There are Two Kinds of Libertarians (At Least)

Republicans who smoke pot.

And:

Anarchists who like money.

Keep the options going/growing!

(Lord knows we need more variety up in this piece…)

Just One Of Those Things

I’m in high school and I’m in speech class. I’m supposed to give my five minute speech on a historical figure today, only, uncharacteristically for me, I have arrived utterly unprepared.  My procrastination binge the night before ended in a procrastination overdose straight into a deep, albeit short, night’s sleep.

So I’m up this morning, in this 7am class and I do not have my shit together.

I’ve got a biographical speech to give on Malcolm X. I’ve got plenty of notes. They’re just not in any particular order, so I’ve got no speech. I’m slated to go fifth, right after R., the very big, tall guy who’s doing his speech on Lyle Alzado, a man who had, in three years, made a failed comeback attempt in the NFL, been diagnosed with brain cancer, publically confessed to year’s of steroid abuse, then died. I don’t recall who gave the first three speeches or even what they were about, since I only tangentially listened. While pretending to take notes on their speeches, I was trying to write mine. Simultaneously, I was also praying and chanting in my head, over and over again, for a small miracle.

Please, God, may I not have to give my speech today. May I give it tomorrow.

Malcolm X. was born Malcolm Little, the son of a follower of Marcus Garvey.

Please, God.

He had a religious conversion in prison and joined Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam.

May I not have to give my speech today.

Malcolm X. influenced Nelson Mandela, Public Enemy and shit shit shit shit.

May I give it tomorrow.

Our bespectacled freshman speech instructor with the lop-sided mustache closes the questioning after the third person’s speech.   He calls up R., who wears a baggy gray sweatshirt, jeans and a bandanna, not not unlike what a last-days Lyle Alzado would have worn himself. He puts his notes on the front desk, along with his visual aids: a poster of Lyle from The Destroyer, a biography, a Raider’s Jersey.

R. smiles a laid-back smile and starts his speech.

I stop my frantic scribbling.

Either something will save me in the next five minutes or not.

I go very still as I listen to R. give his speech. I’m not blinking very much, my breathe become very deep, methodical, focused. My focus goes in and out in waves—listening to the speech, searching it, very still–listening to my own mental chants—listening to R.’s speech—listening to my own sub-vocal petition. The whole time I am looking straight at R. As I continue to look at him, continue to breathe that deep, methodical breath, he becomes more and more nervous. At first, it manifests as a grimace here and there, then his voice starts to break. Three minutes into his speech and he’s speeding up as if trying to finish as soon as possible so he can end the agony. But no sooner does he speed up, he stumbles, stammering and stuttering, and has to back up and repeat himself. He begins to flub some facts, facts I’m sure he knew pretty well, getting increasingly exasperated and frustrated.

By the time he finishes his speech, he’s sweating and shaky.

There is just enough time, seven or eight minutes, for my speech. If any miracles are going to happen, they have to happen now.

“Okay. Thank you, R. Any questions for R?” asks our teacher.

I have yet to drop my gaze from R.

I raise my hand.

R. calls on me.

“I just wanted to clarify something. You said Lyle Alzado started using steroids in 1969 and you also said he started using steroids in 1989. I was just confused: which one is it?”

R.’s lip begins to quiver. The rest of his body tenses up, as if it’s all he can do to keep his head from exploding like in Scanners. That’s when he screams.

“I don’t know!”  It’s a loud thunderclap that begins a storm of snot and tears showering down his face. He throws his notes on the ground, shoves his Alzado poster, Alzado book, Alzado jersey, and all of the teacher’s stuff off the front desk and runs out of the room crying.

The teacher turns to us nervously and says, “Give me a moment, guys.”

He exits the room.

The other kids in the classroom immediately begin discussing what just happened. Me, I’m not saying anything. I’m shocked, then, perversely a little happy. I knew I shouldn’t be and it didn’t take but a seconds for me to realize why.  Hell, I deserved to be R. at that moment, out in the hallway crying and embarrassed. I’m positive he was completely and utterly prepared for his speech today, unlike me. No one would ever know that, though.

Five minutes later, the teacher steps back into the classroom.

“We won’t be doing any more speeches today. You guys can get your things together to go to your next class.”

I hadn’t read any woo-woo magick stuff back when this stuff happened, though being of a certain bent (the superstitious one), I figured on that day that I had caused R.’s melt-down. In a way, I probably did. Speaking in public always ranks high among American’s greatest fears, and that’s among adults, and Freshman Speech was a class most of us would not have taken if it had not been a requirement. It’s not unlikely R. fell within that camp. Add to latent public speaking fear, a brainy motherfucker sitting in the front staring you down, even if he’s not even a quarter of your size, and all that’s left to do is nudge things with a pointed question from that same brainy motherfucker’s mouth. Non-verbal communication? Psycho-dynamics? Hypnosis? Magick? Whatever term trips your switch. It’s just one of those things. It’s mundane or meaningful or somewhere in between simply depending on where you’re standing.

