The Audio Version
So, right about now in my story is when you're wondering why I've decided I need to devote no fewer than 10,000 words to it – and with no end in sight.
Unless you know the effects long-term THC use has on the brain; in which case, you're no doubt going through a myriad of emotional responses to my work. If you don't, I hope you're hoping I will talk about it – because I'm about to.
Novelty is something I've been trying to figure out how to talk about for a while now. I've experimented, but it hasn't gone the way I want. Does anything I write – hell, has anything I've ever worked on? All the way back to the damn egg parachute thing we had to make as children, to my macrame, to my sketches – nothing ever turns out quite the way I think it's going to for me. Which says something about me. And nothing at all about what novelty is and how it connects to long-term THC use.
See, novelty is.... Let's just ask Dictionary.com: State or quality of being novel, new, or unique; newness. Novel in turn is defined as: Of a new and unusual kind; different from anything seen or known before; Not previously detected or reported.
(My dictionary search history is... filled with ordinary words.)
From a Psychological perspective, novelty is the reward-center response in the brain to new experiences. If we expand on the ideas of GOD and the self I laid down in Pt 2, we could say that the answer to the meaning of life is the pursuit of novelty. But that's not what I'm here to talk about – today. That is kind of the thesis of this whole adventure, if you want to skip to the Call to Action at the end. Go experience new things – I mean – listen to me as I take your mind to new and wonderful places.
Ahem.
One of the affects – effects? Eesh, I should know this – of THC consumption is that it sort of opens the novelty centers of the brain. You can liken smoking weed, especially irregularly, to taking off dark sunglasses in a forest: suddenly, what was once mostly darkness is filled with subtleties of light and nuances of color which make ordinary experience itself entirely new again. The downside of long-term THC use is that you can chase the dragon of feeling numinous and unique into dark and dangerous tunnel systems of the psyche – tunnel systems you're no doubt thinking you've witnessed me traveling.
And you're probably more right than any protest I could offer – that is how addiction works.
But is it addiction if you're not making choices that hurt your life to consume it – even if you consume too much? Is chemical dependency an acceptable way to live? I think about it a lot. Have thought about it a lot since I first wrote this all down - actually, I'll have to write about how my life is working in small cycles, and writing these, then editing them over the course of days rather than hours is giving me a... clock to measure them by. But that isn't what I'm talking about right now, so I'll have to figure that out later.
When I ask myself whether it's okay to be chemically dependent upon a consciousness-altering substance, the only answer I can come up with is always the same: I don't know.
I do know that it would be dishonest to omit my consumption from these PLogs. If Rob can have the courage to discuss his consumption - and his life is way more negatively impacted than mine - is it cowardly to lie?
It's always cowardly to lie.
Especially if I'm doing this in the name of some kind of science. (I am, after all, not an upright man.) Many of my heroes would disapprove. Many of the others have already quit – which should be an indicator that I should; but I'm not at a place where this experiment is over for me. And they have much more money and far greater access to self-harm than I do - via the drug, that is. They have to be vigilant against threats I do not. And if I'm convincing myself of anything, it's that the drug makes me better-equipped to do these things I want to do So, until then, irreparable damage it is.
Life is irreparable damage. Well – damage which is only repaired in death.
Guess it depends on what you think is broken.
I've proposed the question about whether a shaman's power comes from the drug or whether the drug allows him to access it – or something like it. I'm not trying to sell or even apologize for my weed consumption. I am sure why I can't quite get off it as a pivot point, though: I'm the kind of person who is addicted to novelty.
As a child, I did not get many... stimulating experiences.
Until recently, it has deeply bothered me that I don't have many memories from my childhood between birth and about eighth grade. Now, many of those I do have are either surreal or traumatic – so I figured that trauma had more than just something to do with the gaps in my memory. It'll do that to you, trauma. But more and more I think it might have much more to do with a decided lack of stimulation – a deficit of novelty in my life. I have no memories because for so much of my life, every day has actually been exactly the same.
So, yeah – by the time I'd given in to the banality of poverty and allowed myself to slack into self-medication through THC intoxication, I was primed for the despair and destitution of adulthood – I've basically been thirty my entire life.
I really am still talking about my Tarot reading - promise.
