ari_ormstunga

 I read an article recently about magazines having to put submissions on hold because of a flood of AI generated content, both stories and artwork. As a creative being who once had dreams of being an artist and writer, I found the whole thing pretty discouraging. At the very least, it will change the publishing landscape, probably in a negative way for writers and artists.

Similarly, as a consumer of content, I don’t have any interest in reading or viewing AI created content. It may be great, but as Jules from Pulp Fiction once said, sewer rat may taste like pumpkin pie, but I’ll never know because I won’t eat the filthy motherfucker. I played around with an AI art generating program, and all it did was basically rip off other artists by swiping their styles and pirating their content. Sure, it doesn’t legally violate copyright law, but without a stock of images real artists produced, it has nothing.

It sort of reminds me of a mechanized version of what JMG notes happens in a civilization in decline; all of the cultural forms become stagnant and ossified and it ends up repeating itself in iterations of the same thing over and over. AI generated content is the same trend but cycles faster and more broadly, without having any sort of direct connection to anything of spirit. How Faustian!

I guess the question becomes, what do people who want to support the creative people they value do? There are a few answers to this. One is platforms like Patreon and Substack; find the people you like and support their work directly. This cuts out middlemen like publishers, which may be a good or bad thing. I personally pay for a few Patreon subscriptions, and go out of my way to buy books published by my favorite authors. I don’t pay for Substacks but I’m not totally opposed to the idea either.

A second idea is going local. You can’t be sure that a lot of content on the internet is being created by humans, but chances are there are a number of creative types in your area that you could throw some support towards. That may take some creativity, but supporting local artists and craftspeople also helps build community. I suppose in some areas open mic nights and the like could offer opportunities to find local writers and support them as well.

One of my projects this year is going to be to try to find a local creative community and offer it some sort of financial support by buying art or using the creative services of a local person, or people. It’s high time for me to start taking the next steps in building (and participating) in my local community. The idea kinda scares me after three years of pandemic bullshit, but if not now, when?

I never thought I'd be in any way grateful for Covidianism, but in a way it has given me both the impetus and courage to change my life. I am no longer the same man I was when the pandemic hit. I am something far greater. As shitty, limiting, and Saturnine as this has been (and I'm very glad Saturn is getting the hell out of Aquarius next month), it has also built great strength and resolve inside of me. I'm ready.

 When it comes to magic and symbolism, I prefer for there to be a bit of subtlety. I like hints, small flourishes, and a bit of vagueness. Unfortunately for me, we don’t live in a subtle time. Therefore, when some obviously relevant and demonic stuff happens right in front of my face, well… I overlook it. Like the sponsored by Pfizer demonic performance at the Grammys.

Part of it is really contempt. Loud, vulgar, and trite, played out… the whole rock or pop music as rebellion against the status quo was fine, until it became the status quo. There’s really nothing more mainstream than reveling in demonic imagery to drive sales of products. Far from being shocking, it’s humdrum and boring.

Then again, maybe sometimes things just are what they seem to be. Just because I like a little mystery and flair doesn’t mean that demonic entities operate the same way. Besides, in a world where everyone is yelling all the time, they probably have to be over the top blatant, or no one would pay attention at all.

Thus, we get the servile lackeys at CBS tweeting they’re ready to worship, followed by images of demons onstage brought to us by our pals at Pfizer. My mind sees it and rejects it. It’s just too OBVIOUS, Ari!, my mind cries.

This has happened to me before, when I was getting synchronicities about the “demonic hypothesis” in the past. One of the difficulties about mystical and magical experiences is communicating them convincingly to others (which may be part of the purpose of “keeping silent”). Sometimes the inner worlds have messages just for you, and they come to you however they can. For me, they were coming in synchs through the series of novels kicked off by the book “John Dies at the End”. Both that book and its sequel had a lot of events that almost seemed to prefigure Covid and the demonic hypothesis, and in my mind served to affirm it.

It wouldn’t have necessarily done so for every reader of course. When I was reading the books there were various astrological conjunctions occurring, and I was contemplating the demonic hypothesis regularly. This confluence of events became meaningful to me, in the same way that various forms of divination constellate into meaning for the reader, or the practitioner of bibliomancy finds relevance and meaning in texts they just happen to select at a given time.

