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!!!

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* thanks to GM for that imagery

Lost in Triangulation....

Whenever I get the chance to spend a day flitting around the ol' In-tro-net I inevitably stop by a lot of the blogs here on e that I used to have the time to ponder on a daily basis. I never seem to have the time or attention span to do more with this network of invisible passageways than log on, check my email, write my Chudblog and then log off, as I've really tried to up the ante with my writing (and shopping the fucking writing too, which usually puts me in a foul mood) and don't wander as much.

Anyway.

It always fascinates me and makes me a bit sad to read all the glorious diatribes and ideas that go down on my Ohio friends' blogs. Dayton is something of an adopted foster home for me (through my wife) and the city, as well as all those glorious folks I know back there (what's up y'all!!!) have such a community - something I do not have AT ALL - that it makes me miss them and the place all the more. I always find myself wondering, what would it be like to know a place so well that the names of the shop keeps and the daisy chain of acquaintances who expand out from around them border and frame my own understanding and subsequently interaction with the place, so that whether I'm three feet in front of my house, five miles away in a bar that I like or buying a new set of strings from a music shop I'm in the presence not just of neighbors, but people. People not as in 'yeah, what else walks around on two legs and opens guitar shops, runs roller derby leagues or stumbles out of a bar into traffic I'm actually interacting with people - people who I know or know of, or in at least one case in the above make a mental note to recognize and never interact with again. No, out here in vast sprawling Los Angeles I have no neighbors - not next door to me or down at the bar. Not in the coffee shops I might breeze into and out of as quickly as possible or at the restaurants I've chosen to adore. It's definitely down to my own damn fault at least 60%, and it's also the uprooted factor that accompanies leaving behind everything you know, but it's also the product of my own distancing from the things around me for the things I'm trying to train and translate within me. This of course is something that must be done, but I cannot help but wondering what I would write if I could live in a place like Dayton for a year.

Maybe one day we'll know, eh???

...

Sit, please.

Thank You.

So, we really liked the book.

Thanks. I put a lot of time into it. Would you say it's ready to be published?

Maybe. We've got a couple of crack editors we'd like to run it by. There's some small stuff - you tend to use more passive verbs than active ones, sentence structure. Stuff like that. But for the most part the story is there, so if you feel comfortable with it...

Oh yeah, believe me, I've waited for this for some time. And this one was a lot easier than my first one, which I just recently started going through again and sprucing up.

So what we'd like to do is tell you a little bit about our firm and the way we do things, what we could do for and would expect of you, and then if everything is still good, well, we can sign a contract and start looking at some of the other stuff you've got.

Excellent.

In the trenches...

... It's been a pretty strange year, eh?

Actually, no scratch that. It is not that it's been a strange year - that is a cop out, a product of human language to say something that is pseudo-important not in the interest of being observant but in the inability we have of keeping ourselves in check when it comes to opening our mouths just to open our mouths.

So let me start again.

It has been strange, evolving through this bizarre matrix of intervals that we long ago fashioned restraints for using out language, to find myself utterly convinced that we live in what I would have recognized as science fiction when I was in fourth grade or below.

There.

Perhaps it is a product of being a child of what we refer to, here in western civilization, as the middle class. The middle class is not a shield, but it is a fence of sorts - a partition. We may not have had a lot of money growing up but we were, because of the institutions and social mores of this country, not in need of much. I had a roof, three square meals and a continuous loop of education for the pre-advised intervals, so maybe it was a fence, or blinder rather, to what the world really is.

Science fiction.

Seriously, I have detailed in my Bartender Chronicles blog the moment that I realized that there was no such thing as an 'Adult' - a mythical being of maturity and responsibility that children are taught they will turn into if they do good in school, get a good job and marry for the sake of propagating the species. But this goes beyond that.

Life is surreal not because clocks drip from trees or Jesus appears as a conquistador, but because we are taught through words and through repetitious reinforcement that certain key guidelines are always in place, governing us and the world we live in. Good triumphs over evil, Love can beat all, good people are rewarded, bad people are punished, etc. And sure, we can probably all name examples where these statements are true and more where they are not, but the very fact that we are raised to believe that these ideals are plentiful, or some kind of Universal Absolute is the basis for the real illusion - an illusion that some people never get to see behind. And when you do see behind it, when you're standing in a grocery store at 10 PM on a Thursday and realize just how alien a concept it is for droves of people to walk up and down brightly lit isles choosing from literally millions of products that have been researched to glisten and call to us with expensive, environment-defeating packaging while not too far away someone is taking part in a conference call that is going to cost thousands of people their jobs, or someone else is paying for a donut with a piece of currency that has passed through the hands of hundreds of people who died for it's possession, all while invisible, human-appointed 1's and 0's make and break the building of new cities, traveling devices and entertainments that suck us dry of our zest for actual, physical experience, well, that's when you have to either recognize that the world we live in is stranger than the science fiction we used to think was so strange and 'fictional' or maybe check yourself into an ECT treatment center.

