Nuthin' Matters & What If It Did?

Nihilist Bear

Which Dysfunctional Care Bear Are You?
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I got this one before. The word "nihil" means "nothing".

"For I am perfect, being Not..." Liber Al, 2:15

Fook yeah!

You are a True Metalhead. You dig the
classic music and the classic lifestyle. As
metalheads go, you're pretty open-minded in
terms of music and lyrics; if it rocks, then
you'll listen to it. Concerts are the pinnacle
of the metal experience, though sometimes they
get a little too crazy. You generally respect
everybody else, but as far as you're concerned,
they all wish they were Priest or Maiden.


What Kind of Metalhead Are You?
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Up the Irons!!! \m/

"Now ye shall know that the chosen priest and apostle of infinite space is the prince-priest, the Beast; and in his woman called the Scarlet Woman is all power given. They shall bring the glory of the stars into the hearts of men."

Aleister Crowley--The Book of the Law, 1:15

I just found out that the twelfth was the Feast of the Beast and His Bride. Happy belated Feast Day, here's wishing you blessings that bring the glory of the stars into your hearts.

You are the the Hierophant card. The Hierophant,
called The Pope in some decks, is the preserver
of cultural traditions. After entering The
Emperor's society, The Hierophant teaches us
its wisdom. The Hierophant learns and teaches
our cultural traditions. The discoveries our
ancestors have made influence the present.
Without forces such as The Hierophant who are
able to interpret and communicate traditional
lore, each generation would have to begin to
learn anew. As a force that is concentrated on
our past and our culture, The Hierophant can
sometimes be stubborn and set in his ways. This
is a negative trait he shares with his zodiac
sign, Taurus. But like Taurus he is productive.
His traditional lore can provide a source of
inspiration for the creatively inclined, and
his knowledge provides an excellent foundation
for those who come into their own in the
business world. Image from: Morgan E.
Cauthers-Knox.
http://elfwood.lysator.liu.se/loth/m/o/morganc/morganc.html


Which Tarot Card Are You?
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Interesting. I've gotten this as a life card according to some book somewhere. I have a very strong Inner Teacher (of course, I don't always listen to it, shame on me!) which also means I have a love of learning at the same time.

Digging Up Ghosts

"All writing of the narrative kind, and perhaps all writing, is motivated, deep down, by a fear of and a fascination with mortality--by a desire to make the risky trip to the Underworld and to bring something or someone back from the dead."

Margaret Atwood--Negotiating With the Dead: A Writer on Writing

So last night I'm sitting in Wendy's having dinner, reading an interview with Margaret Atwood in Writer's Digest. All of a sudden it occurs to me, this Wendy's is situated on the spot where once was an A & W. The very same A & W where, over 20 years ago, I used to sit and hang out with a friend who once told me she might be related to Margaret Atwood. A friendship long dead.

I started having an imaginary conversation with the friend's "ghost":

"I wonder what it's like being a published author. You know, that would be the pinnacle of success for me--to be a published author and have my book made into a movie like Margaret Atwood or Stephen King."

"What would you write about?"

"I'd write about us. About growing up during the 70s and 80s, hanging out in coffee shops and fast food places. It would be like an 80s version of 'Grease'."

"Somebody already made that movie--"Fast Times at Ridgemont High'."

"Yeah, but the trouble with 'Ridgmont' is it was done pretty much as it was happening. The beauty of movies like 'Grease' and 'American Grafitti' is that they are filtered through the perspective of 20 - 30 years later--they had nostalgia going for them."

Then I started thinking, what with the internet and the 80s being trotted out as a fad every two years, do we have the ability to be nostalgic about things in that way any more?

This is my lullabye tonight

Forever

And to think that he was listening to the artist he covers here, round about the time I was spending all my money at the Record exchange in Burlingame, listening to this same artist and dreaming of someone just like him. (sigh.)

He definitely has someone in mind here, I heard somewhere he was getting married. Probably to someone who never heard these songs in their short life.

That's ok, Dave, we'll always have the time I said "Woohoo Dave!" and you said "Woohoo YOURSELF!" It was love, you know it.

Musical Meanderings

It occurs to me that I have not sufficiently pimped my Launchcast Radio Station.

For people like me who don't feel much like bothering with Napster or Kazaah, the principle is simple: you sign up, program in your musical preferences, they play you stuff, and you sort of vote for the music you like the best by rating the song, artist, and genre. It plays further music based on how you vote.

