2018: March 27th 4:22 AM

Starting the day with The Wire Tapper #23, specifically at the moment a track called "Sevilla Una Maravilla. I wanted to embed this here, as per the norm, however the track is not on youtube and the information provided on the liner notes of the disc point in the direction of a warm circuit.com, I'm guessing a label, which is no longer operative, due to the fact that if you click that link you'll see the domain is up for sale. First another track, the subsequent one on the disc, which I really quite like:




Not finding the warmcircuit or Windup track brings to mind the idea that in this 'high speed age', things appear and disappear quickly, and amazingly almost without track. The Wire Tapper disc itself is a free anthology that would accompany Wire magazine back when I bought it ravenously every month or other month - can't quite remember the schedule - circa 2009/2010. I stopped simply because of the mounting financial issues that culminated with my personal apocalypse in 2015, and the fact that I stopped working at Borders and they went out of business in 2011. Sure I could have subscribed, even felt guilty sometimes that I didn't, as Wire is a truly, completely independent magazine, owned and operated by the staff, who bought the publication out from its former publisher sometime in the mid-to-late 00s. It's still available, and what's more it's available online here, every issue ever for the 2.50 lbs a month (a new concern of mine is space - I just had to throw almost all my old issues away in the move).

Playlist from yesterday:

Singles - OST
Preoccupations - New Material
Genghis Tron - Board Up the House
Led Zeppelin - Led Zeppelin I
Sepultura - Rise
My Bloody Valentine - MBV (Vinyl)
The Soft Moon - Eponymous
Black Sabbath - Sabotage (Vinyl)
The Dead Boys - We Have Come for Your Children  (Vinyl)
Angelo Badalamenti/David Lynch - Twin Peaks Archive

Card of the day:

From the Grimoire: "Indicates trouble earlier on that is now revealed/healed. Rest/recuperation. Find the high ground to gain perspective."

Okay, this is of particular interest to me, as today's pull appears to answer directly an insight I had upon waking this morning. If you've keep up with this page you know I've been pulling The Fool a lot lately. This has had me wondering if I'm on more of a 'journey' than I originally assumed, something more than an allusion to my move, now 90% complete. So why still pulling The Fool? Well, there are other interpretations, but that's not it. I hang with my gut on these, and my gut says journey. At the same time, in my everyday life, I've noticed over the last few days, specifically since the move, my eye sight has become horrendous. For example, yesterday at dusk I drove the five minutes to the nearby beer palace for a sixer, and had such a hard time with my night vision that I returned home essentially terrified that I'm going blind. Dramatic? Maybe, but I've begun fearing degeneration due to my Sarcoidosis, a disease I am currently treating with a first six-week salvo of Prednisone, but one that is known to affect the eyes. I've apparently had Sarcoidosis for a long time, possibly over ten years, and because of repeated missed diagnosis by medical professional fools, it was not until I was somewhat dramatically thrown in a local hospital's quarantine area for three days last spring that someone finally figured out what was wrong with me. Well, no, it wasn't at the hospital they figured it out, it was later, when I was first introduced to my current Pulmonologist, who is fantastic. So if I'm finally treating it, shouldn't any symptoms be diminishing, not escalating?

This is the question...

For the record it's not just at dusk or in the dark that my eyesight bothers me, and it's not consistent. I drove to work in the dark yesterday morning without incident, and yet my daylight drive home yesterday was a massive strain. Even over the weekend, Saturday specifically, the day after the move, I had moments of confusion and stress due to not seeing properly in broad daylight. So with all this mounting, I woke up pre-alarm this morning, and the first thought in my head was about what The Fool is trying to tell me. And I thought, "hey, my eyes feel better - maybe I'm just exhausted." Normally I nap at least once a week, but I haven't had that luxury since at least a week before the move. And even if I stay up late, I generally do not sleep in. So I wake up and the first thing I think is, "Maybe my eyes are a symptom of being exhausted?" and then I pull the Two of Swords and, to reiterate for effect, "Indicates trouble earlier on that is now revealed/healed. Rest/recuperation. Find the high ground to gain perspective."

Not sure at this point how the "Find the high ground..." might factor in, if at all, but I think the rest speaks for itself. And I realize that, whether it's a case of 'if you've convinced yourself, that's great' or not, pulling a card a day and making the effort to reengage with my Thoth deck and the Tarot/Jungian system in general has had a similar turn of results as my dream journaling/meditation experiments from 2015 - the more you engage, the more the results become exponentially interwoven in your daily life and, eventually USEFUL.