I'm trying to illustrate how my THC-soaked brain is going to look for new and personally meaningful messages in everything I see; both in the Reading to come, but also as the foundation of my worldview – because it's already prone to that from not having many life experiences to desensitize it – but also because I've put a drug into my brain which makes me think that everything is new and significant and that my thoughts are more important than they are; and with the specific intention of helping me believe that these thoughts and these feelings I've been taught by trauma over time to believe are insignificant and less than worthless are, in fact, significant and valuable.
...That was a sentence I have been walking around stating baldly for... a long time.
I don't know much about anything. Maybe I can say that in fact I know next to nothing. But I know this about my consumption: It makes me think uninteresting things are fascinating. So I try to judge my level of enthusiasm for everything I look at based on how I'd feel about it if I were sober. But that only works so far. I've literally lost friends for being too enthusiastic in general, long before I'd ever even smelled reefer. Indeed, I started smoking originally to keep some of my enthusiasm for life to myself – or at least to let it look like, well, he's just stoned. So—
This is all to say that I finished this first reading with two thoughts in my mind:
That the first drawing was way too convenient and exactly the kind of thing I would want to read into a Reading for me to do only one; and that the first rule of reading Tarot is not to ask the same question twice.
This is a crossroads in my story.
I have to point that out, because unless this were framed like a horror movie – with someone having already warned me, the presumptive hero, away from the magic McGuffin and a suspensening of the soundtrack – most people aren't going to understand why it's a big deal.
Usually the spirits or entities or intelligences or whatever that you're working with when you divine through Tarot are... temperamental – and require a particular cultivation to build a relationship with. I'm playing Pokemon Shining Pearl right now, so I'm already primed to think this – but in a lot of ways, this spirit is not at all unlike a Pokémon in these later generations: you do need your Friendship level to be high enough for them to do the things they can do for you.
Typically the relationship is one where the Spirit has all the leverage, as it were. So not like a Pokémon at all.
Typically we first go into divination afraid of it. It, the divination practice or it, the potential range of Entity we might encounter. Or not believing in it at all. This, the not believing at all, is why so many Experiencers are frightened completely out of their bodies by Contact with the Other: the Other can frighten them to that degree; so it's going to – or maybe you could phrase it that because it can, the first chance they come across one that wants to, it's going to. It's sort of like... if you're standing on a flimsy beam that spans an infinite space around you covered by a rug, and you're bragging about how you know how big the area beneath the rug is.... it's a Trickster's responsibility to yank the rug out from beneath you. Luckily most disbelievers never come across anything inclined or powerful enough to torment them.
Even though I think they'd all tell you that at some point in their lives the rug had been yanked out from beneath them. And they'd tell you that they landed on the beam and held on for dear life and closed their eyes until the rug was put back into place.
Bravado comes from a place of deepest fear - the kind of fear that comes with terrible knowledge.
And you only gain terrible knowledge at a terrible price.
But Reality would be very different if They did reach out and touch all of us whenever they wanted because they could, wouldn't it? Let me rephrase that - because the Other is touching all of our lives all the time.
Life would be very different if They could be obvious about it.
Rob says they used to be. But he hasn't made Peitho tell that story yet - not to my satisfaction, anyway. So I won't. Not yet.
You know, while I'm thinking about this – and I'm not as far off-base as you by now no doubt think I am – there's a reason that most people – that is that most inquisitive people who would actually like to have an Experience – never experience the Other: Civilization as a phenomenon, whether you want to call it society or culture or group cohabitation— Civilization is designed from the very roots up to prevent The Other as such from acting as the Rule which governs Reality.
That's a nonsense statement, so we're going to move on. All that I mean to say is that there's a reason to be afraid of magick, of divination. The stories you hear about Ouija boards, for instance, aren't stories. Not all of them. Some of them are harrowing experiences that leave people with very real scars.
My father told me once about a Ouija experience he had; and I'm feeling like I need to pad this Part out, (even though by the third pass through it it's bloated enough I should skip it - but what the Hell, let the piece speak. I don't have to follow all of John Steinbeck's advice) (Call back!) So what the Hell—
My father said that he was in high school – that he and a group of friends, some six or eight of them, had got their hands on a Ouija board and were playing with it by the dumpsters behind the school. Exactly the kind of story you want to hear your father telling when you're – I actually don't know how old I was when he told this story. I know I was old enough that the place we were driving, when I went there as a more developed consciousness, was completely different than how I remember it. While also being unchanged in that span of time. So this may have been one of those memories that's more dream than actual experience I had.
But I remember the telling, because you remember this kind of story when you're a boy of somewhere between 5 and 13 years old.