Oddly enough, my station as it stands now doesn't play enough Counting Crows and is a little top-heavy in the metal department (of course, who doesn't like a little Pantera now and again?) but perhaps the more I work with it this will rectify itself. That would be my only complaint--that you need to get the paid version in order to get different "moods" programmed in so you could listen according to what you felt like at the time.

Another interesting discovery in online music that I've made is that Bruce Dickinson has a radio program, and has made himself over to the point where he looks and sounds every bit as one would imagine those BBC radio personalities do. Not altogether unobjectionable, as one of them might say.

I found out about this through Rocksnobs, which is a blog my inner High School Senior would love to have written. Of course, they didn't have the internet back then...

For the past couple of days my parents have been gone, visiting my brother (the one I like , the gay one) in Chicago. They will be back on Tuesday. I proceded to spend the first night to myself staying up til 8 am. Then I had to get started on my plans for my few days alone.

I like to spend time cleaning my room when my parents are gone. It sometimes involves throwing things out, and moving some of my junk into another room while I vacuum, dust, throw shit away, and move stuff around.

Anyway, the first order of business was to get some storage units. Not just any storage units, but bookshelves for the many books that are littering my floor. What this meant, was that I had to get some milk crates. I waited til about midnight to go get some. Not being sure how the stores feel when you go and take their milk crates, I like to do it on the sly.

So I got my expandable luggage cart, and set out for the Baskin & Robbins at the local strip mall where I had been able to gank some before. Of course this time there weren't any.

I looked up at the end of the strip, at the Mollie Stone's, I heard some music and voices coming from there. I assumed it was the people who worked there, winding up for the night. Actually, it was a bunch of kids playing cards at a table in front of the store. The kind of kids that sit around at Starbucks drinking coffee until the place closes, then they're so hyped up on caffiene they can't go home and go to sleep, so they go somewhere else and sit around. You could call them "coffee shop kids", they seem to have a culture all their own.

It was strangely peaceful there, at the end of the mall in the middle of the night, kids with pink hair and glasses playing cards at a table, at the other end of the tables sat an affable looking security guy. It was one of those weird quiet moments that I like about the middle of the night. I occasionally find myself out and about in the middle of the night, and this night's somnambulent errands made me feel a little weird.

I asked if they had any idea which store I was most likely to find some crates, they suggested I look behind Longs. I did and found the mother lode. I wished I had a truck and a house of my own to bring a bunch of junk to, because I could have built my own furniture with some of the crap I found back there. I know one day I will be a serious dumpster diver.

I got six crates, stacked them up and lashed them to my luggage cart. I made my way home, pushing my cart through the middle of the street.

I am such a weirdo.

I tried a new way of meditating today. While I was out with the dog, I was sitting in my favorite spot, a little berm in a corner of the park with some trees.

When I walked into the park, I had seen an orange-robed Buddhist monk walking, a reminder to seek for the inner peace within. As I sat down in my corner, I had a little daydream: I was following the monk, thinking "Show me the Tao of my purpose in life, the path of my True Will."

Then I thought about the idea of doing a Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram in the astral--something I've heard about, but I'm not quite sure if I am a strong enough meditator to do it (but duh, I guess I can practice and learn how--I am going to do this.)

I had done an LBRP this morning, and I wasn't facing east anyway, so I basically visualized the pentagrams that I had created this morning, feeling them strengthen a little. Then I imagined my chakras as I was sitting cross-legged, seeming to vibrate up and down. After that I saw an image of the Sephiroth, with Kether being at my head, Chokma and Binah at my shoulders, etc. This also seemed to vibrate. By this time I was feeling an intense sense of well-being.

This all unfolded like a daydream, and I am looking forward to doing it again tomorrow.

And in other news: I have decided to go back to school. With my sister setting such a good example, I am hungry to get back in the ring again. Since I am on academic "Fuck you and the horse you rode in on!" status, I will have to start very slow, and I will have to go to CSM in order to build my grade average back up. So taking that into consideration, I have decided to take the telecourse "Introduction to Philosophy" and augment it with something called a "Learning Community"-- probably an informal discussion group--called "Philosophy & Psychology in Contemporary Films."

Also, I have been fiddling with my website a little. It is slowgoing, but eventually it will be something really neat.