How's that for Magick?

2018: March 17th 9:12 AM

Happy St. Paddy's Day!



Two corned beef in the croc pots at home, a boat load of Guinness, Smithwicks, Bushmills, Jameson, and State of Grace on tap for a late viewing this evening. Life is good.

Playlist from yesterday:

Talking Heads - Sand in the Vaseline (disc 1)
Urge Overkill - Saturation
The Pogues - Red Roses for Me
Wrekmeister Harmonies - Light Falls
The Bronx - Eponymous
Sex Pistols - Never Mind the Bollocks...
White Zombie - Astro Creep 2000
Blut Aus Nord - Memoria Vetusta II (Dialogue with the Stars)
Blut Aus Nord - Memoria Vetusta III (Saturnian Poetry)
Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats - Vol. 1 (Vinyl)

Card of the day:

Fitting, eh? As usual, totally in tune because, of course, this isn't "Magick" in so far as special powers from outside, but deeply connected Jungian hoo-ha from the gobbledygook far down inside our minds, the shit that comprises us but we don't understand or aren't even aware of. It colors every action, thought and day. And these cards help reflect a bit of it out into where we can try and draw juxtapositions with it. And here, Completion, because, of course, tonight is the end of my 11 years and 11 months at this place. I don't move until next Friday, but this is the pinnacle. Also, there's harmony here with the fact that, in 2006 when the girl I used to live with and I first got an inkling on moving out to CA, we flew out over St. Paddy's weekend to look at apartments and have her interviewed by her perspective employer. So total Completion. Yes.

Marilyn Manson - The Reflecting God

It's funny, when this album came out I was most definitely not a fan of Marilyn Manson. For much of his early to mid career, as he ascended into goth-metal-godhood I thought he was a moron. This was particularly based on an interview I saw him and multi-instrumentalist Twiggy Ramirez do circa mid-90's where they pretty much acted like morons and said some things that felt rather disingenuous. That's the funny thing about Manson, and something I definitely didn't get until much later - depending on what face he wanted to put forward at any given moment he was apt so play different angles on his character. Later the two songs on the soundtrack to David Lynch's Lost Highway soundtrack planted the seeds of my interest in his music. Piggyback on this his autobiography The Long, Hard Road Out of Hell - which I read in a day, and then finally his BRILLIANT post-Columbine rebuttal to the accusations of real morons that his music was to blame for that tragedy and I began to realize that this guy was a very, very smart person. And an artist of the highest order. As the years have gone by I've become more and more of a fan, Antichrist Superstar achieving a status in my personal hierarchy of music that puts it up there with the greatest concept albums ever made. This - very much like Pink Floyd's The Wall - almost feels transcendent of the idea that it is a concept album in a world where that term gets bandied about a little too loosely (smashing turnips' meloncholo and the infinite drabness a concept album? No.). Antichrist Superstar of course also has the distinct function of being a rather sophisticated act of Magick, and the power the cycle of songs achieves by the time it reaches the peak song The Reflecting God is something that can be physically harnessed and used to fuel all manner of creative, philosophical and empowering undertakings.

Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages

Back in '05 or so my wife bought me the Criterion Edition of this marvelously produced documentary about Witchcraft. William S. Burroughs does narration.

Decoding Tool's "Holy Gift"

I found this about two months ago. It's been some time since I've listened to Tool. They're a band I love but I have a very specific mindset that I have to be in in order to listen to. Part of this is because they are not a 'passive' listening band. Tool is very engaging with their music, I cannot just put them on in the background. I wrote a massive chunk of my first, unpublished novel to Lateralus and to this day it remains my favorite of their records. This was a time when I was also really falling into Magick and the album fit perfectly - the enigmatic way in which the band conducts itself lends to their mystique, as does a lot of the little 'hidden' things they do in their music and on their website. If you're interested in what I'm talking about go here. That's a link that was hidden on their site back around the time Lateralus dropped. How many famous rock bands spend time talking about/doing this kind of thing? To some it would be an act, the whole Magick thing, or a fashion, but to Tool and their inner circle there has always seemed to be the air of research into our world, and in keeping with this Tool's Holy Gift makes perfect sense.

There is a video here that explains the concept, but the basic gist is that the Fibonacci Sequence is integral to the record Lateralus - it contemplates or draws upon it in several places. Could there then be some hidden meaning/message in re-arranging the track listing of the record in accordance with Fibonacci's numbers?

Solomon's Wisdom...

I want to build this.

