Live and Learn and Pass It On

Letter to the Editor by Sharon Underwood, Sunday, April 30, 2000 from the Valley News (White River Junction, VT/Hanover, NH)

As the mother of a gay son, I've seen firsthand how cruel and misguided people can be.Many letters have been sent to the Valley News concerning the homosexual menace in Vermont. I am the mother of a gay son and I've taken enough from you good people.

I'm tired of your foolish rhetoric about the "homosexual agenda" and your allegations that accepting homosexuality is the same thing as advocating sex with children. You are cruel and ignorant. You have been robbing me of the joys of motherhood ever since my children were tiny.

My firstborn son started suffering at the hands of the moral little thugs from your moral, upright families from the time he was in the first grade. He was physically and verbally abused from first grade straight through high school because he was perceived to be gay.

He never professed to be gay or had any association with anything gay, but he had the misfortune not to walk or have gestures like the other boys. He was called "fag" incessantly, starting when he was 6.

In high school, while your children were doing what kids that age should be doing, mine labored over a suicide note, drafting and redrafting it to be sure his family knew how much he loved them. My sobbing 17-year-old tore the heart out of me as he choked out that he just couldn't bear to continue living any longer, that he didn't want to be gay and that he couldn't face a life without dignity.

You have the audacity to talk about protecting families and children from the homosexual menace, while you yourselves tear apart families and drive children to despair. I don't know why my son is gay, but I do know that God didn't put him, and millions like him, on this Earth to give you someone to abuse. God gave you brains so that you could think, and it's about time you started doing that.

At the core of all your misguided beliefs is the belief that this could never happen to you, that there is some kind of subculture out there that people have chosen to join. The fact is that if it can happen to my family, it can happen to yours, and you won't get to choose. Whether it is genetic or whether something occurs during a critical time of fetal development, I don't know. I can only tell you with an absolute certainty that it is inborn.

If you want to tout your own morality, you'd best come up with something more substantive than your heterosexuality. You did nothing to earn it; it was given to you. If you disagree, I would be interested in hearing your story, because my own heterosexuality was a blessing I received with no effort whatsoever on my part. It is so woven into the very soul of me that nothing could ever change it. For those of you who reduce sexual orientation to a simple choice, a character issue, a bad habit or something that can be changed by a 10-step program, I'm puzzled. Are you saying that your own sexual orientation is nothing more than something you have chosen, that you could change it at will? If that's not the case, then why would you suggest that someone else can?

A popular theme in your letters is that Vermont has been infiltrated by outsiders. Both sides of my family have lived in Vermont for generations. I am heart and soul a Vermonter, so I'll thank you to stop saying that you are speaking for "true Vermonters."

You invoke the memory of the brave people who have fought on the battlefield for this great country, saying that they didn't give their lives so that the "homosexual agenda" could tear down the principles they died defending. My 83-year-old father fought in some of the most horrific battles of World War II, was wounded and awarded the Purple Heart.

He shakes his head in sadness at the life his grandson has had to live. He says he fought alongside homosexuals in those battles, that they did their part and bothered no one. One of his best friends in the service was gay, and he never knew it until the end, and when he did find out, it mattered not at all. That wasn't the measure of the man.

You religious folk just can't bear the thought that as my son emerges from the hell that was his childhood he might like to find a lifelong companion and have a measure of happiness. It offends your sensibilities that he should request the right to visit that companion in the hospital, to make medical decisions for him or to benefit from tax laws governing inheritance.

How dare he? you say. These outrageous requests would threaten the very existence of your family, would undermine the sanctity of marriage.

You use religion to abdicate your responsibility to be thinking human beings. There are vast numbers of religious people who find your attitudes repugnant. God is not for the privileged majority, and God knows my son has committed no sin.

The deep-thinking author of a letter to the April 12 Valley News who lectures about homosexual sin and tells us about "those of us who have been blessed with the benefits of a religious upbringing" asks: "What ever happened to the idea of striving...to be better human beings than we are?"

Indeed, sir, what ever happened to that?

[Spread the word: Pass this on]

I wholeheartedly agree with this woman's sentiments. As a sibling of a gay person, I try to confront this kind of prejudice wherever I see it. I have even been in a church meeting (back in my church days) where some guy was telling a story about how gays chased another guy around and almost made him run into oncoming traffic (not even a story about himself! Some other guy out there, so how do we even know this is even true?)

This was in a church I attended--so we know, it's not just the goofy preachers on tv, but these bastards are even moving into local churches with their lying propaganda, who's really the one with the agenda? You, or the fictitious pedophile gay people teaching school to your children? Anyway, when my brother came out of the closet, I started listening a little harder to the rhetoric that was being spewed by the Xian church, and it was one of the things that made me decide it wasn't for me.

And in other news: It may not be news to some of you, but this was news to me--what is really interesting is that it involves the lovely and talented Lon Milo DuQuette, probably one of my favorite people right now.

And just in time for my birthday: Tonight, on AMC, The Blues Brothers.

"It's 106 miles to Chicago, we've got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark, and we're wearing sunglasses."

Riding that old Mount Prospect police car, this is the newly 38 year old Hermgirl, signing out.

More on Bonzo--sorry, can't leave this alone, grew up during the 80's, etc...

Had to share this from Craigslist.

 

Now that we've put Bonzo to bed for the last time, let's all go see this movie about five times and make sure we don't have another four more years of incompetence.

And Today is a Very Good Day

As we say goodbye to someone who wanted to destroy the school lunch program by pulling funds from it, on the grounds that ketchup could be considered a vegetable.

Ronald Reagan was also the governor of my home state of Kah-lee-fohrnya, and one of the most memorable things he did (in my view, and representative of where his real heart for the people was) was a wonderful luncheon he had in the governor's mansion.

During Reagan's tenure, Cesar Chavez was leading the migrant farmworkers to rise up against unfair treatment, one of the avenues this took was the Grape Boycott. In a classic piece of upper-crusty right-wing snarkiness (right up there with Marie Antoinette's "Let them eat cake!" remark) Reagan served grapes for lunch and flippantly said something to the effect of "I don't see what the problem is; these are delicious."

This is what I will remember when I think of "The Great Communicator."

In Other News: My nephew is better, and out of the coma. Among his words upon awakening: "Ooh, my head hurts!"

Let that stand as a lesson to anyone who thinks that it's OK to drink/take drugs and operate heavy machinery.

A little comic relief from Eddie Izzard...

Which Eddie Izzard "Dressed to Kill" line are you? by Saphyne
Username
Eddie Izzard quote:	"If the president of Burundi says, 'Would you like a cup of coffee,' you’re not supposed to go, 'Yeah, I’m in here!' 'And how do you take it?' 'Anywhere, find it, big boy! Oh, just a cup of coffee, all right… I thought you meant ‘Do you want a cup of *coffee*!'"
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Update on my nephew

Well, my nephew is still wrapped in bubble pack. They actually wrap them in bubble pack in situations like this.

He has a subdural hematoma, which is a swelling in his brain. When they got him to the hospital, he was unconscious, then went into a coma. Then they put him under drug-induced coma so that he wouldn't wake up suddenly and jar himself. It is very important in these cases that they remain completely still, so that the swelling can go down.

In the next 24 hours they will learn more. They will be slowly taking him off the drugs and said that they may need to peel back the top of his head to relieve the swelling.

So basically, no good news yet, but no bad news either.

Hermgirl's Excellent Tarot Adventure

I've been computerless for a couple of weeks, and a couple of days ago I got my computer back from the cleaners (I have it on good authority that it is now clean as a whistle.)

So I wanted to share with you all about my weekend.

I went to Divinationfest on Saturday, which was presented by Daughters of Divination, as was Thoth-a-palooza on Sunday, which was a talk given by the lovely and talented Lon Milo DuQuette.

I had expected a larger "psychic fair" type of thing, but was pleased to note that it was a more intimate gathering, not the cattle run sort of thing I had been to before a couple of times (in my teens I went to one where I met a man who became my "Tarot teacher" for a couple of months, the upshot of that being that I've been reluctant to go to any Tarot/psychic type functions til now for fear of bumping into this person again, but that's another story for another time.) Of course, it would be nice to see more people go to these things, hence my plugging of the appropriate websites.

Anywho, I got there on Saturday and it was set up like a classroom or a church meeting. I sat down, right next to Mr. DuQuette, and proceeded to gush at him like a teenager. Sometimes I am overly enthusiastic--I have to cut that out.

Then things got started, with Thalassa, the Mistress of Ceremonies (who, in the words of Will Farrel channeling James Lipton, is "Scrumtrelescent." Anyone who lives "with a herd of feral dust bunnies and too many Tarot decks in what looks like a fortress made of books" is my kind of person), holding an Intuition shaver over her head. The theme of the fest was to get ourselves to think oracularly by listening to what was going on in the universe.

Joseph Ernest Martin was there, creator of the Quest Tarot, talking about what makes a good psychic. Then he led us thru an exercise in which we tried focusing in on a picture he had in an envelope and seeing how close we could come to what was inside. There was also some discussion about how the military investigated what kinds of personalities make a good psychic. They got a bunch of these people together, trained them, and used them for their psychic skills, didn't give them any kind of support when they got burnt out, and then threw them away like toilet paper. I'll just let everyone mull that over for a while.