I do know that the medicine I needed was not the reprieve of fate in this fairly minor but note-worthy moment in my former life. The better pill would have been the exposure of my laziness in front of all those people, knowingly and willingly, with the acceptance of all that would have meant.

I gave my speech on Malcolm X the following day.  I didn’t even have to look at my notes once.

I got an A minus.

Gas and Prostitutes

Drinking a ginger ale at an old-man bar with my friend Z, he says:

“I’m walking through the neighborhood the other night, and there are a bunch of cops hanging out across the street from a nightclub. And I overhear one of the shorter cops standing in the middle of the group say, ‘You know, gas prices are really causing an effect on the prostitutes.’ I wanted to stop and say, ‘Tell me more!’ but I just kept on walking.”

No one ever thinks about that, how gas prices are effecting the prostitutes or any of the merchants of black-market wares, be they flesh, chemicals, or unauthorized services…

I hadn’t myself even been cognizant of the presence of prostitutes in the neighborhood until a few weeks ago. I’d been told by a long-time resident of the area when I moved in: “It’s a shit-hole. Lots of prostitutes.”

The only thing I had seen was a ridiculously-named strip club that I had to walk by on my way to the grocery store. (What strip club doesn’t have a ridiculous name?) No prostitutes, though.  I tend to get home late (1am) and do laundry much later (3am) when there’s laundry to do; if I hadn’t seen any of these property-devaluing paramours-for-hire at that hour, then perhaps my neighborhood had breakfast-hour prostitutes. Or maybe my perceptual mechanisms are simply not entrained to notice such things.

What my perceptual mechanisms are entrained to notice are coincidences or, if you’re less “rational,” or just less afraid of being judged as a weirdo, synchronicities–a.k.a magick.

So I’m at a different bar, a different borough, a different week, and I run into an old friend I haven’t seen in quite a while. She’s with her very tall, newish boyfriend, a fairly successful performer who believes in her greatly and is helping her to finally manifest some of her own artistic dreams. We’re catching up a little bit and she mentions that my core feels a lot stronger than the last time she saw me. Perhaps at one time I might have thought I knew what that meant, and though I’m certainly happy to get compliments, I couldn’t begin to tell you these days what she was on about. Very soon after, we stumble obliquely onto the topic of magick in the form of a thank you.  See, she’s a witchy kind of woman and she’s telling me that it’s working pretty well for her–magick, that is–and she nods toward her man-friend, who is engaged in a different conversation. She says she feels that she owes me thanks for turning her on to magick, for helping her find her spiritual path, in the form of some books I lent her at another time in both of our lives. In that life, I had been very much a magickal dilettante, an intellectual dabbler; so while I’m sure she sincerely feels thankful to me, I’m ambivalent about the influence my former self had on her present spiritual journey. Blind leading the blind and all that, though I suppose she did something with it or, at least, she feels like she has.  (And hell, if she feels it, then she really has.)

She asks me, “What are you doing with that these days?”  Magick, that is.

“Hard to say.” And maybe I could say, but whatever it is is between me and the Ineffable.  It’s private, personal, and so I don’t feel like divulging for the sake of what, by her raised eyebrow, seems to be an attempt to fish for gossip.  I probably have read her intentions totally wrong, but there it is: my choice–silence.

“Are you seeing anyone?” she asks me.

“Not at the moment, no.”

And then she pulls out a plant.

“Want some pussy?” she asks mischievously. Then she hands me a stick of pussy willow.

Well, why not.

Two blocks away from my house, and four hours later, I’m at the late-night deli, squeezing some mangos of dubious quality, hoping to find one worth purchasing at $1.29 a pop. (The gas prices are really having an effect on the mangos). I’ve got the pussy willow stalk in my free hand as I look them over.  I hear a woman’s voice, sensual in an over-rehearsed way.

“I like your plant.”

“Thanks,” I say, turning to look in the direction of the voice. And there, leaned up against the side counter, next to the juice cooler, up against the window looking out on the street, is a woman with bleach blond hair and a boustier. She’s very heavy set and wearing fishnets and black panties, neither of which is flattering. Standing next to her, still looking out the window is a man with a fedora, out of context with the flannel shirt and jeans he wears.

I turn back to my mangos.

So these are the prostitutes in my neighborhood.

Huh.

“You wanna date?” I hear her ask.

Looking at the pussy willow in my hand, I have to smile.

“No thanks.”

“I got women. Men. Whatever you want.”

This is probably not the result my witchy friend had in mind when she handed me that pussy, but it’s a pretty funny joke.

As I’m leaving with a couple of 50 cent bananas (the mangos were a wash), I hear the prostitute whining at the deli attendant about letting her use the employee bathroom, and he’s telling her, no, no, no, please leave now!

