The Thirtieth Olympiad Of The Modern Era...

I know the Olympics are cheesy.  I know this.  But I can't help it.  I love them.

I love everything about them.  The spectacle, the melodrama, the simple poetry of humans from all over the world gathering together for the sole purpose of doing amazing things.  I spend every fourth year looking forward to them.  And when they finally start, it's like two weeks of Christmas in July.

It started when I was a kid.  The '92 Summer Olympics in Barcelona.  The summer in between my sophomore and junior years of high school.  The two weeks of our vacation at the beach happened to coincide that year with the two weeks of the Olympics.  As a teenager, I was living a nocturnal existence; staying up all night doing nothing, and then sleeping all day in order to rest up for another night of doing nothing the next evening.  There's nothing to do in the middle of the night in the small beach town where we stayed, and the TV in the cottage we were living in only got about six channels.  And, of course, the only thing on was the Olympics.  They played Olympic coverage almost all night.  (And all day, but who was awake to see that??)  I literally had nothing better to do, and a night full of hours to kill, so I started watching.

Late-night coverage of the Olympic Games at the time tended to favor the less-popular sports, giving recaps of the events of the day that hadn't made it into the daytime and primetime broadcasts.  Handball.  Water Polo.  Badminton.  Archery.  Women's Volleyball.  Sports that you'd never see on television back then.  And I found myself, quite despite my desire to be an apathetic misanthrope, getting really, really into it.  I fell in love with the stories of the athletes, and I cheered their amazing accomplishments.  And I felt a sense of pride in my country (a completely foreign and somewhat nauseating experience for me at the time, I assure you) whenever Team USA triumphed.  It didn't matter if it was a sport that I would never have cared about in a million years if I'd had anything better to do.  It was about being fortunate enough to witness humanity's best, doing their best - pushing themselves as hard as they could, striving to be the very best in the whole world - and having the results of all their efforts and hard work displayed on the single greatest stage we have ever constructed, for all the world to see, whether they fell short, or were victorious.  I was hooked from that moment on.

I've always been a drama-queen, and never more so than when I was a teenager.  And, as cheesy as it was, and is, it was also, undeniably, the greatest drama I had ever seen.  Have ever seen.  And that is in no small part due to the fact that it is not a story, crafted artfully from a fertile imagination.  Better than that, this drama is real.

Men and women from all over the world pushing themselves as hard as they can every single day for four years with the single-minded purpose of being the very best in the entire world at what they do.  And every four years the entire world gathers to watch these people, the best in the world, compete and crown their champions.  The best in the world.  None faster.  None stronger.  No one.

What a great fucking story!

And that amazing story is made up of countless other single, just-as-amazing individual stories.  Kerri Strug sticking her landing on a sprained ankle to win gold at the '96 Atlanta games.  The '04 games returning to Athens.  Michael Phelps at the '08 Beijing games winning eight gold medals, more than any other person has ever done before or since, and breaking his own World Record by more than two seconds!  (He set new World Records in six out of the eight events he swam in!)  And Usain Bolt in the same games, setting new World Records in both the 100m and 200m.  (Whenever I remember that, I can't help but think of one of my favorite scenes from the pilot episode of Sports Night.  As a runner half-a-world away is setting a new world record, Casey McCall, an anchor for a late-night Sportscenter-like TV show, calls his young son, waking him up in the middle of the night, and instructs him to hurry up and turn on Daddy's channel.  Then he says, "I'll call you tomorrow and tell you all about it.  But for now, you just watch him run.  He's not doing much.  He's just running faster than any man's ever run before.")

And those are my absolute favorite Olympics moments - when I see that "WR" flash up on an athlete's results, and I realize that I've just seen a human being expand the boundaries of what is possible, and push themselves to do something that no other human being has ever been able to do before.  It is literally awe-inspiring, and I absolutely love it.

And I don't care if that makes me a cheeseball.

S.M.A.R.T., Take 3...

Last night felt like a decent meeting.  Finally.

There was a lot of discussion, people seemed more engaged, there was a lot more discussion of actual issues surrounding our compulsive behavior, and the chit-chat about everyday bullshit was generally short and quick.  There was also a lot more laughter and smiles this time around, which I think makes a difference.

