Under a Blue Moon

I woke up this morning sweaty, wrapped up in my blankets, having just had the most ridiculous dream about being a warrior princess. I was on a quest for gold and jewels, leading a small army of my Viking brethren across a snowy pass. I quickly forgot most of the details but what I am certain of is that the content of the dream was totally outlandish, and I was thrilled. This might seem like just a dream but for me it’s something much more monumental. You see, for a really long time all the way up to very recently, I’ve only had realistic dreams. I’ve dreamt I lost my job and couldn’t find another one. I’ve dreamt I lost my home and had nowhere to go. I’ve dreamt I was living in my car with my dog during the hot summer months. Sometimes I dream about men I’m dating and the very real, very dysfunctional relationships we have. Sometimes I’m pregnant and homeless and jobless. Those are the best. And these dreams would happen every night for the last year. There were never the silly kind of dreams that you needed a handbook to decode. There was never a cow riding a unicorn through a storm on a rainbow or any symbolic shit like that. It was just my deepest fears of failure and abandonment replaying through my mind even when I was asleep. At least until last night.

Admittedly I am still working through my shit: all my feelings of regret and blame for the choices I made this last year, notably selling my house and making unsound decisions that left me kind of homeless and a little bit hopeless. Since my return to Vegas, it has been a constant battle of emotions within myself. While I know that I can’t go back in time and change anything, that doesn’t stop me from beating myself up constantly over it. I remember thinking it can’t keep going like this; it can’t keep this tempo of everyday being a little worse than the last. The days went on and on, the despair trudging along at a constant pace. And then one day some fucking hippie came in with her patchwork purse and Kamala autobiography asking for wetwipes. I thought that might be the day I really fucking lose it. She sat at the bar slurping her broth with discarded artichoke leaves, occasionally watching me and I could feel my internal rage that always simmers at a cool 140° starting to rise. Then all of a sudden she says “I’m a psychic and if you don’t want me to read you, I won’t but I’d really like to tell you something.” At a place in my life where I think I’d listen to ET give me advice, I said go ahead. So she says I’m cursed, someone has hexed me and while they may not actually want me to die, they really fucking hate my guts (no!!!), she thinks it’s a woman (probably), and do I have any idea who it could be (someone get me a pen and paper). She says tonight, like fucking tonight, is some rare super moon, full moon, blue moon combo so if I want to rid myself of all this nastiness surrounding myself, I need to get a white candle, write some names on some bay leaves, and burn them in the moonlight while I say a chant and then basically sage my asshole. Then she handed me a white stone and told me to charge it in the sun and wear it in my bra.

I shit you not.

Sounds wild as fuck right? Well, while the old Bitter Bitch would have thought this was a lot of silly hoopla and scoffed at her, this sad, despondent bitch that I’d recently become had actually been thinking something similar for awhile. In fact, I’d even used the word hexed at least ten times, partially joking that someone somewhere was poking sewing pins into a voodoo doll with my name on it. So when she said a dollar candle and some cooking herbs, I said o-fucking-k. In fact, I might’ve considered sacrificing a chicken if she’d told me to but burning herb seemed like a small price to pay for the notion of peace and I was stoked. I went down to Walmart and grabbed myself a cheap pillar candle and stuck it in a Tupperware container. Then I grabbed some bay leaves and began to write my haters on each leaf. I quickly realized that ten leaves was not enough so I wrote on some of the backs of the leaves before grouping names together, for example: “bitches who hate me from work” or “bitches who’ve dated my ex” because that just made more sense. Finally I did a leaf for general mother fuckers I just want to expel from my life. I made myself a drink, grabbed a lighter, and headed into the back yard where I had full view of the moon. I began the process of burning the leaves while saying some affirmations to the moon, one after the other until the whole pack of leaves was gone. Then I blew the candle out and washed the smoke over me as she instructed. I lit some sage and got to work on the house.

This was a month ago.

Now, I don’t really know if any of this worked or if its just some hippy dippy shit, but what I do know is that when you’re really low and really desperate, you’ll do just about anything to change your circumstances, including dancing around naked singing Ying Yang Twins songs under the pale moonlight. Either way, things began to turn around for me. Just a day later, I got the truck back after almost six months. I began to get hired on jobs I’d bid for months ago. I was saving money, had a vehicle, and finally making forward strides. I could finally start thinking about the future and the dreams I’d put aside. I also began to accept my new life here, which wasn’t all that bad. I’d made great new friends, made some substantial personal growth, and managed to land on my feet even when things seemed the bleakest. I began to see all the benefits of my new life and stopped dwelling on the losses of Bitter Bitch past. And then one day, just like that, for the first time in a long time, I had a dream and not a nightmare. I was a female Conan the Barbarian, covered in fur pelts and not some damaged girl living out of her Chevy Malibu in a Walmart parking lot. I was dreaming about fantasy instead of being bogged down by reality.

I don’t know if it was the saged asshole or the good vibes or just a slight change of luck for me but I do know that for the first time in a long time, I finally felt good again. So the next time some weirdo starts spouting off shit about intentions and gemstones, give it the benefit of the doubt. Because if its a full moon or a blue moon or any other celestial event, I suggest you get your ass out there in your underwear and get to fucking work.

Postscript - the unscented pillars at Walmart are only $3 bucks!