Black Elixir Neat

Cobra on my left, Leopard on my right

2010-06-16T12:35:00.000-04:00

I attempt, once again, to attempt to write more story. I prayed to my godhead this morning for inspiration before imbibing the Yemeni fire-seed drink. I wanted this to be a libation, not a simple tool to bring about false wakefulness. I sit, I put on music, a powerful melodic roar of strings and electricity, and I fall into a trance of research, like I did in my more alive periods.

Desperately, I attempted to drag this into the narrative, but a smooth, large hand kept shoving me away. The shove felt more like a concussion, rattling the mind each time I would attempt to batter against its force. "Let me tell stories!" I would meagerly yelp, smashing at keys and contorting my mind into a dried, screwed-up mess. The presence loomed large in my heart, lit from behind and wreathed in serpents and vines, dripping leaves and clutching a spear, a gift from the light behind it. I can almost hear what my mind translates as a brusque laugh and a playful, derogatory utterance.

"Go fuck yourself."

Thankfully, my god has a sense of humor, and so do I. I tend to forget the irrational yelps and unbridled fire of being that my god incites within me. I forget that "he" incites me to cease caring about the judgments, the consequences, the imperceptible restrictions that asphyxiate our breath, our True breath. Y'know, the ones that, in spite of having a wide space around your body and all the relaxation and health in the world, keep you from actually getting a breath.

Panic. Greek for "of Pan." The Fucking God, the wildness. We've made him so abstract in our day, either jamming his frequency into ourselves and binding our breath and action in "panic attacks" or babbling on and on about ourselves, our illusory, impermanent little beings vomited out of the biomass and tossed into Saturn's world of circumstance.

Scare yourself, now. You are Beast. You are violence. You drink the blood of footed beings (use of plastic, oil, use of animal products and human resource), you drink the blood of rooted beings (paper, plant matter, biodiesel, lumber, fungus, mood altering substances), you drink the blood of the Primordial Being (water), for you yourself are a part of it all and must inflict yourself upon the world to be a part of it. Involve yourself not in abstraction, not in the far flung scales of the World Serpent; it has the unique proclivity both to envenom and to constrict. The "world," that which you have in front of the vessel of your consciousness, contains all of the information you need to push forward.

Knowledge is as dangerous as wine. It impairs our judgment as much as it clarifies. Knowledge is power, and power is an opiate illusion of the worst kind, pushing us to chase the Dragon, the reptilian primordial force of change, instead of cultivating a safe, warm place for the Dragon to roost in our stillness. Fear not the sacrifices you make toward this goal; they serve Life, they serve our very source. Our dalliances and mistakes give us lessons, give us raw materials to shape that which we always have, ourselves, into the very tools used to overcome those mistakes, if not for ourselves, then for those mysterious other glimmers of being that swim in the same chaotic seas as we. We adapt to our dark and dangerous climates through growth, just as generations of biomass grow around vents on the sea floor and bob in lazy luminescence in the barren, lightless depths. In the darkness, we build our tools to create our next evolution. We create our own light, we change our senses, we grow new mouths to capture the Marine Snow, the foundation of life, in humility.

If it takes a lifetime to move an inch towards the Sun's chattering call, then that lifetime has been spent well. If we live to let in the world, to become a part of the world, to taste of the gutter and of the stars, and commit ourselves to combing and soothing the turbulence in the asensate roilings beneath or above the wall of our universe, if we seek to understand that the words tossed into our minds remain mere symbols, and that no exemptions exist from the connection of all, then we truly live in the light of God, even if that light comes from a bioluminescent angler fish readying to consume us whole.

Nature shows as much mercy to the cautious as it does to the valorous. What restrictions we place on ourselves and on each other serve to sever that connection to the true restrictive source, the limits of which we can only explore and to which we adjust ourselves when found untenable. We don't pick where we were born, and we don't pick what we're taught. We do pick where we go, and we do pick what we learn. What atrocities of separation do we justify? What abstract concept do you feed with the blood of others: Religion? Culture? Country? Ideology? What have these ideas done for you lately? How have they brought you closer to others, and whom do they ask you to exclude? How dare these concepts tell you whom to let in and whom not to let in? How dare a series of idiotic words in a book claim your life and determine your actions? How dare it claim to present the truth, when it presents simple smudges of lines on innumerable dead trees, only to serve its own propagation? How dare this infection muzzle you? How dare these ideas toy with us, pitting infection against infection like gamblers at a dogfight? How dare they shame us into listening to their drivel, justified with the occasional lip service to Universal Love, while stating that some are more deserving of that Universal Love than others?

Drinking the Brew of the Bent Mother

2010-06-14T19:22:00.000-04:00

I feel like every so often I get on here, scream and shout about the world, then feel defused and affable for a bit, maybe discussing some magic, until it creeps up again with a thousand eyes of hatred and teeth of steaming, solid malice.

I would pretend at slaying this monster, perhaps to think that I might emerge the bright solar hero and gain the accolades of the kingdom. That secret, deep down, is that I really, truly, hate the kingdom, and really I just want the monster to do what it does in a less short term manner. I want to till the soil with this fury; I want to plant trees who bear fruits of despair. I want the world to see its own horrible black heart of hate. I want everyone to know all of which they are capable, for only in our depths of villainy, deceit and torture can we understand what it means to care.

If we are, indeed, the royal gift of the divine, and if indeed we contain universes within us, then no matter how we attempt to purge our bodies and souls of the muck and horror, we still contain that filth. We are unclean. We contain in ourselves rapists, torturers, manipulators, bigots, despots, enablers, thieves, brigands, and all manners of the vile professions. The only possible way to keep these villains from running rampant over our lives and the lives of others is to embrace them. We have an imperative to love all, including ourselves, and especially including the horrible within ourselves. If we bring these truths to light, we may yet utilize their abilities without excuse or apology. We will know our "enemies," for our enemies are ourselves, have always been ourselves, and will always be ourselves.

We are BP. I am BP. I haven't done a goddamned thing about that oil spill. I haven't traveled down to the Gulf to help clean up. I haven't put any effort into shaming the creator of Girls Gone Wild out of business. I haven't lifted a finger to reduce the crime rate of my city. I haven't cleaned up any of the litter blowing around my streets. I have spent time watching the vicarious inane actions of the unsuspecting on reality TV in lieu of traversing the path my heart has laid out. I have lied to countless people and I have padded myself well on the larder of others. I have allowed myself to follow in the wake of others' ambitions like a remora, or a tick. I have discarded my fire in the name of flaccid tranquility. If I were to tally up my perfidy I would have an excellent corner of Hell situated for me on conspiracy alone, to say nothing of deception. That said, I doubt incarceration would do much to change my ways. I have a vengeful heart that forgets easily, yet forgives in the same manner that a single ant might count grains of sand. That said, I forgive my vengeance, my envy, my sloth, my gluttony, my lechery, my vanity and my greed. I forgive my perjuries and my perfidies, in order that I may surpass the need and desire to resort to their usage. They characterize me just as much as my accolades and accomplishments; not at all.

We still walk a meaningless void as the dangling phalanges of some unseen process. How well might we submit to this process? How might we destroy the "I," the frozen chunk of detritus that meanders down our stream? Come forth, Beast; I lay down my sword in order that you consume me, and I shall issue forth from your belly with your secrets.

The Shattered Gray Expansive

2010-06-08T18:27:00.000-04:00

When was the last time you thought about giants?

I remember when I was starting to get into this whole Norse worldview and I was reading the various myths that involved the jotnar, or "giants" as we'd translate them into English. Whatever proportions these beings might have would fly around wildly, especially in relation to the aesir, the focus of the narrative. So much rowing about was made on "who" the giants were supposed to be that I feel like a lot of folklorists lost "what" the giants were supposed to be. Not every myth's an allegory for society (*cough* Homer! *cough*). What if the strict relative volume that we experience in Midgard just... doesn't occur with giants, as if forced perspective and points of view would shift wildly and their relative placement and size in space-time were somehow screwed up? The best example I can think of is some dull, neurotic person standing in a road, screaming about all of the things s/he can get or have to keep safe, caught in this mental loop ("Oh no! I'm worried about Thor killing me, so I'm going to steal his hammer, Mjolnir. Oh no! Now that I have his hammer, he might find it, so I have to hide it. Oh no! Now that I've hidden it, I don't know if he'll still find it or not, so maybe I'll just give it back to him. Wait! I had his hammer! I spent so much time working on this, I have to get something in return! I want... Freyja! Yeah! I'll give them the hammer in return for Freyja's hand in marriage!") Of course, there's no reasoning with a giant; everything they think about is just blown out of proportion, so you give up and walk away. Somehow, the giant takes up exactly the same percentage of your field of vision at 500 feet away that he did at 50.

That's the thing about the jotnar: they have no sense of proportion in physicality, and even less in terms of situational moments. I have this notion that if a jotunn just took a deep breath and showed some sort of consideration, maybe they'd get by without being walloped by Thor or thoroughly embarrassed by Wodan. "Hold on a sec; I'm in Valhalla, and I'm really drunk. Maybe I should just own up and go home before I start saying something stupid and making these guys angry at me." "You know, this potion was made from the blood of a god. Maybe I should just leave it with those two stupid dwarves, or even better, tell the gods about it so that they can give their kinsman rest and I can earn a favor from them." See, thinking along those lines would have made lives a lot easier for the giants in question, but nope, they had to go shooting their mouths off and taking stuff that'd best be left untouched, out of this unslakeable self-interest.

Thankfully, here on Midgard, we human-types have the advantage of getting over that self-interest. I might even go out on a limb to say that the antagonistic jotnar might embody the overblown self-interest that leads us to situations where the gods repeatedly smack us around. The creation myth of Ymir's death at the hands of Wodan seems to spell that out rather clearly: the singular Giant contains all matter that we know, and that singular giant continues to grow, simply spawning off more of itself with no differentiation between anything. So, thanks to some interaction of the Fate Cow, the other self-created being, Wodan and his three brothers (who might just be he in triple form; I've since stopped caring) come about and chop this One Giant into all manner of little pieces to create the world as we know it, thus casting out that monomaniacal initial being into a vast universe of explorable parts. It's rather telling that giants persisted after this, as some level of self-interest is healthy, but leading a person to charge in headlong instead of addressing them as sensible equals and engaging in communication doesn't please the powers that be all that much.

I have to wonder about the "giant" rune, as well, Thurisaz/Thurs/Thorn. I got thinking about the line "woe to women" in the poem and thought about the times my energy got caught up in myself, expressing as some neurotic self-perpetuating frustration that froze my libido, which in turn froze the muscles in my back and ran "loner" and "restricted" loops in my mind while alienating and frustrating my sex life with my partner. The misery seemed to seek to perpetuate itself not only in my thoughts, but in my interactions with others, shouting louder and louder to drown out the identity of the problem. It took a few massage sessions, a fainting spell, and an inordinate amount of patience and love from my consort to break through to the core issue and awaken the fire between us once more. While I can feel myself falling back into those thoughts and patterns every so often, it now lasts for a moment before I take a deep breath, calm my thoughts, and loosen the muscle. Yeah, I still have my work cut out for me, but I feel like the process has given me tools and focus.

The Candle Formed in Filth

2010-05-12T21:36:00.000-04:00

That empty feeling's creeping up once more. I can feel the place where something ought to feel warm, yet instead provides a mere cool sting. My energy ebbs, and I feel no compunction toward productivity. It's as if my heart just slams shut, some days. So, here's another throatfull of venom from the Abyss!

I want to wallow, to indulge, to do it all wrong. I want to fall into a state of inanimate self-indulgence, marinating in musk and grime with no one around to incite me toward action. I feel resigned to the actions of my fellow species, but I'd rather not interact with them. I'd rather just... watch their funny little dance, have them hand me what I want when I ask, maybe engage in some form of pleasantry, and then sputter off back to that self-derived delusion of comprehending the enormity of the universe.

We're so stupid. We are so very, very stupid. We deny and justify our avoidance of action, and often give our mindless impulses the same treatment. We continue to bicker over responsibilities. We take on said responsibilities of others to avoid our own, and we're so quick to permit this interaction as a form of dependency, rather than tutelage. Who wants to learn how to fucking fish when that dumbass over there keeps pulling up marlins and handing them to whomever gives him boo-boo eyes?

We cling to this elusive sense of "identity," of placement, of surety. What could we do if we gave up wondering what we could be? I can be a mini-fridge, if I just try! No, I don't want to sell mini-fridges, I want to be one. Don't stand in the way of my dream of pulling cold beer out of my midsection! Just use your imagination!!

Seriously, my imagination uses me. It's been a fanciful pit of despair that led me to ruin, with cutesy little foxes drawn in the margins. I just... want to get left alone. I want far away from my fellow thumb-bearing bipeds. We're just a waste of good carbon.

I suppose this is like William Murderface moving from "maybe I should just kill myself" in the first season of Metalocalyse to "maybe you all should just kill yourselves" in the second. It's a progression in the black pit of despair. Cultivating the ever-present light seems like trying to fix something that ain't broke, and I kind of like my darker moments more than my lighter ones. I feel accomplished when I can figure my way through all of that bile I accumulate over the course of a day and use it to create, to change, to act in truth. I feel stronger, I feel more at peace after sitting in the dark, watching the unfortunate side of humanity unfold, because I know that it has some strange, twisted merit when engaged. I'd really like to know what it's like to dash someone's head open with a steel bat, but that's hardly a constructive use of time, despite the difficulty in sublimating that urge toward something useful. I bet it has some horrid beauty to it; oh well, I suppose I'll just make due.

The Sacrifice of Hodr

2010-05-06T11:23:00.000-04:00

Beltane tends to be a rough time for me. So much goes on internally that I have a hard time keeping up, and often dig in my heels. May 5, the advent of astrological Beltane this year, was especially tough. The Gregorian dates configured the week to the same setup as the week when my mother died 11 years ago. I really wish my life events didn't happen on holidays so that I could maybe get over them without some glaring reminder to remember the day.

I spent much of the day running into far too many people from my past, not that it's a bad thing. Nevertheless, crossing a temporal gulf can get emotionally trying on a day when I just want to indulge in vice and curl into a fetal ball. Nevertheless, the holiday's all about that diminished separation between consensus existence and subjective existence, so I suppose the spirits took the shape of folks I've met before in their own travels. It feels as if they've been put to rest, at least until Samhain.

This morning feels so much more... clear. I suppose that's part of the holiday's nature; figuring out if you can break out of the gravitational pull of the past. Hell, I talked about the world tree, did a tarot reading, and pretty much ran my gamut of sacred moments. I still have lots of barriers inside me to bust open, but the process is in motion, with decent enough traction to continue.

Expatriation

2010-04-17T09:41:00.000-04:00

Hey everyone! In order to keep my mind and the threads of consciousness of this blog a little more streamlined, I'm moving the operations that relate directly to comics and other media to this fine little landscape. This one will remain as the philosophical core, and sure, there'll be thematic overlap, but I figured I'd just try to clean house a bit.

What is it about that Parker fellow?

2010-03-31T19:11:00.003-04:00

Ho-lee crap, Sunny Day Real Estate's made it to the overhead at Chapterhouse, and I feel like such a dweeb for having missed most of their oeuvre.

So, I have a lot of posts on here about the depiction of sex, gender, etc. in comics, and ways I feel the industry falls short of my rather lofty social expectations. Well, then this guy comes along and throws up a post that makes me quite, quite happy on many levels.

Responsibility and repercussions seem to have long-standing resonance in the comic book collector world, seemingly without regard to genre. That said, those are subjects I feel that just about any of these genres could explore admirably. Spider-Man's flubs and social misalignment stand as the primary example of this, yet perhaps other, less central matters could explore these topics, in smaller details in the margins and corners.

One element few people wish to touch in post-human stories without absurd amounts of pathos are responsibilities around the extraordinary abilities. How does the way Superman flies differ from Wonder Woman? Can we get some little side notes on the ways that Peter Parker satisfies his predatory Spider instincts in the bedroom, like the way his fingers stick to skin, or the unorthodox positions his flexibility allows? How do characters who convert back and forth between solid and energy forms feel about having guts one moment, and a nuclear fusion/fission reaction the next? How much does Wolverine really use his eyes when he can smell what you ate on your sixteenth birthday in your sweat, and what does it mean when he decides to look at you? I really would like to see a little more of how individual and alien the lives of post-humans are to humanity, in those little ways that each of us differ.

Although Marvel's scientific experiments gone awry exemplified the element of trauma in the awakening of post-humanity in an individual, even Superman carries an element of this phenomenon in the revelation of his extraterrestrial heritage. A boy grows up in a middle-of-nowhere town that, to this day, probably gets one bar on a cell phone, worrying about things like fixing the tractor and that godforsaken social studies test, when he starts ripping steel in half and shooting fire out of his eyes if he gets a half-mast from Lana Lang's thong strap peeking out from her Dungarees. Eventually, Pa takes him into the cellar and shows him this contraption that seriously can-not have come from anywhere we know, lighting up in the dark in increasingly subtle ways and incongruous color schemes that make no sense under a yellow sun. Something lights up, and a defeated, terrified scientist fellow appears like Leia out of R2D2, with a voice ringing with that despair that comes from wishing that you just weren't right. This man, this weird ghost-man, has these little gestures and features that drill right into the boy's heart while he listens to this mysteriously familiar guy address himself as the kid's birth father. The dude's already staring into the proverbial void while preparing to fire his child out into the physical one. The end of Krypton must have been absolutely gruesome. He's left, this confused tween boy, with the usual maddening drug trip of puberty, the confusion of coming from a completely inaccessible origin, and heretofore unexplainable abilities and physiological functions that he has to learn to manage on the fly (pun totally not intended, but kept in.) That sounds pretty traumatic to me.

In what ways does post-humanity process this trauma? How does the nature of the trauma creep up for these people? Does Cyclops of the X-Men rub the back of his head before getting on a plane after falling out of one and hitting his head as a child? Does Luke Cage's unbreakable skin ever itch, and how does it register touch? How does Carol Danvers feel about her body, even having a body, when her consciousness and form have drifted up and down the vibrational wavelength?

Comics do cover trauma, yet often times the characters seem to feel sorry for themselves until someone comes along for them to hit, and in hitting this someone, they find the strength in themselves to project their problems onto some stupid thug with pimped out riot gear and feel contentment in mauling their fellow man over what's "right," or saving some morons from a burning building to renew their basic sense of humanity. Savagery and compassion are to superheroes what boredom and disappointment are to us; part of the deal. If we take into account that a superhero will, most likely, save someone in trouble, then what would pose to them the real challenge of living their "everyday" lives and permitting themselves to feel their woundedness? What can a superhuman accomplish with a little humility, flexibility and ingenuity?

The Confessional of Doubt

2010-03-16T17:28:00.004-04:00

My faith wavers. I try to think of the world as I used to and it just doesn't fucking work, anymore. Every emotion comes with four of five contradictory ones, and I have to sift through to figure out which one will serve me best in order to have a discussion with anyone. My mind's filled with reactive, self-aggrandizing doubt. My body communicates something of which I'm not aware and it unnerves me. I don't know if my instincts act in truth, or if I just want an excuse to keep lying around, unable to display basic fucking human affection without repressed narcissism swirling around the corners.

I miss invisibility, and I have no idea what the hell I'm supposed to be doing other than babysitting middle-aged men and their infantile power fantasies, deluding myself into thinking that this job is something I find fulfilling, psychoanalyzing loved ones while trying to sound as right as possible and fucking up any communication, doing everything in my power to make sure I have neither home nor resources, accepting advice only based upon the delivery of it, and whittling away the hours in front of a screen, watching everything else do something instead of me. I don't even fucking know what security is, and by that admission I've done a great job at maintaining a persona of centered spiritual wisdom. Said persona remains just a well-painted but shitty papier-mache mask that's starting to smell and peel.

How can I pull my weight in a relationship when I can't even pull my weight on my own? How can I balance this idiotically overwrought sensitivity with an underdeveloped sense of center and a vicious, pompous misanthropy? How do I get over myself and start fucking living with the rest of the species? I feel weight and irritation, and all I know how to do is treat it like some kind of necessary trial to burn off this unpayable debt I owe the world. I keep wondering if I have something wrong with me, if I've invented something wrong with me so that I won't have to deal with the world, if I have such overweening pride that I choose to defend against any intrusion into my life. I don't feel like I've rested at all, and I don't know what to do, any more.

I wish that my love didn't come with these conflicting insecurities and doubts. I hate it. I want my heart clear and true. I want some fucking clarity. I want what others seem to get from me, but I cannot seem to give myself. I feel drowned, cannibalized and thoroughly vexed. I want to be in the world just as much as I want it utterly devastated, and while I hear and understand the Great Big Tree o' Love and Light branching through the layers and levels of existence, I mostly feel despair at its distance from my ego, and an unceasing urge to submerge my senses in the grime and despair of it. I speak of optimism and hope to disguise my dearth in both categories.

