kimberlysteele: (Default)



I am happy to read your Ogham free of charge -- that's how I hone my divination skills. Please limit your reading request to four or fewer Ogham cards: though this can take many forms, here are some common ones (all of them are basically combos of 4 cards):

 
-a single three card reading for the week or month and a one-off, one card reading
-four questions about four separate items that require one answer (card) per item
-a one card reading to answer a specific question and a three card for a more nuanced question
-Two separate readings, two cards a piece exploring the positives and negatives of two different choices

I am happy to do Ogham readings confidentially via emails -- just email me at k steele studio at gmail during the allotted time/before deadline. I cannot answer health questions. If you have a question about health or another sensitive, private matter, provide a bunch of non-identifying information and the Ogham will be able to figure it out even if I don't. I'm serious... the Ogham actually tend to "know" things without me being privy to what is going on.

Please note I take time off during Solstices and Equinoxes for Druid stuff and because sometimes I simply need a break.

My next planned break is from June 18 - July 5, 2026.

I take reading requests from whenever this post goes up on Friday night until 8pm US Central Time Saturday.

For a more in depth look into how I read and interpret the Ogham's symbols, please visit my website druidogham.wordpress.com.

Thank you for your generous donations. They often buy cat food and litter, groceries, and take out burritos and sandwiches for my Mom and me. If you would like to donate, please do it here:

http://buymeacoffee.com/kimberlysteele

Your prayers of blessing to the deity/deities of your choice are welcome whether or not you can donate.

Open Post

Jun. 8th, 2026 02:41 pm
kimberlysteele: (Default)
 Another month, another Open Post! I'll be fielding new comments on this post until July 8, 2026. Please don't use the eff word unless it truly makes sense in the context you are using it. Thanks!
kimberlysteele: (Default)
After seeing the movie Obsession in the theater, I was inspired to re-watch 2 other movies about wishes gone horribly wrong from the past: Wishmaster (1997) and Wish Upon (2017). Obsession has gotten its own full, spicy review behind my Substack paywall, however, I will synopsize it here without spoilers.

Obsession is the story of a Caspar Milquetoast named Bear who lives a lonely, post-teenage life in the house he inherited from his dead grandmother. He is on a daily banquet of antidepressants which somehow end up being eaten by his cat Sandy, who tragically dies. Bear is in love/lust with his friend Nikki who is his co-worker at another friend’s father’s music store. On the night Bear finds his dead cat, Nikki invites him to a party. Instead of declining to mourn over his pet, Bear allows himself to be dragged into attending. On the way, he picks up a gag gift an an occult store called the One Wish Willow, a glorified stick that promises to grant one wish when broken in half. Bear is tasked with driving an intoxicated Nikki to her home. After Nikki mildly confronts him and asks him “Do you like me?” Bear takes the coward’s way out and denies he has any romantic interest in his friend. He then uses the One Wish Willow outside Nikki’s house, wishing for her to love him more than anything else in the world. Nikki becomes instantly obsessed with him, which is paradise for a short time but quickly devolves into Nikki having a violent split personality. The “real” Nikki suffers and rots inside as Bear has his way with the demonic Nikki who is in love with him. She begins an escalating campaign of possessiveness, jealousy, and self-harm that culminates in an eerie climax.

Wishmaster is a Wes Craven film directed by Robert Kurtzman that became an offensively franchised intellectual property. This review considers only the first Wishmaster from 1997 directed by Robert Kurtzman. The film begins in 12th century Persia. An emperor is using his second wish (it is implied that his first wish was to become Emperor) granted to him by a djinn who has been released from a red jewel. He foolishly asks to “see wonders”, and his wish is granted when his entire palace becomes infested with wondrous horrors such as a people being turned into reptiles and trees and H.R. Geiger-style aliens bursting out of their stomachs. The emperor’s mage corners the emperor before he can make the third wish to “set things right”, warning him that the djinn wants it because it would allow djinn-kind to spew itself all over the planet to presumably work more “wonders”. The mage traps the djinn in a fire opal with some esoteric incantations and the chaos ends without the third wish being made.

Cut scene to modern day America. A drunk crane operator accidentally drops a priceless statue of Ahura Mazda — the very same one that the mage used to embed the fire opal — and kills a guy while breaking the statue. The collector, Raymond Beaumont played by Robert Englund of Freddie Krueger fame, is rightfully pissed. A dockworker surreptitiously finds the opal in a chunk of the broken statue and brings it to an appraiser. The appraiser, Alexandra Amberson played by Tammy Lauren, accidentally wakes the djinn by examining the stone with a bright light. This ends up psychically bonding her to the djinn and all his upcoming misdeeds.

Not knowing what she has done, Alexandra or Alex as she is known in the film takes the gemstone to her colleague Josh, who ends up as a casualty of the djinn when it explodes out of the stone for the first time in 800 plus years. Josh examines the stone as a favor to Alex right after he makes it known he has a crush on her. The djinn asks Josh, who is bleeding out from severe wounds, if he would like some pain relief. Josh says yes and the djinn ends his life, which Alex feels as a sort of awful vision. The djinn uses more unfortunate victims to gain a human form. His regular form is very deluxe Spirit Halloween scary demon costume, complete with hooked nose and pointy ears. He hijacks some dude’s corpse via his ability to “wear” faces and bodies, transforming himself into a more debonair Agent Smith. With his new body, it is much easier to terrorize the general populace with wishes as boneheaded literalism. A woman who wishes to be forever beautiful becomes a mannequin and a man who wishes for a million dollars ends up getting his mother (also his insurance beneficiary) killed in a plane crash.

Wishmaster is a silly film and its ending is equally silly, and though I will try not to spoil it, it’s the adult rendition of “whoops, it was all a bad dream.”

2017’s Wish Upon, written by Barbara Marshall and directed by John R. Leonetti, opens with a tragedy. A mother says goodbye to her young daughter and her golden labrador, sending them off on her bike to ride down the block. She then retreats to the upper floor of a quaint Victorian house and hangs herself. Her daughter returns, witnessing the end moments of her mother’s suicide.

Years later, the girl, whose name is Clare Shannon, is an unhappy teenager and her dog is no longer a puppy. She is being harassed at school by an evil bully named Darcie and her crew of friends. Clare’s father, a compulsive hoarder, gives Clare a birthday gift in the form of a Chinese music box that he found in a dumpster dive near her high school. Clare, who happens to be taking Chinese in high school, deciphers the “make a wish on this box” part of the inscriptions on the box. She casually wishes for her enemy Darcie to rot. Darcie develops severe necrotizing fasciitis, which is worth a few laughs among Clare and her friends and also saves Clare having to deal with the aggravation of Darcie and her bully crew. The same day, Clare’s beloved dog dies, his guts spilled out underneath the rickety porch on the old Victorian house. The premise of Wish Upon is that the box grants 7 wishes to its owner, however, every wish has a price that must be paid in blood and the seventh wish’s blood price is the soul of the wisher. Clare slowly figures out this mystery, picking up goodies along the way, all with a commensurate price in the form of both boneheaded literalism and somebody literally dying every time a wish is made. Once again, the ending was a cop out, though done in a slightly more clever and stylish way.

Wishmaster was a big deal when it came out and Wish Upon was the talk of the town back in 2017 from what little I remember. Obsession made a huge splash because it was made for only a million dollars and raked in over 150 million on opening weekend, making it the most profitable horror movie ever made.

All three of these films use the plot device of wish-making as boneheaded literalism, and right out of the gate, it is a tiresome premise. Horror as a genre has always suffered from lacking nuance, and nothing says “this isn’t actually worth thinking about” than a jump scare where someone dies by getting her hair caught in a garbage disposal or having her head bashed in on the steering wheel of a car by an insane murderer.
These movies actually serve to keep us from thinking about the consequences of wishes by fooling us into the trance of the belief that wishes mean nothing because they don’t immediately result in obvious tragedy or grievous physical harm. Our world does not resemble the world of fantasy, where a wish made on a stick, stone, or box can bring instant fame and fortune, such as a billion dollars literally falling from the ceiling (Obsession) or the instant inheritance of a family fortune (Wish Upon, Wishmaster). We think that because we cannot wish to win the lottery (unless you are Jeffrey Epstein, who won it twice) and have it happen that we don’t have to reap any consequences from pining for unearned wealth. That is what these wish morality plays are about, by the way — the horrific karma of unearned wealth.

We all do magic


Our era is one of profound misunderstanding of magic. Magic is never understood as something that is done by everybody all the time. To grotesquely oversimplify, magic is the inception, process, and reverberation of intention. People will jump to even more oversimplified conclusions and say “magic is intention.” Yes and no. Magic is the way intention works, not intention itself. You are doing magic right now. You intended to read this article and you are reading it. This took a bunch of magic, such as applying the skill of reading, forcing yourself to keep your eyes on my words in an extremely distracting environment, and by the potential of thinking these words after you have read them. I thank you for the your magic you have done in reading this article, and this in itself is me doing magic on the article and you, its reader. Gratitude is the most powerful magic in the universe, and it spreads by the power of 7, which is a long story I won’t get into right now. At any rate, human beings are not the only ones capable of magic, and that is what my book Sacred Homemaking attempts to explain. Houses, trees, animals, rocks, towns, couches, doors, and even toilets do magic because they participate in the processes of intention. It is my opinion that the toilet wants to be cleaned and thanked every day, and that is the foundation of my quirky book, this idea that helping household objects by appreciating them can help them to help you. Magic is not as obvious as light beams shooting out of Harry Potter’s fingers. If it was, we would live in the world of Wishmaster, Wish Upon, and Obsession where stupid wishes brought even stupider consequences right on schedule. Instead, we live in a complicated, deeply enchanted world of intersecting intentions that is more akin to ripples in a pond. Never forget that there is more to the pond than just the surface.

The bad witch

Feminists like to imagine a fantasy of all ancient witches being good, persecuted by evilly evil Christianity for daring to operate outside of its toxic monotheist system. Yes, that definitely happened, and there were some herbalists who were burned at stake for the mere crime of being better at healing than the local priest or doctor. Sometimes, witches were burned because they actually were causing harm.
Everyone does magic all the time, and that means that intention is actually pretty important. Some people are extremely good at weaponizing the mental power to wish harm, and though it cannot be proven, if they put their mind to it, they can cause someone to get hurt, suffer, and die just by thinking it. I had one of these who used to attend the meetings of a group I was part of. She had no pretensions to doing witchcraft or formal magic. She just wished harm all the time, and sometimes her wishes came true. She was certainly good at antagonizing other people in the group and causing them direct drama and stress from her asinine behavior. In medieval times, I can see her being pilloried and cast out of whatever city she had blighted by her presence and she would have deserved it. Nowadays, nobody except I was able to detect what she was doing, so she and witches like her run amok and wreak whatever harm they want.

