If You Were There, You Are There Now

I brought a case of the blues back with me from vacation.  Amy Schneider's class tonight helped a great deal.  I wasn't at my best, but I made the conscious effort to not let the blues stop me but to integrate the blues into my practice.  I worked with the blues, rather than against it.  I decided to be softer and more fluid.  It felt great.

Still, in savasana, the blues planted doubts in my head.  The blues said that I'd never reach the states of awareness that I wanted to reach, or even make it back to the states of mind where I felt I was making real progress in the past.

But, see, the blues fucked up when they mentioned the past, because I know enough about theoretical physics to be dangerous.  Theoretical physics sees time as a dimension like space, which opens the door for time travel and other, more interesting ideas.  Grant Morrison introduced me to one of my favorites, which is, if we were all fifth dimensional entities that could look down on the four dimensions humans perceive, we could theoretically point to different areas in time, and we'd see that all moments in time are actually part of the same thing and could really be said to be happening at once.

So, if that's the case, every moment in my life is happening right now.  The time years ago in Florida where the universe manifested itself to me as interlocking golden light that makes up everything is happening right now.  The time in savasana where I realized that God is real is happening right now.  There's no beginning or ending to anything, which means that if I have ever had a transcendent, spiritual moment in which I glimpsed higher existence, I can have it right now, if I just open myself to it.

And since we're all one thing anyway, if I've had such moments, you can too.

Needless to say, savasana got really, really trippy after that.  And really, really good.

Meditation Overload

I am in the midst of an identity crisis that cuts to the core of who and what I want to be.

Do I want an end to suffering?

Do I want to awaken?

Or do I want to transcend the limits of human perception and trip the light fantastic?

The first wonderful experience I had in meditation came about two years ago, thanks to Grant Morrison and his wonderful little book called The Invisibles.  Morrison sold me on the idea that there was a hidden world just outside of the reach of the every day that humans had and could access, if they'd just dive far enough into the weird and wild, where all the good stuff resides.  The fan website Barbelith led me to Condensed Chaos, which is as good an introduction into the principals of magic as I can imagine.

One of the first things an aspiring magician needs to learn is how to achieve the gnostic state.  Basically, you close your eyes or look into a mirror or a bowl of water and just...let you mind go, wander, play.  Don't forbid yourself from seeing anything, and you might see everything.  When I stopped worrying about whether what I was seeing was real, I could see a lot more cool stuff, a lot more meaningful stuff.  I saw myself as Gandalf retreating to my castle of ice.  I met my spirit animal, the grey wolf.  I journeyed deep into the heart of death and found complete peace there.  I learned so much about myself, and I felt I was moving forward.

Books got me on the gnostic path, so it's fitting that a book should have knocked me from it.  Magic had shown me glimpses of the whole world, but I didn't want a piece of the world.  I wanted the whole thing, and Buddhism Plain & Simple seemed to offer that.  All one had to do was let go of everything superfluous and just...wake up.  Awaken to ultimate reality.  Right now, because there is only now.  The key wasn't to let your mind wander but to stay present in the moment.  If one could understand right now completely, without hope or fear of anything else, one might actually wake up, and then one really could see everything.  As I learned just a little bit about Tibetan Buddhism, I saw a lot of stuff floating around like bodhisattavas that matched some of what I saw in gnosis, which only furthered my belief that Buddhism was big enough to encompass magic and a lot of other stuff.  I felt I was moving forward.

With the beginning of yoga teacher training, I've encountered a third organizing principle for meditation.  Yogic meditation seems to want to calm the fluctuations of the mind, not for the sake of awakening, but just because.  Because it will make you better, fuller, more content.  I confess I've thought the least about this type of meditation and that it appeals to me the least.

Frankly, all that the yogic ideas behind meditation have done is bring to a head a situation that had been developing for quite some time, which is that I've officially hit meditation overload.  Too many chefs have spoiled the broth.  I'm confused.  I don't know whether to seek calm or enlightenment or visions from another dimension of reality.  Too many ideas are competing for the time I spend in lotus.  I don't feel like I'm moving forward.

In the long run, I'm not too concerned about where I am.  I'm not going to stop meditating, and I recognize that even the best journeys have times spent at pit stops, lost, or stuck in a ditch.  I believe Steve Hagen when he says that all we need to do is show up and meditate each day, and the practice will teach us everything we need to know.  Ultimately, I think all of these paths have one final destination, anyway.  The Buddha and the great magicians and yogis of history are all chilling at the top of the same mountain together, calmly sipping mushroom tea and tripping off the world in all its glory.