Alan Moore's Course in Magick...

...appears in five volumes at $14.99 a piece. You didn't know Moore had a course on Magick? Yep, it's a series of graphic novels entitled Promethea and it is wonderful.

Basically Moore disguises his teachings/theories as a slightly futurist superhero comic following protagonist Sophie Bangs as she comes to grips with being chosen to be the new incarnation of ancient god/force Promethea, essentially The Scarlet Women. The entire series is packed with Magick, however the real gem is from issue 12 to about 20 where Moore walks Sophie through the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, the ancient map of the Universe that the Tarot of the Egyptians is based on. It is brilliantly rendered in word and in art, J.H. Williams III and Mick Gray really pulling out all the stops and bringing each Sephira to life with the different colors, images and other associations.

In keeping with this, more for my own benefit really, because writing stuff like this helps me consolidate and streamline my own understanding, I'm going to write out the Major Arcana and brief definitions according to Moore.

............................

0 The Fool - Nothing. The Void. Ain Soph.
1 The Magus - The Father, the initial spark of creation.
2 The High Priestess - The womb in which that spark gestates.
3 The Empress - The Motherly crafting/nurturing of life.
4 The Emperor - The governing body of rules for that life = DNA.
5 The Hierophant - Something... more that guides that life. Birth of the idea of God or Higher Consciousness.
6 The Lovers - Life splits, Adam and Eve, the Protozic Amoebas. The Brothers, Cane and Abel. This Life thing gets complicated as life proliferates and takes on many new forms. Survival becomes you either kill or get killed.
7 The Chariot - The Holy Graal the dawn of man's exploration of imagination and enlightenment
8 Adjustment (formerly Justice) - Ying and Yang; Laws, compromise & cooperation. The first faint lines of civilization
9 The Hermit - A dark period of withdrawal and gestation. Re-grouping.
10 Fortune (formerly The Wheel) - Civilization: Empires come and go.
11 Lust - an undying drive that propels life further in spite of itself
12 The Hanged Man - Four points over one*: the triumph of reason and matter over the Spiritual
13 Death - A change of states.
14 Art (formerly Temperance) - The flip of card 6; alchemical mixing of Will and Imagination (Silver and Gold).
15 The Devil - Materialization over Spirit
16 The Tower - What goes up must come down (the Industrial Revolution).
17 The Star - The Path to enlightenment. The dawn of Spiritualism in the late 19th century.
18 The Moon - Hidden meanings. The Unconscious Mind.
19 The Sun - True Enlightenment.; revelation.
20 The Aeon - N.O.W. - Information age; Aeons turnover quicker and quicker. Eschaton.
21 The Universe - The Dance of Life. The mirror of card 0 - Everything.

Dr. Bacteria or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the End

"Science holds plenty of exotic worlds that are not exactly parallel to our own. Rather they overlap outs to a degree but are generally outside direct human experience. Beyond frequencies of sound that we can hear and of light that we can see, very different realities can present themselves."

This is a quote taken directly from the December 2007 issue of Scientific American, page 12 - the 'From The Editor' column. It is a warm-up for the readers to an article by Peter Byrne on page 98 of that issue, an article about Physicist Hugh Everett who in the mid-twentieth century met with disdain and unfavorable responses from much of the scientific community when he proposed a 'Many worlds' multiverse theory. Go here for a slightly annoying but nevertheless fun explanation of Everett's theory utilizing, what else, SuperMario.

Anyway, I woke up later again today and once more found myself swimming up from the deepest reaches of dream-state. This is interesting because that means the subject of all of my recent blogs here have merged, what with dreams and now multiple realities and the idea of 'thing beyond human experience shaping our world.' Because today I double back and talk about what I really think is going to be the 'Big Bad' to our modern life plotline, and that my friends, is bacteria.

Bacteria.

Please allow to quote just a little more from that SCI/AM to further set the stage of my ramblings: "The Universe of the gamma ray spectrum, for example, is utterly invisible to us. But it is painted in the colors of the most energetic events in the cosmos: massive stellar explosions, g]black hold collisions and similar catastrophes."

Okay, I could go on because after I woke up, got my pot of Dunkin Donuts coffee brewing and stopped in the latrine before beginning my customary first-thing-up blogging (to get the juices, and fingers, flowing for the day's real writing) I picked up the Scientific American and found it to be exactly pertinent to thoughts I'd lain down over the last several days or so.

