Things can change so much only to stay the same— tomorrow is different but it’s still the same— as I stand here waiting for the 62 bus here on the corner stop across the street from a gas station. I’m gonna grab some coffee from the Barnes & Nobles cafe, as I have a gift card with a $33 remaining balance. Welcome To Paradise plays in my ears; an accurate melody, as always with Green Day, and one which I feel I’ve lived over and over now in my own way.
“It makes me wonder why I’m still here
For some strange reason it’s now feeling like my home
And I’m never gonna go”
But as also sung by Billie Joe on the song Jesus Of Suburbia quite poignantly that, “home is where the heart is but what a shame cause everyone’s heart doesn’t beat the same…”
On the bus now. It seems less rickety than before I left two months ago. Still free though, thankfully. I think I just saw Scott, a homeless acquaintance I used to get stoned with on breaks while working at Circle K. Looks like he had a shower recently…
About halfway through my reading of the teachings of the founder of Aikido I realized that the words of wisdom noted down as being quite proto-Crowleyan. Where this sense is then encapsulated is in the statement that, “The way of a warrior is based on the humanity, love, and sincerity; The heart of merital valor is the bravery, wisdom, love and friendship. Emphasis on the physical aspects of warrior is feudal, for the power of the body is always limited,” which then is echoed in the Thelemic dictum of, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. Love is the law, love under Will.”
Then said exploring the idea of brute strength alone as flimsy and farcical as body ages and metabolism change is capabilities; With the added notion that, ‘there’s always a bigger fish.’
From there becomes able to be interpreted via a Satanic framework. Noting the 11th rule of the Earth, which advises: “When walking in open territory, bother no one. If someone bothers you, ask them to stop. If he does not stop, destroy him,” and giving him outline on how to do so without solar systemically ruining one’s own life simultaneously— “Warriorship is none other than the vitality that sustained all life.”
In essence: tooth and claw is not all which exists…
With that, it has been said that 'an eye for an eye makes the world blind', but this is very much false- inherently false. You have two eyes, if you are stupid enough to lose both, then clearly you're the idiot who fucked around and found out... twice, quite obviously not learning from the first time that actions have consequences.
As Newton said: "every action has an equal and opposite reaction." It's simple cause and effect- punishment fits the crime.
Self-preservation is the highest law and if you cannot preserve your eyes- a vital organ of your body- what use are you to yourself as an individual? Demonstrating this is the founder of the philosophical system of Objectivism based on rational self-interest, Ayn Rand put it well when she said, "the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his absolute."
Now, how reasonable are you if you have by your own actions lost both your eyes? How noble are you in productive achievement if you have faced such an example of lex talionis? How heroic and happy are you, having been responsible for the loss of a vital sense? Clearly the reasonable answer to all these is very little.
As Lucius Cornelius Sulla put it: "No friend ever served me, and no enemy ever wrong me, whom I have not repaid in full."
Lex Talionis can go either way, in your favor or your detriment. It depends on who you surround yourself with and how you interact with them and others in the world. Do unto others as they do unto you. Of course, this doesn't mean you should go out and be a pretentiously solipsistic prick, going around administering judgement on anyone who should slightly wrong you. Some people are simply psychic vampires who aren't worth any of your time. However you also shouldn't let anyone walk over you.
There is a regular raven in the neighborhood, and is seen only preceding a black outdoor pet cat. The connection between the animals is none, except turning to stone when for a brief moment the sun flickered. Baffling the surviving scientists of the non-rock inhabitants of the Earth’s population; learning that reversal is impossible it would seem. Even chipping at the new statues stone bodies results in the release of an acidic blue liquid— which when tested seems to be a sort of semen high in pH content— which eats away rapidly at organic material.
Some months later a meteorite with a core of antimatter crashes and it is learned by touching a bit to one of the sun’s statues, that it would reverse the freeze…
It’s at the precipice of reviving each person until the core was suddenly dropped and everything went to instant white to nothing but a few million beings made of pure antimatter where a planet once spun in orbit. They drifted through the solar system until eventually where Pluto sits at its cold distance. Landing, the people melted into the planetoid, merging with it as it hatched like an egg into a tortoise.
After some millennia of roaming around the cosmos the tortoise snacks on an underripe brown dwarf; getting ill and then vomiting out a concentrated beam of unimaginably hot intergalactic material. This then ripped the tortoise in half as it expanded in all directions, hitting the borders of the universe causing the structure to buckle then swiftly collapse like a tape measuring tool snapping back into unimaginably cramped singularity: the glass eye of a fox.
Claudia: Yeah, that was an interesting take on it.
Shane: What was?
Claudia: That it's basically what you've been saying.
