Unquiet
Things

I got yelled at on Reddit* today, so this explosion of runway ridiculousness was exactly what I needed.

Kevin Germanier turns haute couture into a glittering trash compactor’s fantasy ball where carnival debris, parade detritus, and party store castoffs become evening wear and rejected plastic bottles metamorphose into sculptural flames shooting from shoulders. This Swiss designer has appointed himself the fashion industry’s most glamorous garbage collector, transforming literal waste into a rainbow-bedazzled ball-pit apocalypse worn by models who look like they’re preparing for Crayola Eurovision end times.

The runway showcased gowns of toilet paper origami meets ice sculpture architecture, Big Bird pom-pom warehouse rave explosions, and lite-brite ninja fantasy attack catsuits (which sounds like a Sailor Moon move – “In the name of sustainable fashion, I’ll punish you!”) Watching a model stride down the runway encased in a phallic riot of colored balloons while Hello Kitty mascots shimmy in the front row feels like witnessing a children’s birthday party but make it DRUGS.

His “Les Joueuses” collection closed Paris Couture Week with the kind of unhinged optimism that comes from one who has perfected the alchemy of turning trash panic into glittering catharsis and sequined salvation.

*Anyway, sorry, Reddit lady, that my experience with and opinion about a totally subjective thing was not expressed to your liking and that I triggered you (despite my multiple content warnings!) Go look at Hello Kitty dressed up in your grandma’s old fiber optic lamp from the ’80s and calm down! Also, someone else patronizingly told me what I write amounts to “perfume fanfic.” Which…okay, that’s fair. 

✥ 2 comments

This is typically the sort of thing I might write about in my end-of-the-month newsletter (which is a different thing than my blog! Here’s an example of what I sent out in June) but we’re going to be traveling at the end of this month, so this will be the first time in three years that I am skipping a monthly newsletter. The dictator in my brain who holds stubbornly fast to arbitrary rules and deadlines that nobody but me cares about is trying hard to make me feel crappy about it, but I am attempting to resist.

Also…where should we go in Seattle? Coffee shops, tiki bars, nature walks/gardens, museums, please tell me where to find the best of these things! I have been there once before, but that was back in 2017 for a friend’s wedding, and we didn’t have time to do very much.

Anyway! Being off social media since early June has resulted in two noticeable things for me. A massive sense of peaceful unbotheredness, which probably merits getting into more, but all I will say is this: there’s a lot to be concerned and upset about in the world, but at least my time hasn’t been wasted by irritating people on Instagram. I get irritated/annoyed/peeved/infuriated for a lot of reasons, and a lot of them, I realize, are my own damn problems and issues and insecurities…but it has been SO NICE not to have all of these people in my face every day.

And the second nice thing about these people not being in my face every day is that they are not influencing me to buy whatever it is they are selling/shilling/whatever. I have saved so much money in the past two months. I bought a new pair of walking shoes for our upcoming travel (ok, on recommendations from Reddit, but I don’t consider Reddit social media). And one dinky thing from Amazon, and that’s it. I am that much closer to retiring in approximately 100 years!

Speaking of Amazon, the first inexpensive thing I have purchased lately and have a vast, weird fondness for is the little record display stand featured in the photo for this blog. It just makes me so happy. I cannot explain it. The second thing is this Ravi Shankar album that Ývan found for me in a local vintage shop for maybe $5.

But it’s not just the record, it was the whole day. Fans and Stoves is a really cool antique mall in an old Presbyterian church, and the afternoon we spent there was booming with gloomy, thunderous weather and downpours, and afterward we met up with friends for boardgames at a nearby brewery and had such a lovely time chatting and laughing that 3-4 hours had passed and we hadn’t even played a single game!

The Ravi Shankar album was a neat gift, but it was wrapped in the package of a wonderfully memorable day, and I think of it every time I listen.

Pickled onions, how do I love thee? To the depth and breadth and height of your glorious pink stink! This is a batch that I have steeped in strawberry vinegar (when you’re chopping up strawberries, save the tops, cover them with white vinegar overnight and strain into a jar, et voilà! Strawberry vinegar!) I have them in my lunctime salad every day and I can assure you, I smell delightful afterward.

