Ambivalent Post-Saturn Queers Seek Derridean Surf Instructor

Boots and Addy compose fan mail to their favorite postmodern astrologer and discuss the meaning of woo in our times.

How would you describe who our pomo astrologer is and and what she does?

Boots: A lesbian witch who wears a pirate jacket.

Addy: Yes, all of that and also the person who talked to us about how the Gemini twins are bowlegged and sassy booted, and that this is a critical refounding of butch/femme, and that actually, one of the belly buttons of the universe is where the gemini twin’s sassy boot sits in the sky.

[Our astrologer] is here to help us figure out how to be around for the turning of the ages in the right kind of way. I also think I’ve maybe described her as post-structuralist. The way she talked about the 'dude standardization project' and the foundation of the zodiac as a very relevant way of understanding the lives of people living in a world that would divide up the sky in such a way...It’s not only weird pomo times, it is the speech of someone who is invested in the political.

Boots: That is what was so fun about it, though, is that she was so clearly invested in the political and speaking on all of these different registers about astronomy and astrology and these different ways of seeing the sky, and that she seemed invested in all of them, and also the project of the universe beyond the sky. It was all about not needing those to fit together in any tidy kind of way.

Addy: Defying disciplinarity. It was as though until I heard her speak I had never thought of the zodiac as a structuralist framework. Of course, duh, but we don’t have to just choose between woo and air sign, academic woo. No, we can be discerning, critical with our woo. I felt like she was really speaking to this crew of wayward, thirty-something slash Saturn returns-ish ambivalent post-punk queers.

Boots: She really had her finger on the pulse. Is that what is happening in [the northern coastal counties]? Who else is employing her services.

Addy: Maybe we should open the post-university [up north].

Boots: Her number of registers of politicization of the zodiac and where we are traveling in life and where all of the planets have been situated in different historical eras. The ways we can politicize the looking of the sky.

Addy: It’s the idea of historicizing, but on a totally different register of time. It was this woo materialist, or woo historical materialist, understanding that is so how we need to talk about it right now. Women, the original Marxists. Witches, the original Foucauldians. There was also a real commitment to the terrestrial.

Boots: There is something key about that teaching us how to be in time, and teaching us to engage multiple planes of existence and attention. There is something about the way that I’ve engaged with metaphysics that feels like a bracketing, we are either uncritical or critical in a way that is flip. I detach from the level of criticism I use in the way I engage the rest of the world. I don’t engage with it as something to be interrogated, which would allow it to show itself in more interesting and generative ways.

Addy: Like a conservative interpretation of lesbian feminism's 'nationalist' impulses, the ways that woo is engaged with non-critically, that we treat it too tenderly. We are scared. We were closed off from it or it still marks a loss. But that is the kind of conservative 'decolonial' imaginary. To not engage with a critical refounding of what woo is and what we need woo to do. What is woo in our times, really? I think [our astrologer] opened up that it is possible to have a different relationship to time and magic and material and being than the one we usually get to engage with that still draws on skills we’ve been honing by being in the fucked up world that we are being in. Why are we tentative with woo?

Boots: It’s not that I’m tentative with the critique. It’s more about this feeling that I’m slightly uncommitted to the nationalism. Interested in the potential of such, but skeptical about the border-making practices, or the aesthetics or the way it’s configured etc. but I’m interested in the effects such nationalism might have the resources I or others might draw from it, such that I am side-stepping into the practices that I find intriguing, without being able to commit to the full-on political project. I am dabbling. I don’t feel the need to critique because I don’t take it seriously as something to critique, even though I do take it seriously.

Addy: We want a post-nationalist feminist world-making project that we are not just 'dabbling' in. What would it look like to embrace? Braid it into the strands we are pulling on to make meaning in the world. What would a relationship to woo that wasn’t handling it--relating to it with some kind of generational deference or over-carefulness? How could we wield it more meaningfully?

