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evil eye

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evil eye

Article

evil eye is a recurring concept in the Collected Agenda archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between January 19, 2025 and September 09, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “I’ve been clutching my evil eye in case I do decide to travel. All my friends wear evil eyes, too”; “my friends in Miami and they called it Evil Eye”. It most often appears alongside El Salvador, Jordan Castro, Lower East Side.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: January 19, 2025
  • Last seen: September 09, 2025

Appears In

None.

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

January continues
January 19, 2025 · Original source
WHAT I DID Sunday, January 12 Ruby and I go to Bar Belly for dinner. Can we move to a table away from the bar, Ruby asks the waitress. Sitting at the bar is bad for your posture and alignment, she explains. This is another thing she's been learning at witch school. It seems that at witch school, you learn to sit and stand and then by proxy, to eat and sleep and breathe and think. Fruit and honey for breakfast, feet on the ground when you are seated with an unsupported spine. I am craving spiritual guidance, and so I soak this up like a sponge. I want to be taught how to be. This is how you wake up. This is how you shift your feet out of bed, this is how you land on the wood floor, toes first, the arches of your feet, then heels. The truth of it is my movements are products of my best but often misguided judgment. Guesses, really. For all I know, you should wake up in the morning upside down. Palms on the ground first. Heels then arches then toes. I want to learn how to be divine, but there are so many shamans and they all know best. God forbid I become sacrilegious. I certainly know myself to be fringing on this at times. Even the mention of shamans.... Ruby and I were going to go to El Salvador on Tuesday, but then I’m thinking about how I should read more before I continue my research on the ground. I visited El Salvador this summer. Later, halted my story about crypto-charter-state-red-light-therapy-benevolent-dictatorship etc etc etc. A result of overstimulation and laziness - I should deepen my roots before I return to them. Later, I'll go later. David sends me an X Post: “Wish we lived in 1970s media economy so esquire or playboy could fly me to El Salvador and publish my 10,000-word marginally-coherent slice-of-life coverage of the crypto convention that ends with a guy in a hot tub saying something accidentally zeitgeisty.” Ruby and I go to Forgetmenot. There’s a dog behind me, a big white husky, I hold out my hand to pet him and he gives me his paw. He does this a few times. He’s trained, I’m sure, to expect a reward in response but we’ve ordered a grill plate, there’s only halloumi left, I don’t want to poison the poor thing. Ruby posts a picture of me with the dog, but I’m in my big puffy jacket, and it mostly becomes just a picture of the dog. She tags my name on the screen. David sends me a screenshot of the picture. “DID YOU TURN INTO A DOG???” he asks. I order David ice cream from Figo when I get home. I ate half his bread and butter even though I've been so Ray Peat and even though after, I’ve been so Keto. I've been drinking again, hence the bread. Not a lot, but I was sober for a week, and the three drinks feel jarring. I've decided to stop causing problems. I've decided to get a job at a restaurant. I like the service industry, because the job is intensely exterior. There are many things so close to me of true significance, and I'm sick of ignoring them in favor of acting like a grasping freak. Monday, January 13 And so, you decide to redecorate again. Look at the layout of this place. There’s so much potential. There’s a big marble table and it’s cramping every corner. It’s cramping the light from the window. It’s cramping the yellow golden light that is framing our mirror. I go downstairs quickly, the light will be gone soon. I want to get a flight tomorrow, leave with my friends and find clarity in the hot humid heat, but it doesn’t feel like I'll be absorbing myself in something more - it feels like escape, and I haven’t earned this decadence. I’ve been deliberating all day. I’ve been clutching my evil eye in case I do decide to travel. All my friends wear evil eyes, too. It’s a strange coincidence - something most people I'm drawn to share, not intentional. I'm not religious, but this is different. Adele keeps a drawer in her apartment full of evil eyes, stocked to the brim in case one charm coincidently shatters. She'll never have to go unprepared. I take a test today. Sent, received, complete, returned. It’s so thrilling to do something I’m supposed to do. If we got rid of the marble table…. If we lined the walls with floor pillows below the windows, their tufted fabric landing well lower than the horizon line even when stacked…. I can imagine the furniture gone. Me, staring clearly across the room, one wall to another. I'm imagining all the clutter dissipated. I imagine it would erase some sense of static. I can imagine my hypothetical week in El Salvador, but I need to learn how to think about something outside of myself, even when I’m here. It would be better there. I can picture the airbnb in San Benito, the