Also on our daily salad are these sourdough discard crackers. It makes me SO MAD to throw away the excess starter after you feed it, so I either save it in the fridge for a rainy day (where a big gluggy vat of it sits forever mouldering) or I try to do something with it immediately.

For these, I spread the discard very thinly onto a silicone baking mat and sprinkle the top with lots of pumpkin seeds, slivered almonds, and hemp seeds. Bake at about 250° for 15-25 minutes, or until they are brown and shattery, break them up into satisfying shards, and store in an airtight container.

Ah, my dear library holds. Invariably, the anticipation of the thing is much more exciting than having the thing in hand. And inevitably, there are titles on this list that I won’t even get a chance to read in the two weeks that I am allotted to finish them. That’s okay. It’s a thrill just to see them all lined up, all the possibilities and stories that might unfold, like a buffet of potential worlds I may or may not have time to visit.  There’s a tantalizing romance in the overly ambitious library haul (which, funny enough, is aggressively and intentionally devoid of romance), the eternal optimism that this time, somehow, I’ll read faster than humanly possible and finish fourteen books in as many days. Please note that I started 157th in line for the Stephen King book. Yikes.

There’s something to be said for the quiet pleasures that emerge when you’re not constantly being told what to want or buy. What small, unexpected things have been making you happy lately when you’re not being sold to or influenced by algorithms? And while we’re chatting, drop your Seattle gems in the comments. I’m collecting recommendations like I collect unread books, hehehe.

✥ 5 comments

When I write about the artists whose work appears in my books, the focus is usually on showcasing the visual creations themselves. But with Forest Rogers, I find myself equally enchanted by her language. Her words cast spells – quite literally, if we consider Alan Moore’s insight that to spell is to manipulate words, to change consciousness. When Forest writes about “wrestling with devilkins” in her house “like a proper Baba Yaga hut,” or describes a pigeon dancing “a pure call to cast one’s very soul upon the waters,” her prose channels the same otherworldly quality as her sculptures.

Which presents me with a delightful challenge: how do I write about an artist who already expresses herself so beautifully? Forest’s mystical voice feels like incantations emerging from the same mythological realm as her creatures. But we’re going to try anyway, because her sculpture, The Beautiful Crustacean, graces the pages of The Art of Fantasy: A Visual Sourcebook of All That Is Unreal, and her work deserves deeper exploration.

One gets the sense that Forest Rogers is an artist who has experienced first-hand both the joy and despair of mermaids singing, has felt the euphoric, incandescent flutter of angel wings, held the literal hand of the dark night of the soul, and maybe even danced a tango with a prehistoric skeleton or a luminous beam of starlight. How else would this artist instinctively know how to sculpt the ineffable, the transcendent, the staggeringly unbelievable into such a graceful and dynamic reality?

These creatures, marvels of myth and imagination, monstrously beautiful and tinged with melancholy, seem poised at the verge, a frozen moment of fragile movement – as if they may at any moment take flight and disappear with their secrets into the mist, or skitter close and whisper mysterious revelations. Approach them with care, take only what is offered to you, and let the world go on, knowing that you have experienced a bit of the magic that made them.

Forest’s path to these mythological beings wasn’t direct. For 25 years, she created dinosaur sculptures for the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, alongside an eclectic array of commercial projects, but her artistic vision was seeded much earlier. As a child, she spent hours sitting on her grandmother’s floor studying volumes illustrated by Rackham, Nielsen, and Dulac – “I think I’m now digging through the universe for my ideas, just as I was looking for treasure in this house,” she reflects on her blog.

Growing up as the daughter of visionary artist Lou Rogers, Forest learned that art could be both wound and healing, a lesson that infuses her current work. Her creative process now begins with morning observations at a coffee shop, watching pigeons dance while she sketches on tracing paper, contemplating the same subjects repeatedly until they reveal their essential nature. From these loose drawings, she builds each sculpture methodically – first the head to establish identity, then an armature wire framework, gradually filling out the creature until it achieves that ineffable moment of transformation.

This gift for capturing transformation reveals itself across her mythological menagerie. Night Bloom captures a creature suspended between violence and grace, its delicate bat ears framing a face of porcelain serenity even as it holds a moth caught mid-flight at its lips – a dainty dinner frozen in breathless moments before consumption.