Boots: I think it’s about looking at what resonated for us listening to [our astrologer]. These ways of approaching woo in non-fundamentalist ways--in ways where there are multiple registers, not simply bracketed lines. I’ve been thinking a lot about irony and the general disappointment/dissatisfaction with hipster irony in the world. I read this thing that was a challenge to take irony seriously, at this level of reading things multiply, rather than that creating distance necessarily, to think about things as being more than what they say they are. That there is a relationship with meaning and intention and multiplicity that allows us to access ironic readings not as distance-making or emotionally distanced. I’m interested in a multiplicity of readings for woo that don’t demand distance, such that one can encounter the project not as nationalist nor anti-nationalist. Because I think that’s the thing about dabbling. You are allowed to read things multiply such that 'this is how I’m reading it, this is how it really is.' 'This is what I’m going to say I think about it, but this is what I really think about it.' All those different ways of reading and narration.

What I got out of [our astrologer's] talk was this ability to not create distance in multiple readings, but to take all of those readings seriously. When she was describing how the zodiac was more of a spiral..these suggestions of other ways to imagine beyond the terrain that we are given. We can reimagine borders and still take seriously the work that they do. Take seriously the terrain they set out and how they demarcate themselves, how they are in relation with other models and structures. What they give to us, and what they don’t give to us. All these ways of taking things at their word, even though it’s not the final word. What would that model of relating to woo be? Rather than, ‘I’ll take it, but I’m going to be skeptical about x, y, and z.’ Or to be really devoted to x, y, and z but to say I’m really skeptical about it because I’m afraid of how it might come across. But that involves not taking it seriously or not responding to the demands that it makes.

Addy: I think about camp as this way of really loving things and putting yourselves in them and also totally not taking them seriously, so I think gay people are good at this. Being back in school and witnessing some of the cultural break downs between the gays and the people who don’t have much context for the gays has made me appreciate that difference. It’s one of the things I think is sad about taking everything so seriously. I wonder what it’s like to make stake in the world and also re-think stake. To be open to a constant and incoming remaking of the idea of self-interest and what it is. I think gays are good at that, as a world-making practice, and I don’t know what that means in relation to the woo, but as people trying to embrace a piece or idea of our own 'history' in that, there is something a little bit more tender about how people handle that than just through irony. There is something very bittersweet about it.

Boots: I’m with you, I think that gets at something with the lesbian nationalism. The woo provides a reimagining of worlds while still acknowledging its roots in, and it’s being a product of, the world in ways that are similar to gay camp. The sort of unicorn-ing of the world.

Addy: You just turned 'unicorn' into a verb.

Boots: That particular tenor of camp...its the tendency of kinds of humor and marginalization to come together in ways that are bittersweet, and hilarious and tragic and that reimagining worlds becomes possible through an against a hopelessness of the constrained world. And that the structures or the ways things are held in and confined, precluded, becomes visible because of that..and the magic is created in response to that.

Addy: That is some thin air shit! People just folded meaning back in on itself a couple times and then invented a world.

Boots: Absolutely. I mean, they did. And that’s not always obvious. It makes it extra fascinating and extra hard, because we see how tenuous and accidental and specific those sorts of makings were and how solid they are in their remakings of themselves and how hard it is to create resistances to those..whatever they are, I’m not quite ready to call them ‘accidents,’ but that set of possibilities that then became solidified. So other world-making practices are both tragic and hopeful in that way which I think is part of what’s going on in irony and gay camp--and I hope part of what’s going on in the woo. 

Addy: I feel like I’m seeing a shape right now but I don’t know what it is. I feel like its made out of soap.

Boots: When you said that, I immediately imagine that Dial cheese soap. Because the moon is made of cheese.

Addy: That’s what I’m saying man, just bringing it back around.

Boots: Are you imagining a giant moon made of dial?

Addy: It was a little more umbilical than that.

Boots: Umbilical dial. Or cheese.

Addy: Something about umbilical and cheese go badly together.

Boots: A lot about umbilical and cheese go badly together.

What are [our astrologer's] three best qualities?

Addy: Pomo-wisdom and Hilarious re-naming of things. Her aesthetic. She's got swag.

