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Furcons, Operation Mindfuck, and Triad goes to Washington(s)
10 years ago
General
Hey there everyone, I got some things to make a journal about again, and, for the first time, I'm gonna post this across all of my accounts (SoFurry, IB [don't judge, I'm just trying to get my art out...], and maybe Weasyl, since FA isn't the only player in town). First I'll spew some text your way about random stuff, furry and otherwise. First, the furry:
So next weekend, Anjel and I are going to be at Rainfurrest, which we're looking forward to a lot. I've also never been to the Northwest before, and I'm pretty stoked. Also, the part of me that gets the urge to get punny when I ingest certain plant material is certainly enjoying the fact that I'm going from one Washington to another Washington, all in less than a month.
Also, in three more weeks Anjel, Obonic and I will be running a table at the AZ Furcon, under the Furluminati banner. (http://www.furluminati.com/index). We will have some prints of our art, and various other goodies, including homemade orgonite that is curing outside right now. Since 2 and Kage and the annoying furry "Old-Guard" will be there, it goes without saying that the furry esoteric counterculture should be represented too. And since some of us may have, according to some, actual ties to certain illuminati front organizations, well.... >;3
...Check us out, if you're there. ;3
And now the Other:
So, aside from the usual work and school (which I will have at least another year or two's worth, since I got accepted into ASU's accelerated Master's program for Graphic Information Technology. However, after my current class, I still got 7 classes to go for my Bachelor's, so, you know...), I finally, after 7 years (since my dad passed) I went back to Washington, DC and Northern Virginia, the environment that produced me, in it's own oppressive way. Anyway, it was a great trip, we spent the first day getting high and wandering around all of my old woods and neighborhoods that I grew up in. You don't truly appreciate a lush, wet, green forest at the end of summer until you've lived in the desert for a good length of time.
In addition, we had an experience of the good old-fashioned NoVA/DC paranoid and "The Fear" when we decided to go to the local urban legend/cryptozoological/creepy place, Bunnyman Bridge, down in the ridiculous Clifton, VA, area. The legend of the Bunnyman, which, despite being hilariously furry, involves an axe-happy psychopath in a rabbit suit who likes to decapitate people down there, or a supernatural being, essentially, NoVa's twisted sociopath version of the Pookah of Irish (and Robert Anton Wilson) lore. How freaking appropriate. All synchronicities aside (as I've been reading tons of Wilson again after too many years as well), it was also the source of the rabbit-creature thing in Donnie Darko which, I hate to say, I only stupidly watched once while homeless and on the worst mushrooms I've ever had in my life. It not only left me with a shitty imprint that I had to work on later, but I also can't remember most of the movie. Oh well.
But you see, the real scary shit at Bunnyman bridge isn't the Bunnyman, or lack thereof. It's the neighbors. Clifton is an oddity in the otherwise forested but highly suburban area. It's the last part of Fairfax county that is semi rural (or likes to pretend it is, anyway). There are three parts, the town of Clifton, which is a charming little outpost of "real" Virginia (which had missile silos to urban-explore). There's the old half of Clifton, which is (or was, anyway), full of regular country Virginians. Then there's the rest of it. The rest of it is full of these sometimes ridiculous, and sometimes impressive, gigantic 100+ million dollar mansions, all hiding out in the middle of the woods. Look it up on Google Earth, and you'll see what I mean. These people are all of the hyper-rich assholes who have made their millions with the Military Industrial Complex. And Lobbying. Fucking lobbyists. Anyway, it is a gorgeous area full of the ugly people responsible for all or the wars and shit that lots of us are tired of. And the money here was predominantly made off of the blood of countless brown people and American soldiers.
And so, as we finished our blunt and took our pictures, we wound up getting stuck in the mud. Naturally. After a good fifteen minutes of doing our best to get the hell out of there (the local stoner legend is also that the place is super-hot, as in you're-gonna-get-busted hot. Which is true). Right as Anjel and I are about to give ourselves hernias pushing the car out, this guy in a polo shirt comes down the road walking his dogs. Shit, we all thought. Fortunately, we had just gotten the car unstuck, when he came over and looked up over the the most soulless eyes I've seen on a human being (since I left the DC area, of course). "This is Private Property, you can't be here, there are cameras everywhere, etc." he told us. The private property things was a lie, but the camera thing may have been true. Either way, I told him we were on our way, done with our pictures, etc. We got out, but due to the nature of the road, we had to pass him two more times.