The being’s coloring whispers of twilight’s most tender palette: cream and pale salmon, the palest of lilacs, like a sunset with the saturation washed out in the inside of a seashell. Yet for all its predatory purpose, the creature has taken root, its lower body flowing into a plant-like stem that suggests it belongs as much to the garden as to the night sky. Here is hunger made beautiful, the hunt transformed into ballet, a reminder that even the most essential acts of survival can be rendered with exquisite tenderness.

In Winter Siren, Forest presents us with a figure draped in the deepest winter’s palette – plum and midnight blue feathers that seem simultaneously cloak and natural plumage, rimed with a scrim of frost that catches light like captured starshine.

Her pale face gazes cool and quiet with devotion as she holds aloft a golden Venetian mask fashioned as a sunburst. “She holds a mask suggesting the Sun, ever eagerly awaited in the longest winter nights,” Forest explains, and in her gesture we witness the entire drama of seasonal faith – winter personified as keeper of summer’s promise, the siren who sings not of shipwreck but of spring’s eventual return.

Octopoid Descending embodies the elemental pull toward oceanic depths, her tentacles streaming upward as if caught in an invisible current. Rendered in cream and the softest coral shadows, she possesses an expression both serene and formidable – a being wholly of the sea drawn toward her natural element.

Her descent carries the weight of ancient purpose, guiding her toward realms where pressure and darkness hold their own terrible beauty. Her tentacles flow with liquid grace, yet carry the weight of inevitability, as if she bears messages meant only for the deepest trenches.

In Goblin Spider, Forest weaves together folktale and ukiyo-e tradition with her own dark humor – the spider perched as elaborate headdress while a mouse dangles from lips that once might have held silk fabric in classical prints. Where courtesans once conveyed coded desire through delicate tissue, the creature offers rodent prey with the same demure poise. T

The wordplay tickles the mischievous itch in my brain that delights in such things: from moth in mouth to mouse in mouth, Forest creates her own language of captured sustenance. The symmetry speaks to that eternal tension she loves – grace balanced against horror, beauty shadowed by predation, the spider maiden who watches with eyes both human and arachnid, equally capable of seduction and consumption.

Night Sphinx embodies the wistful contemplation of desert nights, her gaze turned skyward toward constellations only she can read. Rendered in blues softened by darkness and touched with subtle gold as if moonlight were burnishing her feathers, she perches upon her pedestal with the patient grace of one who has spent centuries watching the wheel of stars. Her expression carries that particular melancholy of nocturnal guardians – beings who know the secrets whispered between dusk and dawn.

A delicate winding stairway spirals around the base of her pedestal, leading to an entrance far too small for sphinx paws but perfectly sized for the tiny magician who dwells below. She stands sentinel not just over the desert night, but over an entire miniature realm where creatures of different scales share the same moonlit world.

Flemish Moth emerges from transformative slumber, her face blank with the serene stasis of a creature suspended between becoming and being. “Hatched from the Northern Renaissance,” she bears wings that crown her head like an elaborate headdress complete with spiral antennae, while additional wings spread where human arms might rest.

Rendered in the softest pinks, yellows, creams and blues, she suggests something that might have fluttered from the detailed margins of an illuminated manuscript, her pale luminosity recalling the lustrous surfaces masters once achieved with patient oil glazes. A bright orange moth rests at her center, vivid against her dreamy palette, as if marking the spot where metamorphosis concentrates its most vital energies. Her form extends downward in a long moth-tail that ends in a delicate tuft, structured like the lepidoptera she channels, poised in that eternal moment between chrysalis and flight.

I gaze at this sculpture and want to sniff it too. What would a Flemish Moth perfume smell like? What is the fragrance of transformative slumber? Maybe dusty parchment, the powdery residue of ancient wings, pressed flowers between gilded vellum pages, the metallic sweetness of metamorphic silk.

“When I am creative, I realize: ‘This is Love,'” Forest has written, and this devotion permeates every carefully sculpted detail. Her creatures emerge from that same loving attention – beings caught in tender moments of transformation, rendered with the kind of patience that only deep affection allows. Each figure seems to hold knowledge born from their suspended state, as if their eternal pause between becoming has given them time to gather wisdom from both sides of transformation. What whispered revelations might they offer?