The second book in the series, given the events of that time and the frame of mind I was in and approaching the text, seemed like a ringing endorsement of the demonic hypothesis, and I nearly rejected it, because it was too obvious.

I guess its worth asking if I really believe that the whole Grammys performance was a direct and coordinated Satanic ritual. I still don’t, exactly. But meaningful coincidences do seem to seep into mass consciousness from time to time, and one can certainly wonder exactly what draws all of these factors together at the exact moment to deliver a message to those with ears to hear it? If it wasn't an intentional ritual, this thing could very well have been an omen of some kind. 

Tool has a song called “Stinkfist”, which explores overstimulation and bemoans the lack of subtlety in our society using the analogy of anal fisting. I guess to get any attention at all from the brain-fried and browbeaten populace of the Western world, spiritual powers more-or-less have to project it onto the screen of mass consciousness with the raw force of HD hard core pornography. Whatever force is coordinating this isn't one for subtlety, obviously. It's just as well, since I was pretty content to chuckle to myself and let the whole thing slide.

Then again, maybe that's the point.

 To even imply that a human, or group of humans, could be an enemy, seems to be a little problematic amongst some folks. After all, we are all growing, learning aspects of the divine expressing ourselves in an eternal dance that is inherently beautiful and intricate, with ebbs and flows of energy endlessly moving in grand patterns. In my better moments, I can genuinely see things that way.

In my better moments I can see the world the way that I imagine Christ saw it. That those who persecute us do so from ignorance and should be forgiven. I’m not so barbarous and crude that I’ve never turned the other cheek (but I’m not so saintly that I haven’t groused about it now and again).

After the last couple years, my better moments have become a bit more fleeting though. Because the last couple of years have been bullshit.

At some point, I truly believe that most of the world began an all-out information war, and we are caught up in it. Like any war, it is brutal and ugly, and various types of casualties are piling up.

Innocent people get caught up in war all the time and suffer injuries. Even in an information war. I get to watch my oldest boy struggle with OCD every single day because he was made so terrified by COVID and the protocols at school that he can’t even go to bed without enacting ten minutes of senseless repetitive movements. Apparently there’s a lot of OCD and anxiety going around with little kids who have been scarred by this war.

In the book Paths of Wisdom, (which is about the magical qabalah, not the Jewish mystical qabalah; they share features but are not the same), the first meditation on each sphere is a meditation on the negative and unbalanced version, its qlipoth.

These unbalanced energies are in all of us to some extent, as well as in the world at large. Once you know what to look for, it is pretty easy to spot them “out there”, although seeing them in yourself can be a bit more challenging. The ego wants to protect itself, and most people don’t like facing their own inner darkness. I certainly have it; I spent a lot of time wallowing in it and enjoying the feeling of power, of self-righteous rage, and the other emotional payoffs that come with reveling in imbalance. I know now that the bill will come due in time, and in fact I’m sure some of the circumstances of my life are prompted by my own carelessness, irresponsibility, and even maliciousness and cruelty.

I haven’t quite become a saint just yet, alas.

I’m reflective enough to recognize evil in myself, but that’s only part of the picture. It's an important part, because it allows me to take responsibility for it, and to curb it and the excesses it breeds.

There’s a lot of evil in the world just now.

I’m not talking about politics, although I guess what one labels evil probably has a political dimension. I associate with a fairly wide range of people with fairly diverse perspectives and find common ground with most of them, although extremists of either political persuasion leave me cold.

The evil that I see is unthinking, self-righteous, unreflective, and unconcerned with consequence. Can I find that in myself? Sitting here at 4 AM with another bout of insomnia under my belt (insomnia won, obviously), I can see it. Sure I can.

But I also see it “out there”, and as unrighteous and generally unseemly I can be, there are lines I won’t cross. My enemies don’t seem to have those lines. The kind of people who would force medical experiments on the unwilling, bomb populations endlessly to access resources, take over media outlets to spread constant lies for what they are serenely convinced are good causes… Nah. I don’t do that stuff.