My buddy who was with us commented, as we were leaving, that this was probably the kind of guy who had just gotten back from waterboarding some hostage at a CIA or Blackwater/XE/Whatever dark site somewhere in the Middle East or Eastern Europe, and now that he was done torturing people, he just wanted to relax and walk his goddamn dogs, and not see a bunch of weird people in their neighborhood. This was said sarcastically, of course. If we had stayed any longer (or had to wait for AAA), we would have most certainly have wound up in jail that night, or worse. Because fuck those people.
The next day we had a great day in DC, which was pretty chill, as the day before, a bunch of BLM and trans activists had to kick the KKK and other similar shithead groups out of the city. I will say this about DC. It is a place that lives really far up it's own ass, and only knows how to work and not to have a good time. It is also technologically and culturally (in some ways) at least two to four years behind the West Coast, as Spice was just making it's rounds and getting big on that coast (where we all learned several years ago how awful that stuff was), and everyone's nicotine vapes all still had tanks, and hadn't gotten to RDA's yet. People were fascinated by mine, which is out-of-date here. However, it is an insanely and wonderfully multicultural place, and in my experience from growing up there, bigotry is as useless as tits on a bull in a place where almost every major ethnic group is represented reasonably equally. White people may be the majority still, but not by very much. And that's totally alright, as we're all just people anyway. So the KKK had to go and they did.
When we got there, I noticed that the place had chilled out a bit since my days there before and six years after 9-11. When I left, there was still concrete barriers around everything, and they still had those SAMs hanging out openly in the parking lot of the Pentagon. Now, at least they had to good enough taste to hide the security apparatus better. You can't even catch glimpses of the snipers and missiles on top of the buildings around Layfaette Square anymore, and people can go on Segways right up to the White House fence. That made me happy. Watching DC turn into what it did after 9-11 and during the Bush years was tragic. What also made me happy was walking around DC with an awesome Trans woman who I met that day who hung out at the Museums with us. Back in the day, I'd wander around Downtown with my dad, a (thankfully not social) conservative, often gawking at the protest and street theatre while smoking cigars and messing with the Lyndon LaRouche people. This time, we got to talk all kinds of "outsider politics" while walking past some of the main seats of Power in the Western World. Then we went up to Dupont Circle, the gay/boho part of town, and ate at the best Greek restaurant I've been to in my life, Zorba's (named after the awesome book). I broke my "I don't eat pork" rule on the best sausage ever created (and I know my sausage >;3), Loukanikis(sp?). Opa!
It was good to go back, but it was also a nice reminder of how much I prefer it out here. The middle-east coast has some perks (and beautiful forests), but if you're a weirdo or someone who isn't a career-addicted robot, then it's not the best place. But, as I am from there, I think it's good if I got out there every couple of years for a couple of days to recharge my soul in those woods. But that's just my opinion, anyway.
BUT REGARDLESS OF ALL OF THAT:
When I got back, I figured that it would be wise, after getting ahead with schoolwork, to go back and start reading stuff that isn't textbooks again. In the 2.75 years since my mom died, and all of that stuff, I am finally starting to be able to have time to read stuff that is actually important to me. So I went out and got a ton of the books by Robert Anton Wilson that I was never able to find. I also got stuff by Israel Regardie, John Lilly, and a few people who have made meditative and other mind exercises centered around Leary and Wilson's 8 Circuit theory of Consciousness, which has always been a major ideological player in my own head for years. You'll se it in my early art if you know where to look...