Perhaps the Winter Siren knows how to hold hope through the darkest months, while the Night Sphinx has memorized the true names of every star. The Goblin Spider might teach us about the duality that exists within us all, and the Flemish Moth could reveal how to sleep through our own metamorphosis without losing ourselves entirely. The Night Bloom understands the delicate balance between survival and grace, while the Octopoid Descending carries knowledge of what treasures wait in the deepest places we fear to explore. Forest’s work echoes ancient wisdom about transformation, a recognition that becoming requires both death and birth, that the spaces between are where magic gathers and essential truths dwell. Her creatures remind us that we, too, might be poised at the verge between what we were and what we might become.

Below waits an assembly of further enchantments, each a testament to Forest’s gift for seeing what mysteries live at the threshold, for coaxing them forth and offering them form.

Find Forest Rogers: Website // Instagram

✥ 3 comments

I designed a Magic: The Gathering card for a perfume today—Witchly Mixologist, complete with mana cost and flavor text and everything! The full story of how Winter Nights by Dasein became my olfactory black/green deck, is waiting in the Midnight Archives feature for Midnight Stinks Patreon subscribers today.

✥ comment

Harbingers of doom, vessels of secrets, survivors of catastrophe—rats have worn many historical hats (often that of “carrier”) but now they’re the ones being toted. Copenhagen Fashion Week has given us a metallic disco rat clutch that feels like ancient plague vermin reincarnated as glittering dance floor devotees.

Models prowled runways and lurked in photos with shiny vermin tucked under their arms like tiny, glamorous familiars, creatures whispering of witness to humanity’s cycles of excess and collapse, and which now spread fashion contagion instead of bubonic plague.

These are rats who’d fit right into a Studio 54 revival, complete with glass eyes that have seen civilizations crumble and probably know where to find the best after-party powders and pharmaceuticals. Anne Sofie Madsen and Esben Weile Kjær have created familiars for the disco apocalypse—rodent companions carrying FASHUN FEVER instead of actual fever.

To whoever is going to comment on this, I know, I know, someone else did it first. Probably even someone before that! You’re very smart. You know all the things. I probably should have consulted you before I wrote this. As a matter of fact, you probably should have written this! Wait…where are you going?

✥ 2 comments

Again, this is something I might typically share on my Instagram stories but we’re not doing that right now. We harvested a very sad dozen of carrots that looked like diminutive, diseased dingdongs, and I said “no thank you and good day, sir” to that!

But these warty little weenuses had a profusion of bushy greens, so I thought it would be a shame to toss the whole vegetable. Thus: carrot top pesto, pictured here with freshly made gnocchi. The recipe bloggers always say that baked potates make better gnocchi than mashed (lower moisture content) so that’s what I did this time, but I am not sure I could really tell the difference. I didn’t use a recipe for either of these things, but there are plenty of recipes for both all over the internet and YouTube if you had a similarly freakish carrot harvest.

In other news, I had a blood appointment last week, and the results are in. I am winning at cholesterol! I am apparently within normal range now. I am losing at iron. Probably because of these reasons. 

In other-other news (I guess this is turning into a little update list?) I completed my Goodreads reading challenge on August 7th. I finished my 100th book of the year when I read the last page of Catherine Dang’s What Hunger. Anytime I announce my progress (which is loudly and all the time), Yvan always deadpans, “Does this mean you are done reading for the year?” HAHAHAHA WHAT. Everyone’s a comedian. By the way, if you liked Monica Kim’s The Eyes Are The Best Part, I think you might like What Hunger even better.

And in the last bit of news…I submitted the final four chapters in my upcoming book! I cannot wait until I can seriously start talking about this thing. I have had so much fun writing it and have so much to share. Any guesses as to the title or what it’s about? If you get it right, I will send you a signed copy, on the house!

P.S. I had to look up how to spell “wiener,” and I did a Google search for cocktail wiener, and the search results gave me “cocktail wieners near you!” and for some reason, I cannot stop laughing at that. 