I just wish I could be like Batman and throw off my identity, devoting myself wholly to a cause that comes from Within and Beyond instead of grasping at vaporous phantoms only to uncover a venomous trap I'd laid long before, without my knowledge. I keep trying, and I keep feeling this sharp pull in the opposite direction. I just want some mercy from myself. I just want to know what I have to do to make this life work. If it's right in front of me, just... can I maybe get the eyes to see it, or maybe some little happy glowing signposts so that I can figure out how to devote myself best to that path? I haven't been the best fellow, and I haven't always acted in the most conscientious manner, but I really try to keep myself feeling okay with what I'm doing, and I try to keep my eyes open for what you say, but I fuck up, as humanity does, and as we've built ourselves to do. I neither want to sit next to the Divine, nor do I want to languish in cold, dark Hel; I want, in my deepest heart, to find my Work. I want to find that Work that consumes every fiber of my being, that nourishes both my being and the Great Being. May I ask for these things? May I demonstrate my adoration through my work? I would really appreciate and feel honored for the chance to help.

The Ballad of Greg Feely

2010-02-25T11:30:00.003-05:00

The active function, every so often, exceeds its grasp and begins to scramble.

Lately I feel a sense of panic that arises during the seasons involving bureaucracy. It's such an obfuscation, deemed necessary through some irrelevance. I'm sure that if we still cling to these functions that they serve some kind of utility, but to me the tax season, and especially income tax itself, seems an elaborate obfuscation of a clumsy larger entity to insert itself into the everyday life of people who ordinarily wouldn't give a flying fuck. Now, don't get me wrong, I wouldn't mind the well-managed socialism that seems prevalent in Scandinavian countries, but from what information has crossed my path involving these countries, the whole of it seems pretty well-managed and oriented toward the benefit of all citizens.

See, if the government spent less time trying to arrange all of this financial dickery with corporations and special interest groups, instead spending its time on things like health care, education and jobs, then my cynicism would decrease and I'd be a lot happier with this stupid state of affairs. Nevertheless, Corporatism and the big magic spell that concept has cast over our country and perhaps the world has diverted a lot of time, energy and resources into the most ridiculous pursuits for the sake of feeding useless neuroses and fears.

Maybe it's just me, but most of what we perceive as conspiracy seems a simultaneous paranoid fear reaction, polarized into archetypes of Rich, Fearful Old Man in an Ivory Tower and Anarchistic, Fearful Individualist Outside the City Gates. We're all damned afraid and we're all ready to point our fingers at someone for being The Problem, especially lately. So, that said, what the fuck are any of us doing to unfurl the rest of our fingers, extend our hands and say, "Okay, I was being a dick, and you have a point. We're both nervous and agitated for different reasons, and if you're willing to help me with my shit, I'll help you with yours, and then we'll be a better species for it"?

I understand the value of seeking the source of our shit so that it doesn't have to be so unpleasant, but I also appreciate the value of seeing our shit for what it is and spreading it on our gardens instead of letting it rot in a lab as we test it endlessly for why it smells so bad. We have guts, germs, blood, fat, crap, and all manners of juices squirting up and down our being, and in fact our entire physical manifestation comes from inventive collections of germs into ambulatory bags of carbon reactions, absorbing and emitting all sorts of things. The reactions of our consciousness to this process, this basic, natural process of acting as a living being, have been rather prohibitive, especially given to an imbalance in our current conception of dualism, where one polarity has the attribution of greater value in relation to the other ("Good always triumphs over Evil"). If shit smells bad, it must be bad, and thus the act of handling our crap becomes not a part of a greater spectrum, but a banished universe of horror.

What of our fears drain our resources from our living, fructifying process? How might we choose to utilize this drain in a constructive manner? In what ways can we permit the entire living process into our hearts, and how might we best suffer in order to manifest the desires not of our ego or our consciousness, but of our very Soul?

The Snarling Well Hvergelmir

2010-02-12T18:16:00.003-05:00

Since I just don't give enough of a fuck to load up my iTunes with all manner of music, I'm starting to get sick of everything media related. I can feel the sun dig in its heels and tear up at the prospect of diving into Pisces, after spending a month in the unfeeling chaos of the void reminiscent of Aquarius. It's like locking someone in a dark room for a month with nothing but their neuroses to keep them company, then tearing them out only to submerge them in the ocean of the screaming dead. Boy, I'm a chipper one!

Look, I could take the piss and pretend that I like wearing long vests and babble about all the good people you meet amongst the dead, but it's still fucking jarring, especially when you aren't some goobery medium convinced that the universe speaks in linear sentences and coherent faces, only discernible by those with "special powers" or some bullshit like that.

I've been stuck playing Dante's Inferno a whole bunch during my less productively oriented moments. I keep going and going through the game, scrambling through all of the various puzzles and the like, smacking monsters about the face and generally going through all of this gory catharsis, but then my ears key in to the pervasive shrieks and gargles of pain that constantly waft through the environments, all vicious and stomach-turning.

There's some point where I begin to question what the game's really doing. Some passive-aggressive sort might dither about the level of violence in the game, but seriously: it's a game dealing with the Crusades and the Renaissance vision of Hell. On some level, the game actually makes Hell the infected anal sore of the cosmos instead of a cheesy black metal album cover, but on another, certain circles could have stood to have been examined in more excruciating notions of hypocrisy or have had some form of elucidation. The City of Dis, the circle relating to Heresy, kind of left me cold. I mean, D&D undead wizard things with goofy magic staffs, under the name of Pagans? Come the fuck on. Pagans gave the Church fucking Christmas in December, Mother Mary (cognate with the Latin mare, meaning sea), incarnating and resurrecting godhood, and... hold on a sec... HELL! Oh, but why no Pale Queen in the Darkness? Why offer us as the only powerful women of Hell some stupid giant half-naked "Egyptian" with a Glasgow smile climbing a massive cocktower and Dante's sylphid paramore in a pathetic virgin/whore complex? Maybe I'm just too into this kind of thing, but it'd be nice to see the nasty soddering done where the Christian dualist ethos tried to nestle its way into the black womb of Hel, where the cosmogony starts to fall apart and point to its own failures at unifying humanity with Creation, or in fact where it pulls humanity away from Creation so forcefully that one might take a look at the devilishly fabricated dreck such as national origin or creed and vomit on the face of God upon realizing how such associations lead us into the sterility of binary thought.

I demand games of a higher caliber and sophistication of thought than this. It needn't be so goddamn rare. It's fucking lame, and I'm sick of excuses as to the perpetuation of this crap. I want Kratos to fight Atalanta. I want to see vicious, corrupt industrialists with ovaries that commoners swear shoot buckshot and sulfuric acid. I want more of Amanda Waller and Helena Cain. I want to see women antagonists capable of such intricate and brilliant cruelty that none dare consider them some misunderstood soul deserving of empathy, and none would venture to consider themselves lucky to run afoul of them. I want the anti-Lilith, not some blustering gasbag with a mouth full of talk kept closed by a smug smirk holding back the urge to wretch all over her shoulder-padded jacket at her sheer ineptitude at being anything other than a mild frustration and vague sexual interest to a protagonist. If anything, a higher caliber of female villain might hopefully stir some more interesting female heroes.

I want too much from the world of media. The expression of the collective dream has become a vapid, derivative waste. We've become so quick to excuse diversions of our attention toward the manipulations of our time and resources, if only to fuel the self-flagellation that diverts our psychic and emotional ability to heal. We're placid miscarriages still dangling from the rotting placenta of retrospective, in desperate need of resuscitation and a fucking belly button. I want to remember blood, pain, vigor and victory. We deserve life, in all its teeth, venom and horns.

Downcast Malocchio, Coughing Up Benediction

2010-01-16T10:19:00.004-05:00

"What do you want?" "Information..." "Well, you won't get it!" "By hook or by crook, we will."

I started reading the Invisibles again. It's been yeeeears since I've picked it up, despite its importance in my life. The fresh perspective, post-Batdeath, post-Crisis, post-ASS, post-LSD communicates so much more. It's a good, stable reminder of why I got into this crap in the first place. I can read Tom O'Bedlam unafraid of becoming a crazy homeless man. I can read King Mob as a walking erect penis dressed in a novelty condom instead of a role model, while still acknowledging his help in keeping me from leaping off of whatever I deemed fatal enough.

Pretty soon, information will become the next resource we mine. We'll scratch at the freshly-mined furrows of our brains, weeping as some entrepreneur sets nanites to start picking up whatever memories can earn enough to buy that big stupid boat or fucked-up jacket to replace the utter disinterest of the genitals. Some day we'll be staring at the Mechanoid Frontier, where machines self-evolve into maddened ecosystems beyond our control, and we'll have all manner of brave sorts on Robot Safari to get more of that precious information. Geez, I dunno if this'll end up a vibrant dream or a terrifying nightmare. Sometimes you just hope that some of that information will burst the blockade set up to "make it" in the average corporate stooge, and maybe pull the stick out the ass of the snide intellectual.

As much as I exist Right the Fuck Now, often to both my benediction and my detriment, I think about the future an awful lot. Deep down, there's this little Utopian voice yip-yipping away at how cool everything will be once it's all said and done, but then the Dystopian voice chimes up at the grotesque sacrifices that need to be made to make that future. It's sometimes hard to keep track of all of the colliding multiverses within the imagination and their feasibility in response to physical existence and the patterns found therein. How aggressively do we want to drag these things into the realm of physical experience? With development comes some act of violence on something.

So much hinges on our own concepts as a species, but how much control do we ourselves have over the concepts that we find unsound or offensive? How do we address the perspective in our darkest corners who tends to the blackness so that we don't drown in filth and despair? How do we open a discourse to the internal scapegoat we've cast into the wilderness to bear our maledictions, our blame? What wisdom does this wretched creature bring? How do we control our impulses and self-righteousness when it says something that might be right?

Creating Grimalkin Lane

2009-12-30T12:00:00.002-05:00

Today, Gunderic Mollusk and co embark on a new adventure: trying to create a comic book publishing company from scratch. So far, it's just an idea.

It all started from the most innocuous of moments. To preface, My stepmother, a self-made woman who came to America to create opportunities for herself, gave me one of the most compassionate interventions that I've ever experienced. I'd clouded myself in the realms of the spiritual, escaping into magic for magic's sake as my reason for being, in hopes it would give me an answer. She more or less laid it out that if I didn't make a change in my life, I was doomed. I honored her words, yet shelved them for the rest of the trip. The door blew open to our home in South Philly while I had my childhood friend from Delaware, his mistress and her cousin over for carousing and musing, catching up, et cetera, without anyone noticing. My roommate enters, and of course his cat-preservation instincts kick in fiercely, prompting my erstwhile compatriot to hit the road. It made for an awkward evening, yet the confluence of events overwhelmed me. Being the teetering emotional Tower card I am, I've let no one, not even myself, in on exactly how deeply my existential woes had cut into my being. I fainted a few times, and eventually my roommate, in his infinite compassion, helped me to the bed.

Dare I say it, it was a great time to hit a "ripple" from a previous psychonautical experience. I hadn't listened to my inner promptings up to this point; I merely reported them. I hadn't listened to the voice that told me that if I continued to ignore this drive for purpose, I would self-destruct. My stepmother... really hit it on the nose. Her primary quote was as follows: "Without financial independence, you can't achieve mental independence." I realized that, even though I don't much care for the ways money works, or the process of making it, I can put it aside for a goal that I find enriching. In my head, I've had little musings about post-human stories trapped in superhero conventions, superhero stories trapped in self-referential neurosis, and all manner of these things, but I haven't written a blessed thing outside of tables of correspondences and thousands of rewritten character histories, changed names, and an endlessly complex interpretation of supernatural abilities. If I get keyed into anything organizational, be it cleaning, folding laundry, doing the dishes, putting paperwork in order, and anything along those lines, I'm methodically unstoppable until I hit a wall. I need to use this to create this company. I want Philadelphia to have a comics scene. I want to make a home-grown pile of wierdo comics for people who like both forms of media under the name Avatar, who like canceled TV shows, who want to take control of the effect of the superhero medium and create marketing for compassion, sincerity and the evolution of mankind. I want to see Lance Evaporator onesies on babies who'll make the new economy that'll permit free energy. I want to see Gunderic Mollusk patches on the beat-up jeans of art school vixens who innovate art therapy programs that prove that society needs autistic, bipolar and schizophrenic kids, and it needs to find some better ways of translating their viewpoints aside from pills, pressure and paper trails. Yeah, I want to change the world. I want to make comic books. I want comic books to change the world. This is how I will do it.

Skanda lies bleeding, pierced by his own spear

2009-12-22T20:06:00.003-05:00

We air the grievance publicly, yet not really. The catharsis occurs through this internet medium, and thus, our own identity as an individual becomes more complicated, bringing the notion of individuality to a possible conundrum in which the matters, as filtered to create this toy persona, express even less than the little we understand from actively living. The extent to which we take these personally comes from awkward moments, seeing the pictured body of a person manifest in close spatial proximity, wondering if, perhaps, you really know anything about the person inhabiting the body pictured, or if somehow through some internet quibble you've said or done anything to set this person against you, precluding their conversing with you. How does one understand collective value with so many proxies and conditions? How much do we allow these conditions to pre-emptively deny experience? That said, it's the due of the manic/depressive and the psychotic to sense few, if any, social barriers. Remember when those folks just did shrooms with the local fauna and had jobs set up for them? Remember when choosing that path didn't have the same social stigma and terror behind it?

I suppose it's my dharma this round to feel connected to the world, still. Maybe next round I'll do the renunciate dance, or at least I'll tell myself that to get over sadhu-envy. I feel like I have pressure to adhere to civilized structure, as I've few faculties to remove myself from it. Do I create those myself, and if so, what do I choose to ignore in order to maintain a certain level of being "psyched out" of doing anything?

Knowledge ends up little more than odd cues more or less resembling sentimentality's stodgy, logical cousin in the perspective of the observing conscious medium. Sometimes, it pay to remember that wisdom and ignorance are a polarity, and stupidity has its own virtues. The collective will have an infinite amount of opposing values. How do we understand the revulsion we have toward opposing values within ourselves? How many of us have devolved to the bumper sticker displays of our conviction and conscience? Do we need to laud our ignorance, or use our charity to justify our hardened hearts? What happened to compassion? I mean, really? What happened to sincerity? So far, I hear the word and the only whisper I get is "oh yeah, like Fugazi." Is Fugazi really the last bastion of sincerity in the world? I mean, I don't even really like listening to Fugazi. Why are we always seeing an attack, or making up fake enemies we can't see? Wouldn't we rather look at that, faint, dying little pulsing heart at the bottom of the tree, weakly beating like a child dying of leukemia, trying to keep us all together, trying to unite us as One? Why must we fight the Adversary around us instead of heal the Unity in ourselves? When did the heroes stop building and creating? Where's our next Hammurabi*? Where's our next Alexander*? Where's the next Lorenzo di Medici*?

*- I'm well aware these guys were dicks. Just sayin', we could use some major constructive cultural shifts into realms imagined.

Tintinabulae

2009-12-08T17:10:00.003-05:00

God... dammit. So, after a heavy psychedelic experience some time in the beginning of autumn, I've been waking up, slowly but surely. It's been tough on both ends. I just... I don't know what I expected out of choosing this path in life, and I don't know if I've even chosen anything aside from justifying self-indulgence and lassitude. I don't know if I'm making a case for "The Other Guys." I'm damned inept at anything involving paperwork, and basic job applications seem so threatening. I'm doing okay, financially, in that I have food and shelter. That's better than a lot of people in the world, but I wonder if I'm just wasting opportunities for something more fundamental, something more involved with humanity. Is it okay that I don't care?

On a spiritual and experiential level, I understand that I'm a part of this global organic chemical reaction. Thing is, I still feel really uneasy in this place. It's lonely and sad. The frame of reference of my consciousness is from a member of a communal species who has a hard time communicating. I don't know if I'm ever getting across my feelings, and I really try, in a bunch of different ways to do so, but it rarely comes out close.

I used to have faith. I used to call on the universe. Whatever would call in me wasn't anything deserving of an answer. Adversaries develop from half-baked ideas on social constructions. So much of our universe seems dependent on our own inventions. We cope with the pain of compassion by denying God; we justify our cruelty by accepting an all-loving God who will "make it all okay in the end," only on the value of belief instead of action. We invent silly dramas amongst broadly-writ charicatures of human interaction in the hopes of understanding the universe better, yet instead fall back into persistent delusion. My mind cannot stand simply being. It doesn't enjoy anything of this world. It seeks destruction more than anything else, and oh does it hate. It hates the constant hum of instinct and its lack of finesse at achieving its satisfaction. It hates the fallacy of language. It hates this half-baked enslavement to concepts and ideas that masquerades under the names of "culture." It hates the empathic sloth of intolerance and the methods used to enforce it. Pff. That's my favorite: "Can't abide intolerance."

I feel like my senses have been screaming for release. I feel like my nervous system swings between a conflagration and charred remains. I'm exhausted perpetually. I wish I had courage.

I wouldn't feel so much antipathy if I didn't feel an equal amount of love for the universe. I just wish I had a better idea of how to operate, a better idea of what the hell would constitute my center. Whatever had served that purpose has disappeared.

So then, I wonder: if we have a purpose to build and create, we have an equally valid purpose to destroy. In what ways can each individual utilize destruction in the best way possible?

Tesla's Wireless Electricity in the Erogenous Zones

2009-11-28T14:48:00.004-05:00

Mmkay. Pluto has entered Capricorn. Thank Fucking God, the God of Fucking. Planetary position's as meaningless as everything else, but to go on association, the transformative essence of Pluto applies to the fundamental Structure of our human perspective when in Capricorn. That's neither here nor there, but I guess I have some hopes for certain fundamental changes. I want to change the world to be more accepting so that I don't have to act demonstratively. It's selfish and stupid.

Anyhow, gender identity's been on my mind a lot lately. Of course, I could go on about Batwoman for days. I could talk about how Greg Rucka has written her as a full human being and how that seems so fucking mind-blowing in the reactionary field of superhero comics. I could write about how her scary straight-browed mask offsets the chalk-white skin and blood-red lips, how her body language becomes both intimidating and arousing simultaneously, how White Town's "Your Woman" goes through my head when she flirts with her future Big Ex and future Question, Officer Renee Montoya.

Thing is, I don't know that this should feel as special as it does. I should be more critical of the stilted dialogue during the Baroque Horror of Gotham moments with the Religion of Crime. Frankly, it says something to me about the world that Batwoman doesn't get a title all her own. I can complain that DC Entertainment "should" have done a Batwoman book, but as a retailer, I don't think that it would sell as well as it would within Detective. I'm kind of sad that a character as human as she is seen as new and innovative for a lead role, that LGBTQIA characters most often flesh out ensemble casts as something separate or novel.

There's also the shapeshifter/intersexed character problem that dogs me. "Shapeshifter" as character type seems to carry the dichotomy of Trickster/Sociopath, and, with the exception of a few X-Men or aliens, seem mostly male/masculine in disposition. Mystique, the most high-profile of the feminine shapeshifters in the superhero genre, is a notably oversexed sociopath, all the way to fighting Wolverine while naked and carrying all sorts of phallic artillery. Her callousness seems only portrayed through her cavalier use of sex appeal and through few other outlets. We could argue that it's "part of her character," but she's barely a character in contrast to the potential she has. Secret Invasion, where Earth has been invaded by a shapeshifting species of extraterrestrials, exemplifies this by displaying the War Skrulls as bulky, steroidy Man-Dudes with the ladyshaped ones acting in a more manipulative role. Why does it take so damned long for media to move forward? As much as I love Mad Men, I feel frustrated that a show that takes place in the early 1960s seems more relevant than the most bleeding-edge dramas.

Sure, I get it: it's comic books. Most somatypes are relegated into extremes and visual shorthand due to the limitations of publishing, as well as a given artist's skill. I'm as incapable of living up to Batman's physique as the lady sitting next to me is to Wonder Woman, but with so many opportunities to explore the fallacy of any identity, especially in a genre where identity is writ so large, the stagnation feels like a waste.

Having LGBTQIA characters work in comics would, in my opinion, come through making it less of a big deal. A character's gender identity, or rather gender tendencies, act as window dressing for the person beneath all of those motivations. In the words of Mark Renton, "It has everything to do with aesthetics and fuck all to do with morality." I'm getting kind of tired of two women getting intimate as being seen as "hawt" and marketed toward this weird harem fantasy for the hetero male. Maybe I take all of this too seriously. Maybe it's that focus on sensory intimacy as, well, intimate that makes this whole scenario seem more frustrating than it should be. Maybe I just want the world to change so I don't have to think about how to act like a Man all the fucking time.

Spitting Out Golden Apple, Rinsing the Mouth Out with Mes.