Boots: Her coat is amazing. And she has an amazing demeanor! She talked for 2.5 hours straight with utter charisma. She was so chill and so on. A hard note to hit.

Addy: Yes. Discerning and also chill-axed. We are all striving.

Boots: But I want to back to re-naming, because it’s actually super important to these questions around what is woo in our time? (Talks about collective tarot making process) That question of categories--that questions need to be asked of categories, and some need to be hung onto, or at least we can hang our hat on them. And that’s what [our astrologer] got into. She offered another way to think about the universe, another way to think about the constellations.

I always had a hard time remembering constellations, but now, all of the sudden, I remember the sassy booted twin. And the whole thing of making the body into that shape, so it’s not only a renaming and reimagining of the things we are seeing, but a demand to collapse the space between them, to rethink constellations as bodily, which was a connection to the historical stargazers she conjured up at the beginning. Making it a non-intellectual exercise to look and create a relationship to the cosmos.

Addy: And the way she described looking as a way of making stories about their lives. Could we just do that too?

Boots: I think we are!

What do we need that [our astrologer] might be able to support us with?

Boots: This is [back to] the relevance question.

Addy: I need other ideas of time, or of ‘victory’ to sustain work for justice. Kind of like we were talking about earlier [in a previous conversation]. Not what is right or legitimate in this exchange, but what are responses that open up the conversation, that open space to imagine other ways of responding to one another? I think those are questions I have in relation to our movements. What are ways of noticing space for intervention on speech or discourse? How do we recognize the openings when our concepts of justice and the future are not fixed? What are the tools we use to frame and reframe and negotiate with one another our shared values with respect for difference, and--I hate the word ‘innovation’ because we live in the Bay Area--but on some level, innovation? And I just don’t feel like we have that.

I think the spaces where people often went to think about those things, as imperfect and often disappointing as they were, are increasingly diminishing. So far we mostly have reactive responses to that. What is a response to neoliberalism and to everything we need to be learning right now in terms of the spaces we used to labor and make meaning in our lives that are no longer open or available--what are the openings within that? What is a response to that that is not about being like, ‘look I told you so?’ but a response that fundamentally continues to open up more spaces for being with one another in ways that are just and possible?

I don’t know. I mean, I feel bitter. I really do. I don’t want to lose the powers of discernment. I don’t want to be just a surfer, but that’s why I’m learning to surf because discernment comes easier for me. It’s so easy, living in places that make themselves over so quickly and that are so expensive, to just roll around and think ‘it’s not like it used to be.’ It’s kind of like our earlier conversation about radical queer politics which is running on 70% nostalgia for a time that a politics of transgression was more meaningful and this idea of a perfect queer left that never ever existed and so now people are just busy being bitter, and talking shit, and that’s kind of what it is, you know? What’s on the other side of that?

Boots: I’m curious though, what do you think is under the bitter, if anything?

Addy: It’s that these fuckers don’t even enjoy themselves. They have miserable lives. It is like getting a big fucking tick. What do you think?

Boots: My question to myself when I’m feeling bitter is: 'Is that a feeling of loss? mourning? disappointment? disconnection?' I think that there is, more often than not--it’s a feeling of subsumed rage. Just really tired rage. I need to have a bit more energy if I’m going to stick with this game of living and resisting. I guess that’s why I ask myself, where is the bitterness coming from? What is that? I’m clear that it doesn’t serve me or anyone else or building another world. I want to understand it’s origins better and it’s trajectory better to figure out other ways to be in relationship with it. Maybe that is too therapeutic sounding.

Addy: Well, I don’t think it’s only therapeutic because it doesn’t sound like you are just trying to fix it, but to ask what it should do. I think, for me, it is mourning more than anything. And moving through a world in which so many people refuse to mourn. Where the spaces we built to figure out how to do that together are being systematically destroyed. Spaces of being where we could imagine responses together no longer exist and we are supposed to file out into the world as individuals who are all self-calculating, like, ‘What do I need to do?’ And that’s supposed to be progress! It just feels like there is a fundamental social contract that has been violated. The idea of what surplus and progress are supposed to be and be used for. It just really gets to me.

