Salem, demons, M&M's
June 17, 2025
In 8th grade (I think), we went on a field trip to Salem, Massachusetts. You know, that place with the trials? We were in New Hampshire, so it wasn't that far.
There's all sorts of touristy shit there now. Magic shops, museums dedicated to the witch trials, and there's a pirate museum. I never knew anything about any pirates in New England. I got a metal water bottle from the pirate museum. I put Sunkist in it once and after that it was almost unusable. Don't put soda in metal water bottles.
We went to a bunch of the "witch museums". One of them had a reconstruction of a dungeon, which I admittedly still think was pretty neat. It's a cute little town for sure. Nice buildings.
After a while, the teachers let us go off and fuck around for a bit. My friend and I decided to stop in this psychic reading place. The guy there told me that if I wanted to fight the plan the universe had for me, I had to study abroad in Italy for a year, stay home for another year, and then go off to Italy again. There was obviously no way in fuck that could have ever happened in real life, but I always thought it was funny how he never clarified whether the plan the universe had for me was good or not. Maybe he was trying to screw me over.
I was actually pretty fascinated by "demons" and grimoires when I was like, 13 or 14. I even got a copy of The Lesser Key of Solomon, which is still in my house somewhere. Eventually you figure out that the vast majority of these "demons" are just older deities that were recast as demons during the rise of Christianity, and you realize how weird and disrespectful it all is. The narrative it spins is quite sad, though. Take Baal, for example, once worshipped alongside Yahweh, but who was spurned and named a demon.
I never did try to summon any spirits. It all looked too complicated for me to pull off correctly, and I figured I would be setting myself up for disappointment anyway. I was raised an atheist, and I never was particularly spiritual. I was mostly just fascinated by the stories. Sometimes I do wonder, though. Maybe I should put "summoning a spirit" on my bucket list.
I will say that I think most "witches" are pretentious, many retellings of the Salem witch trials are sanitized and / or blatantly incorrect, and I think Wicca is a strange, borderline offensive pastiche of many indigenous / pre-Christian faiths. I also (really, really) dislike referring to said faiths as "paganism", which I believe denies them the respect they deserve. Even though I don't believe, I think many younger people don't realize how important religion can be to a culture or community, and treating it like a weird game of charades doesn't make you much better than a missionary. What do I know? Anyway, after talking to the weird psychic guy, I went to CVS and got some peanut M&M's. Then we all went home.