I felt a lot more comfortable this time around.  Just getting some basic familiarity with everyone, I guess.  Felt a lot less like "the new guy."  I felt comfortable offering input on other people's stories, and when I did they seemed to find it helpful and it usually sparked further discussion in the group.  I did my own "sharing" mid-way through the meeting this time around, rather than at the end, and that worked out much better for me.  I had gone in there with every intention of updating them on my resolution to the question that I'd been struggling with and that I discussed last time, but I actually ended up giving them a bit of a synopsis of where I'm at right now and what I'm working on and what my goals are.  Not sure why.  Just felt more natural, I guess.  Went with the flow.

Talked about my mother and her mother.  Talked about how I self-identified as an addict since before I ever actually used or drank anything, and that I've basically been using for my entire career as though I were also in recovery; using what I learned from my mother as a child to maximize the pleasure while minimizing the risk.  Explained that I'm just kind of tired of it at this point, and so I've committed to at least a year completely sober from anything, which will be the first year of my adult life spent that way.  And that generally I'm not struggling with my addiction in any way on a day-to-day basis - that I feel like I have a good bit of experience here, and how this all feels very comfortable and familiar - but that every once in a while, it'll suddenly sneak up out of nowhere, and I won't know what to do.  Told a condensed version of the story of my relapse from a few weeks ago.  I got a lot of positive comments, including "Wow, good share!"  And I got a lot of laughs.

(Why is that so important to me?  I guess I feel like, if I have to essentially give a performance to a group of people - a captive group, at that - then I feel I should at least be entertaining.  If I have to tell a story, then the people who hear it should at least enjoy the experience on some level.  I strive to be entertaining here, too, as much as possible without compromising the message.  So, I guess I shouldn't be surprised to discover that I do the same thing in the group.)

I realized a few new things about the whiny woman who has apparently decided to become co-facilitator.  I realized that it's not just that she's whiny, but that she rambles.  She never seems to get to her point, and you're never actually sure what her point really is, anyways.  She just rambles on and on in this stuttering, monotonous way, that makes it really difficult to pay attention to what she's saying.  Whenever she finishes, I'm always left feeling sort of, Huh?  What were you trying to say?  What was the point of all that?  So, of all the people I've met there so far, she is absolutely the worst at actually communicating her point to other people.  That doesn't seem like a quality you'd want in a facilitator.

And she always has her two-cents to stick in.  Which I guess is why the facilitator thinks she'd be good at the job.  And I know we're supposed to respond to each other and discuss things and try and help out (SMART actually encourages "cross-talk," whereas most groups forbid it), but whenever she responds to somebody's story with her two-cents, it's always about her.  It seems like she always begins with something like, "Well, that reminds me of this thing that happened to me the other day..." and then suddenly we're all listening to her story again, instead of the person who was supposed to have the floor.  It just seems so rude.  I imagine she must believe she's trying to help, but it's hard for me to see how she's actually helping anyone.

Also, now that I've heard everyone share their stories a few times, it's becoming fairly obvious that of all the people in the group, she is the one who least has her shit together.  She is clearly the biggest mess in the entire group.  I would go so far as to call her a hot mess, in fact.  And she's apparently been coming to this group for years.  If, even after all of these years, she is still struggling to this degree with the most basic aspects of recovery, then, again, I have to ask, how is this woman in any way qualified to function as a group facilitator?  She seems like the absolute worst choice for facilitator out of the entire group!  Ugh.

Hopefully I'll be done with all of this by the time she starts taking over.  Or that she'll prove me wrong and turn out to be a wonderful facilitator.  (Stranger things have happened.)

Despite all of that, the meeting was more of a positive experience than a negative one, and much more so than the previous weeks.  For the first time, I find that I'm looking forward to the next one.


The last of the "ironic" bumper stickers from the back wall of the room:

"I've Fallen and I Can't Reach My Beer"

"Rehab Is For Quitters"

"The Only Urine Sample You'll Get From Me

Is A Taste Test"

Confessions #1...

A couple of hours after writing this post, I was reading an issue of The Sun, a non-profit literary magazine I subscribe to.  In every issue, they have a section called Readers Write, where they publish true stories sent in by readers, and related to a different topic each month.  At the bottom of the first page of the Readers Write section, I saw the list of upcoming topics and submission deadlines, and I thought, Well here's a ready-made list of ideas for whenever I have a day like today where I can't think of anything to write about.  How perfect!

So, I think I'm going to start trying to do that for a while.  As always, we'll see how it goes.  The first topic on the list is "Confessions," and the submission deadline is May 1st.  I've got a few ideas, and we'll see how many I post in the next couple of weeks.  For now, here's my first submission:

...

"I'm Suzanne, and I'm an alcoholic."

"Hi, Suzanne!"