Shane: Oh, it definitely felt like that. It felt like, "Wow, this is what I've been saying." Like how LaVey was a mama's boy—there's a lot of that kind of stuff going on in Satanism. At least, let's put it this way, that may be where the Satanic Temple shines. They have politically active, politically correct gals in the group. Maybe that's where the men—I bet you, like the Church of Satan, the women are very predatory. I'm going to bet, if I understood the Satanic Temple crowd enough, the men are the predatory ones. I'm going to bet you that's how it is.
And that's an interesting thought. I don't really hang out with Satanic Temple people. In fact, I don't hang out with anyone younger than the Church of Satan crowd anymore; I did that for a few years in my life. It was just because LaVey touched me. I talk about it a lot, or people ask me about it a lot. LaVey understood that, though.
I thought about him watching it and I felt like I could see LaVey in here laughing too. I started laughing at parts that no one else was laughing at. Some of it was obviously funny, and I laughed at those parts too, but I continued to laugh because it was just like a documentary of my life, and everyone's life I know that's into Satanism.
Just think about any of the heavy hitters in Satanism you know—anyone you're thinking about, anyone that knew Anton LaVey. Know this: they are having the same kind of life. They are with a very predatory woman who won them over with her sexual prowess, and they are under control. They are under that person's thumb. They cannot do anything without that person's permission; that's just the way it is.
But I grew up in Chicago—my nationality is a Chicagoan—but some of my family is Italian, so I got to see inside that culture. Italian tough guys are not really tough guys; it's their wife. They go in the house, and their wife is a predatory woman. It's just like that movie, where she'll get on him: "That guy is calling you, he's treating you like a bitch, you got to go fuck him up!" That's the woman inside the house. Then the guy comes out full of rage and kills someone because he was called a mama's boy or called names by his partner. It's like, holy shit.
But I thought it might be recent too because of some of the raps, like "marriage is bondage," which I've said. If this movie's only 10 years old, I'm not the first person to say that, but I definitely am the first in Satanism. There are not too many people in Satanism that admit to flaws and weaknesses—they're the alien elite, after all.
Claudia: Whatever that means.
Shane: Yeah, I'm the alien, I'm the fucking spaceship. I don't know what I'm saying, I'm like Kanye. I just thought it sounded cool.
Claudia: I thought it had a good visual aesthetic. I thought that was cool.
Shane: Oh, I loved it because it was campy and horrible. But I will tell you, whoever wrote that knows what they're talking about. This is what I'm saying. Wherever they read this stuff, it felt like we were in a time machine back in the day of LaVey. I would have loved to have seen this with Carla, because Carla has all these big ideas about doing shit with the Satanic Witch stuff. But that's the problem with the world: everyone's got big fucking ideas, and no one can make them happen. And the people who can make them happen are funded and killed. I know, I'm one of them. Yeah, so what else about that movie? Are we going to smoke that joint?
Claudia: Sure.
Shane: What the fuck, I thought we were going to smoke on the way in there, but I didn't need any, did I?
Claudia: No, I thought we were...
Shane: We were late, we were at the wrong movie theater. It was like retro—and don't tell me retrograde doesn't happen, because all these weird things happen. I'm never late to a movie, and if I am, it's probably because of a retrograde if I look at the calendar. It's a people watch. We're in Logan Square at the Logan Theater.
Claudia: I guess the first half hour wasn't that important.
Shane: Well, I figured it wasn't, based on the name of the movie: The Love Witch. I thought it sounded like a porn. And you know what? I thought about the old days of porn and how it was filmed with that beautiful aesthetic and those kinds of actors. They would act just like that. Old porn wasn't hard or what people would call misogynistic; the old days of porn were really campy and cool like that. So I say bring that back, or it should have had porn in it. I mean, porn is a little crude, but you can do things like finger-fucking to make it more graphic. I would have been more graphic.
Claudia: You already did that though.
Shane: What?
Claudia: You already did that though.
Shane: That's true, I'm Satan. I loved the movie. I went into it thinking, "Oh my God, what if this thing triggers me because of my life?" I'm not getting involved with any more witches, because I go to a therapist and a psychiatrist who tell me better. They talk me down. Just them teaching me boundaries and stuff like that has helped out a lot. Now I catch it and I'm like, "Oh Jesus Christ, another fucking witch." Witches.
Claudia: Well, it's better than that other one.
Shane: Which one is the other one?
Claudia: That four-hour castration movie.
Shane: Oh, the one you came out laughing so hard from. I don't know what I would tell you now that I'm smoking this weed, Jesus Christ, but I will tell you there's a flaw in that movie. They would say black witches are like the love witch. Satanists are pretty diverse, so I see that thread in there, but there's also a very upper-scale, healthy side. They've had generations of education and healthcare, they know what mental healthcare is, they go to counselors, and they deal with life a little differently than some of the more radical Satanists.
