Non-Lucid Lucidity: or, The Author Rhetorically Defends his Bedtime

There's something lucid about experiencing a crippling day of illness following hard on a day of festivity. To have the flesh transported so acutely in two very different directions in such a short space - bewildering, to say the least. In case the reader is wondering: Yes, I had a very REAL Thanksgiving, followed closely by a very REAL (& quite feisty) triumvirate of ailments. I'll spare the hoary details; let's just say I felt worked-over by the seven plagues of Egypt. I found myself staring at the ceiling & giggling hysterically, contemplating the fact that, although I was relatively sure I wasn't dying, it felt like I was dying. How many lives have been snuffed out after long, horrific ravages of illness, the soul tossed into the gulag of plague for a spell before being quickened and loosed?

By the time I'd recovered enough strength to walk sans staggering, I'd developed a deep, abiding sense of gratefulness (a grotesque Thanksgiving miracle, perhaps?) for the thrum of a well-functioning human body. A body whose operations are so refined, well-timed & uninhibited by microbe or mutation that the mind & spirit are free to employ it as a launching-place, & tread the ether unconcerned with the ever-waxing threat of clogged heart valves or the metastasis of lurking cancers. Due to proclivities for such projections, artists are often somewhat unkempt in appearance (at least in their natural habitats). The mind, the spirit is off holding court in alien dimensions & attending strange sabbats, not contemplating sock compatibility (at least this is the excuse I offer when some highly-conscious-of-propriety individual points out that I've absentmindedly put my shirt on inside-out). Such 'mistakes' may seem hilarious (perhaps even troubling) to some, who will attempt to project their epistemological values (justified belief or opinion?) on the person breaking the seeming taboo. This is one of the most common, minor perils in my line of work; I can't even begin to estimate how many times friends/family members/enemies/associates/postmen have upbraided me on my unstructured wake-and-sleep schedule. The active (even studied) disorientation of the senses is an immemorial tool of the poet, the magician, & the bard. Sadly, our hyper-modern hyper-materialistic reality considers the Promethean pursuit of craft and Beauty (ie: idle scribbling) a poor excuse for staying up after ten o'clock (though a media-binge marathon is somehow apt justification!).

My newfangled answer to all incongruities of perception is to Love. Simply, idiotically, against the grain of all terrestrial turmoil: Love. To be human is a shocking (as in PTSD) blessing: we are all walking wounded, half-blinded by the orchestrated horror of the world & our own subsumed Divinity. In the wake of my illness I felt actually lighthearted, open to a gust of wind exciting raptures, achingly grateful for the entities I call friends, family & lovers. I'm sure that a resurgent sense of jaded regularity will dull these feelings in short order, but I will strain to remember them, and moreover to embody them. For me, this means writing: for you, it probably means something else.

Reality: The Affectation

Well, gosh darn it, we seem to be nearing the lateral end of November. I was charitably poked the other day and reminded that one of my chief duties is to cook up brain matter to splash judiciously on this page. Someone wanders off from writing an already sporadic-as-hell blog for a few months, and the readers of said page naturally assume a failing of purpose, a waning of vital force; yet here I be, quite alive, the better for a dozen strange sojourns, & straining at the seams with cogitation. Expect a few bumps and bramble-scrapings 'afore this post terminates. I'm listening to a lovely sludgy psych thing called Mr. Flood's Party, & it's manning my nerves for the immediate present.

Have moved back to Michigan, and spent several months adjusting to a very different (yet oddly familiar) new existence. All seems well as the snow begins to fall in graceful, mild quantity...very different than the desert, here. It took me a month to fully compute and integrate the sheer abundance of trees & green life, and then there was a long lingering Autumn, with mild but everlasting rust colors spilling over the hills (odd, I always thought of the area as flatter). I'm prepared for the coming crystalline flood, only slightly apprehensive, but the old Nordic blood is beginning to boil a little. I grit my teeth and exhale a cloud whenever I step out the door. There are no cacti in sight.

So, in short, 2015: the Year I Hurtled. I came up to Michigan twice on visits, then executed a full cross-country move with my boyfriend and his nephew. Settled back into the house I lived in before I went away to college, and have been gradually unfurling my senses. Always odd to come back to a town you've lived away from for many years, odder still if it's altered as much as TC; it was always a tourist-fed community, but it seems the ol' berg has exploded into something of a boomtown. The two-lane road that ran near my house ten years ago has swelled into a five-lane monstrosity. There's a tantalizing array of restaurants and about two-trillion locally made beers, a genuinely bustling downtown district, etc etc...the half/mask prosperity of inspired gentrification. I believe the new season of South Park addresses the phenomena with abundant causticness.