Boots: So what we need [our astrologer] to do is provide us with a restored social contract! Or space for restoration beyond the bitter, or at least a space for mourning...

Addy: mourning the displacements of neoliberalism. Okay, well, concisely, leftists need a critical astrologer.

Boots: I think a critical astrologer who has a warm relationship with the cosmos and its cruelties.

Addy: A Nietzchean astrologer?

Boots: Not quite that bad. I don’t think [our astrologer] did it in a way that was so direct, now listening and talking to you after and our conversations about our need for spaciousness. There’s a way that how she frames the cosmos was a metaphor for that. And that didn’t involve some fictional perfectionism of the universe. Not this sort of importing of the other-worldly as a pinnacle of us. It wasn’t an idealization of the universe. Nor was it an idea that we can in some fundamental way universally represent the universe, but this idea that in this grappling with the grandness and potentially deadliness and the weight of the temporality that it presents in this very hopeful and very disappointing way, that that is part of what gives us the space. To use that understanding as a resource to imagine specificity and generality at once. History and future at once. Or historic and present-future at once. As a tool, as a metaphor, as a muse in a way--being able to engage in the sky or the cosmos gives us a kind of concrete and abstract metaphor for space. For an opening that we are asking for.

Addy: So, maybe more like a Derridean-surf-instructor-astrologer for leftists?
...

All the Apocalypse Purses: Devotional Packing Practices for Posi End Time Spins

This time last year, I was riding my bicycle on the north shore of Lake Superior with my dear friend, Roger. Route 61 in Northern Minnesota is one of the most gorgeous roads I’ve ever ridden. Roger had rigged a pair of solar powered ipod speakers to his handlebar bag (he was going all the way to Labrador) and with Fleetwood Mac on our side, we pedaled long into the far-north summer solstice days, stopping only for the homemade pie sold all along the Scandinavian-inhabited shore.


Maybe it was that Lake Superior itself was a cold and mean old Daddy such as I had never met. It could whip up storms so nefarious we were sure the fore riders of the apocalypse had arrived. I’d find myself one moment contemplating the water’s stillness, darkness, and eerie silence, the next riding through sheets of rain to the echo of distant tornado sirens. Maybe it was the Finnish wizardry that Roger began practicing to guide said storms after picking up a spell book at a small town solstice auction. It could have been that I was headed towards the Canadian border on a bicycle, riding a road made more lonely and gorgeous by the fact that gas prices had topped five dollars. Then again, maybe it was just that Roger was reading Octavia Butler’s Parables series and our nightly conversations over re-hydrated split pea soup and cans of tuna inevitably turned to what kind of getaway bikes we should build in case of industrial collapse…But somewhere on route 61, I took to casually referencing the end times in relation to how we might best approach any given activity or quandary.

The thing was, I felt pretty positively about the end times we spoke of. It’s not that we weren’t talking about doomsday, but that we were more so speaking about readiness—a commitment to being ready—not just for the coming world—but for the one already here. One thing I’ve always appreciated sharing with Roger is a sense of camp, emptiness, and maybe even possibility arising from an appreciation of the utter absurdity of late capitalism. It’s as though we both agree what we have on our hands already is, and will continue to become—far stranger than any end of the world we can imagine.



The end-times-speak used between Roger and me took on it’s own internal conceptual framework, that though unarticulated, we understood to be generally positive or at least matter of fact. I spent much of the rest of that summer traveling alone. End times-speak—the language of readiness—became a private language I used with myself to maintain a sense of agency, accountability, and in-placeness while regarding the brutality and absurdity of such realities as borders, capital, and US citizenship. End-times-speak was such a precious part of my private internal lexicon that I didn’t realize until I was back in the company of friends that constant off-handed references to the end of the world didn’t work well for most people.

