Notes from a barking shaman

NFABS All Up And Running at BarkingShaman.com

2011-05-26T01:33:00.003-05:00

I have reformatted all the entries imported from here into the new Notes From a Barking Shaman over at my website. While there may be a bit of occasional odd font sizing, entries are now easily accessible. For a number of reasons, mostly sentimental, I am leaving barkingshaman.blogspot.com online. With new posts and the archives updated on the new site however, visitors should be reading and commenting there.

Thanks and see you on the new site.

-Wintersong Tashlin May 2011

Pyrrhic

2011-05-02T12:30:00.000-05:00

We have killed Osama Bin Laden

We have killed Osama Bin Laden. My nation is united today with a sense of pride, accomplishment, and closure. There is a sense that somehow this victory belongs to us all.

I don't want it. This is not my victory, and if that makes me a bad American, than so be it.

Let me be abundantly clear, I will shed no tears over this death. My own spiritual beliefs and gods value just revenge. Given the chance I would have lost no sleep over taking this life. But with those who attacked this nation nearly a decade ago dead in that very attack, Bin Laden became the focus for the United States' thirst for vengeance.

There are many reasons, that I cannot share in the glory of my countrymen.

First and foremost, I didn't kill the mastermind behind the attacks of 9/11/01. If we are to revel in this death, honor is surely due above all to the ones who stormed his mansion, the one who pulled the fateful trigger, and those who designed the attack plan itself.

That said, the overwhelming reveling throughout my nation in this death shakes me. A man is dead, granted, a truly horrific one, and one that by all rights deserved his death. But to see America so united in celebration over their/our vengeance frightens me. We have become what Osama Bin Laden made us. He has shaped, and even corrupted our nation's soul in a way that disturbs me.

In our hunger for vengeance and fear of attack what have we forged ourselves into? We have bankrupted ourselves financially and morally. Becoming all too like our enemies in our quest to “ensure American safety,” a worthy goal, but at the cost of what has made our nation a beacon of freedom for a hundred years.

Let us not forget the detritus left on the road to this victory:

Over $1 Trillion Dollars spent on multi-front warfare.

Thousands of American lives lost

Untold numbers of soldiers wounded or suffering from mental health issues and TBI

Civilian death estimates ranging from the tens to hundreds of thousands

The United States engaging in state sanctioned torture

Suspension of Habeas Corpus

Domestic Surveillance

Progressively more dehumanizing, yet largely ineffectual security theater in public transportation

And:

A wave of anti-Muslim sentiment that has included attempts to ban them from building sacred space, verbal and physical assault, sometimes on women and children, politicians calling for Islam to be reclassified not as a religion in order to disallow 1^st Amendment protections for Muslims, boycotts of companies that make food that fits Muslim dietary restrictions (while many companies produce food that fit other religions' proscriptions on foodstuffs)

Looking over the above list, one could be forgiven for thinking that I am anti-war. The truth is that I am not. Spiritually and morally I value violence and warfare as a path to resolution of conflict and righting of evil. I pray regularly for other paths to take precedence, but sometimes war is the path that the Fates choose. Nor, while the death tolls are terrible, do I feel that they are particularly central to my lack of celebration in Osama Bin Laden's death. I study WWII as a hobby, a war where a single battle could easily cost more lives than all those listed above.

The truth is that it is today's celebrations that crystalize my fears about the path Osama bin Laden has set my country on. On 9/11/01 our people were unified in sorrow, but today we are unified in bloodlust. Nearly a decade ago, the world mourned with us, today we triumph alone.

As I sit on my bed typing this essay, I can turn my head and see my Kimber Ultra Carry II 45ACP sitting in my open nightstand drawer. Next to it is my ex-husband's Glock 19, the first gun I ever bought. My gun is rarely far from my side, and I have lived this way since my family was attacked nearly six years ago by a homophobe with a stolen Beretta.

The parallels to the changes in our country are inescapable. Which is perhaps why I am so concerned. People, good people, ask me all the time if I could use my sidearm. If the need arose, could I really pull the trigger and end a life. When I answer with an unqualified affirmative, the responses ranges from relief to disgust. I have looked deep into my soul and found the certain knowlege that I could kill. Many of my fellow citizens find that aspect of my being incredibly alien to their experience and identity, and I can respect that.

Yet caught in the tide of retribution, those same people revel in the glory of having sent Bin Laden into Death. Today their souls are washed in another man's blood and they embrace it in the name of justice.

We American's have watched as our nation has been twisted into a parody of itself in the pursuit of what the Bush administration branded “The Global War on Terror.” On 9/11/01 we were attacked by people directed by someone who wished to destroy our way of life and strike at the very soul of what it meant to be an American.

As our people glorify in bloodshed and death I can't help but imagine that somewhere beyond the last grey river, in whatever awaits one such as himself in the underworld, Osama Bin Laden is celebrating a victory of his own.

Change of Venue

2011-04-20T20:07:00.002-05:00

I've decided that in the quest of greater integration, I am moving this blog over to my new website, BarkingShaman.com There is now a Notes From A Barking Shaman tab on the menu, and the direct link for the blog is here.

I am remain unsure if this is the direction I want to take the blog, and the blogger site will remain available here. I am currently planning on only updating the new one, although that plan may change.

Aside from the logistics of working with a wordpress blog rather than a blogger one, I may find that Notes From A Barking Shaman distracts from the focus of BarkingShaman.com, or vice versa. On the other hand, NFABS has at time struggled to catch peoples' eye, and being a part of my new website may be a boon.

Regardless of where it appears, Notes From A Barking Shaman won't be disappearing any time soon.

note: there is now a "subscribe" button in the footer of barkingshaman.com, those of you who have subscribed here should add your name to the email list for the new site

TANSTAAFL

2011-04-07T01:38:00.005-05:00

There is a well know platitude that reads: When the gods close a door, they open a window.

Admittedly, I took a few pagan liberties there with my pluralization, but I am confident that the essential sentiment remains unchanged.

While undeniably clichéd, this sentiment has an element of truth (or perhaps truthiness) about it. However, there is a inverse truth that has failed to achieve quite the same level of Hallmark success.

When the gods open a door, they close a window.

Most people know me as “Wintersong Tashlin.” Granted it is not the name I was given at birth. Nor is it the name that adorns my state and federal ID. I was given this name in February of 1999, and in 2005 my legal name was amended so that “Tashlin” became my legal surname. For a number of sentimental and practical reasons I decided for the time being to leave my first name alone. However, the list of people who call me by my birth name is quite short. Nearly all of them are related to me by blood.

My life and Work as “Wintersong” has open many doors. Regardless of what community I am in, this is the identity I am known by. The freedom that has allowed me made it possible to establish a reputation working at the intersections of the communities that I hold dear: pagan spirituality/magic, kink/BDSM, queer/LGBT. With separate “scene” “circle” and “real” names, it would have been impossible to do much of the Work I am proudest of. Additionally, I have never made much effort to separate “Wintersong” from my legal identity. It seemed a loosing battle and one that I could never be happy while fighting.

The question of identity has always been one of interest in my life. The collection of poetry I wrote as an adolescent (some of which is surprisingly decent) asks the question “who am I” and “where am I going” with the frequency one might expect of a disabled queer kid that age. There are times I wonder, would ELL see his own future in WST? Would my childhood self understand the path our wyrd took? Or instead would he resent me for such gross deviations from the course he had envisioned for this turn of the Wheel?

In his wildest dreams, my younger self could not imagine the doors the gods have opened for me. Starting with those gods themselves, and continuing to spouses, lovers, friends, community, and a family of choice that, along with my family of birth, has made it possible to experience richer joys and weather greater pains in the last twelve years than some people experience in a lifetime. Of course there are moments I would love a do-over for, but never have I regretted the path itself.

Not regretting one's wyrd however, doesn't not prevent mourning what has been sacrificed to make it possible.

For instance, my life as a godatheow (god-slave) does not allow for children. I was raised to believe that as a parent, one's children have to come first, an idea incompatible with my oaths. Service to the Lady is my highest priority, before my partners or potential children. Germain to this essay moreover, my public identity as “Wintersong” effectively eliminates having children in our society. I am sterile, and someone on record as an openly unabashed polyamorous pervert has little chance of getting approved for the adoption process (note: I'm open about being poly AND a pervert, one does not automatically equal the other). A part of me longs for children, but even if an arrangement could be reached with my patron, there is no feasible way to become a parent with the openness my Work requires.

Career options have their own limits too. A friend and colleague of mine recently raised the prospect of some potential employment that would dovetail well with my current Work while fitting with my disability and schedule needs. However, the position requires being able to pass a level of hostile scrutiny that my legal identity cannot withstand. Googling my legal name ties it to “Wintersong” on the very first page of search results. Taking that into account it was obvious I was unsuitable for the position. Disappointing as that was, there was also relief. For most of my life I lived openly and doubt I possess the fortitude for a closet. My time at the car dealership would indicate that I do not. Hiding under the refuge of my legal name was an emotionally distressing experience (I should note that, to PCN's credit I was out as queer without issue).

At present there are a number of projects vying for my attention: The first is to achieve greater market penetration and financial success as a presenter in the kink/BDSM and spirituality communities, which includes writing two books that will ideally improve my name recognition. At the same time I am working to complete and find a market for an unrelated writing project that must not be tied to the first task due to its subject matter. If, in defiance of the odds, the second writing project finds an audience and publisher, I will not be able to publicly take ownership of a work I'd be rightfully proud of. Changing gears between them would be hard enough without the knowledge that in the best case scenario I will still be unable to claim credit for the second work. The added pressure of teaching private students and trying to grow a nascent magical clan has not improved matters.

If an opportunity presented itself, I would certainly not go back in time and prevent myself from going out stargazing that night in mid-September of 1998 with the first friend I'd made at college. The encounter we had that night opened an incomprehensible door for us both, and even then, a part of me recognized our wyrds would entwine as part of something bigger than either of us. Returning home that evening battered and drained, but also exhilarated, I could sense the barest glimmer of an unimagined possibilities.

Perhaps it is merely my knowledge of what the future would bring, but I fancy that in that moment we both also felt a hint of sadness, recognizing on some level that by embracing those unimagined possibilities we were forever forfeiting a great many imagined ones. The Fates had opened a door, but over the coming months and years would close a great many windows.

New Website

2011-03-19T14:47:00.002-05:00

My new website Barking Shaman.com is now up and running. For the moment I am going to continue to keep Notes From a Barking Shaman active here at blogger since I like the amount of graphic and layout control Blogger offers. For bios, class descriptions, selected writing (mostly from NFABS) and more, come check it out!

Waves of Fate

2011-03-16T02:50:00.001-05:00

It has been a dizzying past several days. Across the world, humankind has trembled in awe as the extent of devastation wrought by the earthquake and subsequent tsunami in the Pacific has been revealed in in piecemeal reports on our television and internet, as if each garish report by the 24hr news stations, always in glorious technicolor, were pellets being dispensed to waiting lab rats. With the addition of the crisis at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, each time I turn to CNN to get my pellet of news, the metallic tang of fear creeps up the back of my throat. With every loading of a webpage I wonder if this is the time the picture will display an innocuous white cloud blanketing northern Japan, carrying with it the brutal death so associated with sibling cities in the distant Southwest of that same nation.

For those of us aware of the flows of wyrd, it has been a particularly bewildering time. Rarely have such great shifts in the path of our whole planet's wyrd been so bound up in so many concentrated variables and so few puny humans battling such terrific and incomprehensible demons. As I write this evening, only fifty or so people remain on station at Fukushima Daiichi. Fifty champions of their nation pitted in battle against a demon who once wreaked such devastation on their land that it shaped their culture for more than half a century. One who even as I type is threatening to break the man-made bindings that have chained it to human ends for forty years.