Maybe it’s a difference of degree and not kind. I mean, I’ve lied before, and although I never tried to convince someone they were crazy, I’ve bullshitted people into believing my distortions for my own gain, which I would call a form of gaslighting. I wouldn’t do it now, but I’ve done it before, self-righteously convinced that it didn’t matter and no one was getting hurt.

I’ve even hated a lot of people and really intensely wished for bad things to happen to them. Unflattering but true. I don’t really indulge in that anymore (evidently the proverbial old dog can learn some new tricks after being knocked about by karma long enough), but in my heyday I was a spiteful individual from time to time. To time.

But when you see evil in the world, real evil… what do you DO?

Jesus would turn the other cheek I guess. I respect that, truly, but if someone slaps my cheek I’m probably going to bust their jaw. I’m not that enlightened. Maybe I’ll get there someday, but in the interim, come at me and I’ll try to make sure you won’t do it again.

The world can be pretty ghastly. I’ve seen some shit. A good portion of our ruling elite demonstrably do not care about “us”. A good portion of our ruling elite are what I would qualify as being evil.

Nah, I don’t think they are all pedos or get together and eat babies at black masses or any of those fevered fantasies of some folks out there. I think they don’t really give a crap about me, my family, or my community though. This is reflected in me too of course; I don’t typically think about how my patterns of consumption negatively affect people in faraway countries who I’ve reduced to abstractions because I don’t have to see the effects of my choices.

There is another layer beyond the mere indifference to evil that most of us in the Western world display though, because in a good number of our powerful elites, there is an active will to evil, where violence and coercion and deception are all tools of control to advantage some against others. I find this reflected less in myself; if someone hits me I’ll probably hit them back, but unless I’m starving I won’t run around mugging people, and even then I’m not sure I would (not sure I wouldn’t, either, depending on how hangry I got).

Would I take a potentially deadly virus, figure out how to make it jump species, and carelessly or maliciously let it out of a lab to kill and infect millions? Nope. Do I think that people are doing that shit, right now? Sure do.

Would I tell someone that an experimental treatment is safe and effective when I know there’s no way of knowing it because no proper fucking tests were done? Nope. Do I think people are doing that shit, right now? Sure do.

Would I push ineffective masking on people, including kids in school, knowing full well that studies have shown it doesn’t do much of anything except serve as a reminder that there’s a pandemic and everyone should be very afraid all the time? Nope. Do I think people are doing that shit, right now? Sure do.

Would I cover up people dying from heart issues after they took an experimental drug that literally has been demonstrated to cause heart issues, and call anyone who noticed it a conspiracy theorist? Nope. Do I think people are doing that shit right now? Sure do.

I could go on at length, and have now and then on other sleepless early mornings (even on my worst insomniac nights I get a couple hours of sleep in, and I’m grateful).

But what do you do about it?

Honestly, I haven’t done a whole lot. I’ve bitched semi-anonymously here online, I’ve withdrawn my support from other obviously corrupted forms of social media, I’ve worked on resilience and reducing consumption of goods and fuel, though that’s certainly still a work in progress. It’s work that I am doing, though, and I do think it’s important.

I’ve done magic to encourage personal freedom in the wake of what amounted to a mass binding on the whole Western world, and I’ve argued for free speech and expression of ideas in a time where the idea of freely expressing your thoughts has become radical, especially if you have thoughts and perspectives that counter the preferred narratives of the elites I discussed above.

I’ve worked to understand the things I see reflected in the macrocosm by examining myself, and I’ve been working on untangling the way that things that have happened to me are things I’ve created and owned in various ways. That’s all been hard work and not a whole lot of fun. All the same, the evil persists.

There are many possible responses to evil. There are many ways to respond to your enemy. Despite the work I’ve done on myself, and there is always more to do, there is still a growing darkness.

Maybe the best response is to rise above it entirely, but that’s not so easy when you’re living in it. I’m not one to clutch my pearls and stand aghast when someone punches a bully, or consciously reflects some ugliness at a bunch of unthinking people who are unreflectively pushing and shaming people into taking a treatment that is killing people without really doing anything to prevent the disease it is supposed to be stopping.

(Vaccines are supposed to stop the spread. How’s that working out?)