Friday Kinda Stuff (on Saturday afternoon)

EXOTIC FOREIGNER ALIAS = Favorite Spice Last Foreign Vacation Spot : Nutmeg Seattle--Sounds like a guy who is a gunrunner/flies a
dope smuggling plane.

SOCIALITE ALIAS = Silliest Childhood Nickname Town Where You First Partied : Bip Millbrae

"FLY GIRL" ALIAS (a la J. Lo) = First Initial First Two or Three Letters of Your Last Name: You can call me Hermie G.

ROCK STAR ALIAS = Any Liquid on the Bar Last Name of Bad-Ass Celeb : Johnny Walker McQueen--has a ring to it.

DIVA ALIAS = Something Sweet Within Sight Any Liquid in Kitchen: Sugar Latex--could be an interesting porn name.

GIRL DETECTIVE ALIAS = Favorite Baby Animal Where You Last Went To School: Ducky Trousdale--I kinda like that.

BARFLY ALIAS = Last Snack Food You Ate Your Favorite Drink : Cracker Bacardi

SOAP OPERA ALIAS = Middle Name Street Where You First Lived: Mary Beech--sounds like someone who played someone's mom on a soap in the 1950s.

PORN ALIAS = First Pets Name Mothers Maiden Name : Tinkerbell King--will be starring with Sugar Latex in a girl-on-girl flick...

DRAG QUEEN ALIAS = First Pets Name Street Where You First Lived : Tinkerbell Beech

---

I am so happy that Marion, my next door neighbor came
home from Vermont yesterday.

I was taking care of things at her house while she was gone. It seemed like every time I turned around I had to feed somebody or water something or clean a litterbox or walk somebody else.

She has two cats and a dog. I believe I've mentioned Atticus before, the German Shepherd who started me on my new career as a kanine perambulist. The cats are brand new--to her, anyway, they came from the rescue shelter.

A lovely, black puma-like creature named Alex, shy and brooding, yet very affectionate, I have taken to calling him "Alexander Attaturk." Then there is a siamese without a name yet--at the shelter they were calling her "Buffy," but Marion said she will not call any pet of hers "Buffy."

NoName likes the garden, and justifiably so. The garden is an enclave of color, with deep purple clematis, clay vases with water lillies blooming out of them, and roses and nasturtiums by the score.

Yesterday
I was running around like a chicken with my head cut off, with my own errands in addition to aforesaid duties. When I finally got home at around nine, I had a horrible head/backache. Disregarding the 420 herb that Marion had left on the coffee table, (no doubt in the hopes I would see it) I went to my mom's medicine cabinet and stole a vicodin, grabbed a cold rag, and went back over to watch tv with the pets.

Marion had encouraged me to watch tv, borrow her CDs, play her Netflix DVDs, whatever I wanted (people have a
tendency to trust me to stay in their houses by myself a lot. Lucky for them I'm a trustworthy kinda gal.) She has two tvs, one in the kitchen, the other in her room facing the bed. I had been having breakfast and dinner with the pets in the kitchen while they ate, so they wouldn't be lonely, but I had resisted the urge to televise in her room on the grounds that since Marion is gay, I might get cooties (how homophobic does that make me?)

Last night I dove onto her side of the bed in front of Bill Curtis and "Cold Case Files." A cold rag on my head, a pleasant narcotic haze coming over me as Alex snurggled me lovingly in the semi-darkness.

Beastie

He roved up and down through history --- spectre with tales to tell.
In the darkness when the campfire's dead --- to each his private hell.
If you look behind your shoulder as you feel his eyes to feast,
You can witness now the everchanging nature of the beast.

Beastie

If you wear a warmer sporran, you can keep the foe at bay.
You can pop those pills and visit some psychiatrist who'll say ---
There's nothing I can do for you, everywhere's a danger zone.
I'd love to help get rid of it, but I've got one of my own.

There's a beast upon my shoulder and a fiend upon my back.
Feel his burning breath a heaving, smoke oozing from his stack.
And he moves beneath the covers or he lies below the bed.
He's the beast upon your shoulder. He's the price upon your head.

He's the lonely fear of dying, and for some, of living too.
He's your private nightmare pricking. He'd just love to turn the screw.
So stand as one defiant --- yes, and let your voices swell.
Stare that beastie in the face and really give him hell.

Jethro Tull--"Beastie"

Take the quiz: "WHAT RELIGION BEST SUITS YOU?"