In this time, I've read Man in the High Castle by Phillip K. Dick, which, naturally, triggered a mini-VALIS type experience immediately afterwards where I got the rest of the plot of the comic (and it's successor that will come later) down, filling in gaps that I've had in it for years. I've also reread RAW's Cosmic Trigger 1 and 3, a series of books that changed my life years ago and are again. Since we are now at the part of the comic that I've been working four years to get to, it's been a good thing. I am also attempting an "experiment" in my free time to rebuild my connection with that higher source (or part of our brains) that goes by many names by many people. Whatever this thing is, it has given me a shit ton of my ideas, and my plan for years on the next part of this comic is to essentially get back into intense meditation and other practices, read books conductive to this process, and pretty much "channel" it in, like I did for the Mahatma series, several of my other drawings (Trip of Lord Hyperfox, The Vulpic Dialogue of the Magnetic Center [V.D.o.t.M.C], Apotheosis, and pretty much anything of mine that isn't a comic. The song Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh (Hebrew for "Holy, Holy, Holy") also came out of one of these experiences, this time initiated by my recording of a friend having a mystical experience. Over the next, um, indefinite period of time, I guess, I am going to be attempting, in addition to the Real Life shit I gotta do, slowly trying to get myself back to where I was (in some ways, but not others) when I did my best art, only now i'm in a much more stable part of my life since, like, forever. It should be interesting, and, with any luck, it will help me to produce newer and better art and music.
To finish this journal and to set the mood of the reality I am trying to create in my tiny corner of the world(that isn't run by anxiety, stress, and being way the fuck too busy, like it has been for a while for me, with my/our classic Overworked American Syndrome), I'll end this with a few videos from the individuals whom I am trying to (re-)acquaint myself with their work.
I^2 (Intelligence Squared) - Robert Anton Wilson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1ZqU3myVbk
Timothy Leary messing with Fundie Christians: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpT31m_6jQs
Leary tripping on something at a Neo-Pagan conference back in the day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUtdgwf6s9s
I was not expecting the thing about the dolphins, and his outburst a little after 27 minutes in about followers was a delicious drug-fueled outburst.
And finally, a subject very near and dear to my heart (and my art), Operation Mindfuck, explained by Robert Anton Wilson:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIs442IQR4U
Thanks, for reading, and I'll see you at Rainfurrest, the AZ Furcon, and, with any luck, maybe even the internet again! I always feel bad that I can never seem to stay in touch with my friends online in the fandom anymore. Part of it is me being busy, and part of it is me still recovering from one of the most intense, stressful, and transformative times in my life. For that I am truly sorry. I miss you guys, and if you're someone I know online who I haven't talked to in a bit, it, quite literally, is not you. It's me. Life is too short, and I promise that eventually, I will be more active again with the fandom, both online and off. I gotta be. Furries are my people, what can I say? :3
So next weekend, Anjel and I are going to be at Rainfurrest, which we're looking forward to a lot. I've also never been to the Northwest before, and I'm pretty stoked. Also, the part of me that gets the urge to get punny when I ingest certain plant material is certainly enjoying the fact that I'm going from one Washington to another Washington, all in less than a month.
Also, in three more weeks Anjel, Obonic and I will be running a table at the AZ Furcon, under the Furluminati banner. (http://www.furluminati.com/index). We will have some prints of our art, and various other goodies, including homemade orgonite that is curing outside right now. Since 2 and Kage and the annoying furry "Old-Guard" will be there, it goes without saying that the furry esoteric counterculture should be represented too. And since some of us may have, according to some, actual ties to certain illuminati front organizations, well.... >;3
...Check us out, if you're there. ;3
And now the Other:
So, aside from the usual work and school (which I will have at least another year or two's worth, since I got accepted into ASU's accelerated Master's program for Graphic Information Technology. However, after my current class, I still got 7 classes to go for my Bachelor's, so, you know...), I finally, after 7 years (since my dad passed) I went back to Washington, DC and Northern Virginia, the environment that produced me, in it's own oppressive way. Anyway, it was a great trip, we spent the first day getting high and wandering around all of my old woods and neighborhoods that I grew up in. You don't truly appreciate a lush, wet, green forest at the end of summer until you've lived in the desert for a good length of time.
In addition, we had an experience of the good old-fashioned NoVA/DC paranoid and "The Fear" when we decided to go to the local urban legend/cryptozoological/creepy place, Bunnyman Bridge, down in the ridiculous Clifton, VA, area. The legend of the Bunnyman, which, despite being hilariously furry, involves an axe-happy psychopath in a rabbit suit who likes to decapitate people down there, or a supernatural being, essentially, NoVa's twisted sociopath version of the Pookah of Irish (and Robert Anton Wilson) lore. How freaking appropriate. All synchronicities aside (as I've been reading tons of Wilson again after too many years as well), it was also the source of the rabbit-creature thing in Donnie Darko which, I hate to say, I only stupidly watched once while homeless and on the worst mushrooms I've ever had in my life. It not only left me with a shitty imprint that I had to work on later, but I also can't remember most of the movie. Oh well.