I’m in a war. We all are. I didn’t declare it, and chances are neither did you, but here we are. Pretending we are not at war is an option, but sticking your head in the sand just makes you look kind of clueless. For the record, I’m not talking about or advocating for violence; as much as I find “Joe Biden” or whatever is wearing his skin nowadays unpleasant, I don’t think he’s wrong about the unlikelihood of violence or armed rebellion solving the many problems facing average Americans nowadays.

I don’t know much about war, but I know a bit about fighting against the odds and resisting tyranny. I know you can’t make friends with a bully while he’s grinding your face in the dirt; you either submit or get up and fight.

I know that when you’re at war, you win the fucking thing, and save the niceties for after the enemy surrenders.

 In the Western Mystery Tradition, Demons are malefic, disembodied beings who essentially prey on humans. Remnants of a fallen universe, they are smarter than we are but have mentalities that don’t really make sense to us. People who sufficiently debase their consciousness or actively court them can enter into contact with these beings, who can perform acts of magic on behalf those who contact them. Typically, this doesn’t work out very well for the hapless sorcerer, although there are still plenty of practitioners of the magic arts who give it a try.

This description is a narrative that can be considered from many angles. One might be tempted to take it as a literal truth, but any mage who has spent some time diligently studying the type of magic that John Michael Greer teaches will have come across Dion Fortune’s comment about training the mind, not informing it. Nonetheless, the idea that there are negative spirits inimical to humanity in some sense is pervasive and has been present in most cultures with a magical tradition.

In my view, therefore, while stories of the demonic sublunar realm, the fall of man and ancient Lemuria are intriguing and are definitely good meditation fodder, they are unverifiable in any “scientific” sense. As narratives, they are symbolically useful, and point at a spiritual reality that is ultimately beyond expression or full comprehension.

As a mage, I have encountered what I can readily label as demonic forces in ritual and meditation. While these types of experiences may be regarded by rationalists as some kind of evolutionary tic or “bug” in the psyche of humanity, such a view seems incompatible to the worldview of the mage. Demons seem, in my view, to be an unpleasant feature of the map of reality of the operative mage, and therefore are spiritual forces that must be taken into consideration.

Another consideration for the operative mage is the presence, use, and indeed the sheer prevalence of malefic magic. Even a stone-cold rationalist who spent a few idle hours looking into magical communities would be unable to deny that people use malefica and evil magic all the time for various purposes, even if they think it is silly superstition. I live in a small, fairly conservative community and I’ve been the target of grubby workings several times by people in my personal sphere (to say nothing of the malefic works of mages who seem to have targeted the magical community in which I have chosen to participate). Many hurlers of malefica may very well be consciously or unconsciously in contact with demonic forces.

In a world where “rationalists” hold the levers of power and dictate what is or isn’t acceptable to include in our larger consensus reality, mages are in a bit of a bind when they see something that occurs that seems to potentially be influenced by evil spirits. When a good chunk of the population turns on a dime and starts behaving in unbalanced and irrational ways after several malefic astrological conjunctions occur, for example. Or when a group of mages and neopagans openly court demonic powers to sic them on their political opponents and suddenly the Western world as whole is locked down and weird plagues are running rampant.

Mass bindings and summoning of demonic forces were indeed a trendy thing during Donald Trump’s presidency, and a number of the people who participated admitted on their own public blogs that they continued to do workings designed to hurt, bind, and kill people who disagreed with their political opinions even after the publicity died down. This is all a matter of public record and can be found in books, blog posts, and even mainstream news coverage.

A lot of people think that sort of thing is nonsense, at least on the surface, and since Trump and his supporters were acceptable targets of hate, the mainstream didn’t seem to take it very seriously… but the people doing it certainly did, and there were a lot of them performing these rituals over and over.

Pointing this out and suggesting that maybe all of these thousands of spells may have actually had an effect, and that maybe when thousands of people went knocking on the gates of Hell something answered, so to speak, is really not that shocking. I mean, you don’t have to believe in spirits to be a mage, ask a chaos magician, but if you think magic is bunkus and none of this really means anything, why the hell are you LARPing as a magician anyway? It’s the opposite of cool to most people.