Mostly I think those people who do not see things for what they are choose to adhere to the guidelines they've been ingrained with, because if in this day and age, the beginning of man-made interval 2009, you cannot see the absolute pure, swirling chaos all around us EVERY MINUTE OF EVERY DAY then you probably are in need of something stronger than I can give you here.

so what the hell good does all my jibber-jawin' here do, anyway?

Sadly, not much. But as my high school guidance counselor once told me, just being insightful enough to be aware of what is really going on is at least a step in the right direction. Only I don't believe that as much anymore, but I too am so ingrained in my own personal minutia-intensive Universe to get up and go out and DO SOMETHING. Also, I am largely non-violent and maybe it's a cop-out but it seems more and more to me like the only change that is ever going to really come is going to have to be on the back of drastic, world altering conflict.

Who knows.

time travel... again!!!

Tonight on KCRW I heard that old 90's song by the Primitive Radio Gods. I think the track was called... well actually I have no idea what it's called. But regardless, if you're over 25 you probably remember the song. It's the one that had the sample of, I believe, Martin Luther King, Jr. 'I've been down hearted'.

We on the same page? Cool.

Remember this song? I do. It amazes me how the simple keyboard tones of something like this can overwhelm me with a nostalgia that hits on every sense at once; in fact I believe this to be a kind of sixth sense itself – when touch and smell and taste all seem to meet in the middle of some big, soft swirling feeling in the middle of your head, and you’re standing in the rain ten years before, walking out of a place you used to work surrounded by people you used to know – it’s something else. I’ve talked here before about my belief in time travel through the senses and I take this to be a pretty good example of it. Back then I might have been looking forward in time to this exact moment now where I write this, but I hadn’t touched it before with any of my regular senses, so my brain couldn’t decode it yet. Now, I’m looking down the opposite end of that corridor and even though my ass is still firmly planted in this chair in my kitchen I’m also there in the Bedford Park UnderPaidSlaves parking lot.

I can smell the fucking place.

All that from a song I don’t even particularly give a shit about. Wow.

It's a common problem and one, I think, that is probably not really that difficult to overcome in the grand scheme of things, this inability we 21st century humans exhibit in not being able to Remember forward. Time is a loop, obviously, so why are we restricted to one side of the curvature? Or are we? This is all so 4:00AM-stoned-as-hell (guilty as charged) but really, how do we know the future if we haven't seen it yet? Maybe I had visions of this exact room ten years ago while working the sort at UPS, zoning out with the trance of repetitive labor. How would I have recognized it then, having not been in it or known any of the stuff that would be in it yet?

These are the questions that keep me going...

Thanksgiving...

... I am thankful for the fact that it's not too much longer now until GWB leaves our lives forever. Don't let the door hit you on the ass on the way out. Well, actually now that I think of it, let it hit you in the fucking head a couple times maybe, not that there's that much to damage up there...

David Foster Wallace's INFINTE JEST is, academically speaking, kicking my ass. This is the hardest book I've ever read, regardless of how enjoyable it is (mostly). I've been working on it for probably about a month now, off and on, and I'm just about to crack page 300.

300 of 981 (1079 if you count the footnotes).

One of the things about the book that is difficult while also being extremely cool, is the fact that the tone of the prose changes constantly, as if several different writers were all working on it together. Some is light and breezy. Some, ie the crack-addicts, are ten pages of (literally) one or two run-on sentences. Then there's the academic parts, where I don't understand half of what is written on the page. This is because Mr. Wallace uses technical and medical terminology and jargon, as well as abbreviations, as if everyone reading will understand them. Not that I'm complaining, it just slows the flow.

But the book is definitely good. As in I'm enjoying it. As in I feel it is 'good' for me to read something like this. As my friend Walter has pointed out, some things are just 'good' for you to ingest - he said this in a conversation comparing Goodfellas with The Godfather movies, the latter of which I dislike immensely even though I've not seen them in well over 10 years. Goodfellas is a good time, like listening to a Pixies album, while The Godfather is more stoic and not s easily rewarding, like listening to Puccini. Now apply that comparison to Infinite Jest vs. say, Stephen King. King is going to have more hooky-choruses and toe-tapping drive, like the Pixies, and Infinite Jest is going to reveal itself in layers, making you work for it's rewards.