Unit 01 breaking free of her armor, the Akira Explosion, Vash the Stampede's barren world, the Japanese have been preparing their culture and children for the possibility that they might fight and loose this battle for decades.

I am not Japanese. I am not in death's path if those bindings are broken. And yet, it may be that the wyrd of our entire world rests on the outcome of this struggle. With every new variable, fuel tank left unfilled for too long, or on the reverse, a cooling pump restored with moments to spare, the wyrd shifts and eddies. Unlike my sister, the wyrd does not come to me as a great branching tree. The flows of fate carry me along and from my place in the deep and swift river, I can feel the oncoming turns and forks of fate. But these last few days, as if to echo the catalyst of catastrophe (for surely it is already that, even if no further harm is done) the flows of wyrd have tossed and built, only to settle momentarily before resuming their chaotic dance.

As a wyrd worker, all I can do is struggle to keep my head above water and ride the waves that crash through time and space as the battle at Fukushima Daiichi wages into its seventh day.

Why though does this endeavor so bind the whole world's fate? Humankind has chained many demons throughout our history. The one engaged at Fukushima Daiichi is impatient, and when it slips the wards of steel, concrete, water, and technology that we have used to constrain it, it takes its revenge swiftly and brutally.

However, even as the eyes of the world are turned to Northern Japan, we have become aware of a far more patient sibling pressed into humanity's service long earlier, whose own retribution crept up on us slowly. In our quest for swift transportation, heat, and power, we allied ourselves with one who poisons the air we breath and the water we drink, not to mention ensnaring those that benefit from its bounty in deadly internecine conflict. This demon may be far more deadly in the long run than the one struggling to break free at Fukushima Daiichi.

Idealists who have been forced to view the world through pragmatic eyes, believe that until we can discover a whole new way to survive, perhaps a new demon bound in undreamt of bindings, our best hope for beating back the slow and patient poisoner may very well be to rely far more heavily on the bounty of the impatient and brutal demon that even now threatens to destroy its tamers.

Alas, we are mortal and given the choice, slow and uncertain poison is often given preferential treatment over a swift and deadly blow. If the beast at Fukushima Daiichi breaks free, it is unlikely that we will embrace it as an ally against the slow poisoner, even if no other strong allies can be found. Shortsighted though that may be, it is also very human, and the decades delay before those events fade into distant memory may bring far greater harm upon us as the poisoner gains ground.

And so, it may be that the wyrd of a species rests of the shoulders of fifty brave souls. Or, it may not. As I strive to sift understanding from the tumultuous currents of the wyrd, I can not be sure of where the river flows.

As in counterpoise I go again, rat-like, for the pellets of information passed out by the news, it occurs to me how very like the turbulent wyrd their meager scraps are. The truth is that we are all caught up in the waves of fate that waves of water have unleashed upon our world.

We hold our breath together and wait for sun.

Exploring Privacy Through a Torture(d) Metaphor

2011-03-09T22:04:00.001-05:00

Fair Warning: This post will contain graphic descriptions of practices that may be disturbing to some people. Reader discretion is most definitely advised!

Why are some things “private” in our lives and not others? This is question of particular interest to me of late because of my work in the sexuality field. More than once I have found myself inadvertently making someone uncomfortable by sharing details of my life or work that, while not areas I considered private or taboo, in retrospect were not things this person wanted to know in that moment. While I find spiritual and personal value in pushing people's comfort zones when appropriate, I also take pride in not being a jerk. Hence my recent ruminations on the subject of “private areas” in our personal and public lives.

I actually consider myself to be a relatively private person. If you have been reading BarkingShaman or my other writings, or have attended my classes in the past, there is a good chance that you are chuckling a bit right about now. However, I am being completely serious. From where I sit, I don't share that much that I consider to be “private.” Sure I talk about sex, including my own sex life. My spiritual life is a pretty open book too, my gods like it that way. And despite my issues around my body, which I have written about on BarkingShaman in the past, I have demonstrated BDSM techniques on myself in many classes and was even been filmed naked for British prime time television.

However, there are whole chapters of my life I have spoken and written little about. As open as I am about my life as Wintersong, writing about who I was before I recieved that name is virtually nonexistent. Likewise, few people have heard me talk about what makes me cry, or what old dreams hold sway over me. Outside of my sexual explorations, few people know anything of my childhood. Details of my education and professional training, or my financial situation are likewise rarely shared beyond the broad strokes.

It is an interesting phenomena, this process by which certain topics or even body parts become designated in our society and our minds as “private.” I understand that by the nature of what I do as someone who talks publicly about sex and spirituality, that I transgress this taboo on a regular basis. Howver, I often feel like it is a taboo that even those who abide by it do not entirely understand.

Warning: if you have a delicate constitution, now might be a good time to stop reading this post!

Allow me to paint a picture for you. The picture is of a man's genital area. His flaccid penis is held to a shaved pubic mound with a piece of medical tape. Dangling between his legs, one testicle has been freed from his scrotum through an incision. He's holding it carefully between his forefinger and thumb, though it is still attached via the spermatic cords. The picture is in perfect focus and rather well framed at that. However, the glans of his penis has been digitally blurred, presumably for modesty reasons.

This isn't a scene from a medical training manual. The photo was part of a series on BMEZine.com, a body modification community, and the man in question was engaging in “ball exposure play.” Over the course of the photo shoot he did eventually return the testicle to its regular location and stitch himself back up. It was not the first time he'd done such a scene.

If you were wondering, that was most assuredly not me.

So why describe this little tableau, and what could it possibly have to do with the topic of privacy?

What struck me when I first saw this shoot was what seemed to me the total absurdity of censoring out the head of his cock while showing us, the viewer at home, one of his testicles. When I mentioned this to a few friends however, several seemed to understand the desire to maintain some modesty by hiding his “private parts,” which in the end weren't relevant to the scene anyway. This was incomprehensible to me. What part of one's body could be more private than an internal organ? There really are few circumstances in which anyone would be seeing your testicle, which from my perspective, made it about as private a part as one could have. What thought process made it ok to show me, the viewer, that intimate a part of oneself, but still leaves one feeling it necessary to blur out a penis?

I realize this example raises the issues of modesty vs. privacy. The argument that could be made that rather than being private, this man was being modest. I can intellectually understand the accuracy there, in the context of modest as “Dressing or behaving so as to avoid impropriety or indecency, esp. to avoid attracting sexual attention” (Google word search March 2011). However, I still struggle to grok the rationale or value in the behavior.

Yet, in a way this man's actions are not all that different from my own. As I said before, I am very open about all manner of things that most people would generally classify as part of their “private” lives and I am quite comfortable with that. But there are areas of my life that I choose not discuss outside of a small and select group of people. Graphic stories of sexual experimentation gone awry not only come out among friends, they feature prominently as cautionary tales in my workshops. But other subjects are off the table, or at the least are heavily censored for public consumption, just like a certain gentleman's gentleman.

I had a conversation a while back with my friend Lee, a fabulous performer, educator and fellow traveler on the shamanic road, about the way our sense of what “normal” is shifts off of the societal baseline when we spend a lot of time in the kink/BDSM world, spiritual space, or any other specialized community. There are people in my life that I have seen naked, seen fucking, maybe played with personally, but could not tell you the first thing about. In my world that is not unusual, but I sometimes have to remind myself that it means that I am “off-normal” by society's standards.

I think that people in the kink/sexuality and other subculture communities compensate for this shift by re-prioritizing what we consider to be private. As humans, we seem to have a need to have some parts of our lives belong just to us and our intimates. If we yield one area, another takes its place. Perhaps what matters is that we have something to be private, what that is may not be all that relevant.

There is a delightful science fiction writer named Spider Robinson whose work I am fond of. Many years ago he wrote a series of books, which I enjoyed called the “Stardance Trillogy.” Despite my enjoyment however, the fundamental belief of the series was that the best outcome for the advancement of humanity would be for us all to enter into a hive-mind of shared consciousness. I reject this idea, as I think many people do. We define ourselves in part as we relate to other people. What we choose not to share or share only selectively, helps to give us that definition that we need to have a sense of self.

Sometimes people who take my classes or read my online writing comment that they admire how open I am. Truthfully, this is largely an illusion. I doubt that I am any more open than most people. Like the man showing us his balls but hiding his “regular” bits, I simply keep different things “private” than most people. Not better things and hopefully not worse, just different.

In the Land of My Birth

2011-03-05T01:22:00.001-05:00

The light and water that make up my soul reflect the image of this place...

I'm home tonight, in the land of my birth. As I step out of the odd round building I am staying in this evening and look a short distance away, I can just make out the lights of the place where I knelt and swore my life to my goddess. The place where I was given my Name. Just outside these poorly insulated walls, the winter wind from whence I got that name whistles through the first woods I called my own. This is not where I first encountered power and spirit, but it is where I learned control and took my first faltering steps towards becoming who I am today.

Echos and memories greet me everywhere I turn. There I drilled with wooden practice swords, overcoming a lifetime of ingrained belief that I was clumsy and uncoordinated. Down that path is the place where I first held a regular full-moon circle. This place is where I learned to shield, and that where I first heard of “pattern magic.” My whole apprenticeship and the first years of my journeyman period took place in these scant four hundred acres.

But I am not solely the sum of my magic and spirituality. In that building yonder I trained in the ways of design and seeing things not as they are, but as they could be. And in a building identical to the one I am in now, I experience the challenges and joys of living with friends and family and of having to cook your my meals and clean my own space. And back that way again is the place I feel in love, and learned the lessons of love and loss, of passion and dedication.

I am in the place of my birth and I feel the spirits of this land reaching for me, hear reports whispered in my ears by faithful spirits who've long waited for someone they can tell of the passage of time and the goings on of territory once claimed by my Clan. Power sings in my veins with the unbridled freedom of old familiarity as I feel myself connected to this place with an ease that boarders on the involuntary.

It is the nature of the Vreschtik that we leave a connection to everyplace we have held. Every land where we once built a vrescht will still answer to our call. But the way we do that is by leaving a bit of ourselves behind each and every time we move on. And we were young and new to our power when this land was ours. With the passion and temerity of youth, we poured ourselves into this place, which in return made us over into what the Land and the gods wanted us to be. I am a child of woman, god, and earth. My mother, my Lady, and this place each share stake in my being.

This place the still sings to my heart and tells me that I'm home. But alas I am not. This is not a place for men like me. Here I am old, even as land and memory sing sweet, seductive songs of my youth in my ear. This is a place for the young, for those whose path is to find themselves and their place in the world and while I can sojourn here for a brief time, I must always leave it to them. This place is as lost to me as my mother's womb.

It is after all, the land of my birth.

Reflections From a Fixed Point

2011-02-24T20:51:00.002-05:00

When I was a boy, probably about eight years old, I first heard the soundtrack to “A Chorus Line” on the tape deck of my mom's red GMC Jimmy as we drove from our home in central Massachusetts to New London Connecticut, where I would catch the Cross Sound Ferry to Orient Point New York to see my father. This is not the first time I have written about “A Chorus Line” on Barking Shaman, and it is tempting to see this introduction at such a young age as my mother's way of subtly supporting her already burgeoning gay son.

With the benefit of hindsight however, I suspect she was simply desperate to hear anything that wasn't another repeat of Billy Joel's Greatest Hits. “A Chorus Line” was probably the only other tape within easy reach. Remember that back then our music storage mediums only held about an hour of data each, and a child can happily listen to that hour repeatedly, long past the point where an adult might be tempted to steer her cutting-edge (for a woman at least) SUV into a bridge abutment.

I don't remember when exactly I fell in love with the music from the show, although it was not on that first listen. As a boy in the 80's I was a bit scandalized and titillated by the classic “Dance Ten, Looks Three,” better known to most people as the “Tits and Ass” song, and it was probably this taste of the forbidden, that brought me back to the cast recording initially.

