Who Are Yooooooou?...

Alright, let's get this requisite bio bullshit out of the way as quickly as possible. I was born on Valentine's Day of America's bicentennial, in suburban Maryland just outside of the Washington, D.C. beltway. My parents had been hippies in school and were then trying to build a life together now that the world was moving away from the Peace and Love of the 60s, and towards the Money and Mine of the 80s. Growing up, my father worked hard, and wasn't around much. When he was, he always seemed on the verge of exploding in violent anger. My mother was angry a lot of the time, as well, and was actually much more violent than my father (she kicked the crap out of me at the slightest provocation), but she also was one of the most Loving people I have ever known. She had a very dual personality (violently Loving, compassionately Angry), which might go a long way toward explaining my own dualities of Self. And since she was the one who basically raised me (my father working 3 jobs and going to school), I got to know her wholly, in a way that I didn't know my father. The violent outbursts were common, but they weren't the rule; 90% of the time my parents were warm, Loving people who took good care of me and made me very happy. And so, despite all of the anger and the violence and the beatings, I never, never, had any doubt that my parents Loved me more than anything in the world, and that is what I remember most about my childhood: feeling Loved and supported. Even when she was beating me unconscious, I knew I was the center of her world. If she didn't care, she could never have gotten that upset. And I saw how hard my father worked, and I knew he did it all for us.

My mother taught me the importance of Love above all things, and that the only person's opinion of me that mattered, was mine. She impressed upon me the importance of being myself in the face of a world that told me I was wrong. It doesn't matter what other people think; all that matters is that you're happy and Loving. I was an extremely inquisitive and curious child, and my mother never hesitated to answer any question I asked her to the best of her ability. Since her parents were cold and distant and emotionally abusive, it was always very important to her that I knew that I could say anything to her; I could tell her any secret and it would be just between us; I could ask her any question and she would give me an honest answer. And I took every opportunity to avail myself of this aspect of our relationship. We were very close. I was her first born son, and she was my mentor and my best friend. She was also my abuser and I, her victim. It was a complex relationship, to say the least. But I Loved her more than anything in the world, and I knew she felt the same.

She taught me that sex and drugs were incredibly dangerous and to be respected and feared, and that they were also two of the greatest pleasures humans could experience. My parents still smoked marijuana, still of the hippie mindset that "it's just an herb", and was inherently much better for you than the alcohol that was the mainstay-drug of their parents' generation. (I found out in my twenties that my father had used it to season our family's pasta sauce on more than one occasion, and that they felt no qualms about letting their infant son partake of the drug-laced pasta at family meals. They honestly believed it was good for you, and not poisonous or addictive, like alcohol.) She told me in explicit detail of all the joys and terrors of her drug experiences as a youth, informing me of what to look out for as well as what to look forward to. And being of the Free Love generation, countering the repressed mindset of the 50s, sex to her was something wonderful to be explored and expressed and enjoyed as much and as often as possible. Not something to be feared and hidden away in a dark room as though it didn't exist. As an example, I was toilet-trained, in part, using Playboy magazines; when I used the potty correctly, I would be allowed to peruse one of my father's Playboy's to my heart's content. And it worked like a charm; I LOVED using the potty. And so while it wasn't until much later in my life that I would discover the pleasures of drugs, it was at a very early age that I discovered the pleasures of sex.

I began masturbating at 5 years-old. I had my first orgasm at age 7. I remember being really scared by the sensation and asking my mother at the earliest opportunity what had happened. It felt like I was going to pee myself, and I was afraid I was going to wet the bed. She explained it all to me, naturally, and reassured me that nothing was wrong. Quite the opposite, in fact, she explained that what I had experienced was a wonderful thing. After that, I became even more curious about sex. It was that same year that I found my first regular sex partner, a caramel-colored playmate of mine named Travis, with whom I would have many pleasurable adventures over the next several years. Again, being a Free Love Parent, my mother didn't hide the concepts of straight and gay from me; I knew that some people Loved boys and some people Loved girls, and either way, it was all Love and therefore, beautiful. So I never discriminated on gender when it came to sex. The idea of Loving someone based on the shape of the skin between their legs seemed as ridiculous to me as Loving someone based on the color of their hair, or the number of fingers and toes they had. You Love people, not bits of people.