Intentions matter

I am going to pick on those who wish to win the lottery for a hot minute, as I think it plays into the theme of the 3 movies featured in this article. The wish to win the lottery seems perfectly innocent, and much like Bear of Obsession half-heartedly wishing for Nikki’s love and teenage Clare wishing for affection from the popular boy who becomes obsessed with her, wishes are made in a half-assed, thoughtless manner that can later ruin our lives and the lives of those around us. Wishing to win the lottery is a failure to be grateful for the lotteries you’ve already won. If you are reasonably healthy, have a roof overhead, clean water to drink, and plenty to eat, you are already richer than several billion people on this planet. Those who get the literal wish granted and come into a great deal of money are more cursed than blessed, even if they don’t know it yet. That is what Matthew 19:24 was talking about when Jesus said that it was very hard for a rich man to enter heaven. The more luxury you have, the more you want to wallow in it, and the more it acts as a prosthetic so you can be lazy and lose even the most basic abilities to organize, cook, clean, and think for yourself.

Pop stars and their intentions

Ariana Grande may not be long for this world. She recently went on tour and she looks terrible. She looks as if an evil djinn granted her wish to be the thinnest singer there ever was.


Though we are not officially allowed to comment upon women's bodies (men's bodies are fair game?) by the wokerati, we can easily observe that not only is the emperor naked as the day he was born, the empress has starved herself down to skin, gristle, and bones.
 
 
We can almost imagine a child Ariana (a childhood she seems desperate to capture even at age 32) wishing to become the most beautiful princess in the world. She got her wish. For a time, she was at the top of a game that was nearly impossible to win. Perfect pitch, perfect body. The blood price of Adriana’s wish was having to go through Dan Schneider, Tom Hanks, and who knows how many countless other pedophiles to get to the top of the heavily-frosted layer cake. These encounters have taken their toll and now a frail, skeletal Ariana struts the stage invoking images of Eugenia Cooney and Karen Carpenter. The powers granted her wishes but at great cost. The same is true of Michael Jackson, Justin Bieber, and every actor, actress, and personality that has achieved Hollywood fame. They gained the largest stages and arenas and sold their souls along the way, because certain intentions carry a price.

So let's please stop thinking of wishes as things that literally come into being like instant coffee when you add water. A wish is an intention that morphs over time along with its consequences, shaping both the wisher and the environment itself. Wishes are magic. Not literally turning a pumpkin into a coach or zapping someone dead, though I suppose both of those are possible if you know the right tech crew. Wishes are dangerous enough without having to be literally life-ending, and though Hollywood will never catch on, that should not stop us from learning the truth.

kimberlysteele: (Default)



I am happy to read your Ogham free of charge -- that's how I hone my divination skills. Please limit your reading request to four or fewer Ogham cards: though this can take many forms, here are some common ones (all of them are basically combos of 4 cards):

 
-a single three card reading for the week or month and a one-off, one card reading
-four questions about four separate items that require one answer (card) per item
-a one card reading to answer a specific question and a three card for a more nuanced question
-Two separate readings, two cards a piece exploring the positives and negatives of two different choices

I am happy to do Ogham readings confidentially via emails -- just email me at k steele studio at gmail during the allotted time/before deadline. I cannot answer health questions. If you have a question about health or another sensitive, private matter, provide a bunch of non-identifying information and the Ogham will be able to figure it out even if I don't. I'm serious... the Ogham actually tend to "know" things without me being privy to what is going on.

Please note I take time off during Solstices and Equinoxes for Druid stuff and because sometimes I simply need a break.

My next planned break is from June 18 - July 5, 2026.

I take reading requests from whenever this post goes up on Friday night until 8pm US Central Time Saturday.

For a more in depth look into how I read and interpret the Ogham's symbols, please visit my website druidogham.wordpress.com.

Thank you for your generous donations. They often buy cat food and litter, groceries, and take out burritos and sandwiches for my Mom and me. If you would like to donate, please do it here:

http://buymeacoffee.com/kimberlysteele

Your prayers of blessing to the deity/deities of your choice are welcome whether or not you can donate.

kimberlysteele: (Default)

Humans are not a very bright species, and we express our profound misunderstandings of the universe by attempting to tabulate the scores of everything in perceived existence. The prevalence of autism has not helped matters, as autistic people tend to have an attraction to quantification as part of their disorder. To fan that fire, autistic people like myself often suffer from autistic literalism as a side effect of autistic narcissism, which means that we think following directions to the letter or “playing by the rules” will steer outcomes towards what they would be in our ideal world. If I had a dollar for every time my autistic literalism has blown up in my face, I would be a very rich woman.


We are all on the spectrum in some sense, and the worst afflicted are not necessarily bean counters. A bean counter is a human being who has fallen into the trap of gameifying every interaction in his or her life, hoping that there is a system beneath it all that they can exploit and reap the eternal benefits. Most religions are built by people who have gameified their particular god or gods, firstly presuming that their deity is superior to all others (or in the case of monotheism is the only deity that exists) and secondly presuming they are God’s chosen people. Monotheism is especially plagued with literalism, and that is why we have Christians who waste their lives living provisionally in anticipation of the Second Coming and Jews who believe avoiding pork will help them in the afterlife. Religion, being a creation of human idiots grasping at straws, is not good at grasping the subtle, and the spiritual is the subtle. Religion bulldozes the subtle and its metaphors with obtuse virtue signaling and grandiose carnivals of unearned wealth and fake charity. Churches and temples are great as social clubs in a civilization that has lost its ability to create social cohesion, but as far as getting humans any closer to the Divine is concerned, they suck at the one job they are supposed to perform.


Bean counting for 5 year olds


If we have good parents, we are taught as children to trade good behavior for approval. We are nurtured and not left to our own devices when it comes to learning to go potty, how to clean up after ourselves, how to share with others, and earning an allowance. The trouble comes when we are forced into school, or at least it came when I was forced into school with a bunch of strangers who immediately hated me and determined that I would be cast in the role of Outsider for the next 14 years of my life. A blissful youth spent at home was broken on the rocks of girls who forced me to sit by the bus driver because I had never met them or their friends at age 4. At age 9, I won spelling bees and had a handful of pals but was so generally hated by my so-called “best” friend that she admitted that her mother hated my guts and did not want me to hang out with her anymore. Popularity was a game and I was its biggest loser. I felt alone at the time, not understanding that my experience was being played out in every classroom across the nation and the world. School was not about learning — just about everything I ever learned during ages 4-17 was learned on my own or via my parents. Reading? My mother taught me that. Arithmetic? That was my dad, who showed me how to add and subtract. Typing? I taught myself on an old-fashioned ink and ribbon typewriter with the help of a book. School was about learning to comply with absurd rules to please unhappy and bitter “teachers” who lived lives of quiet desperation while trying to make it look like they knew what they were doing. School was about becoming a good little drone who knew what to say in order to keep the peace.


School sports


One of the ways to become popular in school besides being born to obscenely rich parents was to excel in athletics. It was not enough to be fit and healthy; no, you had to be the one who could hit a softball into the subdivisions beyond the creek and down someone’s chimney. You had to run fast enough to prequalify for the Olympics. If you were a cheerleader, you had to be able to do flips in the air and to be tossed around like a hackey sack without landing on the ground with two broken legs. If you were not that — heaven forbid you were fat, uncoordinated, or just plain not into sports! — you were shunned as weak and pathetic.


Those of us who sucked at sports were tasked to prove our worth elsewhere. The other school clubs and activities beckoned: Join the debate team to word-battle with other kids! Enter the sonatina festival! Qualify for National Honors Society so you’ll have better chances of getting into college! Join Yearbook so you can be of use to the school with all that free time you have after 4 hours a night of homework! It was never enough to just be.


You don’t have to imagine the surprise of all those who were repeatedly told they would get good jobs after graduating college to afford spouses, a home, and a yearly vacation somewhere because they are living that surprise. Zoomers, Millennials, and most of Gen X labored under the delusion that by following the script of get-good-grades-then-degree, they would be rewarded with a job that paid enough to cover the bills and a few small luxuries. They thought they would have enough to raise a family if they chose to do that. As it turns out, my decision to not have children was the best economic decision I have ever made for myself. Had I landed with a husband who wanted children (there was a guy I had a crush on in college who probably could have gotten me to bear his children if it my love had been requited) we would have been very challenged when it came to affording the basics for them. Both spouses have to work these days outside of an extremely privileged echelon of the upper middle class. Everybody has got to hustle, and even then, it is almost impossible to make ends meet.


Most of the women and men who went to college got rug-pulled. This has not stopped the current generation from flooding into colleges and universities as if the past 30 years never happened. They still believe in the dream of flowing into a luxe life after serving up 4 - 8 of their most productive years. Dreams are hard to kill, and bean-counting depends on a dream in order to prop it up.


Dieting


The bean-counting mentality becomes literal when it comes to psychoses over food, otherwise known as dieting a.k.a. disordered eating as a result of an attempt to create order in eating. Wallis Simpson, the train wreck socialite 2x-divorcee who married Prince Edward, quipped “You can never be too rich or too thin” She said this despite being a horsey looking mid who suffered throat cancer (probably from a combo of smoking and starving) and dementia. She could have benefited both health-wise and looks-wise from gaining a few extra pounds, just sayin’.


Anorexics turn calorie counting into a bona fide addiction. It's a talent in its own right.


At its core, anorexia is and always has been a disease of privilege. Anorexia, which rarely happens to men and mostly afflicts affluent young women, is a disease of ingratitude. When we are surrounded by easily attainable, beautiful, life-sustaining food, it is a truly vile and perverse act to starve ourselves to death.


Semaglutide drugs have thrown gasoline on an already roaring fire, and I would guess that most GLP-1 drugs are being used by people who have no business taking them such as Demi Moore. Anorexia is about counting calories as if they were lepers. The anorexic would like to expel all lepers from the kingdom (some claim to do just this by becoming supposed breathatarians) but some lepers must be admitted so the kingdom does not die off entirely. Why? You can never be too rich or too thin.


Liv is gonna die



Liv Schmidt, probably about age 18


Elliot Rodger


There is a creepy, possibly pedophilic, foul influencer named Liv Schmidt who is only known in certain circles of social media. Schmidt is known for being kicked off of TikTok and other social media platforms for her abusive pro-anorexia rhetoric and malevolent bullying. If there is any better example of how to profoundly fail at life than Liv Schmidt, I have yet to see one. She seems like an absolutely awful human being who should be pitied for her emptiness in every sense of the term.


Liv Schmidt wanted to be a haute couture model but was allegedly too “fat” to be considered for runway work. Yet as a younger woman, she was absolutely stunning. Had she been born a decade earlier, she might have been a Victoria’s Secret or Abercrombie and Fitch model, with all its attendant Jeffrey Epstein and Mike Jeffries-related problems. Her look was all-American. Schmidt, however, apparently has severe body dysmorphia. She reported in 2024 that she had lost enough weight to walk a “real” fashion runway. Since at least half of her content is AI slop, it is unclear whether or not she ever achieved her dream to strut down a designer’s catwalk.