Ten years old is rather young to be listening to a show about the perils and triumphs of being a struggling Broadway actor. “A Chorus Line” talks frankly about love, heartbreak, struggle, adolescence, failure and even puberty. As a boy, I looked up to the characters whose fictional lives were woven in the air of my room as I quite literally played the soundtrack tape to death and had to replace it for a new copy, a CD this time. As a creative and, although I didn't quite understand it yet, gay boy growing up in the late 80's and 90's, I looked up to them. These were people living their dreams and having a life more fabulous than I could ever dream of. Most of all, to me they were adults when it often felt like I'd be caught in the false dawn between childhood and adulthood forever.

That was more than two decades ago now, and the man I've grown into sometimes wonders why I ever wanted dawn to come. At fourteen the song “Adolescence” resonated strongly with me, particularly “To young to take over... To old to ignore. Gee, I'm almost ready... but what for?” At thirty I see the same position in life very differently, an adolescent is old enough to be a sexual being, but young enough to still get away with playing with Legos. Old enough that their opinions carried some weight, but still years away from worrying about car payments or divorce lawyers.

My friends in “A Chorus Line” still sing about their recent emergence from their own adolescence, still marvel that other guys got hard-ons in class, still lust over Robert Goulet and Steve McQueen. Like Capt. Jack Harkness, they are fixed points in time and space. AIDS, Cats, 9-11, all of it remains forever over the horizon for them.

However, I am not a fixed point in the universe. At some point, the characters of “A Chorus Line” went in my mind from being ineffable symbols of adulthood, to being young and naïve. Don't get me wrong, it doesn't make me love them any less, but I know actual dancers and actors now. I know what their lives and careers are like. From my vantage point beyond the horizon I can understand what sort of struggles aren't reflected in the show, and too easily imagine what good and bad in their lives may have waited for them beyond their last curtain call.

As a child, these were people who seemed to know everything. They were worldly, and lived in the grandest city on Earth. Now I see them as sisyphean figures hoping to beat the immense odds in the pursuit of a nearly impossible dream.

Good art acts as a mirror for ourselves, and as my life ebbs and changes over the course of its journey the meaning I find in “fixed points” like “A Chorus Line” will change to reflect the changes in my own heart. Just as the boy I was saw a distant vision of freedom and fabulousness, the man I've become sees the struggle to maintain my dreams against the odds.

I can't know what will be reflected back at me when I look into this mirror in another twenty years, but I find it comforting to know that no matter how much the world may shift and my life may change, these constant and unchanging companions from my youth will be there to help me look into my own heart and point me toward tomorrow when time comes.

Putting out (Financial Stability) Where Our Mouths Are

2011-02-13T00:10:00.001-05:00

“Fish or cut bait.” It's a more polite version of “shit or get off the pot” but only really makes sense to people who fish, whereas everyone can relate to the second, less delicate wording.

The last few months have found Fireheart and I very much in a “fish or cut bait” situation. For over a decade we, and the rest of Tashrisketlin have been guided and driven by the will and hand of the gods and spirits, particularly our Lady. For the most part, we have served Their needs and They have done right by us. It has rarely been a typical life, for instance the last two years our company was in business we lived very comfortably doing deeply fulfilling work that was so unusual even I struggle to believe it really happened sometimes.

The trade off in being god slaves has always been that we are fixed into our and our Clan's wyrds, as well as the interests of our Patron, as inextricably as a train is tied to its tracks. Like a swimmer in a strong river, as long as we go along with the current, the track that They have laid out if you will, things move, if not with ease, than with some smoothness. Try to swim against the current however, and we risk being slammed over and over again into rocks that we fail to see approaching because we are facing the wrong way.

Fireheart and I have been swimming against the current.

It is never easy for someone who has built a reputation around their spirituality and faith to speak of questioning that faith. I have served my gods with all my heart since just after I came into adulthood, and I have been shaken before, but lately Fire and I both have suffered from the worst “faithquake” in our history.

Our lives have collapsed around our ears in the last two years. Our company has failed, our spouse left us having declared not just a loss of love, but an absence from the start, we have had hope for my improved health snatched from us more times than I care to count, and our young Clan languishes with its numbers diminished and only one part-time student where there should be many. On top of that, both Fire and I have struggled terribly to find reasonably paying work, with him working part time for just above minimum wage, and a promising contract job of mine not being renewed (company collapsed), leading me to accepting a poor paying, 75hr a week, morally questionable position as a car salesman, while still relying on my family's financial support to keep our electricity on.

The icing on the cake, so to speak, is that while we have tried to do what is asked of us over the many years and seemingly have seen the collapse of our fortunes, our former spouse defied Them at every turn and yet has gotten everything in life he dreamed of, right down to being laid off the week he intended to quit his job, allowing him nearly a year of stress free independent living in his new city.

I always tell my students that everyone has their own internal idea of what the “white picket fence” means to them. I will freely admit, I liked the idea of getting a new motorcycle, of not having debt collectors calling at all hours of the day, maybe replacing my dying Subaru before it strands me on the side of the road. Those ideas became my “white picket fence” and it felt... safe. These were concrete easy to grasp, and mundane goals. They were goals my mother could get behind (not the motorcycle part, she'd much rather I give that up). But they weren't what my other Mother, my Patron wanted me focused on, and they did not fit too well with what Fire and I have spent years working towards.

My shamanic work has always been somewhat nomadic. Frankly, the Northeast is well served by the shamans it has, and I've traditionally worked best with populations I traveled to, and then left. I suppose it is my equivalent of living in a hut on the edge of the village. Back in 2008 I got the clear instruction that I was to learn to be a shaman for the kink/BDSM community. Not that this population lacks spirit workers, shamans, and magicians, we're there, but I was to be another. I had to learn what that meant, not only for myself, but also in terms of what I had to offer. It is not the only shamanic work I do by any means, but perhaps the way to look at is that the kink/BDSM/LGBT communities are my shamanic pastoral congregations.

This has not been an easy journey, although it has been a rewarding and often fun one. It has taken years of hard work to build my reputation and learn to not only serve, but be a part of these communities. And I have had support from amazing people, too many to name, although they know who they are I hope.

When it came time to put aside that Work to bring home steady paycheck, things got a little ugly in our lives. I have regaled you enough with our recent trials that I will not go on further, but it has come to be clear to us that She is looking for more commitment, not less. Our Lady and the spirits want me to be doing my shamanic work full time, even if that means taking to the road, not an easy thing for a Vreschtik shaman and mage to do.

And so, Fireheart and I had the conversation last night. Not about me trying my hand at this Work full time, we had the other conversation. The one where we seriously discussed whether we should just say “Fuck It?” Let Wintersong and Fireheart die quiet deaths, along with the tattered remains of Tashrisketlin and chase the “white picked fence” as simply Nick and Eric? Many of my colleagues would say that it is not possible, gods slaves are never free. But the truth is that it has been done before, those who fail are generally not willing to sacrifice enough in the pursuit of that freedom.

The only other option left to us at this point is to turn our stubborn asses around and swim full-bore with Their current and hope it carries us someplace good. Fire and I are both nearing our 31^st birthdays, and we took our oaths of service when we were nineteen. Maybe taking a leap of fail should not scare the ever living shit out of us anymore, but it does.

I know how stacked against us the odds are. One of my closest friends and lovers makes his living through his work in the BDSM/alternative sexuality world and we have discussed many times over all the reasons why I likely can not do the same.

However, here I am. I am actively pursuing mundane work that will allow me the scheduling freedom to take off to teach a class or attend a conference as the opportunity arrises. I am buckling down on my kink technique book, as well as a book of essays on magical theory and philosophy for Raven Kaldera's newest imprint.

Fireheart and I are choosing to swim with the current. We are trying to keep faith with those naïve children who signed away their futures to a goddess they barely understood and did not have a name for because She promised that life would never be boring and we would always be able to be proud of what we did and who would become.

Maybe this new path will be “successful,” and maybe it won't. But whatever happens, Fireheart, myself, and the whole of Tashrisketlin will strive to serve, and hope that the great river carries us where we are supposed to go.

Sending The Wrong Signal

2011-01-06T18:55:00.002-05:00

This post will violate one of the cardinal safe practices of life in the internet age, I am going to write about where I work. The media is full of stories about people getting into trouble for doing exactly that, but I believe there is a difference between “telling tales out of school” and commenting on the legitimate effect corporate policy has on the lives of LGBT people. Sorry Mom.

For the past half decade I was the project manager for a small design firm that I co-owned with my partners. One of the many upsides of being a queer small business owner, is that the issues of sexual orientation & gender identity discrimination in the workplace loose much of their personal immediacy.

I have certainly faced harassment and discrimination at work in the past. After college, while waiting for our now ex-husband to graduate from university, both myself and my partner (we were in a polyamorous marriage for just over eight years) worked for a local Jiffy Lube franchise to pay the bills. We each endured significant, daily, and at times violent harassment at our respective stores because of who we were. We were grateful to leave such things behind when we founded our little company.

Now, like many business owners faced with a troubled economy and/or familial strife we have had to shutter our company and seek gainful employment in the broader world. To keep the electricity on, I recently accepted a position as a junior sales consultant at a successful import car dealership on the coast of New Hampshire. For this essay we can call my dealership OBM.

Before I write another word I want to be completely clear that I have not received an iota of harassment at OBM due to my queerness. No one has used gay slurs in my presence, and my supervisor did not bat an eye at the mention of my “partner” or “boyfriend.” And yet, I do not feel safe or secure at work. The awareness that as far as OBM policy is concerned, I am a second class citizen, is never far from my mind.

Our employee handbook and training covers discrimination and harassment extensively, hardly surprising in an industry focused on customer interaction after all. OBM levies steep penalties up to and including summary termination for any harassment or discrimination on the basis of the standard categories: race, religion, sex, disability status, etc. Sexual orientation and gender identity/presentation are not protected under OBM policy. The anti-workplace discrimination video all employees have to watch only featured one portrayal of a gay person, and that was as the stereotypical predator who wouldn't take “no” as an answer from a heterosexual co-worker.

New Hampshire is a gay marriage state, so presumably health benefits are available to married gays and lesbians. With repeal looking horrifyingly likely in the upcoming legislative term however, I would be extremely surprised if OBM was to offer health benefits to same-sex partners without a state mandate.

If I have never been harassed at work, why then does this lack of protection concern me? For the simple reason that I am always aware that I can be at any time. My employer has made the decision that I as a queer/LGBT person am not someone worthy of protection in the workplace. The argument could be made that I am theoretically afforded some limited protections by the state's non-discrimination law as it applies to employment. However, this position has two flaws. The first is that the law's scope is more limited than one might imagine. The second is that if state legal protection really is all that one needs, why then does OBM have a policy to cover any categories of identity, as all of the ones named in OBM's guidelines are also covered under state law.

I am not so naïve as to think that having sexual orientation and gender identity/presentation in my employer's anti-harassment policy would provide me any real protection or recourse if I was being harassed at work. However, I do think that not including those categories sends the clear message to OBM employees that the company has no direct objection to the harassment of their queer colleagues. This disregard by the corporate management in itself creates a state of heightened tension in the work environment, even in the absence of any conflict with my coworkers.

I think of myself as a queer activist. In fact, I have taught classes on queer/LGBT activism in the past. This situation at OBM has me deeply conflicted. With no recourse against discrimination or harassment, it would be difficult for me to bring the issue up, particularly in a field that still has a reputation for machismo. Moreover I am still in my probationary period, and rocking the boat so-to-speak could reduce my chances of being retained at the end of my probation. I feel a deeply rooted struggle between my desire to fight for my right to work in a workplace free from fear, and my desire to keep my creditors at bay.