2009-11-25T12:23:00.004-05:00

Unfettered information shrieks through the mind at a terrible pace when stimulated and given little chance to absorb. The focus of the mind narrows to increase the velocity of the information's processing, yet more often than not a bottleneck occurs for those who tend toward a visual-simultaneous information processing method to their mind. The proverbial log jam thus creates anxiety, since the perspective views all of this information building on itself from all angles instead of a single line. Of course, non-physically-oriented anxiety leads to abstract sources for solutions; imaginary cobra problems require imaginary mongooses.

So anyhow, Assassin's Creed II can share some blame for the length of time it's taken between posts, yet it can take a lot of credit for inspiring this Town Madman to rattle his box full of thingamajigs and scream to high heaven once more. The first Assassin's Creed dropped us into the Crusades of the 13th Century CE, highlighting the effect that dogmatic organized religion has had on civilization, primarily for the worse but without being uncouth about it. While the player operates the Assassin Altair (pronounced all tahyEER), the main character of the game is a fellow from 20 minutes into the future, Desmond Miles. The premise comes from a corporation interacting with his memories to find a particular maguffin artifact, the Apple of Eden, presented as a gold sphere that contains all human knowledge (but of course, not all human wisdom). So, Desmond gets into a machine which allows him to operate within his own memories, synchronizing with the actions of his ancestor, Altair. This ancestor in question had, as far as the first game went, very little in the way of personality, and was a bit like Mr. Spock with a hard-on for libertarianism. You had only so much you could do in the first game, and the gameplay eventually became something you had to do to get on with the story... until you beat the game and have the development of a) Desmond developing similar ESP to Altair and b) the entire lab in which Desmond was imprisoned covered in strange glyphs and symbols, most (if not all) of which come from real sources. (Nazca plains animals, Hebrew phrases, Quran scripture, Newgrange spirals, etc).

The second game comes right after the weirdness of the first, and shoves us immediately into a game whose scale goes absolutely berserk in both macrocosm and microcosm. Desmond escapes the corporation to a hideout of others who belong to the Assassin bloodline (or cause or whatever). Their machine's better, of course (cuz it's made by a cute girl! Haw!) and the premise of the current game is Desmond learning through the memories he accesses with this machine the ins and outs of Assassin training.

Now, let's clarify: "Assassin" in this game comes from a hypothesis of a radical, rational humanist sect coming off of the Ismaili sect of Islam, rather than the mercenary. It doesn't overtly recognize the notion that "assassin" was a pejorative epithet of the Ismaili made by opposing sects and picked up by Christian scholars. While the games use history as incredible window dressings for the game, it does digress wildly.

This round, the Assassins cue him up for the career of his ancestor Ezio Auditore da Firenze. Ezio begins as a pugnacious rich kid who isn't quite used to consequence. In contrast to the angular, cold features of Altair, Ezio has rounded, earthy features. The only real mark that possibly sets him as worth mentioning is a from a split lip he received from a rock to the face during a very demonstrative brawl with a rival family. Once the story requires he accept his role as Assassin, he goes through various stages of helplessness. Where he had been used to punching and yelling, he must now work in secret, skulking in crowds and ducking into alleyways to avoid detection. The designers put a lot of work in the subtlety of his emotional shift from extroverted snarls and barks to cautious speech and chilled stares at odd corners of the room.

One of my favorite things on this game is the introduction of money. Not only does Ezio have numerous ways to gain income (completing side quests, treasure hunting, looting bodies, pickpocketing, maintaining his villa) and utilize income (artwork, weapons, throwing money to distract minstrels and guards, hiring courtesans, thieves and mercenaries, bribing town criers), the power money has becomes more emphasized in this game. Most of the targets in this game have more of an economic influence than religious, although the Church still plays a large part of the story. Lorenzo de Medici has a strong connection with the character, and yet he challenges the player's perceptions of their actions. Aside from the assassinations that move the story forward, Lorenzo sends contracts through carrier pigeons to different cities for you to collect and act on. After about five, I began to wonder about these contracts myself, and exactly how many people Lorenzo wanted me to kill for good reason, how many he wanted me to kill for his own purposes, and how many out of pure paranoia. I've stopped doing those missions altogether, and with the amount of things to do, I don't feel that bad about it.

For me, one of the most important features in the game comes from the glyphs hidden throughout the world on important landmarks in Italy, and the Codex pages penned by Altair after the events of the previous game. These unlock computer code written by the previous person to enter the Animus, which opens into puzzles that bring into question contentious moments in human history (Oppenheimer, Gandhi, JFK, Nikola Tesla, Atilla the Hun, etc) This is where we get into the meat of what the game wants to express ideologically. How does a person fight a war against ideas? What will a person find himself willing to do when rational humanism devolves into atheism and nihilism? What is the responsible use of knowledge? How does a person fight a battle against ideas? How do we outgrow civilization and how can we initiate this next stage in our species' evolution?

I feel like Assassin's Creed will be the next Metal Gear series, and I hope that we'll be able to see this kind of sophistication in subject in future games.

Clapping Away the Calluses

2009-11-11T10:41:00.005-05:00

Been thinking about Ragnarok. Well, pieces of it, since a person so possessed could write a lifetime's worth of observation and still find themselves wanting in expresion.

Baldur dies by his brother Hodr's hand, while Hodr is in turn killed by Vali, one of Wodan's sons. In some way, Vali seems to represent some form of the a balancing function. With Baldur, the brightness and active illusion gone, Hodr, the action made in ignorance, must pass as well. Loki's whole role in this, although often presented as due to some self-interested malfeasance and malediction toward the consummately useless, yet well-loved Baldur, Loki can also have performed his own function as the External brought Within. Baldur had no songs of his deeds aside from those that prefaced his death, an inevitable yet exceedingly unlikely event. In fact, his whole existence as the impenetrable allowed for the resolution of extreme penetrability. Baldur would not be wounded; Baldur would in fact stop functioning entirely once his impenetrability had been compromised, like the proverbial imperfection of a diamond that blows the whole thing up. Upon his death, the Aesir, the Pillars and Riverbeds of the Wights, could see past the distracting glow of Baldur and see the resolution of their own paradoxes and beings. Of course Wodan had foreknowledge of the situation, existing outside of time after a fashion.

Frey hasn't the chance to resolve anything. Not unlike Baldur, his function is the sacrifice. He relinquished the martial aspect of his libido for the lovin' aspect of his libido. That martial aspect is then writ large as Surt, a big walking Armageddon. Frey as a progenitor analogue, as this will act as resolution, is slain by the destroyer itself, as if to mention this as the point from which no new things will come into being, but instead break down. The aesir, the big mamma-jamma powers of the universe, are little more than cattle that requires culling during Ragnarok.

On the other end, Wodan makes preparations. He prepares not to overcome his demise; that's inevitable. He instead prepares his son, Vidarr. To his son he gives a boot made from all of the excess straps of leather shoes. The superlative nature of the boot allows for a transdimensional quality, as all leather straps, from all time, from all leather shoes, contribute to the strength of this boot, despite these items being seen as castoffs by Those who Make Shoes. This tradition its opposite number in the attention to the fingernails of the dead, said to construct the Poltergeist Ship Naglfar, which carries jotnar and Bad Dead Guys to the final battle. Although both are inevitable, (The giants get there to wreck shit, Vidarr whups Fenrir) the effects of each action come to making the job of one easier, the other harder. A lot of row has been made on Wodan's death at the jaws of Fenrir, some claiming these silly, anthropically biased ideas of this consummate mad god of inspiration and death slipping on blood while flexing his martial muscle against the big wolf. In this instance, we see Wodan submit to become a part of the natural scheme of things, understanding that all of his preparation, all of his searches for wisdom, for enlightenment, for elucidation of the universe all stems to giving back to the universe. His wisdom holds that he remains little more than a snowflake doomed to melt in the persistent churning of events of the World Tree. The Yggdrasill remains the unshakable yet ever-transforming foundation of the universe, and all of our aspects of life further its living process. He has left behind his children, both who present attributes of ascetic sacrifice (Vali, with his ritual squalor, and Vidarr, with his ritual silence).

Everyone's favorite superhero Thor, one would think, would have been pitted against Loki. This is where Comic Book Shaman Ben shrieks in terror as Vitki Ben and his spitting cobra fangs of maledictions toward fanboys and comic book fundamentalism/escapism. The closest imagining I've found for a Thor archetype comes from Brock Samson on the Venture Brothers. Brock's capable of ludicrous feats of violence and sexual prowess, a fully-realized Mars at peace with his capability. His challenges don't come from the act of killing, screwing and his mission, but from elements that keep him from properly killing or screwing as defined by his mission parameters (Expired OSI license to kill, Molotov Cocktease's chastity belt, a nameless henchman he killed resurrected by his charge to create a childlike Venture-stein who reflexively fears him). Brock's role changes upon his quitting both OSI and the Ventures, signified by an exploding robot. Hidden killers, such as poison and explosives, fall under the scales of Jormundgandr, the World Serpent. Thor faces off with his own capability to kill, with his own Zen sense of the world (all Thor needs is his hammer, all Brock needs is his knife) as an extension of himself. Jormundgandr represents the barrier between this individual sense of control and the actual external world. Once this barrier breaks (through repeated hammer blows) the imperceivable, undodgable, unblockable poison seeps in and the greater unity reabsorbs Thor, who takes nine steps, one for each world in the cosmological model of the Norse. Not unlike Wodan, Thor has left behind children. Magni comes from inborn strength, using one's proclivities to move forward. Modi comes from the sheer desire to reconcile a conflict, using otherwise adverse reactions to achieve victory. Thrud, Thor's daughter, seems a mystery. Her name means "Power," in the most basic terms. Her name has been included amongst the Valkyries, and she may have acted as a feminine analog to Thor to universalize a concept socially confined to one set of plumbing. The children of Thor and Wodan seem to point to methods a person may call upon the "powers" of these gods without ripping out an eye, throwing hammers or any of the other hyperbolic tasks these two aesir undertook.

Heimdall and Loki also annihilate each other. Heimdall represents a Fellow, be it friend or family, pushed to the outskirts of the world while Loki represents an unknown variable welcomed within. Consider the reliable friend with whom you never socialize, and the strange, exciting person you want to know more about. Trickster and Shaman archetypes on occasion act in concert, each providing a different service. Preservation and change annihilate, the Trickster's inductance of transformation creating a process through which the greater pattern can subsist. The interplay of these two acts like the rhythm, the chaos found in order and the order found in chaos. Infinity results, and all becomes renewed.

Once Ragnarok finishes, the children of the aesir emerge to take up the tools and toys their predecessors have left them, and Nidhogg, the ultimate non-being, makes its presence known. This begs a question: would, in the next Ragnarok, Nidhogg resolve a paradox we have yet to perceive, and what world would open up from there?

Ajna Heat Vision, Anahata Super Strength

2009-11-07T20:05:00.003-05:00

Lately, in very ordinary ways, I've been dunked in the well of Myth for sustenance. The offer to cover one coworker's shift at the comic book store has spun out into two weeks straight of counter-jockeying, bagging, pricing, grading, reading, bag checks, and so on. One tarot reading tends to spill into three at the drop of a hat, and astrological Samhain snorts in laughter at my attempts to act skeptical, rational and detached.

According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, "Hero" derives from the same route as servare, to protect. This said, one wonders how much stock "protectors" receive. What of the abstract preservation brought through development? The moment in Flex Mentallo when Vic Sage remembers the magic word has stuck with me, and I wonder: what would we consider a super-shaman, super-sadhu, or other such figure? In one way, the attribution of post-human bombast with these social roles might seem counterintuitive, yet there's that there show Avatar that made many transcendental concepts accessible for even eight-year-olds. How would we strip down the scriptural trappings and faces given to the basic ideals that underpin philosophy and paint them in bright primary colors? Would the character really need to wear their briefs on the outside? Does the character require a secret identity? How does identity play into a role of non-civilized living and liberation? How does a person apply extranormality to their position? How does the individual explore a genius phenomenon that gives reason to their manifestation in the reality continuum? How about the super-construction worker or super-chef? Need post-humanity remain purely defined by militarism, with uniforms and stripping of the individual into sickening self-deification and strong reference to deeds as noble in and of themselves?

So now, the caffeine has worn off. Whoops.

The Lion in Winter

2009-10-23T14:21:00.003-04:00

Still going on comic books. My feelings on and around them are going through a putrefaction for a variety of reasons, so I may as well get some curd from the fermentation.

Andrew Hickey, the Mindless Ones, and others have touched on a lot of these points. All eight people who read this blog, if you like the comics rambles I've been doing, check these guys out.

I've always dug legacy heroes. If anyone got the opportunity to watch "Son of Rambow," the little Mormon boy shows a lot of how Little Ben interacted with and conceived of the universe. I didn't feel right as playing the established character, as most of what I experienced of, say, the Justice League or Marvel characters were from continuity dense works bought sporadically or from the mini-comics I'd get in the Super Powers action figures. I had it in mind that Hal Jordan meant little to me outside of a name, that Superman may or may not have had that Superplane thing, and that Batman seriously didn't have a shiny blue costume for fighting Mr. Freeze. So most of the time I'd conceive of some derivative, some new fellow who would receive endorsement from the Big Grown Up Heroes who had their grown-up things to handle that I didn't recognize all that well. (I'm still waiting for editorial to treat Green Lantern more like The Wire and less like G.I. Joe meets Star Trek.) That said, whenever some young buck would take over the mantle from the Big Grown Up Hero, I'd be excited to no end. For me, it showed that it was possible to take that idea popularized by these unassailable, emotionally inscrutable things made to look like people and make it viable through change.

Unfortunately, most comic book readers never saw it that way. The idea of growing up into a hero meant needing to grow up, and that scares a lot of them. Somehow, "growing up" means things like "get married, have kids, feel guilty about enjoying yourself, overdo it, get chided by Mother-wife-thing." Thus, comics became normalcy. The popular, emotionally inscrutable fellows in the costume became fundamental pillars instead of benchmarks. To my perspective, it's like being mad that Barry Sanders isn't playing football any more. Just because he isn't out there doesn't mean that his contributions to football and the masculine identity aren't valid.

Also, some characters were poor, poor excuses for follow-ups. Ben Reilly had a convoluted origin involving genetics, enough so that he contributed little as a stand-in Spider-Man. He had little with which I could associate, while Peter Parker's acceptance of an ambivalent totem due to an acceptance of his less-than-stellar traits and his desire to redeem them at all costs was something universal. Kyle Rayner had the greatest potential as Hal Jordan's replacement as Green Lantern, yet he was kept too closely in check by shortcomings on both writing and editorial staff. He never showed us what a visually-oriented person could manifest if given the ultimate artistry kit, and he had nothing of a relatable personality, except for the inferiority complex manifested in his appearances in JLA. The entire Marvel Next line, for all of the interesting details, had been far too sanitized. None of the characters dealt with anything heavier than a slightly bad day or a bombastic, vague cosmic threat.

However, some characters taking up mantles were quite successful. Wally West, the original Kid Flash, graduated from sidekick to full-fledged Flash, and with it he brought a hyperkinetic, childlike enthusiasm that the doddering, stiff Barry Allen lacked. Bucky Barnes was retrofitted as a damaged, dark young man who had been a part of numerous questionable moments in history, and his accession to Captain America after the ethical perfection of Steve Rogers gave him a path to show that he was, beneath the wretched history and rightful political cynicism, capable of altruism and evolution.

With that, however, Barry Allen and Steve Rogers have returned to remind us that comics are governed more by fear more than by possibility. The past returns, and with it a message that our futures are useless and meaningless in the face of nostalgia. Wolverine, along with the return of his memories, has been gifted with a son, a successor. However, his successor is a morally bankrupt, manipulative horror, capable of cruelties that even his hard-boiled father cannot match. The same goes for Bruce Banner's son, Skaar. The younger generation is seen as a blight and a terror, bloodthirsty monsters who would sooner eat a live kitten than save one from a tree. The future holds nothing but aggression and pain in the world of Superheroes these days. Those who empathized with the characters who had bad fathers are now perpetuating the same Zeus/Kronos complex that had damaged them.

I really hope that this is a last-ditch effort before the human spirit kick-starts itself into the realms of the impossible, where science and religion aren't seen as proving what doesn't exist, but as displaying what can become manifest.

Patagia

2009-10-20T18:11:00.003-04:00

Thanks to B.L. Donnelly, Batman and related material have gotten a lot of mental airplay over here. Batman has strong roots in the Mystery Man pulps, not to mention Aristotlean philosophy (as often exemplified by Frank Miller's literature). However, I choose to examine the phenomenon of what allowed "Batman" to form as an idea and take the reins.

The canon of Batman's genesis goes as follows. Thomas Wayne, inheritor of the preposterously exhorbitant Wayne family fortune (money as superpower), goes to medical school and becomes a surgeon. Somewhere along the way, he falls for a powerfully idealistic woman named Martha. The two marry and have a son, named Bruce. Although often estranged from other youths and easily startled, Bruce had a good heart and a singularity for a brain. The family resided at Wayne Manor, which has a rich history. Set over a vast cave network, Bruce had his first encounter with live bats after tripping into a well. The event left him shaken, but otherwise unscathed. Most scribes put Bruce at around 7-10 years old when he and his parents set out to see Mask of Zorro on the big screen, as an endulgence for Bruce. This endulgence coincided with a very strong desire, or perhaps even need, for liquid assets in a gentleman named Joe Chill. Agitated by circumstance and possibly other stimulants (or lack of opiates), Joe Chill attempts to mug the Wayne family and in the scuffle shoots the parents before scrambling away from the devastated child.

Here's where the recounting gets shaky. The point at which Bruce re-encountered the bat shifts and changes often, implying a moment out of time. This is where I feel that Bruce interfaced with something much, much bigger than his individual consciousness, the moment in time that sent ripples through his short life. The well of bats didn't exist in Bob Kane's original story, instead coming from later authors. That said, it has been used repeatedly since its inception. Bruce was, nevertheless, left with nothing off of which he could project a Paternal or Maternal role directly, which left him open in that moment of trauma to recognize the Living Idea Being which he identified through the same sensation as a child trapped in a well with an endless stream of bats flying past him. Many authors have projected the idea of what he must have felt, yet it all seemed to ring strangely. It seemed clear-cut and softened, neglecting the raw uncertainty that comes from the loss of fundamental psychological rudders.

As with all great works, Batman started out in utter dreck. Bruce, understandably, felt responsible for the loss of his parents. He pleaded for hedonism's sake; he wanted to see one of his favorite action characters ride around on the big screen when he could experience the same from recording equipment at home. He wanted his mother to wear pearls to make the excursion a noteworthy event. If we take a step back and remember Bruce's exploratory and literate nature, he perhaps "remembered" sacrificial rites in Dionysian tradition, in which the vessel would receive the greatest accolades and endulgence before getting ripped to shreds. Seeing meaning in everything, this seemingly random event may have been part of a larger process of manifestation. If they hadn't gone out, and if he hadn't wanted to make a gaudy spectacle of it, his parents wouldn't have died. Bruce's sense of self-chastisement made any sense of enjoyment for its own sake something to be discarded. Bruce Wayne was responsible, so Bruce had to be cast out as the lead role. The child had such an aversion to the psyche responsible for the sacrifice of his parents on the altar of crime that he chose to embody everything that would send Bruce Wayne running: discipline, vigilance, and control. He chose the trauma in the well as his starting point. Considering Bruce Wayne as co-conspirator, he chose the very thing that would make the boy panic, and used it as his template for future endeavors. The Bat requires the absence of a commanding figure or figures before introducing itself. Bruce Wayne became the puppet, the unwanted thing that the controlling consciousness would use to avert people's attention to its doings. Despite continuing his Father's business and his Mother's philanthropic work, Bruce Wayne would do his best to come across as an idiot and dilettante, in order that the consciousness could return to lashing out at this vague "crime" thing of which Bruce was an unconscious part, using the spirit of the animal that brought the boy to quivering trauma. He would act as the vessel of the Bat.

I don't know how relevant, cohesive or sane any of this sounds, but I'm going to keep at it.

So, a man in a Bat costume runs around, ruthlessly mangling and mutilating those who would choose to bring pain to others through illegal means all throughout his city. Much of this, however, was beating the living shit out of drug addicts and other people whom life handed the short end of the stick. Chances are, Batman began in an ugly, ugly place. Just as it required the sacrifice of two outstanding people, the Bat-monster must have chewed on a lot of furniture and shat on a lot of carpets before the controlling consciousness could get a leash on it. Batman would now give rise to his antithesis, as if to create limits for himself. This he would manifest in the autocratic need for violence and justice in the Man, who would carelessly knock an externally unremarkable fellow into a vat of chemicals, out of which would arise The Joker.