I get all that.

But that doesn't mean I'm not frustrated now.

Dream Weaver

I have broken the Seventh Seal of the New Age Apocalypse.  I have started to keep a dream journal.  If you don't, I cannot recommend it enough.

I never gave dreams much thought, even when I encountered therapists who encouraged me to treat them more seriously.  The psychological approach to dreams seems so clinical and cold to me, and, although I never consciously had this thought, I think I always wanted my dreams to remain free, wild, and mysterious.  The idea of putting dreams on the couch seemed to rob them of all their potency.

Thanks to Arthur Magazine, I know I'm not the only one that feels that way.  The cover story of their big comeback issue is an interview with comic book artist Rick Veitch, who has spent the better part of 20 years writing and illustrating his dreams for over 20 years.  That's his work on the cover.

Something about the combination of dreams and comic books spoke to me.  Comics are one of the last places where the free, wild, and mysterious can still bubble up into the larger culture, unless you think a Norse god teaming up with the Tin Man and an unfrozen WWII soldier is standard everyday happenings.  I love comics but have never been able to participate in the creative process.  I can't draw, and I haven't written any fiction since high school.

Rick Veitch tells me I don't need to do either.  All I need to do is dream, and I can play with the same magic he does.

So, yeah, I started a dream journal this weekend, and I am already amazed at what I am uncovering.  Thus far, because the cosmos has a sense of humor, the primary benefits I have seen have been psychological.  I am amazed at what writing and rehashing my dreams has told me about how I carry guilt around.  Some of the details have been painful to write down, but doing so has let me walk around this week with a little less weight on my shoulders.  Being aware of some previously subconscious coping mechanisms has let me understand myself a little better, and I'm able to be just that much gentler with myself.

Thus far, I haven't dreamt up the next great superhero franchise, but, hey, the Dream Every Day Project is less than a week old.  Give it time.

Sex and Mermaids

What's it like to be down with the Sexcamaids?

You may have seen stories or, hopefully, pictures from Coney Island's 30th Annual Mermaid Parade, held this past Saturday.  Basically, the Mermaid Parade is a Pride for everyone, a chance for any and all to let their freak flag fly in the middle of Brooklyn in front of half a million people.

In my incredibly biased opinion, no group better represents what the Mermaid Parade is and should be all about than the lovely Sexcamaids, a dance troupe that calls themselves 'the sirens of the sex world."  Saturday, they were the ladies wearing just enough clothes, rocking the best, most coordinated moves, pushing the loudest, rudest speaker stack, and otherwise behaving like those untouchable bad girls you were scared to talk to in high school.

(Please keep in mind that a heterosexual man wrote the preceding paragraph and that your experience with the Sexcamaids may vary.  For example, every little girl saw the coolest set of big sisters to ever walk the Earth.  If you want to see happy, you should see an 6 year old girl who sees the Sexcamaids and realizes that, despite whatever her parents have told her, she can play dress up for the rest of her life.)

I had the opportunity to join the 2012 version of Maids' support group, the (ahem) Sea Men. The Sea Men are the Alfred to the Maids' Batman. We do the logistical stuff that kept them dancing and looking good. We push along the sound system that plays their music. We drag along the coolers and give them the water that keeps them from passing out. We deal with the overzealous paparazzi. As befitting any superhero support team, the Sea Men are in costume, which is how I found myself pulling a cooler and dancing down the streets of Coney Island wearing nothing but a sailor's hat and a pair of white rhinestone-encrusted booty shorts.

It was one of the best experiences of my life.  Even as a sidekick, I felt and still feel like an honest-to-God superhero.

I had a bit of a "come to Jesus" moment Saturday.  Now I understand, to a far greater extent, Pride and Goth and Lady Gaga and S&M and so many other things.  Such diverse phenomenon usually get lumped under the banner of sexuality, but after Saturday, I'm convinced that all of these things are about so much more than sex.  They're about expression and freedom and experimentation and role play and performance and power and giving it up and community and billion other things for which either I can't find the word or the word doesn't exist.  We lump so many things under the banner of sexuality because, like sex, we're profoundly scared of many of these things, because they're SO powerful.  We worry that if we let them out even a little, they threaten to flood us and knock away all they fragile little bridges we've built that we think makes us into functional adults who don't have to sleep in cardboard boxes.