In truth, I would be somewhat surprised to find that OBM's owners and management have any serious anti-LGBT bias. This situation feels more like one of benign neglect than outright discrimination. Perhaps OBM has not had many openly non-heterosexual employees in its many years of operation.

As I continue to learn the ropes in my new job, I am not going to stop being who I am. I will not switch my pronouns, or pretend to be single when I am not, or police my mannerisms anymore than I would in any other professional environment. I hope that over time my concerns will prove unfounded, and my queerness will continue to be a nonissue with my supervisors, coworkers, and customers. However, even if my none of my concerns manifest, the criticism remains a valid one. In a workplace that allows anti-LGBT harassment, even should it never occur, an LGBT person can never be truly equal to their fellows.

Surfacing

2010-12-24T01:27:00.001-05:00

I have tried here to capture the experience of “surfacing” or “coming out of the trunk” during a deity possession or “horsing” as it is generally known.

Sleep Wintersong. Go back to sleep...

Distant voices, deep in conversation, rumble in the void like thunder beyond a clouded horizon. Wrong, this is wrong. A splinter of consciousness whispers into the dark that I should be without thought or form. Stubbornly, I cling to the fabric of the nothingness that envelopes me, like a war torn child struggling to stay buried in dreams of a time before blood and fire. The voices grow clearer one voice mine and yet not mine, and I can feel the words carving groves in my mind, and know that these scattered words will be waiting in my memory when I wake. I don't want your words, they belong to you, not me.

Wish as I might, the fabric of my void is tearing. Am I crying, can a thought cry in fear? Lightning flashes, illuminating flicking visions of the waking world, burned into my memory like pictures in someone else's scrapbook. My flesh is being returned to me prematurely and I feel His irritation, tempered with concern, though whether for Himself or for the vessel I do not know. I am sorry. Inadequacy and shame burns in my breast, or would if I had form and substance.

And then, in an instant of sickening dislocation, I do. I am a passenger in a ship born of my mother's body and I can feel Him struggling to maintain His connection. I am small. I see nothing. I feel nothing. In this Work wishing can make it so, if you wish hard enough. Whatever I can do to make room for Him I do.

Help me Master! I cry out for my Teacher and a distant echo reassures and soothes my frightened heart. I know that my Teacher will do his best to erase the grooves in my mind and white out the unwanted pictures in the scrapbook of my memory. It will be incomplete, but the effort will ease my readjustment, when the proper time for my return finally comes.

Then I feel how I don't want to feel Him reach with His/my/Our hand and grasp the hard, slick glass. The vile liquid inside hits my tongue and He rides the wave of liquor down into Our body, the spider puppet-master again ensconced in His temporary temple. Don't think about that, never about that. As the blessed void closes back over my drifting consciousness, my last awareness is of the transmutation of the alcohol from loathsome to ambrosial as His desires reassert dominance and sleep claims me again.

The Other Social Lubricant

2010-12-14T23:25:00.004-05:00

There are times when I worry that as I grow older I am turning into a crotchety old man before my time. Certainly there are elements of my worldview that may come across as old fashioned or outdated today. We live in an ostensibly egalitarian society, and one which grows progressively more informal with every new social networking fad. There are times when this informality, and perhaps egalitarianism as well, rubs me the wrong way.

The worlds that make up my personal universe are ones of hierarchy and formality mixed with independence and humor. As a spirit worker and a shaman, my spirituality places a firm emphasis on behaving appropriately in one's interactions with the gods, spirits, the dead, and fellow travelers on this strange road. In the magical tradition I was trained and work in, practitioners spend years and even decades of their lives to build their skills and advance to higher degrees of both accolades and responsibilities. And of course, there is the kink/BDSM community, in which boundaries, titles, and roles go a long way to forming the foundation of the social contract.

I don't think of myself as particularly rigid in my expectations or expressions of these hierarchies and structures, at least not in the context of my teachers and friends. People who know me well will tell you that I tend to be on the cheeky side, and I try to find the lighter side of even the deeper aspects of my life and Work. However, I find that I grow more irritated as time goes on with what I see as the transgressing or disregarding of social and interpersonal amenities.

The last thing the internet needs is another rant about people bothering to use proper spelling and grammar, so I will try to forgo that diversion. Other folk have done it better and far earlier than I. Plus, there is no need to add to this essay's already inescapable “grumpy old man” vibe.

What I am far more concerned with than the above mentioned manifest grammar and spelling issues that torture the our language so, is what I see as the odd familiarity that I find in growing frequency online. This is not to say that I am someone who requires “high protocol” in my correspondence or conversations. Far from it. The “odd familiarity” I am referring to is odd precisely because it seems to me that people are in fact less proper with strangers than they might be with someone they know well.

For instance, I recently received a message demanding information regarding a class I taught two and half months ago. Disregarding the fact that I addressed those exact questions during my class, the person writing the message did not bother with the social niceties that I would consider proper when asking a stranger for assistance. Seesawing between awkward informality and rapid-fire demands for information, their message established that they had taken my class and proceeded to their questions in a nearly bulleted format. There was no “I was wondering if you could answer a few questions for me” or “Thank you for your time.” The “establishing shot” as they would say in the film world, was missing.

It is tempting to see this person as simply entitled, and in truth there is an attitude I have encountered as an educator in the kink, pagan, and disability communities that my obligation to someone who has taken one of my classes endures forever. However, I suspect in this case this person simply did not know how or why they should write a proper message. If pressed, I do not suppose I could easily elucidate that point myself. If I understood their questions and they got an answer, albeit a terse one, then why bother with the effort of a proper message?

The old fashioned part of me, which is inextricably bound up in the magician, shaman, and kinkster sides of myself, would say that the reason is evident: it was rude not to put some effort into the message. The problem there is that it presumes a negative consequence for rudeness. In my shamanic work, rudeness to the wrong being can quite literally be deadly (see: half of Greek mythology), and I suppose the same could be said for my magical work to the extent that magicians are generally not known for their patience with disrespect. Likewise a reputation for rudeness or brattiness in the BDSM community can make it harder to find partners or arrange play.

This line of thought however, is in itself problematic though. We should not need to look at questions of rudeness or politeness in terms of consequences. From where I sit, attempts at basic interpersonal protocol make the world run more smoothly. Social interactions without courtesy are like sex without proper lubrication, yes you can do, but it is not nearly as enjoyable for anyone involved.

This is not to say that I am a paragon of politeness. In fact, there are aspects of the social contract that I suck at. I am bad with thank you notes, sending cards on birthdays or anniversaries, and I am terrible at remembering people's names. But I believe strongly in making an effort in my communication. I reread every email I send, try to be as careful as possible with spelling and grammar, and always respect that someone is taking time out of their generally hectic life for me or my message. Granted, there is a level of informality with my friends and family that only makes sense (if you get emails from me signed “Winty” on occasion, that likely means you).

Do not get me wrong, I like communicating with people online, and I like answering people's questions. I have however found, as I mentioned earlier, that some people develop a sense of entitlement regarding public figures, whether in the pagan, kink, or other communities I am or have been involved in. There is a perspective that whatever fee they paid to attend an event I taught at entitles them to a lifetime of limitless access to me or my colleagues. To some extent I even believe that to have a grain of truth, but there is a fine line between my willingness to help and that help being taken for granted.

As our interactions become more virtual and we see each other in person less often, there is a temptation think of the online world as one large Turing Test, and that words on a screen do not deserve the same respect we would give to a “real” person. This of course is not the case however, and we need to remember that those words represent people. Even if Dr. Turing's vision was to come true one could argue we would just be interacting with “people” of a different nature (and our new AI overlords will not appreciate it if we don't even bother to spellcheck our notes from the Matrix).

It is my hope that the social contract of our online communities will with time resemble that of the “real world.” My fear is that the opposite is already happening.

Looking for Roots (that I might not need)

2010-10-22T14:24:00.002-05:00

AUTHORS NOTE:

It is obvious from a quick perusal of the last several Barking Shaman that I have been in an introspective mood of late. “Requiem for a Symbol,” “Lessons from a Plastic Bracelet,” and “Don't Call Me a Unicorn Hunter” all had elements of self-examination.

In the earlier days of writing Barking Shaman, before my long hiatus, it was not uncommon for posts to group into themes. I do not intend to turn this blog into a forum simply to talk about myself. The internet is replete with venues for narcissistic expression, and I have my Facebook page and Twitter feed to indulge that part of my psyche.

However, I do feel that I have something more to say, and gods be damned, Notes from a Barking Shaman is my little corner of the internet, so bear with me through one more inward journey. Or don't, if you are not so moved, I won't mind.

-Wintersong Tashlin

Looking for Roots (that I might not need)

I am Wintersong Tashlin, although most people just call me “Winter.” Of course, it is largely a given that if you are reading Barking Shaman, you already know who I am. What likely goes without saying is that “Wintersong” is not the name my parents gave me, nor it should be noted is it the name that they use to this day. “Tashlin” as well is a taken name, although unlike “Winter,” my surname was made legal over five years ago.

On second glance, the above is a powerful statement though. My identity is far more bound up in who I am as Winter than it is around my birth name, which I continue to use in certain limited areas of my professional and familial life. My identity and the life that I lead, as a spirit worker, magician, god-servant, BDSM educator, queer activist, and gun nut, are vastly different from what I could have imagined as a child. It is hard at times to reconcile my “real” life with more mundane one that I associate with my birth name, which is the name I am called at work or when the bill collector calls.

There are times when I feel adrift. It is hard not to disassociate from my childhood and my life before I took this name (Wintersong was my third chosen name, but I have had it since 1999). I have very few ties to the person that I was. I am quite close to few family members and I am in touch with no friends from before college, and only one or two from college.

It has been pointed out to me on more than one occasion that through the magic of the internet and Facebook in particular, I could try to reconnect with people from my childhood. This has raised an interesting question for me. Should I? There are few people I would want to connect with. I did not go to my local high school because of the severity of my Tourette, so I lost touch with many of my friends after middle school. The remaining ones I was close to primarily through the synagog youth group, and there are obvious issues there. One of the few people I'd really care to reconnect with is now a successful Rabbi, while I am a hard-polytheist-shaman. Clearly our paths diverged, although not as far perhaps as I did from her brother who is a successful accountant. She and I may serve different paths and gods, but in our own ways we both serve, I honestly cannot imagine the life her brother (also a good friend of mine growing up) lives.

Thanks to Facebook I did discover that the first boy with whom I ever had what I felt was a positive sexual experience, did in fact end up batting on the same team as me. If nothing else this finally set my mind at ease after seventeen years and allow me to enjoy that memory without concern that what had been a positive experience for me had been mere experimentation for him (it still could have been, but now I know what the experiment's results were).

That is interesting, and perhaps edifying knowledge, but I do not see it providing any real connection between us. At least no more so than anyone else with whom I shared a one-night-stand with a very long time ago. Another childhood friend and I have remarkably similar tastes in film and television, again, at least according to what he has chosen to list on Facebook, but other than a fondness for Jeremy Clarkson's automotive antics, the culinary adventures on Top Chef, and hazy memories of the of children we haven't been for nearly two decades, we likely share little common ground.

I could reach out to them, and in truth I have experimentally sent out a few introductory notes, but the reality is that I feel more like I am contacting the childhood friends of a lost relative than the children I once whiled away long Saturdays playing with. Part of me hopes to hear back, because no one likes to be rejected or worse, forgotten. However, an equal part of me hopes that my messages vanish into the empty reaches of the internet, taking with them awkward conversations and feeble attempts to recapture a sense of connection to each other, when what we are really looking for is a sense of connection to the child we each used to be.