However, prosperity is prosperity. There's a lot of dedicated artistic energy being focused here. And the lakes, forests & dunes are every bit as beautiful as they have been declared in countless magazines. I merely observe, & do not complain (tho railing about the yearly influx of 'Fudgies' is a hallowed local tradition, after all!).

On to business: I know there are a few people very interested to know what happens to Kelrob and Jacobson in the next installment of The Magistricide. I've been spending a large amount of energy adapting to my new, very-different-than-a-trailer-perched-on-the-edge-of-reality existence; however, I have been doing some very devout, if periodic, writing. Much of my effort has been poured into a series of weird fantastical tales, which I'm hoping to polish and submit for zine publication in the next year. I've hacked at The Curse of Roc-Thalian, which has gotten itself into a very gooey, horrible flow - I definitely seem to be fusing elements of horror & fantasy with larger interpersonal arcs, & have hope for the book, though I doubt it will see print before early-to-mid 2016. I know I swore to get it published by October of this year, & admit the deadline became a somewhat uncomfortable lodestone in the midst of drastically & concretely altering my life. However, the book is mostly writ, and my editor (remember that friendly poke mentioned above?) is currently looking it over. With the luck of Dionysus and the fetid blessings of Nyarlathotep, the third installment of The Magistricide will burst into the world slightly before the leaves & flowers, along with a trickle of shorter fiction.

I've got more to relate; expect increased clutter on this page in future days. Lots of thoughts ricocheting in me brainpan: Lovecraft (& L. Sprague de Camp's rather infamous bio of him), Clark Ashton Smith (found a beautiful - but overpriced - hardbound book of his in town, drooled & walked away), krautrock (currently listening to later Kraan, which is kinda like disco-prog), getting the podcast up and humming, the fact that people have been rationalized out of an understanding of magic, allowing them to be constantly enspelled by corporate wizardry, downed Russian planes & the viscera left behind by suicide vests (Always remember, War ain't good for business: War IS business!), & a host of other glandular secretions desirous of being expressed in language. In short: The Curse of Roc-Thalian still being written. Also writing a host of odd and depraved little fictions. Have moved to Michigan, unified my family, & am prepared to endure the coming freeze-out. Also I like using &s now, apparently......AFFECTATION?

..........reality is an affectation. G'night n' talk soon.

Kindly Afterthought:

“Inability to accept the mystic experience is more than an intellectual handicap. Lack of awareness of the basic unity of organism and environment is a serious and dangerous hallucination. For in a civilization equipped with immense technological power, the sense of alienation between man and nature leads to the use of technology in a hostile spirit—to the “conquest” of nature instead of intelligent co-operation with nature.”- Alan W. Watts

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.

Ode to the Makers

Ode to the Makers

O you beautiful transmigrants!

Sewn to words like a deleterious cloth.

A wild, swaying passion seizes the mind

and the pen scribbles rampant.

O you beautiful transmigrants!

Effigies of former ages cast

in quantum flesh.

Your busts will loom o'er

the atom-blasted waste.

O you beautiful transmigrants!

Flare in worship sufficient

to sunder and remake the soul.

Dark chasms are yours,

and the inhabitants therein.

O sweet poetry! The curving rhyme

laps up the tail's singularity

and all is distraught

buffeted by the winds of Apollo.

O sweet suit of skin

a humming carapace of molecules

to execute animacy.

The act of every hand

and the word of every tongue

are preserved in the poet's eye.

O darling transmigrants!

The madmen raving at anthropomorphic marble

the magician hot with stave and will

the wail of Grecian harps

regurgitating up the throat of time.

Great Pan calls, and I must answer.

O you beautiful transmigrants,

Drunk on strange wine

and fed on queer dishes

gorged on the weird milk

of the Muse –

O darling transmigrants!

Let thy flow be my pulse.

Old Man, recede into your shell

and stopper up that bastion well.

Cram your ears with lumps of dirt

and hide from all that serves to hurt.

Hear not the scream of wind and rain

nor heed the rising swell of pain

that overtakes all living things

(tho Change is what this agony brings).

The guard, the day, the aeon absurd

will alter as surely as the Word!