In the midst of my re-integration, I caught a performance by Justin Bond in New York. I remember being particularly struck as Justin spoke of witchcraft and calling corners from SF drag show dressing rooms in the pre-ARV days of the HIV virus. She sang songs to lost loved ones—“luminaries of affliction,” she called them. “The end of the world already happened to queers,” I remember thinking. The end of the world already came for queers and the end of the world came to most of the world five hundred years ago when white people started running ashore all over the place.

The end of the world is happening right now, it’s just a matter of where you stand in relation to that end. And by ‘end’ I mean both death and violence and destruction and domination AND I also mean the end of stabilized and naturalized notions of those violences. By “end” I mean the world that is unfolding out in front of our feet again and again—all of the time.

The end of the world is scary not because it asks us to hole up with ammunition and iodine tablets but because it asks us to take responsibility for the world that we find before us. Right now. It asks us to be ready for what is coming—without having more than a guess about exactly what that might be and only educated guesses about how to best make it happen. It demands that we keep our shit fresh and our hearts open and that above all, we be paying attention.

As for preparation, I might burlify my bike. I might keep some iodine tablets around. The early summer’s draft of my apocalypse-packing list (made while biking the North Shore) included things like: spare bike parts, solar panels, autonomous Marxism, potlucks, sex, and calisthenics. I quickly realized my packing list was trying to balance out a need to take care of shit with a need to appreciate it as it is. And this made me think, that really, the best way towards the apocalypse/promised world was really in and through our love of this one. That by loving this world well—really well—that we also locate our readiness to have it change in ways beyond what we find imaginable.

I began asking myself and others: what is it we want to take into the next world with us? If we had to pack purses for the apocalypse, what would we put in them? What do we love enough to carry, or what are we loving so well that it delivers us to the next place, allows us imagine a profoundly different world?

For me, it turns out to be things like watching teenagers dance, or a pair of kittens I helped nurse in Brooklyn, or Stevie Nicks youtube videos, or stretch denim, and definitely this picture:


Munira, Tuesday, and Ser on a broken down ferry in Maine last August

When I ask most people what they would put in their apocalypse purse, the first thing they want to know is how big the purse is and how much space things like youtube videos take up. This is really hard to answer. I’m not here to tell you whether there will be anything like youtube after the apocalypse or help you figure out how big a purse you should carry. The apocalypse purse is a conceptual packing list. It is a practice, a sacrament of sorts.

Once, someone answered that the only thing they would need to pack was “world peace.” I don’t want to mock anyone’s packing process. Maybe you are a heavy packer. Maybe you don’t carry purses. That’s fine. But I will say this: How are you going to put it in the purse if you don’t have it to pack? That’s the only rule. That we are working with the material we have available to us.

It’s like Mary Poppins’ carpetbag. It’s bottomless. You might never see the things you put in there ever again. And I think that’s okay. Because it’s the packing, not the contents, that count.

It’s all tumbling out in front of us. The new world. It’s happening very quickly. Likely there won’t be any hard and fast lines we cross, but should we find ourselves having moved into a new territory, a landscape maybe even known as the apocalypse, I’m willing to wager the question is going to be not what we are carrying but how devotionally we have packed.

Everything you need to know about surviving the scabies half of the mite-pocalypse

Late nineties apocalyptic preoccupations were primarily concerned with ubiquitous vaginal infections like bubonic BV and the tenacious and fearsome colonization of all bodily moistness known as candida. While fears of basic vaginal ph levels are hardly a thing of the past, evidence suggests that the apocalyptic proportions of such vaginal infections may have decreased over a timeline roughly coinciding with veganism’s decline in popularity.

Declines in the rate of bubonic BV may also be due to experimental research in “bouch-wear,” leathery protective talismen crafted by fermentation artisans out of the dried liver-like substance of “kombucha mother,” a gelatinous colony of yeast and bacteria originally found floating on the surface of Ukranian lakes. While conclusive proof is still being awaiting, it is suggested that bouch-wear may have powerful balancing effects on microorganisms, including the bacteria known to cause BV.