Just as Batman became defined as Not Bruce, this Joker would become defined as Not Anonymous. Every act would be an indulgence. Everything would be seen as a source of amusement. The Joker has no alter ego, for his world is all for fun, and thus he has no need to act in shadow or in secret. The terrorization of the Bat-monster run rampant has consequences with the Joker. No one is an anonymous vessel for crime when a person chooses to become the opposite of their fears instead of the embodiment of them.

The Joker's inception perhaps initiated the Robin scenario as well. Seeing the effects of his works, Batman would perhaps see a unique opportunity in the newly orphaned Dick Grayson, already a child so different than the young Bruce Wayne of an equivalent age. The forgotten Little Boy Bruce found a peer, and Batman found a person in whom he could affect change without terrorizing. Although Robin and Joker share red and green elements in their appearance, Robin chooses yellow which complements the Joker's purple. From here, the Robin figure would act as the synthesis of Joker and Batman.

Grayson would eventually distance himself from Batman. Many authors have attempted to cover this disagreement, yet the result remains the same. He would take a new sobriquet not from the polarity of Batman and Joker, but instead from Superman's mythology, something foreign to the Matter of Gotham. The next Robin, Jason Todd, would not escape the polarity. Jason lacked the discipline that Grayson had learned as an acrobat, and had no desire to develop it. This would, inevitably, lead him to fall into the Joker's hands, or rather his repeated crowbar blows and explosives. Jason at first hung like a scarecrow, a bogeyman story to spook aspiring Robins. He would rise later as the consummate counterpoint, dressing in the rags and castoffs of others to attempt to put a name to his senseless rage. He would come to embody the self-loathing of young Bruce Wayne, the all-consuming sense of abandonment that would burn through whatever stupid outfit he'd put on. The third Robin, Tim Drake, was more of a mirror for Batman. Although he dressed in the colors of Robin, the vibrance and hyper-activity of Dick and Jason gave way to a predatory coolness and diamond-like intellect. Dick was the Detective personified, scouring for solutions to the mysteries that would present themselves before him. Unfortunately, Tim's emotional center hadn't the years of processing that Batman was afforded, and after his father's death, he would retreat into the indestructible mind of his for any and all trauma. When he sought initially to become the next Batman, the "death" of Bruce Wayne brought him to evolve the idea of what being Robin meant in and of itself, without connection to a Batman. Donning one of Jason Todd's Robin-derivative costumes, Tim would step out to solve the mystery of Bruce Wayne's death.

I think this is all I can do for now. There's a lot more to say on the matter, but the Mindless Ones have said it before and have said it better than I have. It's sometimes just nice to vomit information.

The Hangman's Banner

2009-10-17T13:55:00.002-04:00

I just could not get through the snarls, today. They run too deep and too far, but I may as well get them out of my system. The Internet is our collective Shadow, and I may as well own it.

I love comics. I dare say, I will love comics for a long time, especially those silly superhero ones. That said, the past year has made the Superhero comic into a form of rage-inducing tedium. Meandering hipster chatter about the creation of an issue replaces content, even though that little smidge of content's fucking great. A story with a novel and inventive take becomes bogged down in grindhouse camp and devolves into '90s-style posturing and flexing on who can claim the "baddest ass" title while mowing down redshirts in rockin' cool ways. The bad guys had supposedly won the day in Marvel's Dark Reign, yet after the inception it's become increasingly flaccid and uninspired. We're on the fifth Marvel Zombies iteration, with a sixth, now including zombie superhero monkeys, in the wings. Superman is on some new version of Krypton, and guess what?!? Kryptonians are still the same stiff, dull, soulless alien tropes I've had to suffer through for so many years. I mean, there's no artwork on an alien world aside from architecture, everyone's clothes are plastic, nothing wears down, and everyone has a stick in their ass. Spacemen can say "Fuck." You hear that? Little green men have probably called someone an "unwashed anal bead" or some equivalent. I mean, seriously: where are the rude people, the working class, the sports fans in space? Why don't I see Non of the New Kryptonian military pissing on a building and knocking it over after too much Superlager? Ohhhh wait, speaking of dense and uninteresting aliens, let's get into the great big DC jam-bo-ree called Blackest Night! I barely know any of the characters coming back from the dead, and I have to deal with every dickface who's read DC since they were 8 staring down their nose at the latecomers for not giving a shit about Magpie, Hawkman's unrequited love, the Dibny's, and Necron.

The Batman property, so far, has kept afloat. All anyone needs to know is Bruce Wayne's dead, the first Robin is now Batman, and his biological son is now Robin. From there, it's all crazy adventure. The world of Batman has burst open with possibility, and one needn't have read it for eons to enjoy the story. It feels... unburdened, and I like that a lot.

Well, that's that.

Ice and Hammers

2009-10-01T12:02:00.004-04:00

What's validity? Okay, yeah, just as most intellectual concepts, "valid" has all manner of subjective values that rearrange between subjects, which in themselves remain just as amorphous as the aforementioned adjective. As far as English goes, I feel more likely to hear "valid assessment" than "valid gardening trowel". That said, could I then come to a notion that "valid" represents the structural integrity of an experience or idea, and thus possessing an oxymoronic nature, as ideas have less physical presence than a neutrino in our sensory observance?

So, with this in mind, I popped onto the Online Etymology Dictionary, which gave the definition of "supported by facts or authority." However, as far as authority goes, the Orson Welles movie F for Fake has elaborately ruined that concept for me.

Yet... in our presentation of ideas and concepts, for the populace that operates in the realm of words, symbols, concepts, philosophies, religion, magic, spirit and persuasion, "Validity" is not unlike the Holy Grail bearing Bran's severed head and the Lapis Philosophorum. Somehow, the idea has no merit if not repeated to another source, be it in singular perspective or in multitude, and if that source mentions a confluence of perspective with that idea, the Ideomancer steps a little closer to finding the Big Prophecy- and Abundance-Barfing Head on a Plate. What do I hope that Validity will offer? What power does it manifest in our social sphere?

I've more found that Validity acts not as a giver of power, but as a means to stave off Thanatoic fear. "If I have people who have heard my ideas and agree with them, and those people either have merit through either number or status, then I have made a worthwhile contribution to humanity, and my existence has been useful. If my existence bears utility, then my experiences of life were not wasted and I need not fear mortality." In my case, this feeds into massive social phobias and ambitions. Will Grant Morrison come across my thoughts and feel moved to see his own effect on a human being? Will I convince Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to forgo anti-Semitism with a comic book? Will I dazzle a member of the desired sex with my intellectual might so that I can appease my lizard-brain's incessant screams for carnal experience? What if I'm not making enough money to meet these people? What if I'm not relaxing in the right way to formulate the Most Impressive Idea in the World? What if I miss the opportunity to Meet Validating Ideomancer/Dazzling Soulmate/Perfect Audience? How do I find these people on the way to finding the Most Impressive Idea in the World?

Ha! Ha ha ha!!!

But... what do we chase when the windmills stop looking like dragons?

Carbon lattice, electrified fence.

2009-09-17T12:09:00.003-04:00

Last night I was having dinner at my friend's, and she'd invited over some aging New Agey sorts, if we're going to go about categorizing. Everything seemed to be going okay, and the night started to progress while the one fellow had busted out these pendant-things made of tree resin with bits of some crystal inside. It looked like some sort of opal, but I'm not a geologist. Either way, the shared experience was nice, but the demand and insistence surrounding these was distressing.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a sucker for stones and crystals. I pick up resonance with ease, to the point that it distracts from, well, most everything else going on around me. However, I recognize that the majority of the populace has other things to worry about, whether narrated by flickering TV screens or through sensible, fundamental instincts like family care and community. It was a comment mentioned through one of the folks going through word-association that really set things in motion: "It gives people what they need..." That kind of thing... terrifies me, especially when considering the recent heebie-jeebies surrounding consumerism as of late. It reminded me of a regular customer when I used to work at Stellar Coffee who would go on paranoid jags, discussing how human consciousness was some fabrication by a crystalline intelligence to reposition their placement around the world to create some new resonance. The way the metaphysical community, myself included, reacts and practically worships crystals, I begin to ponder the validity of this.

With that strong resonance in mind, how much transphysical essence bullies us around into these pockets? Why do so many folks in the metaphysical community sound like the same person? Why is it so often about "joining" and where do we draw the line between community and cult-like idol worshippers? Why do we flock to find objects that will mean something to us when, deep down, these objects have little or no meaning outside of our own associations? How do you point a person past the fascination with the object and toward the individual interaction with it that provides a simple signpost for what non-physical consciousness/wavelengths want to communicate (and this may or may not be anthropically-oriented. We're talking Nature, here.)?

I spent that night sitting on my bed, looking at the wall of collages before me, a swirling expanse of faces and words, and felt like I was sitting on a precipice overlooking the Abyss, like in the Neverending Story. I wonder how many people would fall screaming into it, and how many found a way to climb back into the world, found a way to get back Home; not the regressive home where responsibility is nil and life stagnates into a parody of itself, but that area where we could explore safely, without feeling exposed or self-conscious. I've been adventuring too long in my own wilderness. It's time to get back.

Metropolis vs. Transylvania: a Guidebook to Modern dreck

2009-09-11T13:44:00.004-04:00

Yup. Feeling a lot better, today. Just like any cycle, the uncomfortable skin has been shed and new eyes look outward into the opened system until it finds the closure, and newer eyes manifest. Yay Lunar Churning!

"America: Fuck yeah."- Team America theme.

"Are you being sarcastic?" "I don't know any more." -Simpsons "Hullabalooza" episode in the '90s.

Today's been all Superman and Vampires; Final Crisis in a nutshell, I guess.

I wish people could see the Evil Empire in themselves, and I'm not talking about just the Suits and gelled-hair yuppies; I'm talking every person who involves themselves in this mess. If we attempt to push it away, we end up the "enemy" of the Evil Empire, raising flags in opposition and presenting them with a target as much as we ourselves have painted one on "them," with the presumption of an Us vs. Them scenario. It's been exploited too damned much.

See, that's something we forget about Superman: he doesn't give a flying fuck what Lex Luthor does in his spare time unless it fucks with people. He doesn't hate Lex, since Lex is just the opposite end of the Superman spectrum of amplified humanity. Lex's brilliance is all geared toward reflection and validation, where Superman's actions are, in his mind, just what he does. He places no more importance on moving the Earth in and out of orbit than he does saving that kitten from a tree. He doesn't agonize over what he can't do, but enjoys what he does. To put in simply, Lex is the separation of self from collective, and Superman is in unity.

I guess when we're considering the Sun and Superman, we can get into vampires as well. I'm a bad blogger cuz I forgot the link, but someone put down that vampires fear the notion of self-sacrifice that the Cross embodies. The idea that someone chooses to avoid a predator/prey relationship, to avoid victimization for one's own benefit, makes the Vampiric essence go cross-eyed. The lack of a reflection represents just that: lack of reflection. The Vampire, despite being a night creature, has a remarkable lack of self-awareness. The instinct and Will to Power override all higher cognitive aspects. It's the sociopathic aspect of the animal instinct and solitary non-mammalian critter. The coldness and deadness are remarkably reptilian (If I hear any bollocks about Lizard People I am going to fucking scream). Warmth has a metaphor in human language as reciprocity, and the lack of it displays that inner Void so well. There's no way to fake Dead Body Cold. It's too chilly and squamous to pass off as bad circulation. The wooden stake, fire, and sunlight represent pretty much the same thing: Life. The stake was cut from a living entity and will eventually decompose. Fire is a chemical reaction with remarkably life-like characteristics. The Sun, our relative position to it, etc. is that reductionist source of Life. All three act like Wilhelm Reich muscle memory to send the frozen essence back into the living cycle of elements. Garlic seems so basic that it's confounding. It's a bulb, it's living potential, it promotes circulation, it's an overwhelming spice... it just seems the opposite end of the vampiric spectrum of Subterranean Entities.

Vampires, to me, feel more Saturnian than anything else, and getting acquainted with that sort of energy in oneself's pretty daunting, but useful. Vampires have gone from Apotropaic funerary ritual to modern Frost Giant, calcified elements of human nature that require recirculation when left unaware. Like Frost Giants, their position is ambivalent instead of purely pernicious, not unlike the "Asura" in Hindu literature. The key comes to getting that Vampiric part to see itself in the mirror, to enact that self-recognition that accompanies a cognition of one's soul. (I'm of the idea that everything condemned to existence has a soul, but self-awareness and sentience have the unique prerogative to examine it.)

When we consider the Killer of Monsters, from the Winchesters, to Buffy Summers, to Batman, to Thor, we consider the symbolic utilization of destructive instincts for the cause of Life. Sam Winchester flirts with his possession of demon blood, Batman toes the line of power-mad and oppressive Hades, and Thor's brutality and characteristics make him almost indistinguishable from the Giants he bludgeons to death. That said, all have romantic ties, for good or for ill, to members of their quarry. Sam and Ruby, Dean and Anna the Angel, Buffy with both Angel and Spike, Batman to Thalia al-Ghul and Catwoman, and Thor to Jarnsaxa.

In conclusion, to be effective in counteracting the demons which we feel compelled to spit upon and villify, we must understand sacrifice without power-over, we must understand the deed as villainous instead of the perpetrator, and we must, in some way, romance that evil in order to combat it effectively. Love is what conquers all of it, and in the end the poles shall collapse on themselves and become distinct from their previous nature, just to find new oppositions and repeat the process. (Thor and Jormundgand annihilate each other, and find reconciliation in Magni and Modi, a dual-divinity at Rangarok.)

In the cold light of the Hyperborean sun.

2009-09-06T11:46:00.003-04:00

The past week has been rough. A chill wind from the winter had hidden in a drawer and escaped while I folded laundry. I stared at my e-mail inbox, with another open-ended rejection, reinforcing my belief that I'd be better off a castrated hermit living on the side of a mountain, subsisting on dirt and prayer, or covering my face in lacerations so that all of the middle-aged hausfraus who tell me I'm beautiful can shut the fuck up and stop imagining me in poses designed for Harlequin book covers. Once more I feel better off as the King of Jerusalem, the hideous leper in a gold mask, sexlessly meandering the halls and appreciating beauty like a eunuch, because God forbid that I seek romantic love or display an active sex drive, that I display the level of rancor I have toward the general ignorance of the world, and the smug superiority of those who stare down their nose at those who lack their particular insecure quality of banner-waving, that I seriously do not care about the useless details that fill the air with banal, soul-crushing chatter.

However, it's the easy, stupid way out to spit bile and justify the emotional defensiveness of the world. It's too easy to release all of this on some poor, unsuspecting individual set on their path in life, thus becoming that smug sense of superiority so despised. The cycle continues: showing oneself causes the other to recoil or misunderstand, and thus retreat digs one further back, propelled in reverse like a nautilus from a hungry octopus, further and further back until an unrecognizable speck in the sea, even more inscrutable and dismissable than before, to begin the cycle again. Those who care stop looking at the person and instead begin smothering, selfishly throwing themselves into realms of admiration and guilt, shrieking for approval and validation for inconsequential acts from a source that finds the whole affair sickening, coddling and crushing it like a lapdog.

I wouldn't feel this much vituperation if I didn't have an equal amount of veneration. The two extremes seem irreconcilable. Perhaps it's from a lack of self-cultivation, a lack of socialization or just because I'm a hypocritical douchebag, but I still find myself alienated from just about everyone. In every circle I've attempted to join, I've felt disinterest in the internal secret handshakes and the pursuit of their social cues, left out in discussions that revolve around experiences shared by core members and unconsciously yet persistently marginalized and invalidated, especially by those who claim friendship (a repeating pattern). Much as I enjoy the individual company of many people, the larger body, the clique, the banner will, by the devices of myself or another, cast me into the outskirts and render me irrelevant.

The human animal is, by nature, a social one. We're formed too awkwardly and too weakly to subsist on an individual agenda, and thus we seek collective clustering to form a superorganism, which have applications as irrelevant and diverse as computer usage, political inclination, genetic heritage, athletic inclination, stylistic/aesthetic inclination, and so on. Competition has greatest strength when intercollective, with intracollective or individual competition serving to excise weak/sick elements from the collective. A human being can take only so much rejection of the collective, initiated by self or other, before pondering the relevance of its being.

In the mire of all of these conflictions, I began to question: why don't I want to die? Why do I want to stay alive? Why can I not fathom leaping in front of an oncoming vehicle like I used to? Why can't I shut myself out from the prospect of the pain and madness I'd cause my father? Do I have some other reason to stay around than simple financial obligation? If so, why don't the people closest to me seem to want me around? Why do I have to rely on a mentally ill person to provide me with the facsimile a familial setting that each day reminds me more and more of my actual familial setting in which I spent endless amounts of time taking care of my physically ill mother whose death was a tempest of guilt and relief? If I seek acceptance and independence, why do I put only nominal amounts of energy into finding a more substantial form of employment? Why do I avoid the idea of taking medication? Why do I worry about the time that I spent living instead of carving myself into pieces to achieve some basic form of credibility, when I really, really don't give a flying fuck how many degrees a person has? If, somehow, all of my decisions and inclinations are valid, then why can't I see the point of my existence? Why can't I get some kind of reward, some kind of kick-back or signpost to let me know what I'm doing right or doing wrong in the cosmic scheme of things? I mean, even Peter Parker, who has a shitty life, gets to be Spider-Man at the end of the day. Where's my reason to be here?

I felt okay, this morning. My emotions were level, and I was happy to see the cats, and as far as I can tell, they were happy to see me. Cats, especially those belonging to someone else, are a pretty poor barometer. They'll forget you exist when you leave the building, and it won't have much consequence on their life if you disappear. Either way, I can make a cat genuinely happy through my actions and observe it, and that brings some validation. I went through my ritual of heading to the coffee shop to do... whatever it is I've decided to do there while guzzling stimulants. Today saw me nestled into research, where I came across some astrological articles of Dana Gerhardt's regarding Venus and the Moon. Maybe it was the subject matter, the music playing at the time (The Rapture's "Been Down for So Long"), the caffeine, or that my brain chemistry reached a breaking point, but I remembered how I felt reading All-Star Superman. Somehow, that story got it into my head that whatever it is that Superman represents, the working-class superhero, the avatar of Vishnu, or any other thing that doesn't matter, that symbol, that primary-colored farmboy from space believes in us. It's the same feeling I got as a kid when I thought about Santa Claus. Much as people would say that Santa had a naughty/nice list or wouldn't give presents to non-believers or some exclusionist hateful shit like that, the real spirit behind both Superman and Santa Claus is that if we let them, if we just, for a minute, drop the skepticism and the snide barriers we've set up to be a rebellious teenager, we're fully permitted to think that there's something out there that believes in whatever we do, that believes we can be great, that loves every single one of us even when we turn our noses up at the red briefs or the jingle-bells. Don't get me wrong: I still hate most Christmas music with a fire that could completely sublimate the polar ice caps into perennial storm clouds, but with the Fortress at the South Pole and Workshop at the North, I'd rather ignore them entirely and learn to just do what I do with the full belief that something bigger than anyone I know, anything I can conceive believes in me, and has wished a happy ending for all of us if we'll have it. If we won't, it still believes we know what we're doing. Ha.

That thing we found out in the cornfield...

2009-08-23T13:57:00.003-04:00

Y'know, for some reason the "gotta be in a relationship" bug's hit me hard. I'll be fine with it for a while, and then I'll see some young lady who either I didn't have the guts to talk to or who shot me down stuck on some fellow with a beard who seems content and approachable, if dull. It'd be one thing if I felt like an alien who wants to be like everyone else and relate to them, but I don't want that. I want to be whatever it is that I am, and reconciling whatever that is with the social structure of humanity feels nearly impossible. It just seems like any time I got into a relationship before, it was either some fateful crossing engineered by God or a very unfortunate alignment of hormones, aesthetics and availability.

Rationalist thought-modes would be gleeful on the anthropological ideas of group dynamics, with stability and security versus variability and irrational behavior. I have a lot of difficulty with jobs and monetary ambition. I justify it with an anarchist philosophy that I must admit I feel strongly about, but those philosophies definitely came after difficulties with fitting into the given model. I mean, ever since I was 7 I was the kid in the "smartypants motherfucker" program that wouldn't turn in homework. According to that given model, I "wasn't living up to my potential," and I had no clue what to make of it or what to do about it, until hearing the idea that maybe the values expressed in our educational/consumerist/capitalist/industrial system weren't anywhere near my own and that I might not need to care about it.

Unfortunately, I still do. I still find myself terrified of working creatively, and despite my aversion to paperwork and most of the way that modern government really operates, I can't bring myself to live on the rails, join a monastery or find a commune.