✥ 13 comments

✥ 4 comments

Robert Wun’s Fall 2025 couture collection felt like stumbling into someone else’s fever dream about getting dressed for a funeral that might also be a wedding that might also be a fundraising gala for surrealists in a parallel universe. In the pitch-black Théâtre du Châtelet, models drifted out like sleepwalkers draped in the remnants of interrupted morning rituals—quilted coverlets stained with phantom blood as if breakfast in bed had been a cannibalistic affair, handbags sporting formal wear, prosthetic limbs offering assistance where none was needed, one model adorned with what looked like a high-end Korean face mask infused with something like fermented eel placenta and pickled starfish extract and imprinted with Dr. Who’s Lady Cassandra.

Wun turned the act of getting dressed into a gothic haunted house attraction complete with the uncanny body horror of disembodied hands and shadow people adjusting hemlines and smoothing imaginary wrinkles, while veils were held up by tiny figures perched on heads like Ralph Wiggum chirping, “I’m helping!”

It was like watching someone get ready for prom or the Kentucky Derby in an avant-garde horror film directed by Klaus Nomi and the Brothers Quay—otherworldly elegance and operatic theatricality mixed with stop-motion surrealism and decaying beauty.

If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?

✥ 2 comments

You might have read the title of this post and assumed I was setting up something snarky or satirical. Not so! I have always loved the “What’s in my bag” blog posts and videos. There’s something gleefully voyeuristic about peering into someone else’s bag. Not voyeuristic in any creepy way, but just in that sense of being allowed access to a space that’s usually kept private. Your bag is one of the few places left that isn’t curated for public consumption; it’s not your Instagram feed or your carefully arranged bookshelf that guests will see. It’s just the real accumulation of what you actually need, think you might need, or forgot you were carrying.

That said, while I love people showing me what they keep in their bags, I would never want to reach into someone’s bag uninvited. The thought of digging through a stranger’s purse and encountering mystery crumbs, sticky lip gloss tubes that have somehow gotten hair and wrapped around them, crumpled tissues and wrappers of unknown origin, or worse, finding something wet and unidentifiable lurking in the bottom corner, makes my skin want to crawl desperately right off my body. No thank you!! I’ll take the controlled reveal of an organized dump-out over blindly groping around in someone else’s portable petri dish.

The intimacy feels safe because it’s accidental. No one sits down and thinks, “How can I reveal my deepest self through my choice of lip balm?” But that’s kinda what happens. The person carrying three different books tells a different story than the one with seventeen bobby pins or the one whose bag contains only Labubu dolls and antidepressants. We reveal ourselves through these portable ecosystems without meaning to, which makes the revelation feel more genuine than anything we might consciously share.

These mundane objects become accidental portraiture. Your wallet choice, whether you keep things organized or let them rattle around loose, what you think you might need versus what you actually use,  it all adds up to an unintentional autobiography. The broken sunglasses you keep meaning to fix, the receipt from an embarrassing impulse purchase, the lucky charm you’re too superstitious to remove. These aren’t calculated reveals; they’re just the debris of daily existence.

Maybe that’s why I find myself watching these videos with the same eagerness and enthusiasm I’d have when promised a good piece of gossip. The ritual of emptying a bag and cataloging its contents reveals more about someone than they probably intended: their priorities, their neuroses, their small preparations for an uncertain world. We call it these dispatches “content” – that most awful of internet words – but no matter how much I hate the term, that’s what it truly is: the contents of someone’s daily vessel, the small survival kit they carry through their ordinary life.

My bag is the Seneca Leather Crossbody from Will Leather Goods in black with cognac trim. I have to carry a crossbody; a clutch is out of the question because I would set it down somewhere and never see it again, and over-the-shoulder bags never work for me. Whether the strap is long or short, they’re always uncomfortable, with short over-the-shoulder being the absolute worst. I received this several years ago when I asked my Facebook friends for their recommendations for everyday bags. Shout-out to Tenebrous Kate for this one! It’s served me well and shows no signs of giving up. (I’ve got a nearly identical one in the cognac color that I am happy to let go of for half the cost, if you want it. Let me know!)

So here’s what’s actually living in my bag, along with the small stories each item tells.