There are plenty of people who consider their mind the most important thing, not their genitalia. We are not only a carnal animal beast, but we're an intellectual breed. That turns people on. I'll tell you this, here's what I thought: oh boy, I've dated plenty of sad girls. That's what a witch is in the context of this movie—it's a sad girl. It makes me sad that someone would find power in their genitalia, because that's a very limited part of someone. It's very fun, and I get how manipulated you can be using it, but...
Claudia: I think the detective guy kind of spoke to that end, too, because he mentioned borderline personality disorder, or almost being on that spectrum. And that's really on the head, because I've noticed that's pretty rampant within Satanist groups, at least online.
Shane: You mean amongst women or amongst Satanists in general?
Claudia: In general.
Shane: Okay, so there's one person that's more aggressive. Weird, okay, got you. Yeah, thanks, I would agree. And I don't think that's a bad thing. I think when people don't treat their problems, that is the bad thing, especially when they have access to healthcare. I get it, I've had plenty of problems. I didn't want to be there, thinking, "Oh, this is a fucking Satanist movie, I don't need to be here." The last place I want to be is a Satanist movie, because people will know me there. So I looked and said, "Let's go."
Claudia: Yeah. I wonder who made it, if they were Satanic.
Shane: You were absolutely...
Claudia: ...correct to guess that it was The Love Witch. It was.
Demons of the Mind is a 1972 film which in its essence is a Shakespearean drama and Freudian Frankenstein. The attacked and crippled man from A Clockwork Orange plays a medieval man of medicine, science and the occult study variety— called a charlatan, among other things by many— is hired to aid a Duke in curing some hereditary ailment; or as the balding Gandalf-esque character deemed it, a disorder which drives unsavory tendencies amongst the specific, familial gene pool.
Namely and central to the plot are incestuous lacings where the Duke’s two children, Emil and Elizabeth, are shown to have quite a deep and seemingly very sensual attachment to one another. As it would seem and be realized through the course of his looking for an aid to the intergenerational malaise reported to him by the Duke, what disorder existed largely sprung of the Duke’s own devising and willing it to occur— in a mix of both unconscious and conscious course of doing so. Transpiring apparently as a result of grief due to witnessing his wife commit suicide and eventually developed attraction to his daughter.
Ultimately he decides his bloodline can no longer continue, and sets out to end his ‘genetic curse’ and in the process shoots the hired wizard with his rifle on a mission to eliminate his two remaining kin and offspring. Following in close pursuit he manages to succeed in shooting Emil his son; but before he could then do away with an increasingly distraught Elizabeth, is engulfed by an angry mob of peasants and workers under his jurisdiction. Already agitated but then stirred up into a religious frenzy by a wandering, raving preacher they witness his familial transgression, and in quick action pin him to the ground to hack a hand off the Duke then finish the execution via planting a flaming crucifix into his torso with his daughter onlooking.
Like Hamlet, the film focuses on the decay and ‘depravity’ of what those in the Marxist lineage would call the bourgeois’, or ruling class— as observed by the incoming attacking peasants. In that it resolves in a minor familial bloodbath as a result of its psychological decay beginning when Emil winds up killing his Aunt in order to get to his beloved sister after being induced into a psychotic episode where he also killed another girl— believing it was Elizabeth then resulting in aforementioned murder of his aunt. Similar to separated star-crossed lovers in Romeo & Juliet intentionally separated by familial disputes; nonetheless ending like Macbeth in masterminding oligarchs murder in a Frankenstein flash-mob fashion.
Coming from the 1970s and the innate overtones of incest and projected pedophilic wishes from the Duke, I have to wonder how much takes inspiration from or in connection to a movement in the same decade— namely in France— of prominent intellectuals and figures moving to a more open consideration of the tendency. The French Petition against age of consent laws however did not come to until 1977 while the movie hit theaters in 1972.
River rushes before me; it swells white mixed into turbulent, translucent blue-green. Walking past informational signs detailing about some 1889 fire— a tragedy. Combined with passing over the running water across various bridges with sight of where the old ones were; I began to wonder about a specific type of what is considered a tragedy in association, that being suicide by taking a jump.
Researching into the topic, it would come up rather short in surprise. While in 2024 the city exceeded the norm of the entire state with 120 recorded successful acts committed with an average of 21 per 100,000 residents whereas the average for Washington state itself stands at only about 14.8 per 100,00 people. Then sizing down to solely Spokane statistics, the data shows most attempts occurring on the Monroe Bridge with around 400 since 2005 and a majority talked down with only an average of 2.5 deaths a year; making up only about 4% of the actual suicide cases out of roughly 300 hospitalizations a year. Ebbing and flowing with consistency, whereas the vast majority of suicides are enacted by self-inflicted gunshots, followed by hanging, and with more rising rates, overdoses.