I keep going back to my family while I'm writing this. I can sum up my childhood and family life with the following scenario: My first bicycle was just a tad too big for me to pedal comfortably, and the rationale was that I would grow into the bike while learning on it at whatever size I was at the time. It took a tempest on my part to point out that the pedals left my feet as I tried to ride. I received neither comfort nor apology, but instead, "Look! It's a smaller bike! Aren't you excited?" No admittance of damage, no apology for not believing me, and no willingness to communicate on any levels aside from small talk and tantrum. It was so strange. The only phenomenon that I can think to describe it is the very uncomfortable feeling of centripetal force on a roller coaster or train making a turn. I wasn't mad about the bike as much as I was mad that they didn't believe me, they didn't trust me, and they didn't care that I was hurt. I was loved, sure. It wasn't an abusive household (although I to recall times when my dad would hit me, scream at me or elbow me, which would generate years of patricidal fantasies that eventually subsided as I got into adulthood), and I wasn't physically neglected, but I received absolutely no attempts on my parent's part to understand my motivations. During my mom's illness, expressions of affection became thinly-masked calls for death, rage, and blame, and I think that, especially after my father remarried to a very ambitious woman, he just got tired of me, and I completely lack that sense of safety that a lot of other people have with the familial ideal. I watch the other "Boomerang Generation" folks dress and act like a long, terrible joke while trying to formulate the punchline as they go along, and just stumbling into some new idiotic quote or bit of kitsch to keep the damned thing limping along, secure that their parents have their back, confident that they have the support they need to get through whatever they're going through in this period. Much as I feel like their appearances and actions are absolutely ludicrous, I'm envious of the support more than anything else.

I don't want to end this with feeling scared and alone. I have support out there: it's unconventional, it gets a little suffocating sometimes and it has just about the same bank account issues that I do. I suppose that sense of alienation has some very strong fundamental roots, but it's just a sense, not a rule of existence.

"We have evolved beyond the need for asses!"

2009-08-09T12:39:00.003-04:00

Restricted Site! Your computer is infected. Turn on your anti-virus software, which is useless anyway. "Fhaaaaaaack. Mmkay, I'll try it again." Restricted Site! "Gads you putrescent tumors that pass from the diseased womb and black jizz of the Monster God Ymir! WHY must you make viruses?? WHAT is your fucking damage and why can't you direct it in a less puerile fashion? I hope rabid dogs rape you in your sleep! Okay, now, again." Restricted Site! "PISS!"

This, folks, is the daily internet ritual of the Benjamin. Somehow I have this idea that "Restricted Site" could be a stupid, obvious pun. Saturn wants to try his hand at being clever, and it just generates groans and takes the life from the party. What makes it frustrating is that the restriction encloses communications, primarily. It could be worse, I suppose.

The urge to find the Ultimate Novelty follows when approaching the internet. Endless, endless itineraries and changes in emotion catalogued, with neither purpose nor resolution. Where can a person find that source of infinite wisdom that pours out knowledge in an increasing rate? Why does the information never seem to be enough? How far can we distance ourselves from the people in our lives by having little electric paper dolls of them to replace sincerity, and how pretty can we make our own out of fear that no one will want to talk to our little idol? When did we think that anyone seriously gave a fuck that it was raining, outside of travel complications or the possible cancellation of a physical congregation? How many people have you counted as a friend on an internet site with whom you find yourself willing to talk after doing so? Are you disappointed that few pictures of you exist on these sites, or even so far as few flattering pictures? Have you entertained the idea of a person far longer than was healthy while utilizing Facebook or Google? Have you distanced yourself from someone due to their page content? Have you sent innumerable, inane messages to someone over the internet, or been the recipient of the same? Have you permitted an application on MySpace or Facebook only to spare the feelings of someone you barely know? How far do our emotions extend through this communicative medium?

Well, ladies and gents, someone beat us to the Age of Aquarius and turned the concept of friendship into a fur-trapper's paradise for the Brand. "Why do you dislike this ad? Let us know so that we can better market to you. Be independent: Drink Sprite." Let's not forget our favorite new brand, Eschatology! How much information can we put out there on our impending doom? Can you imagine the internet in the age of The Bomb? Exchange science for anthropology and metaphysics, and well... here we are. Our ideas are eating us alive.

Stellar Dialectic on the De-Tuned Radio

2009-07-29T11:35:00.002-04:00

Great. The caffeine's kicked in and my mind's racing a mile a minute. There're days I wish I worked harder at writing as a profession so that I could spend more time on it instead of getting into a groove just before running off to work.

I was trying to research Alice Bailey's esoteric astrology, specifically the esoteric and hierarchical rulers of the signs. The problem is, just about everywhere I try to find information and assertions as to "why" these associations are in place, I find nothing but birdchatter and nonsensical self-interested dithering, to say nothing of rampant metagenetic philosophy. Somehow in the course of this, the relatively simplistic method of calculus as a philosophical template has been confounded in discussions of seven Rays (Bradbury, Park, Stanz, Tampa Bay, Liotta, and Charles) and a strange dismissal of the Moon as "obscuring" a much cooler and more eldritch luminary. The whole things seems to act toward complicating rather than revealing understanding.

Tables of correspondence run rampant, so dismissing this as a search for easy cookbook astrology has left my head. No one can seem to say "Mercury as the hierarchical ruler of Scorpio makes sense because--" and any searches seem to bring up people who will spend much time discussing a lot of nothing.

On another related astrology note, aside from a few allusions to Hellenic creation myths and surprisingly in the book Sextrology, I've seen very few astute discussions of the Aquarian sun. A lot of it seems to be caught up with the idea of causes, and so far all of the Aquarians I know could not give a shit about joining something. We're inherently mistrustful of marketing, and often end up the Martian Manhunter in terms of "superheroic" associations: Just as wonder-oriented and idealistic as Superman, but ultimately as pessimistic and intellectual as Batman, preferring to hide within and unite a drastically different and yet like-minded group while pursuing individual interests that others find extremely obscure, obtuse, or possibly dull. Aquarians tend toward hypersensitivity and neurological problems, and the characteristic stubbornness comes from attempting to handle the onslaught of information screeching through the conscious mind. Aquarians seem more like cavemen than spacemen, or more accurately the arc of Terrence McKenna: beginning as scientific-minded futurists and developing into Archaic Revivalists after objective models prove fallacious or incongruous to a subjective existence. One might see this as the transition from the Saturn/Uranus mundane ruler to the Jupiter esoteric ruler, seeing wonder in data and theory instead of just ideas with no romance or affection. Somehow, as the Aquarian sign moves up in vibration, it moves closer to the Earth, not quite making it, but still affecting tides and emotions in some fashion. That characteristic aloofness and coldness seems at home on the Moon, yet still waters run deep.

Well, there we go. It's time to head out.

Hydrochloric Acid Body Scrub

2009-07-17T13:23:00.002-04:00

I run the risk of proselytizing once more on a barely-observed record. Motivations become questioned, reproach seeps in at the borders, but those remain chattering noisemakers settled around the doorways, like the carvings surrounding Hindu temples to distract those who would bring their dharma into church with them: God seriously does not give a shit about your opinion of the universe.

I get tattoos and piercings. They're such an old method of delineation that it's hard not to understand. It's the brand logo of a person's tribe, the externalization of some ideological value that demanded manifestation on the skin, corresponding to the stimulation of nerve centers through pain and endorphin firing. The experience often creates powerful talismans, combining minor trauma and symbolic representation, not to mention a reworking of the body-image and the relationship of the senses involving the body.

Then again, I see so many people in the city just covered in boring, kitchy, shitty tattoos with no meaning other than to provide some protective layer to hide a shrieking, terrified child under a layer of false bravado, fucked up on endocrine-based opiates and turning the skin into a cheap barf of meaningless symbols like the separated fat in the cream of the collective unconscious. The subject debases itself in a cloud of 18th Trump misdirection, dressing in the dreck of the world around it in order to keep the world from penetrating and infecting the psychic womb back into which the subject has crawled. The sheer intent of meaninglessness permits the subject elements around which it can erect a field of constant self-consciousness, and thus constant jadedness and cynicism. Angry children draw all over the walls of themselves, instead of primordial humans immortalizing the images of beloved spirits on their most sacred temples in homage.

Perhaps it's no wonder: The non-spirit has given way to the anti-spirit. Compassion and love have become strangled by arrangements of causes and dietary labels to permit some illusion of positive effect and superiority. To love animals has come to mean disregarding the "cries of the carrots," as Mr. Keenan pointed out over a decade ago. To love the environment has come to mean the exorcism of human activity within it. To love humanity has come to mean the denial of aggressive instincts that unite us with our mammalian kin. Thought overcomes Mind. Anthropic bias runs wild across all fields, impoverishing our planet and our souls. Spirituality has become a giant gold Buddha statue, a graven image of the God-Suffering-Flesh and the sacrificial device, a meaningless sitcom of Universal-Scale Gender Politics.

We can't "go back." We can't undo the last 200 years of technological innovation. We will remember the "neat little box that could heat things up in seconds" and perhaps miss the background hiss of radio waves screeching through the atmosphere. We will fret and weep for our vicarious friends at opposing ends of the globe, and our species-tribe shall be carved into pieces once again before returning to exactly the same place it was prior: in constant threat of annihilation, like we have been from the get-go. Golden ages don't exist: Gold doesn't oxidize. We stare back at ourselves and mistake our own experience for the quality of the universe. The world won't end, and that may be our apocalypse: looking down and finally tasting the shit we've been smelling for so long.

Zoetrope

2009-06-21T12:36:00.002-04:00

Summmerrrrrrr solstice. Lots of weird little ego-drives and stubborn digging-in of heels, but beneath, fireworks spark like a rollercoaster of phosphenes and bass lines.

I've been into the concept of the chimera, lately. I've always dug xenozoic and xenobotanical imagery, and there's something about pondering what makes particular traits in nature, how they combine in different kingdoms and phyla. Upon hearing of the scientific "chimera," or the Genetic Frankenstein Monster thing going on, I felt kind of disappointed.

Y'know, I understand all of the genetic tinkering. We as a species have been doing it since the rise of agriculture, and for all of the dick-moves and moral reprehensibility, I doubt it'll stop. If there's anything I would like to see, it's genetic manipulation of life in order to create a robust and balanced ecosystem in which we may include our current innovations, in whatever new form we may put them in. We as a species are nowhere near this level of understanding or implementation. It would require a massive shift in social consciousness and most likely step on all manner of toes in both animal cruelty and corporate power structure, thus insulting both Left- and Right-wing sensibilities. The goal would be a relatively self-sustaining resource structure. Primarily, I'm going on a few ideas: introduction of plastic-eating microbes and regulatory predatory species, robust "scavenger" types for other forms of waste, symbiotic cleansing animals (inspired by the shrimp-like Dentik from Farscape and this actual spa where little fish eat your dead skin. Apparently it's amazing.), better sewage treament, temperature regulation through heartier plant life, living building material, to say nothing of human genetic manipulation. While that may sound like eugenics (which scares the fuck out of me), imagine attaching a phytokleptic genome, in which the body could utilize the chloroplasts in the greens you eat in order to photosynthesize. Imagine what that would do for world hunger when everyone's body's making their own food during abundant sunlight.

Getting there would suuuuuuure be a mess, however, to say nothing of manipulating reactions to natural allergens. Either way, it's an idea.

The Sprout Breaks the Seed

2009-06-05T13:56:00.002-04:00

The contentious nature of the separation caused by observation as empirical does indeed cause discomfort. Nevertheless, our frameworks still display polarity, and imbalance along that polarity brings forth conditions around which a given section of the greater cosm may reveal an aspect previously unseen and without experience from the perspective of the conglomeration of universal material affected by the imbalance. In a way, the damage that comes from a dualist perspective seems to find greater purpose when treated as a wound, not ignored or anesthetized, but instead tended and healed. As with any effective treatment, "this may sting."

Sometimes, the manner of trying to break down an imaginary wall or treat an imaginary disease comes through the search for the right imaginary hammer or imaginary elixir. Like many elements, those who find these tools may not have full knowledge of the capacity, or expect to take down the barrier in one mighty blow. I have found that these barriers and wounds require finesse and patience, taking a steady, diligent hand at reducing the barrier between individual existence and the transformative heart of all things, expressed in translation perhaps through the natal placement of Saturn in Scorpio in the 6th house (using Tropical astrology and Placidus house placement).

Thank you, contributors and comrades, for opening your hearts and sharing your radiance. You have offered me invaluable gifts of insight, eternal slivers of Soma that permit translation from the ultraviolet to the infrared. Your communication through the "external" collective of humanity has opened the internal communication to the greater spectrum of internal being, and I hope to utilize these gifts in the best way to honor this interaction.

Le Pendu

2009-05-29T12:41:00.002-04:00

This week's put me on the fucking edge, and I'd like to thank my friend Brendan for having the foresight to be born on May 26th in order to make things remotely bearable.

I had a job offer for a retail chain that peddles in wares for which I have a great passion. So, in order to become a blip on the radar, I had to fill out an online application for this company. I filled out all of the pertinent information, and then came the "personality profile" stuff. Now, the questions within were things that I wouldn't fucking ask anyone I didn't share a major life experience with. Most of them I wish I had an extra option for "none of your fucking business; this has nothing to do with my job performance." Nevertheless, I answered as honestly as I could, with a little embellishment where I felt I could wiggle. So, I pop in to check on the update, and I had a red flag. Is it that I want to spend my free time alone, most of the time? Is it that I take pride in my work? What, in that godforsaken quiz, makes me seem like I'm going to set the store on fire while stealing the register? Shouldn't these questions be reserved for a face-to-face interview? In order for the company to view me as a viable candidate, I have to compromise my integrity.

In between this, I had bought a ton of cleaning products for a big Memorial Day/Birthday clean with my roommate while at work. While walking home, I passed a large group of people at Broad and Bainbridge. I thought little of it, until I heard a pop and the groupd of people began running wildly. Figuring "Oh, that was probably a gunshot" I began running as well. A boy probably not much older than 17 started running next to me, and as I turned to ask him what the fuck was going on, he clocked me. While I was dazed, he and others took the cleaning products from my hands, as well as my shoulder bag which contained a tarot deck, a pair of sunglasses, a journal and my work uniform. The crowd pulled away, and I found my uniform and journal lying on the sidewalk. It was such a freak event, but I've been shaken up by it for a bit, now. I think about the circumstances of why I got out of work late enough to experience this, why I got targeted for mugging, and the absurdity of what was stolen, and I find I have a hard time loving mankind in the same way.

Well, this same job has also given me no hours to work next week, and I'd like to figure out whether or not I've been downsized, or if this presages a spotty, obnoxious work schedule. I fought for this job, I battled with myself to maintain my integrity in that preposterous workplace, and I'm returned to the conditions I was in that put me in the position where I needed this job in the first place.

I've been a mental and spiritual train wreck this year, and I just hoped for a little stability, just one fewer things over which to fret. It's getting really hard to keep it together. I have tried relating my feelings to people, and the feelings are understandably deflected and trivialized. I feel very strongly and very intensely, and that's not going to change just to make the people around me comfortable. I often wish my conscience could allow me one of those big, selfish meltdowns that leaves a massive scar of physical and psychic turmoil behind. As much as I regret it sometimes, I'm very glad that I was given the heart that I have. The breadth of experience it allows seems so rare, as painful as it is sometimes. I've withstood what seems like an eternity of heartache. I've accepted roles both chivalrous and contemptible. I've upheld my core beliefs, even when I didn't even know it.

I have no clue how I will handle all of this, but I trust myself. I trust that ineffable Void to offer forth the elements required of me to keep me around to fulfill my purpose for being here. If not, I trust that it will at least allow me to peacably close my affairs before it ejects me from all that I know.

Binah

2009-05-17T13:26:00.003-04:00

I keep on getting onto the internet, with the notion that somehow I'll find meaning for utilizing it. That said, it devolves into Facebook picks and quizzes, with the occasional excursion onto Hulu or whatever will serve that same purpose of passive entertainment.

I had terrible problems with internet addiction growing up. I used to spend hours doing what teenage boys do with unsupervised access, and drown myself in the mess of introversion and delusion of the AOL chatroom. It took a maddening, damaging relationship to get over it, thus swapping one series of hangups for another instead of resolving either of them.

As I've dealt with enough of the relationship's issues to grow from them and resolve most of the internal conflicts, I find myself falling into patterns that preceded its inception, as if returning to the paradigm of my adolescence. I miss my epic RPGs, my jaunts to the forest and losing myself into the media of the time. It took ten years, but I have finally afforded myself the opportunity to feel my mother's death. I finally feel the anger and the imbalance of it, the "injustice" if you dare. Why couldn't I have a traditional mother figure? Why did I escape from the world instead of embrace it during her illness? Who could I have been if she had the capability to be more involved in my life? Why wasn't I one of those strong, stoic children we see on TV who immediately becomes responsible and comes through it admirably, instead of the dissociative, escapist man-child sitting here right now?

It took a while for me to figure out that our expectations of strength remain disproportionate in comparison to the challenge of the psychological trauma. Here's the story.

I watched my mother's physical capability slowly drag her down and smash her spirit, to the point that I just wished she'd die, some days. I wished that she and I could have arranged her death; something merciful so that we could get all of her affairs in order and so that we could spend some time finishing her business of life so that she could depart feeling complete, using some gentle, painless method. Our society and legal system frown on that, and so I was stuck, watching her body grow weaker and weaker, each day more and more painful for her, changing her adult diapers and patching up bedsores on a woman who, by rights, should have had at least 40 more years before those subjects even would come to mind. So, on May 5, 1999 I woke up to hear my dad making a frantic 911 call (in his measured, unfailingly logical way. You want my family in your corner when shit hits the fan). I watched from the balcony as my mom tried to mumble out some words and went limp. I think at that point I went into shock. I remember the EMTs coming in and trying to resuscitate her on our living room floor, and one of them indirectly telling someone to tell me to put on a shirt. I put on my black Clockwork Orange shirt and still watched in shock, wondering when she was going to spring back to life from the defib pads. They took her out on a stretcher and I got dressed so that my dad and I could get to the hospital. We were both very quiet and solemn, if despondent. I remember my dad saying "Well... looks like you're not going to school today." as a form of gallows humor. That was typical of my family. We're still Scotsmen, underneath it all.

We were paged into a waiting room. We... kind of knew, at that point. I don't know what we felt at that time. I think my emotions just left. A doctor who looked like the Bizarro version of Newt Gingrich (being that he appeared friendly and compassionate) came into the waiting room to tell us that they did all that they could, and that by the time she was at the hospital, she had already passed. He told us that they couldn't do an autopsy, since her MS was so progressed that they couldn't get any accurate data. I would obsess over that for years, but it'd be like trying to figure out who shot whom in a charge on a trench in WWI. My dad and I sat for a while, and we eventually went to see my mother's body. Rigor mortis had set in, so her lips peeled back to bare her teeth. Thankfully, the hospital folks had closed her eyes at this point. I touched her hand: the drop in her temperature had caused condensation to form, and I'll never forget that sensation. I watched my dad try to close her mouth and push down her lips to no avail, until he placed a single kiss on her forehead. We went for coffee in Hockessin after we left. I don't remember the rest of the day.

Trying to be that stoic kid, I went to school the next day. The guidance counselor made a big fuss, which was the last thing I wanted. So, all day teachers were asking me if I was okay, when in truth, I was in shock and just trying to make sense of things. I went on a date and we held the funeral on Mother's Day, which I didn't realize fucked me up until much later (I put a Mother's Day card in her coffin). I mean... I know why we do viewings and all, but I found the makeup and dressing her up so gaudy and needless. It became a stupid carnival instead of recognizing death. The painted corpse wasn't my dead mom, just some tarted up carcass people could look at. I saw my dead mom, with her rictus and pale, cold skin. I hid in my room and viciously necked with the poor, pretty, vapid girl that my friend had the best intentions of setting me up with during the wake. This wouldn't be the only relationship begun at a funeral for me. It fizzled out after a season after I found that I just could not talk to this girl. We were on two totally different planets most of the time, and I don't think I even really liked her, and she thought I was the bee's freakin' knees. That just... sucked.

We spread her ashed at Lum's Pond that summer. I felt the bits of bone as I doled out her ashes into the lake. My dad told me that I didn't have to reach in, but in a way, I kind of did. After all the ashes were dispensed, a rainstorm rolled in like a curtain, drenching us in our canoe. Ever since, I have loved the rain and the overcast sky. It wasn't the sun beaming down like the Polyphonic Spree, but the crack of thunder and the onslaught of water that reminded me what it was to live.

Later I had dead neighbors who "... smell sssso bad," and meeting a girlfriend's family at her father's funeral. I've had death tied tightly with other things. I can't hold it so closely any more. It isn't helping me exist. I won't get any more answers by holding onto it so tightly. I won't be okay for a while, and I sure as fuck won't be average, but I can at least see that "okay" will happen.

Hemorrhage of Black Fire

2009-05-15T12:51:00.002-04:00

I have an overwhelming urge to try to sort things out in a public forum right now.