Even though I believe in negative spiritual energies that we might as well call demons, I literally never discuss that belief with anyone but my closest confidantes.  Even though I know I’ve been the target of evil magic (someone who did a work on me later admitted it and I’d recorded the effect of the work in my magical journal, though I didn’t know where the energy came from), I don’t spend a lot of time talking about or worrying about that either. When you’re a mage, it seems to go with the territory.

All that’s great, Ari, but what’s your point, you may very well be asking. If you are outside the Ecosophia community and stumbled on this by accident, it probably seems like mad gibberish, and if not, you probably already know most of this anyway.

This is a response to some recent criticism I’ve seen of my eclectic little online community and the man who founded it. I’m not entirely sure that it’s outside the pale for a spiritual teacher with many students to propose that maybe some stuff that sure looks like evil magic and demonic activity may actually be evil magic and demonic activity.

I’ve seen the suggestion that these sorts of speculations are irresponsible and risk “othering” people. If they are generalized too broadly, there may be some validity to that. I’m sure there are plenty of witches and mages with left-leaning politics who didn’t curse people or invoke demons, even during the heyday of anti-Trump hysteria. That said, there are lots of people in the Ecosophia community who are now being painted with an equally large brush, including the person who created the community to begin with.

In my opinion, if a spiritual teacher thought there may be demonic activity afoot, that teacher would be derelict in their role as educator if they didn’t alert their students and community to the possibility, even though there would be the risk that people in that community (and a whole bunch of pot stirring Anonymi) may run with it in potentially dangerous or counterproductive ways.

I don’t always agree with everyone in the community. I don’t always agree with JMG, and I’m dead certain he wouldn’t want everyone to agree with him all the time. He has advanced some hypotheses that are pretty controversial and extreme, and they will either be confirmed or disconfirmed in the fullness of time (well, the influence of demons, or not, may be pretty hard to verify; they probably won’t show up to take credit).

In the meantime, those of us who don’t know exactly what’s going on but know damn sure something is wrong with the coronavirus response and vaccines have a safe place to discuss ideas (and the Open Posts ARE host to a wide variety of perspectives, although I guess one could say a person skims what they want to read and disregards the rest), including ideas about the ways magic and disembodied intelligences may be a factor in current events. If that sounds outlandish, a couple billion people agree with that position by default; maybe it’s okay for the rest us of who think it isn't to have a little corner of the internet to explore that possibility.

 I'm not a gifted artist. When I was a kid, I loved comic books and sci fi/fantasy books and films and wanted to draw superheroes, spaceships, Jedi, dragons and the like. I labored gamely at recreating my favorite characters and scenes, and wrote my own derivative and awful comic strips as well. It was a fun way to pass the time, and gradually I attracted a group of fellow nerds to create art and comics with. I discovered soon enough, to my personal sadness, that I was actually the objectively worst "artist" of my bunch. Ah, how I burned with envy as I looked at my friends' artwork. Of course, I realize now that they were actually working to perfect their craft and become better artists than I. Young me seemed to think that I should have been able to achieve competency just by virtue of wanting it really bad.

To be fair to my past self, I had a lot going on and I channeled a lot of my creative energy into roleplaying games, reading, and writing short stories, so my efforts and will were divided. Later, I began doing the sort of work and practice I should have been doing all along, and achieved modest but decent results. I have very amateur but decent skills at representational art, but I remain a bit frustrated that I can't quite draw or paint the way I really want to... I still recognize that I haven't put the requisite time into becoming a competent artist, but I've also accepted that there is unlikely to be any real payoff for doing so; I'll only ever be a hobbyist.

At some point, I also seemed to develop a bit of a case of "artist's block". Every time I sat down with a pencil or pen, I couldn't think of a dang thing I wanted to draw. The well was dry. I still occasionally sit down with a sketch book and force myself to draw something as an act of pure will, but there's been no real passion or interest. 

I ignored the recent "AI Art" trend until fairly recently, when I saw some examples on a Twitter thread and was fairly shocked by how good the illustrations were. I had some extra time off around the holidays, so I found an AI art program and ordered a month's subscription. I am pretty sure that I didn't find the specific program that produced the images that originally "wowed" me, but the samples I produced were intriguing enough that I got into it... for a while.

