A Day in the Life of a Salty Sorcerer

Sure, everyone needs doctors, and scientists and teachers, but what you rarely hear about these days is the stunning lack of sarcastic, semi-threatening home decor. It is this keen, neglected need that I have been called upon to fill in life.

On an average day at work, I wake up in the morning, claw my way out of the ground, and have a nice warm flapjack covered in cookie butter to rev up my engines. I’m lucky to be able to work from home, so I can get a nice slow start to the day, sipping my coffee and staring out the window at the scenery.

Sometimes the hag who lives in the woods behind my house will stump on up to the door and knock. She will not stop doing this until I get up to answer it.

“What is it, Esme?” I’ll ask.

Esme does a grotesque, crackling laugh that makes me cringe. She eyes my half-eaten flapjack.

“I’ve got you a new client,” she crows.

“Esme, I said no more ghosts.”

“This one’s not a ghost.”

I am not fooled; it is always a ghost.

“Just because we’re neighbors doesn’t mean you need to take an interest in my life,” I beg her.

“Someone’s trying to buy his house,” Esme says, ignoring how much I hate her.

“Okay.”

“They’re calling it a fixer-upper.”

“Okay.”

“Raist.”

“What?”

“You need to help him.” She takes a hard-boiled egg from the thatched basket she is holding and stuffs it in her cheek, gumming on it grossly.

“You make me want to throw up,” I tell her. Then, “How much is he willing to pay?”

“He doesn’t have any money.”

“I fucking knew it was a ghost.”

I start to close the door on her stupid mug, but she stuffs an arthritic hand in the crack.

“I am willing to pay for my good friend,” she says.

---

So it is that I set up my workstation in my little upstairs office. I work on an old lift-top coffee table that I have covered with an even older sheet from my bed. I get my paint, my varnish, and some brushes, and wake up my one employee, a mint-colored cricut machine in the corner. Then I take a look at the photo Esme has sent me of the house.

The roof is caving in and one of the windows has been busted. The door has mysterious scratch marks overlaying the peeling green paint, like some unholy demon tried to claw its way in one night. There are dark stains on the porch that look suspiciously like blood.

I spend a moment thinking of the best way to spin this. Then I get to work, sanding my wood sign, painting its surface, finding the perfect font and sizing for the message I need to impart.

When I am done, it is a thing to behold.

“Hang this under the realty sign,” I tell Esme when I drop off the sign at her mud hut.

“Oh Raist, it’s perfect!” she burbles. I take my money and get out of there before she asks me to dinner.

---

Don’t get me wrong, aside from the odd ghost commission, most of my customers are of the human variety, both demon-possessed and not. I got inspired at a young age when my first demon had started to make itself at home in my flesh prison. I remember loving the smell of wood just as much as I hated meeting new people (whenever guests came to my childhood home, I would canter into the woods to huff a couple of trees and talk to myself like a garden-variety psycho.) More even than I loved trees, I loved the things you could do with them once they were slain. My father had a woodworking shop and it was a great source of fascination for me as a young heathen.

Another great love of mine was words. I would get lost in books as often as I could to escape this mortal coil. I don’t care what anyone says, including those fools who never sent me my Hogwarts letter (UM??): true magic exists and it lives in pages made from trees, printed all over with little squiggles that breed life. There were so many things one could do with words, so many emotions one could evoke. Sometimes, you could hang a completely different meaning on the same sentence just by switching up a couple of words: true sorcery. I began to observe the way people used words outside of books and stories.

Lastly, one of my other favorite childhood pastimes was imagining going through other people’s houses and rifling through all of their belongings. I would read their diaries to find their secrets, raid their fridge for good dessert-things and judge their home decor and what they’d done with the place, imagining how I would undoubtedly do things better.

It was inevitable that at one point all these lines of passion had to converge. When they did, I was thirty-one. The demon inside of me was 3,459 and was entering its rebel phase. Every morning we would argue what to have for breakfast. It was after one such argument (the demon won- it is why I can’t fucking stop with the flapjacks) that we began to discuss the one thing we had in common these days: home signage and how it just wasn’t like it should be.

“Why are there so many signs in houses that say the same tired stuff?” I muttered. “I mean, there’s only so many ‘live, laugh, love’'s one person can take.”

My demon replied something that I cannot repeat here, mostly because it was spoken in tongues and I didn’t get about half of it- but it sparked an idea in me.

A certain (very small) amount of this story might be false, but the signs today in my Salty Sorcerer Society shop today address the very real, overlooked needs of real people. Yes, we have the signs that say, “It’s five o’clock somewhere,” for cute little vacation homes on beaches, but what about signs for tired people with morbid senses of humor that say things like “live. laugh. destroy thine enemies”? (available soon). We have no shortage of signs saying things like, “Bless this home and all who enter it” for kindly grandmas, but there are very few for wicked crones who want to humble-brag about their house’s dark history or just create a vague sense of unease in their visitors. Take my recent bestseller for instance:

...Harder to find, I trust you’ll agree. We’ve got signs galore that say ‘Beware of dog’ but where are the signs letting you know how to handle other less common household pets, like the shadow figure in your closet or the demon under your stairs?

Alongside my signs, I also occasionally produce shirts that convey specific feelings I’ve never seen addressed on a t-shirt before like the following:

There are parts of my day that feel like plain old work- I’m still quite a new business and the amount of learning, promo and stressful dark magic rituals networking & financial types of tasks I have to do are not so fun. What’s also not fun is finding ways to fill the gaps in my income. But it’s more than worth it to be able to sit down in my little home office for a bit every day and dream up things I myself would one hundred percent buy and hang in my home or wear on my body. Marketing isn’t fun, but when you truly feel you’re doing it on a quest to reach kindred spirits, then it’s at the least very fulfilling.

In conclusion, if you’re a disenchanted goth feeling culturally appropriated by Halloween or a lover of dark quotes from dead authors, or hell, even a ghost (note: WITH a PayPal account!!), Salty Sorcerer Society is here to help. I mean that, as sincerely as its possible to mean anything when you have a teenage demon with ulterior motives leeching off of your life force.

I have to go, I think Esme’s at the door again. Now I just need to magic up a sign to keep her away.

xx Raist