eight or so bedrooms, the open air layout that big homes in warm climates often share, arches bleeding into courtyards, steps built into hills, unclear where one room becomes another, wind and heat lightning swirling around you and raising your hair as your walking, even through the kitchen, even ostensibly inside. I want to swim in a big clear pool over a city that is now vaguely familiar but still, not really mine. I want to finish the story I started. New England Winter. I need to learn how to sort things through while staying put. David and I go to Estela for dinner. It’s our anniversary. He tells me not to say anything online about it. Private life should stay private, he says, but I’m writing it anyway. Estela is nice. It’s the sister restaurant of Altro Paradiso. My friend, Madelyn works there. Estela is smaller, cozier, you have to buzz to get into the building and then it’s up some steps, it feels like you’re in an apartment, it feels like you’re in Berlin. I’ve never been to Copenhagen, but I imagine it feels a bit like Copenhagen, too. “I like more old timey restaurants,” David says. “Me too,” I say. “But sometimes isn’t it nice to be in a restaurant that feels like Copenhagen? David agrees. He’s never been to Copenhagen either. Altro Paradiso is brightly lit, whereas Estela is dim. Stella - Latin for Star. Etc. The distinction feels a little obvious, but then, I’m being a little particular. Estela is small plates. Romantic. You can tell because you have to buzz the door to get in, and because the lighting is really dark. They put us in a little alcove by the shelves and shelves of wine. We order iberico ham, bread and butter, endive salad, crab with celery root (the best dish), squid ink fried rice with little bits of squid, steak with elderberry sauce. I order a Tito's martini, but I’m told they don’t serve Titos here. I’m told they have one martini with vodka that “tastes like smirnoff” ($22) and another with vodka that’s way better and far preferable (paraphrased) ($30). Our waitress is peppy. “We’ll take the Smirnoff,” David says. “She’s nice,” I say, later. “Domineering,” David says. Later, the waitress rolls her eyes a little when she asks me how my martini is. She smiles when I say good. I believe she is sincere in her hope that I’m happy as I guzzle up the fruits of my lowbrow taste. It really is a lovely meal. I don’t mean to be cynical. I tell David he should tell them it’s our anniversary so we can have something free, and he tells them “it’s our anniversary, can we have dessert on the house.” Then, I’m embarrassed, but they bring us dessert (with a price) and champagne (on the house). Tuesday, January 14 I’ve been working on maintaining constant motion. “An object in motion will stay in motion,” I’ve been telling anyone that will listen. I walk in place all day, and then I walk through Washington Square Park at night, freezing. I make sure to do an extra lap to circle under the arch, all sparkling and illuminated and icy. I’m thirty minutes late to the Post-Doomerism talk at Gonzo’s, and this feels like an important one to me because I used to base my entire framework of thought around mitigating dread through a surrender to the inevitability of fates worse than death. It’s a terrible way to view the world - juvenile if nothing else, but also aesthetically and morally barren, limiting, a nihilistic obsession with the present does lead to destruction (yourself and others), no matter how many delusions you harbor about enlightenment, and about time and therefore preservation as false constructs. You can’t be nihilistic if you believe in good and evil, and I do believe in good and evil, so it was never going to hold up. Post Doomerism The lecture is just starting when I exit the elevator. The talk is between Chris Small (founder of Amazon Labor Union), PradaHorseShoe (founder of Russian Cosmism Circle NYC), Joshua Citarella (Doomscroll Podcast), and Geo Yankey (Comedian) “Russian Cosmists think that Marx doesn't take it far enough,” Amana explains. “Marxism wants to abolish capitalism, religion, the family…. but what about abolishing the OG bummer - death.” The point of the talk seems to be to present a sort of leftist vision of tech accelerationism. Capitalist Realism, the parts of the industrial revolution deemed actually good, nuclear fusion (clean and limitless energy which imitates the sun) instead of nuclear fission, fossil fuels , etc etc etc. The audience, on the other hand, is mostly composed of people I recognize from other downtown events - this one taking on an uncharacteristic and somewhat academic sincerity. “Hypothetically, heat death could occur before we run out of fuel,” a girl sitting next to me murmurs at one point, evidently at least somewhat convinced by technology’s capacity for limitless good. I try to conjure a sense of what she’s imagining in my mind's eye - create enough clean energy, and you could be driving your car one day when the whole universe just implodes. This isn’t aspirational to me. Longevity even, has never been particularly aspirational to me, although increasingly moreso, I’m increasingly less cynical. I appreciate the sincerity of the lecture. I appreciate some of the ideas they put forward, too. It’s an irony-pilled audience and they're sitting in a deeply earnest room. I slip out during the Q&A - overwhelmed, honestly, and I’m late to another function. I’m handed a