At least that is what I find myself looking for. I like the man I have become, but in many ways I feel like a man without a past. When I look in the mirror I can not find echoes of the boy who played pretend games, Legos, or Micromachines, with Jeff, Steven, Lucian, Josh and other childhood friends (boy are those '80s names or what). For a while I looked for those echoes in some of my age play, and almost found them, but circumstances in my life shifted and I lost track of them again. When I wonder “How is X doing” one of the things I mean is “maybe by understanding how my childhood cohorts got to where they are in life, I'll understand where my own childhood self fits into my identity now.”

At the same time, as I stated, there is a lot about who I am now that I like. I feel like I fit better in my own skin now than I have in a long time and I am not sure that looking backward is necessary or healthy. I am unsure of how I will benefit in my sense of self or well-being through connecting to people whose concept of me is fifteen or twenty years out of date. What value would I gain through such a connection?

In the end I am a shaman and spirit worker, and as such I have put this issue into the hands of the fates. If I have something to learn or gain from such an interaction, one will happen and I will endeavor to approach it with an open mind and heart. If one does not, then that too will tell me something of value about the relationship between the child I used to be and the man I have became.

Requiem for a Symbol

2010-10-18T22:57:00.001-05:00

As a shaman, magician and spirit worker, animism is a vital part of my spiritual belief system. There are objects that I think of as having “soul,” my VW Beetle certainly did. So does the motorcycle that I ride, my first athame, the milling machine in our shop, the list goes on.

An extension of this way of looking at the world is that some objects do not have soul of there own, but instead become part of a person. The wedding ring that is never removed for instance. There are several things in my life that fit this later category, my ring is one, as is my tactical flashlight which never leaves my side, the same with my 45ACP sidearm (although to a lesser extent), but most strongly of all would be my glasses. I feel especially bound to them as without corrective lenses I am completely helpless visually. As I look over the rim of my frames at the computer screen I cannot make out a singe word no matter how hard I squint my eyes, that is how dependent I am.

However, this past year I have been dependent on my glasses for more than just vision correction. As I have written about previously, just over a year ago now my husband left our triad after eight years together. I still believe that there were good times in the three of ours life together, but there were some very challenging times as well, and especially in the last year before he announced he was leaving my ex told me often and in great detail that I was unattractive and undesirable. I often felt it was my fault that I could not be the person I needed to be to make him happy and my lack of physical attractiveness to him was a frequent subject of our conversations.

After he left I decided I needed to make some major changes. Not, it should be noted because I truly believed that he was right. Even by that point I had started to realize that my ex-husband was hurting emotionally and lashing out at the people close to him because he did not know what else to do. But just because a bear strikes you out of fear rather than rage does has no bearing on that fact that you are still badly wounded.

So I went on a diet and determined to loose weight. I redid my wardrobe. I began making attempts to be more social when at events. And, as an overarching symbol of new beginnings, I bought a fabulous and somewhat insane pair of glasses.

They were J.F. Rey model 2285's in matte black metal. Designer specs out of France and bought at a little boutique shop in Nashua. I'd never dreamed of spending so much on a pair of glasses. We had just received the last check we would get from our company's big project and this was my last indulgence. It was a way to radically change how I would present myself to the world. These were not glasses that blended in at all. They made a statement, one I knew I was not yet ready to make. I was not a J.F. Rey kind of guy, but gods I wanted to be.

My ex had placed rather strict limits on my self expression. I was not to be too flamboyant, too forthright or direct, too obvious. I needed to blend, and not make any more of a spectacle than a barking guy makes by virtue of being himself. Giving up drag, even on Halloween was a condition of our relationship.

Make no mistake, I did not want our triad to end so completely. I still wish it had not, that we could have talked and compromised and found ways to each be ourselves and be happy without as extreme a solution as was found. However, if he was going to leave my life, I was going to try to find out who I was now free to be, and these glasses were going to be a symbol of my commitment to myself and a very real push to do so.

That was about nine months ago. I am a more complete and self confident person now in many ways than I have been in a long time. I became the person I was pushing myself towards when I choose a new pair of glasses, and somewhere along the line, those frames became a touchstone, and physical symbol of a new beginning in my sense of self and the course of my life.

I know that this view was dangerous. In truth I knew that even before today, when they were irrevocably destroyed.

Because of the highly unusual shape of the ear pieces, the 2285s did not fit well under my motorcycle helmet. The bike I ride now does not have a glove box, but it does have saddle bags. There being few good days to ride left I decided to take the bike to work and the Reys went into the saddle bags inside their metal case. The left saddle bag came loose and came to rest on the exhaust pipe which burned through the tough leather and rubber and melted everything inside, including my camera, night visor, and of course my glasses. Their metal frame is largely undamaged to the naked eye, but the paint chips off at the lightest touch. The plastic pieces puddled, and the lenses warped and scorched beyond salvage.

I cried. A piece of myself, destroyed. Even now, hours later I am crying just remembering the sight that met me when I pried opened the case, the heat warming my hand even through heavy winter riding gloves.

I feel lost, and that is Bad. I know now that I had invested too much energy into the J.F. Rey glasses, had allowed an external object, and a fragile one at that, to embody too much of what should be an internal journey.

Worse still, as I mentioned I am truly helpless without a pair of glasses. I only owned two pair, my beloved Rey's and my older pair, the ones I wore through the divorce. I generally think of those as my “riding glasses” since they fit fine under my helmet so I use them when I take out a motorcycle. However, now they are all I have. If the loss of the glasses I had invested so much of my sense of self worth in has been a bad blow, seeing my face in the mirror wearing the glasses I associate with messages of unattractiveness and undesirableness from one of the most important people in my life (at the time) is certainly making the situation more challenging.

Plus there is the tiny detail that the prescription is wrong so my vision is not clear, which is not thrilling either.

Intellectually, I know that they were just a pair of glasses and can be replaced (although the model is discontinued). My mother has expressed a willingness to help me find something else I will enjoy, but I know how costly designer glasses are, calling them an indulgence was not hyperbole.

No matter what happens, even if I find fabulous glasses that say exactly what I want them to, it will not be the same. Those glasses changed my life, and I feel that I owed them a better run and a better end than they got.

I know that I am in a difficult emotional period of my own right now, even without this particular unpleasantness, but I find myself worrying that the strides I have made, image I have built, the person I have become, may have gone up in smoke along with the symbol that to me, had come to represent all those new beginnings.

It's Already Better

2010-10-12T10:13:00.002-05:00

The media has recently focused a great deal of energy on the issue of LGBT youth suicide. To be honest, I am not sure why. That isn't to say that I don't think the problem isn't both enormous and heart-rending, because I do (see: “Our Kids Are Dying”- Barking Shaman 9/29/10). However, according to The Trevor Project, suicide completions are not notably up in our community, the media has just suddenly taken notice.

One response, and a response that I support, is Dan Savage's “It Get's Better Project.” Not a solution, or even a band-aid, his project ideally brings a small bit of hope to folk who don't have any. But that hope is generally tempered with the reality that for kids already in crisis, their situation will remain poor until they can get out of their home and school environments and start a new life. This misses out on an essential point in my opinion:

It's already better. Not for everyone I'll be the first to admit, and I think we're working on that, but things are changing.

I came out as gay (I now identify as “queer”) at fourteen in 1994; I had been attracted to boys my whole life. The following was my “coming out” conversation “Mom, what would you say if I told you I was gay?” To which she replied “Are you?” I said “Yes,” she hugged me, a little misty eyed, and told me she loved me and didn't care who I brought home as long as they were Jewish. When I left my milk religion several years later it was far more tumultuous than when I came out as queer, which, as you can see, wasn't really tumultuous at all.

I am thirty now, and my experiences coming out and growing up in my queer identity have been quite different than those of someone who is forty or fifty.

I recently went on a date with a twenty year old, born ten years to the day after me. When I asked him what it was like being out as gay in rural New Hampshire he replied “Well it was hard in elementary school because I was the only out gay kid so I felt pretty alone, but by middle and high school it was fine.”

At that moment I realized that his experience was, in its way, as different from mine as mine was from the generation before me. He had never known a time when the Plague stalked our community bringing swift and brutal death (I was too young to be an active part of the community, but I certainly remember), he'd always had out queer people on television, and for him it was a given that by the time he'd ready to be married he would have the right to do so (in my opinion a naïve view). I don't think he has ever known anyone who has been disowned by their family for being LGBT.

I am not trying to say for a moment that people in our community, are not suffering. Especially our children, the most vulnerable and hardest for us to reach. But let us not loose sight of how damn far we've come and how steady our progress continues to be.

Every few months the LGBT, or sometimes the mainstream media, runs a story about a parent who beats a young child to try to make him “straighter” or more “manly.” This is tragic and as a culture we need to have a discussion around the issue. But that discussion is incomplete without the other side. Let me tell you about one of my favorite childhood memories:

When I was ten years old, my parents picked me up from religious school one Saturday morning and drove us into Boston. I don't remember the reason they gave, other than that it was ill defined and I didn't care because I had MegaMan on my Gameboy. As we rounded the corner to Tremont St. my mother pointed out the sign for the Wang Theater which had a prominent sign advertising that the touring production of “A Chorus Line” was currently playing there. I was a little slow on the uptake, and my dad had to spell out that that was where we were going, at which point by all accounts I went crazy in a ten-year-old sort of way.

“Chorus Line” was my whole life at ten, I danced around the house to it, sang along to the tape until I wore it out and had to buy another copy, and I'll freely admit, a good bit of it went over my head. Seeing the show was a highlight of my childhood.

For every story of a parent beating their non-conforming child to death, where are the stories of parents surprising their non-conforming kids with third row seats to the show of their dreams?

As we move forward in the discussion around how to make things better for people who are struggling on our community, it is vital that we not loose sight of how much progress we have made, of how much better things already are.

Lessons from a Plastic Bracelet

2010-10-05T14:46:00.001-05:00

My Dark Odyssey Summer Camp attendee bracelet started to crack this afternoon, which is the Universe's way of saying I really have to sit down and write this. And yes, I realize that it is also, it's the Universe's way of saying “Hey stupid, those bracelets really aren't meant to be worn for twenty days!”

I have asked myself repeatedly why I have not taken off my attendee bracelet, and I keep coming back to the idea that D.O. Summer Camp 2010 was an important event for me. Rather than say that I experienced a great deal of personal growth at the event, I'd say a great deal of growth I've been doing crystallized for me there. I guess in some ways that little piece of purple plastic represents a lot of positive change in my life over the last few years, and the last year in particular. This piece of writing will instead take its place, thought and ideas being far more durable than cheap synthetics.

Some thoughts that came out of the last year, and DOSC in particular:

* People care about me. There have been some new mysterious medical issues going on with me that are as yet unresolved. The outpouring of support from people in the community who knew about my fears and concerns was overwhelming. Living in rural NH, and near Boston, a city & community that my partner and I just can't seem to forge a connection with, it is easy to think of myself as being relatively isolated or having a pretty small circle of friends and family of choice. The realization that people even knew who I was was pretty shocking (my classes are popular for what they are, namely specialized, but I'm not a huge draw). I know that some of this is due to my issues with self esteem, but the feeling of welcoming and belonging I got from everyone will help sustain me during the winter isolation in NH.

* My Work is benefiting the community. For a long time, I've known that the kink/BDSM community was one of the places where I felt drawn to do my spiritual Work as a shaman, and to a lesser extent as a magician. This has been a goal of mine that I've been working towards, but at DOSC it really hit home that somewhere along the line, without even realizing it, I had found my way into doing it. At Camp, I know that I provided valuable service to individuals in the community in the form of spiritual counseling, ordeal ritual, healing ritual, and the “Ritual for the Breaking of Energetic Ties” that I ran. It was highly fulfilling Work, and being an accepted and valued part of the community for doing it is not something that every spirit worker or shaman gets to experience.

