Tuesdays With Abhorrent Fiends vol. 23

Tom Cruise is Tom Cruise crazy
Just be glad it's him not you
If you had Tom Cruise's troubles
You might be Tom Cruise crazy too
You'd flash your big, white, shiny smile
And wear expensive shoes
But you'd be the only man on earth
Who couldn't enjoy Tom Cruise


- Jonathan Coulton

Tonight, we go to see the Lemonheads! Possibly tomorrow as well, if Dave can locate tickets.

Afterflux has come and gone, like Bureauflux before it. Not having a calendar is killer, but having one is part of my evil plan to make myself more good. Let me esplain zis plan.

Step one: take leave of Myke. This is a move I talked about with Dave yesterday, and Dave actually talked some sense into me on the subject. I am bad at leaving people, especially people who haven't given me a reason why they specifically deserve to be left, and such is my brother Myke. Until I do something, like in this case sending him back all the stuff I have borrowed from him with a note of apology, my guilt and repressed annoyance / aggression will stand in the way of me making big changes in my psyche.

Step two: press the reset button in my visual imagination station. I dunno if the thing I have in mind will work--with this sort of thing, you never know what the correct action is until you're about to do it. It's a move I contemplate with great loathing and longing and trepidation.

Step three: consecrate and mentalize my dayplanner. Step two has to be done before this one, because you can't mentalize a physical object until your visual imagination is well-disciplined.

Yes, yes, I should do the hammer exercise before I try it with something complicated and editable like a dayplanner. Maybe instead of a hammer I should try the first experiment with a pen or some other object I like lots and use lots. Whole point of doing visualization practice with a hammer is that it's a tool which is familiar and used for many things. Then again, the exercise was almost certainly developed back in the day when most young men who would aspire to magical dealings had spent time in their lives building things. The ruler I carried into the dream with me that time is a good example of object mentalizing. A tool I am familiar with, have used many times, and which has many uses. Course I didn't do the visual part first--which is probably why I can't call it up in dreams anymore. Not a solid enough mind-bond to hold it in inventory. I have repeatedly dreamed (retained fragments more often than not, though on some of the older ones I got the whole thing) of being about to go into combat, turning to my hoard of weapons, and finding them all flimsy and rusty and poorly-made or poorly-suited to the job. In a recent dream where this happened, I recall getting a crappy implement out of the box/pile/shelf, starting to fight and having it bend in half the first time I struck my foe with it. So I tossed the "weapon" away, felt myself recede out to the third-person perspective and watch my dream-self dispatch the opponent with my/her bare hands.

Anyway, I've clearly gone fullspeed into a ramble, a good indication that I have no plans beyond Step Three, not even vague mental ones.

I am a sneaky, pouting doormat in some aspects. This is what this next group of transformations is meant to correct. My large deficiency in earth magic having been sorely dented, I now must resolve my problems with water in order to advance.

[time passes]

As good old Gareth Knight has written, the initiate knows how to do magic; the adept is magic.