Schmidt’s entire life revolves around how little she can eat. She is 24 and thoroughly emaciated. Her social media presence consists of hurling abuse at women whose legs are thicker than the girth of a cheerleader’s baton. She often takes selfies where she is seen “eating” a small portion of food with puffy, overfilled duck lips. She hosts an online club cringily entitled the Skinni Société, a subscription club where the seriously anorexic can get lifestyle advice from a pro. To Schmidt’s credit, she has become an expert at making her own body disappear. She was never a big girl, but now she looks like the Grim Reaper if he stole and wore the head of Elliot Rodger, the incel who took his own life after killing 6 people and injuring 14 in 2014. Schmidt’s constant, whiny vitriol towards “fat” women is reminiscent of Rodger’s rants about sluts and Chads. I’m not saying she’s a massacre killer waiting to happen; only that she is entitled and autistic. She also has the dead Rodger boy’s glazed eyes, puffer fish lips, and perpetual frown. Rodger filmed countless hours and wrote a boring, novel-length manifesto about how he was owed beautiful women because he was a “supreme gentleman”. He literally thought that because he wore brand name clothes, drove an expensive car, and was reasonably good looking that women should have been falling over themselves to ride his dick. He was too proud to hire a prostitute, and when he took his own life, he was supposedly a virgin.


Somewhere along the line, Schmidt was told that the only way she could be worth more than the powder to blow herself to hell was via being emaciated. She reports that her mother was the original Skinni club member, which shows us that eating disorders run in families. Like Rodger, she seems to have been a child who was never told “No” unless it pertained to having a full slice of birthday cake.


Fake and gay


Schmidt has shaved her nose into a Michael Jackson fishbone. Because she is dysmorphic, she cannot stop getting work done despite her first nose job being quite terrible. She is now on her second or third. Her nose, however, is a masterpiece compared to her botched lips. Her pout looks like a female baboon’s ass if it was able to frown, and it is all the more disconcerting paired with the fake blonde hair, empty eyes, and horrific fashion choices on the bundle of sticks she has made out of her body.


Also, Schmidt is likely a closeted lesbian. There is photographic evidence that indicates that she has groomed and possibly molested a female 15 year old member of her Skinni Société. I will be talking about the gayness of anorexia in a future article.


Like Elliot Rodger, Schmidt’s entire existence is bean-counting and scorekeeping. Because she has enjoyed a great deal of privilege in her lifetime, she feels she is owed more and more as long as she lives up to the tortured image of privilege she has created in her brain. Every fat-shaming posts she makes makes claims that the “fat” who cannot lose weight are always, always eating too much. Lack of self control = fatter than Starvin’ Marvin Liv = you must be eating too much. Never mind that some people are genetically thinner than others or have diseases or medications that result in weight gain; nah, it all boils down to how much you’re willing to starve yourself like Liv.


Why we are all probably going to die alone


I recently stepped in it when I posted on TikTok about how I don’t nag my husband to do dishes. I explained that he does the dishes more frequently than he used to because instead of bitching or going on housework strikes, I thank him when he does do chores. The women of TikTok went into attack mode, saying that it was sad that I was gentle parenting my husband and that I obviously don’t know how to communicate with the man I have been married to for 26 years. One woman said that she was affirming her choice to be perpetually single via my video.


Whatever. They were triggered by my soft approach and my unwillingness to see myself as a commodity to be traded. When people divorce, they do so because of a long list of offenses committed by their spouse that amounts to physical, emotional, and spiritual debt in their minds. One divorcee I knew saw the writing on the wall when her husband started saying “That’s a divorceable offense!” in regards of some terrible thing she said in an argument or chore she was unwilling to do. He had been tabulating her unworthiness since the honeymoon or before it. The main excuse women use to divorce their husbands nowadays is that he is a man-child. He is not able to earn enough money and he does not help enough with the housework and child-rearing, so they kick him out and become single mothers, come what may. They try for alimony and usually get it, or at least they get what is known as a lump sum or all-at-once payment for their troubles. The main excuse men use to divorce their wives is that she has become unsexy or that she no longer puts out. Never mind that she has given him healthy children and put her own needs and wants on the shelf to care for those kids; she’s no longer hot, so it is time to trade in her moody ass for a girl who is about five years older than his children.


So of course a woman who has gone the Way of the Lone Harpy sees my nonconfrontational treatment of the other adult in my household as deficient because she would much rather see me join her Hate Club where all men are stupid doofuses who cannot do anything right. Tonight my supposedly-terrible husband insisted I open a new package of shredded lettuce for the tacos I made for dinner because as the woman, I should not be made to suffer the insult of eating old, slightly wilted lettuce. He ate the old lettuce on his tacos because “that’s what guys do” according to him. (I tried to get him to throw the old lettuce away, if you’re curious) This is the sort of sweet, chivalric interaction the Lone Harpy does not get to enjoy, and in my opinion, it is her loss. She will die as she lived — utterly alone.


I say this and I fully anticipate dying alone. My husband is 14 years my senior and as I mentioned earlier, I chose not to have children. People have children partially because they hold out hopes that those children will repay them by caring for them in old age. I certainly have put in my fair share of care for my aging parents. Nursing homes, however, are full of old people crying and moaning to go home. They are too far gone or senile to understand that home has been sold off by their children who almost never visit. Filial piety is not what it used to be, especially in America where most kids move far, far away from their parents the moment they are grown.


When people turn relationships into transactions, it all becomes hoe math. Hoe Math is a snarky guy with an eponymous channel on the internet (we never see his face) who draws flow charts of people ranked on a 1-10 scale of attractiveness. Women, who he calls females, used to date in their own range, for instance, a female 5 would date a 4-6 male. Nowadays, every woman from 1-10 only dates the hottest guys fro 8-10, leaving the 1-7s like poor old Elliot Rodger in the lurch. Hoe Math, though it claims not to be serious, is a perfect example of how the autistic brain attempts to reconcile human behaviors into rational units that can be stacked and organized. The Hoe Mathematician thinks he is dealing blows to the slutty femoids who choose Chad over him — never mind that Chad actually attempted to treat her like a human being and not an animated doll. When he finally pins down a femoid and makes her into his wife because she checked enough boxes, he is ironically blindsided when she dumps him for someone who is less enthralled by his own, tiny, narcissistic world.


I am not going to go into it here about how gratitude and generosity break the rules of negative bean-counting due to their sublimating effect. I have many other essays on that. Here are two of them:


The Glad Game

How to Attract the One: Advice from an Old, Married Woman


I will leave you with the observation that bean-counting should be saved for actual accounting, such as in the scrupulous avoidance of high interest credit cards. We humans are simply not intelligent enough (present company very much included) to see the ripples in the pond and how they intersect. Better to go with thankfulness and thoughtfulness than to be absorbed into the fray of retarded bean-counting.


Life is unfair and difficult for human brains to understand. Count on it.

 


kimberlysteele: (Default)



I am happy to read your Ogham free of charge -- that's how I hone my divination skills. Please limit your reading request to four or fewer Ogham cards: though this can take many forms, here are some common ones (all of them are basically combos of 4 cards):

 
-a single three card reading for the week or month and a one-off, one card reading
-four questions about four separate items that require one answer (card) per item
-a one card reading to answer a specific question and a three card for a more nuanced question
-Two separate readings, two cards a piece exploring the positives and negatives of two different choices

I am happy to do Ogham readings confidentially via emails -- just email me at k steele studio at gmail during the allotted time/before deadline. I cannot answer health questions. If you have a question about health or another sensitive, private matter, provide a bunch of non-identifying information and the Ogham will be able to figure it out even if I don't. I'm serious... the Ogham actually tend to "know" things without me being privy to what is going on.

Please note I take time off during Solstices and Equinoxes for Druid stuff and because sometimes I simply need a break.

My next planned break is from June 18 - July 5, 2026.

I take reading requests from whenever this post goes up on Friday night until 8pm US Central Time Saturday.

For a more in depth look into how I read and interpret the Ogham's symbols, please visit my website druidogham.wordpress.com.

Thank you for your generous donations. They often buy cat food and litter, groceries, and take out burritos and sandwiches for my Mom and me. If you would like to donate, please do it here:

http://buymeacoffee.com/kimberlysteele

Your prayers of blessing to the deity/deities of your choice are welcome whether or not you can donate.

kimberlysteele: (Default)


The Mandibles: A Family 2029-2047 was published in 2016 and is a scathing satire of current events. The Mandibles is about one extended family's journey through the collapse of the American petrodollar and how they adjust (or do not manage to adjust) to reduced living circumstances. Various family members in the Mandible clan are counting on inherited wealth via the death of their old grandpa when the rug is pulled out from underneath the American economy in the fateful year 2029, 100 years later than the Great Crash of 1929 that set off the Great Depression. The dollar, now worthless, is replaced by a currency called the bancor from which Americans are vengefully excluded. Inflation and money printing leads regular Americans down the garden path trod by Weimar Germans and millennial Argentinians.

In the second chapter of The Mandibles, Florence, the lower-middle class granddaughter of the Mandible clan is on the (video) phone with her well-to-do sister, Avery. In this conversation, we are introduced to Avery and her family. Florence, as we saw in Chapter 1, is a bit of a black sheep, having chosen to live in what Avery considers a slum with her common law husband, Esteban and a young son she had from a one night stand before she met Esteban named Will. Avery, of whom it is directly implied got the good looks in the family, is married to Lowell, a professor of economics at Georgetown. For those not in the know, Georgetown University is -- in real life and the novel -- a prestigious Boston school. Lowell is a tenured professor there, which means that Avery and their children have never worried about money or making ends meet a day in their lives. Avery speaks to Florence, who is doing the dishes, while reclining on her posh furniture in her beautifully-decorated living room. She gloats to herself about clearing out her collection of old books, smugly delighting in her virtual library and dismissing paper books as junk. We learn that she is a self-styled therapist with a coterie of clients, most of whom are elderly. Avery has three high school age kids: two sons named after search engines, nerdy Goog and Bing, and a promiscuous daughter, Savannah.

The women discuss their brother, Jarred, who has recently bought a small farm and named it the Citadel. Though neither of the sisters saw it coming, their brother, who until age 35 has lived at home and been a college dropout and general failure at life, has gone full doomsday prepper. They gawk at the idea of him doing subsistence farming in upstate New York, wondering how on earth he will ever manage it.

The subject of conversation changes to the US changing its country code to 2 before the area code, which is Shriver's subtle way of bringing the focus back to collapse. The US is no longer Number 1, and Avery quietly resents this symbolic alteration while Florence errs on the side of thinking it is a benevolent change. Meanwhile, upon learning that the spigots have been turned off in her neighborhood for an indefinite period of time called a "dry out", Florence sends Esteban and Will to get bottled water. Of course in Avery's elegant quarter of Boston, the taps never run dry.