In essence, you create a text prompt for the art you want the AI to generate, and then it produces an image, which may or may not have a whole lot to do with the prompt you selected. In order to get results even remotely like whatever you may have had in mind, you have to get pretty creative with the prompts. After a few hundred generated images in a variety of styles, I was getting quite creative with my prompts. I still couldn't get much of anything like I was going for, although many of the pictures were satisfyingly bizarre.

Gradually, I came to the realization that all of these prompts I was putting into the keyboard were ideas. Ideas that I, with whatever modest skills I have developed, was capable of producing far better than a computer scouring the internet for references and mashing them together in strange ways. Just like when I was a kid, I didn't really want to be a working artist; I wanted to have created art, and to get credit and accolades for making something cool without any real effort.

I guess there's kind of a debate raging about AI generated art and how it will put artists out of work, and they will all become obsolete. That may be the case, although I'm not so sure, myself. I spent a couple days using the program and I'm utterly bored with it and won't be renewing my subscription.

I got some killer ideas for some artwork, though. 

One of my recent meditation sessions was disrupted by thoughts of my own mortality, my soul, and the Divine. This wasn’t completely off topic, but I got overwhelmed by the emotional content my thoughts inspired. Some of it was embarrassing “woe is me, I’m gonna die” garbage that I don’t usually indulge, some of it was concerns about what would happen to my loved ones if I checked out early, so to speak. I even spent some time lamenting the future loss of my “personality”, which is the part of myself that will in some sense not continue beyond this physical incarnation. Pretty pathetic and cowardly, I know, but I’ve spent a long time learning to like myself; I’m gonna miss me.

 

As I’ve written before a time or three, I’ve spent a fair amount of time contemplating my mortality and the mortality of my loved ones over the past two years. None of us are getting any younger, and conditions for most people are not getting a lot brighter, either. There are a lot of unknowns that make me worry about my family (most of them are enthusiastic test subjects for big pharma’s latest boondoggle, as I’ve probably already mentioned a hundred times).  I’m not fully convinced that those of us who have opted out are entirely safe either, given that I’m still pretty sure the Virus that Shall Not be Named is an escaped bioweapon and that’s why the security state has been so bananas about narrative control and draconian with their mandates.

 

The result of this tangled meditation, after I dried up my tears and remembered that I’m a grown adult and not a freaking baby, was the realization that none of this changed anything. We are all of us going to die anyway. Whether it’s the vaxx, or recurring Covid infections screwing up our bodies in whatever way the jolly ‘ol spike protein seems wont to do, or one of a million possible other things, we all still gonna take a dirt nap. This just makes it more overt and immediate.

 

The image that popped into my head was the sword of Damocles, which I vaguely remembered from mythology class. I looked it up to refresh my memory after my session was over (I did an extra day on the theme I was supposed to working on; I am a lousy meditator but I do my time). The basic story is a powerful and tyrannical king named Dionysus II rested uneasily because he always had to be vigilant against his enemies; he couldn’t really enjoy the fruits of his exalted position because at any moment his opponents might strike out at him.

A wanderer named Damocles showed up at his court and really talked up how great Dionysus’s life and palace were, and how he had it made. Dionysus, who was pretty paranoid and stressed out, asked Damocles how he’d like to give it a try. Damocles was down for that.

Dionysus had him seated on a golden cushion and had servants prepare a lavish banquet. Damocles was enjoying himself until he glanced up and saw a razor sharp sword hanging by a thread above him, poised to fall and skewer him at any moment. He decided a king’s life wasn’t for him.

This fun little tale was about the dangers inherent in political power (especially for tyrants), but I’m not the first to note that we all have a metaphorical sword of Damocles hanging over us. Even though Damocles excused himself from the banquet, he still ended up dying somehow or other. So did Dionysus the II, and Cicero, who popularized the tale (Cicero also got to experience some of the negative consequences of political power at the hands of Mark Antony).

The sword is always there for everyone. May as well try to enjoy the banquet.