Emotionally, things have been difficult. I've been doing my junk food medication thing that I do when I'm depressed, and I'm not sure it actually helps. I just end up realizing that I've blown a shitload of money on food that offers neither nourishment nor satisfaction. I haven't slept well at all the past few weeks. Most of the social gatherings I've gone to have left me feeling even more alienated than when I went in. I haven't gotten laid in six months and I'm sure feeling it this spring, yet I want only to be acquaintances with the prospective women I meet, friends at best, and not even "with benefits."

These new theme party trends everyone's jumping on have also left me cold. I don't want to indulge in the trappings of childhood or play dress-up at 26; supposedly, the sequential art and animation interests do that enough for me. I don't want to cut off my balls and drink the special Kool-Aid to be a part of these damned cliques of cuteness. I feel like this city's in costume all the damned time, hiding behind social networking sites, "grown up" get-together activities, snarky blogs (of which I currently accept guilt) and whatever it can to stay impervious to feeling something genuine, from the deep down scary places where the scars and cavities that have ripped hearts to pieces lie, where that implacable terror of life eventually gives way to exhilaration. Unfortunately, the imperfections fall under the pixelated veils of Photoshop and airbrushing in the heart as much as in image. Personally, I'm getting really tired of my costume and what I'm doing to stay in it.

I wish I cared enough to create something that expressed what I feel. I wish I could open up to someone instead of dancing around with vapid small talk. I'm tired of misery and contempt; I want to feel joy.

The Scarred Trunk

2009-05-08T14:34:00.003-04:00

I have caffeinated almost non-stop since I arrived in Chapterhouse. I trust myself enough to harness this, but I'm still a little nervous that I'm just guzzling the stuff down without heed. Reeh reeh reeh.

Anyhow, Dollhouse has been incredible. As much as I love Whedon's previous works, I feel like this one's my favorite. It's all of the great emotional tension from the previous Whedon shows without being too supernatural/sci-fi. The fight coordinator does beautiful work (see the Muay Thai boxing in the pilot and just about every fight afterwards). I haven't been disappointed yet.

I seem to perceive changes and augmentations in consciousness as necessary parts of a personal directive. I mean, there's changing your mind and changing your mind. To get corny for a moment, it's like in Kingdom Hearts 2. The main character would have certain costume changes that would augment his play style to certain extremes, and exploring these extremes would allow him, in his non-augmented state, to gain certain traits based on the themes expressed through those extremes. By harnessing and exploring the traits of an altered state, one can bring clarity to the baseline state, in effect broadening and refining the zero-point energy of a personality.

I have no reason to panic. The present remains eternal, and the future does not prognosticate inevitable doom. Certain elements will repeat, regardless of one's preference or will. The acceptance of the place in these greater events that cannot be helped, and the choice to utilize our time around it to adhere to our human roots respectively provide the support and the fuel for our growth. As much as we seem to create our circumstances, our own will merely acts as the means through which we manifest a larger pattern and process, purely feeding into our perceptions through which we make these decisions. The predilections and preferences that compose out personalities and consciousness act as simple points of intersections that bring about larger patterns.

Each mistake made, each lapse in awareness and unwilling ignorance acts as an imprint from the greater consciousness upon our reality. What seems a failing on our part merely points to a new venue for that part of consciousness to explore. We hold ourselves and others too accountable for our shortcomings, sometimes. However, much as a person might see it as their duty to inform the world of these unconscious ventures, these intersections come about in their own time, regardless of individual intent. Certain elements must continue on a path deemed hazardous or toxic until a point of realization comes of its own accord. Once desire greater than one's individual being drives a process, the process plays out as it must. If reserve leaves one ennervated, then that reserve denies the greater process.

Woo! That's enough of that.

Canned Madness

2009-04-13T03:50:00.003-04:00

I took it upon myself to sample two different sorts of a new marketing chemical phenomenon, the "chill out" drink.

The first is called Mavala Novocaine, with the active ingredient of Kava extract. As with any fad drink, the taste is meaningless, in that it's universally awful. This one left me somewhat drowsy, and loosened up my muscles mostly. It carried over into the following morning, leaving me groggy for a while. All in all, not too shabby. I'd drink this one again.

The next is called Drank. It has the overkill of valerian, rose hips, and- get this- melotonin. I already have a severe melotonin imbalance, and yet my urge for experimentation remains undaunted. I felt drowsy, stupid and giddy as it metabolized, and immediately crashed into a four-hour nap afterwards. The problem with using a chemical that regulates circadian rhythm, is that the brain compensates with its own juices. So... It's 4 am and I'm still awake. No, not feeling active, but just... awake. I don't think I'll be picking this one up again any time soon. Once again, we see the wonders of our legal system's views toward mind-altering substances.

"Kids, nothing good ever happens after 2 a.m. Just do yourselves a favor and go to bed." -Old Ted, How I Met Your Mother

Santos L. Halper

2009-04-03T13:47:00.002-04:00

I dunno about the whole thing that fantasy authors and the like seem to enjoy harping on about how "we've abandoned the elves" and so on and so forth, as if these concepts remain unchanging.

Now, let's take the idea of the elf. A major pop culture image of the elf is the image of Orlando Bloom prancing around and looking very worried about the prostheses glued to his ears, or Cate Blanchett in a tight closeup at the end of Return of the King when most everyone in the theater had to take a leak after three hours and endless cut-backs to golden light cutting across water. Then, maybe the idea of Will Ferrel in a ridiculous green getup.

Now, if we were to start backpedaling for a while, the roots of "elf" come from the concepts of the "alfar," spirits encountered by shamans in the tribes of northern Europe during their trances. Somewhere a polarization of the "alfar" concept occured, between the elves and the black elves, cognate with the folkloric dwarf. Mythologically, dwarves tended to be present in the creation of sacred objects of the gods, most often requiring some sort of sacrifice either as payment or for a component in the creation of the piece.

Going back to that "loss of the elves," a common thread tends to be that children, madmen and mystics can see elves, and most people have either grown out of it, or aren't fucking bonkers. With fingers in the pies of both mysticism and mental illness, I noticed that in states of receptivity as an adult and during play as a child, the mind tends to free-associate with facial recognition, perceiving not only human-like faces in random objects, but attributing traits to these faces. This phenomenon might indicate an "elf" experience, as our cultural schematic tends to brush these off as "oh, I'm just imagining things" rather than wondering "why am I seeing these faces right now?"

Some of this phenomenon seems to run along with the "voices in the head" scenarios, as impersonal voices inform activity of a person whose mental stability has been compromised. I have the opinion that the Dualistic qualification of these phenomena (Angels or Demons) has brought more harm than good in this scenario. The subject perceives actions informed by these voices as either the word of God or the word of the Devil, leading to mental images of perceived catastrophe or rapture upon the execution of these tasks. By permitting a mental schematic with these voices taken as simply numinous and reserving qualification on a case-by-case basis, the scenario permits dialogue into the subjective phenomena without compromising the rational decision-making process.

I feel like this phenomenon has been utilized to great effect in marketing and cultural demands. The "liberal-run media," the "evil secret society in charge of the entire world," the "perfect mate," and other memes capitalize on our anthropomorphization and collective-defining instincts, presenting associations and facts that create these constructs that seem to act independently of the intent of the people involved. As Don Draper said, "There is no system. The universe is indifferent." That said, the subjective concerns created by these phenomena have been given faces, and these faces interact with the psyche on levels of which we remain unaware on a day-to-day basis.

Although imaginary and intangible, these "entities" still affect our processes of thought and emotion, and thus these entities have a "reality" to their activity, despite slipping through rational consideration, to the point that a person will rationalize actions based around these conceptualizations. I ask this: when a battle of ideologies breaks out, would it be more effective to go after the "ground troops" following the orders of the ideology, or to go after the ideology itself, using its own tools?

If humanity had greater education on the effects of subjective processes to complement the objective processes, the species as a whole could find greater forms of understanding and communication to overcome aesthetic and cultural hurdles. Often times, one mindset seems to preach in its own subjective language, bestowing a concept of "non-belief=lesser" that can create resentment between parties. If we were to understand the irrational functions of not only ourselves but those whom we sought to inform, we could assuage the presumptions between parties and create a dialogue on more than just the linguistic/dialect level.

Then again, I could just be bonkers.

Sputtering Toward Do Long Bridge

2009-04-01T17:19:00.003-04:00

Back on the drugs, but it's a little more functional this time. I think I needed some time to remember that I could have religious experiences sober.

Every so often I have an occurrence where a bunch of things that relate to a singular concept go haywire. Lately, it's communication. I can't make outgoing calls, my typing's been wretched (some of the typos have been flabbergasting), and I've been really really outspoken over the stupidest things, while dead silent over what matters.

I find communication bores me, when studied for too long without some subjective feeling thrown in. Still, we receive signals and pick up cues from the environment, and language and communication methods, as shitty and slapdash as they are, are the closest we have to sharing how each of us interpret those signals. Vocabulary fascinates me, and in truth, I would really like to brush up on Latin, and try, in some slappy way, to learn Farsi, Sanskrit, or just about any other weird old root language. I pick up tonality and pronunciation quickly (not perfectly). It's like swimming: you don't really think you want to get in the water, but once you're in, it's freakin' great.

But.. who fucking cares? Who needs to know that I want to study dead languages, just so they can bug me about it later, in the "uncomfortable" silence? I muse about doing a million things, but I never have the resources for them, and as long as I can handle the basics, I don't give a fuck. I would rather know about what's moved someone, or blown their preconceptions of reality to pieces, or moments when the environment, in its weird way, spoke to them. I really don't jibe with a person if they're trying to impress me. I don't jibe with myself when I try to impress people. We aren't that fantastic on a whole. In fact, most of us end up fascinating wholly by mistake. In the end, I guess I'd prefer to understand than adore. There's this one cartoon where the conniving dick of a villain said the following: "Admiration is the furthest thing from understanding." The quote has, so far, held pretty correlative.

Hey, remember when these weren't quite as autocentric? No? It's a goal of mine to make this blog as impersonal and universal as possible, using life only to reference greater themes in the entry. Still, only way out is through.

A Playground Covered in Vines

2009-03-29T13:47:00.002-04:00

So, Saturn's the only planet in retrograde right now, but a lot of weeeeird elements of dredging up repressed or forgotten memories seem to be a theme.For one, Bleach started this awesome storyline that took place long before the "present" of the series. Two, Dollhouse's new episode features psychedelics and unveiling of repressed memories. Three, Brendan and I have been getting into the third season of Venture Brothers, once again with many episodes dealing with the elements of the story's "past."

It's not that big of a deal, and I might be making more of something out of nothing since I can loosen my sphincter over doing psychoactives these days, yet I'd rather follow the connecting elements than let them just dangle as if they had no personal relevance. I am experiencing it, after all.

Bleach doesn't necessarily make itself into the "best cartoon series ever" category, but its soapy long-form story, subtitles and style-heavy visuals make it a good subject for iTunes shuffle experiments. Usually, I pick a song that fits the tone of the opening credits for the story arc, and just let the shuffle go from there. It lines up more often than not, but sometimes the shuffle starts working in verrrry mysterious ways.

I could go into the elements in Dollhouse, but I won't. It's too fresh. However, I would like to touch on the half of Venture Brothers season 3. The episodes seem to be structured more around film than TV plots this season, and it's getting real freakin' heavy real freakin' fast. Regardless of the intent of the writers and directors while working on the series, the interrelated nature of some of these characters gets mind-blowing: Dean Venture and the Ape Monster/Boxing Orangutan manifesting after his freakout, Hank and Dermott, Brock trapped in a room with the Atom-like fellow, the Moppets in general. I feel fucking dense looking at some of these elements. I feel like a silly, small little man probably looking too hard at something meant to be a gag, but I feel like there's something else there. The "strange places" feel really, really strange in that David Lynch kind of way, where it's juuuust familiar enough that characters seem more parts of a gestalt than framing for gags. I know what it's building towards since I've seen the last episode (and only the last episode before this viewing), but the material leading up to it just makes the end even more striking.

Well, guess what I'm gonna have to do?! Yaaaaay regression. Fuck.

"Tiny Pieces Come to Me..."

2009-03-22T12:08:00.002-04:00

The new job, even though for a few days a week, feels like one of the most daunting developments so far. I had expected a calming, spacious shepherd sort of situation but instead received a luminous evolutionary bolt. Frankly, I got what I need.

Anyhow, I was poking around the internet and came upon the possible dwarf planet Quaoar. The Trans-Neptunian object's named after the Tongva creator deity, associated with wave function and "music," which eventually gave rise to his son Weywot, representing dimensionality. What startled me was that astronomers first found this object in the constellation Ophiuchus. Now, Ophiuchus has this rap in the New Agey community as the "13th Sign" of the Zodiac, found somewhere between Scorpio and Sagittarius in sidereal astrology.

Ophiuchus has a few post-Homeric mythological parallels, most of which feel like someone trying to win the Marvel No-Prize and failing. Howwwwever, the Orphics of early Hellenic society and the Ophites from early Gnostic Christianity relate to a creator function personified by a serpent coming out of the Chaos.

Hmmmmmmmmm. HMMMMMMMMMMM.

Someone's Laughing.

2009-03-21T13:17:00.003-04:00

So, while I was sitting in Chapterhouse, a local coffee joint, this fellow brings in his Boston Terrier. Now, the place has these little strings with mirrors on them in the windows, and they were throwing these little reflections all across the floor. As expected, the little dog was going nuts, chasing the reflections across the floor with utter verve and gusto. Just about everyone witnessing this, me included, were lauging in amusement, cuz frankly... it was fucking adorable. This still got me wondering: what are all of the stupid instinctual things we keep doing with no result? Who's laughing at us?

On a less cerebral level, this place is starting to get like the Last Drop with its music annoyance level, but instead of playing Modern Lovers or Klaus Nomi, it's this horrible sterilized folky stuff that sounds like someone's killing Tracy Chapman in slow motion. It makes it hard to think. At least the other stuff was irritating in general; I can tune that out. This mellow nonsense turned allll the way up to the point that it drowns out the Raveonettes on my headphones completely annihilates my concentration, to say nothing of my hearing.

I've been scratching away at this writer's block that's been a lifelong issue. Getting from Idea to Implementation's been a chore. Sure, I tend toward a process-oriented mindset anyhow, but for how much I adore narrative, I'd like to be able to get through a story without losing time to some "creative" fugue state that leaves me exhausted during almost every creative endeavor that requires conscious delineation. It's a matter of figuring out where my mind keeps getting off track and losing itself in the current. It's like an out-of-body-experience. Either way, it's being worked on.

Pre-Vernal Blather

2009-03-17T17:54:00.002-04:00

My playlist feels like a '90s heroin film. I feel like I need to load myself up with necklaces, wearing an army surplus jacket with no shirt underneath, and do whatever I can to make my sunglasses lens-flare into a camera.

Spring's such a fucked up season. How does the modern mind handle the animalistic urge to co-mingle juices and still remain respectable enough to look itself in the eye in the morning? It's like a light turns on and all of the sudden we're all squirting pheromones around and social interaction returns to that endless sizing up and dance of body language. Shit's easy in winter: it's usually just the booze and the rather dainty "teehee" that dagga gives folks, but then the heat and onslaught of serotonin turn that giggle into something a little more throaty.

The plants have their growing pains as the leaves rip out of the branches, and the salty pant of a morning's run whisps down the block from the growing collection of joggers and runners as the Earth's axis tilts a little bit, inch-by-inch, toward the Sun. It's the time of year to hide out with the cool kids, bowls, straws and 40s passed around while the sun peers through the slats of the bleachers. The gods return to life. Ragnarok ends. The birds return. We can smell again, between nectar and bus exhaust. We shed our musty layers and bathe in rain.

Whatever.

Throwing the Lamp onto the Gasoline

2009-03-16T21:40:00.003-04:00

It's about quarter to ten, and I haven't gotten a call to let me know when I'm going to start orientation at the second job. Ordinary men would have given up, but I... I am no ordinary man. I am an Extraordinarily Stubborn Tool-bag.

I'm not good at this. I mean, no one really is. I don't feel like I'm set up for a world where "work" means "job" with everyone scrambling for these little credits that were meant to signify involvement in the human collective. I mean, you have dudes just rolling in this stuff, and have routinely screwed everyone over for the sake of it, just to die after a tedious, flashy, meaningless motorboat ride of a life that just spews oil around and annoys the fuck out of everyone else not on the cock-extension of seafaring vessels.

I want to pretend at fun and games, being the goofy heel-clicking spaz who blurts out randon pieces of science and TV trivia, but... deep down I'm watching humanity attending its own funeral, after a handful of thousands of years blown through like lines on a mirror at 3 a.m. Kids're treating holy shamanistic tools like X-Ray specs, blowing their minds apart into self-interested drivel, terrified of the gaping blackness that weaves in between our senses. A film reiterates the atrocities which we must commit upon each other to even consider progress, and the viewers snicker at a flaccid penis or pick at whether or not it remained "true" to the material from which it was inspired.

I don't know what's left to value, any more. A part of me really, really wants to help people, really wants to encourage people to consider the value of introspection and resolve anthropic bias, or whatever will educate us into looking each other in the eye and seeing ourselves in all sources, regardless of financial, cultural or genetic variation. The other part won't miss the radiowaves and foul emissions busting up the world, or the idiots killing each other over ideas and the other idiots fucking their integrity over for some imaginary shit that's supposed to pass as liquid assets, to say nothing of those who routinely deny what it is to be an animal, who use guilt like a maniac with an automatic rifle, firing it at anyone who won't collect under their particular banner of "-ism"s. I doubt we'll all pull together in some Fullerian utopia, yet that's the world I want to see. It just... requires other people, and so far the only constant in my life seems to be that I can't rely on anyone.

Pre-Lepidopteran ignition

2009-03-14T14:02:00.002-04:00

I have gone for days thinking that I would have something interesting to share, and yet each time I sit down to this page, the process devolves into some self-referential neurosis about my impending technological obsolescence, perhaps fueled by some itch at the back of my head inspired by what may very well be a worm/trojan cranky ad-splosion waiting to happen, a la ATHF's www.izzard.d. I'd done so well without anti-virus protection, and now my computer's gone done got the clap.

Lately, my dreams have been consumed with the potential varieties of beer and food. I expect to consume vast American Glutton-style portions of pho, dim sum, daal, and whatever maddening variety of brunch food comes across my way. "Can I get some lamb saag with a wheat beer and a stack of kiwi pancakes? Great, Thanks!" No, ladies and gents, om nom nom does no justice to the sounds of a black hole's accretion disk whose event horizon begins at my uvula. Yes, I will be drinking at brunch. hic.

Next, I shall fawn over anything and everything showery, lotiony and shavey. Goat's milk soap? Toner? SPF 15 facial moisturizer? Mmmmmmaybe some BPAL? I'm overdue for some BPAL. I'm the only dude I know who refuses to smell like either ambergris or Axe. I wanna smell like fucking vetivert and passion flower, dammit! Gimme some jasmine neroli mandarin rose pepper nonsense!

Lastly, I plan to curb my rampant abuse of psychedelics and alcohol with some good olf fashioned opiates courtesy of exercise. See, if I trick myself into thinking of it as a cheap high, I might actually do it. Self destruction can be such a great motivator. I'll be one of maybe three people who, while running, may seem as if they're actually running with a purpose, even if that purpose is to high five the talking statue of Commodore Barry in Independence Park before the trip turns into a soul-searching fugue. What fun!

After adequate narcissistic ventures, maybe I'll... y'know... actually contribute to humanity. If this could include adventurous PG-movie hijinx, then we're definitely in business.

The Screaming Caveman

2009-03-11T19:07:00.003-04:00

Tis the fucking season.

So, in the Julian calendar, the astrological sign of Pisces comes as the first "mutable" sign of the zodiac. Now, we could go on about personality traits and all of that magillah, but I'm going to do my best to focus on the meteorological parallels in the temperate climate.

In the Western astrological model, the signs come in three modalities: Cardinal, Fixed and Mutable, further split between the four Aristotlean elements of Fire, Earth, Air and Water. In the Western Tropical astrological model, the Cardinal signs begin with the Solstices and Equinoxes. Aries begins Spring, Cancer begins Summer, Libra begins Autumn and Capricorn begins Winter.

So, we're left wondering, "Well fuck! It starts getting hot out long before the Summer Solstice, and winter doesn't begin to rrrrrrreally suck until February. What gives?" See, here's where the modalities pick up. Cardinal begins, in that we collectively go "Okay, I guess it's not summer anymore. Time to get out the sexy boots and sweaters, bust out the moisturizer and drink chai." Fixed signs tend to be unmistakably of their season: more days in Aquarius are wintery than not, and it's statistically colder than any of the other months. The mutable signs tend to exemplify when the season's definition falls apart, where the winter gets warmer at random, when hurricanes kick up in the summer, when we get drippy noses.