gin and tonic in the Lower East Side. I’m talking about the Russian Cosmism lecture. “Lenin tried that and 20 million people died,” I am told. “I don’t really know enough,” I say. I’m sent a documentary about The Tyranny of Scientism. I order some things like the books by Nick Zurnig and Mark Fisher. It’s good to be objective. The night slips onward. It’s rude to talk about accelerationism at a party. Wednesday, January 16 It's slightly warmer in New York today. It's still cold, but it's less frigid, I'm walking through Soho typing, I'm walking to Equinox, I'll finish writing this on the treadmill, I had such a fun night last night although I do feel terribly guilty about squandering my health and my beauty and my soul every time I get drunk. I was such a good drunk, though. I adore my friends so deeply. I adore my new friends. I think they are my best friends. I’m trying not to quantify everything. There are names of people I love spinning through my mind, now. Why order things. Some people exhaust me, and then there are other people who don’t. I’ve found new friends who live artfully while occupying a natural state that is absorbed with the physical world, recently. How lucky for me. I don’t want to use my volatility as a bludgeon with which to bend people to my whims. Good thing I don’t feel particularly volatile this week. It’s best to consider these while outside of them. Objective introspection: am I doing a good job? WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Gofundme + LA Fire Resources here. Sunday, January 19 From 6pm - midnight at EARTH — Jordan Castro and Cluny present SILENCE. An evening of silence. No speaking, no phones.
Inline links: X Post, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!C7a6!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5b47129c-0bc4-49be-9951-68a8a3f58ac6_1179x1372.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!RkCJ!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcb4a64bf-f664-428e-854a-221b40a26109_1536x2048.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!XxFb!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F59a8c887-c1bc-4090-9568-92185cc4e0c1_1412x1420.png, Amazon Labor Union, PradaHorseShoe, Russian Cosmism Circle NYC, Doomscroll Podcast, Geo Yankey, Capitalist Realism, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!kDE6!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd7220533-39ee-4944-a185-b7983b1500e9_1600x1066.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!abSY!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcb12cd88-f058-4032-ba7f-a91514034d33_1600x1066.jpeg, here, EARTH, Jordan Castro, Cluny
City Built on Crystals
September 09, 2025 · Original source
WHAT I DID Monday, September 1 On the train to Coney Island, my friends are talking about the motifs that keep occurring. It's the sort of thing that happens to you when you have a pure heart, one of my friends is explaining. It's the sort of thing that people try to do to Real Life Angels, my other friend is explaining. Real life angels aren't real, I am saying, though I understand her point. The train is streaking through open air with towns on both sides. Housing projects rising up beyond that. Fallen green leaves and gray pebbles on the edges of the tracks. I have had these concepts of destruction explained to me before, only then it was by my mother or my friends in Miami and they called it Evil Eye. Here, they call it Devils and Angels. Real life Demons. I have been spending a lot of time this summer, trying to parse out the difference. Later, we emerge onto the boardwalk to find Curtis Sliwa in his red barret at the edge of the Atlantic. Police officers and children and men with snake tattoos in the ocean. There is live music at Salt and Sizzle and a ferris wheel that is one-hundred-years-old-and-never-any-accidents and the sky turns blue and purple and they cancelled the fireworks last year on account of someone drowning and due respect. We miss them this year of our own accord. When I was in love I spent a lot of time thinking about the apocalypse and feeling kind of giddy and aloof in this anticipation, convinced that the best way to die was euphoria and so end times while the center held would be a relief above all. When I smoked cigarettes and was a teen I would spend a lot of time pondering pop-psychology notions of optimistic nihilism and watching reddit atheists evangelize online. Now, I'm on the F-train back towards block-party-bars and my friends are shooting photos of their merch line, standing in front of the train doors as they open and close and I prefer to stay seated. Mostly aware of how dehydrated I am, which is a relief insofar as it diminishes all less corporeal thoughts. At Time Again, we make new friends with rare and inquisitive souls, which is really what the end of summer is all about. Writing on my phone on the walk home. Scribbling with kind of blurry eyes like an ipad baby on Delancey Street about the things that one has left to lose. Scribbling kind of incoherently about Health and Strong and Pervasive Senses. Scribbling Mother Teresa’s Rules For Humility. Speak as little as possible of oneself and Yield in discussion even though one is right and; well - what else am I supposed to do besides accept and embrace a Strong and Pervasive sense that things are as they are? Things were one way and now they are another. Things are harsher now