Isa Briones, Michelle Hurd, and Santiago Cabrera were named, which somehow made sense - if they had been there, chances are I'd have forked out the heavy pile of dosh to have booked this con.

I got the general impression that this fan-run media convention had cost me a pretty penny, and that for my money there were all sorts of guest perks available such as nice hotel gifts laid out for visitors - I'd snatched up all of their 1Tb thumb-sized flash drives and microSD cards, but I'd discreetly turned up my nose at the cigars and champagne.

It was the last day of the con, and delegates were given a short break of two hours between panel discussions to go out and visit the town. The guest celebrities had been whisked away on a short tour of the historic town, so there was little to do but to go out in the autumn sunshine.

Lorna came up to me and asked if I could join her. There was a part of the town she had always wanted to go to. It looked like a row of bungalows to me. I lost Lorna somewhere, and sat on a low wall opposite one of the bungalows to wait for her. A delegate of the hotel approached one of the flats, looked at me and said "I'm not sharing," and went in - there were two scantily-clad female models, sex workers whom I'd seen earlier at the convention, doing some sort of commercial cosplay as video game characters for a forthcoming console game.

Wondering where Lorna was, I rounded the corner and saw that just past these bungalow flats was a much posher part of town. And in the middle distance, I saw Lorna and a female friend chatting with some chap who was riding in a limo. He looked rich af, and Lorna looked around before she and her friend got in.

She never saw me, but there was no mistaking the look of hardnosed ambition. This was what she'd come to town for. The convention had been an excuse.

I tried to make my way back to the convention, but the shortcut involved scaling a low castle wall, and it didn't look like a part of the castle which was open to the public, so I walked the long way back. Besides, shortcuts in my dreams aren't - if I take them, I literally spend the rest of the dream wandering around and never get to my destination.

The dream skipped ahead. It was already the end of the convention, and guests were being given parting gifts. Apparently, I was checking out already, the bill having been settled - and they'd offered comp laundry, so my clothes for the con were fresh in their sack, washed and pressed and sealed up in those vacuum laundry bags for no extra cost.

The hotel lobby looked just lavish, decked out in a kind of medieval style, with the reception desk set between the entrance doors, facing into the lobby, meaning you'd have had to pass by the reception desk coming in or going out. I saw coats of arms on the front of the desk, but I couldn't tell if they were real heraldic coats of arms, or if they'd come from Game of Thrones or Harnworld.

I ended up taking two of those cigar cases home after all, as gifts to the few friends of mine who still smoke, but my bags were positively groaning with 1Tb flash drives and microSD cards worth hundreds of pounds. So I guess my time at the convention had been profitable for me, too.

And that was it.

I never wondered what happened to Lorna or her friend. A person with that kind of ambition and ulterior motives really has no place in my life.

Pic is unrelated, sort of.

 I began a new hobby in June this year, at the height of the lockdowns - mastering the ocarina. I bought a 7-hole egg pendant, a max range double ocarina which plays like a 6-hole English Style pendant, and a 12-hole Thomann C1 tenor ocarina in red. The latter is a plastic instrument, rather than ceramic, but it's been good for me since i received it on 2020-06-22.

(I'm buying another new one, an Elf's Ear ocarina from STL, 12-hole transverse, but that's a story for another day).

Within 24 hours of trying out the ocarina I have since come to call Big Red, I was already picking out my first tune by ear, from memory. The traditional Welsh song Myfanwy, by Joseph Parry (1875).

I had to pick it out by ear, because the singsheet for it - the tabs - were not available on the internet, or anywhere really.

Until today.

Behold.

 Yesterday, I watched the sunlight drain from the sky, and I said "The sun shall not rise on a day in 2019 ever again."
This is how I let go of bad years. 2019 was a bad year.
2019 was the year that I, amd my family, lost the best and brightest of us. Our gentle soul Samuel Thomas Greene, 1994-02-01 - 2019-02-21. My sister's boy, taken from us on an otherwise beautiful Thursday morning.
Compared to that, the rest of the year's events really cannot shine, no matter how good. There were good things in 2019 - my Welsh language course, my brief stint in paid employment before becoming an unpaid volunteer again - but really, the only thing I can say about 2019 that would make it good in the end is that 2019 is now over.

 I'm making the official announcement here.


I've come up with a novel, and I'm putting together the outline. Just thought I'd break the news here first. I'll let people know on my other social media platforms that my output may be somewhat curtailed over the next few weeks.

Two days ago, all my tumblr accounts were suddenly terminated. No reason or explanation given. I asked tumblr staff for some sort of clarification - they have never replied.

So now I have no home on tumblr.

I guess that means I'll be here, as well as on Blogger and Wordpress, picking up the pieces and starting afresh. At least, so far, I'm not completely internet homeless.