It seems such a marvelous triumph to me that science has, in the last half of the twentieth century and now beyond into what we in our life times would once have thought of as "The Future", come around to a place where it not just recognizes there are entire corridors of the known Universe that are outside of the human experience/perception but CAN PROVE IT. This is especially titillating to those of us who secretly long for some big, undefinable and awesome experience to touch our lives and make the world around us seem that much more beautiful and grandiose: religion does it for some but not for me, although I suppose one has to be careful that in their alternative searches they don't just end up becoming devout "INSERT BELIEF SYSTEM HERE" something I found myself doing a little more than five years ago in regards to studying the occult, most specifically Chaos Magick*

So yeah, there are thing that our race of egotists and species-snobs just cannot comprehend with our limited senses, no matter how great and all-knowing we think we are. And on that note I'd like to take you back to the other day's blog where I prattled on about my dreams a decade ago that warned me of a coming extinction event and how my own personal investigations had convinced me that despite the aura of the dream clinging to the idea of the word 'Nuclear' preceding the event, I know believe (and have believed for some time) that what we really have to worry about is Bacteria.

Think of it like this:

In the last twenty years Antibiotics have become a widespread relief for everything from the common cold to any of the other inconvenient little eco-systems that pop up in our blood streams and high jack our bodies for days, sometimes weeks at a time. This is because those antibiotics work. And in the blossoming 'neat and sterile' island of Western Culture we continually refine and replenish the idea that you would have to wait until you came down with such an illness became unthinkable, thus the dawn of the widespread Antibacterial products: hand soap, dish soap, every kind of soap. There's even that antibacterial goo that comes in the small bottle for us to rub on our hands whenever we think we may have come into contact with something that could be 'dirty' enough to lead us into a cold or worse. So everybody's all neat and clean and protected in the modern age, right?

Hold on a minute.

Think about this: for every one day we live bacteria, a microorganism that exists in a dimension that we humans cannot see without the aid of a microscope, cycles through generations. Thus, extending the 'treat-it-before-it-happens' life plan on to a much longer time line, what we are going to find using science or even just the most basic reductive reasoning is that Bacteria, which is like us and other life forms in that the more contact with something that negatively affects its immune system the more it will be able to marshal its forces and eventually, generations later, overcome that something, will eventually evolve past the point where our treatments will work on it. This will take some time, however it is a race being run in two different dimensions, ours and the microcosm of the bacteria, and that means our clock doesn't apply, because again, in relation to us humans, Bacteria evolves faster.

I've been saying this for years but now we've begun to see it. H1N1? Originally called Swine Flu. How many people did you know that had it, because I knew two. And wasn't it like some demented Gilliam/Orwellian science fiction setting to see those pink billboards at the height of that outbreak that colloquialized and even attempted to make 'hip' and 'cool' the immunization shot?

Bacteria can travel too. If you read Howard Bloom's book The Global Brain you'll hear all about how millions of years before we or any other proto-sentient life came along Planet Earth's highest lifeform was Bacteria and it managed to do a lot of the things we think we are so special for doing today with just their DNA and its continued refinement.

They traveled across the globe.

They set up vast and far-reaching communcation networks.

They evolved. Maybe too much, because they eventually led to us, however, that process could always be wiped clean and begun again. In the event of a global human population scything Bacteria may also be damaged, but being that they are more resilient and existing on a micro scale, they'll be back long before we are.

Now why do I seem so hellbent on an extinction event? I'm not, but look around. Better yet, go here and stare at the numbers in the center of the screen. Then, when you've committed at least the last two or three places to memory, hit refresh a couple of times.

world population clock

Now do you get it?

Yeah, so throw away your antibacterial stuff and the next time you get sick, stick it out. We're supposed to go through that stuff from time to time - that's what the bacteria does when we bomb the hell out of it with our fancy shmancy pharmaceuticals and its getting stronger.

The race is on.



......................

* Which is especially ridiculous for any out there who are familar with that particular paradigm. But the important thing was I caught myself! What can I say, raised in a Christian house (not an overbearing one however) I recognize there is certain 'programming' that's been hard-wired into my head. The trick is to locate it when it activates and then hit the DELETE button until it is gone.

Making Dreams with Mugwort Smoke

(Originally written on 7/20/10)
Interesting experience last night. Mugwort is a plant that I have possessed a dried quantity of for some time. Back in the Chicago Ridge days, while I was recording the bulk of the Forest Children albums with Dennis and Chooch we would mix the stuff with our pot and smoke it all night long. I'd found out about it from some guy in some occult shop in some city, probably while looking for Salvia or DMT. Mugwort is legal as it is a mild substance when ingested, usually as a tea or smoke tincture. During my initial research period with it, and now subsequently as I've begun ingesting it again, I have seen it often mentioned as being particularly effective as a catalyst for strong or even lucid dreams. I'm not sure if I could ever corroborate this claim before last night*, but yeah, that does indeed seem to be the case.