So, the big thing that a few people have noticed are that the extremes of the mutable seasons have grown. The outdoors is a nice 45 degrees and the sun's gone down, yet the high tomorrow will barely breach that. Most of my friends have headaches and feel ill, especially those who've investigated metaphysical phenomena on a regular basis. This, at least for me, seems to indicate one of the most immediately noticeable effects of environmental screwups on humanity's part. That, however, is a story for another time.

Anyhow, you get it: Once a mutable sign (Pisces, Gemini, Virgo, Sagittarius) starts, the weather gets crazy.

Planted Zygote Narrative

2009-03-08T12:40:00.004-04:00

It's been a weekend of eating ducks, bats, and a dry, curt laugh watching people funnel out of a theater.

The trailers before Watchmen, aside from that Night at the Museum crap, were pretty freakin' cool. Transformers looks like the "bad robots fuck things up, good robots stop 'em" formula from the first, but this time without any of those pesky character moments. Leave your left hemisphere at home. Say, does anyone else get really uncomfortable when folks have a very strong opinion against Shia LaBeouf? I mean, sure, he's a little geeky for the action movie roles he's in, but the sheer amount of venom folks spit about him seems a little out of proportion.

On a whole other track, the trailer for the next Harry Potter film is probably one of the best trailers I've seen in forever. It's everything I wish a trailer was: archetypal whisps of the plot, psychedelic shifts in imagery, a handfull of reaction moments to remind us of terror, quick cuts between a series of dread-inducing yet unrelated scenes with nothing given away aside from the notion that Everything's Going to Hell. Sure, we've all got it in our heads what happens in Half-Blood Prince (I fell off the wagon at Goblet, but working in a bookstore handled that just fine), yet the movie stil seems to paint this picture that we're not going to know what Unspeakable Blackness will drag through these characters. If this movie came out when I was 8 (in a magic world where we had that kind of special effects tech in the early '90s), this would have been the movie that I'd make a big fuss to see. Shit, I'm 18 years older than that and I want to see it.

The last of the trailers worth mentioning was, of course, Star Trek. Mo-Ther-Fuckers. Having watched all iterations of the damned show, even a few episodes of the epicly dull Enterprise, the preview of this movie might be the first time I've ever experienced a hard-on for the franchise. I mean, the little snippet of the space battle looked, well, exciting for once. Mmmmaybe this time someone will have the foresight to install seatbelts in the Enterprise for when "the inertial dampeners go offline" or whatever shitty line they give for the cue to flop about like a spaz.

So, here's my problem with the Watchmen: the audience. Thus far, that's my only valid gripe about the movie. If you don't mind having questions raised without any easy answers, if your emotional maturity has evolved past that of a prepubescent boy, if you can handle having no immediately discernible mustache-twirling antagonist, and if you really like good musical cues, then this movie's for you. If you're afraid of seeing penises, then maybe you'd be better off with Madea Goes to Jail.

That's that, folks.

Web of Supermonkey

2009-03-02T19:04:00.002-05:00

Okay, we're still going on about druglessness, if only because I'm surprised how much I stick to my guns when surrounded by the influence in social settings, without being "that guy." The party itself was great, almost made moreso by the fact that I had a great time without having anything aside from snacks while there. I walk in and it's some ridiculous girlygirl dance party going on, with all the dudes cowering in the corner. Seriously, you want to see straight dudes get really fucking uncomfortable, start playing obscure musical numbers and dance around in impromptu choreography. There's absolutely no way to join in when a dude's positive experiences with musicals begins and ends with Reefer Madness and The Who's oevure. Once that concluded I ended up meeting tons of great people by discussing art, drugs and music in totally different circumstances. It was a helluva mix of people that seem to follow that strange Philadelphia Social Net rule.

More than a lot of places, Philadelphia seems to create these unusually large social networks, with tons of parties interconnected. I mean, for being the 6th largest city in the US, you'd figure people wouldn't run into each other that much, or that you could actually have unrelated groups of friends, but it all inevitably winds up whittling down to 3 Degrees of Kevin Bacon (a Philly-area native, har har). I've stopped asking how people know each other, and chances are I've either seen or met my friends three or four times before officially meeting them. "So how do you know Sasha?" "Well... she used to be a regular at [insert retail gig], and we worked together at [insert new gig] for a month before the car crash, and we met like a year and a half later one random night at Oscar's, and it turns out I met her boyfriend before at the comic book store..." You get the point. I've stopped caring how people know each other, unless it's a cute girl and I want to know if she's dating someone.

How doesn't seem as important as why, in many of the circumstances that I've encountered. "How" seems almost subservient to figuring out "why," and oftentimes asking the former without the latter deals with the latter being invented in one form or another in the mind of the individual. Sometimes I wish in social encounters more people would ask me why, rather than hound with endless musings and doggedness about my path in life, mostly pertaining to my personal stance on "higher" education. It fits a system I want as little to do with as possible. Being a caveman's cheap, and I doubt I'm going to feel any manner of contentment in retiring, seeing how I tend to fall into a catatonic panic when I have nothing to do with my time (as I sit here blogging instead of doing a host of other useful things).

It's funny: all I want is a second job and I'm making friends, and when I had a full-time job all I wanted to do was spend more time making friends. Somewhere, there's some metaphysical cartoon character laughing at my expense as my wallet dries up and my hospitality needs grow. I'm hoping I don't have to start hitting the street corners just to pay the bills. Kidding, but still... fingers are crossed.

Life outside the Fractal

2009-03-01T00:07:00.003-05:00

It would be nice to forget about money for a while. I mean, this period of feeling panic at the very mention of it's getting kind of boring. "Oh, wait, I can't get any new fancy soap because..." "Hey, I'd love to go out drinking and embarassing myself and everyone around me but..." "Oh, gee, getting high as a kite and blowing out the gummed up pipework in my mind would just float my boat, but I might run into a drug test while interviewing for a second job since..." So, I'm out of Lush soap and coming as close to that "good kid" that I used to be soooooo very many years ago when my stiffest drink was shandy (Sprite and Beer mixed together. It was as good as it sounds).

I've learned a lot from this dry period. Going from stoned on a daily basis to cold turkey has helped me gain an appreciation for how much of what I experienced was just my own mind. I chased a lot of phantoms in that period, and a lot of that came from the projection and objectification of the tools I was using at the time. Each dose was a hope that somehow I'd get launched into one of those mind-blowing religious experiences, and frankly, they grew few and far between as time went on. My jaw was always clenched in some neurotic fit, and it was tough not to fall into smug self-reference.

Even though those big enlightening fireworks would go off here and there, and I know that there're patterns I'm missing while "clean," a lot of things I've learned while under the influence have stuck, to my surprise. The time away seems to have reiterated what's really important: it's just a little easier to navigate without the sensory and intuitive barrage. Trust me, I'm nowhere near getting a sensible haircut and getting a cubicle job to find a boring hot chick that'll squirt out some kids before we inevitably split and I lose both custody of the kids and the cool half of everything I own. I'm still not getting a car or going back to college: both seem equally ridiculous straight as they do stoned. Maybe when it's not 1 am I'll get into it more.

Despite all that, the real reasons I want to get this money situation handled are still a) getting drunk, but with friends. b) tripping out, but only to face some demons and get to know myself and c) Lush products, but... more of them so I can smell frilly all the time.

Pin in the Grenade

2009-01-02T13:57:00.002-05:00

New Year's Eve.

I watched the TV at the bar as flames spat up behind Dick Clark-bot on the screen, Robbie Kinevel wheeling his way to set up his jump, his success and failure set up like a trick Groundhog's Day tradition: "If he lives, it'll be a good year! Hahaw!" The Patriarch and Matriarch of the Clinton Dynasty initiated the ball drop, to show us who we really elected. Somehow, it seemed like everyone at Times Square represented humanity waving farewell to itself like the cast at the end of a play to the audience.

The seashells in the bathroom. The octopus necklace on the waitress handing out champagne. The purple background with growing spirals on the screen. The Mollusk was speaking, and it was time to move away from the bustle and into the blackness. I stepped outside the bar, to see a single, scallop-shaped purple firework go off just off to the right from across the street. All is well. It's time I learned to trust the Mollusk a bit more, ask it more questions and make fewer observations of an ever-changing figure. I was saved, I feel, but from what I have no idea. Maybe it's best to save that question for when I'm ready.

I'm going to take advantage of that second chance. I have so much life, here, and if the world's going to end, I have to make sure I'm comfortable where I am as we all fall down, if only to justify a painfully slow death. I want to know that somehow, somewhere in there, I lived for at least a little bit during the time my heart pumped.

Refusing to Die

2008-10-26T15:34:00.001-04:00

Much of this has been said before by folks with a better grasp at language.

Magic can be one of the hardest things to break. How does a person smash an already flexible view of reality? It’s something that needs to be hardened and then cracked for the gooey unspeakable phantom crap to burst out like a New Orleans levee. I mean, we could pretend for a moment that magic is the aforementioned unspeakable phantom crap, but all I’ve found is that magic is just a way of comprehending it. We can argue ad infinitum about what events constitute magic, and that, in and of itself, makes the damned thing invincible. Some of it we hold onto tightly; we make legions of conjectural structures on a handful of philosophical points. Some of it we let slip through, hoping that the wash of nonsense will accumulate a universal, true structure that underlies all things. That last one’s the most arrogant and tragic. That view has this arrogance in believing that the measly, slapped-together human mind really can perceive a structure greater than its senses or the cultural structures created in the former work. Isn’t it all just reaction to a spooky world beyond experience? Is it just angry dismissal and reaction against experience? Can we really just sit there grinning about how there’s “just this moment”? I can tell you, when I’m puking my guts out from food poisoning, I’m praying for the moment when it’s out of my system.

Our experience left without validation leaves us without any drive. As a superorganism created from deformed monkey stock, this self-aware and variable mental framework became fragile after separation from direct involvement with natural threats. Apparitions compose most of our societal taxations and structures. Separation from the toil of the hunt has come to the toil of a possibly meaningless occupation of time to receive imaginary liquid assets in order to acquire nourishment that’s been killed on an assembly line or in a threshing machine. Guilt over this lack of participation leads people to go to great lengths to “buy organic” or “fair trade,” in order to assuage their guilt over a total lack of interaction. This framework develops arts of combat, still beholden to rules that keep true savagery at arms length. It brings people to create preposterous tools in order to tackle the ordeal of a natural structure that those who live alongside it would rather just respect and let alone, as the hardship of that environment is a regular occurrence. Many of these excursions leave those primal sources of danger worse off. Who will clean Everest of the litters of oxygen tanks and non-degradable thermal jackets from dead mountain climbers? Still, when pressed to hear the story from a person who has been in physical peril, envy creeps in, then guilt, then defensiveness. The drive to prove the worth of one’s traits by besting the throes of death still lives in the furthest abstractions of life, no matter how divorced it is.

These apparitions and theoretical compositions still have major ramifications. A lack of an arbitrarily decided trading unit in a given area can devastate a population, no matter how hard it works, due to a handful of individuals in decision-making positions attempting to increase the stock of that trading unit for themselves in an overvalued sense of self-preservation. That these individuals will have a legacy of terror means nothing to them; the idea that they will have a legacy at all means everything to them.

Without connection to natural events, cycles of psychological development have become just as dangerous to the individual as the external. Without justification for existence, and without a close connection to nature’s randomness to experience survival instincts, the individual falls into what many call depression, characterized by the passivity and irresponsibility of early development and/or desire for the termination of the existence deemed invalid by the evaluating perspective of the individual. One way to posit depression is to perceive both the passivity and the thanatoic drive as methods for the mental framework to alter itself. Without perception of separation between an individual’s own structures, the perceiving function can draw the action to encompass all levels of an individual being, that function could easily judge the entire structure as invalid. However, the separation of those structures can allow the perceiving function to articulate changes in the individual framework and how the being can respond accordingly.

While the separation might seem inauthentic, perhaps untrue to humanity, this current state nonetheless exists. Once externalized, an idea rarely becomes undone. Often, a flow of events renders this idea obsolete in the acting structure of the psychological landscape of humanity, yet these “obsolete” ideas become valid either through revision or through a separate psychological landscape adopting it for its own means of development. As much as humanity lives in a physical world, its imaginary world seems to equally affect its existence, and often this concept becomes marginalized. Responsibility for the psychological environment equals that of the physical environment, as one often reflects the other. In the darkness of modernity and in the possibility of global devastation, some small fragment of meaning must be found, or the thanatoic response will have the capability of extinguishing the entire species, if not much of what can be considered life.

Snarls from Beneath All Things.

2008-10-22T16:16:00.003-04:00

The thought of walking out into the cold and freezing to death seems so appealing. Closing the mind off from the body and letting it die... it's coming around again. It's been years since I've been this depressed. It's getting harder to rationalize my way through it.

I've gotten through it before, but each return makes me wonder if the way through was just finding ways to ignore that darkness. It's completely self-absorbed, but that urge to erase all traces of having existed and wandering into the scary wild with the intent to die feels... right, sometimes.

Much as a personality could make broad, sweeping statements of "nothing can do X" or "everything's just so Z that I can't stand it," it's not so grandiose this turn. The mind meets an irreparable paradox in its framework, and excessive association with the mind can lead a being to ignore its other faculties. The unknown factor of this paradox leads the framework into a state of destruction, although this destruction of identity and association can be confused with destruction of the entire being. We have the technology.

I need the "wilds" again. I must set forth into my own destruction, to preserve my existence. This round has a sense of humor: In the season I feel the most alive comes the inescapable sense of wanting to die.

Der Hexen and Old Timey Crotchety Business

2008-10-13T16:41:00.003-04:00

I got thinking about the old Malleus Maleficarum nonsense about witches, wizards, and the like. Now, most New Agey whitewashed nancy Wiccan/Pagan/whatthefuckever will try to distance from some of the associations brought up in that, but what the Hel? In the right context, some of them are worth embracing.

The big one that makes people shriek is the Satan Gang Bang sessions that grumpy priests would wank off to in their lonely moments. Now, There're two old stories that make this story sensible: Brinsingamen and Sir Gawain.

The first story told of Freyja, Scandinavian goddess of Beauty and Value, screwing the living hell out of four horrible little dwarves for one of her most emblematic talismans, and the latter of Sir Gawain of the Round Table going on a quest to have nastysex with a horrific old woman in the woods who becomes the goddess Sovereignty upon his waking. The real idea behind both is the union of opposites, yet that "other" is still too "other" to be attractive in any way. So, fellating The Devil was ceremonially the idea of accepting and loving one's fears and horrors. There're some circles out there that probably have some silly fetishised version of this where no one learns anything and everyone just fucks with little more than the trappings of religious pretext around it. It's like Tantrism: the practices were meant to utilize apprehension and fear to shock a person into enlightenment, yet so many people in the Western world saw it as just some excuse to be lecherous. That's the real killer through sexual repression. Lusting after something can make a person to incredible things. I mean, the shit we do to get laid... wooh! But just wallowing in that, allowing that asymbolic union to override one's mind and actions from its adamant separation from "polite society," that's where the real "straying from the mark" comes through.

Then, there're the Familiars and, as mentioned in last post, homunculi. Women accused of witchcraft would usually get put under if they had some odd mole that someone would attribute to a nipple on which her familiar would nurse. Wwwelll, if we consider the "familiar" as a product of imagination and creativity and barring magical practices involving one's pets (still valid, but getting off-topic), this concept connects to the Great Mother archetype, who brings all things into existence through birth. Anyone who connects to bringing something out of oneself can pull this off, but since I kinda don't, I'm not the guy to ask. Homunculi, I feel, have a more Hephaestus/Weyland origin. Their creation seems to be out of taking a basic material and expressing some sort of lacking function upon it to observe. It's an inert material imbued with life, rather than a piece of a person separated before getting reabsorbed. For lack of a better comparison, this can be considereed a "masculine" creative function, with the creation as the contained to be imbued/womb to be impregnated. Once again, physical plumbing doesn't really matter.

I guess that's that. Stay tuned for more as I stubbornly skin my knees a few more times to figure this stuff out.

Homunculus Now.

2008-09-28T13:40:00.003-04:00

Ladies and gentlemen, today we dicuss homunculi.

Now, legend has them created by mandrake or chicken eggs, in some spermatogenesis goofiness. However, the notion of personified elements as posited by Zosimos seems at least more feasible to my sensibilities. Still, it's just as silly, thinking about little men going "arrrrgh!" all of the time in some constant gory torment.

I've experienced homunculi in the same manner as nature spirits initially, faces that appear in just about everything while I'm in what folks call the "receptive state," or what most folks perceive as being "zoned out." Eventually, certain faces kept repeating, or had a particular series of advice voiced in those moments, and were a bit more accessable, more obviously drawn from some bit of absurdist creation on my part. That little bit of personalization took those faces out of the matter and shaped them into satellite beings in the mental sphere.

This comes almost as a form of depersonalization of particular traits, making a parapersona to observe, understand, and manage before reabsorbing those traits back into the home persona, of course to move in and out constantly. Much of this relates to dolls, toys, and stuffed animals as a child. In fact, most magic comes from things we used to do as kids put into some comprehensible way of observing and understanding reality in a constantly changing manner, opening up new possibilities. It's admitting to madness and using its trappings to find sanity and completion.

One method I use to understand homunculi is beginning to draw the vague pretenses of a face, and watching what happens from there, in a trance. It isn't always symmetric, it's rarely pretty, but the imperfection of manifestation in any reality is the point: these beings are a part of that massive, multidimensional matrix, and manifestation shows merely one small size of an infinitely-sided being, with that imperfection acting as an attempt to stretch or fold that shape into something understandable. That's the point of paradox: let it happen.

Once the face is finished, put it away, and do something that relates to its manifestation while still awake that day, and don't look at it. Let it do its thing until something says otherwise. It's like a sigil with a personality, relating in that human-to-human fashion, touching on the concept of progeny and creation of life.

Naudh a sammitch.

2008-08-23T12:19:00.002-04:00

I began ruminating on the "N"-stave rune: naudh, need, whatever you wanna call it.

Poetic kenning tends to color any person's view of a rune. A lot of it becomes a matter of finding words that sound similar, which would relate to actually attempting to poke around in the roots of language and association. Learning the runes becomes a lot easier to understand as the mind removes itself from a solid, unwavering view of language.

Now, the N-phonetic rune, which I'll just call Naudh for simplicity's sake, has had Trouble, Toil, and Need listed as possible definitions. I've just recently come to understand nith as one of the possible associations with the rune, which I'm sure someone's figured out before.

Either way, the concept of nith seems to derive from a sense of a person's roundabout nature in understanding the world, deviance from cultural morality, and the emotions such as envy, hate, and malice. A nithing is listed asa person who inspires these concepts. In a modern concept, we could see a nithing as any group that Billy Graham or David Duke spits bile about, up to and including that idiocy of "well, she shouldn't have dressed like that if she didn't want to get raped."

If we were to put the runes in a circle, then across from Naudh would lie the rune Ing, based primarily about the spread of the cult of Yngvi. Conceptually, Ing relates to cultural and social elements relating to one's own culture, such as eitquette, relations with family, and community-based religious practices. However, just as the alienating and belligerently xenophobic tendencies flourish in those who follow the passive, charitable, and omni-loving Christ, so too does the Ing rune bear an incongruity with its representations.

Nith, as a companion definition of Naudh, seems to relate to our own individual needs and alienating qualities. Those who follow somewhat primitive and rapturous practices, who test the borders of law and morality, would then begin to enter the purview of Naudh: entheogenic Mind-altering substances, unconventional romances, personal ethic, etc.

Naudh itself relates to elements that challenge the relative ease of existence. Constraint, Trouble, elements that begin to display themselves when options run out. To connect this with nith, these elements arrive when the sanctuary of cultural/societal existence begins to conflict with individual needs. The Anglo-Saxon rune poem leaves a passage about Naudh as a source of help and salvation when heeded. A resolution to the Naudh/Ing dichotomy comes from balancing external, societal operations with personal "taboos", so that both have enough space. Too much time spent dealing with Naudh leaves a person alienated from society, and too much Ing leaves a person bigoted and unfulfilled, in this framework.

Of course, Naudh also stands for undoing tensions, such as creative struggles of bringing the internal world into the external, through creative, technological, mathematical, or athletic ventures. Aren't symbols cool?

Seeds of the Luminescent Pomegranate

2008-08-21T16:33:00.003-04:00

There's a star exploding in the center of my chest. It's no big deal.

Still sittin' alone. Old board games bring the Mysteries to mind. Not really sure why.

I can feel the leaves and the sighs of the evergreens. I feel like a cat that comes to a person's door every night, yet will never get in. No harm in trying. It's hard to see clearly through the haze of emotion, and I don't want to give up, like I have before with anything difficult. "This Vagina Mine teaches patience, diligence". A semi-unreachable focus seems to stabilize.

The hemispheres gradually work together. Thought augments Feeling. Senses augment Intuition.