Then Lon Milo DuQuette gave a talk entitled "Psychic Power? YOU'RE FULL OF IT!" in which he told some great stories and even recited stentorially from Shakespeare's The Tempest. I'm a sucker for a great speaker.

Then there was an interesting divinatory technique demonstrated called Aura Soma. We were lead through a chakra tune-up, instructed to ask a question, then choose from about a hundred bottles with colored water and oil in them. Each bottle was half filled with tinted water, then filled to the top with oil of a different color. Each was keyed to a Tarot card. The interpretations were very poetic, like, "This is the bottle of the Jade Emperor," "This is the bottle of the Guardian Angel", it was extremely interesting.

Then there was a woman teaching on palmistry, which doesn't really excite me too much, so I stayed in the narthex, listening like a fly on the wall, perpetrating like I was reading the books and flyers. I found it quite educational to listen to the event facilitators share their troubles with each other.

Then there was a raffle (I won a prize!) Then it was over. It had been an extremely good day, I even made a new friend and we had lunch together. I walked down to the BART station, stopping in front of the Diva hotel, where I stood in the square that had Chita Revera's handprints.

Sunday I had a little trouble getting there on time (those busses in the city are not easy to figure out.) When I arrived Lon Milo DuQuette was talking about the life of Aleister Crowley. He interspersed this with stuff about his own spiritual journey. Then he talked about the Book of the Law (thereby rendering himself a center of pestilence.)

From there he talked about the Quabalistic progression of the creation story, working his way into a slide show discussion of the trump cards and the minor arcana.

On the whole, I was very glad I attended this, I feel as though I have a better handle on the cards after this weekend. Plus I bought lots of books, yay! So I will have lots of homework ahead of me.

Update in Library

Seven minutes to go--comp totally down at home--will check in tomorrow when I have two hours.

Comp being taken in for repairs.

Recently caught up with the KAGC--much intense awesomeness to follow.

A couple of things:

I am currently experiencing technical difficulties with my comp, so I may be offline for a while. Will attempt to use library comp.

And in other news: If you are within the sound of my voice, live in the San Francisco Bay Area, and are interested in Tarot and other forms of divination, please go to . I am hoping other pagan LJ people in my area will be interested, and we can get together. I am so definately going to this.

Will attempt to check back tomorrow and the next day.

First real post in a long time, I would be greatly remiss if I didn't share what happened a few days ago.

As most of you may know, I am a dogwalker by trade. This day I was walking my latest charge, a miniature schnauser by the name of Sunny. She is very small and has a good temperament, which sort of lulled me into a false sense of security. Big mistake not to think I should have been watching her like a hawk.

Unbeknownst to me, her owners had her collar adjusted just a tad bit loose. I had her on one of those leashes that feeds out from a hand held unit, the kind that lets them get pretty far away. Well, of course, she slipped right out of her collar and was a block away before I could do anything about it, and the chase was on.

I saw a group of teenage boys ahead of me, all dressed in gym clothes, looking like they were out for a jog. Perfect people to ask for help, right? Wrong. They kind of danced around like chickens, and in the end did nothing--they could have been making fun of me, I wasn't sure. Most teenagers, not all teenagers, but most teenagers are about as helpful as a screen door on a submarine.

Well, Sunny was zigging and zagging and getting further away. I lost sight of her, then spied her again, at an alarming distance. We were now by the high school, and I sort of hoped she would run in there, because it might have been easier to catch her in the enclosed yard. But no! She decided it would be fun to run all the way down Park Blvd., zigging and zagging as she went.

She was now at least four blocks away, a tiny grey dot going back and forth. That was it, she was going to get hit by a car and I was going to have a heart attack. I was so not prepared to run this fast--I mean, this little doggie was fast.

I reached the intersection by the front of the school and started to panic. The dog was nowhere to be found. The direction she had been running in, where I last saw her at this intersection, led up to El Camino just a couple blocks away. This is a major street where there are tons of cars going fast, very few of them likely to stop for a little grey schnauzer. All I could think was that she was going to be smushed.

Thankfully, the direction she was going in was also East. As I ran, I started doing a Lesser Invoking Ritual of the Pentagram, turning each direction as I went. After I traced the pentagram in the direction of the Archangel Michael, I stabbed it with my fingers and shouted, "Adonai!" Cars were going by, I didn't care if anyone saw me.

After I finished, I returned to screaming the dog's name. A man down the street waved, "She's here!" he yelled. Praise be to the Divine Current, some nice people had gotten Sunny's attention and kept her from going any further. A woman was holding her in the corner of a driveway. I thanked the people and sat down with the dog in the shade of a minivan in the corner of the driveway.

I put Sunny's collar back on and adjusted it a little. I had a little talk with her while I caught my breath, and petted her.

When I got back up to take her home, behind where I had been sitting, I found a lucky penny. A reminder that god is always with me.

Something to tide you over till my next real post

Grab the book nearest to you, turn to page 18, find line 4. Write down what it says.
Herman Hesse's Siddhartha: "There still remains much to learn."
Stretch your left arm out as far as you can. What do you touch first?
A floppy disk with my resume on it.
What is the last thing you watched on TV?
Judging Amy.
WITHOUT LOOKING, guess what the time is.
4:00 pm
Now look at the clock; what is the actual time?
3:29 pm
With the exception of the computer, what can you hear?
Dad running the water.
When did you last step outside? What were you doing?
1:30. Took the dogs out--I now have three (soon possibly four) dog-walking clients--Yay!
Before you came to this website, what did you look at?
Checked email.
What are you wearing?
Nothing but a bathrobe. Don't all get exited at once.
Did you dream last night?
I'm sure I must have but I almost never remember my dreams.
When did you last laugh?
Probably the other night watching tv--I sit in the den & watch funny stuff & laugh out loud, I'm goofy that way. At least I'm actively participating in it.
What is on the walls of the room you are in?
Bookshelves full of my dad's stamp albums--I'm in the den.
Seen anything weird lately?
Does the funeral afterparty I went to yesterday count?
What do you think of this quiz?
S'pretty good--it got me posting again.
What is the last film you saw?
LOTR--I hardly ever go to the movies.

If you became a multi-millionaire overnight, what would you buy first?
A big plot of land somewhere around Half Moon Bay or San Gregorio where I could build a straw bale or cob home. Such a hippie chick, I know.
Tell us something about you that we don't know.
When I was a kid, from age twelve to about 16 and 1/2, I was the biggest Doors fan evah.
If you could change one thing about the world, regardless of guilt or politics, what would you do?
Have all of the liberals secede from the US so the damn conservatives could have their own place and we could have ours. Although, I wonder if that would be a very good idea?
Do you like to dance?
Yes, and I do so divinely.
Would you ever consider living abroad?
If I found a place I liked, yeah.
Will you pass on this survey?
Consider it passed--or as Ziggy said, "...I'm sure one of my many LJ friends will steal it from me."

I will soon have a real entry, but it doesn't seem to want to get written.

Couldn't resist this...

Haven't posted in a while, hope this will tide everyone over--will have a REAL entry soon, promise.

LiveJournal Haiku!
Your name:	hermgirl
Your haiku:	there close enough to get high it wasn't worth eighty bucks of my crochet
Username:
Created by Grahame

Fleetwood Mac Goodness

Fleetwood Mac is BIG Love.



And some SNL wonderousness:



SNL is love.



It's a seventies thing, fellow babies.
And to think, I was a kid during this awesome era...

Mars Trines Jupiter

So I am really feeling good, yesterday and today.  I am making lists, getting my life and plans and goals in order, and generally taking advantage of this time.

Of course, when I get up today, my dad has not been having such a good time.  In an inexplicable foul mood, tells me he had a gross nightmare that he can't even explain.  This is an odd phenomenon, whenever I am feeling on top of the world like this, he is often extremely down in the dumps.

Oh, well.  Mine is not to puzzle or worry over this.  Mine is only to Do What I Will.

You are Shetland Wool...

You are Shetland Wool.
You are a traditional sort who can sometimes be a
little on the harsh side. Though you look
delicate you are tough as nails and prone to
intricacies. Despite your acerbic ways you are
widely respected and even revered.


What kind of yarn are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

Two Friday Fives, since it's Sunday afternoon...

1. Are you superstitious?  No.  Superstition:  1 a:  a belief or practice resulting from ignorance, fear of the unknown, trust in magic or chance, or a false conception of causation   b:  an irrational abject attitude of mind toward the supernatural, nature, or God resulting from superstition    2:  a notion maintained despite evidence to the contrary      My beliefs do not come from ignorance or fear.


2. What extremes have you heard of someone going to in the name of superstion?     I remember seeing people pay extreme amounts of money to go listen to people teach them superstitious ideas at seminars.  This is when I was in the Xian church.


3. Believer or not, what's your favorite superstition?     In light of question #1, I don't know if this is an answerable question.