I've smoked two or three times in the last week, the most recent of which was last night. I sat down to watch El Topo for the first time despite being tired to the point where I knew I would probably have to fight to make it through the entire film. I smoked a bit of a mixture and settled in for the film, which I quickly realized I hated. However, as I sat struggling through the movie I began to nod off. What occurred next I am still unsure whether was in sleep or waking.

I began to feel very conscious of my heart rate. My vision flickered and my head spun a bit. I'd open my eyes knowing I'd been out but unsure how long. I The film playing out on screen is nonsensical to a degree anyway, so there was no way to use the perceived rhythm of its story to tell how long I was going out for, or whether or not the film was insinuating itself into my dreams. Had I been sitting here only a moment ago and feeling as though my heart was ramping up, threatening me, or had that been a part of the dream? As I was thinking this I even became aware that to some degree I was dreaming.

But then I wasn't.

It is as I have described here before, that when the REM pattern breaks up so does the dream. But the dreams can often hold on, like a rider bucked by a horse who may slip from side to side but ultimately manages to stay mounted.

My dream was telling me something. Or trying to at least.

The room and its accoutrements became a hazy dimension suspended in the twilight between wakefulness and REM. Even when I was finally certain that I was awake everything had the soft halo glow we associate with dreams or mild hallucinogens. I was burrowed into the N.O.W.** but something seemed as though it was moving around me, just outside my veiled consciousness. And my heart was beating.

Fast.

Maybe fast is the wrong word. And maybe this wasn't the reality of the situation at all. Everyone who has taken acid knows that feeling where the drug suddenly seems as though it is about to climb on top of you and batter your senses to its own twisted-reality whim. I tried to recognize this and utilize it as an antidote to the encroaching panic but to no avail; of course thinking about needing to slow my heart down implies there is a problem, implies there is a danger in how fast it is beating. This is the ridiculous sing-song drug logic that, for the most part, made me stop doing them a loooong time ago. But this is Mugwort. I mean, come on, really?

Eventually I was able to out fix my paranoid android and get everything under control. My mind is stronger than this and again, the mixture in question is nothing that has ever reacted with me like this before. I ended up crawling into bed and falling asleep pretty much immediately. My dreams were long and vivid, I think, and I've since found literature reporting it is possible to die from prolonged ingesting of Mugwort, if taken over enough consecutive days.

Where the hell was that information before, when we were ingesting it daily and recording? Or, how much of those recordings possible contain messages from that plant, using the musicians harbored in those late night recording sessions at Dennis' as their vehicle to try and impart some subtle, archetypal knowledge to the world through our hands and voices, ideas and melody?


..............

* Well, that's not true, but let's just say it's been so long and if I wrote anything down I'd have to unearth it.

The Heir To The Throbbing Throne

I have not experienced something so brimming with Magickal energy since Throbbing Gristle. The video I've linked below is not for the squeamish – it contains such a strong undercurrent of energy that it is disturbing, even if when broken down most of the images are fairly simple. This isn't youtubesnuff or anything like that – there is no place in my life or this world for that brand of sick exhibitionism. However, when music and image come together in an alchemical marriage of Magickal Will, well, things can become very strong.



This actually brings to mind a video I had worked on back in 2003. I was renting a house with two other guys and spent a lot of time in various altered states, playing around with different ideas for ritual and exercising of the Will. One of those ideas centered around constructing a video to eventually distribute to various outlets (before Youtube) and influence the world, or at least the segment of the world amping up on media consumption as a way of determining direction in life. The collection of tracks and videos, never finished, were loosely referred to as 'tulpas' and have been since misplaced in the aeythers of the lost dimension of computer storage.

The Most difficult thing about...

... Magick isn't believing it's there. Nope. How I ask, could you NOT believe in Magick? In this world where a guy two parties have never met before can 'conjure' paperwork and then bang a ceremonial gavel and grant one ownership of land, children, money (and make no mistake, those little bills that represent value based on bajillions of sequences of 1's and 0's are some of our society's STRONGEST Magick) or any number of other privileges, rewards or punishments, Magick is the bread and butter of what we experience. Or I could always challenge nn-believers to visit Washington D.C. and tell me that it is not the most meticulously occult place in the country. Seriously, the a giant obelisk in front of a reflecting pool? Really...

