Purpose.

I've been wondering what I'm going to put in this blog.

I'm a bit old-skool in that I feel what I put on the web should actually be of some value - I don't understand the allure of posting a laundry-list of things that you've done in a day, devoid of commentary or narrative. But I have a Livejournal out there that already collects the interesting stories in my life. I also have a second LJ that contains book reviews for an ongoing book project.

Nobody reads this. I think I can say that with all saftey. So I've decided to put my heresies here. Like everyone else, there are things that I don't talk about. Even me, Little Miss Loquatious. There are things I am not entirely comfortable discussing.

These are things I am not entirely comfortable with, full stop.

I live between worlds. The rational and the occult battle away around me, and I have very few people I can discuss this with comfortably. People who don't have the experiences I have can't understand what it's like. I've tried to communicate what it's like. I fail.

I have occassional moments of prescience. They are useless, by and large, and are best described as remembering something ahead of time. Like deja vu, only the other way around. They come as visions, auditory hallicinations or scents, and they can be so very confusing. I've been blindsided by them, to the point where I've had to physically stop what I'm doing and compose myself. I've been wandering around the city and smelled blood, and sulphur and concrete dust, and have spent the rest of the day in a day trying to decipher it, and to stop my heart from racing. They only ever last a few seconds, and I never get anything useful. There's only ever enough to tag a moment, so that when it does happen, I remember the vision and when it happened. About the only time this is useful is when I know who's calling before I pick up the phone.

I pick pregnacies before the mother knows, and I'm usually right about gender, too. But the knowledge comes to me passing women in the street, and I have no way to convey it to them, and I know damn well that they don't want to hear. I just have to keep walking.

Sometimes I have dreams that later come to pass. But I also have dreams that are just my brain chewing over the day's content. The predictions fall between the fantasies like a paragraph taken from a newspaper and sandwiched into a novel. Very rarely I can pick it, but never to the point where I can use it.

Things speak to me in the night. It's usually in the night. Ghosts and restless spirits, lares and penates. I'm particulary good with water spirits - undines, sylphs. Naiads and nerieds. Malicious things have been known to come looking for me, because I know that they're there. They can hassle me because I can hear them.

I occasionally refer to this whole package of maladies and blessings as "the Spidey sense". That name clips in the scariness of it, makes it palatable and easier to contemplate.
The sense is just that - an extra dimension that allows me to take in things in a different way to other people. I know that some time years from now science will work out what exactly is going on in my head. There's a lot of talk in occult communities about the possibilty of quantum mechanics finally being able to tell us why we can do what we can do. Sometimes I think it's a job for the psychiatrists, especially when things are singing to me and I'm more worried about people who aren't alive yet than myself.

See, there's a history of mental illness in my family, and for regular people that's a bit enough sword dangling over them. When you've been seeing ghosts since childhood a history like that can inspire such suspicious doubt - I worry so much that I'm just a mad woman, and that every encounter I've ever had is just another step towards a sanitorium. It doesn't help that so many of the people I've met who are sympathetic to my experiences have been well removed from reality. The people who I've met who are rational and understanding can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Most infuriating of all is that I even seek that confirmation, since I don't need confirmation in any other aspect of my life. The spectre of mental disintegration is so very huge that I will check my mental health against others every damn chance I get.

So I'm going to put this here as another checkpoint, along with my journals and workbooks. I can look back later, and maybe things will make some sense.