atmos haunt

atmospheric hauntings and more talk of life without a toaster...
woke up today startled from a dream of an earthquake by what I thought was an earthquake. Just a thunderstorm. a 2 hr thunderstorm. I lOVED EVERY FUCKING MINUTE OF IT, except that we had put Tom (short for Thompson, as in HST), the outdoor cat we harbor at night, out just a little while b4 and I was terrified for him being trapped out in such a heavy storm. I couldn't get back to sleep so I sat up re-reading the INVISIBLES book 7. Smoked a little. Put on a pot of coffee (first of MANY) and had a wonderful experience. I literally trip when I read THE Invisibles. It changed my life back when the issues of this particular (the last) volume was monthly, and since then it has been one of the main sources of inspiration for EVERYTHING I do. I can't explain it, but it has this effect on my nervous system where its a time machine, a halucinogen, a road that mainlines you right into the supercontext. At one point I stopped reading, opened the back door that looks West toward the water and just stared at the cloud formations. Performed my Tarot pull for the day. 5 Cups: Disappointment, upside down. It was at this point that something strange happened. It was definitely fueled by the comic, because I still had so much effect from King Mob and Edith by the Ganges and Division X at the Wicker Man and blah blah blah but the image on the card expanded. It grew, and as we toggled our perception back and forth between the atmosphere of the planet in my vicinity and the image spilling from the small card out into the many levels of my brain I reached all kinds of new angles for reading and interpreting these things.*

At the same time I fell under the subtle impression that I was witnessing the exact same atmospheric conditions that I had the second morning in Dublin, '01 when I went with Grez and Tony. Like I was somehow standing in my doorway now in 1/07 and also on a street in Dublin looking at a storm that just may have passed from one when through what we think of as the limitations of time to another. Maybe I'm like pigpen from peanuts and instead of a dirt cloud following me through the air I breath this storm is following me through the ages of my life, weaving in and oout of tiem to rear its head and inspire me when I need it. Maybe its that same one from sooo long ago, sophmore year? when I laid awake at night with a teenage broken heart listening to it and Disintegration by The Cure for the first time. Maybe it will be there when I birth from this life into the next.

*Tarot is amazing because there really is a scientific reason WHY a divination system such as this works. based on the collective unconscious of humanity's archetypal pallete these things don't come true because you want to make them that way, their simply putting into language the future as it already unfolding via higher dimensional perceptions we do not understand how to use, interpret or acknowledge. this system puts those instincts into our language, a language based on symbols representing what we can all perceive with our Earth bound senses.

Anyway, I'm fucking rambling because I was off today and I've smoked quite a few times. Hence where 'disappointment' comes in, cuz the Magick of that first time at 9:30 in the morning was (I knew) never going to be re-created.
Currently reading:
The Invisible Kingdom (The Invisibles, Book 7)
By Grant Morrison
Release date: 01 December, 2002

Peachy

the long, winding journey of sleep - the darkening that embraces all in the end...
okay, I'm just writing this to get my brain flowing. I slept for a good number of hours for the first time in a long time last night - felt good. I must have been a real bastard in a previous existence to warrant my working retail during the holidays...

Finished the Sopranos this week - I don't know why there was such a backlash about the ending when it aired - I thought the finale was amazing. I'll probably write about it eventually, just to put down what my thoughts on it were - if for no other reason than to work it out for myself. Also, watched Martine Scorsese's The Departed last night, 2nd time I've seen it since seeing it in the theatre. The blurb on the front of the box is 'Scorsese's best film since Goodfellas' and frankly, I'd have to agree (although I haven't seen everything he's done since then. Gangs of New York comes to mind as one I definitely did not see, although me thinks I shall remedy that soon). Great use of music, as always, to compel and capture the different era's.

The nights have been colder lately, and it feels good, although now I have this stupid cough.

Ministry announced their final tour recently, with their 'final' show being in Chicago in May. If I could sell a couple scripts by then I'd fly home for that one in a heart beat, to see it end where it all began...