Lowell arrives home, all but demanding Avery get off the phone with her sister. He worries aloud about news of the collapse of the dollar in Europe and the bond market doing sketchy stuff. He and Avery discuss Lowell's colleague at Georgetown, Vandermire, who has been predicting apocalyptic collapse for years and who seems perversely gleeful that it has finally arrived, despite being in a poor position to celebrate if collapse goes down.

He wakes up in the morning to go to work and there are ominous signs that Vandermire's lurid fantasies of collapse could be blooming into reality this time, and that collapse seems to be directly gunning for him and his family.

---

I feel like we have all worried our entire lives about the collapse that many of us see as baked into the cake, where the tremendous debts that have been racked up by the American government come home to roost. We have all been taught to live provisionally in some way, and only elites like Avery and her family have been able to relax all this time while enjoying the best life has to offer. Yet it's not Avery's level of money or comfort I envy; it's the privilege of never worrying about what on earth you're going to do if the car breaks or the furnace peters out. For I like to tell myself a tale that if I had the amount of wealth Avery and Lowell possess in the novel, I would spend it more wisely. I suppose I have been somewhat wise, far more like Florence. Yes, spoiler alert, Avery and her posh family are about to be taken down several notches, both where economics and pride are concerned.

Though I don't own my home outright like Florence, it is the smallest, cheapest mortgage on the block because the house is teeny-tiny and old. Like Florence, the neighborhood is decidedly lower middle class. We bought the house in such a state of extreme disrepair (it was the only mortgage for which we could qualify) that it would not be livable if my husband was not hyper-competent at all things building. That said, I don't see myself as doing "great" in a true catastrophic collapse, nor would I want to if all my neighbors were suffering more than I was.

The contrast between the way Avery lives compared to her sister Florence is glaring, yet Florence does not seem unhappy. Avery is happy as well, but her happiness is smugness, a fragile state that could topple like a house of cards at any time. In one telling paragraph, we begin to see the chinks in Avery's armor as she rants to Florence about a certain type of doomer thinking that pisses her off:

"But I see the same thing in my elderly clients all the time. They have different obsessions, of course, we're about to run out of water, or run out of food, or run out of energy. The economy's on the brink of disaster and their 401(k)s will turn into pumpkins. But in truth they're afraid of dying. And because when you die, the world dies, too, at least for you, they assume the world will die for everybody. It's a failure of imagination, in a way -- an inability to conceive of the universe without you in it. That's why old people get apocalyptic: they're facing apocalypse, and that part, the private apocalypse, is real. So the closer their personal oblivion gets, the more certain geriatrics project impending doom on their surroundings. Also, there's almost a spitefulness, sometimes, I wear, for some of those bilious Chicken Littles, imminent Armageddon isn't a fear but a fantasy. Like they want the entire planet to implode into a giant black hole. Because if they can't have their martinis on the porch anymore then nobody else should get to sip one. They want to take everything with them--down to the olives and the toothpicks. But actually, everything's fine. Life, and civilization, and the United States, are all going to go on and on , and that's really what they can't stand."
How much do you personally think about collapse, and have you centered your life around the possibility of collapse? Has this caused problems in your life? What wins do you think you might have achieved from prepping, if any?

What will you do if it real collapse happens and you are thrust into Weimar Germany conditions? What if that never happens? What will you do if the US or whatever country you are in goes on like the proverbial blister in the sun?

kimberlysteele: (Default)



I am happy to read your Ogham free of charge -- that's how I hone my divination skills. Please limit your reading request to four or fewer Ogham cards: though this can take many forms, here are some common ones (all of them are basically combos of 4 cards):

 
-a single three card reading for the week or month and a one-off, one card reading
-four questions about four separate items that require one answer (card) per item
-a one card reading to answer a specific question and a three card for a more nuanced question
-Two separate readings, two cards a piece exploring the positives and negatives of two different choices

I am happy to do Ogham readings confidentially via emails -- just email me at k steele studio at gmail during the allotted time/before deadline. I cannot answer health questions. If you have a question about health or another sensitive, private matter, provide a bunch of non-identifying information and the Ogham will be able to figure it out even if I don't. I'm serious... the Ogham actually tend to "know" things without me being privy to what is going on.

Please note I take time off during Solstices and Equinoxes for Druid stuff and because sometimes I simply need a break.

My next planned break is from June 18 - July 5, 2026.

I take reading requests from whenever this post goes up on Friday night until 8pm US Central Time Saturday.

For a more in depth look into how I read and interpret the Ogham's symbols, please visit my website druidogham.wordpress.com.

Thank you for your generous donations. They often buy cat food and litter, groceries, and take out burritos and sandwiches for my Mom and me. If you would like to donate, please do it here:

http://buymeacoffee.com/kimberlysteele

Your prayers of blessing to the deity/deities of your choice are welcome whether or not you can donate.

kimberlysteele: (Default)

 
Demi Moore is no longer beautiful, and it is up for debate whether she was ever beautiful in the first place.

For those who were spared the visuals, a few weeks ago, Demi Moore was captured at the Cannes film festival in a shocking state of emaciation. Rumors have it that she abuses GLP-1 drugs or starves herself. Regardless of cause, the effect of the 63 year old's gaunt, skeletal appearance is extreme. Page Six and other goyslop/System propaganda outlets lauded Moore's petrified taffy arms as "toned". They have yet to realize that gaslighting of that nature won't help them regain lost popularity in an age of social media.

Demi Moore is still young as old people go. Her face has been frozen into an obscene mask of an oversexed 30 year old, complete with sluglike, rouged lips and artificially-inflated cheeks that are stretched so tight, you could bounce a quarter off them without so much as leaving a mark. She is a grandmother trying to look like a virgin ingenue, and to the myopic who have lost their eyeglasses and to superfans who have lost their discernment, she looks good.

To the rest of us, she looks scary and like she climbed out of a crypt. The wasting that is ravaging her body is a type usually only seen in advanced cancer victims and elderly folk in hospice. Cachexia, a syndrome that happens to deathly sick people that causes them to wither away to visible tendons on bones, seems to be an apt descriptor for Demi Moore's current state. She is strutting and pouting down the red carpet while at death's door. The only thing I can admire about her at this point is her commitment.

Diminishing returns

Celebrities are having an increasingly difficult time getting our attention. Personally, I had no idea Cannes was happening until I heard about it through TikTok, specifically in videos concerning Demi Moore's weight. Hollywood is dying and unlike Demi Moore, they seem afraid of death. The most recent spate of GLP-1 It Girls and It Boys are obviously puppets for Big Pharma, just as Shirley Temple was a puppet to sell war and volunteering to be a soldier and Marilyn Monroe was a puppet to sell divorce, childlessness, and broken families. Hollywood is big mad, because the advent of the Epstein files and the Diddy material before that, has caused its former victim-believers to emerge from the poisoned cocoon and wipe the sleep out of their eyes.

We are in a new game. They know it, we know it, and only a few naive slaves to the System don't realize what or who is being played. For the longest time, the Tribe of Cain has placed bets that we the pleebs are going to stay superficial. They did not foresee that some of us -- not many, but enough -- would see the soul. So when I see Demi Moore, I see someone who used to be considered very beautiful, but was always just an average, pretty girl who caught a great deal of attention by being in the right place at the right time. 
Demi Moore in Ghost (1991 film)

She is not particularly stunning, nor has she ever been, at least in my eyes.

Not exactly ugly, but . . .


Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. If Demi Moore with her raspy voice, medium height, straight hair, and girl-next-door appeal is gorgeous to you, then she was and is the cat's meow. Not everyone is into brunettes. Also, we are not in a contest, despite the protestations of Hollywood.

When I was younger, from about age 12 onward, I would occasionally encounter a man (and occasionally a woman) who was legitimately obsessed with me for my looks. I made the mistake of dating a couple of these guys. For them, I was the exact thing that they wanted. I certainly wasn't appealing to every man. Short, dark haired, and spicy isn't every dude's cup of tea. The ones who truly were into me, however, were almost at the point where they would stop at nothing to have me. I began to understand those women who manipulate men into handing over their fortunes for sex and the chance at love. I could have been that one of those courtesans (whores) several times over, and I had multiple opportunities to jump ship even when married and sailing towards middle age. The prettier you are, the more of these would-be willing victims you will attract. It is not necessarily a good thing, either, nor should it ever be a goal in life. There is an anger that accompanies being fetishized that I know well. The anger builds to a point in some women and men where they exact revenge by taking their worshippers to the cleaners. We all want to be appreciated, but to be appreciated mainly for one's looks is infuriating. For one, genetics are the main determinant of looks, and in most cases, no amount of self-control or surgeries can turn a genuinely plain person into a looker, cough Kelly Osbourne uncough. For two, looks fade. When someone or perhaps a significant part of the world population is obsessed with you because of the way you look, the clock is ticking the moment you start benefiting from wealth you did nothing to earn in the first place. With every year, your looks betray you, and when you get to the sunset of middle age like Demi Moore, the betrayals become faster and more furious. One month it's sagging eyes that need to be lifted with surgical threads and moored to distant places in the forehead as if each eye was a flaccid marionette. The next month, the implants in your breasts need replacement. (In Moore's Cannes photos, her implants are practically bursting out of her chest like the unfortunate Officer Kane in 1979's Alien.) The next month, you undergo an experimental treatment for veiny hands. It never ends.

Celebrities think we hoi polloi are jealous that we cannot afford constant "refreshments" on the surgical table or the dentist's chair. Honestly, I'm glad I cannot afford to be insecure enough to care about those things, because when I was younger and more vain, I might have started down that Wendigo of a path had I the finances to cover it. Crow's feet, a spare tire, and jowls seem a hell of a lot worse until you actually have them, and then you realize that being guffawed at like a delicious pastrami sandwich by creeps was overrated to begin with.

Looks come and go. For those of us who invite the vampires of natural aging over our doorstep, admiring glances start petering out as if they are being graded on a curve. I used to get crazy attention going to the gym and the grocery store. That no longer happens. I am fine with it. Demi Moore is not.

It's not that Demi Moore looks bad -- she looks nice enough, especially if you don't look too closely. If she were to wear a sweater and jeans we could only view her from a distance, we would presume she is a lanky grad student with great hair. No, it's not Moore's actual looks that make her ugly. The source of Moore's ugliness is her desperation. If you can read the soul, her appearance screams PICK ME from stem to stern. She is not at an age where she should need to be picked.

Demi Moore is at a level of fame that almost guarantees she has been through a clandestine mutilation ritual, MK Ultra programming, or something that rhymes with it. Her blank stare, rictus of a smile, hypersexualized pout, and long history of substance abuse speak to a lifetime of unprocessed trauma that she wears by flexing Starvin' Marvin chic on the red carpet. Though the celebrities who have been through this garbage think we don't see it, oh yes we do. They have counted on being able to fool us, and until only recently, they fooled most of us. They want to believe the It Girl schtick still works and that we can be sold Ozempic, NuvaRing, PornHub, and 1-800-DIVORCE as long as they put the right face to the right TV series or movie. They want to believe we cannot see the suffering human being beneath the false transcendence of celebrity glamour. They want to believe we are still buying.