Modern Satanist
Thinking yourself to be a god, realizing Indulgence as your main goal, not believing in a literal Satan, and counting stupidity as your highest sin. You are a proud LaVeyan Satanist! You might enjoy www.churchofsatan.com if you're not already a member.

Interesting. I do agree with LaVey's "Virtue of Selfishness" kind of philosophy. To look at me, you would never know. I don't dress like a goth or anything. The only black clothing I have is rock t-shirts. In fact my fashion sense is a slightly sloppier version of the "denim adept"--rock t-shirts, pants and long shirts from Goodwill and K-Mart.

---

So, Monday (not this past Monday, but Monday last--that's how off the ball I am this week.) I went with Mom up to the City. They had announced on the news the night before that Bill Clinton was going to be having a book signing, and we were under the impression that anybody could just go down there and meet the President.

Of course, this was not the case, as you had to have bought the book at a certain store and gotten a ticket which they had given out all of about two weeks prior. I was so pissed off. Why does everything have to be such a stupid big money deal? I mean, he's the former president, ferchrissakes, shouldn't everyone have equal access to meet him? Meeting famous people in person is one of my favorite things. To assuage my anger I ate mass quantities of M&Ms.

At least the whole day wasn't a complete wash. Mom took her lunch hour with me and we had a nice lunch at the Embarcadero Center, where she works, and I met a couple of the people in her office. I also took the opportunity to swing by Green Apple Books and trade in some of my old books. I achieved "book shrinkage", which, when you need ever inch of bookshelf space you can get like I do, is a very good thing.

I traded in for a used Thoth deck which I am going to modify by cutting the frames off (sacrelidge, do I hear you say?) and a copy of Colin Wilson's "Aleister Crowley: The Nature of the Beast". I had to wade through his blather about poltergeists and Montague Summers, but it was worth it for this quote from Israel Regardie's "Eye in the Triangle"

Regardie to Crowley--"Darling Alice: You really are a contemptible bitch..." So you know I have to read that book now too.

Also, I happened upon a complete deck/book set called "StarGate" by Richard Greer. This was freom the late 70s early 80s. I used to have one before, but it was one of the things I scissored into centimeter-sized shreds when I had the Xian sickness. It wasn't so much an oracular deck as it was a great tool for giving your brain a creative workout.

Then last Friday I went and saw the marvelous Fahrenheit 9/11. I noticed on NPR this weekend they had at least one Republican spin doctor trying like hell to refute the facts in the movie. One was just sputtering out of control and then said something like, "You have to remember, these things took place during the Clinton administration!"

Sorry fellas, Clinton's long gone, you can't blame your problems on him any more. Besides, just because something happened while he was president, doesn't mean that the Bush family weren't the ones who did it. I think the guy really felt like he had made a good point, but actually he was just another wonk who showed how stupid the Dubya Clan really are.

Anyway, after I came home from the movie, I was watching 20/20 and they had this segment on prominent sports figures that had been convicted of violent crimes but their teams had let them come back to play with merely a slap on the wrist for consequences. They were interviewing a sports team executive and once again I noticed the sputtering, scrambling for an answer, and even the guy himself had to admit, "How can I even answer that? What can I do?"

This, coupled with the two and a half hours that I had just spent in the movie theater, made me say to myself, "Jesus, doesn't anybody just do the right thing, not the thing that will make the most money?" I know this is being un-Thelemically overly concerned with other people's paths in life, but I am sometimes interested in what motivates people to do the things they do.

Then I found myself reading AC's Absinthe: The Green Goddess and came upon this passage that spoke to me:

"That marriage has today become a matter of convenience is the last word of the commercial spirit. It is as if one should take a vow of knighthood to combat dragons--until the dragons appeared."

It seems to me that there are a lot of things that people "get married to" or make bedfellows with--politics, career, business, money, and then wonder why it gets them into trouble.

As our friend Marilyn Manson said, "You live with apes, man, it's hard to be clean..."

And a dash of lovability...

How did they get this so right?

How to make a Hermgirl

Ingredients: 5 parts intelligence 1 part crazyiness 1 part empathy

Method: Stir together in a glass tumbler with a salted rim. Add a little cocktail umbrella and a dash of lovability

Username:

Personality cocktail
From Go-Quiz.com

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*!'"
Created with the ORIGINAL MemeGen!

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.