I miss industrial music. But alas, it would appear it finished its course some time ago, with all the current stuff I've heard (if there's something out there, someone let me know) being more concerned with perpetuating what the original bands sounded like. Everything good has evolved the form until it has become something else, which of course is the natural order of true evolution.

The big fish

I stepped out of the shower this afternoon and while doing some deep breathing exercises I usually try to step into my day with for the first time I think ever I felt something behind the mask of the ego scaffold I so adamantly stick to.

I felt a quiet. Not an introspective quiet but a vast ocean of calm underneath the clothes I dress myself in when I step out of my mind and onto the stage where I interact with all of these other marvelous souls. It felt raw and primal and... powerful.

I'm going back in, after it, and suddenly I understand what David Lynch called the 'big fish'.

The Smiths

I can't get them out of my head. I've never felt like this about a band before. Not that they're better or I like them more than other bands, but they're resonating with me in ways that are really kind of creepy. I'm not usually one to pay super attention to lyrics but Morrissey gets to me - he's able to capture in a few simple lines some of the most important, daunting ideas of what it is to live and love...

Fuck you november 12th 2009

Fuck You November 12th 2009. You batter me for 9 hours with corporate-bullshit stress that makes my soul leak through my eyes, then you take my friend from me. Fuck you - I'll drive a nail the size of a gallon of alcohol through your heart and leave you dead and behind me when I wake up tomorrow in a world with one less person I love in it.

Life, the Universe and everything really worth thinking about (if you are in the habit of thinking too much)!!!

So, a long time ago I promised this in a strange aside kinda manner, and while I'm sure everyone who read it thought it was a joke, I can assure you, it most certainly is not. For damn near ten years now I have been, when not distracted by this large, slippery and often disabling thing called modern life, obsessed with cracking the codes this thing we call reality is written in. In the grand scheme of things I'm not really any further along today than I was when I started this, but I have learned an interesting trick or three, along with a wealth of information that alternately turns on and off, like some cosmic tap for bigger-than-human-life information. Not information as the two-dimensional whirly gig that flitters faster and faster through our constantly shrinking attention spans, but information as living, breathing, reality-altering substance. When actively engaged, the right information would appear more as an alien abduction than a boring snore through some ledger of letters and numbers.

Alright, I'm going to pause now to re-fill my coffee cup (my very large coffee cup) and when I return, we will begin...

SHAWN'S ATTEMPT TO EXPLAIN IT ALL

Warning, this is going to begin as a series of posts of loosely intermittent information that will then tie together in the end. I hope. Anyone who reads this should keep in mind I by no means consider myself any kind of expert or enlightened individual, and thus this is as much an attempt to coalesce and congeal this stuff for myself as for anyone else. I just figured, why not do it in public, might be fun for others to watch me run around the proverbial page like a chicken with its head chopped off.


Okay, first we should start at the microscopic level. See, one thing I am sure of is we as humans are so caught up in ourselves and things taking place on our level of experience, we forget or downright snub all the other limitless levels of existence that actually help make what we see around us exist. There is an age old Hermetic maxim, and every good book on Science or Magick quotes it at least once, because it is a good compass point to mark when beginning a journey such as this. AS ABOVE, SO BELOW - in its most concise form. What this means is that the universal relationships, why's, wherefore's and properties that exist on any one of these levels of existence, as in simplicity's sake we'll say the microscopic, they also repeat in all the other levels, as let's say, the macroscopic. This means that some of the same behavior we see Electrons, Neutrons, Quarks, and all their tiny brethren exhibiting is repeated with people, planets, stars, etc. A good, simple example of this is the idea of the orbit. Planets orbit the stars that grant them life, and Electrons orbit the nucleus of an atom. ONLY this idea has changed, and I interrupt the simple definition now in an attempt to introduce a new idea forthwith. For a long time this idea of the particles of an atom mirroring the behavior of the stars worked, that is until the inception of Quantum Mechanics.