Hollywood keeps trying to resurrect the illusion of its own youth, when it was at the top of its game. Right now, it is hedging its bets on reviving the Ally McBeal/young Ariana Grande/ ED Tumblr era of the 90s and early 2000s. Back then, Hollywood would say something, and if they said it enough times, the general public would absorb it as truth.

“It would not be impossible to prove with sufficient repetition and a psychological understanding of the people concerned that a square is in fact a circle. They are mere words, and words can be molded until they clothe ideas and disguise.” ― Joseph Goebbels


The roadblock they are hitting head on at the moment is that we are no longer in the Age of Pisces. We are in the Age of Aquarius, and there isn't a binary of famous person versus obscure person anymore. Andy Warhol's dream/nightmare of fifteen minutes of fame has been realized in every two bit TikToker, Instagrammer, and YouTuber. People certainly don't go to TV to get their news. They go to social media, and if one source seems problematic, they algorithm a dozen more to weed through within the speed of as many swipes. Celebrities are going broke and desperately flooding TikTok in order to sell hair pieces and perfume. They are up against legions of people who are more relatable, more fun, more entertaining, and oftentimes more talented than they are. Celebrities are being quickly and brutally replaced by common people who never sold their souls. The internet ushered in the Age of Aquarius for us human beings and the Age of Aquarius will last long after the internet is gone.

Demi Moore doesn't have to worry about me, a relative unknown who is keeping her day job. I don't have much influence and the things I am saying -- that beauty is in the eye of the beholder and that we see through the shenanigans of what is being sold and that it's not going to work this time. What she does need to worry about is that I am not alone.

I did not go to see the second Wicked movie at all. I unenthusiastically watched the first one about a year after its release. I found it bland and predictable. Stephen Schwartz's music was alright, but I think it was much more fun as a stage play with Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth. Perhaps it was the overproduction and perhaps it was the anorexia of the two female leads, but the first Wicked movie lacked energy. I doubt I will ever see Wicked: For Good. I don't want to support eating disorder culture with my time or money and from the sounds of things, Wicked: For Good is Ally McBeal on steroids and probably twice as boring. No thanks.

Dying Hollywood is trying to pound eating disorders down my non-bulimic throat. I'm not having it. They have overestimated our desire to watch people waste away. I don't want to see Demi Moore as a gaunt, stick bug person pretending she did not peak in 1991. I don't want to watch it, I don't care about it, and I am one of millions who feel the same way. I would rather remember old Hollywood stars fondly for their talents. That era is over now and no amount of pissing on our legs and telling us it is raining will change it.


kimberlysteele: (Default)



I am happy to read your Ogham free of charge -- that's how I hone my divination skills. Please limit your reading request to four or fewer Ogham cards: though this can take many forms, here are some common ones (all of them are basically combos of 4 cards):

 
-a single three card reading for the week or month and a one-off, one card reading
-four questions about four separate items that require one answer (card) per item
-a one card reading to answer a specific question and a three card for a more nuanced question
-Two separate readings, two cards a piece exploring the positives and negatives of two different choices

I am happy to do Ogham readings confidentially via emails -- just email me at k steele studio at gmail during the allotted time/before deadline. I cannot answer health questions. If you have a question about health or another sensitive, private matter, provide a bunch of non-identifying information and the Ogham will be able to figure it out even if I don't. I'm serious... the Ogham actually tend to "know" things without me being privy to what is going on.

Please note I take time off during Solstices and Equinoxes for Druid stuff and because sometimes I simply need a break.

My next planned break is from June 18 - July 5, 2026.

I take reading requests from whenever this post goes up on Friday night until 8pm US Central Time Saturday.

For a more in depth look into how I read and interpret the Ogham's symbols, please visit my website druidogham.wordpress.com.

Thank you for your generous donations. They often buy cat food and litter, groceries, and take out burritos and sandwiches for my Mom and me. If you would like to donate, please do it here:

http://buymeacoffee.com/kimberlysteele

Your prayers of blessing to the deity/deities of your choice are welcome whether or not you can donate.

kimberlysteele: (Default)
 
I have changed things up a bit and to give myself more time to complete my next book, Sacred Beauty, I am putting up an Open Post on the second week of the month. 

One of my favorite pastimes is to play a game with Google Maps of dropping a pin in a random location and viewing pictures of other countries. I used Random.org this time to choose for me, and it chose what looks like a rural street in Brazil. Damn, Brazil is huge! It is 90% of the size of the United States. 

This post will be open until I post the next one in June. 


kimberlysteele: (Default)



I am happy to read your Ogham free of charge -- that's how I hone my divination skills. Please limit your reading request to four or fewer Ogham cards: though this can take many forms, here are some common ones (all of them are basically combos of 4 cards):

 
-a single three card reading for the week or month and a one-off, one card reading
-four questions about four separate items that require one answer (card) per item
-a one card reading to answer a specific question and a three card for a more nuanced question
-Two separate readings, two cards a piece exploring the positives and negatives of two different choices

I am happy to do Ogham readings confidentially via emails -- just email me at k steele studio at gmail during the allotted time/before deadline. I cannot answer health questions. If you have a question about health or another sensitive, private matter, provide a bunch of non-identifying information and the Ogham will be able to figure it out even if I don't. I'm serious... the Ogham actually tend to "know" things without me being privy to what is going on.

Please note I take time off during Solstices and Equinoxes for Druid stuff and because sometimes I simply need a break.

My next planned break is from June 18 - July 5, 2026.

I ONLY take reading requests from whenever this post goes up on Friday until 8pm US Central Time Saturday. So if you don't get an answer because you posted too late, ask again the next Ogham reading week BEFORE THE DEADLINE.

For a more in depth look into how I read and interpret the Ogham's symbols, please visit my website druidogham.wordpress.com.

Thank you for your generous donations. They often buy cat food and litter, groceries, and take out burritos and sandwiches for my Mom and me. If you would like to donate, please do it here:

http://buymeacoffee.com/kimberlysteele

Your prayers of blessing to the deity/deities of your choice are welcome whether or not you can donate.

kimberlysteele: (Default)

Johnny Depp's daughter is like this for a huge chunk of the movie. No wonder it was popular.

I am a busy, busy lady and though I have always enjoyed movies, I rarely have time to watch them like the good old days. Horror has always been my favorite genre, especially well-done psychological horror where one is required to read between the lines and copious gore isn’t necessary to induce chills. I do not believe I can be frightened by a horror movie — like Michael Keaton’s eponymous character in Beetlejuice, the Exorcist gets funnier every time I watch it. I love the Amityville story but it’s nowhere near scary. Hereditary was fascinating as a study in the mass invocation of the demon Paimon as he relates to the Covid 19 scare. Was it scary though? Not to me. My main takeaway after watching that film for the first time was that it was unfortunate the director decided to write a love letter to that particular entity, but whatever. I always loved The Ring, both the original Japanese Ringu version and the one with Naomi Watts. Neither were scary. Insidious, the yarn about the comatose kid who wanders the lower astral plane because his father has been stalked by the Hag since forever ago, is a ton of fun. Scary it is not — the demon/devil guy who is part of the lower astral dream sequence (they keep calling the lower astral plane The Further which always makes me giggle for no apparent reason) looks like the lovechild of the pointy haired boss from Dilbert and a lost member of the Insane Clown Posse. He is goofy and fun, not scary, at least not to me.

Despite my voracious appetite for horror films, it still took me two solid years to get around to watching Nosferatu, a remake of the 1922 classic film of the same name, which in itself was the film version of Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula. This newish version was directed by Robert Eggers, whose breakout film was The VVitch (the Witch) which was a genuinely good original story by Eggers about a 1630s family who is cast out by their Quaker/Shaker brethren into the wilderness for being too radically, rabidly Christian. The dysfunctional, patriarchal family falls apart and succumbs to demonic influence out in the deep woods while they struggle to survive. A young girl named Thomasin (played by a not-yet-emaciated or plastic-surgeried Anya Taylor Joy) is the fascinating centerpiece of a complex and ultimately understated story.

The protagonist of 2024’s Nosferatu is a young lady named Ellen in 1830s Germany. Right out of the gate, Ellen is dramatically victimized when she wanders the bleak halls of her family’s mansion at night and stupidly conjures a demon lover out of loneliness and boredom, much like the urban legends of the teen girl who conjures the Candyman by saying “Candyman, candyman, candyman” while holding a candle in front of a bathroom mirror at a sleepover. The demon dude wastes no time hopping aboard that virgin train, and we are subjected to Ellen’s hentai-whimpering while she is deflowered by an invisible man.

Time passes and Ellen is a happily married newlywed. There is trouble in paradise, however, because she has night terrors and premonitions that are the consequence of having picked up that horny demon incubus-astral attachment from her younger years. Ellen, to abuse a more modern vernacular, can’t get no satisfaction, so when her new hubby tries to extricate himself from the bedchamber to go to a job interview, she tries to cajole, badger, and worry him into another round and makes him a bit late.

He gets the job anyways, and that is because it is rigged.

Can you rape a willing victim?

The New Yorker’s film reviewer Richard Brody sees Ellen as a victim and in its annoyingly paywalled review (of which I somehow got a sneak preview and am suddenly denied access, as if I could be bothered to care about or subscribe to the New Yorker) Ellen is depicted as a sweet young thing who is repeatedly raked over the coals by evilly evil vampire Orlok, according to Richard Brody:

“In Eggers’s telling of her past, Ellen, a lonely girl desperate for affection and attention, is supernaturally visited and physically raped by Orlok, with the result that she bears both his curse and his connection to the beyond.”


Despite her gothy darkness, Ellen is a Mary Sue who can never truly do anything wrong in Nosferatu. She’s less of a milksop than Bella of Twilight, but the tubercular vibe isn’t far off. Pale, wan, prone to crying fits and existential melancholy, we are supposed to be drawn in and enchanted by the girl who fell under the spell of the ghostly villain. Yet whenever we see Ellen being visited by her incubus, she appears to be having the time of her damn life, and that is because we are supposed to be titillated by her beatific innocence being corrupted.

Ellen is seen as cursed for the entire movie, but it is she who invited the curse, and until the absolute end of the movie, she keeps on inviting it in. The old lore about a vampire not being able to step over the threshold unless you invite him was meant to inform us that evil cannot truly get to you if you refuse to polarize with it, and modernites have utterly missed that memo as is proven by Nosferatu. Ellen is Persephonized as an eternally pure angel who could not possibly be held accountable for rolling out the red carpet for her incubus night after night, and this reluctance to shed the heavy victimization mantle is a signal that our culture still is tragicomically hung up on the Victorian era binary of virgin-whore.

Oh, holey plot

Eggers did a much better job realistically portraying the brutality and horror of 1630s pilgrim life in the Witch than he did with the stifling, Victorian repression of 1830s Germany in Nosferatu. For one, could we just set the story in England, considering that everyone in the movie has a British accent? When Count Orlok travels to Germany via boat from landlocked Transylvania/Bohemia, that would certainly make a great deal more sense if he was trying to get to the British Isles.