in some ways, and more gentle in others. Tuesday, September 2 Woke up feeling very concerned about the decay of my physical form as a result of my bad habits and also by my newfound sense of passivity which I hope is driven by surrender and not by cynicism but one can really not be too sure. Woke up to a brand new delusion. In my dreams, someone was knocking on the door. They woke me up screaming. I stayed very quiet in response. Sunlight through my windows that I cannot bring myself to drape with curtains. Looked through the peephole. No one was there. Here are things I need to do: email the priests at Saint Joseph's to join OCIA and consider becoming Catholic despite my generally waspy sensibility. Finish and publish my substack. Create publicity materials for the play, go to class tomorrow, go to screening at Anthology Film tomorrow, write write write. Conjure up some sort of novel-like plot out of my hundreds of thousands of words of musings I keep in secret online documents. Make final edits on El Salvador piece and hope for the best. Conjure up some sort of plausible plot for my novel about gnosticism and also schizophrenia in people who seek to approximate the feeling of being famous by having friends online. Drop off laundry. Workout a lot. Maybe go sober. Certainly be sober-for-today. Today I am Cleansing. Today I am proud of myself in some ways and disappointed in others. Over plates of octopus and shrimp in lemon mustard sauce and pita and eggplant dip, Iris asks if she can treat me. Treat me to what, I asked. Do treatments for you, Iris explains. Treat me with iodine and thyroid and hypnosis. Treat me with methods opposite to my own. My own being mostly, a hysterical dipping in and out of notions of asceticism. Ok to some treatment, I say. Iris and I walk to the shops. The sky is still light but it is getting colder now. Iris buys dish soap and I slip sea kelp spray into my pocket. I have become quite destabilized by my afternoon visit to the glass apartment in the sky with the revolving doors. Not my apartment. No one's apartment. I am less like an orphan now. Iris and I walk back outside and down towards Seward Park. Iris says Sam knows a good aura cleanser. Not that I think the aura in the glass apartment in the sky is necessarily dark or doomed, Iris clarifies. I’d been telling Iris about some theories on the aura of things as dark and doomed. An invisible string but it was most of all bad. Ultimatums of gnosticism but they were delivered with nefarious intent.. Narcissistic to assume spiritual implications in the everyday, obviously. But how does one explain why they feel like they are floating by the time they are drifting up the stairs? On the Internet, they are making up real life retreats to enter the void. On the internet, they will take you to the Real Life House where you can Understand Real Life Consciousness. On the Internet, you can't live forever. Everyone realized that a few years back and I realized too, a few years after that. In Real Life you can maybe live forever, though. Everyone hopes so. I have been worrying, lately, that I hope so too. Wednesday, September 3 It’s Art Week in New York, which means less to me than it used to, besides for a pleasant rise in energies and things whirling back to life. I go to the first installment of the Marjorie Cameron series at Anthology Film Archive on account of Emillia’s recommendation and a slightly uneasy interest in the occult, tonight. An interest in witches who used to dance in a ring of rocking horses by my childhood home and a drive through Lily Dale with Riley in other lives, a few lives before this one. All that greenery and a long road alongside a lake towards the Psychic Capital Of The World. Hub of Mediums. Salmon Rushdie had been stabbed nearby a few years back. A psychic in Rhode Island had told me things would happen as I wanted them too but it would be first a thing of waiting, and secondly a thing of new architectures and spaces given that I’d been dealing in impossible conditions for awhile. Trying to make something stick in an Architecture of Unhappiness for a while. I stayed up til dawn over the weekend. Awoken to a Providence necklace placed around my neck and a burning desire to remove myself from the organ donor registry just in case. I worried about the morality of seeking loopholes as it pertained to the Providence Necklace, but a few days have passed and now it is Wednesday, early evening, tuck the tag under the collar of my shirt and began my hovering walk towards things that happen. The screening shows a Curtis Harrington film called Night Tide (1961), and it is about a girl who is a siren or perhaps it is just about Psychological Warfare, the ending leaves things a bit unclear. I've been nostalgic for the kind of California where I've never really been before. Nostalgic for things that never happened which I think is less a thing of clairvoyance and more a sense of how it all slips away but regardless; the shots are all of witchy Venice Beach and an apartment over the carousel that overlooks the sea and there is a bonfire on the rocks and some dancing that becomes a bit possessed due to dark forces - pulling my hair over my eyes like a blindfold for these parts - but I am thinking I could live in a place like this in spite of perhaps some evil. I have always thought I could float around it. I have always been arrogant in this