* I have come into my own in terms of BDSM skills. Within the areas that I specialize in (which are admitted relatively narrow) I am quite good at what I do. Being a good player is a constant learning process and I'm always trying to expand the breadth of my skills as well learn new twists on the skill sets that I already have. That said however, within my comfort zones, I know my shit and it's ok to take pride in that.

* I've become comfortable with (and fond of) the title of “Sir.” This is a pretty new thing to me, I haven't publicly identified with this type of power dynamic up until recently. Interestingly, until now I have not said anything about it, but something in the signals I give must have changed, since at the last few events I've done people have started using “Sir” with me. I'm also rapidly learning that, at least for a spirit worker, the “Sir” hat comes with restrictions and obligations like any other spiritual role.

* People are attracted to me (although I still don't notice flirting 9/10 times). I grew up as the obese-barking-queer-nerd and somewhere inside that's still how I think of myself. To be fair, other than the “obese” part those are all pretty much still true. I am not entirely sure why I am continually surprised that people are attracted to me, although a certain segment of the population whom I am quite attracted to continues not to notice my existence. I am working on getting over the whole being “surprised when someone is interested in me thing” in part because I think it's an unflattering personality trait in myself.

* I can function (and have fun) without my partner. As someone whose been struggling with challenges related to serious health issues for many years, not to mention being shy, this was a pretty big revelation in itself. The fact that I could both make things happen on my own, and ask for help from others when I needed it was quite literally liberating. More importantly, if I can be more independent, that frees him up to enjoy himself more when we are at events together.

Don't Call Me a Unicorn Hunter

2010-10-05T10:21:00.000-05:00

So how do I write this without sounding like a whinny bitch? I spent a good five minutes trying to figure that out before deciding that perhaps I would simply allow a bit of whine to leak out, so I apologize in advance. -WST

The last year has taught me some interesting lessons about life, relationships, polyamoury, and what I'm looking for in my emotional and romantic life.

A year ago my primary relationship, a poly triad that had existed for over eight years, ended when our husband left us. I'm sure I don't have to elaborate that this sucked. Hard. It was a complicated situation, made much more complicated and difficult by the ways in which our spiritual Work and our relationship overlapped, or more accurately were interdependent.

In the time since our husband left, I've come to accept that there was much about our relationship that was not healthy for any of us. Although I miss him terribly, in the past year I've been free to be myself in ways that he never allowed me, and I'm more comfortable in my skin than I ever was when I had to closely modulate my behavior for his comfort. Likewise, while the three of us were together my remaining partner was not permitted to explore his gender identity, and the divorce, painful as it was, freed him to begin the process of transitioning.

We have also greatly expanded our extended poly family. The people who we consider to be “family” have enriched our lives in a way that I never really imagined, and brought me many unexpected joys.

Through that though, there has been an aching hole in our lives, and fear for our future. My partner Fire and I are not cut out to be a primary dyad. We liked being part of a triad, it was the relationship we were looking for from the time we first got together, and we looked for a 3^rd for two and a half years before we found our now-ex-husband, and only then with divine assistance.

Most of our friends and family have told us that another triad is likely just not going to happen. Most unicorn hunters never catch a prey, lest catch two, and a queer guy who's down with cis & trans guys, on the same page with our spiritual and magical Work, poly (because we're not giving up our extended poly family for anything), and very kinky, is a pretty tough beast to find. There are even more considerations, but I'm not going into all of them here, and to be honest, some of those things could be worked around and others not-so-much.

People have been telling us that we should just enjoy our extended family and be a dyad, or each get a boy or sub, and while I in particular would like a submissive, it is not a substitute dynamic, but an additional relationship. We've been accused of simply trying to “replace” our ex-husband, an accusation I find odd, and uniquely poly. When a monogamous person gets divorced and expresses a desire to remarry in the future they are rarely told that they are merely trying to replace their old relationship.

The three of us got together when we were in college, a simpler and more direct time in our lives. A time when we'd never heard the term “polyamoury” and didn't know that there other people out there doing what we were doing. Strangely, I find it much harder to imagine finding a third primary today, steeped in poly, queer, and kink community, than I did then. Maybe because now I know the odds and then I was ignorant.

There is of course another factor in the discussion, and that is my Patron. She had a pretty big hand in making the triad happen in the first place and She has given indication that She would have a hand in doing so again. But that brings matters of faith into the discussion, a hard thing to do when the people you love and trust are telling you that you'll never have the kind of relationship that you desire again.

I am not saying that if we found ourselves in another kind of relationship that was fulfilling, we'd abandon it simply because it was not a primary triad. That would be foolish and self destructive. However, we know that the triangle as a core relationship is a form that works for us, and a dyad does not.

I know that our friends and family are trying to be helpful and supportive when they tell us to forget about having a triad in the future. I know that they are warning us off from chasing unicorns and missing out on other wonderful possibilities that don't quite fit a particular vision. We aren't looking with singular focus, but letting go of the idea of a multi-person primary is a heart wrenching idea.

I don't know what the future will bring. There are days when I have hope, and days when I have faith (not always the same days) and other days when the statistical reality of what we desire brings with it a crushing feeling of loss.

I know that Fire and I were lucky, we got together looking for a third and we found someone and while it ended rough, it wasn't always that way. I hope it isn't asking too much of the gods and of our Lady in particular to have that stroke of Luck a second time.

Our Kids Are Dying

2010-09-29T18:32:00.000-05:00

Our kids are dying.

I don't know any other way to say it. The recent rash of queer youth suicides, or at least the rash of reporting about queer youth suicides, I'm not sure that the actual numbers are so atypical, have left me feeling helpless and angry.

I like direct action, situations where I know what to do, or at least what I'd like to do. Fuck, I like a situation I can look at and say “eh, in a perfect world I'd put a bullet in that guy there and things would be better.” This isn't one of those situations.

Sure the list of hatefully bigoted assholes I wouldn't mind providing with a high-velocity trepanning is pretty long, but it won't save our kids. It might shut up a few gloating fuckers who take to the airwaves and blogs to profit by their deaths, with their ranting about how each suicide “proves” that we're unhealthy, emotionally unstable, not right with their god, or that being queer inherently makes us more likely to die young. But there would still be another dead kid.

I'm one of the biggest supporters of religious freedom you'll ever find. But we live in a melting pot and you don't get to huddle behind religious freedom when it comes to making someones life a living hell because you don't agree with them. As a non-Christian, it's a daily struggle for me to remind myself that these kids blood is on the hands of right wing extremists, not on Jesus'. It would be easy for me to brand all those of the Christian faith as hateful, because the bigots who gloat and profit over our children's deaths use their Christianity as a justification for the poison in their own hearts. But our kids would still be dying, and blind hate can only breed blind hate.

I believe in Dan Savage's “It Get's Better Project.” But I also know that for many out there, it's just not enough. The promise of a bright future can't wash away the shadows of the present for too many of our youth. I don't think that this is a situation that has a legislative solution either. Frankly, there are already federal laws regarding bullying and school safety, but clearly they aren't doing what we need.

I can't have children. From a biological standpoint it's impossible and from a practical and emotional one, I worry that my health issues and the life I live aren't suited to raising a child. Maybe it's because of this that I feel a special connection to the younger generation of queer youth. They are surrogates for the children I'll never have. Every new death is a twisting knife in my chest. I envy Dan for having been able to have some impact on the situation, no matter how small.

Whatever we're doing (or not doing) clearly isn't enough. We're on the verge of being accepted into the armed services, we can get married in a handful of states, our jobs are protected in much of the country, at least if we aren't transgendered, in which case our situation is still far more dire, and the majority of Americans seem to feel like we deserve to be treated like human beings (if not fully equal ones). It's probably safe to say that there's never been a better time to be a queer adult in this country.

But our kids are still dying, and if we don't care about it, no one will.

It's Finally Time

2009-06-07T12:31:00.003-05:00

I created Barking Shaman to write about the odd experiences and perspectives that go hand in hand with the atypical life that I lead. It was supposed to be a place where I could express my insights and views in a way that people could find interesting and enjoyable. Essays have ranged from purely funny (the Nexium commercial you'll never see) to ones that maybe made a difference, such as the one about the Southern Poverty Law Center which actually led to a dialog with the SPLC.

But life is about unintended consequences. If you go back to the beginning of this blog a read the essays in order you'll find that my writing gets steadily better for a time, levels out, and then gets steadily worse. The essays get more and more stilted, and the humor bleeds away like blood from a wound.

Notes From a Barking Shaman has, quite by accident, chronicled my worsening pain, and steadily increased dependence on narcotic pain meds, all through the changes that those meds have made in my personality. There is little humor in my essays now, not because I find the world to be a bleak place due to my situation (although if I did, few would blame me at this point) but because I quite literally don't feel all that much in the way of emotions, a common side effect of regular narcotic usage. More importantly, the cognitive side effects make stringing my thoughts together and writing them down quite difficult right now, and this blog is not at the top of my priority list for writing. Typing itself has also become agonizingly painful, and I typically write via voice dictation, which (for a number of reasons at the moment) is a clumsy and time consuming method.

I am a contributing writer at the spirit worker blog Gods' Mouths, and the ordeal worker blog Blood for the Divine. I don't contribute there as often as I would like for the above reasons, but when I look at my limited resources, they take priority over Barking Shaman.

I am embroiled in a quixotic fight with my insurance company to get approval for a radically different pain management system, a computerized implant. I had a 30 day trial implant last year and it eliminated %80 of my pain, allowing me to go off of my narcotics entirely. However, while the insurance company was happy to pay for the trial procedure, they won't pay for the actually implantation surgery.

If the situation changes, and through this or another means I can go off of my pain drugs, I will resume writing here. Silly as it may sound, I loved writing here and I miss it.

In the meantime, please look through the old essays. With few exceptions they aren't time or date sensitive. I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I enjoyed writing them.

Wintersong Tashlin
June, 7 2009
New Hampshire
New Hampshire

New GM Post

2009-04-21T22:47:00.001-05:00

Still fucking sick, but starting to get better. I've got a new post up at Gods' Mouths, you can find it here.

End of the Beginning up at Gods' Mouths

2009-04-01T23:12:00.001-05:00

I do have some writing in the works for BarkingShaman but my throat is still giving me trouble which reduces the amount of writing I can do since I've had to switch to voice-recognition.

However, I do have a new short essay up at Gods' Mouths.

interesting filler article

2009-03-25T12:03:00.003-05:00

I've been sick for a while which is why there haven't been any new BS or GM articles for a few weeks. Keep an eye out for a new BarkingShaman essay on how, thanks to my supportive family, I can't relate to over %50 of the GLBT books at Barnes and Noble. Also in the next week or so we'll have the next installment of "Marking a Journey in Flesh" over at Gods' Mouths. Speaking of Gods' Mouths, there's a brand new advice colum for people with spirit work questions over there and I'm one of the responders.

In the meantime, I thought this article from the Chicago Tribune was quite interesting.

Marking a Journey in Flesh Part II up at Gods' Mouths

2009-03-09T17:04:00.001-05:00

You can find Part II of my four part series Marking a Journey in Flesh here.

Listening in the Dark

2009-03-04T14:38:00.002-05:00

This is an essay of mine republished from God's Mouths, a blog I write for aimed at the spirit work community.

Nearly every night for over a year I have found myself sitting at my computer in the hours after midnight, scouring the World Wide Web, looking for something. I have to confess, I don't really know what it is I'm looking for. I scan article after article from various news sources trying to build a picture in my mind of what is happening to our world.

Nearly any time you get together a gathering of spirit workers you will find that there is a big elephant in the room that doesn't get talked about. More of us then I can count have been told by our respective gods to "Get really. Get ready faster, you need to be prepared in time. Something's coming." Pressed for details, the gods get reticent. Many of us have been told "we can't tell you what is coming; things are still too much in the air for even us to know for sure."

