Tonight, The Maxx, Visceral Madness

Tonight was pretty good. Went to Brandon's new place, and helped arranged the stuff. Always good to spend time over there, and see him. techiecl came over, too. That was cool.

Then we watched all of MTV's The Maxx.

I had forgotten exactly how deeply that shit was engrained in my head. It's like the fucking Manchurian Candidate, in there, when that show plays, i swear to god. The layers of sexuality, violence, psychological toment and interplay... All of these things when I was twelve and thirteen years old.

Watching that show, for me? Better than therapy. No lie.

Good night.

A long as shit response about Magic.

Under the cutBelow is a response to this: 'Of Camels And Straws'. It is very long, and it is about Magic.

I don't feel the need to explain myself to you. But I do often feel the want. I may alter this for my Bluebird submissions, if sammaelhain is okay with that.

Read This, or don't.

[What makes you so fucking special?

It's that I'm just so God Damned Pretty.

Let's talk about the Vendor, there. What they initially seemed to be doing was to ignore the collective experience and reportage of hundreds if not thousands of years of practitioners, for a view which held no more nuance and depth than "Oooh Lookit the Pretty Drawings From This Other Book, They Must Be ANGELS!" When the history and work with this tradition has clearly shown them to in no way necessarily have the best interest of the individual as their motivating force.

Upon further contact and conversation, it was shown that this person had experiences with this system that differed from the standard, that brought about a different set of understandings than usually reported by people working with this set. I can't speak for anyone else, but my main issue, here, is that this kind of thing should be mentioned at the Outset of a page making "Angels" out of what most people in the field know as "demons." It gives us a base line of experience to work from, and from there I can say, "Well, that's not my experience with them, but if that's the lens that works for you, if that's the way the work gets done, more power to you."

The thing that I keep trying to say here, is that, in my view, reality is a matrix of inputs of beliefs: recursive, self-referential, reflexive and subjective. The ways of expressing these beliefs are more or less useful, in that they get more or less work done, on a number of levels. Either the personal worldview, the guiding principles of a group or community, or the rules by which we operate and try to manipulate the world around us, as a species. As we take certain conceptual tools for granted, like gravity, or mathematics, or the love of God for us, personally, we no longer question the fact that even if these are Things That Exist, they only have meaning and value because we put words to them, names to them, and input them into any number of fundamental systems as variables for figuring out and operating within the world around us.

Scientific methods give us wonderful understandings of the world, and of the facts That things are. They give us data points and allow us an understanding of how things interact. They are not truth. They are not even, themselves, fact. They are a system we have invented to describe something that we likely cannot ever fully understand and comprehend. Why not? Because Data is, literally, meaningless.

Without interpretation, without someone taking the time to imprint a Pattern on this chaos, to correlate Point to Point, it never becomes a duck, or a giraffe with a hat on. It always stays dots. And those dots aren't even dots, because the name "dot" references "a point in space" and the words "a," "point," "in," and "space" all reference yet more things. They are constructed definitions, with no truth or meaning, prior to our learning about them, prior to learning what they mean.

I can make a system a system where the first two of something I have is called "two." The second two is called "plak." I take two and add plak, the first time, I get five. They're words. They're names and descriptions of things, as complicated or simple as we choose to make them. They have as many input variables of causality as we choose to acknowledge.

Words and ideas come together, form plans, form systems and make things we can use to get through, day to day, to make cars, and life, and bottled water. If I can change what a thing means, what it does, in the worldview of 3 billion people, then I can functionally change what that thing IS. That's magic. If I can conceive of the world the right way, so that my ideas and patterns of understanding are transmitted instantaneously from one point to another (a phenomenon we know is possible; all we need to know is how to Do it), then I can make actions happen at a distance. That is magic. If I can understand how rain and the universe work on a level of symbol and meaning as well as particles and atoms, to the point where I understand exactly that (and maybe how) every single movement of my body, word from my mouth, intention, utterance, thought, and gesture affects the physical constituents of the universe, and the mental frameworks of every conscious being, ever, then i can influence what they think, what they believe to be true, what they know. And that is magic.