 Growth can be very awkward. Awareness of the Long Descent, coupled with the worldwide totalitarian Covid response, has provided the impetus to really, finally, change my life. About a month ago, I did a quick self-assessment on how it's working out (results were mixed). In terms of my skill development, results are still mixed obviously, but something important has changed. The most significant shift has been in my mindset.

Like a lot of modern people, I think I grew up in a state of learned helplessness. I didn't have any real confidence in myself in a lot of areas. It was true that I lacked a lot of important skills, but beyond that, I also lacked the faith in myself that I could learn them. A lot of the things that I'm learning how to do now just seemed like things that other people did. I also struggled sucking at things, for lack of a better word. If it wasn't great right away, I became discouraged and wanted no part of it.

Learning the magical arts, perhaps not so strangely, was what helped me break out of my mental rut. I was forced to do different and unfamiliar things as a part of my training, with nothing but my own determination to keep me going in the face of frustration (and sometimes fear). Slowly gaining some confidence as I entered a whole new world and way of being gave me the willingness to push outside of my comfort zone. It's strange to write that putting on robes and chanting barbarous words of power in flickering candlelight and clouds of incense smoke somehow helped me begin to learn home repair skills, start learning about herbs and essential oils, and opened whole new areas in my life, but it did.

The very idea of being a magician in modern times is ridiculous to many people (and many of the ones who take it seriously regard it as evil and Satanic), but it is a set of practices and a mindset that has allowed me to access and change my own consciousness in accordance with my will. I'm building a different sort of life, one I never thought was possible for me, and if it is ugly and halting here at the onset, I know that in time I will shape it into something pleasing and uniquely mine.

 I'm not a Republican. I am in favor of personal freedom, which the Republicans arguably offer more of at this point. After the Covid-and-lockdown mania, I am unlikely to support anyone with a D next to their name any time soon. I found Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of my state, to be abhorrent due to her pandemic decisions. Before that, I was fairly indifferent to her.

It appears that I'm stuck with her for another four years. I have no idea if Tudor Dixon would have made a good governor. At this point, all I really want from the government is for them to get the hell out of my personal life. 

I think that may be part of the problem Republicans are having. Their main selling point is they aren't Democrats. Apparently that isn't enough for a wide swath of the country. They are against a lot of things that are, rightly or not, regarded as fringe issues with a lot of voters, like CRT and the radical trans agenda. I'm not a fan of those things, but if I wasn't anti-lockdown and anti-mandate, I probably wouldn't be incredibly motivated to vote R just based on that. I also don't really want that stuff in the schools, but I'm not against trans people living their lives as they see fit either, and CRT isn't any more right or wrong than any other ideology, I just don't buy into it.

Another problem is Donald Trump. Lots of Republicans are blaming him for the "red trickle", and I think they are probably right. I never cared about the guy's "cult of personality". He had some ideas I thought were interesting, and the media very much lied about and misrepresented a lot of what he had to say. He was also a crap politician who let Fauci and his goons run the show, greenlighted the MRNA vaccines, let the country descend into chaos in the wake of the Floyd killing, lost the popular vote by a landslide and failed to win the electoral vote beyond the required margin of cheating in 2020. He let the country get torn apart after he lost and has never moved on from 2020. My personal last straw was him attacking Republican candidates and failing to support people he helped to get nominated to win their elections. He's not an effective leader, he was always just a hand grenade.

If he runs in 2024, I don't think he will win. I think the American people as a whole are just tired of him. He will always have die-hard supporters and true believers. I'm not one and never was. There are a lot of things that I can agree with conservatives about, and there are still things Democrats support I can get behind too. In my opinion, Trump is an albatross.

My big hope for the midterms was that a message would be sent to our crap political class that we the people are over their nonsense and they need to change course. Apparently most of the country are happy enough with how things are going to stay the course. Maybe go down with the ship is a better phrase...

 I've been learning some new skills for the Long Descent. I'm still somewhat optimistic that things won't get as bad as I sometimes fear they will, as fast as I fear they will. A lot of heavy things have happened over the last few years, but thus far I've moved through it more or less intact (except for a lot of my faith in my fellow man, but that is a casualty that was probably overdue). I've tried to pick up a few skills that are pretty far outside my range as a more-or-less useless eater who once aspired to be an artist and now just aspires to survive and raise my family in a world that has kind of gone to dookie. Here's a list of things I've tried and my self-assessment of how I'm doing.