My mother and I had always been very close.  I was her first-born, and my father worked three jobs to support our family, so my mother practically raised me herself.  She was my best friend, and we shared everything with each other.  So when she finally had to give up drinking and drugs, after her gall bladder had failed and had to be removed, it seemed completely natural when she invited me to attend some of her AA meetings with her.  I was ten years-old.

I think she wanted to share this new world of hers with me.  And I imagine that she wanted to show me that she was different now, that she was getting better.  I was curious, too, and I enjoyed being included in her new grown-up world of church basements and coffee urns and chain smokers.  And I have to admit, there was a definite voyeuristic thrill in spending an hour listening to strangers' sordid tales of addiction and despair.

Every story began the same way.  The person would stand up and state their name, followed by, "...and I'm an alcoholic."  Then the entire group would respond by saying, "Hi," always using the person's name back at them.  "Hi, Suzanne!"  And then they would tell whatever story was on their mind to tell that day.  There was no judgement, no disapproval.  Everyone understood what everyone else had been through, because they'd all been through the same thing at some point.  They were there to take care of each other.  "Keep coming back," they'd say.

We weren't Catholic, but I'd seen the ritual of confession enough times in movies to understand that these meetings served a similar purpose.  Everyone there all seemed to feel very guilty about who they'd been and the things they'd done.  And so they were confessing their sins.  Not to a God, but to their peers; people who had suffered in the same way, who understood their pain intimately, and who could provide immediate feedback in the form of reassurance and support and compassion.  And forgiveness.

As I got older, I stopped going to the meetings with my mother.  And she stopped going, as well.  Over the next ten years, she would fall back into drinking and getting high again and again.  And in her brief periods of sobriety between relapses, she would go back to the meetings for a while, until the next time she fell back off the wagon.

On December 31, 1999, she went to her last meeting.  She left that particular basement room that day, checked herself into a local Holiday Inn, and took her life with a bottle of sleeping pills purchased at a nearby grocery store.

Now it's my turn to stand up at the front of one of those rooms and state my name.  But I can't bring myself to do it.  Because I can't find any comfort or solace in that ritual of confession.  Hearing those familiar calls and responses, all I can think of, is the life I've lost.

Who Are Yooooooou, Too?...

In the same year of my mother's suicide, and the beginning of my Love with Ingrid, I also experienced the next great shift in my spiritual development. I had left the Golden Dawn a couple of years earlier, after only a few months with my teacher. I found their system ultimately hollow and unfulfilling. It had nothing to do with the real world; it was only about their system, their organization. If you bought into what they were selling, and worked hard, you could eventually become very powerful in the Golden Dawn. But being powerful in the Golden Dawn only matters to other people in the Golden Dawn; outside of that tiny group, it meant exactly nothing. I thought I'd found "real" magick, but it turned out to be just more new-age bullshit. I continued studying the occult and practicing my western ceremonial rituals, though, still seeking for ultimate power and control behind-the-scenes of reality.

My best friend, eminent trip-partner, and blood-brother, Daniel, had been studying Peter Carroll's system of Chaos Magick, and he introduced me to it as well. It wasn't long before we were studying and practicing together on a regular basis. Chaos Magick, finally seemed to be what I had been looking for all along. The system eschews ancient mystical systems and order-centric ceremonies (the province of the Golden Dawn and just about every other magickal system out there) in favor of learning the mechanics behind magick that make it work, so that the magickian can create their own magick that works for them. The ultimate in postmodern relativism, it teaches that reality itself is inherently a subjective experience, and therefore it can be influenced using basic trance techniques combined with various methods of self-hypnosis. The idea is to study any and every system that appeals to you, learn what techniques you can, gain what experiences you can, and then move on to another system and do the same. This technique of "paradigm piracy" will inevitably reveal the fundamentals behind the systems, the common elements, the under-the-hood workings of magick, if you will; ultimately garnering the magickian an arsenal of magickal techniques and knowledge from throughout history and around the world that they can draw upon in order to create their own spells to accomplish whatever they want. Spells that really work. Whereas every other occult system I had ever studied relied upon rote memorization of ancient rituals of dubious origin that produced no real effects in consensus reality, Chaos Magick was a system that allowed the budding magickian to learn the basic skills of magick in order to affect actual change.

A year earlier, Daniel had applied to the IOT (the Illuminates of Thanateros; the occult Chaos Magick order founded by Peter Carroll and other progenitors of the system) but had been passed over for initiation because he was under 18 at the time. He came of age while we were practicing together, and in 1999 he was contacted by a friend of ours in the organization and asked if he still wanted to join. He did, and he recommended me, as well. I was invited to join, and along with a couple of other area magickians, we began the 6-month long IOT initiatory process known as MMM.