The scenes where Ellen’s husband Thomas runs off to the Carpathian mountains to get Orlok to ink a real estate deal are entertaining. Orlok’s environment features beautiful cinematography and lovely, artistic milieus that are often worthy of printing and framing.

The cringe does not happen until we hear Orlok, who is played by the typecast, always-relegated-as-a-monster-since-IT actor Bill Skarsgård, who for the life of him cannot speak in anything except bastardized, Harry Potter Latin and mangled, heavily-accented faux Russian-English. Dear gods, it’s so laughably bad. He’s supposed to be a reanimated corpse, yet he has had the mojo to groom his handlebar mustache and shave off his beard. His shoulders and arm muscles look as if he has spent time a gym. Presumably there were 24 hour gyms in 1830s Carpathia, or maybe he has a workout room in his castle basement?



Pornstache Nosferatu, ready to get some

Ellen is not scared of him — in fact, she can hardly wait for his arrival, at one point donning her damn wedding dress to be with him as she eagerly pants and pretends to protest her fate. She wants that gray-fleshed, hunchbacked creature with every fiber of her being, but because she’s a manic horndog, she also has a consistent appetite for her husband. 

Ellen’s long-suffering cuck husband, Thomas, ends up being drained/raped by Orlok while at the castle, and unlike his wife, he does not seem to enjoy it.


Portrait of a lady and her simp

He manages to escape by jumping out of a window into a river, somehow managing not to break his neck or both legs. He is carried downriver and rescued by a bunch of nuns.

Meanwhile, Orlok bails on his castle, having secured the land deal, and starts his pilgrimage for Ellen’s hometown, Wisburg, Germany. Like I said earlier, he does the illogical thing and takes a boat instead of just retracing the same route Thomas took to arrive at his castle. Orlok’s ship is full of fresh-from-the-coffin plague rats that infect the unfortunate sailors and eventually the village with blood-borne Yersinia pestis.

Ellen manifests increasing psychosis, including sexual psychosis where she tears at her own bodice and generally goes crazy for Orlok’s etheric vampire dick. In order to keep her “safe”, her husband has her shack up with their friends Friedrich and Anna, who is pregnant, and their two young girls. Ellen sleepwalks and generally turns the household into a godforsaken possession depot. Doctors are called in, including Ellen’s own doctor Wilhelm Sievers and his eccentric occultist-alchemist buddy, Albin von Franz (played by Willem Dafoe), who takes on the role of Van Helsing from other Dracula remakes.

As Thomas arrives home, having barely been healed by the nuns, the plague ship has arrived. Rats run around spreading bubonic malaise in Wisburg like a scene from the Decameron.

The superficial stuff

I think I have given enough spoilers at this point, so please indulge me as I complain about the superficial aspects of this film. The camera angles were annoyingly Hollywood, and the close ups and perfectly symmetrical, central frames of a single character were very narcissistic and self-conscious. Maybe this worked for The Witch but it falls flat in a vampire film. The whole film feels claustrophobic, despite being set outdoors for half the movie.

The costumes and wigs of this film were butt ugly. Not once do any of the female characters wear a pretty dress! I get it that Anna, Ellen’s friend, is a pregnant mom-to-be, but can we please dress her in something that does not look like it could be found in the 1800s equivalent of Target, if there was such a thing?


Look at the crinkling and straining of the material around the shoulders and the lack of ornament. Also note the ghastly wig and the not-found-in-nature hairline.

The costumes of Nosferatu 2024 are so basic, they look like something I might be able to manage to sew from a Butterick or Vogue pattern, and trust me, I do not sew very well at all. The material chosen for the women’s gowns is consistently drab and ugly and the designs were frumpy and amateur. Compare this random photo of an 1830s dress:



Note the attention to detail around the bodice, the gathered bodice, the dropped, corseted waist, the pragmatic yet cute pattern, the pretty sleeves, and the lace detail at the shoulders. Now that second dress I could not sew if my life depended upon it.

The wigs on the characters are hideous. They were so bad, I could think of almost nothing else when Ellen or Anna appeared in one. It is patently obvious that none of these women (or men) have ever had long hair. They don’t know how to carry it. Even Willem Dafoe’s hair looked fake as hell — his was a wig that would have made more sense on a barrister in British Parliament. Also, in this age of lace fronts, why does the hair in this film look so fake?

The film is also dismal and dreary. The reviewer I mentioned before used the term lugubrious to describe it and I’ve got to say he hit the nail on the head. Compare the 1990s Francis Ford Coppola version of Dracula with Winona Ryder as Mina and Gary Oldman as the vampire: at least that film, though campy and cheesy, had some joy in it. There are opportunities to be lush, voluptuous, and sumptuous in any given period film that Nosferatu missed entirely with its basic-ass Walmart discount costumes, its obvious, squirting sexuality, and chintzy, suburban, human-as-framed-doll portrait shots.

Nepo babies

Lily Rose Depp, the actress who plays Ellen, is the daughter of actor Johnny Depp and model Vanessa Paradis. I dimly remember reading something back in the day where claims were made that Johnny Depp and Vanessa Paradis were sensibly raising their kids outside of Hollywood and that when Paradis divorced Depp, she took the kids and stayed in her home country of France. I don’t pay attention or care about Johnny Depp or his family, but upon seeing that his daughter clearly did not escape Hollywood, I was disappointed. Lily Rose Depp is an obvious product/victim of the System, and she is being foisted upon us as the new It Girl. No thanks, I’ll pass. I know how those people are created and manufactured for public digestion. Gross.

This thing had nepotism written all over it. The screenwriting and the acting was awful. We are given no reason as to why the vamp seeks Ellen except that she randomly called him on the psychic telephone. When Dafoe’s character likens her to an Egyptian priestess late in the film, I’m like “Why?” Depp’s Ellen is the common bar slut of paranormal heroines, allegedly chosen and special because she’s somewhat attractive without discernible makeup. Why does Ellen love Thomas? She’s supposedly very into him but we never get a scene about how they met or why they fell in love. She cuckolds Thomas from the first to the last frame of this film — she was not a virgin when they’re married and we find this out quite bluntly in one scene — and she is not lovable. She’s a mope who spends three out of four nights on average being obsessed by her etheric rapist/annoying psycho vampire ex-boyfriend.

Overacting is the name of the game when you have no real plot to go off of and you are supposed to wring your hands and cry the entire movie for . . . reasons. Anna, the young wife/matron character played by Emma Courin, is a bad actress. Not for one second do we believe that she is a mom (even if she is one in real life), nor do be believe she is Christian (even if she is a Christian, which I have no idea), nor do we believe she is anything except desperate for her big break in Hollywood. Her death scene by rats is ridiculous in its melodramatic fakery.

Anyway, I am grateful for this film. This piece of crap movie that made more than expected at the box office because of Lily Rose Depp showing her small, natural, 24 year old breasts for long stints of the film and being “raped” by an ugly, pornstached, hunchback dude was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

I am finally getting a DVD player and I am finally quitting every movie made after the year 2000 unless I can find that rare unicorn of a modern film that is worth my time to watch.

The real star of this film was my future DVD-R.
kimberlysteele: (Default)



I am happy to read your Ogham free of charge -- that's how I hone my divination skills. Please limit your reading request to four or fewer Ogham cards: though this can take many forms, here are some common ones (all of them are basically combos of 4 cards):

 
-a single three card reading for the week or month and a one-off, one card reading
-four questions about four separate items that require one answer (card) per item
-a one card reading to answer a specific question and a three card for a more nuanced question
-Two separate readings, two cards a piece exploring the positives and negatives of two different choices

I am happy to do Ogham readings confidentially via emails -- just email me at k steele studio at gmail during the allotted time/before deadline. I cannot answer health questions. If you have a question about health or another sensitive, private matter, provide a bunch of non-identifying information and the Ogham will be able to figure it out even if I don't. I'm serious... the Ogham actually tend to "know" things without me being privy to what is going on.

Please note I take time off during Solstices and Equinoxes for Druid stuff and because sometimes I simply need a break.

My next planned break is from June 18 - July 5, 2026.

I take reading requests from whenever this post goes up on Friday night until 8pm US Central Time Saturday.

For a more in depth look into how I read and interpret the Ogham's symbols, please visit my website druidogham.wordpress.com.

Thank you for your generous donations. They often buy cat food and litter, groceries, and take out burritos and sandwiches for my Mom and me. If you would like to donate, please do it here:

http://buymeacoffee.com/kimberlysteele

Your prayers of blessing to the deity/deities of your choice are welcome whether or not you can donate.

kimberlysteele: (Default)

I had a wonderful conversation with AC and Isaac of the Plant Cunning Podcast. We discussed my book, Sacred Homemaking: A Magical Approach to a Tidier Home, which is available from Aeon Books.

PLANT CUNNING EPISODE #229 SACRED HOMEMAKING with KIMBERLY STEELE

"In this Plant Cunning Podcast episode, AC & Isaac interview Kimberly Steele about her first book, Sacred Homemaking, on making the home a sacred space through everyday practices. Steele shares her path from a casual Christian upbringing and decades of atheism into Druidry and daily spiritual discipline, including meditation and long-term practice of Sphere of Protection rituals, and discusses gratitude and generosity as transformative forces. She explains perceiving multiple “planes” (physical, etheric, astral, spiritual) and how tidying, thanking household objects, cleaning (especially the toilet), and avoiding both hoarding and sterile perfection can shift a home’s “vibe.” Steele offers practical suggestions such as removing “haunted” objects, using sprays and salt, and placing symmetrical sacred geometry patterns as “demon traps,” critiques materialism and doomscrolling, and introduces the idea of “astral pyramids” and group spirits."

Watch and listen to this podcast episode on these channels and more:

Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/2wed4EEeUy7U2xsWbv10ro

YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTlmfgUfnsU

Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/plant-cunning-podcast/id1534970138

kimberlysteele: (Default)
Lionel Shriver is a woman writer in her late 60s who has written 17 novels as of today's date, only 7 or so of which have been published. Her breakout hit in 2005 was We Need to Talk About Kevin, the story of an ambivalent mother who ends up birthing and raising a monstrous school shooter. The novel was later turned into a film (that was in my opinion poorly executed and not all that well-acted) with Tilda Swinton playing the mother. Shriver is a fiercely opinionated writer of eclectic interests and her novels and stories deal with everything from morbid obesity to childlessness to immigration. She currently resides with her husband in Portugal.