4. Do you believe in luck?   Yes.   Do you have a lucky number/article of clothing/ ritual?     Now this is something I do do more irrationally.  Whenever I see pennies, I pick them up, so all day long I'll have good luck.     As far as lucky clothing, I have this one orange teeshirt that I always get good responses from the menfolk (I will always remember that I was wearing this when I had my 30-second meeting with Counting Crows guitarist David Immergluck.  Much heat was being generated, my friends.  It was da hotness.) when I wear it.   Again, this is no irrationality, since the color orange is keyed to the second chakra, the chakra of sexuality and pleasure.  Oh yes.


5. Do you believe in astrology?  Yes.     Why?   As a Gemini with Venus in Taurus (and that is all I remember about myself, astrologically) I feel that it is a good general indicator of personality.

 

 

When was the last time you...

1. ...went to a doctor?   Twenty years ago, when I had coverage.


2. ...went to a dentist?   Same answer.


3. ...filled your gas tank?  I've never had one.


4. ...got enough sleep?   Enough sleep?  What's that?  I don't even know how much sleep my body needs.


5. ...backed up your computer?  Uhh, all I ever do is clear my cookies and defrag occasionally.  I do have Norton Antivirus sofware.

This last Friday Five made me feel like a homeless bum...

All things just keep getting better...

Ted: Food & Wine Connoisseur


Which Member from Queer Eye for the Straight Guy is your type?
brought to you by Quizilla



If Ted, Carson, or Jai were straight, it would be game on...

We love you, man, but please sit this one out.

Ralph, don't run.

It does matter.

I guess I'll have to read this now...

You're One Hundred Years of Solitude!

by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Lonely and struggling, you've been around for a very long time.
Conflict has filled most of your life and torn apart nearly everyone you know. Yet there
is something majestic and even epic about your presence in the world. You love life all
the more for having seen its decimation. After all, it takes a village.


Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

"Come forth, o children, under the stars, & take your fill of love!"

Do What Thou Will Shall Be the Whole of the Law.

Love is the Law, Love under Will.

Another reason Bush is an asshole...

As if we needed any more fodder.

Ok, I don't think the president, his cabinet, the constitutional amendment people, the people in the supreme court, or anyone in the federal government belongs saying or doing anything about this issue. 

This is a lifestyle issue.  You have no right to legislate or amend anything having to do with lifestyle.  It just makes me so mad that Dubya has taken this country which was in pretty good shape when Clinton left, ruined the economy, gotten us into a war, and now he wants to turn the clock back and add more discrimination into the mix. 

The Law is for All

The Book of the Law is adamantly against the rule of mass man. We shall witness many disturbences in the years to come as their bad taste in social organization, religion and politics gradually increases and diminishes._{--Israel Regardie, The Law is for All}

So I had a lot of time on my hands and I've been reading my books. The more I read of Thelema, the more I am convinced I am on the right road. Being self-oriented is better, IMHO, than self-sacrifice or living for others. How can one make a real contribution to society unless one first deals with oneself? Living to please others can be a never-ending job. And then, so many different people with so many different ideas about what is important, what is urgent, what is needed right now, and what can wait. To comply with them all would be impossible, and who would want to? As we have seen with our current American president, some people have the most ridiculous ideas.

Current laws relative to homosexuality will have to be modified or repealed as they have already been in Great Britain._{--Israel Regardie}

I heard something interesting today. One of my gay brother's friends that we used to party with is one of the people that went up to San Francisco City Hall to get married. Today they only let fifty couples get married. I was hoping ther would be a constant influx of gays that wanted to get married. I hope they don't stop.

I support gay marriage.

Friday night was a party for the people across the street, it was the husband's 60th birthday, there was a belly dancer, lots of crazy fun ensued. I walk dogs for these people, but I am not very close to them. Their oldest daughter (my age) and I did not get along at all when we grew up, and though now we both seem to be able to communicate and be pleasant with one another (I was even showing her some of my crochet work, and she showed me some of hers), there is definately a sense that we have very different values and perspectives on life, and therefore must interact on only a mundane level. Anyway, I left early as I always do from their gatherings.

My nephew came over yesterday, and had been with us a full hour before any of us remembered it was Valentine's day. That's how much we care. It was nice to have his Leo sunshine here for awhile.

I also spent some time knitting. I am almost through with a scarf that has taken me about TWO YEARS. One of these days I will have a digital camera and be able to post my work.

The Latest in Hermworld

Warning:  This entry is probably going to be very pissy/moany.  What can I tell you, I'm a curmudgeon... 

I'm walking the dogs today and I enter the park.  Just ahead of me was some guy getting out of a city parks truck.  He walks in ahead of me and then turns around, blocking my way.  Apparently, we are not allowed to walk dogs in the park--at all, even with a leash.  The guy was very nice about it, saying that basically it was a case of a few irresponsible people ruining it for everyone else.  Walking their dogs without leashes, and when asked to leash them getting belligerent.  There had been a couple instances of dogs knocking babies over.

I have no problem with any of this, I have no intention of going against a city ordinance.  So I leave, go around, go home and get the other dog, go around again (I actually live right next to this park.)  As I walk by the park again, I notice there are more city park guys just kind of hanging around and talking.  As I go by they quiet down and start talking again as I get further away.  There are an awful lot of city park guys around for some reason...

So this is just an example of the sense of entitlement that people have that just bugs me.  You have a park where it is illegal to walk your dog but they sorta don't care if you do, because  it's kind of agreed that if you want them to extend you this priviledge, you won't walk the dog without a leash.  So not only do you flout this law, you act like an asshole if someone asks you to comply?  I have no more patience for you my friend.

And you who are parents of a child who may be small enough to get knocked over by a dog, I have this to say to you:  Why are you not right there, close enough to the child so you can see what is going on?  Do we need to childproof everything so that you don't have to pay attention to anything?  That parental sense of entitlement really bugs me.

And the thing that really burns my onions about the whole issue is the amount of people who look at having a dog as an entitlement, when, let's face it, there are people out there that are just not responsible enough to have a pet.  I have been militantly pro-people-must-have-a-leash-for-their-dog since my cat was killed by an unleashed dog a couple of years ago.  Not only that, but you must be paying attention when you take them out in public.  I have heard horror stories about people just blithely going for a run with a dog on one of those really long retractable leashes and then getting out in heavy traffic with them, then being dumbfounded when the dog gets killed by a car.  You are not entitled to risk the life or limb of another sentient being.

A woman on a message board was whining about how her dog had killed a cat and she was bent out of shape that she was actually gonna have to go to court and have some kind of penalty.  I practically ripped her a new one.  I believe if your dog has bitten someone or killed another pet, you have basically made your dog as much a victim of your stupidity as the harmed party. 

Can you kind of tell I have a strong opinion about this?  And then I find out from my mom that they are also talking about making cosmetic changes to the park, building bathrooms, etc, and I realize, "Oh, that's why they were swarming the park today."  They haven't cared this much about the park the entire 37 years I've been living here, but since the city Beautification Committee wants a new project, this is how it goes.

To end things on a better note, I got my copy of Crowley's Liber Aba in the mail today.  So I now have something to stick my nose in to find surcease for the sorrow of growing weary of the ways of man.  I am being edified just thumbing through the thing, now I am going to settle in for a nice long read. 

Sigh, end of rant.

Serving up a plate of "I'm as mad as Hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore!"

This entry is dedicated to Carlie Brucia, 1993 - 2004

Well, I watched Larry King tonight, I hope they string this guy up.  I just don't know anymore.  Where do these people get the idea that hurting kids is ok?  Where does a judge get the idea that a guy with a list of priors as long as your arm is a good risk to be let loose?

Being a thelemist, a person who is concerned with the ideas of Will, intention, and motivation, these are the things that knock me for a loop.  You see every man and every woman is a star, and each star in the galaxy has an appointed path to follow.   Here's Joseph Smith, a guy who is traveling down a violent road, and he's not ashamed of the things he's done, I think he thinks it's pretty nifty.  He's quite pleased with himself.  He keeps going down that road, and he doesn't stop himself until he gets to that place with the dead little girl. 

I saw that picture of the "alleged" killer, there is no capacity for remorse or compassion in those eyes.  And everyone deserves compassion, the word of the Law says:  "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law; Love is the Law, Love under Will."  Every human being is worthy of compassion.  Except possibly for those who have extinguished every ounce of humanity in themselves.  That's what I believe this guy is.  He is not human, he has made himself a creature.  Somewhere back there on the road behind him he set his intention to wind up here. 

I say show him no mercy, he had none.

 

Lastly, I think everyone should go to this site.  They deserve every bit of love and support we can give them.

 

 

I'm such a Gemini!

LOVERS
"the synthesizer of dualities, polarities,
and opposites"
You have extraordinary gifts working with people of
all ages. You can access your deep
understanding, application, and synthetical
abilities dealing with the concept of paradox,
polarity, and opposition. Relationships are an
important focal point for personal growth and
development-- you need to feel things changing
in a relationship. You have the ability to do
multi-level thinking. You have great insite
and perception of what is going on with people.


which major arcana of the thoth tarot deck are you? short, with pictures and detailed results
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But enough of me stealing quizzes from http://www.livejournal.com/users/fratercapriel/.