Now, in Quantum Mechanics, arguably one of the most important ideas that arose was Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, which essentially says that the more you try to pinpoint the exact location of a quantum particle the more uncertain its location becomes. This is roughly due to the idea that in the time it takes to receive the light to view the particle it has changed position. Herein is the advent of the Ground State Fluctuations. Now think about this...

If you consider Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle you immediately see that while it is common place to consider matter as being made up of particles you'll realize that if those particles move fast enough that we cannot see them then wait a minute, doesn't that mean they're behaving more like waves than particles? Ahh... so what do we call something that sometimes behaves like a particle and sometimes like a wave?

We call it a 'Quanta'. Quanta is a measurement - often h*j where h= Planck's Constant and j= an amount of radiation.

Anyway, if the Universe is made up of these quanta, which are always moving, there would be a constant accumulation of energy. These are Ground State Fluctuations and they occur on such a small scale that they are responsible, to some degree, for the physical essences that make up our world (what people used to refer to as Eyther, Aether, Ayether and all other manner of spellings). Matter, from the desk my hands now type against, to my actual body are complimenting quanta all vibrating (or moving, as in ground state) at the same or similar speeds. This is why some of the Universe we see, some we feel, some we taste, smell, hear, etcetera, and some are just plain invisible to us in every way. This is why some materials bend to our strength and others do not. What moves at the same or similar speeds interacts or appears to one another. This opens us up for the idea of different 'Dimensions' because they are things vibrating at different, or non-complimentary speeds to our own and those could be said, for us, to exist in different dimensions...

Rain

So I've been in Chicago for six days and it has rained everyday.

This is good.

However for the last two and a half days I've been sick.

This is bad.

I ended up postponing my flight back by two days (from Monday to Wed). This has been both nice and difficult. Difficult because I miss my wife and cats, nice because I get to spend more time with my Mom and Dad, kibitzing around the house of my birth (which I get womb-like inspiration from) and driving around in the rain.

The Rain.

I don't get hardly any in Southern California, and although I sure as hell would NEVER want to live in Chicago full time again I can't wait until I can come back whenever I want, stay as long as I want and soak up the rain in a leisurely fashion. I've driven by Bachelor's Grove twice today - it's perfect weather for the Midwest's most haunted cemetary (in the middle of the freakin' woods no less) and I wasn't able to get there because of this goddamn sinus infection ripping my head apart!!!

Tarot for the day:

1) 6 Wands Victory
2) 7 Disks Failure
3) XVII The Star
4) 2 Disks Change
5) IX The Hermit
6) 8 Disks Prudence
7) 10 Swords Ruin
8) 5 Disks Worry
9) (in this case unseen) Queen of Cups

I'm coming from Victories and Failures. These are the starting points or two main impulses (results?) - I'm trying to move from out from under their one-two punch and have better results. I'm My current main influence are the cosmic forces of Nuit represented by the Star card. This fits with my writing shifting back into a 'cosmic' focus. My most recent previous influence is Change, that is the need to. The future will be driven by The Hermit, which means more isolated work ahead as the lights come on and the shadow forces of inspiration are integrated further into my overall sturcture.

What is in the dark (card 6) is Prudence bright perception, vitality and healthy growth. Also possibly winning by not doing anything. This in particular is interesting as I have a lot of 'feelers' out - queries I sent and still have not received responses for. This may be an area open to Magickal 'Push'. What is in the light is Ruin, which doesn't bother me because my interpretation of that is, ah yeah, I've not gotten any positive response from the queries I did get back, so it's all in what's not yet seen.

Finally where the journey will lead is Worry, but the actual picture on the Worry card shows light shining through the dark gears - in other words I'm inclined to receive this as 'you worry and it dampens your sight, but just behind there be a light.'

Wow, a little poem there. How coffeeshop of me.

Nine isn't interpreted here because 8 wasn't one of the Major Arcana. However, The Queen of Cups is one of my cards, so this is good, interpreted as a familiar.