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Not sure why, maybe just because I feel I tend to neglect this blog since starting the CHUD.com one, but I feel compelled to prattle on today about nothing really at all, just enjoying the feeling of my fingers dancing and jabbing over the keyboard for now. So prattle I shall, you've been warned.

Thanksgiving '08 playlist thus far: Let's see, Frank Black and the Catholics, Pistolero; The Bronx (all three are eponymously titled so it was #2, #3 and #1); Soundgarden, Superunknown; Sugar, Copper Blue and that makes us current. Next up will be Luscious Jackson's Fever In Fever Out and later, when company arrives Tom Waits' The Heart of a Saturday Night, Tom Waits' Mule Variations, Tom Waits' Swordfish Trombone and finally of course Mr. Waits' masterpiece, Rain Dogs. As you can tell I'm hip-deep in a big Waits jag. I've always loved the guy but sometimes it seems the later period (83-present) tends to repeat itself a bit. But then I'm starting to wonder if I'm not seriously wrong about that, being that I've somehow made that judgement while owning just a small portion of his prolific (to say the least) career.

We Sail Tonight For Singapore...

Whoops...

I had a rather shocking moment of realization today. I was thinking about writing, as I almost always am, and my thoughts turned to my only 'finished' attempt at a novel thus far, The Subtle War.

Recently I began sending chunks of this to a friend to read and this spurred me to pull out the hard copy Sara printed and had bound for me. I've been trying to avoid doing this for a awhile simply because I am immersed in writing a new novel and to start delving back into the depths of TSW, I knew, would spark me to want to begin re-writing or editing it again*.

But yesterday dive back into it I did, albeit very briefly.

This brings us up almost to the present. In driving to get coffee this morning (read: afternoon) a thought suddenly came to me.

I have become one of my characters.

Now before you take this merely at face value, please, read my previous post. It pertains, among other things, to the strange phenomenon I've discovered as a writer: the world of your story can be used to manifest changes in the world in which you live.

I knew when I began writing TSW that I was writing it to try and trigger something, I just wasn't sure what. I had a head recently pumped full of all kinds of esoteric ideas, I was single, I was in a band, etc. Lots of different angles. The story has several 'main' characters, none of which were directly me, but of course there were little bits of me in most of them. They are all moving through imperfect versions of themselves, trying to become something else. Jake, arguably the 'main' main character is a stylized version of my long ago best friend of the same name. Really I split him in half via the other character, Corey, who is sort of the evil doppleganger of Jake. I think these characters are the least 'me' because the were my attempt to revitalize the soul of my friend who died - I wanted to make him a hero, and conquer some of the demons that haunted him while he was alive.

Quinten Alpha Haley however is the character that somehow, and I didn't realize how well it worked until today, I became, or predicted, or whatever.

Since moving to Cali over two years ago I have indeed turned into this character. Quinten stays in his apartment, does not leave.

This is me.

Aside from work, and the very occasional outing with Sara and friends, I don't leave our place. What's more, Quinten sits with a computer as his only real window to the world, head full of Occult knowledge which has essentially become useless to him, writing journal entries. He stares out a window and longs to make the connections he needs to reinstate himself in the world in a way that will make him meaningful - again, everything right down to the fact that the window in front of the desk where I sit now typing this, is an almost exact replica of what I originally had in mind.

It's funny how these microcosm/macrocosm things work, funnier still that the joke has so totally been on me. For one thing, right after moving out here and receiving a slew of rejection letters for the novel, I went in and took out almost all of the first person technique on the major characters except for Quinten, as the journal entries are the initial introduction and developement device of his character. In thinking about all this now I'm wondering if it was this final, definitive definition of writing as Quinten that did it. 'I' became the 'I' in the book.

Whatever the reason, this is just too perfect of a fit to be anything other than Magick. I too sit at the computer, my window into the outside world, writing journal entries (you're reading one now) and longing to make the connections (agent, publisher) that will reinstall me back into the world in a meaningful fashion as the person I want to be. I had a guidance councilor in high school who told me I was extremely insightful of myself, and that strikes me now as I analyze this bizarre transfiguration into a character I've created. Quinten removed himself from the world he knew in order to reemerge as something better. This was the underlying motivation for me, personally, in our move across country. Sure, the move was for Sara and her chance to advance, but it was also for me to try and redefine myself as a writer after spending ten years trying to make band after band work. I removed myself from 'the world' (read: everything I knew) with the intent of reemerging as something new.

How do I control this? How do I use this to my advantage? How do I use this to put myself in a position to do what I want with my life instead of continuing to waste it working in a job that has nothing to do or offer the 'real' me?

I'll have to think about this more and get back to you if I come up with anything...

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* The novel is really only finished in terms of having a (mostly) cohesive start, a lot of work on tense and just generally better sentence structure must be devised.