Last night I watched Audrey Hepburn in "A Nun's Story". It amazes me that people thought (& some of them still think) that living a life of such austere self-denial can help you achieve communion with God. Even more amazing was that at one time I sort of almost was going to be one of them. Not a nun, but sort of the austere self-denial thing. I actually broke all of my Rory Gallagher & Jethro Tull records, that's how austere & self-denying we're talking. People it was bad.

Even if you want to be one of those Christian people, doesn't the bible issue the injunction to "Taste and see that the Lord is good."? What can that mean? Are you really gonna tell me that to you it means spending all day in complete silence, taking an unflinching moral inventory twice a day and writing your faults down daily in a notebook!? That talking to people is bad? That you have to feel bad for making friends with people? I honestly don't think there is any human in the history of the world (including Jesus, if he ever existed) that would be able to adhere to such strictures.

Marilyn Manson said, "I started to learn that everything that’s considered a sin is what makes you a human being." I have thoughts, I have desires, I am not allowed access to God because of them? This doesn't mean that I'm walking around town wearing nothing but lingerie and turning tricks or whatever, but you get what I mean...

So if I was to define what God was to me (at least at this juncture in my life, or this week, or whatever) it is me achieving a state of No-Mind, or No-God, and from there getting in tune with All There Is, and from there learning what my True Will is, and from there...

I "worship" at the herm of experience... That means tasting, that means making mistakes, that means being joyous, that means talking to my invisible friends and being goofy, whatever I feel like that day.

---

Currently reading: The Chicken Qabalah, by Lon Milo Duquette--since I am a dilettante with a really short attention span who pretentiously considers myself a Hermetic Qabalist, this is excellent.

Teen Psychic, by Julie Tallard Johnson--yeah, I know, cheesy title. I really couldn't care less what people think is fluffy/not fluffy/too eclectic/whatever--I have seen online communities where people were practically discouraged from posting there at all because anyone that asked a question or wanted to discuss something that seemed remotely fluffy they were sternly castigated and called "playgans" by the group's moderator. Anyhoo, this is a pretty good book, has a lot of interesting stuff about shamanism, which is a topic I am interested in, and lots of meditation exercises. I like to collect different meditation techniques.

"And still I rise..."--Maya Angelou

You are a PHOENIX in your soul and your
wings make a statement. Huge and born of flame,
they burn with light and power and rebirth.
Ashes fall from your wingtips. You are an
amazingly strong person. You survive, even
flourish in adversity and hardship. A firm
believer in the phrase, 'Whatever doesn't kill
you only makes you stronger,' you rarely fear
failure. You know that any mistake you make
will teach you more about yourself and allow
you to 'rise from the ashes' as a still greater
being. Because of this, you rarely make the
same mistake twice, and are not among the most
forgiving people. You're extremely powerful and
wise, and are capable of fierce pride, passion,
and anger. Perhaps you're this way because you
were forced to survive a rough childhood. Or
maybe you just have a strong grasp on reality
and know that life is tough and the world is
cruel, and it takes strength and independence
to survive it. And independence is your
strongest point - you may care for others, and
even depend on them...but when it comes right
down to it, the only one you need is yourself.
Thus you trust your own intuition, and rely on
a mind almost as brilliant as the fire of your
wings to guide you.You are eternal and because
you have a strong sense of who and what you
are, no one can control your heart or mind, or
even really influence your thinking. A symbol
of rebirth and renewal, you tend to be a very
spiritual person with a serious mind - never
acting immature and harboring a superior
disgust of those who do. Likewise, humanity's
stupidity and tendency to want others to solve
their problems for them frustrates you
endlessly. Though you can be stubborn,
outspoken, and haughty, I admire you greatly.


*~*~*Claim Your Wings - Pics and Long Answers*~*~*
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More Stuff About the Wonderful Me

1. I have a fixation on guys like Bobcat Goldthwaite, Dave Attel, and Jack Black, because they seem like what I might be like if I was a guy.
2. I am unemployed, but I currently have a small dog-walking business. It came at a time when I was very desperate, I was running out of money to pay for a storage unit which had lots of books and craft supplies in it. I subsequently did run out of money for it and lost everything. I try not to think about it too much, it hurts to lose all that useful stuff that I was trying to save. My bad for being such a pack-rat, I guess.
   
   When I was really feeling desperate, I went on Beliefnet and found a pagan prayer. I've actually been studying metaphysics off and on for some time, but I was going out of my mind. Two hours after I prayed, I was talking to my next door neighbor, who asked how much I would charge to walk her dog, and bingo, I had a small means of income drop into my lap. Recently, another neighbor has been added to my roster of canine perambulation, and so things are looking up.
3. When I was on Bloop I talked to a young person about Tarot, (I'm not an expert or a pro {I'd kind of like to be}but I was fairly decent at it some years ago. Getting back into it again.) It seems like some people have these preconceived notions about Tarot, that before you can do it you need to do magick rituals, have candles, etc. I'm not that ooga-booga about it. I feel (especially for young people) magick should be a matter of choice, and if you make that choice, you want to spend a lot of time studying and meditating about it. I also believe you should use divination to guide your magick. So if you needed to do magick to read the cards, it would be like putting the cart before the horse. Divination, to me, is a tool to help you know yourself so that you can bring more to the table magickwise.
4. So last night I was watching videos on Launchcast, I was looking at Stone Temple Pilots (the live version of Sex Type Thing) and also managed to watch that Dave Navarro/Carmen Electra thing. I saw that Dave sports a Unicursal Hexagram tat, which immediately made me sit up and take notice. I then did a google search on him and found out that he's not necessarily the stupid slut-boy I originally thought he was.
   
   Then I found something that said he had surveillance footage on his website of himself masturbating and whispering, "Is this what you wanted?" Something about that made me decide, "Yeah, that's what I want." So I did more mad googling and came up with bupkiss. There is a page on his website that appears to have been sold off to a toy store website--as if something was there, but now that he's marrying Carmen he doesn't want anything like that out there, which I can respect.
   
   So basically, the combination of Scott Weiland's naked butt/Dave Navarro's possible online jackage made me one horny Hermgirl. The idea that developed in my mind was that I would like to see a male stripper that acts like a rock star and comes out wearing women's lingerie and maybe a pair of long fishnet glove things and eyeliner. And lets me smack that ass.
   
   There was a guy I used to work with that was hot like that. In his off hours he was a stripper. He kinda dug me too, I called him "Darryl the Hoochie-Man." Whenever I walked by, he used to do a little snaky stripparella dance for me...

How did the Belief-O-Matic do?

I got this info here.

1. New Age (100%)
2. Neo-Pagan (97%)
3. Unitarian Universalism
4. Mainline to Liberal Christian Protestants (85%)
5. Liberal Quakers (80%)
6. New Thought (79%)
7. Christian Science (Church of Christ, Scientist) (77%)
8. Mahayana Buddhism (77%)
9. Theravada Buddhism (77%)
10. Scientology (68%)
11. Bahá'í Faith (64%)
12. Reform Judaism (61%)
13. Taoism (59%)
14. Mainline to Conservative Christian/Protestant (56%)
15. Orthodox Quaker (56%)
16. Secular Humanism (53%)
17. Hinduism (47%)
18. Nontheist (47%)
19. Orthodox Judaism (45%)
20. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) (43%)
21. Jainism (37%)
22. Islam (37%)
23. Jehovah's Witness (35%)
24. Seventh Day Adventist (34%)
25. Sikhism (31%)
26. Eastern Orthodox (24%)
27. Roman Catholic (24%)

What's My Type?

free enneagram test

INFP - "Questor". High capacity for caring. Emotional face to the world. High sense of honor derived from internal values. 4.4% of total population.

Take Free Myers-Briggs Personality Test

Conscious self	Overall self

Take Free Enneagram Personality Test

Enneagram Test Results Type 1 Perfectionism |||||||||||| 50% Type 2 Helpfulness |||||||||||| 42% Type 3 Ambition |||||||||| 34% Type 4 Sensitivity |||||||||||| 46% Type 5 Detachment |||||||||||||||||| 74% Type 6 Anxiety |||||||||| 38% Type 7 Adventurousness |||||||||| 38% Type 8 Aggressiveness |||||||||||| 50% Type 9 Calmness |||||||||||||||||| 74% Your Conscious-Surface type is 9 Your Unconscious-Overall type is 8w9

Take Free Enneagram Personality Test

And most importantly:


You are Recovering The Satellites, you have
achieved success but are not entirely sure how
to deal with it. You're being positive though
and it shows.


Which Counting Crows album are you?
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The Darkest Time in My Life--Or, How My Cats Helped Me Through a Tough Time

The lowest time in my life was when I was about 25. I went through the most debilitating depression I ever thought anyone could have. It lasted for about a year, and the memories I have of this time are very fuzzy. Today, if I hear that someone I know is depressed, I tend to be more sympathetic than before I went through it.

There were about four or five different points of crisis that I believe contributed to this state. I had broken off a friendship with a friend I had had for 10 years, it was almost like going through a divorce. This friend had been very manipulative and domineering, so by the end of the 10 years I sort of no longer had a personality of my own, I was more like an extension of this person's life. Psychologists will tell you that these kind of relationships can be very damaging to the ego, and breaking it off like I had to do can then be quite traumatic.