But you see, the real scary shit at Bunnyman bridge isn't the Bunnyman, or lack thereof. It's the neighbors. Clifton is an oddity in the otherwise forested but highly suburban area. It's the last part of Fairfax county that is semi rural (or likes to pretend it is, anyway). There are three parts, the town of Clifton, which is a charming little outpost of "real" Virginia (which had missile silos to urban-explore). There's the old half of Clifton, which is (or was, anyway), full of regular country Virginians. Then there's the rest of it. The rest of it is full of these sometimes ridiculous, and sometimes impressive, gigantic 100+ million dollar mansions, all hiding out in the middle of the woods. Look it up on Google Earth, and you'll see what I mean. These people are all of the hyper-rich assholes who have made their millions with the Military Industrial Complex. And Lobbying. Fucking lobbyists. Anyway, it is a gorgeous area full of the ugly people responsible for all or the wars and shit that lots of us are tired of. And the money here was predominantly made off of the blood of countless brown people and American soldiers.
And so, as we finished our blunt and took our pictures, we wound up getting stuck in the mud. Naturally. After a good fifteen minutes of doing our best to get the hell out of there (the local stoner legend is also that the place is super-hot, as in you're-gonna-get-busted hot. Which is true). Right as Anjel and I are about to give ourselves hernias pushing the car out, this guy in a polo shirt comes down the road walking his dogs. Shit, we all thought. Fortunately, we had just gotten the car unstuck, when he came over and looked up over the the most soulless eyes I've seen on a human being (since I left the DC area, of course). "This is Private Property, you can't be here, there are cameras everywhere, etc." he told us. The private property things was a lie, but the camera thing may have been true. Either way, I told him we were on our way, done with our pictures, etc. We got out, but due to the nature of the road, we had to pass him two more times.
My buddy who was with us commented, as we were leaving, that this was probably the kind of guy who had just gotten back from waterboarding some hostage at a CIA or Blackwater/XE/Whatever dark site somewhere in the Middle East or Eastern Europe, and now that he was done torturing people, he just wanted to relax and walk his goddamn dogs, and not see a bunch of weird people in their neighborhood. This was said sarcastically, of course. If we had stayed any longer (or had to wait for AAA), we would have most certainly have wound up in jail that night, or worse. Because fuck those people.
The next day we had a great day in DC, which was pretty chill, as the day before, a bunch of BLM and trans activists had to kick the KKK and other similar shithead groups out of the city. I will say this about DC. It is a place that lives really far up it's own ass, and only knows how to work and not to have a good time. It is also technologically and culturally (in some ways) at least two to four years behind the West Coast, as Spice was just making it's rounds and getting big on that coast (where we all learned several years ago how awful that stuff was), and everyone's nicotine vapes all still had tanks, and hadn't gotten to RDA's yet. People were fascinated by mine, which is out-of-date here. However, it is an insanely and wonderfully multicultural place, and in my experience from growing up there, bigotry is as useless as tits on a bull in a place where almost every major ethnic group is represented reasonably equally. White people may be the majority still, but not by very much. And that's totally alright, as we're all just people anyway. So the KKK had to go and they did.
When we got there, I noticed that the place had chilled out a bit since my days there before and six years after 9-11. When I left, there was still concrete barriers around everything, and they still had those SAMs hanging out openly in the parking lot of the Pentagon. Now, at least they had to good enough taste to hide the security apparatus better. You can't even catch glimpses of the snipers and missiles on top of the buildings around Layfaette Square anymore, and people can go on Segways right up to the White House fence. That made me happy. Watching DC turn into what it did after 9-11 and during the Bush years was tragic. What also made me happy was walking around DC with an awesome Trans woman who I met that day who hung out at the Museums with us. Back in the day, I'd wander around Downtown with my dad, a (thankfully not social) conservative, often gawking at the protest and street theatre while smoking cigars and messing with the Lyndon LaRouche people. This time, we got to talk all kinds of "outsider politics" while walking past some of the main seats of Power in the Western World. Then we went up to Dupont Circle, the gay/boho part of town, and ate at the best Greek restaurant I've been to in my life, Zorba's (named after the awesome book). I broke my "I don't eat pork" rule on the best sausage ever created (and I know my sausage >;3), Loukanikis(sp?). Opa!