But still, at that early age, girls are this weird "other" that is hard to understand, and even harder to get close to; the two sexes interacting largely like alien cultures meeting on the playground battlefield. And being a boy myself, I understood the mindset of boys a lot better than girls. So it was a lot easier to get closer to them. And a lot easier to get into their pants. Being sexually curious, open, adventurous, and highly-educated on the subject (compared to the other boys around me, anyways) I found young boys incredibly easy to seduce. And I Loved to seduce them. I initiated sexual encounters with every one of my male playmates growing up, several of them developing into long-term sexual relationships. (Though the idea of monogamy would remain completely alien to me until my teen years, and even then it felt like an uncomfortable set of chains someone forced someone else to wear for fear they would run away without being locked down.) The Sleep-over was my favorite thing growing up. They were opportunities for all-night orgies of dirty, fun sex while our parents slept down the hall. I had a fucking ball! (Pun very much intended.) I also seduced every major bully who plagued my neighborhood-world at one point or another. They always left me alone after that, afraid I would reveal them as "faggots" if they ever hurt me again. I never would have, of course, because I'd have had to admit my own faggoty-ness in order to do so. But they didn't know that, and so, like the Cold War we were nearing the end of at the time, the situation remained a stable, if uncomfortable, stalemate. (Thinking of it now, I realize there was a Tao in that, as well: overcoming violence, hatred, and prejudice, with sex and intimacy and Love.) I knew that I liked girls, too, though (my potty-training wouldn't have gone nearly so well if I hadn't), but they were like this elusive creature that was almost impossible to get a hold of, so it wouldn't be until high school that I had my first sexual encounter with a girl.

My parents were slightly spiritual (hallucinogens will do that to you), but not very religious (they'll do that to you, as well). My father was more religious than my mother, who didn't really care much about religion one way or the other, and so our family was raised in my father's faith, the Russian Orthodox church. My father always wore a crucifix on a chain around his neck (with the crossbeams of the sign above and the footrest below that are characteristic of the orthodox christian faiths), but we very rarely actually went to church. Ostensibly this was because the closest Russian Orthodox church was 2-3 hours away from our home, but I also believe that it had something to do with my parents simply not considering religion or spirituality to be very important. It was just a fact of life, not a reason to live; something that was always there, but not something you want to waste time focusing on. God made you when you were born, you lived as much by the Ten Commandments as possible, you prayed when you needed help, and when you died you'd go to Heaven if you'd been good, and to Hell if you'd been bad. That was just how things were, and there really wasn't any point dwelling on it. But for me, as a child, this view of life, the universe, and everything scared the shit out of me. I felt like there was this big, grandfatherly figure in white robes way, way up in the sky, watching everything I did, judging everything I did, and if he didn't like me, he would torture me with fire for all eternity. As such, I was a bit of a twitchy, anxious child in many ways, to say the least.

But I Loved our church. It was all gilt in gold and marble and lit with candles, the priest wore elaborate robes and a big, fancy hat; the services were chanted in an ancient dead language, while clouds of frankincense billowed from swinging censers, filling the room with an exotic spicy smoke that was quite intoxicating. The whole thing vibrated with Mystery and called out to me to seek and search and find The Answers. It was a beautiful, dramatic production that rung with The Divine. But the whole story behind the scenes, the meaning that all those rituals represented? God, Heaven, Hell, Judgement, the Crucified and Resurrected Man-god, etc.? All that stuff made me want to pee my pants and hide in a cave somewhere.

At the beginning of my 8th grade year, when I was 13, my mother gave birth to her 3rd son. Just a few months later, she became suddenly paralyzed along the right half of her body. Eventually the doctors diagnosed her with Multiple Sclerosis, a disease of unknown origin that causes brain tissue to deteriorate at random, consequently destroying the information contained therein. It is a fatal disease that could kill at any minute (an attack in the part of your brain that controlled your breathing or heartbeat, for instance), or could take 20 years to wear someone down to a useless sack of meat. It was a devastating blow to our entire family, who had just been so high with the joy of a new son, a new baby brother.

That was also the year I began to rebel, though whether those two events were related, I still can't rightly say. I became interested in Satanism and I started listening to heavy metal. I found that there was power to be found in darkness, in fear. People who had once picked on me mercilessly left me alone once they thought I was a crazy devil-worshipper. In high school, this gradually morphed into an interest in real occultism. I had long ago dismissed christianity as a religion of sheep and fools, being controlled by power-mongers and zealots because they simply found it too difficult to think for themselves. Calling myself a Satanist and pretending to do magick rituals to evoke The Devil had helped me to reject the fundamental teachings of my childhood, but these things ultimately left me feeling like an idiot, too. I knew I was just pretending, creating an image in reaction to my family and my peers, not really expressing who I was. I wanted real power. I knew there was real magick out there, and I wanted to figure out how to do it. I spent a lot of time in our local wiccan/new-age store, pouring over books about crystals and mysticism. I learned about Aleister Crowley and the Golden Dawn and the OTO and the IOT. I wore a lot of black, and read Camus and Sartre and Nietzsche (though I never understood a word of it). This disaffected outcast image I wore finally garnered the attention of the opposite sex, and it was during these high school years that I had my first female Lovers and my first steady girlfriend. I even managed to sneak some boy-love in here and there, too, which wasn't easy in a world where even wearing the wrong style of clothing or haircut could get one permanently branded a "faggot".