I'm not a stranger to self expression or risk taking or any of this stuff, but being a Sea Man hit me in a way I hadn't experienced before.  My enduring memory of the 2012 Mermaid Parade will be that I played with the boundaries of who I was in a way that I hadn't done before, and I had 500,000 people in the crowd who were THRILLED that I was doing so.  When you take a risk and show some side of you that you've rarely shown before in front of that many people, and they show you so much love in return, it can make you feel like every chance you've ever taken to be a better, more complete, more free person was completely worth it, and it makes you want to do it again and again.

Even if you can't see yourself down with the short shorts and pasties crowd, the Mermaid Parade and the Sexcamaids have a lesson for you, and it's really probably the only lesson that matters.  You know that thing you want to try, but you're scared?  You're worried you'll get fired, or your spouse will judge you, or you're just too old/Christian/cool/whatever?  Do it.  Find a safe space and supportive, decent, caring people who will provide you a healthy environment to try something you've never tried or even though of, and let it rip.  There's nothing to lose and everything, everything, everything to gain.

Thank you for letting me tag along, Sexcamaids.  If you'll have me back, I'll haul, push, water, or whatever you need in 2013.

Postscript: Don't get me wrong. It's not not about sex either. Ladies, I am in love with each and every one of you, and so is the rest of New York. You know it, and you wouldn't have it any other way.

11 Things For Which I'm Grateful

1) The grammatical constructions "for which," "to which," and so on.  They make me feel smart.

2) Pitchers and catchers in eight days.

3) Lavoy Allen balling out.  If they really wanna do this thing, the Sixers need toughness and physical play.  Lavoy isn't enough, but he's been a pleasant surprise.  He battles his man on defense on every position, he rebounds, he hustles, and he makes open jumpers.

4) Recently, the Alliance for Student Activites, an organization dedicated to the promotion of the value of student activities for middle school and high school students, launched its "When X=Student Activities" campaign.  This presentation and its accompanying parts are a grassroots effort that will change the public education debate in this country, and I am proud to be a part of this effort.  Please click on the link above and "like" us.

5) The opportunity to work with Bob Tryanski on #4

6) "Postcards from Hell" by The Wood Brothers

7) The staff of the PASC Grove City Gold Workshop

8) David Uzumeri says that Frank Quitely is almost done with his issue of Grant Morrison's Multiversity, which may come out this summer.

9) A semester of leave, which allowed me to submit on Sunday the best article manuscript I have ever written and researched.

10) "This too shall pass, so raise your glass to change and chance.
And freedom is the only law.
Shall we dance?"

11) New opportunities

The Watchmen Prequels

Y'all beat me to it.  When the news broke yesterday that DC was putting out prequels to Watchmen, I thought the Internet would melt.  I thought there'd be vigils at the stately English manor of Alan Moore, the author of the original.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the vigil.

Everyone on the Internet was reasonable.

Miracles never cease.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with more Watchmen.  I tend towards the view of Alan Moore's self-styled antagonist and fellow comics legend Grant Morrison, who sees culture in general and comics specifically as mythology that is the product of no one man.  In the case of Watchmen, this is certainly true, since Moore's inspiration for the story came from the characters of Charlton Comics.  Moore didn't come up with the idea for Watchmen from thin air, which makes it fair game for other creators.

As for Alan Moore, whatever.  Those of us who read comics on a regular basis know that however great Moore was or is, he is a miserable misanthrope who is only happy when he's not.  I guess he can be mad that he doesn't own the rights to anything and won't see much if any money from the prequels.  I'd care if Moore hadn't made his bones in the 1980s working with a series of DC characters (Batman, Superman, Swamp Thing) whose creators never got paid a fraction of what those characters made for DC.  Now that Moore is fat and rich, he's going to claim the path of moral purity?  Fck outta here.

Not to sound to cool for school, but the whole controversy kind of makes me yawn.  The people who get most excited about Watchmen seem to be the kind of people who have only read three "graphic novels" in their lives and thus miss the really amazing comics that come out every week.  As a medium, comics has moved passed Watchmen, in content and scope if not in quality, because, yes, Watchmen really is that good.

Maybe the most exciting part of the Watchmen prequels is that the original story will now become less of a boring old Bible and more of a living document upon which other good writers can build, which will only bring greater glory to original story.  I'm so excited that a broader audience is about to discover how awesome Brian Azzarrello is.

Early Bonus Scotchtime Manichean Madness

Note: I cheated a little and wrote this last night, while drinking scotch to numb the damage my idiot dentist wrought.  Warning given.

I believe Lovecraft.

Who I haven't even read yet.

But mean to.