1. Gardening. I created a garden this year. It's REALLY fortunate that I am not relying on my gardening skills to feed myself. I successfully grew a boatload of tomatillos. My land seems to like producing these. I grew some tomatoes that never ripened and started to rot before I picked them. I grew a lot of sunflowers. My land also seems to like growing these, they really thrived. I harvested seeds for next year. I grew a few cucumbers and some leafy greens. I planted and grew marigolds because I heard they keep rabbits away. I don't think the rabbits got at my crops, but that was probably the fencing I put up. I think I planted the seeds and seedlings too close together, I was kind of winging it.

My self assessment is that I am a poor gardener but I've learned some and will try again next year. My biggest sense of satisfaction from my gardening efforts is that I can now understand and relate to various different gardening metaphors and analogies I've read about for years much better. It is pretty magical watching the earth produce and working in harmony with the weather and land to create something.

2. Home repair. I repaired windowsills on my house that were decaying and painted my walls so they are much brighter. I've tried to declutter a bit but there's still a long way to go. I bought some books and have watched videos on handyman/diy topics, and have purchased a number of hand tools. I took down an unstable old deck and built some stairs to replace it. They seem sound.

My self assessment is that I am a poor handyman and I am unskilled, but I can create ugly yet functional things. I am absurdly proud of every white trash modification I have made to my hovel.

3. Mundane Astrology. I subscribe to JMG's Patreon mostly to support his writing efforts, but I've also tried my hand at mundane astrology. My focus was on New Moon charts, because unless they are eclipses he doesn't cover them, although I've also drawn up ingress charts to compare to the ones he posts to see how mine look in comparison.

My self assessment is that I have become a basic apprentice grade mundane astrologer. I can pick out the broad details of a chart and have learned the meanings of the houses, placements of planets, and the main aspects. I can even cast my chart for the right time 9/10 times if I have the information right in front of my stupid face. If I keep it up, in a few years I'll probably be somewhat competent at the art, as long as I have computers to bring up the charts and I just have to interpret them.

4. Herbalism. I am learning about the magical and mundane effects of different herbs for both magic and healing. Most of this work has been theoretical thus far, although I have been buying herbal supplements and trying to improve my health with them.

My self-assessment is that learning about herbs is going to be a long and time consuming process because I know bunkus about plants and never had an interest before. I can identify a few common plants, mostly weeds that grow in my yard, and I've harvested and dried a lot of burdock to make into tea but haven't yet because I'm afraid I'll kill myself even though I'm pretty sure the burdock is burdock. I think.

5. Learning Spanish. Due to changing demographics in my area and "field", I am learning Spanish because it is really hard to manage employees when you can't talk to them. That doesn't stop HR from sending them down to me. I'm not bitter about it but it is a conundrum. I am trying Duolingo because it is free and accessible in my spare time.

My self assessment is that Duolingo is pretty good for travelers but not so great for managers. I am able to use the app fairly successfully but when I try to use Spanish to communicate with humans it all flies out of my head. I have established with my non-English speaking employees that I like to drink coffee with creamer and sugar, and also that I am an affable idiot. [Important edit: they don't know how I like my coffee because I have them make it. It's one of the few things I can remember how to say aside from basic greetings.]

6. Occultism. I have stopped spinning my wheels as a trad occultist and have expanded my practices quite a bit. I am learning in a structured way in an established order, though I am still a solitary mage.

My self assessment is I have a long way to go, but I know more or less where I'm going and more or less how to get there.

7. Building community. I have built a really solid team at work and have improved my management skills a lot (which may not be saying much because I am a human with a touch of the old autism and I'm still fairly crap at social interactions... my biggest achievement is probably managing people's expectations of me and finding ways to be successful despite myself).

My self assessment is outside of work, I am still basically a friendless misanthrope, so it's going about the same as it has been since Covid killed my friendships a few years ago.

Overall, I'm still pretty useless, and I'm really lucky that there are societal supports to keep me alive and able to barter my time and quirky skills for enough money to get by.