By the time I was in college, I had found the persona of the Gothpunk. And it fit me like a latex glove. Darkness was beauty. Evil was good. Bisexuality was the accepted norm. Gender blurring in both dress and attitude was the fashion and the philosophy. Magick was the mystery, flesh was the altar, and pleasure was the god. We wore garish makeup like nightmare clowns. Hair of every imaginable color, but clothing always black. Combat boots and lace. Fishnets and chains. Rubber and silk. Leather on our backs and spikes through our skin. Black fingernails like claws, and ribbons in our hair. We were the Beautiful Damned, and the night belonged to us. When the Sun went down, it was as though the universe was giving us permission to come out and play, and when it came back up again, it was time to hide from the glaring light. Hide in our rooms of thick curtains; hide in our lives of school and shit jobs. We danced, we drank, we smoked, we tripped, we fucked, and we did it all with a feeling of righteous badness, as though we were the shit of the world, cast off in disgust, and that we were made glorious for it.

I started using drugs regularly at this point. It had started off with cigarettes (at age 14), then alcohol (at age 17), and then pot (age 18). By the time I was a gothpunk at 19, I was dropping acid every chance I could get. My friends and I would drive around the valley where we lived, going up one side, back down, and up the other side and back again, like we were skating a gigantic half-pipe with our town in the center. We spent that whole summer tripping our faces off. We found strength in the madness and insanity that LSD brought, purpose in laughing at the obvious purposelessness of life. And with every trip I learned things about myself, about the world, about life, about reality. Each trip was filled from one end to the other with things I had never even conceived of, points of view I could never have imagined, ideas that surely no other human being had ever thought before. It was these experiences that gave me my first conscious knowledge of the mystical. When you're tripping, everything is magick. I remember one summer evening in the park with 4 hits, I turned into a dog. I wasn't trying to; it just happened. I felt like a dog, I thought like a dog, I sensed as a dog, I experienced the sights and sounds of the world around me as a dog. I ran across the wide expanses of grass chasing ducks at a full lope, and I could smell the fear of the young couples that I encountered walking on dark paths when I bared my teeth at them and growled.

I Loved drugs. They made everything better in every way. More pleasurable, more interesting, more magickal, more powerful, more enchanting, more everything. I would do any drug I had an opportunity to do, and I guess I have to call it Luck or Wyrd that it would be 10 more years before I ever encountered anything seriously destructive, like cocaine or heroin. I was able to get high, laugh my monkey ass off, and go about my day without much consequence. It was in the midst of these experiences that I also finally met a "real" magickian, an honest-to-gods Adept of the secret occult society, The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. The same Golden Dawn that gave Crowley his first initiatory experiences. It wasn't long before I had convinced him to initiate me into the order, and through him I would come to learn the basic underpinnings of the western mystery tradition. I studied Kabbalah and Tarot and Egyptian Magick, I practiced the Lesser and Greater Banishings of the Pentagram, the Middle Pillar, the Rose Cross, the Circulation of the Body of Light. I studied Hebrew and astrology and read "Modern Magick" like it was a college textbook, believing I had discovered the great secrets of the universe, and knowing that one day, this path would lead me to greatness.

In my 23rd year, just before the turn of the millennium, I discovered the Love of my life, standing right next to me. We had been best friends since high school, even though we had always run in completely opposite circles. While I was a gothpunk, she was a theater nerd. While I was a druggie, she was a ballet dancer. While I was a college dropout after 3 semesters, she went to a prestigious school and got her BA. While I Loved and lived with open abandon, she was shy and reserved and frightened of living. But throughout everything, we were always friends, and always took care of one another whenever and however we needed. Her name is Ingrid, and you will find her hereafter referred to variously by that name, or Ing, or Snowflake, or Dollface, or Princess or Strawberry or Peaches or Gorgeous or Strumpet or Blondie or Precious or any one of a dozen other titles. But her real name is Love. Everyone seemed to know this was coming, except us. My last relationship had ended (very badly, I might add) when the girl I was living with left me because of the closeness of my relationship with Ingrid. But we had never even considered being anything other than friends. Until one day, it was as though we woke up, and realized what had been right in front of our eyes the whole time.