Gas prices are really causing an effect on lesser magick.

The Symbolic Powerhouse Unseen

On my way back.  Give it a few weeks.  In the meantime, here’s one of the most arresting segments from Richard Kelly’s ambitiously uneven, much-maligned and little-seen Southland Tales.  Those of the rabbit hole persuasion and well-read arch-ironists alike should appreciate the movie immensely, what with its multiple layers of symbolism and the use of the Eye-in-the-Pyramid as symbol of the happless, delusional, neo-Marxist revolutionaries who fight against the crass, neo-conservative technocrats who run the State.  In the movie, that is.  There’s also some of that ol’ time apocalyptic religion to boot.

Watch this clip closely.  You might miss something:

Skidoo.

 

Summing it Up with One Picture

While I still work through some house re-ordering out in the physical world, I won’t be posting too much. It may be another week or so.

However, in the meantime, I recently recieved this graphic which sums up in one power-house image of concentrated meaning, quite a bit about the Spectacular election ritual we are asked to participate in and cede time, energy and emotions to every few seasons.

And if folks would like to add some non-word symbol responses to this post, consider this a “communicating through images” thread.

Do Trey Parker & Matt Stone Read Waking the Midnight Sun? Or Is It Just Synchronicity?

Just got tipped off by regular reader, Costumeoff, about the latest episode of South Park. Imagine my surprise to hear about Matt Stone and Trey Parker touching upon Britney Spears, Miley Cyrus and…ritual sacrifice. Maybe, this insight is simply in the air now, having penetrating the veil. With satire and cartoon kids, South Park can bring the point home to so many more people than me and my humble rabbit hole diving can.

For those coming here just recently, my thesis is that the very public melt-downs and/or deaths of various Spectacle-created media starlets is simply the continuation of the ancient practice of ritualing sacrificing representatives of gods and goddesses. In our Cult-Sure, the practice has simply been rebranded, nominally secularized, and thus made harder to see, even though it’s now all right there out in the open and many of us participate in it unknowingly.

You can check out the South Park episode right here.

Here are the main pieces I’ve written on this site so far about our Cult-Sure’s debased rites of psychic human sacrifice. Compare this to what South Park’s saying and get back to me:

http://cadeveo.wordpress.com/2007/02/16/anna-nicole-smith-human-sacrifice-the-other-goddess-worship/

http://cadeveo.wordpress.com/2007/02/20/britney-the-bald-call-from-isht-to-isht/

http://cadeveo.wordpress.com/2007/10/02/meet-the-new-sacrificial-goddess-same-as-the-old-one/

The Quiet

Lots has been happening in the Spectacle, which is just the appearance of something happening. Conversely, it’s seemed that a lot of nothing has been happening with this site, and I’d like to think that’s because I’m doing a lot elsewhere in my flesh-life.

I hope to get back to updating and maintaining with lots of long overdue pieces in the near future. Unfortunately, right now I’ve got other things on my plate that must be attended to and I don’t feel like just phoning anything in over here.

So, we’re gonna be quiet for a spell. In the meantime, use this spot how you see fit. Comment away on what and how you will.

I’ll be back in due time.

On Eliot Spitzer: I Am Jack’s Complete Lack of Surprise

The Eliot Spitzer sex scandal is only “scandalous” if you live in a perpetual present with no memory of all the so-called scandals that came before.  A powerful politician, who has branded himself as a paragon of anti-corruption turns out to be corrupt?  To quote Fight Club, “I am Jack’s Complete Lack of Surprise.”

The obvious doesn’t just end with some cynical “All politicians are crooks” jag where I’m sitting, though.  No, that’s too easy and too pointless.  The other obvious aspects of this “scandal” to me other than the fact that Spitzer felt like he needed to pay to “get some” cuz whatever he was getting at home was not enough, is that this whole scandal looks and smells like a classic honeypot set-up.  Of course, Spitz had dirty laundry, of course.  The greater question is, who did he piss off to lead other factions of the political spectacle factory to turn on him and take him down?

There are many of obvious suspects and reasons we could point to there, too.

But, instead, I’ll refer you to an article for a beginning primer on the use of sexual blackmail in intelligence operations:

From Paranoia Magazine: Sex is a Gun: The Deeper Story of the D.C. Madam

Bill Hicks on Waco: Before and After

The wise man changes his views when he sees the truth.

Rest in peace, Bill.

Before the tragedy:

And after(from Rant in E-Minor):

Cadeveo on the Kentroversy Tapes

A little while back, Kent Daniel Bentkowski interviewed me for his very good podcast, the Kentroversy Tapes.  Now, the whole conversation is up and ready for your listening pleasure (or otherwise!).  Go check it out and then tell me what you think:

The Kentroversy Tapes-Monday, March 3, 2008