Another factor was the fact that I had fallen in love with someone, the first man I had ever been interested in. In my younger days at school and so forth I had never been interested in guys, preferring to spend my time with aforementioned friend or alone. When I became attracted to this guy it hit me like a ton of bricks, like all that repressed stuff just came out all at once. He was very cute, funny, and smart, and he knew it. Unfortunately, it wasn't meant to be.

Another factor was my five-year experiment with Christianity. It caused an even bigger rift between me and the rest of my family than I had already had, coming off my rebellious teen years. They just did not understand what was going on with me. I had always been weird to them, and this was just confirmation. Christianity was sort of like a drug to me, at the end of the five years it just got harder & harder to get "high". It wasn't helping me with the problems I had turned to it with in the first place. In the end I was going to church & bawling my eyes out through the whole service, every time I went. I would kneel in my dark little room in prayer every morning, at the end of an hour I was shouting at the ceiling. One weekend I was tired of not being able to communicate with god the way I used to, so I asked for a sign from him about what he wanted me to do, how I could get back in touch with his will, etc. My family & I were spending the weekend out in the country. Nothing happened until my mom and I were driving home. We were the only ones in the car. Then she drops the bomb: My brother has informed the family that he is gay. I have since come to appreciate & celebrate gay people, but at the time I was a fundamentalist Christian, so this certainly knocked me for a loop. Oddly enough, when we were teens, I was the rebellious one & he was the straight laced young republican (I used to call him the Reagan Youth, because he voted for him both times.)

Also, I had quit my job at Sears, the workplace I had stayed the longest at, in order to go to school. Because of my ADD, I wound up really fouling up at school, and had some trouble finding my next job.

When I went through my depression, I did not have the benefit of a therapist or drugs, I just went through it all by myself. I stayed in my room sleeping all day. I would go without bathing for weeks. The only thing keeping me from killing myself was the fact that I had to get up in the morning to feed my two cats, then I would go right back to bed. The fact that my cats were there was really what kept me alive because they gave me a lot of love.

The feelings I were having were very frightening, I did not realize people could really have feelings like this, I really felt like I was going insane. I made things worse by sort of becoming addicted to sugar. I would literally eat granulated sugar from the bowl, several tablespoonfuls, and go into a hyperactive crying jag in my room.

My mother hears me talk about little snippets of these experiences and says "Where was I when all this was going on?" She was just unhappy with me at the time because I didn't do the dishes or whatever. I remember during this time she got irritated with me because the dishes weren't done and I went nuts. If it hadn't been for my parents allowing me to live rent-free though, I don't know what would have happened.

Anyway, it was a very scary time. I had never been self-destructive or suicidal, but during this time I felt like the unhappiness I felt would eventually drown out everything else, and I would attempt suicide, even though I didn't WANT to kill myself. Strangely, this is a part of the experience that redeemed me, beyond everything else. It was like once everything had been stripped away from me, my beliefs, my friends, even having more than extremely minimal contact with other people, I found a rock hard core of self preservation, way down deep, and I had to journey long to find it.

I began finding little things to enjoy. I started watching All My Children, and it became as though the characters were my friends. I started calling a morning dj on the radio, and I was able to make him & his comedian cronies laugh as they had made me laugh (to this day I credit Alex Bennet as one of the people that saved my life.) Humor really is a strong medicine. I started going to the library again. I found a self-help author that really helped me a lot. Another thing that really helped me out was I would sit in the sun by the side of the house with the cats. We would sit in the sun together and I used to get into this meditative state that I called "Waiting for the Mother Ship" This is going to sound weird but I believe that I developed an empathic connection with my cats by doing this. They sort of knew that something was going on in my brain, and they helped out somehow.

When I finally came out of it, it was like a season changing. Even though it was the lowest time in my life, I feel it made me stronger. I came out of it around 1991, and I sometimes like to say I spent the nineties recovering from the mistakes I made in the eighties.

If this makes any of the Christians out there feel like proselytizing me, please don't. I have since read things that have convinced me that Christianity is just a bastardization of all the different myths and religions that were going on in the Middle East at the time that the Bible was being written. I like to think of myself as a "born again pagan."

This was very cathartic to write about, I hope it helps others.

Books on my shelf

I posted this on the Thelema.nu site, thought I'd let my blog buddies read it.

This is a great topic for me--I absolutely love books--I have worked at three bookstores in my life, and about 75% of the wall space in my room is filled with books

First of all I have a lot of fiction--Saul Bellow, Hemingway, Richard Brautigan, the Beats--Kerouac, Burroughs, Diane di Prima, etc.

Typical stuff like Stephen King, Jonathan Kellerman, Clive Barker, Thomas Harris, etc.

Business motivational stuff like Cluetrain Manifesto, Tom Peters, etc.

Then I have stuff like the Collected Works of Antonin Artaud--one of my literary idols. The edition that has an intro by Susan Sontag is really good, because she talks about gnosticism. Like Crowley, Artaud was an insane(?) drug addict. Like Crowley, his ideas went on to shape the second half of the twentieth century.

I also have a bunch of antique books I inherited from my grandmothers. A set of Dickens, a set of Balzac, a series of children's fiction and history.

A huge passel of pocket paperbacks, with stuff like Nietzsche, H.P. Lovecraft, Pat Conroy, Jackie Collins, and Ayn Rand. I find the Ayn Rand a little embarrassing, but I keep it in there because it tends to weird out & intimidate people who don't read much.

There are also things from the fifties, like Bob Hope's "I Owe Russia $1200" and "Barbara Owen, Girl Reporter".

Tons of Complete Idiots Guides and for Dummies books.

An embarrasing amount of Llewellyn books--They were shiny, happy, pagan books that were about three bucks apiece at one store I worked at.

Tons of books on yarn crafts.

Tons of books on Tarot (my current favorite is the Complete Idiots Guide to...")

Some Hippie dippy type stuff like Ram Dass "Be Here Now" and Timothy Leary "Confessions of a Hope Fiend" and also that book he did with R. A. Wilson, the title of which escapes me now. I also have tons of R. A. Wilson, except for that one about Bob & Slack (post-modernism kind of gets on my nerves.)

One of the first books on metaphysics I ever read was Colin Wilson's "the Occult".

I also have some stuff on Gnosticism, like Pagels & Steiner.

I also have a lot of Ouspensky/Gurdjieff--but the only Ouspensky book I even got halfway through was New Model of the Universe, and that was because I really dug the parts where he talked about his disillusionment with society through his newspaper job, and subsequent search for wisdom. "There are enough lies in the world without mine." There is a very cool book about the 4th Way community called "Struggle of the Magicians: Why Ouspensky Left Gurdjieff" by William Patrick Patterson, which reads like a spy novel. You should check it out if you're into them.

I have some things like Godwin's Cabalistic Eycyclopedia, Regardie's Golden Dawn and Garden of Pomegranates.

Of course I have a lot of Crowley books, one of my favorites being an edition called "Portable Darkness: An Aleister Crowley Reader" edited by Scott Michaelson, which provides a nice introduction to his work. I have the Confessions, Laurence Sutin's "Do What Thou Wilt," The Law is For All, Holy Books of Thelema, Book of Lies, Magickal Diaries of AC, 777, Book of Thoth, Magick W/O Tears, Tarot Divination, Magick in Theory & Practice.

I have arrived...

Good. You know your music. You should be able to work at Championship Vinyl with Rob, Dick and Barry (although you know this place could never hold a candle to the greatness that was the Record Exchange with George and Jim.)


Do You Know Your Music (Sorry MTV Generation I Doubt You Can Handle This One)
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Welcome to the Grotto in realtime. The exercise in futility I thought of as getting caught up with my former blog activity so as to give my buddies a better taste of "mah flavah" has come to a screeching halt. The weasle bastards at Bloop saw fit to delete my diary. Not that big a loss, but there were some highlights I would have liked to save. My bad. I will just have to meditate extra hard tomorrow to remember as much as I can.

Note to self: Don't write journal entries without putting them in a notebook first.

I have to go. Got a long day tomorrow...

She was just a wish...

I wish for peace.

We may have found Saddam, but what good are we really doing over there?

Greetings, LiveJournal Citizens!!! (Originally an LJ post)

I bring you salutations from between the Emerald Pillars!

That was a very pretentious way of saying hello (hermeticists should get it, perhaps no one else will.) Generally I prefer a more casual brand of intelligence, rather than intellectualism.

I sort of have an overgrown teenage exterior, on the inside a will of steel. I can hang out with my teenage nephew & watch TV or listen to Queens of the Stone Age, or I could discuss Swinburne & Nietzsche.

I am currently in the process of transferring my old blog over to here, and some of the themes I will be talking about are these:

• Counting Crows (although probably not as much as I have been, since due to currently being unemployed I have no money for concerts.)


• Tarot (used to be quite proficient, am trying to get back into it, but a little rusty.)
  


• Books, TV, movies, music (all kinds.)