Anyway, he didn't tell me who all were playing with the planchette. He wouldn't – you edit these stories for an impressionable youth like yours truly was. But he said that when things started getting interesting and they were pretty sure they'd made Contact, the smallest kid in their group suddenly jumped up and grabbed the biggest kid – this would have been in the 80s – and just started pummeling him mercilessly. The way he told it, they really had trouble pulling this kid off the other one. He ended the story with the typical, “We tore up the board and threw it away, but when we went out there the next day it was whole” bit.
So maybe it's bullshit.
But I heard the fear in his voice, I could feel it in the viscerality of the memory. I don't even know why he was telling that story. So maybe the ending is bullshit. Sometimes you have to lie to make the story feel like it has resolution. Like that Nick Swardson bit about telling a bad story. (Which has evidently been scrubbed from the internet. My understanding is it's in his first Comedy Central Presents. Good luck getting to watch it.) Maybe what happened was even worse - maybe they all just left and they don't know what happened to the board because they never went back there to dispose of it?
What if nothing happened because nothing actually happened? What if the kid just wanted to get cool points. Apparently there was some trauma between them because of it afterward. Who knows.
But, then again – maybe I get this honestly, eh?
Why am I talking about this?
I recently described my journey towards Rob and where I am now as doing all the things that superstitious people will tell you not to do. I think my father would think that holds water. I've never done the group activities – but the fundamental behaviors that underlie that sentence, i.e. making contact with The Other at all, are the kinds of sins that “just trying” could get you killed for at one time in Western history.
And that time wasn't as distant as you think.
The Satanic Panic is never quite over.
It's one of the fundamental ways that Christianity has managed to remain a dominating presence through so much of the last two thousand years of human history - self regulation through policing of thoughts and behaviors on an individual-to-individual level. The nosey lady at work and in your neighborhood? Serving a vital function in both societal circles.
My Goddess and I don't have a traditional relationship. I wish it were something more like what Whitley Strieber describes of his Communion situation— Actually, maybe that's too much to ask for. I haven't read the book, just the recent sequel he wrote. The sexual harrowing he says he went through at the hands of his version of the Divine Feminine is unlike anything anyone but the most extreme fetishist actually wants. You can joke about it, but until a demon-alien-woman-thing is raping you half to death....
But hey! maybe I'm just sensitive.
For good reason – as most things have, whether we like the reasoning or not.
My relationship with my Goddess is very much like my relationship with Robert (Oh! My Goddess is a manga I never read and an anime I never watched) – I spend more time denying Her existence and demanding that she prove herself without feeding her enough energy to manifest in a way that she can do things on her own Bell Witch-styles than listening to or trying to talk to her. I feel her; I am aware of her presence; that doesn't so much mean I'm as connected to her as I could be.
Like... I haven't even asked her name yet. I haven't asked for the name she's going to lie to me with, I guess. I know that she's in the Aphrodite/Ishtar/Innana vein. Maybe one and the same. I don't know. Don't know that I want to.
There's an element of fear there. Also that's a... level of commitment to an identity I have not been willing to make yet. But we'll see how this all goes. I have a feeling I've made that commitment by committing to telling this story in this way. Someone is going to ask her her name in compelling enough a way that I try to find out. I'm just not ready for the chaos that is going to wreak on my life and my relationships, yet. But... I guess the response to that is the same one you get when you say you're "just not ready" to have kids yet, that's why you don't have them: You're never ready; may as well take the plunge while you're young.
That's what this whole thing - this whole life as I'm trying to live it - is about, right now - taking the plunge and learning to establish a "magic circle" I can carry with me into the Darkness of the Goddess's Wicked Garden on the fly. And for your amusement.
(Is that what that song is about? Cus I think it's about heroin.) (Too soon? Too insensitive?)
I wasn't afraid, though, when I drew again.
The Goddess can get grumpy if she wants – she knows I only care about her moods insofar as my predilection toward respecting all things by default will ping that I'm being unkind to Her when she acts out— And then I'll remind myself that “she” is a figment of my imagination and pack up the cards.
Which you could very easily spin as her putting it in my head to pack up the cards because she's offended by my attitude. A good storyteller could make this much more compelling than I am. Or maybe I'm just not committed enough to the bit, yet.
Maybe I don't know that it's a bit I need to commit to.
Maybe I just need to be committed.
Anyway, I drew again. And I'll talk about it... eventually. This one is long enough.
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