For Scribs.
As a teenager it became apparent that getting boys to make out with you required a substantially different strategy than getting girls to.
With girls I would just add wine use my ears.
Straight(ish) boys required a delicate balance of
- Demonstrating your own non-threatening awesomeness while
- Sufficiently loosening their reality bonds so as to be amenable to (or groomed into) doing something they initially weren’t planning on.
Now, stop me if you’ve heard this one or if it precisely describes your own awkward, fumbling teenage years but I found magic to be particularly effective with that second part.
It was like a cold reading. Ask open, innocuous questions and then move down whichever rabbit hole appeared in the conversation. Could be tarot, could be ghosts, could be whatever got the best reaction. The goal was to get to the point where you could start using words like “socially conditioned identity” and “culturally constructed personality” and then provide helpful suggestions as to how to loosen those shackles. Muggle teenagers are idiots. They will rebel against anything and do whatever you tell them as long as their parents or The Man doesn’t like it.
And for me the best results seem to come from, over many drinks, outlining a broadly Hancockian vision of Ice Age civilisation. (If you start with Atlantis/Ancient Astronaut theory you inevitably land on the realisation that we are luminous beings and not this crude matter. The meat suit is just temporary. So really “it’s all just about feeling that inner connection like I’m getting from you.” *GAG* What a douche!)
One such successful target got really into the Atlantis stuff. I had moved to Sydney to start university a year after we’d hooked up and it turned out his father had a pied-à-terre “that was free that night if I wanted to come over and talk ancient history” about a six minute walk from my own.
“Well, all right,” I say. “But I’m going to need some whisky and some old naval maps.” (Love me those maps.) He laughed. Boom. Fish in a barrel.
And you know what? I did bring over some maps photocopied from the library and a bunch of books and some whisky and we did talk Ice Age civilisations. We talked excitedly till 2am. Whereupon he declared he was really tired and took himself off to bed, leaving me to walk home in the dark clutching my maps and books.
I had got distracted and lost the mission. Outplayed by those stupid muggle teenagers. So ended my days of using magic for grooming. (I was now old enough to get into clubs, anyway.)
My Atlantean obsessions, combined with my high school passion for Old Kingdom Egyptian burial customs, positively fizzed when I encountered Michael Foucalt during university. His work gave me the psychological framework to understand how power creates rather than suppresses knowledge. It was plain to see how power could create a dominant historical narrative that supports its own needs.
And I would get a little ranty about it. From that moment ‘whisky rant’ became the umbrella term that held my pseudohistorical studies, Forteana and all the little pieces of the orthodox story of “us” that falls away from the main edifice, neglected and ignored.
It is, in lieu of a meta-narrative (still a chaos magician), my account of magic and mankind, beginning with the emergence of the first modern humans and extending into our furtive explorations of space. This may take some time.
So… bring me some whisky and some old naval maps and we’ll get started.
I’d love to read you waxing erudite on Foucault. Meanwhile I’ll be read- and rereading Foucault myself.
Posted by Tesla Quoyle | January 23, 2012, 4:03 pmI had the same fucking reaction to Foucault and college! Soul. Mates.
And I know exactly what you mean only add in “innocent” constant showings of the movie Bound instead of maps.
Deb´s last [type] ..Banana Oat Almond Butter Smoothie
Posted by Deb | January 23, 2012, 6:26 pmCool, this should be fun.
Now that you mentioned Foucault, I remembered a very interesting ongoing comic book by Vertigo, The Unwritten, that is basically about who writes the stories that rule the world. It’s really worth a look – and perhaps some of the concepts presented (such as the Leviathan) could be useful to Chaos magicians.
Posted by Hierax | January 23, 2012, 7:26 pmGordon, I’ve been reading your blog for a very long time. I’ve been wanting to hear this whiskey rant, so I hope this is an ongoing series coming soon!
Posted by Lonnie | January 24, 2012, 8:27 amYou know, I read “for Scribs” at the top of the posting, and then you proceeded to tell tales of seducing young straight boys in your college days, and well… my fellow commuters on the Metro might have noticed that the elegant gentleman reading on his Android phone was noticeably blushing.
I have my own nascent theories about Atlantis, but I’m waiting in suspense to read yours.
Scribbler´s last [type] ..Arabatel Resource Digest Becomes Search-Engine Magnet!
Posted by Scribbler | January 24, 2012, 7:42 pmIn my HIGH SCHOOL years, scribs… Seducing straight boys in my high school years.
Posted by Gordon | January 24, 2012, 8:33 pmEr… right! Like you said.
Scribbler´s last [type] ..Not an Apology
Posted by Scribbler | January 24, 2012, 9:21 pmAtlantis? *searches for maps* Nope, can’t find them. *settles comfortably on couch*
Here’s some whiskey.
Rose Weaver´s last [type] ..The Question of Why This and Not That?
Posted by Rose Weaver | January 25, 2012, 1:05 pmI think we should take up a collection and send him a CASE of whiskey.
Scribbler´s last [type] ..Contribute to the Arbatel Link Digest!
Posted by Scribbler | January 25, 2012, 1:45 pmI have seen spirits. I know they exist, in what we commonly know as reality. It does take some mental shifts to get there, things that sometimes people might consider altered reality. Yet the actions of the spirits had results in the empirical world. I am an animist. I was initiated into the old Latin rite Roman Catholic Church. I am an artist. I am comfortable with Forteana, and believe magic exists as do nature spirits and haunted places.
I teach an intro to archaeology class through an online university. I have the degrees and experiences, and have been a professional archaeologist. When I do science, I put on my science filter. And the Atlantis stuff, and aliens from the stars stuff etc. It just doesn’t wash, I’m sorry to say. Hancock’s “teachers” and Jensen’s “dreams” and Black Elk’s visions… those are not material. You cannot submit an immaterial thing, like spirits or dreams, to scientific analysis, because it is the wrong tool. However, when one has a material thing to analyze and the analysis does not give you the answer you prefer, well, there it is.
Certainly, people have the right to believe as they wish, to have the worldview they desire. I had to wade through a fundamentalist Christian student’s earnest diatribe about God making the world already old, because after all, God could make Adam a grown man, so why not be able to make an old world, complete with fraudulent dinosaur bones? Where can one start? I don’t want to hurt people’s beliefs, and I just am too old too be interested in rants or arguments, when I know it will not end up well.
I have atheists, fundamentalist Christians, conspiracists, fringe archaeology fans, scientists, average Joes, …and people who would rather be shopping and who think getting an A.A. degree is going to land them a job right after they graduate with a 100,000 dollar salary. Where does one start? I just put the material out there, and it is up to people to use their own choice (of course the reality is there isn’t much real free choice since our culture immerses us in Matrix-like thaumaturgy all the time). I tell them, believe nothing. Use your own mind…if you can.
I have a pocketful of worldviews, like keys on a janitor’s keychain. Each opens a different door. The wrong key doesn’t open a door for which it is not suited, no matter how we try to force it.
Posted by Lance Foster | January 25, 2012, 7:09 pm