MMM is an intense regimen of daily meditation, detailed journal recording, and constant magickal study and practice. Each of the four of us were assigned a magickal paradigm (or belief system) with which we had no experience that we were required to learn over the course of our MMM. We would also have to develop several rituals in the style of our assigned paradigm. Daniel was given voodoo. I was given Heathenry, or ancient northern European paganism (most commonly referred to as Asatru); the spiritual beliefs of the vikings: Odin, Loki, Thor, the Runes, etc. Through my experiences in MMM, I fell in Love with the practice of Heathenry, and adopted it as a religion, practicing it alongside my other magickal work. I had studied many religions since I left the orthodox church (some in the course of my Seeking, some as part of my paradigm jumping), but this was the first one I had ever wanted to practice. Until I encountered Heathenry, all I had ever wanted to be was a Sorcerer. One of the other two people in our MMM group, Brian, was a specialist in the Heathen system, and a godhi (or pagan "priest" in the Heathen tradition). Our mentor, George (the friend who recommended us for initiation and guided us all through our MMM) was also growing more interested in the Northern paradigm, and between the three of us, everyone else in the group became interested in Heathenry, as well. So much so that the night we were initiated on April 21, 2000, the five of us formed an IOT Temple dedicated to pursuing Chaos Magick in the Northern style. We called ourselves Temple Gotterdamerung. Later that year, Brian formed a Heathen Kindred for those of us interested in exploring the religious traditions of the northern European pagans as well (as opposed to the magickal beliefs and practices we explored in Gotterdamerung), and on December 21, 2000 I joined Einauga Kindred. The oaths I swore to these two organizations that year were, at that time, the most important promises I had ever made.

For the next several years, my spiritual development continued on and off in this vein. I continued to practice both Chaos Magick and the Heathen religion. I met monthly for group work with Temple Gotterdamerung, and celebrated the holy days with Einauga Kindred. I studied many paradigms that interested me, with the Runes as my base practice, and developed an extensive archive of techniques and experiences from which to draw upon. Slowly but surely, I began to make things happen around me. I influenced people with talismans and, unbeknownst to them, got them to do the things I wanted them to do, even though it was quite contrary to their normal behavior. I cast a spell to get a new car, and two days later my father called and offered me his sister's old one, out of the blue. I performed a ritual to get ecstasy, and two hours later someone called me up out of the blue and offered me pills. I had learned how to work real magick, and I had the results to prove it. I was finally a Magickian!

I also became a godhi during this period, taking over Einauga Kindred from Brian after he moved away. But it wasn't long before everyone else's interest moved on to other things, and Ing and I were left as the only remaining members. We continued to observe the holy days, but it wasn't the same; without the large group, it became more personal and intimate of an experience than it had been before. They became our gods; our holidays. I stayed in the IOT, working with Temple Gotterdamerung, and then with Temple Lya'o when Gotterdamerung dissolved. Temple Lya'o was dedicated to studying the intercession of three of my favorite paradigms: Taoism, the Cthulhu Mythos of H.P. Lovecraft, and Drug Magick (utilizing the altered states of consciousness brought on by various chemicals in order to perform magickal acts and experience mystical states). It felt like a truly perfect fit.

I came to realize several important things about my spirituality during this period. I summarized them in a series of journal entries in 2003:

"My religion is my way of connecting w/ my planet in a way that is very hard to do in modern times (and getting harder to do w/ every tree that's cut down & w/ every farm that becomes a factory) & in a way that I feel it is very important to do.
The rise of Industry = The decline of Agrarian Society = The loss of our connection to our planet and its natural cycles and rhythms & The loss of our association w/ our planet as the giver and SUSTAINER of our lives (though it still is) = The loss or, perhaps, decline of magick in the world (it's not the only reason, but it's a big one)"

"Taoism - As long as I can remember, I have been attracted to dualities. Everything, it had always seemed to me, had an equal and an opposite. And it seems that in almost every instance where I perceived and classified a duality, I found that I fit into both categories. In those instances where I didn't, I tried to change to fit into both. I have tried to make things equal in my life; to keep balance in all ways between all poles of opposites. I have tried to find the middle path. All of this before I ever studied Taoism. I have since come to know that all 2's are the emanations of the 1 that is 0. And now I am just beginning to study the Tao."