• Knitting & Crocheting (I hope someday to obtain a digital camera so I can show off my work.)


• Insomnia (I have a tendency to stay up till six or seven in the morning.  I am going to attempt to do less of this in the New Year--though not eliminate it, I have too many things to do and sometimes it is the only way to get anything done.)

I have been exploring LJ, and I've already joined many communities.  I think I am going to like it here.

The next entries after this one will be transfers from another blog, which end a little before Xmas, these will be labeled, "Blog Transfer Entry"  to differentiate between my regular entries.

So here is what has been going on between my last blog entry & now:

I went up north to my oldest brother’s house, where he lives with his girlfriend, her teenage daughter, and his fancy parquet floor that you can't walk on in shoes.  This is the brother I don't care for, but I went and made nice.  I was almost going to sneak out of the house the morning we were set to leave so I wouldn't have to go, I had a note written & everything, but it was raining that morning so I chickened out.

The whole time we were there, my brother was so tense you could have bounced a quarter off of him.  The stay was made more pleasant by the fact that I got to gossip with my sister, and spend a lot of time with her teenage kids.  Despite the fact that my older sister is extremely high-strung, we get along quite well.  I don't think she realizes how much I admire her.  Also nice was that we got to see family friends.

Then we came home, and there was a couple of days before my parents were going up to Seattle to visit my aunt for New Years.  I was going to have a nice few days all to myself, but unfortunately, there was a little "episode" prior to this.

Mom was a little disappointed that during these few days when she had her vacation that she hadn't been able to get Dad to do some things she wanted around the house, so she was kind of on the warpath (she pretty much had been since since a few days before we left for my brother's--she knew I didn't want to go, and even bribed me with money--saying it was a Christmas gift, etc. {I took the money--big mistake}amongst whatever other reasons she had for being in Bitch Mode.)  This is her basic pattern:  She has some kind of argument with Dad, and when it stalemates, she lays into me.  She can be extremely domineering and mean, and thinks nothing in these instances of raking me over the coals.

So she decides to open my mail and look at my bank statement, which, since I am unemployed she knows is going to reflect my sorry state of financial affairs.  Of course, in her mood whatever she finds is going to be terrible, and she bullies me into closing my checking account.

Man, was I happy when they left for Seattle.

I spent the time cleaning my room (that is another thing that will be covered in this journal, room cleaning--or lack thereof.) and got it to a nice level of organization.

On that note, I will end this rather long-winded entry.

Stuff I Need to FECKIN' Write

(Note on 1/17/04: This is a humorous entry, since I can't remember most of what this is talking about!)

The Richard Brautigan Bibliomancy deal.

The dream I had last night (nightmare where I am a man quilting and visited by DEATH) only make it a woman sewing a coat...

Working in bookstore piece (block-o-fiction.)

Henry and June resume piece (don't use real names.)

My online history (short & uneventful though it may be.)

Find that feckin' Sleeping Beauty poem and work in Disney Princess.

Courtney Love on being blonde.

Punk remembrance of Sleeping Lady Cafe.

Read that FECKIN' book and review it...

Please, get OFF YOUR ASS and feckin' do this...

(I am actually going to try to remember some of this and do it...)

Frickin' Coffee!

So here I am at one in the morning, when I should be sleeping. I hate having an on-again, off-again relationship with caffeine, it really sucks. Of course I have gotten a lot of good internet reading done, but today I had to deal with that coffee withdrawal/hangover thing that makes me feel like sleeping all day. If we could just abolish sleeping, I wouldn't feel like such a loser.

And in other news: I pissed off a famous author today! He was dissing new age metaphysics and blathering on about Sid & Nancy like he knew about the inside of a real punk rock club, so he got on my nerves.

It was Christopher Locke, one of the guys that wrote Cluetrain Manifesto. Now, Cluetrain Manifesto is actually a pretty good book, but after checking out the guy's weblog (which will not get a plug here, I'm a bitch, deal with it) I got the impression that the total was worth more than the sum of its parts. Like these guys were maybe a bunch of IT hacks that got pissed off one day.

As a New Ager myself (sometimes I call myself an occultist, other times New Ager, it matters not to me) I get a little irked when I see people taking cheap potshots at people's belief systems in an obvious attempt to make themselves look like quite a smartypants indeed. Like pasting a mock ad for Body & Soul magazine, with a blurb underneath it that reads "Get Fucked in a romantic Aegean monastery!" Or quite a saucy little sarcastic headlines that read "WOW! GIANT New Age Wholesale Directory!" or, "If I Laugh at This, Does it Make Me Homophobic?" over simply a picture of a book on gay wiccanism.

Do I also believe that there is a huge amount of crass commercialism in the New Age world? Yes, definately, and that is unfortunate.

But the problem I have with you, Mr. Locke, and your suck-ass weblog, is this: for the words "New Age", substitute "Moslem" or "Jewish" or "Black" or "Gay", and maybe you'll start to see my point.

So I wrote this in an email to him:

We get it, you think new age metaphysics is bullshit.

You also string together pop-culture twaddle in an attempt to sound poetic.

But while you're busy being so self-congratulatory and self-referential, you seem to have forgotten your own Manifesto: #3. Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice.

He writes back to me:

Huh?

I'm interested in what you say here, though I suspect there's more to it. What has you so pissed off? Is it my attitude toward "new age metaphysics"? You did get that part right. I'm writing a book about it-- hope to post a little something to my blog later today that will be not as cryptic as the usual.

But like it or not, that *is* my human voice. If you don't recognize it as such, then one of us has a problem. Eh? Either that or people are way more different than advertised. I think the latter is probably closer to the truth. If there's a truth to get closer to, that is.

Thanks for writing. Say more.

chris

Well, chris, you make me want to ball up my fist and scream "Dooohhh" like Homer Simpson. I will not give you anything to go on further for your crappy little book so you can cash in on your petty prejudices, but I will say more here. Your ham-fisted attempt to make me look dumb by saying that I didn't recognize your human voice means that YOU are the one with the big problem.

Hipper than thou intellectualism sucks! You are unacceptable and need to be bitch-slapped!

That's enough air-time for him I guess.

Hi Everyone!

Writers are people that live on the cutting edge, like rock stars.

They work in a solitary environment. They can be in their own little world, even in the middle of a crowd. They are watchers who observe and record, but never interfere. They are part of the lunatic fringe, having the ability to know strange, interesting people and do strange, interesting things. They are at home with artists and academes, having the ability to hold court amongst the talented.

They are tied to ancient traditions of storytelling and bardic shamanism, with the ability to weave magic spells with words. Ordinary rules don't apply to them. They don't have to have clean rooms, balanced checkbooks, or soul-killing day jobs. They are like the Gods.

I'd get more writing done if I didn't have to live with my parents. I'd get more writing done if I had a clean room. I'd get more writing done if I didn't have a soul-killing job. I'd get more writing done if I didn't feel so crappy all the time.

I'd get more writing done if I didn't watch so damn much TV. I'd get more writing done if i could return to that perfect inner landscape I once knew (ah, Hermworld, your songs echo in my heart.)

God Damn It!!!

Hello everyone. I'm sorry I haven't been posting lately, but I've been busy with the whole work/school thing.

I must post today, because I need to vent about both of these areas of my life, it has NOT been a very good week.

Work: I have had to go from one job to another recently. I left a rather lucrative position at Whole Foods Market, because they refused to give me time off to spend with my mom, who was in the hospital, when I had no idea how well she was going to be doing (she is fine now, but I had no idea how it would go at the time.)

So I got this other job at a baby furniture store near my home. It seemed like the perfect place at the outset. They needed someone to work the hours that I needed to have because of school. I didn't have to take a cut in pay; I wouldn’t have to work really late. Then I started working there. From day one, my supervisor, a young lady in her early 20s I believe, has been on this little power trip. While she hasn't been nasty to me, she has not been happy with me from day one. Also, her training style leaves quite a bit to be desired. She wants me to talk to the customers in exactly the same ways she would, using the exact same words she would, and picks nits with me over this stuff every chance she gets.

Then, last weekend happened. The old man who is the senior owner (& who has owned & operated the place since 1947) ushered me into one of the furniture showrooms where no one was around. He showed me a crib that needed to have the bedding put on it. As I was making up the crib, he asked me if I had sold any furniture that day. As I was occupying my mind trying to answer his question, he came up behind me and stroked the side of my back in a long, slow feeling-up kind of way. I was so shocked I couldn't say anything. And the problem is I feel like I can't say anything, because my supervisor is so girly with him and lets him hug her and talks in a whiny girly voice with him that she would probably say, "Well you just misinterpreted him, he's just very friendly, etc..."

So there's that. Then my supervisor took me aside and had a list of things she wanted to talk to me about. Apparently I raise my voice to the customers, which actually means I just talk in a louder voice than she does. So I guess I have to go around whispering. So I politely sit and listen to her and just kind of yes ma'am the whole thing, but apparently that wasn't good enough for her so she had the store manager have a talk with me and essentially I got written up, and she painted it with the darkest brush possible.