While MRSA staph has emerged as the new and arguably more formidable and mysterious form of infection to colonize our skin surfaces and minds, recent reports from both and left and right coasts have shown mites—namely bedbugs and scabies, are beginning a new all-out offensive to position themselves as the primary threat to our lives, minds, and ability to comfortably inhabit bodies in the world alongside other bodies in the world.

While at TJJET we prefer to offer you information that may be less technical or at least more uplifting, we believe that knowledge about scabies has turned out to be sufficiently mysterious to qualify itself as general esoteria. Also, due to the high number of readers who are public health workers, are having sex with a lot of people, or who are public health workers fucking other public health workers (an especially vulnerable demographic), we have come to recognize this as a subject of growing concern to our readership. To that end, we have agreed to undertake an intensive study of all information about scabies currently known to humans, including original research in mite-specific banishings and excorcisms. While we realize that scabies only represent one half of the mite-pocalypse, the extent of this research has been far more exhaustive than originally intended. We welcome the expertise of any known bedbug experts who have taken that one for the team, because we have no intention of doing so.

The information that follows is guaranteed to have been experientially tested with more weird-girl rigor and neuroticism than anywhere else on the world wide web. We hope to spare you the hours, dollars, and possible mental ruin that could result from a thorough perusing of internet message boards on the subject, where you are likely to encounter numerous scams and the details of horrific science fiction skin diseases unrecognized by the CDC and possibly related to chem-trails and alien abductions. To be fair, we wouldn’t want you to miss this ad featuring a sports-nut scabie-sufferer. But really, you are ill-advised to google scabies.

The Basics

Scabies are a microscopic mite that colonizes your skin. They itch, especially at night. Some people will have rash-like symptoms. Sometimes you will see “burrows” which are wavy lines made by the tunneling action of the mites under the skin. Medical experts will tell you they usually show up around the arm pits, belt line, chest, ass, elbows, webbing of toes and fingers, ankles, and back of legs. If this sounds unhelpful because it describes almost your entire body, it’s because it does, and it is just one part of what keeps scabies infections generally shrouded in mystery.

If you’ve never had them, the symptoms can take three to six weeks to show up because your body develops an allergic reaction to them over time. During this “window period” you can still infect others. Before you call every person you’ve hugged, consider that if scabies were that easy to get, we’d probably all have them from the unfortunately upholstered surfaces of BART trains. Scabies mites are not very hearty. They don’t like to live off the body for more than 36 hours and generally there aren’t too many live mites on the body at one time. Infections are likely limited to parent-child contact, and people you’ve had sex or shared a bed with, though it is not unheard of for scabies to have been passed among roommates by way of couches or bath towels.

Diagnosis can be tough. Everyone’s reactions and symptoms look different. Healthcare professionals often lack definitive information. While diagnostic tests (if you can convince a doctor to do them) do exist, skin scrapings often show a high number of false negatives because there are so few live mites on the body as a whole. Things to look for include a pattern of escalating itching, especially during the night, after exposure to an infection.

Taking care of business

The usual prescription for infection is permethrin 5%, a topical cream that kills the mites and eggs. While this one shot deal might seem appealing, keep in mind that it is a neurotoxin applied to the largest organ in your body and it is recommended to only be done three times in a lifetime. A tube is usually good for two full body treatments, aka overnight coatings. If you have health insurance or a friend who does, one can usually call in and give them a line to have a prescription written. There are other types of prescriptions. Lindane is an ultra-toxic topical treatment and there’s also an internal anti-parasitic for particularly bad cases.

Even in the case of successful treatments, you will probably continue to have symptoms for several weeks as your body reacts to the dead mites left behind, so don’t freak out and keep reusing this toxic shit. Our only other cautionary word is that permethrin does not always work and it does not protect against reinfection. While you hardly want to subject everyone around you to toxic rub-downs, if roommates or lovers are not treating you should pay special attention to the window period for symptoms before letting down any hypervigilant campaigns of cleanliness.

With any kind of treatment you choose, it is important to clean the environment as well. Vacuum like crazy. This also means washing and drying bedding, upholstery, and all recently worn clothing and shoes. If you don’t want to wash everything, you can bag it up for a couple days. If there’s no moisture, the mites supposedly die quickly. Go get several rolls of quarters and some good Laundromat reading because it is incredibly likely you will be cozied up at the coin-op a lot more than usual until everyone in your midst is definitively scabies-free.