"My personal belief structure begins with Taoism; my perception of reality, at its base, is a Taoist one. This is the core of my spirituality. At the next level of my spirituality, that of the more chosen or willed, active practice (though all is, in reality, Willed, some aspects of my life,such as religion, seem more obviously CHOSEN; at the core level of perception, it seems much more like "discovery of the nature of things" than it does "choosing a belief system") I follow Heathenism because I find its culture to be not only powerful, but rich and beautiful, as well. Also, it provides me with a connection to an aspect of human existence on Earth that I feel we have only lost very recently, and that I feel is important as it provides another connection to the world that is outside of me. And I am also very appreciative of the fact that Heathenism is not an EX-clusive religion, meaning that the belief structure of Heathenism allows room for the incorporation of other belief systems. Finally, at the third level of my spirituality I use the power that I have built within me from the first two levels in the practice of Magick. I do this in order to participate in the workings and construction or formation of my reality, and in order to raise myself up, in every way, in every world I walk in."

On September 17, 2004, I was initiated into the 3rd degree of the IOT, and given the leadership position of Temple Lya'o. At my initiation, I was required to renounce my pagan gods and re-dedicate myself to the pursuit of Chaos Magick. I didn't really want to do it, but I had also always considered my religious practice secondary to, and an expression of, my magickal practice, so if I had to choose one over the other, it was obvious to me which one had to go. I wanted to be a sorcerer a lot more than I wanted to be a godhi or a heathen. But that night, I felt like I left a part of myself behind, and over the next several years, that little hole remained; a constant nagging feeling that a piece of my life and my Self was missing somewhere.

In every other way, it seemed that things were going great for me. Over the next 3 years, Temple Lya'o developed into one of the biggest and most potent Temples in the North American section of the IOT. I studied Taoism in its many varied forms (mystical, alchemical, energetic, religious, magickal, shamanic, etc.), worked with the darkness and madness of the Cthulhu Mythos, and discovered drugs I had never heard of before. By this point, I had been smoking pot every day, morning, noon, and night, for almost ten years. Bong hits were my best friends. I'd get up in the morning and do some bong hits. When I got home from work, I'd smoke bowl after bowl until it was time to go to bed. I could tell that the effects of being constantly stoned were taking their toll on me; I was always tired, I never had any energy or motivation, everything felt like a constant struggle, I gained a lot of weight, when I ran out I would have wild mood swings, etc. But, as far as I was concerned then, those negatives were outweighed by the perceived benefits I received from pot (relaxation, pleasure, and mystical experiences). Besides, it's not like I was addicted. I'd seen my mother struggle with addiction for years, I'd gone with her to countless AA and NA meetings, I knew the signs, I knew the program, I knew addiction. And I wasn't addicted. And when and if I ever did get addicted, I would know exactly what to do. Not only did I have much more intimate knowledge of addiction than did the average user, but I was also a powerful Magickian. Reality bent to my fucking Will! What did I have to fear from something as minor as weed? I'd be fine, I told myself. I experimented with dozens of different drugs; some designer, some natural, some legal, some illegal, some for spiritual or mystical reasons, some for simple daily pleasure. I never turned down any experience.

Ingrid and I had gotten married on October 13, 2001, and six years later, we were still enjoying our newly-wedded bliss. Things were getting better and better for us at our jobs. The wealth magick that Ing and I had performed every full moon for two years had paid off, and within 3 days of each other, first our building went condo, and then I received a large inheritance that allowed me to buy our apartment. Our apartment complex was completely renovated. The courtyard that had been empty save for rotting wood planks and a large brick planter filled with barren dirt that would never support life became a lush garden almost overnight; and from the center of that empty planter where we had made our many sacrifices of blood and life and money, there now sprang a giant black fountain. Our apartment went from industrial carpeting, cracked walls, and broken down appliances, to hardwood floors, granite counter tops and marble tile, and a fully-stocked compliment of state-of-the-art technology. The entire neighborhood changed around us overnight, and what was once an aging ghetto of a neighborhood became a beautiful (and rich) center of young urban life. The annual international meeting of the IOT (the Annual Grand Meeting, or AGM) was coming back to the United States for only the 2nd time ever, and Temple Lya'o was hosting it. I had been tapped for my 2nd degree, and my performance in helping to put on the AGM would go towards proving my worth for the position. The whole world was turning in my favor.

And that's when everything fell apart. Which brings me to the real story I wanted to tell, the story that was the impetus for this blog in the first place. But that's going to have to wait until next time. Until then, remember, Everything is True, and Nothing is Permitted.

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. (^_^)