My magic is approaching these things with self-consciousness, with awareness that one understanding may not work, may not gel, but that there IS a common understanding of things, and that's not always a Bad place to start, even if you're only looking to burn it down and make bricks out of the mud and ashes.

The occult vendor is right. They're angels. They're happy sprites of love and peace, and kittens, wanting nothing but the best for her, and everyone she's ever known. Including me. But I'm right. They're dangerous, dark things that come from the worst parts of the meanings we imprint on the universe, the shadows creation casts, and will destroy you, as soon as look at you. Even her. The lens we use to view, to direct, to reflect the data we take in defines the thing that the world sees, from now on, about that thing. From now on, whenever I think about the Goetia, I will think about that woman, and her experiences, and her beliefs, and i will think about this conversation.

I think that you're right, that religion doesn't discriminate between sources, more often than not, and I can't speak for any tradition, and I'm not doing this because I feel that I need you to understand and agree with me, in order to get along with my work and my life. I honestly think that you and I will always disagree about this. "What makes me so fucking special" is that I'm completely okay with this. I think that, on the timeline of a universe-- with which I am not yet on par-- paradox is the true and natural state of things. You and I are simply local effects of that law.

Things Are, and we try to name them, arrange them, list them, to give them form, and then to give that form a use and a meaning. The meanings and uses that we derive may contradict, and even cause schisms, on a local level, but they are meanings that have weight, for those who use them. Even if that meaning is only "it's all randomness." But even that "randomness" is a name, a categorization, heavy-laden with even more implicit meaning. We cannot escape it. We are pattern-seeking, pattern-creating collections of symbols, concepts, reflection and chemicals.

We have to analyse ourselves, our beliefs, our methods and sets of conceptual lenses we find to be the most useful, and beneficial to us, in our lives (whatever that means). My preferences and patterns say that Hitler was wrong, as did the those of the winners of the second world war. Why? I don't rightly know. Disgust? Fear? Righteousness? All of these are concepts that can be unpacked, down until the box is empty. The fact remains that I feel these things, I've investigated them, I've put myself on the other side, as much as I could, with war, and poverty, and hatred, and a people dying, because the world didn't care, a people who needed strength and a leader, and along came a man named Adolph, who saw that the problems of his people could be traced to One Source... But I disagree. Strongly. I think he was Wrong. What does that mean?

His worldview was so antithetical to sense to something that gets things done in a way that I understand and can see as beneficial, that I think it needed to be removed. In another sense, he was right. It was the method and means by which the world needed to function to achieve his aims... But we have our preferences, we have our beliefs and our spheres of knowledge, and we have to take a stand, somewhere. We have to have a perspective from which we view things, or nothing gets done. We have to have a vantage on which to stand. Fundamentally, with constant reflection, constant assessment from the world around us and other points of view, I believe that place has to be In Ourselves.

I hope that... did Something for you.]

And Now I'm going to bed.

Hat Buyin' Day: In which I buy myself a new hat.

Hey, folks. As you may have heard, it's Hat Buyin' Day and, as such, I'd like you to do me a small favour:

I would really appreciate it if all of you could e-mail 7-Eleven corporate, and ask them why they have no plans to open stores in Georgia, USA: http://www.7-eleven.com/

I figure, if we can get enough people to question them on the practice, we may see a Hat Buyin' Day Miracle!

And then I can get me a fucking Slurpee, without having to wait for Christmas.

Later, all.

Good night.

6.30am for work, again, tomorrow.

Yep.

Besides hat buyin', lunch, and television, today has been nothing but arguments on the Internet.

Arguments on the Internet weary me, more and more.

Hello. I'm Damien. I have a master's in philosophy, religious studies, and occult studies, and I'm going to go to bed, now, before I start explaining to you that everything you have ever loved and believed is bullshit.

Because it's not, really. I'm just very tired, and kind of cranky.