A small leather wallet – I finally downsized from the grandma HOBO monstrosity I’d been carrying for years. I saw a Japanese YouTuber with a tiny wallet and thought, “I want that!” However, this was a very too-cool-for-school fashionista with access to Japanese brands that I can’t get my hands on, so this was as close as I could get. I found it on a site that, oddly, sells horse riding equipment, but I don’t recall the name of that site. The label indicates it’s an Embrazio wallet. Discovering the perfect wallet in the most unexpected place was quite cool, like finding the perfect countertop compost bin at a Goodwill shop for $2 because someone had thought it was a lunch box and marked it accordingly (true story). Being able to fit my wallet in normal-sized bags again feels like a small victory.

A pouch from Betsey Olmsted – This is where I keep everything organized because I don’t want my stuff rattling around loose. I fell for an Instagram ad for her watercolor patterns and an eccentric naturalist aesthetic.  Also pictured is an additional little pouch for loose change. This was a gift and I am not sure where it came from!

A small notebook for ideas and lists – Going back to at least 2012 and contains ideas for playlists, Christmas lists, ingredients for recipes, interview question inspirations, and funny things I’ve heard strangers say. Having a dedicated space for the random thoughts that pop up means I actually capture them instead of losing them to distraction, or mental fog, or that one person who always interrupts your train of thought with the dumbest thing at the most inconvenient time. I think this notebook came from IKEA.

A pen that actually works – I keep at least two that work because there’s nothing worse than needing to write something and discovering every pen in your vicinity has given up and you’re left standing there scratching and clicking uselessly like an idiot.

Travel-sized perfume – I carry fragrance the way other people carry lip balm. Though I, too, carry lip balm. Just one, though. Scents currently in play are:

Folie À Plusieurs Aura – Unfolds like a luminous apparition undulating above an endless expanse of sun-baked desert. The opening is a radiant display of warm, peppery ginger and cool, effervescent citrus in an almost holographic way, reminiscent of the way heat ripples above scorched sand—an olfactory mirage. As the initial brilliance settles, there are the cracked and tangled limbs of aromatic woods, the sun-bleached, tenacious timber that survives in arid climes. Incense weaves through these notes, adding an ethereal smokiness, and the vetiver in the base provides a rooty-woody-earthy anchor, amplifying the overall dryness. Ambroxan lends a diffusive quality, creating an expansive halo that seems to pulse and shift with radiance. Aura is a masterful, mesmerizing study in dryness and light that captures the magic of that liminal space where earth meets atmosphere, the mundane touches the divine, and is a testament to the raw beauty of desolate landscapes and the mystical lights that sometimes grace them.

Fantôme Duende – A craggy, forested floral with entangled elements of tree sap, jagged rocky hills, and purple flowers. It calls to mind Backworld’s song, “The Devil’s Plaything”: As in a ruin where violets grow / In moss-covered fields / On cold marble stone… But it also makes me think of Mikey Bustos’ “Filipino Mythical Creatures Rap.” These, you will surely note, are two very different songs.

Diptique Venise – As if the velvety moss-muscled Masters of the Universe Moss Man toy found himself in a biergarten nestled in the midst of a forest of crooked pines & twining nightshade. Seating himself under the canopy of verdant flora, the green plastic henchman orders a moderately priced sampler of lambics and goses and other sour, seasonal ales (but he’s going to expense it to Skeletor anyway) and as he’s enjoying his tiny, half-filled glass of coniferous resin and lactobacilus-y fermented grains, he notices the plants stealthily creeping closer, surreptitious snaking sneaking vines with intent to strangle. For though Moss Man can camouflage himself in foliage and control all the plants on Eternia, on Earth he’s apparently powerless and our terrestrial vegetation views him as a threat. As the air becomes suffocating with the scent of sap-filled botanical defense mechanisms, Moss Man slips into unconsciousness wishing he’d actually ordered the full-sized stein.

LUSH Karma – Imagine the most potent headshop you’ve ever visited and up the ante with the patchouliest fortune teller you ever met. Imagine this scent driving all your friends and loved ones away. That’s OK, you smell marvelous.

Small Advil pill case – I grew tired of being the friend who’s always asking to borrow aspirin when we’re out. It felt shameful to be so ill-prepared all the time, so now I carry my own.