The Mandibles: A Family 2029-2047 was published in 2016 and is a scathing satire of current events. The Mandibles is about one extended family's journey through the collapse of the American petrodollar and how they adjust (or do not manage to adjust) to reduced living circumstances. Various family members in the Mandible clan are counting on inherited wealth via the death of their old grandpa when the rug is pulled out from underneath the American economy in the fateful year 2029, 100 years later than the Great Crash of 1929 that set off the Great Depression. The dollar, now worthless, is replaced by a currency called the bancor from which Americans are vengefully excluded. Inflation and money printing leads regular Americans down the garden path trod by Weimar Germans and millennial Argentinians. Some of the Mandibles adapt better than others, and possibly the most fascinating aspect of this book and why it stood out in my mind is because it went into florid detail about how being used to Starbucks and premium olive oil is a legitimate form of mental/spiritual handicap. This handicap is only exposed when there is a return to the kind of harsh living conditions our ancestors considered everyday.

The Mandibles opening chapter is called GRAY WATER, and its opening scene features the Mandible's matriarch, Florence, admonishing her common law husband, Esteban, to only wash his hands in water that is not fit for drinking but is not yet condemned to being flushed down the drain. Though she grew up in privilege, Florence's background reveals that she has settled into the lower middle working class. She and her mate, Esteban, make lighthearted jokes about the predicament of bathing once or fewer times per week in cold water and humbly appreciate their simple family meals of cabbage and scrap pork patties. Esteban is Latino or Lat, specifically Mexican, and some of this chapter is devoted to highlighting his resilience and general happiness because he never had the impedances of extreme privilege, including immersion in pornography as a young man, so he still has a "taste for real women". Florence does not consider herself to be anything special. She has a job at a homeless shelter that she knows others view her as angelic or virtuous for doing, but she sees it for what it is and rejects any kind of savior complex about it. It's work. She has a son, Will, from a one night stand (not Esteban) who is precociously bright. Her sister, Avery, is briefly introduced in this chapter. Avery is affluent and beautiful and has married extremely well to a professor at Georgetown University. We will learn more about her in Chapter 2.

Esteban and Florence discuss the impending death of Florence's and Avery's super-rich grandfather, and though he is in his 90s, she doesn't want to contemplate coming into that money because her parents would have to die before it became hers. In the background, Will (the son, whose name is Will but for some odd reason is called Willing, and that's not the end of strange first names in this book) watches the dollar collapse even more than its current lackluster status and tries to wrap his young brain around the significance of a reserve currency. The moment is described as if looking into a time capsule, a formative "Where were you?" tantamount to the bombing of the World Trade Center or the JFK shooting.

I remember where I was on September 11, 2001. I was 28, married, and living with my husband in my parents' house in my childhood bedroom, which would be the first of several stints in and out of their home. My dreams of being affluent as a married person were well on their way to being irrevocably dashed, but I did not know it at the time. September 11, 2001 was a beautiful day of cerulean skies and warm autumn breezes. How sad that our government decided to psy op its own people on the most perfect day ever. I ended up taking the day off even though I had a full day of lessons scheduled the nearby music store where I was teaching.

This chapter is at its most awkward when dealing with Esteban, who is portrayed as a lower middle class Marty Stu -- he's a bit too idealized and perfect to come off as a real person. The other characters, including the unfortunately named Willing, seem like they exist somewhere. This idea of water rationing in 2029 Brooklyn seems hyperbolic, though I should probably not say that considering the way things are going. Overall, the Mandibles is a good read because unlike other dystopian novels, it seems like something that could totally happen.



kimberlysteele: (Default)



I am happy to read your Ogham free of charge -- that's how I hone my divination skills. Please limit your reading request to four or fewer Ogham cards: though this can take many forms, here are some common ones (all of them are basically combos of 4 cards):

 
-a single three card reading for the week or month and a one-off, one card reading
-four questions about four separate items that require one answer (card) per item
-a one card reading to answer a specific question and a three card for a more nuanced question
-Two separate readings, two cards a piece exploring the positives and negatives of two different choices

I am happy to do Ogham readings confidentially via emails -- just email me at k steele studio at gmail during the allotted time/before deadline. I cannot answer health questions. If you have a question about health or another sensitive, private matter, provide a bunch of non-identifying information and the Ogham will be able to figure it out even if I don't. I'm serious... the Ogham actually tend to "know" things without me being privy to what is going on.

Please note I take time off during Solstices and Equinoxes for Druid stuff and because sometimes I simply need a break.

My next planned break is from June 18 - July 5, 2026.

I take reading requests from whenever this post goes up on Friday night until 8pm US Central Time Saturday.

For a more in depth look into how I read and interpret the Ogham's symbols, please visit my website druidogham.wordpress.com.

Thank you for your generous donations. They often buy cat food and litter, groceries, and take out burritos and sandwiches for my Mom and me. If you would like to donate, please do it here:

http://buymeacoffee.com/kimberlysteele

Your prayers of blessing to the deity/deities of your choice are welcome whether or not you can donate.

kimberlysteele: (Default)
Irreconcilable differences are the primary reason cited when two people divorce. The designation is amorphous and vague. She cheated? Irreconcilable differences. He is a raging alcoholic? Irreconcilable differences. Her nagging got tiresome, and her body was no longer desirable? Same. He left his dirty socks on the floor in front of the hamper? Good enough -- now let's get the ink on those papers so we can break up your family and devastate your children.

I have a bad habit of watching Facebook reels, and like Instagram and TikTok, the reels tailor themselves to what they believe you'll watch. Underneath them, however, there is a discreet agenda for those willing to look. Facebook would like me to end my marriage. It would like to see my 26 year commitment in tatters and shreds so statists and their cronies can milk me for whatever assets I managed to accumulate, including the etheric energy or loosh I have saved up in my middle aged body. It would like to see me dependent on the teat of the algorithm, continually seeking it out for the next dopamine hit. It would like me to be informed by it and to act according to its will.

Facebook knows its target demographic is middle-aged women and it wants us to blow up our marriages and lives so we can be cast adrift in hostile waters. The more violent and petty our divorces, the better. Facebook has a voracious appetite for drama, and there is a wealth of divorced or soon-to-be-divorced women on it complaining about the awfulness of men. The other social media platforms are the same.

Facebook isn't so bald and out in the open about trying to brainwash me. Mostly, it shows me innocuous videos of women improving their own homes. They restore furniture (furniture restoration videos were what hooked me in the first place as I like to re-work and repurpose old things) and they put up molding and wallpaper without help from men. There is one lady who has re-done her entire house. She has done much of the labor while heavily pregnant. We never see her husband in the shots, and the one time we did, she openly shamed him for doing a bad job framing a wall. This brief humiliation ritual seemed to say "men are vestigial and useless except as sperm donors". Mind you, she was not much to look at in body or face, and as much as I tried not to judge her, I did make the assessment that she was well on the road to divorce. The more famous she got on the social media machine with her pretty pictures of cleverly decoupaged kid's furniture, the further she got away from the notion that men have value. Her house is beautiful but I do pity her children.

The agenda behind the superwomen who can frame a wall, find a dresser on the roadside and spiff it up and sell it for $850, and rake in more than their ex or soon-to-be ex-husbands make on social media from sponsors is to make more divorced women and men. More divorced women means more households as families atomize, liquidating generational real estate to scatter to apartments or the more ideal purchase of a "me and my kids only" home for the new set of fragmented people. More divorced women means tremendous bonuses for family counselors, therapists, and other know-nothing shills who profiteer off of emotional pain and suffering while also acting as direct and indirect drug pushers for Big Pharma. But most of all, more divorced women free up the ultimate resource and money maker: the children of divorce. The System survives off the energy of children, and that is why it wants them to be abandoned, thrown into foster care, and pre-digested in the juices of hatred and discord. The formidable wall of loving, intact husband and wife must be at least partially demolished so the children can be vampirized by the Epsteins and Diddys of the world and their copious followers. Divorce makes it far, far easier to get at those precious children, and it is the perfect tool for distracting the parents and literally removing the kids from their sight.

My husband, the child of divorce, spent the first 11 years of his life in the most sheltered of Christian fundamentalist environments. He was not allowed to watch television other than Flipper or Animal Kingdom. There were no sleepovers. When he hit 12, three years before he would truly go through puberty, his parents began the excruciating process of a long and drawn out divorce. Overnight, he was left almost entirely to his own devices as his father ran off to live with the woman he had been cheating with and his mother scrambled to get a job after being a housewife her entire adult life. My future husband, then an adolescent, started smoking that year and did not quit until he was in his 40s and married to me. He began drinking an entire case of Coca Cola every day as if it was water. He got in such bad trouble at church school for scrapping and falling asleep in class, he was sent to a religious boarding school in a nearby state which utterly failed to put him on the straight and narrow. Just imagine how his teenage years would have gone if he came up in the age of online porn.

Divorce opens the floodgates so the vampires can eat the children, and often they have been grooming the children and both parents for a long time before the ink is on the divorce papers. For instance, the videos of the women doing all of the "manly" construction tasks all by themselves are a form of grooming. They quietly say to the women that we can have the prettiest and most peaceful of homes as soon as men are out of the picture, either subjugated and dismissed by being forced to live in a sea of Laura Ashley-esque chintz, brass bath caddies, and wall-to-wall sage green paneling or foisted out of the home altogether with a suitcase and a footprint on their rear end next to the welt where the door hit them on the way out.

The self-satisfied divorcee can then engage in the fragile virtue signaling of somehow making a living by perpetually photographing her single-woman household, as if that is sustainable long term.

Despite the above rant, I know plenty of women who have died alone in their reasonably clean houses and who did not perish in catastrophic poverty or abject loneliness. I myself will probably die that way unless I manage to pop off before my husband. Fear mongering around those women who will die as lonely cat ladies is highly exaggerated, though it has been known to happen. I fear for the middle aged women currently driven to homelessness who live out of vans like the movie Nomadland, where Frances McDormand plays a widow who has no choice but to take up van life. At some point, we become feeble in mind and body, and the part of Nomadland we never see is how McDormand's character dies. Is she taken in by her few remaining relatives or friends? Does she park the dying van near a large wilderness area and then wander off into the trees to allow nature to do its work?

Are men lonely enough?

Women are not as afraid to die alone as men, that is for sure. They marry and re-marry. If they are single, unlike women, they would rather be paired off.

There is one particular dude bro influencer who shall remain nameless who often posts about the detestable characteristics of females/femoids. He is apparently married to a woman and has at least 5 children. The men who swarm his comment sections are mostly older and married. The middle aged ones are tired of their wives, and with good cause. Their wives are nags who live to complain that their men can do nothing right. Not that the wives are doing any better in their husband's eyes: they overlook the fact their wives are, were, and remain the mothers of their children. My decision to marry a poor man who truly didn't want kids is continually validated by these men's endless posturing that it is OK to dump their wives with the other trash for not wanting sex at age 54 with a balding, grumpy, pot-bellied, lazy, perpetually angry 58 year old. The solution is to replace the aging, used-up harridan with a younger model, preferably about 15 years his junior so that way the adult children won't be as freaked out by the pedophile aspect of their father's remarriage.

In one of his comment sections, Married with Children Dude Bro observes that he finds it interesting that prostitutes, E-girls, and other forms of women he views as trophies can find it in themselves to service men when they are not in the mood, but wives (especially those of middle age) cannot suck it up, either metaphorically or literally. He then suggests that because she isn't in the mood that her man decides not to be in the mood to pay her bills.