Sounds begin to explode once more into muscle. Sorrow in the civilized world feels nearly meaningless. Slowly, I feel like pieces return to the whole. I feel emotions release. I can see the stars again. I can feel that sticky bioluminescence.

I might need to dig up more of this. I feel a little like I've come out of decade-long funk and my muscles are still weak, yet the endorphin surge seems to push me forward for more: more crazy visions, more spirits, more of God throwing me into the Abyss. They feel like a reward for existing.

Hazards of the Flaming Wind and Ghostly Leaf

2008-06-10T13:55:00.002-04:00

Salvia has an interesting way of stripping emotional barriers that are otherwise present, yet that same stripping can allow hostile energies to come forth, especially when stimulated. Sometimes the lesson it imparts is to allow that flavoring, that spitting little dram of cataclysmic fire, to exist and cool down. The key comes from learning that we may experience these feelings without constantly reacting to them. Without that separation, a person can be led to constant distraction and interruption, derailed at the slightest change in plan or change in environment. Invention comes from weathering through that transitional, non-physical discomfort and seeking either reconciliation or later prevention. Of course, those same emotional promptings, if unable to remain tethered, can inspire tremendous movements of action, when used sparingly. That allows drama to be, well, dramatic.

The Eastern Seaboard of the US has been a bear to navigate. Rarely do I feel more pallid and bleak than in the sun. My skin chars with a disturbing ease, and my eyes, accusomed to low light and shade by coloration, overload with the influx of illumination. Both have me clamoring for a nice, cool cavern with phosphorescent fungi in opportune pockets. Light and heat do increase the effects of certain recreational means of mine, and so in those moments I do cherish it. It's all a strange beast to follow.

The Very Real Yet Mythic Individuality within the Universe Great and Small

2008-06-07T11:01:00.004-04:00

In a fascinating diagram on NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day, the Milky Way has been laid out, with a diagram popping up, displaying the placement of our sun and how far everything is within the galaxy from it. The Sun is in a little tangential branch called the Orion Spur, breaking off of the smaller Sagittarius Arm, which runs parallel to the larger Perseus Arm. The smallest little tributary of our galaxy bears the whole of our existence. I'm perked up on caffeine, salvia and chocolate, watching the little green tree in the cafe dance in the breeze and consume the photons from the fancy track lights, senses fighting through the sluicegates of interpretation. Our planet, so full and bustling with information and activity, twirling away in this minor stick of the galaxy, nowhere in the neighborhood of the major metropolitan arms of Perseus and Shield-Centaur.

Sometimes events eclipse certain strong associations and experiences within the conscious mind. The willingness to step back and allow a person to endulge their own need to be the special one can sometimes undo one's own associations and unique expressions of connection. From no shortage of ignorance on my part, I allowed a person's need to take ownership of the spider totem eclipse my own associations, forgetting how I would play in basements full of black widows without any fear, or how I would become enraged when my father would reflexively kill spiders. As I'm writing this, a young lady who has seemed usually very closed off and skittish pours open with adoration towards this retriever that has recently undergone hip surgery, showing no shortage of brightness and love in his presence. The parallell existence that the animal poses has ignited her own totemic energy, and I'm inclined to understand it as originating in what Kundalini would note as the Heart Chakra.

Even then, parallel could very well lack the proper range of expression. Sometimes, instead of embodying similar qualities to an individual, a totem can embody qualities that the consciousness lacks, and the Martial quality of separation for a totem has an attractive quality. The Venal qualities of mirrored traits would best prove examples of the attracting of similar traits, running together through the same current (such as electricity through copper wire). This is where Mercurial observation can diffuse and differentiate, allowing for perspective on the intensity of these matters. Then again, the all-encompassing quality of associative principles may be something that I in particular experience from the symbolic Mars and Venus in the sign of Pisces upon my birth, and conjunct, at that.

Objective observation seems an impossibility. Nevertheless, in acknowledging the bias, the observation can in turn move towards that objectivity. Reason is a silly beast.

Thunder Restores Balance Once Again

2008-05-25T17:53:00.002-04:00

Stumbling so far astray from the path, the external world ignites itself. If I said I felt no discomfort, I'd be quite the liar; something I'm quite bad at. Still, more than a few will believe the buffoonery spewing forth from my lips at those moments, even me.

I suppose there's something to be said for realizing one's own disaffectedness and disassociation from otherwise turbulent surroundings. The constant level of change can be hard to map, and sometimes incites strong reactions from the emotions, perceiving certian value judgments that attempt to drag the self-perception into a bearing of comparison with the group. The issue becomes "better" or "worse," when all lives have their own quality that cannot be judged in proper comparison. What kills is being unable to perceive a secret urge subverting all activity, when the operating system feels little more than apathy. Some strange thing keeps clamoring for attention, with no regard for source or truth of emotion attached. Do you know how long it's been since I've felt butterflies in my stomach at the prospect of meeting a woman? It's been something close to eight years.

Perhaps Ahriman was right: once an outsider, always an outsider. It's nice and free out here, but it's hard to navigate, for various reasons.

The Phantasm's Balm

2008-05-04T12:42:00.003-04:00

Recently I've ben taken to the act of pondering phenomena regarding ghosts and spectral phenomena.

The Spanish film, The Orphanage, reiterated a point I had forgotten; the atemporal quality of a haunting. From the film's perspective, the emotional severity of the incident that precipitated the haunting would create something of a knot in the passage of time, where the incident, lacking sufficient resolution, would continue in the subjective realms and create synchronous events in the standard model.

Part of me wonders how many of us have created ghosts in our own being? I wonder if the presence of ghosts inside facilitates the perception of ghosts in the external model? Of course, a person who has so many elements of reality within them can see that reflection externally. Of course, just about everyone has some form of unresolved emotional turmoil that results in nervous tics, neuroses, PTSD, and so on. To move toward perceiving these elements within oneself confers the ability to see them outside, as well.

The big problem along these lines is gaining that strength to act on these matters with empathy. Thanks to having a martyr god avatar ruling the mythology of Western culture, too many people attempt that absolutely titanic harmonization without considering that it's oftentimes too powerful of a beast for an individual essence to handle. It's not dissimilar to surfing a mammoth wave on one's first try. The wave might be a good place marker, but the act of surfing itself provides a constantly fulfilling goal than the massive achievement, as the act will constantly provide activity and sustenance, while the wave terminates, leaving a source without a path afterwards. I digress.

To heal otherworldly phenomena requires the most minimal push from judgment, and a level of both humility and charity. The phenomenon will speak as to what it needs, since each has its own resolution and rules beyond what we know. If only salting and burning were all that was needed.

The Lunar Gastropod Sings its Glory

2008-04-13T16:08:00.005-04:00

I remember as a child watching octopi on nature programs, fascinated by their ability to change both shape and color, their brilliant minds adapting to a shape that had little or no fortitude against the environment. My mother also had a collection of glass animals, one of which was a green glass snail, ever present in my childhood. Nautili would come to me in dreams, and slugs were common in our temperate gardens.

The snail, however, was the mollusk to truly stand out for me, for their analogues to many alchemical concepts; Both hard and soft, with their bodies kept within a great container formed in a logarithmic spiral, hermaphroditic, and complete with four protruberances from its head similar to the four classical elements. Dimension-snails would slowly ooze their way through my work, sometimes croaking out haunting melodies from blue throats. Reflections of their shells and heads would sometimes reverberate through both my ear canal and throat respectively, and loud choirs of shell organs bellowing steam would herald their arrival to impart great secrets.

Phantoma

2008-04-12T11:44:00.003-04:00

It was about that time when I slipped on the green, glowing ectoplasm, when the rattling ghosts dragged their way up to meet me.

Ghosts don't always come from someone who died and wasn't buried correctly, or from cranky, insidious goons whom the brothers Winchester must dispose. Many of the ghosts I've experienced have merely been the haunting of certain lingering, unresolved human essence. Many of these are both borne from and held back by funerary custom, which sprung from our own awareness of mortality. I'm certain that dolphins and elephants have experienced ghosts as well. Domesticated pets seem to find a physical analogue with these spirits, but is that something that they derived from their persistent interspecies contact with humanity?

Something doesn't necessarily want me going into such matters, which is what makes it far more worthwhile to tell, don't you think?

To describe what it's like slipping into the realm of the darkened dead is often thought of being this hole between worlds meticulously partitioned, spackled and patched through which some hulking breach of the universe's order has burst through a wall. Hmmmmmm, a bit overdramatic, and perhaps smacking of camp? Iiiiii'd say so. If we consider that existence acts as a spectrum of low- and high-wavelength frequencies, then those moments when the fantastical meet humanity on its own sensory plane are like those little glitches on a scratched DVD. Unlike a DVD, existence seems to share the organic quality of growing and healing, not unlike the phenomenon of "life", and so those scratches either heal or sometimes scar, and the viewing experience changes around the point of intersection to fit it into the story.

I digress. Many of the beings found at the "ghostly" wavelength have been too solid for too long, and their seemingly disruptive actions are attempts to find change and growth. To use an electron as an example, a ghostly being has been a particle for a tremendously long time, and under their relative existential gravity, they seek to become a wave once again. I'm not certain whether this is a consensus of these beings, but at least the ones that we experience seem to crave this.

Nevertheless, this comes up from a certain phantom likened to a played out situation. These ghosts are more personal visitations; they interact with the human heart and send carrion crows to squawk in a person's ear, as a friendly warning. As the life leaves the situation, the visited individual must follow, or find a piece of him or herself missing. The situation will mean something different for each person, yet the world of the one thusly visited requires a diseased branch be trimmed from its World Tree, to offer forth new growth.

My head pounds, my sinuses fill and drain, and I'm still sweating out the lager consumed to steel my nerves after that harrowing journey out from the collapsing den, yet it's worth it all to know that I've saved a piece of my soul.

Staring into the Exploding Suns of Twilight

2008-03-11T18:25:00.003-04:00

Living occasionally happens. Constantly staring at one's footfalls when urged forward can cause one to trip. Eyes forward.

The world has been met with great sorrows and joys. Oftentimes, the seeker must feel the weight of betrayal, not as the recipient, but as the merchant of such materials. This essence remains useless when rationalized. The key to endurance is to move forward, fully aware of the transgressions committed, to know what pathways become torn away with each movement while having no idea where these pathways may lead. This step becomes wholly necessary to those who pride themselves in their compassion, as compassion becomes useless when untested and blithely accepted, as with any virtue. To know virtue is painfully to accept an aspect of vice inherent in that decision.

The shaman isn't what most self-help books would have you believe. This isn't an archetype of a mere serene, kindly soul that sits in quiet judgment, dispensing cryptic wisdom while perpetually tending some fire in a tent or childishly jumping around a jungle. These books would have many forget the dangerous, unsentimental and almost callously selfish actions of a person who communes with spirits and the souls of others. A move at the wrong time could set off an animal current of retribution and horror from the shaman. An offer to meddle in his matters could drown an individual in the current of the shaman's lifestream, and trample the person underfoot. Shamans, while often considered healers, contain an equal amount of envenomating, destructive power that can forever cripple a person's soul. This isn't a power to be envied, but a necessary pathway to open when trafficking with beings greater than oneself. To destroy one's own being, one must be reverent of the ability to destroy another. True spiritual power remains unqualified, with no blazing sword to tilt the scale, no black scythe to drag the universe into darkness. These are elements left only to the universe itself, and its manifestations of either merely pebble ripples in an endless ocean of existence that bears more than our senses and instruments will ever truly perceive.

Yet as still, nowhere near any level of proficiency, I choose to walk this dangerous path, to tread amongst the beasts in my soul and hunt amongst the shelves of poisoned, manufactured foods to make sense of the universe as best as it can choose to show me, and with great difficulty carve new languages to understand its message. With no small amount of fear I step forward, knowing that where my foot falls, I shall be annihilated, over and over again, until the atoms of my being forge together to the point of perpetual death and rebirth, with the discipline to bear that explosive energy within my own form.

Clutching the Mistletoe to Melt the Ice

2007-12-29T14:30:00.003-05:00

I feel a bit like I've missed out on a very strong human function whenever I listen to my peers discuss their influences or discuss prominent figures in either recent or distant history.

I have to admit that I hold many forms of media close, yet I can never let them lie still, as a pinnacle of existence that remains beyond reproach. It's perhaps to my social detriment that I slaughter my sacred cows regularly. I can't abide their presence within myself. Perhaps it was a lonely, uneventful childhood that brought this out in myself, but I can never trust my memory of something. Glowing memories become shackles, blinders to the world around me.

The goal seems to be to live with imperfection. The problem lies in the discomfort in watching people ensorcelled by celebrity, fallen into a corporate glamor over a series of images, all falsely planted to coerce us to feel this unattainable attraction, and to hold ourselves to those standards, conceived through Photoshop and lighting, which we vilify, give up on entirely, or hopelessly attempt to mimic in an unsullied, physical form. I watch others admire this image before them, this essence derived entirely by cultural and commercial context, rather than understand it and undo its spell.

Much of this comes from my own frustration in our societal conception of intelligence. To Love Thought, one must somehow trudge through the minds of those who came before in periods of great social repression, racism, sexism, and nationalism, and think them the saviors of modern thought, people with whom we could never hope to be peers. We are devoid of a modern philosophy outside of kitchy little books with minimalist covers to appeal to grad students and make their universes seem that much smaller and immediately comprehensible, rather than expanding and releasing immediate understanding to create the adversity the mind needs to grow in strength and flexibility. The realizations of these aristocratic layabouts are seen as unattainable by we of the modern era, and our own achievements are relegated to what we have bought, how we dress, and our financial impact on the world around us, rather than our sociological and ideological. History has just as many self-important stars as we do currently, and time has seemingly erased their humanity in favor of their glittering surface.

if we were to really examine this phenomenon, it's not dissimilar to Loki's murder of Baldur, the dull, indestructible ne'er-do-wrong. These figures, with their bewitchment of their image and seemingly unassailability, fall prey to those powers that sit in between, antagonistic and in turn undone by the forces of change. I mean, what could all of the Aesir have been doing when they spent their time throwing crap at dumb, pretty Baldur? Functions were set aside and undone by his unassailability, his crystalline image that needed to crack to facilitate the ultimate metamorphosis of the cosmos.

I wonder what we will do when we cast off our echantments and accept our capability to achieve great feats on our own, humbled by the achievements of our peers? What strange, exciting world shall we see?

Facing Giants

2007-10-16T16:30:00.002-04:00

Hah. So, of course, in my paean to Thor, I receive immediate results of seing my ugly giant tendencies.

To be vague, yet specific, my eagerness to please, yet dissatisfaction with the results. I'm one to promise the world to keep people happy. I'd cow to the whims of any near, and erect no barriers for myself to grow. Instead of blaming myself, I'd blame the insistence on others on my woes. The collective is a constant excuse, and the urge to see myself exist in another's eyes seems insatiable.

Hmh. So much of myself is invested in a mask, to the point that I wonder if a void lies beneath. Poignantly cliche. That void has the capacity to hold anything, and I believe that I must begin to ally myself with that void, understand what it wants to fill it, in order that when I strip to my barest self, something lies underneath.

The Pulverizing Thunder

2007-10-15T19:24:00.001-04:00

Idolatry's a funny animal. Some feel it's the acceptance of a fixed form for divinity, some feel that it's depicting divinity in any way, shape, or form. Some even feel that being remotely happy is idolatry.

Either way, certain deific matters seems to be given common forms and attitudes, given their mythology and the sentiment as composed by these individuals. What many forget is that mythology is the anthropomorphisation of concepts and universal patterns. Thusly, I feel that idolatry is the fixing of a single, common form of divinity to one's view of a divine concept and ignoring personal interpretation.

So, Here's me, thinking about how damned afraid I am of self-reflection, and I thought, "Who could help with that ridiculousness?" Wellllll, giving my predilections to Northern European Drug Hallucinations, I figured that perhaps having a go with a Thor motif might be a good idea.

But wait! Isn't Thor some big stupid shotgun-hammer-toting hick who doesn't know his sphincter from a steering wheel? Perhaps, as he's popularly depicted. Yet, allow us some leeway in understanding this brutish figure. He's inseperable from his depiction as a "slayer of giants." It's as with many things, where one takes on the traits of one's activities. Yet, as he kills these giants, and we ourselves take stock of their traits, we see similarities to his own traits. Fondness for drink, reliance on artifice, contempt for the weak, and so on. Long story short, the "giants" are sizeless, amorphous, unconscious traits of a person or of a situation, and the slaying of those giants is the acceptance and integration of those traits into the gestalt psyche, by way of Thor, who could be considered a deity of condciousness.

Although Thor might be lacking in some of the more subtle qualities such as Wodan, who does many things if only to confuse and befuddle, sources often list him as the Strongest of the Aesir. (On an aside, The Avalanches have come onto my internet radio, and for some reason, I've always associated "Frontier Psychiatrist" with the Aesir. Gunderic's a strange one.) Thor's embodiment of Awareness allows him to indeed change negative traits efficiently. He's almost a tactical nuke against hidden difficulties. However, to know him is to know those difficulties, and thus he remains Slayer of Giants.

More on Thor later. It's going to be a bit for me to process.

Synchronicity is a lovely lady with mammoth breasts and interesting nail polish.

The Trail of Bifrost.

2007-09-30T21:08:00.003-04:00

Once again, Anton and I took a drive to the outer reaches, with no true intent.

Unexpectedly, while wandering through the soft borders, I happened upon a place that had long since evaded me: Asgard. It's less a place than a state, from the human perspective. To travel there, I had made the journey through Vanaheim and Alfheim, both areas where connections to very, very old friends showed the strength of their bonds from over 20 years.

Oh, to see the plentitude of faces in all things every where. This is Alfheim, the home of the light-spirits. Consciousness is abound in their presence. The faces we see in objects also see us. The feeling of being surrounded, and permeated, by millions of tiny faces and minds everywhere can be exhilarating. It's one of many layers to the world.

In Asgard, thoughts seem to be angles of gigantic 4-dimensional geodesic spheres. What we touch when thinking seems to be a tiny little point on huge, lattice-work structures set outside our own dimensionality, where one can be in, out, on, and observing simultaneously.

Of course, a lot of these are merely symbolizations of larger concepts, and a wealth of information to collide together aids in the understanding of these structures and symbols. Wodan had shown himself to me, at one point. Blue, one-eyed and brilliant. The figure, the idea of Wodan comes to show how our universe comes to be, in our minds, and how our conceptual being forms in a framework. In a sense, Wodan gave the universe a skeleton on which to grow flesh and evolve, rather than merely killing the hypermassive giant Ymir. The separation of Ymir's parts reflects that although now separate, the universe is all merely part of a larger structure, and the pieces of these structures can then evolve separately. Ragnarok comes when these structures require recombination into the context, when their separate existence has fulfilled its purpose, en masse. The Betrayor element, signified by Loki, in truth serves a function higher than that of those on its same plane. The Wodan function serves a similar purpose of preparation and realization. Perhaps, although mythologically girded for war, Wodan had truly sacrificed his own separate existence willingly, knowing that his place in the cycle was over, and that he would always be considered part of the void, that his own function had something representing it. In response to that niche, he sired the children Vidar and Vali, a dualizing of his own concept, at least in the mythological context. Our conceptions are merely a series of symbolizations. Numbers might be seen to compose the universe, yet only from our own human viewpoint, that from its own position and construction must create limits for its own perceptions in order to communicate within its own structure and to others. To Name is to create a limitation in one's own perception of an object, and give it substantiality. It allows us to slow our view of its vibration down enough to acknowledge it as something separate. We name with more than just language: feelings, thoughts, sensations also Name an object, Memory, especially. This limitation can be considered Wodan's sacrifice of his eye to Mimir's well for knowledge, and this journey, this understanding of Symbols his own sacrifice of himself to himself, to create the paradox that allowed him the chance to see the Runes, or the Mysteries.

The Phoenix, the element of fiery perspective, of proactive observation, led me slowly, by fits and starts, back home.

Black Stone Posters and Hell's Membership Cards

2007-09-18T17:23:00.001-04:00

So, I'm going to try to cut through all of the faux-Elizabethan bullshit that strangled the good goddamn out of this site, and hopefully we'll make something out of this blog.

Push comes to shove, this is a blog-as-alchemical-process. Now, yeah, we're talking shit like magic, wizards, and all of that chakra/pneuma/ki/donkeypiss. I've known a lot of people who can get in way over their heads in this stuff and end up with delusions of "special" powers or something indicating that having an extremely interconnected macrocosmic view is somehow more valid than trying to start a family or paying off a mortgage to a house. I'd like to avoid this nonsense, so that's why this is in a public forum instead of scribbled in some arcane tome in a campy made-up language.

Most of this is going to be musings and interpretations that come about from the media that I love best: movies, comic books, music, and TV, sometimes all tying together to ponder themes in life. Names are changed to set aside identity from the event.

Enjoy

GM