A little passport for brewery stamps – We met a couple through a friend of a friend (rare for us homebodies), and they introduced us to a passport where you collect stamps from local breweries. When you fill up the book, you send it in and get a… thing? Of some sort? The free thing isn’t really the point, though. It gives us an excuse to explore places we might not have tried otherwise, and there’s something satisfying about the ritual of asking for your stamp, watching them press it into the little book.

Car keys – We have a new car with key fobs instead of actual keys, so nothing goes in the ignition. A few months ago, we drove to Yvan’s parents’ for dinner, and when we got there, he realized he didn’t even have his key. The car started up and drove because I had mine in my purse. Apparently, I’m the responsible one for keeping track of the magic car-starting device, which is ironic since, as I’ve written about extensively before, I don’t love to drive.

Phone – Because I am a modern human person, and even if I’m not using it, it freaks me out if I’m outside the house and I don’t have it on me. (Not pictured because that’s what I was using to take these photos.)

Tablet for reading emergencies – I am a reader. I am always reading. Being bookless in public is a 5-alarm emergency. (Not pictured because it was charging.)

Masks – Because pandemic. I still keep them around even though most people have moved on.

A rainbow fan – Yvan found this at a protest a few months ago after watching someone drop it and disappear into the crowd despite his attempts to return it. It’s plastic and fabric, folds up neatly and small, and obviously LGBTQ+ inspired. I take particular pleasure in breaking it out to fan myself audaciously in places where such displays are least appreciated. Plus, you know, Florida heat.

Hair ties – Because if even a single strand of hair touches my sweaty neck in a sweltering expanse of parking lot between the months of April and October, I will have a full-on meltdown. Also, a few Gudetama barrettes because sometimes you need your hair accessories to reflect your inner lazy egg energy.

A mirror – For checking that I don’t have everything bagel bits stuck between my teeth. This one features a print of one of Rebecca Reeves’ artworks.

A tarot card – I pull one before I go anywhere and tuck it in my bag, a little ritual I’ve been doing for a few years now. Which deck I use depends on my mood and currently it’s the Queen of Swords from David Palladini’s Aquarian Tarot, with its distinctive Art Deco aesthetic and washed-out watercolors that give the whole deck an expansive yet melancholy quality. I’m not a tarot expert, but her sharp clarity and no-nonsense independence seem like good company to carry around. It’s like having a tiny piece of guidance with me, though half the time I forget it’s there until I’m digging around for something else.

Vintage hankies – In case I ever go to the theatre again and a movie makes me cry! Though let’s be honest, a puppy in a dog food commercial makes me cry.

Hand sanitizer – I’m not a germaphobe, but wow, is it disgusting out there. Sometimes you touch something in public and immediately regret it.

An empty retainer case – I do have a retainer and a case at home ever since I got my Invisalign off in 2021, but why I’m carrying around this empty duplicate is a mystery even to me. It’s been living in my bag for months, and I can’t bring myself to remove it.

Bookmarks made for each of the books I have written – So that when I encounter them in the wild, I can slip them between the pages like a little secret.

 Looking at this collection, I see someone who has slowly learned that life doesn’t have to be as hard as I once made it. No more suffering through headaches or sweaty neck meltdowns because I was too scattered to plan ahead. Just the basics for getting through the day without unnecessary misery, plus a few things that make daily life a little more magical. It’s the bag of someone who’s learned that being prepared doesn’t have to mean being weighed down and that taking care of yourself doesn’t have to be complicated.

So tell me – what’s really in your bag? Not the curated version you’d show on Instagram, but the honest inventory of what you actually schlep around with you. What stories do your everyday objects tell?

If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?

…or support me on Patreon!

 

✥ 4 comments

A pale face emerges from a writhing, slithering mass of beetles and larvae, yet Jana Heidersdorf’s macabre portrait mesmerizes, not disturbs. In her cover art for the gothic metal project Wurmpalast, inspired by Poe’s Ligeia, insects arrange themselves into baroque adornments around serene features while a lone specimen makes its pilgrimage across her lips. The beetles become ornamental headdress transforming infestation into coronation. Decomposition, but make it elegant devastation.

When I was curating The Art of Darkness and later, The Art of Fantasy, Jana’s work found its way into both collections. She finds genuine beauty in traditionally unsettling imagery and tenderness in decay. Her approach to the darker things feels emotionally vulnerable rather than gratuitous or manufactured for shock.