way Thursday, September 4 Last night, I turned off the air conditioning and spilled Diet Pepsi on the baby pink rug in my sleep. Mom has shipped out baby blue curtains with white stripes and New York (the place where all my problems are) is starting to become a place that oscillates into something more calm. Sophie suggested baby pink curtains, and so I am making compromises in my mind. Compromising my own opinions and the opinions of others. Putting a lot of stock in the opinions of others. Putting a lot of stock in things improving drastically through the help of water in glass bottles and red light therapy and self hypnosis and religious conversion and swapping out the Cool White Linear Fluorescent Light Bulbs for something warmer. Everything becomes warm and still and the air is kind of heavy. I can lie very still for a while. Not forever, but definitely for now. You should just become one of those sociopathic writers who does insane things for the sake of writing, Iris advised me a few days ago. Yeah, I said. Like go to consciousness school in Argentina or conduct strange experiments with materiality on myself and others. Adopt a regiment of strange injections or move to Venice Beach to become Catholic and fight the occult there, too. Sitting on the edge of my bed in my New World in New York City. Closing my eyes and imagining Venice Beach as a magical little enclave with a witchy apartment over the carousel by the sea and arched doorways and conch shells and a jazz club and massage parlors and psychics on the piers. If I became a ruthless psychopath, what could I do in a place like this? In New York City (the city built on crystals). I am not feeling so ruthless. Self-experimentation without self-possession mostly leading towards destruction of a pretty boring variety. At least we don't live boring lives, I used to be told. There is nothing more boring than this, I used to say in response. Friday, September 5 Come in, come in, three psychics beckon on Sullivan Street, but I am pretty clear about how things have been and where they are going, and I would prefer to look for motifs in patterns and symbols and psychosomatic symptoms which reach a peak and then; abandon your whole entire life. That is one thing the psychics could tell me to do. Abandon your whole entire life. They could tell me to buy a whole new personality. I could buy a good fortune swimming in tea leaves and an aura cleansing from the psychics on Sullivan Street. I could buy a membership to witchcraft school and a flat in Venice Beach and a conflicted conscience when it comes to forces of good and evil and certainly, to things like health, sobriety, longevity. It's enticing to create pseudo intellectual or pseudo spiritual explanations for bad behavior when in reality things are obviously much more simple. Most actions are much too plain to qualify as any sort of performance or definitely any art. I'm working on becoming stupider, I told Iris. Will I become stupider? I asked the psychics. Will the apocalypse come sooner or later if the collective consciousness ideates on it or tries to stave it off? Is it better to be witchy but self protective, or ascetic but operating with self abandon. Where can one buy self possession? Taking the C-Train to Fort Greene Summer Fairyland where my dad and Sylvie wait for me at Aita and so everything is better. Plums and peaches and ricotta and octopus which the girls behind us are saying they don't eat after watching My Octopus Teacher (2020). Girls love to say they don't eat octopus after watching My Octopus Teacher (2020) but perhaps I am heartless, and I mostly just found the documentarian in that film to be kind of deranged and unreliable. Beef tartar and potato chips and Sylvie is talking about how she's aware of the balance of power in every single conversation and I'm saying I'm literally never aware of that I'm literally always just seeking equilibrium in any interaction that matters because conversation exists to reach understanding and Sylvie is saying no you are just always making sure that you are the one with the power in every conversation. I say no and she says yes and I say can we seek some equilibrium and she says you make sure that won't ever happen. The combat stops. My dad is asking Sylvie's boyfriend why he seeks intellectual inquiry. Sylvie's boyfriend is pointing out the famous people peppered around the bar. Goodbye you power hungry beast, I am telling Sylvie. My dad drives me back towards Manhattan. Animal skulls are scattered around his mini van and he says I can have a deer jaw for my new place if I want. Wrong turn through the Hubert Tunnel. Twenty-two dollar toll. Drop me off at the most Satanic Nightclub in New York to sulk soberly at the edge of an indoor pool and really lean into nihilism insofar as - what if we stayed for a while? I don't stay for a while. Manhattan night is teeming with people and the city is built on crystals. Good or bad ones? I haven't decided yet. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Tuesday, September 9 From 7pm - 11pm at Night Club 101 — AltCitizen 15 Year Anniversary Show series launches with The Kickoff. Hosted by Brittany Marino. Featuring Lulu Van Trapp, Suo, D. Treuit. From 10pm - late, after party downstairs | Tickets: $15 advance, $20 doors
Inline links: Night Club 101, AltCitizen, The Kickoff

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