#haven’t been on here in ages and owe everyone a catchup!

[ancat-dubh]

A friend died a few weeks ago and I dreamed about him last night. I say friend – he was my boss at my first bartending job when I was 18, and for a few years after that at the theatre where we both acted, did the box office, and served drinks. That was a big transformative period of my life, though, and a lot of the grown-ups around me then – charismatic actors living out of their suitcases, often in addiction, doing some of the greatest art I’ll ever see, also my first dose of queer elders – have had an outsized lasting influence in my life.

He was a friend in my mind, even though we mostly only exchanged birthday messages and pleasantries when I was in town or, once, a black-out drunken run-in at the dive bar where he didn’t recognise me, but smiled and pirouetted me on my way to the bathroom. He was a strange, intense poet who’d won Jeopardy one year, given it all away, and tried and tried to make it work as an actor. He drank more as he got older, and his frequent Facebook posts got angrier, lonelier, occasionally blaming unnamed women for the pain he was in; his spot-on range of accents, sleepy gentle bookseller’s regard, and ability to flick into uncanny, ecstatic states onstage in an instant stayed the same.

He’d grown up in the Green Mountains, and it was there I was driving to see him in my dream. I’d been late getting up to meet him; we’d planned to get a drink at the bar in the town where his mother lived. We were having a text exchange while I drove, the kind you sometimes have in dreams where everything’s shaky and the buttons aren’t working and the conversation’s high stakes. (Or maybe you don’t have those – it’s been a while since I’ve dreamed regularly, years, maybe, but I’ve had a few these past few weeks). After getting tired of waiting for me, he’d gone off to a local environmental demo in support of a rare species of snake. While he was there, a counter-protestor had lit the forest on fire; he was texting me images and videos of the fire, of himself yelling and shouting trying to direct the firefighters, alongside downloaded images of the rare snake they were there to save. Are you okay? I was trying to ask as I drove further up the Mountains towards his house. I stared at the image of the snake bouncing in my lap while I waited for his reply – yellow belly, iridescent black body blazing a dull rainbow.

I haven’t been a ~visual artist dahling since about age 16 and I shan’t pretend to be so it surprised me how much the automatic drawing I did tonight to charge my quarter of our Imbolc ritual looked as it did on the phone in my dream. It looked, too, like the banner my friend and I painted together in the dream when we both arrived at his house safely – him smoky and tired, me out of breath from my anxious drive, cracking open a few beers and an old bedsheet and almost wordlessly painting the snake against the smouldering woods together to hang on his wall. It didn’t occur to me he was dead until after I woke up, but when I remembered the overall feeling of relief, contentment, ease in my body remained alongside grief.

I slowly worked some protection magic into a snake drawing tonight doing a little improvised ritual digesting after our feast (Guinness and honey glazed salmon, my v non-tradish version of colcannon, cheese platter with dried apricots, clotted cream and madeleines). After two of us left, my friend who was hosting and I made our own sketches of snakeskins with intentions and offerings written between the scales, and burned them while pouring out some libations to the ancestors and local gods. I thought about one story of Brigid, particular to Scotland, where the goddess emerges from the ground as a snake to start the spring; snakes fleeing fires through canyons and across hot asphalt in LA; the quiet, tactical prudence of the Wood Snake and the days-old Chinese New Year.

It occurred to me once or twice too, as I thought about my dead friend’s insistence on sending me this image of a snake, of all things, burning vibrant and don’t-touch-me colourful over a pine forest sparking into flames – I’m scared of snakes. Ever since I was four years old, and nearly stepped on a baby copperhead wriggling across my path while I walked barefoot through a dusty summer meadow. But this one felt like so much of a Sign showing up the way he did, I felt like I knew him already; there was no question of being afraid. God is change, I wrote on my paper sketched snakeskin; my friend and I wound ours together and set them alight and they burned right through into a perfect circle of black ash, so perfect and simultaneous we both shrieked and clapped our hands. (I’d had us read some of the maxims in Parable of the Sower for our ritual – I’d started rereading it the other week with images of the LA fires echoing in my brain and had to stop because the whole thing was a little too real and relentless and my brain’s only a few weeks out from feeling like a sharp trap). Spring’s not here yet but the change is here already. I thought of the snake-goddess sticking her head from her winter burrow, tongue tasting the air to confirm – yes. We’re in it; it’s here.