(Once I found out that one-sentence paragraphs annoyed Takao, I dedicated my life to them.)

Anyway, I believe H.P. Lovecraft.  The universe is big and huge and scary and doesn't care about us even a little.  We are scared and alone and can't possibly comprehend the forces that are not aligned against us, but are completely indifferent towards us.

And yet.

And yet.


I believe Morrison.

As a species, we are destined to evolve and transcend.  We are all united, and united we will breach the walls of the possible, and it will be glorious beyond any words, and it is already happening.

You are a light.

Don't waste it.

The Perils of Fame

Originally, yesterday's entry was going to be about the cancellation of the new OMAC series, and how I blamed Dan Didio.  I had a really clever schtick worked out where I was going to attribute low sales figures to Didio's general loathsomeness and that, were he smart or good at his job, he would have penned OMAC using a pseudonym.

A pseudonym like "Schman Schmidio."

Maybe the schtick wasn't that clever.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the snarkatorium.

As I sat down to write yesterday, I thought about the praise and encouraging comments I've gotten from people about TWEDP thus far.  16 days ago, that people would, you know, actually read and enjoy this stuff was the furthest thing from my mind.  Remember, I'm an academic.  I'm used to slaving on something for years and no one reading the end product.

(Seems like a great time to plug my book!  200 scintillating pages on education finance and local school boards politics!  Relive the Great Rutland Donut Controversy of 2003 again and again!)

But some of you are apparently reading.  And you've said nice things.  And...like, humbled, shocked, embarrassed, and really happy.  Thank you.  A million times thank you.

All of this goes through my head yesterday, and I ask myself, do my adoring masses really want to read about how the editor of DC Comics sucks for not being able to sell a book that he wrote?

I actually asked myself if my readers would care about a topic.  Seriously.  My readers.

This is the part where you laugh at me.

Keep in mind that all of this neurotic self-consciousness is being generated by an average of 50 page visits a day.  I cannot even imagine what artists who have followings that support a career go through.  The next time that you're mad that your favorite band made a terrible record, remember that you're probably partially responsible for its terribleness.  Whether they want to or not, that band is thinking about your expectations of what you want to hear from them.  The weight of those expectations has to be staggering.

The best bands often react to fame with the most ambitious, uncompromising effort of their career.  I haven't finished my coffee, so ambition is not happening, but I can do uncompromising.

HE IS OMAC!!!

Sci-Fi Jesus

I came up with one of my greatest ideas ever as I was falling asleep last night, and I am giving it to the evangelical Christian community free of charge:

Sci-Fi Jesus.

The concept: The Bible establishes Jesus has some pretty sweet powers.  He can turn water into wine.  Feeding the multitudes and alladat.

But, see, those are the powers we mere mortals can perceive.

You know that Jesus was on some behind-the-scenes isht.  

We already know that Jesus forbade physical violence but waged metaphysical war on the ideas of violence, oppression, sin, and the like.  So what if someone made a movie that showed that metaphysical warfare in terms we could understand?  You're telling me you wouldn't watch Jesus in a superhero movie where he brings the ruckus to the literal manifestation of evil using powers across all 11 dimensions?  That Jesus punching out Evil and saving the day with a punch that he conceals by delivering it through a pocket dimension wouldn't make everyone you know go see that movie 15 times?

And for the sequel, imagine that the Hadron is actually an evil secular humanist plot to rip apart the universe.  But, of course, they can't get that sh!t past Jesus.  From his physical existence 2000 years ago Jesus perceives the threat, reaches across time and space, and undoes the work of the Hadron Collider at every instant.  Hadron Collider always rips apart the universe, but Jesus simultaneously rebuilds it.  And he lets the evil scientists KNOW that they are constantly succeeding but failing, because that's all part of some OTHER metawar that we'll tell you about in the third film.

You'd go see that movie.

To my faithful Christians out there: don't be mad.  One, I agree that we have to do this right.  That means any filmmaker needs to demonstrate strong Biblical knowledge, and Michael Bay is not allowed within a thousand miles of the set.  Two, I'm pretty sure Jesus is down with this plan.  We know that Jesus is beyond our understanding.  We know that, in order for us to better understand some part of His infinite wisdom, He often spoke in parables.

Well, these would be parables.

Parables about KICKING A$$.

And all of a sudden, Jesus would be the coolest kid on the block again.  Batman would have nothing on Sci-Fi Jesus.  Church attendance would swell, allowing you to talk to the people about...whatever it is one talks about in church.

Thank you Sci-Fi Jesus!!