But no, believing in Magick is not the hardest part of it. Nor is learning it. At this point there are a million books (most being watered down repackagings of Crowley's mostly illegible ramblings, Austin Osman Spare, Peter J. Carroll and Phil Hine) that can teach you the rudimentary philosophies and some methods that will get you going. No, the hardest thing is what's known as the Lust of Result.

Lust of Result is especially exacerbated in this day and age where everyone, and I do mean EVERYONE has ADD to some degree. Computers and the Internet, high speed cable broadband hoo-ha has affected MTV, which has affected advertising, which has affected Hip Hop, which has affected everything else (begrudgingly) and even information, as we know it, has been slim-lined, streamlined, stylized and miniaturized so that we get so much so fast we can hardly hang on to any of it (comparatively). Lust of Result is wanting the result you are trying to influence the Universe to give you, which of course inhibits your ability to get it. Crowley said it the best when, to paraphrase a passage in Book IV he points out, "How can you hope to produce changes in the world around you via nothing more than your Will when you cannot even control your own body or thoughts." In other words, I'm sitting here right now drinking a Sierra Nevada, fidgeting with my legs, oop - there's an itch on my neck, that when scratched starts one up on my elbow, earlier I was having trouble writing so I got up and snacked on crap food even though I wasn't hungry, then I vacuumed and compulsively cleaned for about twenty-five minutes, etc. etc. etc.

See my point.

This is where Crowley, who for all his outlandish and often douche-like behavior, not to mention his penchant for not practicing what he preached all of the time, was really quite a remarkable man (top notch mountaineer and part of the first team to locate and attempt to climb the path up Pakistan's K2) with many a valuable insight for Magician as well as Human, would begin talking about the benefits of Raja Yoga.

I wish I had the attention span for yoga of any kind, esp. of the Raja variety. However, referring again to the previous paragraphs here, I do not.

Could I train myself to better my attention span? Yes, I guarantee it is something that could be fought back. However, I would probably need to trim out some of the drinking, which I have no intention of doing (3 beers, on average, a night is I feel not too much to ask). But the point is, it's the concentration on this routine that combats concentration on other, more spiritually fortifying ones that would help in my enhancement of any preternatural skills I may or may not have convinced myself that I have.

In the end one thing I've taken from all the reading and practicing I've done is that there are no set ways to approach hacking into the local reality grid* - so I keep pulling half-assed attempts at performing in ways that are quick and clean and slight on the preparatory. However, if I ever move into a home with a concrete floor in the basement, you can bet I'm buying a whole shit ton of colored chalk and cracking out my Lesser Keys of Solomon text. Always wanted to try to devote some time to recreating some of those Golden Dawn-era rituals, just hard to do when your renting. But not even a massive sale on Guinness could keep me from that. Besides, I always fancied Constantine's mate Brendan's idea - conjuring the Perfect Pint!!!

...........

* thanks to GM for that imagery

Magick crowd control...

So I've done this before. Back at the bar. I used to HATE it when certain people came in. There were regulars that would suck up a bar seat for a whole night sometimes, leave next to no money, be abusive, irritating, annoying, demanding, whatever. Finally I got the idea to create a servitor, a tulpa, a Magickal (ie Will controlled) thought form that is programmed, much like a computer is, to do X when criteria Y is met. For the bar I named the servitor Karla, after Karla from the 80's television show Cheers, a no-nonsense bitch of a waitress that wouldn't take shit from anybody and would easily chase unwanted clientele from the establishment. I 'programmed' X = make undesireables leave the bar when Y = I drank tea. I don't know why I used that, but it worked. In fact, after I did that several of the unwanted regulars disappeared, hardly ever to come back.

Now at the bookstore we're worse than the fucking bar, especially of late. We have DROVES of high school kids who come in, take up all the seating, buy next to nothing, fuck things up, act like douche bags, are LOUD and all of this makes our (management) lives that much harder because not only do they annoy us, but they annoy our customers (many of whom are fucking annoying too) and then they complain to us. So guess what? Yep, I'm going to program a new servitor and attempt to attach it to the store. We'll see if it works.*

*some people would no doubt hear about the accomplishment at the bar and say, "oh, that's just a coincidence. you've convinced yourself that it worked, but it just happened to coincide," to which I would answer, "Who cares, as long as it works". That's the point of 'Magick' or whatever You want to call it.

Word