Holy Fucking Shit

By Janelle Lassalle

Jennifer can't be losing her mind. After all, she's a scientist, a researcher that's spent her whole life training to become a doctor. Her world is governed by science: by facts, data, research. The scientific method. And yet…Jennifer can't shake the feeling that there's something else out there, watching, waiting, pounding away on a door she dare not open…

• Language: English
• Publisher: Janelle Lassalle
• Release date: Apr 17, 2024
• ISBN: 9798223282891

Janelle Lassalle

Janelle Lassalle is a content creator, science writer and witch based in Los Angeles County, CA. A creative professional extraordinaire, she writes, acts, models and loves to dance. She's also the author of The Ketamine Handbook: A Beginner's Guide to Ketamine-Assisted Therapy for Depression, Anxiety, Trauma, PTSD, and More. Learn more about her by checking out her Instagram @jenkhari. 

Book preview

I was never really insane except upon occasions when my heart was touched.

––––––––

—Edgar Allan Poe

—-

How the fuck do I begin this story? I guess it doesn’t matter much in the grand scheme of things; after all, you’re going to think I’m stark fucking mad soon enough (if you don’t already).

The thing is, I wasn’t always stark fucking mad. Or maybe I was and I was just really, REALLY good at hiding it.

Until you.

I used to be a good kid, a good person. I never imagined hurting people, yet alone hurting them for sport. I abhorred violence in all its forms, and swore to live the kind of life that was free of it.

––––––––

Oh, the irony.

—-

Before we dive in deep to the crazy stuff, allow me to introduce myself.

My mom named me ‘Jennifer Clementine Albukhari’ but you can call me Lulu.

I’ve always been a high achiever, a writer, artist and scientist since birth. I graduated at the top of my class in high school; multiple universities wrote to offer me guaranteed admission. I ended up attending UC Berkeley and was pre-med for my first three years there. I even worked as a research assistant in a lab for a very prominent sleep researcher.

I was hellbent on majoring in Biology with a minor in Psychology and Film but ended up graduating with my BA in English. After graduation I’d continue to work as a writer for a good, long time, racking up bylines in all the top publications from Forbes to VICE, Rolling Stone and beyond.

I just released my first book, *** ******* ********** * ****** ** ****** ******** ***********. The book contains information collected from over 250 scientific sources that instructs readers how to use certain entheogenic substances therapeutically to treat a slew of health conditions. I spent a year working on it.

Most of my content is extremely well-researched and data driven.

Why am I including this useless bit of bragging, you may wonder?

Well, reader, the stuff that follows is pretty Extra Strength Insane, so much so that when you read it you may find yourself thinking, this person is @#$%^&*(.: And so, in my own defense, here I am in a desperate bid for credibility to help you understand that reality can in fact be much stranger than fiction.

Everything that follows is completely and utterly true. Can I explain it all? Nope, absolutely not, not even one little bit.

Am I insane? I’ve been in therapy since I was 18. I have asked my current therapist this questions more times than I can count, and her response has always been:

You are far too lucid and have far too much insight about what is happening around you to be insane, she says.

——

I have always known on some level that magick existed. Notice I wrote that ‘magick’ with a ‘k’? We’re not talking about street magic here, that cheap parlor sleight of hand you see at Vegas shows and kids birthday parties—nope, this is the Real Deal, folks. Magick in the sense of: there’s something out there we can’t explain. Magick in the sense of: we are definitely not alone.

Even as a child I had the good sense to keep quiet about this. After all, who the fuck could I explain the unexplainable to? Who would believe me?

I couldn’t explain the bizarre, odd phenomena I encountered as a child to anyone. But my world was never ‘normal.’

I was born to a Muslim family of Syrian immigrants and raised in an all Muslim private school. Even once I was old enough to attend a regular public high school my mom still sent me to the mosque on weekends.

Muslims, as it were, are an extremely magickal and superstitious people, though I doubt they’d ever admit to it.

"Don’t go into the bathroom without uttering your dua’ first," my mother would warn me.

Why?

"Because there’s djinn and other bad spirits in the bathroom. You don’t want them coming anywhere near you. That’s why we say the dua, to ask for Allah’s protection."

But what if I didn’t want Allah’s protection? What if I had always thought Allah was, well, a bully and a cunt?

—-

I remember sitting in class, arms folded neatly, as my teacher told us the story of Allah and Iblis, aka Satan.

––––––––

Allah is the Creator of all. He created the universe, the planets in the sky, the stars, everything that exists. He is the all-knowing, all-loving, all-forgiving, all-patient...

He created heaven and filled it with angels, beings of light designed to serve the Creator. He then created Man in His own image: Adam.

When Adam was created the Lord was pleased. He commanded his angels to bow to his new creation.

Everyone did...save for one angel, Iblis, who we know of today as Satan.

Satan did not want to bow to Adam. He saw himself as better than that which the Creator had fashioned from clay, man, and refused to bow.

The Creator warned Satan that he must obey.

Bow or I will cast you out of heaven, he commanded.

Satan refused. But before The Creator cast him out of heaven he had one last wish:

Cast me out if you must, but I will show you that humans are no better than angels. From this moment onwards I’ll dedicate my existence to showing you just how pathetic humans can be.

Satan swore to The Creator that his new purpose would be to corrupt man, to show the Creator that man was, in fact, lesser than him, Divine Light.

And with that The Creator cast Satan out of heaven forever.

I knew that Satan was supposed to be The Bad Guy here, and The Creator as all good. But I didn’t buy it.

Why would an all merciful, all forgiving God do something so cruel to his beloved creation? Whatever happened to forgiveness? Was Satan’s sin truly so great he deserved to be cast out of heaven forever???

I didn’t think it was fair to poor Satan. After all, he had only ever been created to serve. Who would want that kind of existence? What kind of kind God would bring something into existence just for it to live a life of indentured servitude?

I knew from then that this God—the Abrahamic God, Allah, Yahweh, El, whatever you call him—was not my God. He was nothing but a bully.

Yet everyone around me seemed to accept this story without question, blindly buying into the gospel with enthusiasm.

Praise Allah, they’d sing out in prayer five times a day.

But why??? Little me would ponder and ponder. Why praise this unforgiving bully? Fuck that guy.

If anything...I felt a deep sense of compassion and empathy for the fallen angel, Satan. God had failed to love him, truly and unconditionally as he was promised. He not only suffered from a lack of God’s love, but he was banished from his home forever and ever—for what, exactly?

And so at some point little child me developed a huge crush on the fallen angel, Satan.

——

I spent ages trying to imagine what he looked like, my fallen angel. I’d sit in class as my teacher went on and on about the virtues of Allah, dreaming of my man. I felt strange urges, urges I’d never experienced before. A hot, warm fuzzy feeling would fill me up whenever I thought of him, almost like drinking a hot cocoa, but everywhere, in every vein, artery and freckle. I’d whisper his name quietly to myself before bed, clasping my hands above my heart.

He felt like light itself.

How could this be evil?

—-

I’m going to do my best to lay this story out in a format that makes sense. You know: a linear, time moving forward kind of structure that’s been hammered into you with every story you’ve ever read? Yeah. I get that’s the structure you’re probably craving but um, this story ain’t linear, baby.

So I’ll do my best, but expect a lot of jumping. Good? Got that? Okay.

——

Grief does some fucked up stuff to the body.

I say this as a grief-stricken motherfucker. I am The Expert On Grief, baby.

You see, when I was a teeny tot in the womb my mama was married to a straight up criminal. Bonnie and Clyde style, only she wasn’t a criminal as far as I knew.

My papa was—still is—an insane man. So much so that my mom used to tell little me I didn’t have a dad because it was easier, I guess. I used to play with Barbies and tell anyone who’d listen that the daddy doll had died.

I guess at some point this behavior sufficiently disturbed my mom, who thought it might be better to start hinting at the truth.

My mom explained to me that my dad was in jail, that he was a Bad Man who had done Bad Things when she was pregnant with my little sister. She told me he would be in jail forever.

At some point pre-teen me started asking more questions. And thus the story came to life.

My dad, Mohammad Albukhari, was a professional scuba diver. He was also, according to my mom, a professional thief and full time piece of shit. He’d successfully robbed a bank in Florida for a cool six figure sum, my mom told me, and had gotten away with it before deciding to help himself to another plate of crime. After all, he was a violent guy that liked drugs and guns and violence in all its forms.

Like father, like daughter, I guess.

This time he had his sights set on a much bigger prize: namely, the CEO of a very, VERY well known company we’ll heretofore refer to as WELL KNOWN COMPANY INC.

My dad had this swell idea that he could team up with a partner to kidnap the CEO of WELL KNOWN COMPANY INC., Chase ‘Cook’ Gessalte, for ransom. And so, being of not sound mind whatsoever, he, well, did exactly that when I was one and a half years old.

I knew so little about this for so long. I didn’t want to know. Then one day in high school a guy who was into me told me he had Googled my dad and read all about him in The New York Times.

I was sick. I still haven’t read it, so here’s an excerpt from Wikipedia summing it up:

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"On the morning of ***DATE REDACTED*** as Gessalte was arriving at WELL KNOWN INC., he was abducted and taken hostage by gunpoint in the parking lot. His captors were two men, Mohammad Albukhari, 26, and Jim Sayer, 25.

An FBI spokesman noted the agency had overheard phone calls between the kidnappers and Gessalte’s wife in which the kidnappers demanded a $650,000 ransom for the safe return of Gessalte. Albukhari was arrested at the site of the ransom drop off. He later escorted an FBI agent to the location where Sayer had been keeping Gessalte hostage.

Gessalte was released after four days of captivity in chains with no injuries. Both kidnappers were sentenced to life terms in prison."

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My dad was only 26 when he did this insane chicken shit stunt. 26.

My mom told me he thought he could get away with it by hiding the ransom money in a safe location he buried underwater. According to her, my dad had just finished burying the money and was asleep on the beach when the FBI found him.

And thus began a curse of epic proportions which would set the rest of this insane story in motion for the next 30 years to come.

———

Prison did not suit my dad well. He was an extremely intelligent man, obsessed with psychology, philosophy, herbalism. He was also obsessed with the esoteric: with all things inscrutable; forces and phenomena that eluded definition. He was an energy worker and mage who could lucid dream and travel freely in the astral plane.

Yet no matter how much he tried to free himself of his prison by traveling in magickal states he could not curb his day to day, corporeal suffering. He could not escape the fact that while his astral body could travel his physical body remained on earth, stuck and festering in a rancid jail cell.

He did everything he could to try and escape, but it was all to no avail.

I know this because I read his journals. He documented everything fastidiously by hand: every occurrence, encounter, strange event, written in all caps with black pen. He was, after all, a rogue scientist in a way.

I have read every manner of book imaginable, and to this day nothing haunts me like those journals. They carried a wicked energy in them, so much so that anyone who physically saw them would tell me they felt uncomfortable. They show, in great detail, what it looks like when a man loses his own self.

Driven mad with lust and a desire for freedom, my father decided to do something to try and relieve his loneliness. He decided to conjure a succubus, a female demon, to have sex with him.

Funnily enough he succeeded in summoning her. And while he never learned her true name—demons will rarely divulge such information—he did know who she was, in some sense. He talked about her all the time as the snake chasing me in the astral plane.

It took me a while to figure it out, but I would come to know her name; to know her more intimately than I had ever known another human being.

Her name was Lilith.

——-

Everyone in my family knows about the family curse. We would all talk about it as far back as I can remember, joking that no man could survive in our family because of it. My mom’s father died when she was young; my father went to jail. My mother’s husband, that sick piece of shit, lived the kind of life where his misfortunes seemed to constantly multiply and stack in extraordinary fashion no matter what he did. My mother tried in vain to have a boy, over and over. It wasn’t until her fourth try that she made it.

The bloodline was clear: it did not want any men around. Any man that came too close to any woman in our family was affected; would suddenly be struck with extreme misfortune; would go insane, mad, destroy everything in their lives.

I watched this curse claim so many men with a curious fascination from the sidelines. I watched how it drove my step father insane; how it drove my sister’s husband to paralyze two people forever from the waist down; how it struck my brother with psychosis.

And yet the women remained, watching, wondering what seemed to be going after the men in our family with such a fresh vengeance. We’d share cigarettes and joke about it, this invisible curse in the family that protected us.

Trust me honey, be glad your dad is in jail, my mom would say.

——-

Despite my crusty beginnings in life as the accidental offspring of a Bonnie & Clyde roleplay gone horribly wrong, I was a Good Kid. I cared about people and things around me deeply. I loved to read books; wanted to be a healer and an artist, to care for things and create beauty. I watched over my three younger siblings like I was their own mama, so much so that when our stepdad beat our asses for this thing or another I’d take the beatings for them.

I was also an Extremely Weird Kid. My curious little self would wander around outside for a long, long time, so much so that I would often walk off the school grounds altogether. This happened a lot after my pops went to prison: teachers would find me sitting out in the woods far away from the other kids, writing invisible things into the sand with a long stick over and over, whispering under my breath.

They’d inevitably find me that way, my teachers, and would bring me back to the school, and my mom would sit in, and they would talk, all those grown ups; talk about me being a Weird Kid and Whatever Can We Do?

Meanwhile no one could have ever fathomed the truth, a truth so fantastical I barely believe it myself. But here we are.

——

There would be this one spot back in the day, a crossroads of sorts where three dirt passages convened. For reasons I could not understand child me was drawn to this spot like a moth to flame. I was in the second grade, so I must have been around 7 or 8 years old.

For reasons I could not understand when I sat there I would have urges to say and write things that made no sense to me.

It was important to find the right tool, I thought. I would wander in search of a long rod, the perfect rod, one that felt right. One that called out to me.

Once I had my rod the urges grew stronger. I would chant and write over and over in the sand what I knew not. I never heard ‘voices’ in my head, either. It was almost like an irresistible compulsion to do a mission I forgot I’d been briefed about: it felt deeply important, somehow, and I needed to be alone to do it. I knew, but didn’t know; if you asked what I was doing I wouldn’t have been able to tell you, but yet I also knew something was guiding me.

—-

I began to have visions of being visited by a woman at the crossroads. I knew this was no ordinary woman: she was like no human I had ever seen before. There were three of her, all exactly the same, each one young and beautiful. She had very tan skin, the kind of swarthy skin I had seen in Egypt, and curly black hair that fell over her shoulders. Each one of her forms was clad in a different color: red, black and white. She would also frequently be bearing a lit torch, ablaze with flame.

——

One day in second grade I finished my quiz early, way too early. All the other students were still doing their quizzes, my teacher told me, so why didn’t I go over and pick up a book to read?

I went up to the shelf and one book stood out at me like a sore thumb, its energy signature wailing so loudly I could barely think until I picked it up.

I opened the book up to this one story. It told the story of a Goddess who loved to hunt: Artemis. She would run through the forests and fields naked, hunting for love of sport, the thrill of the chase, or transform into magical beasts and hunt as those creatures. She was a virgin goddess that disdained the company of men, banning them from her presence. She hunted alone and was in want of nothing.

Seven year old me was captivated beyond all belief. I began to feel something strange, something tingling inside me. I read on.

One day the Goddess went to a river to bathe. In her seclusion and privacy she felt serene, at peace with the world and its inhabitants. Until—

She heard rustling in the trees, and to her horror discovered another hunter out in the woods. A male hunter, sitting at the edge of the river, crouched and hidden, watching her bathe.

The Goddess made eye contact with the hunter, and though he knew he should avert his gaze he could not, she was so entrancing.

Enraged by his boldness, Artemis turned the hunter into a stag, and commanded his wild hunting dogs to hunt him.

I had never read anything this wonderful in my entire life. Seven year old me was elated, inspired, in love. I felt a deep connection to this woman, this hunter that belonged to the forest and lived her life without fear.

I continued to read on and on. I read the story of Athena, the goddess of wisdom who had burst through Zeus’ forehead to birth herself. I read about Circe, the mesmerizing witch who turned men into swine; learned about Nyx, the Goddess of the night, and Chaos, about Hades and Persephone...

Yet I couldn't help but wonder. Why did this all feel so...familiar?

——

what do now?

——

I never loved anyone as much as I loved you. And this is how you repay me?

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I hate that you made me do this.

—

I had never done blood magick before. Like many of you out there, I was a little afraid of the idea. I wasn’t quite sure what I was getting into, and I had no one to advise me about the potential consequences.

I know no one will believe me no matter how many times I assert this is true, so fuck it.

—

You drove me absolutely insane, you steaming piece of shit.

You fucking coward.

I keep trying to bring myself to say it. To say the horrible thing you did. To unmask you in front of the entire world and show them who you REALLY are. So why is it suddenly caught in my throat, then? Why should the thing I’ve been screaming about to empty walls for years suddenly die as a pathetic whimper? WHAT AM I WAITING FOR?

—-

Here goes.

—-

You know that whole violence bit I keep dancing around? Well, it’s a key player in this story.

You see, my mom is a Syrian immigrant. Her mom, my Taytay as we call her in Arabic, was raised in Damascus, Syria.

My mom, my Taytay and my Taytay’s mom were all subjected to violence on a day to day basis. My mother told me as a child if she got the wrong answer in school her teacher would smack her hand with a ruler until it bled.

I had always wondered why Taytay was like a little, grizzled war vet; why she used to scrub my head with such aggression as a child it felt like my scalp was being ripped off. She was not above smacking the absolute shit out of us. Nor was my mother, who would sometimes pull the car over in a fit of rage to remove her sandal and beat the children with it—a phenomenon so common to Arabs it’s become a meme.

My step dad, too, piece of shit though he is, has copped up to many tales of being subjected to violence. It seems to be all too common among Arabs that when things get out of hand violence was the question, answer, solution, judge, jury, executioner, our whole world.

What else could you expect from a family that ‘doesn’t believe’ in therapy? Violence was all they knew.

So it goes without saying that my step dad was a violent guy that liked to hit my siblings and I. But ahhh, ah how he relished hitting me, Captain of Justice. For you see, every time he liked to bully—

He would come home at the end of a long work day,

Huffing and hawwing,

Hemming and full of rage,

The veins near his watery eyes contracting madly.

He’d find the first available candidate,

Whoever was laying around

And POUNCE on them,

Suddenly attacking them with his words,

Shouting, hissing, spitting an inch away from your face with

All the rage and terror of a man who has failed at every

Single

Endeavor

He’s ever

Attempted.

—-

When the old man came home he was always in a rage and looking for someone’s ass to beat for this harmless thing or another. But I never let him. As soon as I saw him start on my siblings I’d insert my nosy ass into the situation and tell him to go away, to stop harassing the poor kid.

This struck the old man the wrong way, and so