So all this places me in a mood where I no longer care about anything they want. I am getting another job as soon as humanly possible, and then they can kiss my ass. Then today I was helping a customer with a procedure I wasn't familiar with, and my supervisor spends as little time helping me with it as possible. She walked off at the end, so I yelled across the store at her--I knew she would hate that. So she sent me to another department, where I know even less stuff. Apparently no one in the store understands that a new person needs to be helped out with procedures.

So I came home & had some Johnny Walker Black Label (and I NEVER drink, so you know I have had it up to here) and decided that the no-holds-barred search for the replacement job starts promptly on Monday morning at 9:00 am sharp.

I will have plenty of time to do it since I am not going to school this summer, because...

School: Monday was the first day of the summer session, which I went to and promptly decided to sit this one out till fall, when they get the GOOD teachers back, because the one they got for our class was completely unprepared for us, & I decided it wasn't worth eighty bucks of my hard-earned dough.

I apologize if this entry is pissy, but I just had to vent.

What I Did Today

Went to school, late (11:00).

Talked with Anita & Jodie--a good discussion, about why I don't work at Whole Foods Market anymore, the Martha Stewart movie last night. And an idea about a website for Jodie--"General Jodie", a play on words about her expansive general knowledge & also her ability to help other figure out how to get going on their lives. It would be a cross between an advice site and an ask jeeves type of thing.

Of course, Anita was quick to attach some get-rich-quick scheme to the whole thing. "You could charge people for advice!" I'm not sure I like Anita very much--she may have a certain amount of intelligence, but what little there is is buried under so much coarseness and scatterbrainedness it is hardly worth hunting for. I explained to her that you can't really make money giving advice, that this kind of site is "content" oriented and that its potential for realizing any monetary benefit was after the fact--using it on a resume, selling advertising, etc. Tomorrow she will probably ask me about "that content website you were talking about..."

On the bus after school I got a very good idea for a short story based on something my Uncle said to my Aunt.

Then I went to my local library, not my favorite library, but that was where the books I wanted were. I tried to check some stuff out & found out I couldn't because a check I wrote to the Friends of the Public Library went bad. I apologized to the library technician, she didn't make a big deal out of it, but apparently she must have told the older librarians because when I went to tell them about the malfunctioning copier, she told me AGAIN about the thirteen bucks I owed them.

I hate those bitches.

 

A day in the life of your average Hermgirl...

I went to school today.

I attend a vocational school, Regional Occupational Program, where I study MS Office. I am at the point where I have a certain amount of skill, I can type & file up a storm, and I'm pretty good at Word 2000, but I don't yet have the skills I need to get that good paying office job I keep talking about. I've gone too far to abandon my journey, but I'm not quite where I want to be.

ROP has students with different levels of education and job experience, many of them with much more of both than I have. I just went straight to work after graduating high school, and I had a lot of things going on in my twenties. So I've basically been trying to rebuild my life/career for the past seven years, through fits and starts.

Right now I'm looking at the possibility of going to work part time at KFC so I can pay for my classes and the few little bills I have to pay. I'm very lucky in that my parents let me live with them rent-free, although sometimes it is not so lucky, if you know what I mean.

So I get to school today and unfortunately I arrive a little late, so I have to sit near these gals, who, though I like them well enough, really bug me because they talk a lot, and they seem so nice I get drawn into conversations with them that prevents me from doing my schoolwork.

Thank god I have this home computer, or I might not get anything done. And then of course, there are the inevitable questions about how my job situation is going.

I had made the mistake of telling one of them that I had mild Attention Deficit Disorder, and now she wants to make a project out of me. She wants me to do all these things that would ultimately make me a lot less happy and much worse off than if I just did things my way. Why must everyone achieve and acquire things at the same level as everyone else?

And then there is Anita. She and I had a mutual friend in High School, someone who manipulated and used me for ten years until I finally kicked her to the curb. My life has gone nowhere but up since, it was one of the best things I ever did. I pretty much don't think too much about her, except when I am yelling at her to myself and pacing around my room.

Imagine my surprise when Anita showed up at ROP. And of course, it seems like her favorite topic is former friend, Andrea. I'd rather not discuss that with her. So I need to not get too close to her.

One of the themes of this journal is probably going to be antisocialness. I am really happiest when I am all by myself, and thankfully, from time to time I get to have that.

Can't Change Me

"Suddenly I see everything that's wrong with me
But what can I do?
I'm the only thing I really have at all..."

So I dropped by the library and checked out this excellent Chris Cornell CD, got a lot of good ones, David Bowie, Henry Rollins, etc, gonna tape them--one of my favorite cost-cutting measures.

I was hugely into Soundgarden; this guy is a tremendous songwriter.

Lollapalooza is back, Audioslave will be there and Jane's Addiction & Queens of the Stone Age, both of whom also rock my socks off, but unfortunately there are no funds for concerts this summer, otherwise I would be SO going to Counting Crows, which really sucks.

I will be back within the next couple of days to get into more depth about things other than music, I'm just tap-dancing around before I really get goin'.

Audioslave Video

OK---Chris Cornell is just a SHMOKIN' HOOOOOTTIE!!!!!

Let's just get that straight from the outset--in addition to the sexalicious Adam Duritz & David Immergluck, I am a fan of the former Soundgarden frontman.

Tom Morello, I advocate your peacenikism, dude, and you are an excellent guitar player, but it’s all about the Cornell...

"Trust me, you're gonna want more cowbell."

My nephew IMs me, and the first line he writes is:

"I need more cowbell, babe."

I answer:

"I've got a fever. And the only cure for it is more cowbell."

Anyone who did not get that NEEDS to watch more SNL reruns.

I haven't been posting as much as I should have because I have been training at work and having to study produce code all night--I will try to post more this weekend.

Magical Personality Quiz Results

[music|Every CD by the Foo Fighters (Courtesy my generous nephew.)]

Here are the results from taking this quiz:

Your Primary Mythical Creature

Air Types
The main strength of the Air types is intellect. The second element indicates the most probable focus for this intellectual activity.

Unicorn
Air with Water

Astrologically associated with Gemini and the Third House

Unicorn types are very concerned with the communication of ideas. They are witty and likeable but can also be quite shy. They are easily bored and easily distracted, and may seem unpredictable and superficial for this reason. Actually they are very deep and are usually trying to find the connections between the people and things around them. They are highly imaginative but not very practical. They love knowledge for its own sake and are not concerned about putting it to use. They are socially astute and sensitive to others’ feelings, but may still appear somewhat aloof. They are drawn to grand schemes for unifying people but these often don’t extend beyond the initial idea. Very logical and rational, Unicorn types are also unconventional and even bizarre. Other people may regard them as fey or just strange.

Your Shadow Creature

Fire Types
All the Fire types have problems relating to anger and aggression. The weakest element indicates the main focus of these problems.

Phoenix
Fire and Earth

This shadow is prone to a sense of stagnation due to lack of motivation and laziness. Nothing durable is ever produced. Practical activities may never be embarked upon. There is an underlying sense of futility and hopelessness. Disillusionment results from their lack of confidence that they can change anything for the better, and in any case they do not have the will. At the same time there is an underlying grandiosity and even megalomania reflected in their dreams and aspirations. They need to feel special. Instead, they may simply overindulge or neglect themselves physically. The biggest obstacle of weak Earth is to overcome self-centeredness and greed; the biggest obstacle of weak Fire is to overcome anger and aggression.

This didn't really tell me anything I don't know--although spot-on about me being a Gemini.

Death of an icon, and a new icon reborn...

At 12:24 PST, there was a little rumbler, just before I started this entry.

In a world where Avril Lavigne is considered punk, the rock world grows a little colder with the death of Joe Strummer.

I wasn't the biggest Clash fan in the world, but I do remember that when I was twelve the song "London Calling" made my heart race with the thought of Anarchy...And that is sadly something that is in very short supply for the twelve year olds of this day. There is a great big world beyond what is spoon-fed you on MTV, kids. Don't be satisfied until you can grab yourself a big piece of it.

In Other News: One of my favorite bloggers, Tangerine Girl, has returned from a long hiatus. This is someone who inspired me when I was first learning about computers and the Internet. One of those people that I looked at and said, "Damn, I wish I could do that!"

Happy Days Are Here Again…

This just in: I have gotten a job at Whole Foods Market, where I will be making a much higher hourly wage than I have ever made. The employment gods have smiled upon me! I even have a week or two to relax before I actually start working there. If that doesn't rock, I don't know what does!

My Eighth Time

[music|The music in my head(sigh.)]

Monday, Dec. 16
The Place: The Warfield Theater, San Francisco
The Event: Counting Crows & Toad the Wet Sprocket

“Such a rainy night,” I thought, “This is a night for pilgrims only.” Down by where I live, there were power outages due to the stormy weather. I grabbed an umbrella, put on my heavy Eddie Bauer jacket, donned a wide brimmed hat, and headed out. I needn’t have worried, when I came up the stairs from the BART station on Fifth I was pleased to note that while the ground was wet, the sky was clear.

As I walked up to the venue, I heard the strains of Toad the Wet Sprocket music coming out of the building (I was ten minutes late.) I saw a large group of people standing outside, but the doors were open and no one seemed to be going in. I approached the guy at the door. “You can just go in if you got a ticket.”