There is a sort of man who will always see his wife as the Queen of All Whores who beat out the other contenders to be the mother of his primary children (he likely has other, less legitimate sets of kids elsewhere). He frames himself as an alpha and is the dictator of his own banana republic. He often has a background in video game design or engineering or both, and he ardently believes that he and everyone else construct their own fates and that there is no such thing as chance, which is rather Calvinist of him. He supports that which helps solidify his delusion that other people, including his own wives and children, are to be used and shat upon for the glory of his ego and solipsism. She is an old sow who was once a young heifer and will always be reduced as a depreciating asset.

We are in a dark pit of Meatworld at the bottom of the Kali Yuga -- luckily there is nowhere to go from here but up! -- and that is why this sort of man does reasonably well in the modern day milieu. He has the sort of retarded, left-brained thinking that makes him think he can avoid the consequences of his actions forever, and that is why he is serenely unconcerned about unearned wealth or being treated as he has treated others.

Women who marry this sort are to be profoundly pitied. She naively believes the hype and enjoys the trappings of material success he is able to provide, and before you know it, she is moored to him and his abuse via their children. He does not grow fonder of her as she ages. When she is middle aged, she had better be nearly as svelte, hot, healthy, obedient, and ready as she was before the umpteen children, or he will replace her with a new Queen of Whores that he has determined will yield better dividends than the current model. She will be cast out of the home she foolishly made, and he will pride himself on the pre-nup that allows him to escape paying for her not to fall into a lower class that she may or may not survive. Naturally, she will be full of hatred, vitriol, and bitterness, and he will never once look in the mirror and own up to having helped make her that way.

For the love of the game

Patriarchy treats all as a game, and we are about 10,000 years into patriarchy as is evidenced by data centers being installed with zero thought towards potable water and a functioning electrical grid and wars that promise to rage until the last child on "their" side is melted down into a puddle of formerly-human grease. Patriarchy seeks to game-ify everything from commerce to intimate love, forcing us all to participate in contests until we collapse in exhaustion and the ecosystem along with us.

In our long standing patriarchal systems, all men are either pimps or simps. All women are whores. Even babies are not exempt from the gruesome reality of human trafficking. Women, like animals, are to be controlled, bought, and sold. A woman's worth is therefore determined by her youth, and it goes away as soon as she no longer is desirable or wants to have sex. The game is far more beloved than any human being outside the self.

For men, the goal is to make manhood a big competition where, like the old Highlander movies, THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE, and the Alpha King will rule his feudal empire until one of his sons takes his place. A man's worth is determined by the size of his penis, his harem, and the delusion that his inflated ego makes him intelligent.

We can hardly wonder with women and men in such a state that nobody in their right mind wants to take a chance on marriage. Women think they're winning the game by being the fairest of them all and scoring a good provider until their looks and sex drive fade and the good provider turns out to be a shallow egomaniac who has never considered them to be human. Men think they're losing the game because the self-appointed Alphas tell them they don't have what it takes to win. Meanwhile, there are plenty who would seek a third and better way, and that is where I come in.

Even if I get divorced tomorrow, I have been married to the same man for 26 years. It is excruciatingly obvious that I did not marry for money. Despite all our troubles and the fact I am the primary breadwinner of my household, my husband and I have a good marriage, and that is why I feel I am at liberty to give some advice for choosing and staying with a mate long term.

1. Stop keeping score

If you read nothing else in this article, read and re-read this first point. Score-keeping is what happens when you game-ify all your relationships (this advice can easily be applied beyond the realm of your mate) and think that you are somehow owed because of the good deeds you did and can somehow escape all the bad deeds you've done. Score-keeping is misery. You did the dishes, so she owes you sex. You changed the baby's diapers, so he owes you a foot rub. You pay the mortgage, so she owes you a clean house. You look good at 40, therefore you can easily leave and snag a richer man than him. And so on. Score-keeping is a fixation upon the negative and a discounting of the positive. It also turns all women into chattel and all men into whoremongers or would-be whoremongers. The solution is to focus on the good the other has done instead of where they do not measure up in portfolio or cup size. Instead of getting mad he hasn't mowed the lawn, smother it with cardboard and mulch for a pollinator garden and be grateful he helps with the yard and maintains the air conditioner. Instead of being mad that she no longer puts out, thank her for all the housework she does without thinking about it and hug your precious kids.

2. Know your real limits

There are deal-breakers in relationships, and if someone is genuinely preventing you from who you ought to be, you do need to leave. More often than not, however, it is a matter of not feeling brave enough to strike out on your own. In my younger years, I was afraid to put my foot down with my husband where our finances were concerned. Only as an older, more confident woman was I able to say "My way or the high way", and that is why we no longer live with my parents and we do reside in our own modest home. This home, though it ain't much, would be easily pissed away if we were still chasing unearned wealth via speculation and risk-taking. If you are the one maintaining the scaffolding and sanity of your marriage, stand your ground. For me, unearned-wealth chasing and cheating are marriage deal-breakers. My aunt had to deal with a gambler and she rightfully divorced him. Others I know had to deal with cheaters and some are still together, some are not. Aside from the true deal-breakers, I can make the best out of the pitfalls that come.

3. Ask yourself "Who benefits?" from your separation and divorce.

We all know that weddings are a racket, but did you ever consider who is making money off divorces? When two people shack up, they do so because "two can live as cheaply as one". Traditionally, large families used to live in one multigenerational house or compound, which offered safety in numbers as well as in-family wealth transfer as the home was passed from parents to children. Atomization is monetization, and not for the families themselves, but for the array of parasites that feed off of the assets and loosh released by broken homes and broken hearts. Maybe, just maybe, we are all being groomed all the time to see marriage vows as temporary and for our convenience. It's also useful when we see each other as pimps, simps, and hoes and use transactional thinking to game-ify our connections with each other, as if they were not priceless.

4. Defeat anxiety with gratitude and score-keeping with generosity.

Gratitude is the only force powerful enough to battle the Wendigos of our demonic age and win, and generosity is a function of gratitude. The kind of anxiety that ends marriages is not only annoying, it is rooted in fear. Anyone who genuinely believes in God or gods should in theory be able to dismiss fear and with it, anxiety, including anxiety created by one's mate for not living up to an ideal. Clearly there are plenty of people who say they believe in God without meaning it. One way we can put more belief in the Divine, even if that divinity is only the best and noblest aspects of ourselves, is to counter each anxious thought with 3 grateful ones. Going nuts over the crappy looking porch steps? Counter it with gratitude for having a porch and not dodging bombs and drones. Be grateful for clean water to drink and the sun on a beautiful day. Yes, the porch issue was not solved, but you put your thinking brain towards things that are actually important instead of whatever rat race the material world insisted you run. Gratitude, as I have said many times, has that weird trait of sublimating whatever it touches by the power of seven or more and radiates exponentially and fractally from its source. Harness the power of gratitude and you'll improve your marriage and every other blessed thing in your life.


kimberlysteele: (Default)



I am happy to read your Ogham free of charge -- that's how I hone my divination skills. Please limit your reading request to four or fewer Ogham cards: though this can take many forms, here are some common ones (all of them are basically combos of 4 cards):

 
-a single three card reading for the week or month and a one-off, one card reading
-four questions about four separate items that require one answer (card) per item
-a one card reading to answer a specific question and a three card for a more nuanced question
-Two separate readings, two cards a piece exploring the positives and negatives of two different choices

I am happy to do Ogham readings confidentially via emails -- just email me at k steele studio at gmail during the allotted time/before deadline. I cannot answer health questions. If you have a question about health or another sensitive, private matter, provide a bunch of non-identifying information and the Ogham will be able to figure it out even if I don't. I'm serious... the Ogham actually tend to "know" things without me being privy to what is going on.

Please note I take time off during Solstices and Equinoxes for Druid stuff and because sometimes I simply need a break.

My next planned break is from June 18 - July 5, 2026.

I take reading requests from whenever this post goes up on Friday night until 8pm US Central Time Saturday.

For a more in depth look into how I read and interpret the Ogham's symbols, please visit my website druidogham.wordpress.com.

Thank you for your generous donations. They often buy cat food and litter, groceries, and take out burritos and sandwiches for my Mom and me. If you would like to donate, please do it here:

http://buymeacoffee.com/kimberlysteele

Your prayers of blessing to the deity/deities of your choice are welcome whether or not you can donate.

Open Post

Apr. 15th, 2026 09:39 pm
kimberlysteele: (Default)
Hi everyone, I have decided to trim my writing schedule to essays every other week in order to make room for new books in the works. In more exciting news, I am in the process of writing my next book, Sacred Beauty. Like Sacred Homemaking (you can still pre-order it with the discount code SACRED20 until April 28, 2026) it is a non-fiction book about self-realization, but instead of being about the spirit of place, it is about the body as home for the soul.

I'm still coming up with ideas on what to do with my "off" weeks besides Open Post, and the first thing I would like to start is a book club. The book I'd like to discuss starting two weeks is a fiction book called The Mandibles: A Family, 2029 - 2047 by Lionel Shriver. The Mandibles centers around an American family who lives through the crash and devaluation of the US dollar and falls upon hard times. Shriver says of her own book that she wanted to write a near-future dystopia that she felt almost happened in 2008, saying that she believes we "dodged a bullet" at that time.

I read The Mandibles a couple of years ago and though I do not scare easily, I found it far more plausible than books in the dystopian genre such as The Handmaid's Tale or Brave New World, and that's why it sent chills down my spine. In the novel, the Mandible family is your average bunch of urbanites who live in Brooklyn and expect that all of their upper-middle class problems will be solved upon the death of the elder patriarch of the Mandible clan. The US dollar crashes and instead of an even easier life, they are plunged into Weimar Germany/Argentina in the early millennium conditions and must battle for luxuries they took for granted. A new currency called the bancor deliberately excludes the US, and US Treasury bonds are reset to zero, gutting the entire salary class overnight. The main nuclear Mandible family's extended relations move into a crowded Brooklyn house into the basement, and the former world-traveling eccentric aunt moves into the attic. They strike an uneasy peace as things get harder and harder. The young son gives up his beloved, loyal dog to a well-off neighbor who is moving away because he knows that if he keeps him, the dog is likely to be kidnapped and eaten. The beautiful cousin Savannah, who was set to go to a prestigious college, ends up becoming a high class teenage escort.

There's a great deal to talk about in the Mandibles, and I feel like it is a novel that is pertinent to our time, though hopefully it is not too close to our specific timeline!

In other news, the cats are doing well. Shadow always gets his fill of the telluric current when I do the Sphere of Protection every morning. The three outers are still outside. They have a heated cat condo and a heated water bowl and 3 square a day of wet food, very much thanks in part to my generous donors at BuyMeaCoffee/KimberlySteele.


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Kimberly Steele

June 2026

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