That year ended quite oppositely of how it began. On December 31, 1999, my mother was found dead in a hotel room a few miles from my apartment. She'd taken her life with a bottle of sleeping pills. She'd been suffering greatly from the ravages of both addiction and MS for many years at that point, and she was a broken, crazy shell compared to the woman who had raised me. Where once she had been beautiful and Loving, she had become ugly and viciously cruel. She was in constant pain from the disease, and she abused her pain medication, which hurt her even more, leaving her in near constant withdrawal, and almost bankrupted our family. She was miserable and demented and constantly high, and she made everyone's life a living hell. I left home to get away from her, but everyone else did their best to try and take care of her. She'd tried committing suicide several times before, the first of which during my first semester away at college, so this wasn't really a surprise, but it's also always a surprise. I awoke to my ringing phone, and the sound of my father's weeping; "I couldn't save her this time. I couldn't save her." I felt like I'd been preparing for that moment for years, but you can never really be prepared for it. I did my best to let go and say goodbye. I didn't hate her, I felt sorry for her; I didn't blame her, I told myself that she was sick, and that she had died from her disease. And further proof that every high brings an equal low, and vice verse: that night, as we watched the fountains of fireworks pouring off of barges in Baltimore Harbor, shivering in the cold, warm in our inebriation, celebrating the lives we still had to live, Ingrid told me for the first time that she Loved me. There's an undeniable balance to things, when you just stop to see it.

There's more to this introduction, but I'm afraid we're going to have to leave it here for now; this entry is far too long as it is, and there's still a lot more to cover before we get to the real story that I want to tell. Next time, we'll get into my discovery of Chaos Magick and the Heathen religion, my initiation in the occult order of the Illuminates of Thanateros, my development into a true Magickian, and the events that led me to the spiritual crisis and renewal that was the original point of writing this blog in the first place. Until then, remember, Change is the Only Constant.

There I Am...

"So, the Statement of Intent. What is this all about?" Well, recently, I've experienced what can only be called a Metamorphosis, a Rebirth, or, perhaps, an Extreme Makeover. Everything I thought I knew or believed in or even cared about suddenly failed me or simply disappeared altogether, and I underwent the most massive restructuring of my Self that I could ever possibly have achieved. (And as an Adept Chaos Magickian, that's saying something! *more on that another time.) As I remarked to my brother Daniel after it was all over, "Frankly, I'm surprised my eyes are still the same fucking color." And ever since I began to crawl out of my cocoon a few weeks ago, I've felt a burning need to record it all somehow. It's such a long, complicated story, and even now I can feel important details of it slipping away. I need to get it out and get it down before it's gone. Also, part of the "new Me" seems to include an almost overwhelming desire to express myself creatively. Before it was something I liked to do, but now it's something I have to do. Also, there's a lot of people that I now owe an explanation regarding where the fuck I've disappeared to for the last year, and why I might seem different now. And, frankly, I just can't tell this story. It's waaaaay too long for a conversation, for one, and it rambles and twists and turns and jumps, and it's simply too big and too long (hehe) and too complicated for me to effectively verbalize it. By writing it down, I can at least attempt to put it into some semblance of an order and tell it the way it really needs to be told. I just hope I can get it all out before it disappears forever.

"So, then, why a blog? Why not just start another journal and keep all this shit to yourself?" There's several reasons for that. And, surprisingly, for once, stroking my ego isn't one of them! I've always been a show-off, and always felt the need for approval from those I cared about. And yet, I never had even the slightest desire to write a blog. Now, I don't feel like a show-off, and I don't feel the need for anyone else's approval, and suddenly I feel like I have to write a blog. 'S a funny ol' world, innit? But that's Tao for you; you turn far enough to the left, and you'll end up turning right. Basically, the first reason to publish my private thoughts and experiences is to strengthen that new sense of not needing anyone's approval. I'm basically putting myself out there, completely open, for all the world to see, as a way to strengthen my self-confidence and my inner courage. It's essentially an exercise to build up my new sense that I will be who I will be, regardless of anyone else's opinion. And also, on a more practical level, this blog can serve as a central location for anyone who cares to know what's going on with me or in my life to check in and see what's up lately. My hope is that this will spare me from having to a) tell this long, complicated story a zillion times, and b) having to answer the endlessly agonizing question, "So, tell me what's been going on with you lately?", ever again. I know that second one's probably a pipe dream, but hopefully it'll at least reduce the amount of time I have to spend "catching up" with Loved ones, and leave me with more time to spend enjoying their company, which is really what I'd rather be doing when we're together, anyways.

So, that's it; the raison d'blog. Next time, a short (hopefully!) bio of me, just to give everyone who doesn't already know me the background info they'll need to understand the story to come. Until then, remember, Wherever You Go, There You Are. (^_^)

The Flow (first post, test)...

I just opened this blog to try and record some of the monumental changes that have occurred in my life recently. I need to familiarize myself with the system and figure out some of the why's and wherefore's, and then the serious (and not-so-serious) blogging can begin. Until then, remember, Go With The Flow.