I fall back into the group of people to fish the ticket out of the pocket of the Eddie Bauer, and who do I see walking past but Matt Malley, Counting Crows bass player extraordinaire!

Knowing him to be “the Spiritual One” of the group, I had a greeting all planned for just such an occasion. Placing palms together, feet firmly planted in a yogic mountain pose, I bowed towards him and intoned “Namaste!” I think I may have jumped out at him a little.

First he asked me if I was spiritual, and if I meditated, to which I answered yes, and a little bit. Then he was going to offer me a ticket—no need, I already had one. I happily shook his hand and wished him a good show. That makes two times now I have had a 30 second meeting with a member of the Crows. I know some people are lucky enough to talk to them for a long time, but I’m so scared I’m going to act like a dork all I can manage is 30 seconds.

So I go in, very stoked, Toad the Wet Sprocket rippin’ it up by this time. Got my seat up in the lodges, which was actually a very nice place. There is a beautiful fresco on the ceiling and lovely architecture. The people next to me complained about their seats and left and two girls jumped on them, and we bonded over what good seats they really were, they seemed like fun people. In a shameless ploy to expand my readership I gave one of them the URL for this journal. Hey, if you’re reading this, drop a line my way, send a message and tell me what you think.

So, Toad (I feel like a person that was into them would shorten the name to Toad.) rounds off their set nicely by playing their two hits which I don’t know the name of but I will call them, “Walk on the Ocean” and “All I Want” Those are the songs that get played on the radio.

So the lights went out and Counting Crows take the stage. Lights slowly come up and they start with a very Byrdsy-sounding rendition of the old Scott Mackensie tune, “If You’re Going to San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair)”

Then: Hard Candy
Mr. Jones
Goodnight Elizabeth—a VERY good version with lots of audience sing along parts and a smokin’ guitar jam with Dan, Immy, and Dave all riffing up a storm. Adam added some parts (“I know you think its alright, It is not alright with me, etc”)
Richard Manuel is Dead—Adam sang up close with Dan in his face and then he shoved him away. I love those little comedic parts.

Adam was not talking very much. He came to the front of the stage and started mumbling incoherently at the people in front, then shouted, “Just be quiet!” at them. Then they did Omaha with more audience singing. Then he talked about the people at Project Open Hand and how cool they were. Then Immy said something about one of them being his friends mom, but he said it in a mocking, falsetto voice, so Adam said, “You’re such a dick!” Then he said something else that I can’t remember, and ended by saying, “We’ve established what a dick you are, this is a song about what a dick I am.”

American Girls—again, not my favorite song, but I got over myself and got into it.
Rain King—Oh Susanna part in the middle and lots of audience singing.
A Long December
Big Yellow Taxi
New Frontier
Good Time—I could swear Adam was looking at me here.
Miami—During the middle, Adam went back and lay down under the piano with a towel over his head. I pointed this out to my new buddies, and I swear when he got up he jumped up like he was gonna jump at me.
Round Here—another song in the middle of a song here—something about “That was the river, this is the sea.” If anyone knows what song that is, clue me in if you would.
Then they left.

Encore #1

Time and Time Again
Hanging Around
Then they left again.

Encore #2
This time only Adam and Immy came back and Adam said, “We’ve lost our band! Dave, Dan, and Charlie went off to Vegas, and Matt and Ben think they’re the rhythm section for the Dixie Chicks!” Then they did Blues Run the Game.Then it was almost over. Adam was trying to talk, but losing his voice. The rest of the band returned for Holiday in Spain, and it was over.

The lights came up, and they filed out as silently as they had filed in, Charlie and Ben wistfully trailing behind, then only Ben. I was screaming and gesticulating wildly, and I actually managed to get Ben’s attention from as far away as I was. He acknowledged me by making the same hand gestures (rock-n-roll horns salute). Then I turned it into a Princess Di wave, and plaintively said, “Bye, Ben!” He smiled and nodded. This is Ben’s last week with the band, he will be moving back to Athens, Georgia, where he is from.

My thoughts overall: It would have been SO cool if I could have gotten up front—this was one of their BETTER shows. Although I would not have been able to chill out and take notes for this review—I’ve tried it that way, it doesn’t work for me. And apparently, Adam, my sweetie and the love of my life, was a little under the weather—and they still played an almost two hour show, and at no time did he hit a bum note. That’s professionalism.

Whatever...

So, the night before last was the Counting Crows on Jay Leno. My thoughts: Once again a fine performance of BYT. I notice Charlie is chewing a lot of gum these days--I think somebody quit smoking. Adam got to go to THE COUCH and was quite humorous. I felt like a teenager waiting for the Beatles to come on the Ed Sullivan Show.

In Other News: Yesterday I had a very enjoyable job interview, where I think I killed. If I get this, I feel like this could be the job where I finally make the transition from being a retail prole to something where I can actually use the skills I've been training for. I don't wanna say any more about it till I find out next week.

The Osbournes

Ok, so the season opener has been watched. First impressions? Jack and Kelly have issues they need to work out. Ozzy is still simply the man. It was weird how Sharon seemed to have a precognition about her upcoming troubles. She may be the only lucid one in the family. So crazy, all of them, but you gotta love them.

I was reading Adam Duritz' Blog (yes, he has one too!) while I was watching, and oddly enough Jack Osbourne had a great idea.

He called his house and said "Tell them to turn on the sprinklers, there's a bunch of people in front of the house."

That might solve Adam's "people waiting to pounce on you in a hotel lobby without any regard for your feelings or what kind of day you've had, etc" problem. Of course, how many hotel lobbies have sprinklers, I don't know, but you could get people with super-soakers to help you out. Seems like that would be practical.

Watching: My new family, The Osbournes!

WooHoo YourSELF! And Who is YO Daddy?!

[music|TV: AbFab, and Carrie Fisher interviewing Jude Law on Oxygen]

Love Calculator results:

Hermgirl + David Immergluck: 96 %

Dr. Love thinks that a relationship between Hermgirl and David Immergluck has a very good chance of being successful, but this doesn't mean that you don't have to work on the relationship. Remember that every relationship needs spending time together, talking with each other etc.

Love Calculator Info

The Crows on the View

So, this past week Counting Crows were on the View, let me ReView for your edification.

Overall, it was a well turned out segment. The set design was attractive. They began by chatting with Adam, and for once, Meredith was not irritating. I had worried about this, as heretofore I considered her an odious bitch, and had been thinking that she had better mind her ps & qs or I would send her a nasty email or something. I need not have worried, however, and have even decided to rescind my former attitude and officially Cut the Woman Some Slack.

There had been some fitness expert doctor on before their set, and Adam joked, "Doctor Lamb looked kind of fat to me!" This made me wonder if the doctor had bugged any of the slightly portly members of the group. Those of us who are advocates of the Fat Band really couldn't give a rip what some fitness guy says.

They played their cover of Joni Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi", a fine performance. I really dug the way Immy leaned up against Adam the way he did. Immy is such a "Right-hand-man" type of guy, or in his case, Immy is Adam's Left-Hand-Man.

This reminds me of how I totally dorked out when buying my Warfield show ticket. I did not get up early enough to get a ticket to the front of the stage area, where I could chill out "Immerside", as us CC fans like to call it. I love that word; I stole it from someone on a message board, whoever invented that word, you rock! David Immergluck, wearer of bindies & eye makeup, lover of Uriah Heep, guy I actually got to meet for thirty seconds, you are the Man.

I am also reminded that about two weeks ago the Crows were on Howard Stern.

I don't much care for Howard, but I feel about him the way I feel about Conan O'Brian: Not very entertaining on his own, but he tends to get good guests, and it is sometimes worth it to tune in just to see the guest. Howard can sometimes even rise to the level of a really good guest, which makes me wonder why he insists on doing stupid stuff like talk incessantly about himself and the toilet humor stuff that he does. If he got rid of those two things and just focused on interviewing notable people in a Larry King sort of a way, he might really achieve even more than he already has achieved.

What really colors my perception of Howard is that I remember when he first started becoming popular in the early eighties. He used to go on TV shows and MTV, etc, and for some reason, people feared him! He would walk around TV show sets, insulting people until someone stopped him. He created huge mayhem on the David Brenner show, until his announcer shut him down by saying, "What did you have for lunch, Howard, salami & garlic?" He seemed to be trying to work out his anger about being the tall ugly kid in school.

Anyway, where was I? Oh, yeah, the Crows on Howard.

Well, Adam & Howard seem to be friends, which seems odd to me, but they had a good interview segment with him. He did some rock trivia with a caller, and kicked major booty, because he is simply The Man when it comes to rock music knowledge. I would love to see an episode of Rock & Roll Celebrity Jeopardy with Adam Duritz up against Mark McGrath from Sugar Ray, which might be quite a contest. Of course, Mark McGrath is a huge dork in all other areas of his life, but the man knows his way around a Rock & Roll Jeopardy board.

Right now I am watching Jarred's Room on SNL--Jimmy did his Adam impression--WooHoo!!!!Gotta go. Bye Buddies!!!I Love Goby!!!!