For some of us this is a bigger deal than for others. My Lady is a deity of productive destruction. I am a diviner, who also has a strong pre-cognitive gift. That combination means that this question is always in the back of my mind, like a song you can't quite remember, but you still have stuck in your head.

The Lady and Var, her not -quite -servant, have told us several things that would happen over the course of the years. I am ashamed to say that we ignored many of her predictions because so many people were telling us that they were simply wrong. Per Var's instructions for instance, we had converted much of our savings into silver. My relatives, who are commodities traders, finally convinced us that this was foolish and that hard metal would never increase in value and in fact could only go down. Today the price of silver is four times what it was then. The spectacular collapse of the stock market was also something we were informed of ahead of time, but again we ignored what they had to say because people who were considered to be greater experts were assuring us that it couldn't happen. We also ignored the Lady's ever increasing insistence that we learn how to use and own firearms, an issue that gained immediacy when a neighbour started shooting at us.

While the Lady can't or won't tell us exactly what is coming down the line, there have been specific times where she has said "Look at this thing, this is a piece of the puzzle." Changes in historic weather patterns, Global warming, the world's financial crisis, political instability in the former USSR, these are a few things that I've been told are pieces of that puzzle. I have many others, but far too few to know what the picture looks like.

And this is how I end up sitting here at my desk at four in the morning, scanning the immensity of the Internet and trying to feel for shifting patterns in the wyrd. MRSA infections are on the rise among children, and it's clear even through the technical jargon, that doctors are terrified of what's going to happen once the last of their antibiotics stop working. Is this relevant? Does this matter? Several former Soviet nations have decided to form a unified military. Puzzle piece, or not? How about China landing a lunar probe?

There are times when I feel like we as a people are standing in a tunnel. We know there's a train coming because we've been told, and those of us with really good hearing have heard its rumble for some time. But now we are starting to see the glimmer of its headlight, and I worry that by the time we can see the body of the train itself it'll be too late to jump out of the way for any of us.

Cheating on BS

2009-03-01T00:51:00.002-05:00

I've got a new essay up at Gods' Mouths a blog/ezine by spirit workers written for other spirit workers. It's part I in my four part series Marking A Journey In Flesh.

Find it here.

Fucking Scary

2009-01-28T13:14:00.001-05:00

"Extreme" Porn Becomes Illegal in the UK

Perks

2009-01-28T13:10:00.001-05:00

I asked the (really) cute guy who works at the local metaphysical shop out on a date the other evening. This was a bit out of character as I have never in my life asked someone out on a date. I've told friends (and let's be honest, acquaintances too) I was interested in playing, but not actually asked a relative stranger out. Still, he'd been real flirtatious and neither Fire nor I had any doubts about his sexual orientation (stereotyping yes, but we were still right).

Not that I had what you'd call high hopes. To be honest, I am pushing thirty and not in the shape I was in before my injury and the eight years of reduced activity that followed it. I think I do pretty well with what I've got, but pretty well isn't a lot if you're asking a twenty year old model out (seriously, modeling is his other job).

He said "no" of course. He is seeing someone (20yr old model, I wasn't shocked to find him taken) and not only are they not poly, he'd never heard of it, which almost certainly means us dating would have been a horrible idea. Introducing a poly-virgin to the idea of being in a secondary relationship seems challenging in a not-so-good way. I absolutely wouldn't attempt it in someone already involved with someone else.

What was interesting was that although I was real nervous about how to ask him without coming across as an ass, which I think I managed, I wasn't too worried about being turned down. I used to be terrified about what would happen if I asked someone out and they said "no." I used to think it would fuck me up, and maybe it would have. Fire certainly thinks that I've changed and grown.

Those of you who are involved in the spirit work side of things know that in many ways being a spirit worker sucks serious ass. I've had a number of people recently comment that it sucks big time and there ain't a lot of perks. It's true. I for one wouldn't mind if serving my Boss came with free home heating oil and HD Cable.

But I know the person that I was, I know the person that I am now, and I know the path that led from A to B. I know that most people have no problem asking for dates and the like without serving the gods on a personal basis. But without the Work, I don't know if I ever would have gotten to that point. My physical body is a map of my journey, in tattooing, branding, and scaring primarily. Each representing an important event along the way. I can point to a great many ways in which the Work has changed my mental, emotional and spiritual being as well. To be honest, some of those changes I have ambivalence about.

However, if this path has led me to a place where I can do something I (and others) never imagined I'd be able to do, like ask someone out for a date and be alright when I'm rejected, well I'll guess I can manage to provide the cable tv on my own.

Making an Ass Out of You and Umption

2009-01-21T01:09:00.002-05:00

Our background and upbringing inevitably leaves us with blind-spots in our interactions with other people. I firmly believe that one of the challenges and requirements of adult life is learning to move beyond the assumption that other peoples' understanding of the world will mirror our own. A great example of where this process began for many of my peers growing up was summer camp. Namely the horrific realization that in different parts of the United States carbonated high-fructose corn syrup bases drinks were referred to in different ways (growing up in the northeast it was "soda").

Of course that example immediately paints a picture of where I was coming from, at least in my pre-adolescence. While the norm for my fellow upper-middle class peers, spending the summer at camp is certainly not the standard summer for most children in this country.

My own experience as a young adult was rather the reverse of the aforementioned process however. Rather than have my worldview stretched bit by bit as I aged and prepared to leave home, I was often the one doing the stretching. The perfect storm of the onset of severe Tourette Syndrome (as opposed to the minor symptoms I'd likely had for years prior) and my coming out as queer conspired to both brutally shred my ideas of where my life was going and expose me to the worlds of people I would never had encountered otherwise.

Because of the severity of the Tourette symptoms there was never any real chance that I would attend public high school (for the record my family didn't "agitate" for an alternative placement, my home district rightly made the decision on their own). Both of the alternative high schools I attended were good experiences and I believe that with one exception I received an excellent education. As you might imagine however, none of us at my high school were "typical."

I had three social groups in my high school years. The first was my small high school, located an hour's commute from home, which I was driven to and from each day by a district provided car. The second was the young adult GLBT youth support and social group that met once a week in my home town. Until I was old enough to drive myself, my parents dropped me off every Wednesday, even if it meant rearranging their own schedules to do so. The third group was my local synagogue's youth group, which was made up of kids I'd grown up with since I was in first grade.

One of these things is not like the others. Perhaps foreshadowing my future spiritual work, I didn't hide any of who I was, with the exception that I didn't tell the synagogue youth group that I was already identifying as pagan. I was open about my sexuality from the time I came out (at 13) and when people talked about what was going on in school I shared along with them. Once you are at the point of involuntarily screaming out graphic obscenities, further opening up isn't all that challenging. I distinctly remember once answering someone in the temple youth group's funny story about something that happened in class with a humorous story from my school about a friend of mine's ongoing recovery from heroin addiction (really it was pretty funny). I also thought nothing of going to a temple costume fund raiser in drag, where it should be noted that, as with the Tourette, I was perfectly accepted. The rabbi (a woman) gave me lipstick pointers.

As I mentioned, I was often a catalyst for expanding my peers' sense of the world. I distinctly remember an argument with a childhood friend about prostitution that sums it up. At 17 he was convinced that prostitution was an urban legend and that even if maybe it did happen sometimes it certainly didn't happen in the city we grew up in. I on the other hand knew guys who had turned tricks after being kicked out of home for being gay. I also knew more than one fellow student in high school who was the victim of domestic or sexual abuse, also things he believed to be urban legends.

All this is on my mind recently because I recently found out that while all this was happening I was developing at least one assumption of how the world worked that until recently I had not been disabused of. Last week I went in for my twice yearly HIV test (clear) and had my eyes opened.

If you were involved in gay culture in the mid 1990's the thing you know better than anything else is what HIV is, how it's spread (and not spread), and that it kills you. By the early 90's there were treatments that kept it from killing us as quickly and there was the dawning understanding that it was possible to live with HIV not just die from it, but it seemed like everyone realized that it wasn't something to mess around with. My sexual partners over the years have largely backed up this perspective.

As I came into my late 20's and became involved in the Kink/BDSM/Poly scene, especially as a needle top, I found that with some exceptions, most people seemed to take blood safety just as importantly as I'd been taught back in the GLBT youth group.

My recent newsflash was that GLBT people who grew up in the 80's and 90's and kinky people aren't necessarily representative of mainstream views. I know, no shit. I had just assumed that when it comes to HIV, everyone was on the same page and it isn't true. As I waited for my test results (it was the rapid oral HIV test) I had a great chat with the director of the local AIDS services organization and one of the outreach people.

Some of their stories chilled me. College students believing that their oral contraceptives protected them from HIV and other STIs was bad. Worse was a recently infected person who was worried that casual touch could infect people that they came into contact with. Call me naive but I thought that as a country we had moved passed touching as an HIV vector before Clinton took office.

And I guess that's the point I have been driving at. I am naive. I am much more comfortable on the outskirts of society than the mainstream and I think that there is just as much of a tendency towards an attitude of superiority among those on the edges as those in the center. I had believed that HIV awareness and prevention was a universal priority because it was such an important one in my world. I imagine it is much the way many conservatives feel when faced with people who are happy being queer and don't feel the need of a "cure."

Our world as it is now has really only been around since the middle of the 19th century. That's when steam locomotives made inter-regional travel feasible. Before that it was a lot harder for people who use the term "soda" and those who call it "pop" to mingle. In the span of human history that's not a whole lot of time. It is not longer enough to passively allow our experiences of the world to develop. We need to make a conscious effort to expand our own concept of reality, even, or especially when it's hard to do.

That all said, for fuck's sake let's get rid of abstinence-only sex ed and teach kids how to avoid the gods-damned plague.

Happenings

2009-01-18T17:35:00.002-05:00

A great deal has been going on since I last posted an essay here. I do comment about every other day on my livejournal, but almost all posts are restricted to my friends list. The difference between my livejournal and BarkingShaman is that I tend to post somewhat meaningful essays here, as opposed to the "here's what's happening in my life" posts that livejournal gets.

However, there are a few things I would like to talk about today.

First off, my and Galina Krasscova's article on firearms and pagan spirituality did finally run in NewWitch magazine. They changed the title sadly (from my "Boomsticks and Broomsticks") but the formatting is beautiful. I know that there is some real fear that the article will generate angry letters and complaints to the editors, but I feel strongly in the subject matter, and I know that there are many other pagans who do too.

There have been some major changes in my life. I had a trial run of an occipital neuromodulator installed in the back of my head (so yes, I spent five weeks with wires running out of the back of my head to a control box I had to carry/wear at all times). The results were incredible. I experienced about an %80 reduction in my pain levels and could function in ways that I had believed gone forever. Then, although happy to approve the trial to see if I was a canidate for implant surgery, the insurance company rejected me for implant surgery on the grounds that they no longer were interested in paying for the implant for any patients. It's one of the reasons it's been so long since I posted here. I sort of lost interest in living for a while after the rejection. We intend to fight it with the insurance commisioner for New Hampshire, but I'm just out of energy.

My home situation is not much better. Summer has decided that while he can't really leave, because the Boss Lady would seriously fuck him up, he will end/suspend his and my relationship. He's recently been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and his sexual identity shifts with his place in his bipolar cycle. He desperately wants to be heterosexual, and some times he can feel that way and others times he can't.

Since my Prop-8 posting I have had little to say about the current state of the world (since the neuromodulator came out I haven't been getting out much) that other bloggers and pundits aren't saying. Everyone sugested writing about my experiences with the neuromodulator in detail, but it is far too painful.

But now I've got some new things to say. Look for a new post before this Wednsday (1/21/09), and no, as of now I have no intention whatsoever to write about the inagural.

As an aside, I will be teaching two classes at Dark Odysey WinterFire, one magical class and one sexual techniques class.

