People who don't wish me any specific harm

Sorry I've been so scarce. I've been writing poetry, loads and loads of poetry, and researching computers that talk and the enormous cultural wound around them. (If you want to know what I think, that's... a longer post than I'm up for making because there's an awful lot of it - fortunately much of it will, eventually, be purchasable as a poetry collection, and I'm probably about to start a newsletter for the rest of it.) 

Our cat Flash is on hospice but somehow still continues seeking food and affection despite not really having functional organs at this point. Flash remains weakly mobile and sort of softly translucent the way that people and some particularly ensouled animals do when they are very old with one or more feet through the door.

This past year I've been through kinds of magick that are difficult to speak of not because they are complicated but because they're so blatant.

Like what do you mean I wrote a poem that sacrificed my appendix for my elderly dad's life? What do you mean it all happened with such unambiguous cause-and-effect clarity that my dad the physicist, my dad the Jewish agnostic, called me up and spoke with me about the nature of God, the consciousness of the universe, and started getting into obscure mystic physics afterward?

This is the thing I hinted at last December, BTW, but I habitually engage with this stuff in a kind of aloof, Discordian-cynical, "well we are humans making narrative" kind of way, and I just plain don't feel honest downplaying it (the classic Alan Moore dilemma.) 

It's not even like I'm claiming to be particularly skillful or anything. I will be the first to tell you that I have very slapdash discipline and mostly fill in for it with intuition. Turns out that living on top of a possibility vortex, while consistently practicing my own soul language, is a crazy force multiplier. Wow! I think I just need to stop acting like a temporarily embarrassed materialist about it. 

......... 

But I have mostly come here to tell you some Venice Beach stories. Mostly funny ones. 

Our booth is really well designed in certain ways (this, I take full credit for; more than for the magick. My cart tetris ability is unparalleled and I people's eyes regularly widen when we shove our entire booth, furniture and all, into a beach cart and a large rolling dance bag) but we've been going through a sales slump. But people regularly do offer to buy things we're not selling, because our kit is cool.

Like I got these little resin amanita mushroom shaped earring racks. They are too good, to the point that I'm going to need to replace them. Everyone's attention is on the toadstool and not the earrings. "Can I buy the mushroom?" No. One person offered to buy all the earrings on it along with it, and I said yes to that but he didn't actually come back with money. Bah.

But the "that's not for sale" award champion has got to be the guy who offered to buy our powerful Anker table speaker and genuinely did not understand why we did not want to sell it to him for exactly what we paid for it ($40 ish) when the item price had since gone up to $80. "We need it. If we sold it, we would have to replace it. Also, your price would cost us more money than not selling it." "Huh? But I'm offering you money." 🤦 

......... 




Though our sales have been abysmal, lately, and we've been missing a lot of booth days to tend to the cat, one of the sales we did make several months ago - I don't really remember when but before the hot season - was another spell. A man perhaps a little older than me came by one day, with an intent look of worry, and browsed the table, bashfully seeking something. He said his mother was in the hospital and things were going badly. That he wanted something to bring to her there, and how she'd always loved the beach.

I don't remember which one of us picked up the sand bottle necklace from the rack. I think we were both immediately drawn to it.

I make a few kinds of talismans of place, which one might call "tourist kitsch", but I can't motivate myself to make stuff that I resent or that I'm not interested in. Art has to be an authentic communication, a moment in time shared between the creator and the receiver. I genuinely love Venice, though. So when I make art about it, I focus on that genuine love & how someone else who is experiencing that love may connect to it. So, in short, touristy stuff like the sand bottles tends to be fairly well charged, and like... tuned?... for its connection with its future owner. 

Anyway, we both knew it was meant to go to his mom as soon as he picked it up. He bought the necklace, and now he drops by some evenings to tell us that his mom is doing great (may it long be so.) 

........ 



I can't be in the right place at the right time for everyone, and there have been deaths in my world this year also.

But those times when it works - they're quite something, aren't they?