Strange Wine

Hello, all you esoteric darlings and those further affixed in the cryptosphere. I should warn the lot of you: I've been reading Harlan Ellison, and he tends to lend a certain profuse flare to my ramblings. Which is good, because honesty is called for on all fronts. Especially the honesty of the lie, that profane means by which the artist decants truth to strange wine.

Last week I 'came out' to my parents. I indulge in parenthesis due to my boredness with the entire epistemological concept of coming out. I've been with both men and women over the course of my life, and consider myself definitively pansexual. My current partner (Shayne) and I have been together for a good while. He's a (here's the part where I simultaneously get to brag and make him blush) polymath: writer, musician, visual artist. We constantly bounce ideas, concepts and visions off of each other, and he's one of the prime editors of my books. I now announce to the entire gaping interwebs: yes, I am in absolute love with a man. There. I guess that's my coming out. Envision a cloud of expanding glitter if it suits your symbolic fancy.

Onwards to further revelations. I've been living in Las Cruces, New Mexico for the last two years (or, more precisely, in a trailer at the very edge of the Chihuahuan desert in sight of Organ, NM). It's been a cleansing, bedeviling, maddened, sweet, drifting, horrible, divine experience, but a myriad of considerations have led me to the decision to move back up to my home town of Traverse City, Michigan. This will put me back in the sphere of my family, which is one of the primary goals; one of the other primary goals is to wed my biological family to my chosen family. Shayne and his nephew Evan will be moving with me up north.

This is all the result of what I am dubbing Project Love, an explicit magical working established at the crest of Venus retrograde. I confess to being a mere dabbler in the occult, though the symbolism of the ceremonial magicians has a pleasing tendency to spring into my path. I hereby (gather close folks: here comes an announcement) declare myself a dedicated syncretist. The walls and subdivisions of genre (alongside magic, science, religion, and God) have no meaning to me save as artificial boundaries to be generatively violated. It's the dawn of a new millennia, and everything old is new. Which means the new will consist of a twisting, permuting, perverting, and venerate remaking of the old. Having fresh visions extrapolated from the current boundaries of human perception is desecration and reverence encompassed in a single act. It's our sacred duty to yearn for the past while sculpting the future.

All of which is very high falutin' talk, I admit. This brings me to my final announcement: I'm a writer. This might seem self-evident (or so I flatter myself), but I've long been a-straying in the realms of metaphysical dissemination, and find myself ultimately unfulfilled. Fiction, to me, encompasses the greatest act of magic: all the arcane numerologies and Promethean intent of the arch-magicians serve as inspiration and fuel for my desire to write. As I mentioned above, I've been reading Harlan Ellison, and he's particularly adept at reminding the individual to be true to their native mode of expression. I hereby yield myself to the instinct of craft, and clamp the Muse's teat between loving lips. I pray she won't mind the bruises.

Thank you, gentle reader. Allow me this indulgence of ye ol' Victorian convention, and understand you are loved.