The low down on non-toxic treatments

Permetherin 5% is not recommended as a treatment for pregnant people or infants due to toxicity. In these cases, pharmacists can mix an ointment of 10% sulfur. Why, you might ask, is everyone not being prescribed this cheap, non-toxic treatment? Good question. Besides it being somewhat messy and taking a couple days, we see no reasonable way to account for the fact that this time-tested favorite of commune dwellers and forest activists seems to have fallen out of use, especially when one takes into account all of the expensive and ineffective alternative treatments being tried.

Here’s how it works: You buy some sulfur powder. We were able to get a pound for five bucks from the local herbal apothecary. You mix it 1 part to 10 into vegetable glycerin or some highly absorbable lotion. We don’t know whether 1:10 means by weight or volume, but let’s be real, you are going to put in way more sulfur than it calls for, so just mix it up. The glycerin can be messy but gets better coating-action. You might want to try a coat with glycerin from the neck down at night. In the morning you can shower and apply another coat with the lotion mixture. Continue this for three 24 hour cycles (days).

If you are trying to select a lotion and you think all gross drugstore lotions are created equally, they are not. The ingredients appear similar, but Lubriderm got a less messy, more even coat on. You can be out in the world in your sulfur coat, you just might smell a little like a home perm. It’s messy enough that you might want to refrain from wearing black or dark colors. The glycerin washes easily out of clothing and bed sheets but the sulfur does leave a faint smell, nothing that can’t be explained by saying you fell into a hot spring until the smell washes out entirely.

Other pro’s of this treatment method: Besides being cheap, not too labor intensive, and non toxic, sulfur has the added benefit of having a common witchy use of being a hex-repellent and expellant. Witchy proprieters of the powder sell it as "brimstone" and claim it removes enemies’ powers over you. If this is true, the sulfur treatment could also be effective in treating the post-scabies syndrome commonly known as “scabies of the mind.” Finally, another notable benefit of the sulfur treatment: If there is anyone you’ve smashed with that you end up needing to tell about the scabies, you could make a date out of a beach blanket sulfur soak with special snacks and a themed movie marathon, which is much nicer than offering someone the other half of your tube of toxic paste and telling them you’d like to see them again in a month.

Some words on Neem and other “natural treatments”

Although we’ve already put forth another, far cheaper non-toxic treatment alternative, there are simply too many wild claims about neem oil to not address it. Internet searching will yield all kinds of vague information about the use of neem for scabies. What is impossible to find, though, is anyone who is claiming to actually have fully managed a scabies outbreak with the stuff. Proponents of the neem approach say the neem disrupts the scabies ability to reproduce and so slowly kills the outbreak.

We personally subjected ourselves to over two weeks of nightly neem baths and just as much tea tree oil. While the outbreak was managed during that time, the mites returned as soon as the baths were stopped. And in case nightly neem baths sounds like a relaxing ritual, consider how you and everything you own, touch, or look at will smell like rancid peanut butter even after several washings. This is especially bad if you live in California where the offensive smell of neem may spark “friendly reminders” at work about company scent-free policies. We wish we were joking.

As for tea tree oil, people have been claiming this as a virtual panacea for every apocalyptic ailment mentioned in this article (BV, MRSA, mites). One question we would like to put forth is if tea tree oil kills everything known to exist, is it really that great for us? Also, the tea tree oil may have helped manage, but did not actually rid us of mites, so we say keep the TTO in the toothpicks where it belongs.

We hope that this information, more acutely painstaking in it’s collection than much of what we hope to offer here at TJJET, proves useful. Since no amount of information about microscopic mites will ever be completely satisfying, we welcome additional questions, comments, speculations, and hearsay related to the mite-pocalypse. Together, we survive.

The Situography of the Imminent Future

Generated by collaborative divinations, illustrated by Ivy. Click to enlarge: