A torn coral-red paper scrap taped down at its corners. INTRO TO in white on a black strip along the top; below, HIGH spelled in widely spaced dot-matrix points, then Strangeness in heavy black type with a staring eye inside the g, over EXALTED DREAMCORE MAGAZINE ISSUE#1.

Welcome to High Strangeness:
the world's #1 exalted dreamcore zine exploring the strange, the unseen and the mundane.

My Editors want me to write an inaugural editorial. They are quite insistent there must be one, those weirdos.

Good thing they can not read, so I can write whatever.

Night photograph of a dirt road under a streetlamp; a tall rectangular slice of the sky is cut out and replaced with a dense starfield, like a door standing open in the dark.

Yesterday I was told to interview a couple of tooth fairies who want to open their own dental clinic. In the end the article didn’t work out. Girls just wanted some free promo.

That's not what High Strangeness is about.
SWIPE RIGHT FOR STUFF THAT DIDN'T MAKE IT →

So instead I chatted with a trio of whisper-punks who break into people’s homes and murmur rebellious bangers into their ears while they sleep.

Interviewed an alpha-graffiti named Richie.

Helped out an ancient goddess who can not legally buy booze.

Wrote it all down.

It seems my Editors don’t mind.

My editorial board consists of rogue higher-dimensional beings, astral information patterns, weirdo lesser gods, call them what you want, I don’t care and neither do they.

Close-up of a corroded brass intercom panel in the rain, name slots reading SMITH, JOHN, MILLER; the bottom slot holds a blank card with a hand-drawn crossed-out-square sigil.

The fuckers communicate with me mostly in a Morse code of dreams, images and a constant stream of strange coincidences. Sometimes they throw me a burst of emotional insight, extreme despair or unconditional love as a bonus.

Yeh, editorial board meetings can be messy. Thankfully, those happen only at summer and winter solstices. Little blessings.

A restaurant table at night set with a single lit candle in a glass, ringed by a neat circle of moths; in the background waiters tidy an empty terrace.

The mission of High Strangeness, as much as I could decipher after one erotic dream, three nightmares, and a strange encounter with a dishwasher, is… well, presumptuous AF, so I won’t even bother trying to lay it out there.

Let’s just say that it’s all about the vibes, man. About the unseen, the misunderstood, the higher reality we are all knitted in.

Four street cats — ginger, black, calico and tabby — sitting in a row on wet cobbles at night, all facing an open doorway into total darkness, waiting for something to come out. A poster on the wall beside them reads FLYERFFITTERS.

Follow the food chain far enough, and you are always someone’s midnight snack. Even elder gods are someone else’s malfunctioning kidney.

A pawnshop window at night: a taxidermy fox stands among trays of wristwatches, silver cups, old cameras and a porcelain doll.

The point of HS is simply to widen the aperture, see more of this world of ours. The zine is supposed to cover topics ignored by mainstream media.

Two lit windows in one dark brick wall: a bar packed shoulder-to-shoulder, and beside it a bare fluorescent room where one man sits alone with a coffee.

You know, stuff like housing problems of urban trolls, love letters that streets send to each other via traffic vibrations, how forest spirits adjust to life in the city, that kinda deal.

Wet asphalt at night covered in utility spray-markings — blue, red and pink arrows, codes, a small spiral — layered like a diagram of something else.

Editors believe there is a market for this. I have my doubts, but hey,

I just work here.

Even if I’m being paid in obsolete Eastern European currencies that are no longer in circulation.

A clothier's window through heavy rain at night — THE COAT & CROW in gold on the glass, a headless mannequin in a long tweed coat.

I will need to bring that up at the next solstice.

A night bus stop: an empty wooden bench against a lit wall, and on the wall the seated shadow of a man that the bench does not explain.

Anyway, nuff babbling. Like, share, subscribe, all that jazz.

Or don’t, what am I – your mother?

Oh, and

WELCOME TO
HIGH STRANGENESS
bits, leads, dead ends. swipe back left for real life
An empty shopping street at night; a wide puddle reflects a row of pale lights that do not correspond to anything above it.
Sodium-lit fog over a terrace of houses; a figure stands on the rooftop between the television aerials, facing away.
A brick alley at night; a huge square-shouldered shadow figure fills the end wall, cast by no one.
Black-and-white alley of layered posters and fire escapes; two rubbish bins marked with spray-painted orange crosshair circles.
The base of a blue door-post chalked with a small mark — a cross over a struck-through triangle — beside an overflowing bin.
The bottom corner of a battered teal door, scratched with a small doubled X; torn rubbish bags slump against the wall.
Rain hitting a pavement drain; beside it a chalk diagram of circles, arrows and tally strokes, half washed out, two cigarette butts on top.
A manhole cover at night ringed with hand-chalked rays like a child's sun, steam rising from it under a yellow streetlight.
A padlocked grey utility box on a brick wall, DANGER OF DEATH sticker peeling, a yellow cat-face tag sprayed across the door.
A roadside utility cabinet stencilled TC 48-B 11/18 MNT 245V D-STRT under a silver graffiti burner, traffic lights green in the distance.
A coiled garden hose hangs on a brick wall beside a downpipe; its loose end whips away into the dark like a tail leaving the frame. A small sign beneath reads ALIBI IN PLAIN SIGHT.
Flash photograph of the kerb behind a parked car's rear wheel: torn paper scraps around a drain grate, the gutter wet, nothing where something just was.
A back door standing open at night onto a lit hallway of hanging coats; the lower half of the doorway is smeared with motion blur.
A cluster of orange-lit birds wheeling low over a corner shop at night, people queueing under the awning, one long light-streak crossing the sky.
An archaeological record card: a pressed fast-food burger wrapper covered edge-to-edge in cuneiform, catalogued beside a black egg-shaped pebble. The label reads River Euphrates Archaeological Survey, surface find, Tigris floodplain, 1977.
A white-bordered print: a night alley with a neon sign, and in the foreground a puddle rippling in perfect rings with nothing touching it.
see you at the solstice