It was good to go back, but it was also a nice reminder of how much I prefer it out here. The middle-east coast has some perks (and beautiful forests), but if you're a weirdo or someone who isn't a career-addicted robot, then it's not the best place. But, as I am from there, I think it's good if I got out there every couple of years for a couple of days to recharge my soul in those woods. But that's just my opinion, anyway.
BUT REGARDLESS OF ALL OF THAT:
When I got back, I figured that it would be wise, after getting ahead with schoolwork, to go back and start reading stuff that isn't textbooks again. In the 2.75 years since my mom died, and all of that stuff, I am finally starting to be able to have time to read stuff that is actually important to me. So I went out and got a ton of the books by Robert Anton Wilson that I was never able to find. I also got stuff by Israel Regardie, John Lilly, and a few people who have made meditative and other mind exercises centered around Leary and Wilson's 8 Circuit theory of Consciousness, which has always been a major ideological player in my own head for years. You'll se it in my early art if you know where to look...
In this time, I've read Man in the High Castle by Phillip K. Dick, which, naturally, triggered a mini-VALIS type experience immediately afterwards where I got the rest of the plot of the comic (and it's successor that will come later) down, filling in gaps that I've had in it for years. I've also reread RAW's Cosmic Trigger 1 and 3, a series of books that changed my life years ago and are again. Since we are now at the part of the comic that I've been working four years to get to, it's been a good thing. I am also attempting an "experiment" in my free time to rebuild my connection with that higher source (or part of our brains) that goes by many names by many people. Whatever this thing is, it has given me a shit ton of my ideas, and my plan for years on the next part of this comic is to essentially get back into intense meditation and other practices, read books conductive to this process, and pretty much "channel" it in, like I did for the Mahatma series, several of my other drawings (Trip of Lord Hyperfox, The Vulpic Dialogue of the Magnetic Center [V.D.o.t.M.C], Apotheosis, and pretty much anything of mine that isn't a comic. The song Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh (Hebrew for "Holy, Holy, Holy") also came out of one of these experiences, this time initiated by my recording of a friend having a mystical experience. Over the next, um, indefinite period of time, I guess, I am going to be attempting, in addition to the Real Life shit I gotta do, slowly trying to get myself back to where I was (in some ways, but not others) when I did my best art, only now i'm in a much more stable part of my life since, like, forever. It should be interesting, and, with any luck, it will help me to produce newer and better art and music.
To finish this journal and to set the mood of the reality I am trying to create in my tiny corner of the world(that isn't run by anxiety, stress, and being way the fuck too busy, like it has been for a while for me, with my/our classic Overworked American Syndrome), I'll end this with a few videos from the individuals whom I am trying to (re-)acquaint myself with their work.
I^2 (Intelligence Squared) - Robert Anton Wilson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1ZqU3myVbk
Timothy Leary messing with Fundie Christians: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpT31m_6jQs
Leary tripping on something at a Neo-Pagan conference back in the day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUtdgwf6s9s
I was not expecting the thing about the dolphins, and his outburst a little after 27 minutes in about followers was a delicious drug-fueled outburst.
And finally, a subject very near and dear to my heart (and my art), Operation Mindfuck, explained by Robert Anton Wilson:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIs442IQR4U
Thanks, for reading, and I'll see you at Rainfurrest, the AZ Furcon, and, with any luck, maybe even the internet again! I always feel bad that I can never seem to stay in touch with my friends online in the fandom anymore. Part of it is me being busy, and part of it is me still recovering from one of the most intense, stressful, and transformative times in my life. For that I am truly sorry. I miss you guys, and if you're someone I know online who I haven't talked to in a bit, it, quite literally, is not you. It's me. Life is too short, and I promise that eventually, I will be more active again with the fandom, both online and off. I gotta be. Furries are my people, what can I say? :3
:p