Consider her mermaids, which she’s created by the dozens. The Queen of Eels pulses with inner light in crushing ocean depths, her elongated form more alien than human, while serpentine creatures coil around her in devoted attendance. She commands these deep-sea dwellers through presence alone. Jana paints underwater realms in midnight blues and greens where strange creatures generate their own light. Her mermaids feel genuinely otherworldly and more than a little terrifying, closer to what such beings might actually be if they ruled kingdoms we can’t fathom.

Her fairy tale reimaginings reveal similar subversive instincts. In “Wolfwood,” the beast has grown large enough to encompass entire forests within its dark fur, each strand housing shadowed trees and hidden paths. His luminous eyes burn like twin moons above a tiny figure in red…but this isn’t the cowering child of familiar stories. She stands her ground in the starlit clearing, neither fleeing nor advancing, her posture suggesting curiosity and wonder rather than fear; she’s genuinely interested in this encounter. The blue-gray mist shrouding the trees gives it a dreamlike quality, and we’re not sure if this is a nightmare, but we’re also not afraid to find out.

There’s a ritualistic quality to many of her pieces that speaks to deeper mythologies. “Dreambird” captures a covenant sealed in crimson, not violence but offering, as a small brown bird pierces a ghostly palm in one clean swoop. Each feather rendered with medieval manuscript devotion, the creature becomes both communion wafer and consecrating priest. The blood that wells speaks not of wound but willing sacrifice, each ruby drop a prayer offered up. Against mottled jade darkness, the pale hand becomes altar, the bird transformed from woodland creature into mystical messenger.

“Spider’s Cradle” continues this theme of sacred exchange. Death extends jewelry with a grandmother’s care, skeletal fingers cradling web-work as if spun from moonbeams. Each dewdrop caught in the strands gleams like baroque pearls while a white spider bears a ruby birthmark – the crimson sigil of small sovereignty. The phantom face veiled in green shadows suggests inheritance rather than transaction, ancient wisdom passed from bone to the eight-legged makers of delicate snares.

Not everything dwells in shadow. In “Apparition,” the night sky’s dreams of swans takes wing in luminescent clouds. The ethereal bird materializes from stardust, its form shifting between solid grace and celestial vapor as it glides through velvet darkness. Below, a solitary figure witnesses from their balcony – summoner or blessed observer, we can’t tell. It’s the artist at her most hopeful, yet mystery persists even in gentler visions.

Her book cover work demonstrates how these sensibilities translate to commercial projects. For Don’t Let the Forest In, a formal portrait fissures along organic lines as wild roses and thorned branches spill through tears in the photographic surface. A pale butterfly settles among the chaos. A crimson stain spots a collar. Violence and fragility. Blood and wings.

“Tears,” created for Month of Fear 2018, captures a nocturnal being that could be timeless elemental spirit or simply someone out past their bedtime. The question hovers in wide, unblinking eyes – one of which nestles a tiny white spider like a glowing moonstone. What slumbering spirits is she communing with? What midnight magics is she calling forth?

In “Make a Devil Out of Me,” elongated fingers curve into a shape that could be horns – or is it just the way pale hands twist in darkness? Each fingertip sharpens to wicked points while rose vines coil around bone-thin digits. Above, lurid red eyes glower from shadows. Are we seeing transformation, or just the power of suggestion? The pose suggests both invitation and challenge – someone who already feels monstrous finally showing us what they see in the mirror.

Jana finds the sacred in decay, the tender in transformation. Her creatures don’t exist to frighten but to reveal something true about change, about how what we fear might actually offer gifts, how the grotesque can reveal hidden forms of grace, how what repels and disturbs us, what we instinctively avoid might be precisely what we need to see. Through her art, Jana proposes that wisdom often wears frightening masks, that beauty and horror might be closer companions than we’d like to admit. That perhaps our discomfort is a compass, pointing toward the truths we’re not yet ready to face but desperately need to find. That change isn’t something to endure but something to embrace, that our deepest growth might come from the very deepest, darkest places.

Below are a few more of my favorites among the dispatches from the dark corners of Jana’s imagination…

If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?

✥ 1 comment