Reflections, Work, Rock and Change

Big day over here in the States. Awoke to sudden marriage equality; currently there's a sense of simmering elation, a strange sudden understanding that alteration (CHANGE) is in play, will eternally be in play. We've constructed innumerable shackles for our minds, spirits and bodies over the millennia, primarily via the construction of societal norms...but reality is as mutable as we allow it to be. Right now there are thousands of fuming xtian fundamentalists writhing on the hook of that which they detest. I don't doubt that there will be innumerable further hurdles (there are always hurdles; without them change can't effect its eternal flux) but tonight is a brief moment of triumph. Of course one can argue about the institution of marriage as a whole; of course we can question this deep-seated assumption that our contemporary definitions of family and society are graven in stone when these conventions are also (gasp!) subject to change. The ideal family of ancient Greece is a dramatically different thing than the ideal family of Babylon or Rome or Imperial China; one can only assume (hope) that a thousand years down the road we will have arrived at an entirely new means of interacting with our human brethren as whole, to make no mention of mating conventions. But at this moment in the United States anyone can get married that wants to. The big picture yields to the little in some cases, especially when there's an occasion for frantic celebration.

Haven't posted on here for a while. And what mischief have I been up to in the last month? Working, traveling. I took a trip up to Michigan for a bit, connecting with family and friends. Enjoyed the stay, but it's always a pleasure to return to my peculiar little box in the dry lands. The first draft of The Curse of Roc-Thalian is nearing completion; I admit I'm a little behind schedule, but then I've always flourished in environments of looming deadlines. I set out to write this book without a definite idea of where the characters would go, trusting them to lead me in the right direction, and I haven't been disappointed. Now there's just a few hundred gallons of elbow grease required. Lots of work (long hours, contemplation, revision, despair and renewal of purpose) go into writing a book, at least any book worth reading. I'm hoping that all my blood and tears and other bodily fluids are evinced in the final text.

I'm currently in the midst of reading The Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler. My first Butler, and amazing; the capitalization of CHANGE above is owing to her influence. I'm enamored of her concept of a new faith/religion (Earthseed) arising to displace the outmoded spiritual systems of old. Butler's concept of revering change as the one constant, as the true face of God, is definitely the direction (or at least one of the directions) I feel we need to embrace. We need to learn from our past, not just record it and then fetishize it endlessly (WWII 'documentaries', I'm looking at you). We loathe change congenitally; we flourish on familiarity, to the extent that the smell of baking bread can waft us back to the forgotten demesne of childhood. But childhood does end, both for individuals and for races. The human species is poised on the brink of our own destruction/revelation, and CHANGE is the key. We must alter, shed the past while simultaneously revering it; we owe it to god/the gods to concoct new faces for the divine, instead of wallowing in age-old systems awash in entropy. That said, I encourage any and all fans of sci-fi, fantasy, or actual thought the read Butler immediately. Her vision of the near future is both chilling and beguiling.

So who am I? What am I? Am I a fantasist, a metaphysician, a crank, a magician, an alchemist, a writer, a fool? I'd argue all of these things. I certainly own the label 'Fool,' and savor the sensation of peering into the sun while my foot dangles precariously over the cliff. I decry labels, especially the labels of genre; we've become too cluttered, too post-modern, to convinced of our mastery of trope and narrative, while losing our ability to tell meaningful stories. I am definitely a writer, and will take that self-definition to the grave. But my interests are far-ranging. To me the hideous and grotesque are bedfellows with Beauty, that utter principal that needs no justification beyond itself. I do not seek perfection, but esteem the act of creation as the utmost human pursuit and purpose. I love my fellow-beings, even as they drive me to distraction; humanity is my palate, my materia, my definition and my drive. I can be no clearer than this. What I do decry is humanity's endless preference for locking itself in cul-de-sacs. CHANGE comes, whether or not we are prepared; indeed, change is our birthright. There is a general preference for stagnation amongst humans (thus our eternal craving for an unending Utopia) but natural processes (us included) just don't work that way. Change is coming, you better run. Or mutate.

My other primary influence is rock music. I haven't talked about it much on here, but my books are littered with little references. The House of the Setting Sun at the beginning of Tamrel is a homage to Swedish metal band Lake of Tears. Niblon the Black, the constellation Nuir sees on her ceiling in the house of Madame Heretia, is a call-out to T. Rex. There are other references, though none so direct as Douglas Adams quoting a bunch of Beatles songs in the beginning of Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. I intend to write an entire post on this in the near future, but suffice to say music has been my guiding principal every bit as much as the written word. If you are making real music it's impossible to lie. As far as I can tell Art is the one thing that cannot lie, and so to me it is the highest purpose. Of course art can be twisted into propaganda, but then it ceases to be art; true ART is true purpose, a difficult pill for a materialist world to swallow (despite the fact that it's far from bitter). More on this later as well.

Well, I guess that wraps things up for the moment. Listening to 'Swimming Song' by Loudon Wainwright III. "Hold your breath, kick your feet and move your arms around." Blessings to all on this day of triumph.

I know the Unknown and the Unknown knows me

Noble species fallen

pull yourself up by your glands!