My Not-Quite Outsider's Perspective on Prop. 8

2008-11-13T01:06:00.003-05:00

I have found my feelings about the recent passage of Proposition 8 in California complex. Note carefully that I have not said "conflicted" because I am not. But they are complex. My relationship is one of the boogy men the right uses against marriage equality. Even more so though, the gay movement falls all over itself to make it clear that relationships like mine aren't any more welcome in the gay community (note the distinction between the movement and the community) than in the bible belt.

I was living in Massachusetts during the fight for same-sex marriage there and I remember being told by many of my gay friends and acquaintances that I owed it to my brethren to go back into the closet about my family because our existence sent the wrong message. The "right" message of course, and by "right" I mean the one on the press releases is that gay people are just like straight ones. They want to meet the right man or woman, settle down, raise a family. This is bullshit. Well the second part is.

I'll grant that gays are much like straights. However, I reject the notion that all straight people want the wife/kids/minivan scenario. The difference between queer folk and straight folk has been that in rejecting society's expectations that we be heterosexual we've also gained the freedom to reject other of society's expectations for who we should be, from the nature of our relationships to defying gender role expectations and a host of other individual choices (my grandfather wanted me to consider business school, I wonder if I'd have been so comfortable disappointing him if my queerness had paved Disappointment Road already).

This narrowing of what it means to be queer has been by no means limited to poly folk. Drag queens, flamers, butch dykes and other "stereotypical" queers have found the movement shrink out from under them under the banner of gaining wider societal acceptance.

I've seen the same thing happen in the Tourette Syndrome world. Just as the gay community wants the rest of the world to know that being gay doesn't mean that you swish your hips when you walk, there is a constant message from the TS world that having Tourette doesn't mean that you have coprolalia (swearing tics). Just as gays I knew told me that I shouldn't be open about Fire, Summer and my life, I recently spoke to the mother of a child with TS who stopped going to parent support group meetings because the other parents were so bothered by the fact that her child had coprolalia. She said to me (paraphrasing) "the Tourette Association spends so much time telling everyone, especially parents, that coprolalia is so rare, and that it's not the defining feature of the condition that I feel like there is no support for me or my son. I feel like they'd rather we just keep our mouths shut!"

When I was in high school a lot of the literature for gay youth emphasized that gay kids were "ordinary" kids. That most of them didn't swish or lisp or like musical theater. The problem was that if a kid did express themselves in that way (and I was literally swishing when I was five, although I later forced myself not to) they can be left feeling like they don't even belong with the gays. I don't know if that has changed much or not in the time since, although I will applaud Alex Sanchez's Rainbow Boys young adult series for featuring a variety of kinds of gay kids.

Don't even get me started on the way that the gay and lesbian movement and to a lesser extent the gay and lesbian community threw transgendered people under the bus during last year's fight for federal anti-discrimination protection. I'll get to that at some point in the future. When I can think about it without wanting to put my fist through my computer screen. Be prepared to wait.

All of this said however, Prop 8 hurt. Leaving aside for a moment all the individuals wounded personally by it's passing, Proposition 8 sends a terrible message. It says that the people of one of the most liberal states in the land don't believe in equal rights for queers. Worst of all, it steals away hope from people all over. When push comes to shove, California is still perceived as one of the better places is this country to be gay. If California can overrule same-sex marriage why should anyone fight for the right to live their lives in a way that %51 of people might not like.

Same-sex marriage rights can never be my victory. But the passage of Prop. 8 and the other anti-gay ballot measures on Nov. 4th certainly felt like my defeat.

The Irrelevant Pear

2008-10-11T09:47:00.002-05:00

It is very interesting to me what makes (or doesn't make) people squeamish. For lack of anything better on television this evening I found myself watching “Machines of Malice- Going Medieval” on the Discovery Channel. I don't think it takes a great leap to figure out that the program dealt with the subject of torture devices. They were dealing with the common and mediapathic ones such as finger and skull crushers, the rack, and the pear of anguish. For each device an engineer tested a reproduction to demonstrate its effectiveness (or lack thereof), often with a neurobiologist to explain what physiologically results it would have (frankly I found her redundant in the case of the skull crusher).

Interestingly, the pear of anguish is featured in almost every History/Discovery Channel documentary on torture devices even though there is skepticism as to whether it had every actually been used (this particular show concluded that it probably couldn't have been). Despite this, it is the pear of anguish and the Discovery Channel's handling of its segment that sparked this post.

The pear of anguish, aside from having a nifty name, is a torture device that you may have seen under a more mundane nomenclature. In many ways it is remarkable similar to a modern speculum, although in some ways it is more like an anal rather than vaginal one. The device consists of several arms that fit together to form a narrow elongated form. When a screw at the back is turned the arms spread apart to form a conical shape. Depending on the victim's supposed crime the device could be placed in a variety of orifices.

Having already demonstrated how the finger crusher would work on an uncooked chicken bone (“you can seen how the blood and marrow are forced out as the bone breaks, if this was a finger it would be rendered completely useless”) this point is where the Discovery Channel shows its frankly bizarre squeamish point.

They first explain that the pear of anguish would be used on blasphemers by inserting it into the mouth and expanding it until the jaw dislocated or broke. They have a CGI animated graphic to explain this for people who truly lack any imagination at all. As with the other devices both before and after on the show the narrator is a bit more enthusiastic than is strictly necessary.

Then homosexuality, which one of the people on the show (perhaps an anthropologist, I don't remember) awkwardly explains “was looked on really badly back then.” You probably don't need me to tell you that there is no CGI animation for how the pear was used on suspected queers. Here though is the phrase that inspired this whole post: they go on to explain that “for the crime of homosexuality, the pear of anguish was inserted into the relevant orifice and then expanded.” That's it, homosexuality portion over.

Lastly we have adulterers who they explain in almost too graphic detail (still no CGI) would have the pear inserted vaginally (and yes they use the word “vagina”) and expanded “until the delicate mucosa tissue passes its breaking point and tears apart.”

This is the part that is really bizarre to me. The Discovery Channel feels comfortable saying “vagina” on this program and describing in somewhat horrific detail how the pear of anguish would destroy one, but can't use the term “anus” or “rectum?”

This could be a regulator issue. Perhaps “anus” and “rectum” score higher on the questionable content scale that determines a show's rating than “vagina” does. I can't see why this would be, but I don't find it all that implausible.

That said, I found the phrase “the relevant orifice” to be very dismissive. As in fact was the entire mention of torturing gays for being gay. This may not be reflective of a bias against gays. In fact if I had to guess I'd imagine that there is more than one person on the production crew whose “relevant orifice” would have been endangered back when the pear of anguish was supposedly used.

Perhaps what is more interesting than the use of the term “relevant orifice” is that there was little attempt to dismiss the use of the pear on adulterers or blasphemers. It's as if by being dismissive the producers of the show are trying to reassure us that they don't endorse the historic view of homosexuality as a crime. Blasphemy and adultery however, are still fair game.

Couldn't Hurt (2)

2008-10-10T13:31:00.001-05:00

Summer thought I should post this over here too. It's a few days old now. (from my Livejournal)

Summer and I watched the debates last night. Since we don't really have sex anymore (although with him coming off of his meds that mights be subject to change, who knows) watching all the debates has been about the most intimate thing we've done; if you don't count the occasional awkward attempt at a hand job. The problem I found is that regardless of the questions, the answers in last night's debate were all things we'd heard before. If what many of the pundits say is true (and I fear that it is) and the American people care more about who a candidate is that what their experiences or policies are (and how else to you explain all the people who like Sarah Palin) then I think that the debates questions might as well reflect this.

As I awoke from my Benadryl/Vicodin/Ambien influenced sleep this leaped into my mind:

What we need is to have a circus clown make each canidate the balloon animal that they feel best reflects them and then have them justify their decision to the American people while holding said ballon animal.

Yes it would lower the level of political discourse, but then, having watched last night's debate I don't think lowering the level of discourse is something we need to be worrying about.

(BTW in my dream Obama choose Dorie, the forgetful fish from Finding Nemo, and McCain choose a squid. Before they could explain thier choices, or for that matter why they both choose sea animals, I woke up)

Looking Back, Into the Future

2008-09-28T12:46:00.002-05:00

Yesterday Fire and Summer gave me a wonderful surprise. Probably my favorite musical in the world (it's got some competition, I am a fag after all) was playing in Boson, about 90 min from our house. So yesterday we drove down to Boson, had lunch, and then went to a matinee showing of A Chorus Line at the beautifully restored Boston Opera House.

Now, I mentioned that this is probably my favorite musical, but it is also the musical that I've interested in the longest. I first saw A Chorus Line at age ten when after much begging and wheedling, my parents surprised me in a similar (although more spectacular) way. I should note that I'd been interested in seeing the show since I was probably eight (I first heard the soundtrack around age five). Looking back as an adult I know that some of the more overt adult content went over my head, although most did not ("adult content" makes up most of the show, it's not aimed at kids... at all).

You might ask yourself "what kind of ten year old desperately wants to see A Chorus Line?" In my case looking back I can say "a sexually precocious queer one." Perhaps it was my (attempted) naughty rendition of "dance ten, looks three," (which most people know as the tits and ass song) when my age was still measured in single digits, or my enthusiastic singing along with "adolescence," but my fondness for A Chorus Line was almost certainly one reason why my mother was less-than-shocked when I came out of the closet at thirteen.

I've been re-examining the above question because I found myself asking it yesterday. As we were finding our seats we passed two parents with a boy who couldn't have been much more than ten. See him siting there in his nice shirt and sport jacket (my parents always made me get totally dressed up for theater) waiting for the show to start was like looking backwards in time. I pointed him out to Fire and we agreed that either his folks had dragged him there, or he was a budding theater fag.

I realize that I'm indulging in stereotypes here. That said, go read the synopsis of A Chorus Line if you are unfamiliar with it and find me a young boy who really wants to see it.

As we were leaving the theater, we again passed the family with the boy in question. He had a smile on his face like a Little League baseball player whose team just won the finals. If he's lucky, he's got parents like mine (and being at A Chorus Line would seem to indicate that he does) and his story will be a whole lot easier than some of the ones featured in the show we'd all just finished watching. But stereotyping or not, I'd be willing to lay money that the only close female companionship in his future are going to be fag-hags.

Of course, seeing myself back then I would have said the same thing and here I am so who knows? Whether women, men or both (I'm betting men or both) lie in his future, we were definitely looking at a young queer.

The vast gulf between the life and future that a ten year old queer-to-be can look forward to today and what he would have had to look forward to when the show was written is so immense that I realized that soon my beloved Chorus Line will be dated enough to only make sense as a period piece. And while that makes me feel old, and sad that people won't get key elements of this wonderful show, it also is a spectacular indication of the progress GLBT people have made between the show's creation in 1975 and today.

Over to the Dark Side

2008-09-19T22:22:00.003-05:00

So after much deliberation and soul searching I've gone over to the dark side. As a compliment to BarkingShaman I've also started a livejournal under Wintertash. I've always thought that it was important that I not be posting essays primarily related to my personal life here on BS and also that I make a serious effort to hold to as high a writing standard as I my situation (and health) might allow at any given moment.

My primary reason for having the LJ will be to keep in better touch with my geographically distributed friends and family of choice. For this reason most posts will be restricted to my friends-list, so it will likely seem pretty empty.

My hope is to maintain a much higher standard of quality here at BS. Most of my essays here are heavily re-read, edited and reviewed (not as much of late I'm ashamed to admit) before being posted. The livejournal is not likely have much of that at all.

While there is certainly no reason for someone to feel any need to read both, I wanted to make folks aware of the option as well as make it clear that the content between them will greatly vary. While Wintersong Tashlin is the Barking-Shaman, wintertash the LJ is definitely not BarkingShaman the blog.

A (local) hero question

2008-09-09T01:01:00.003-05:00

As people who know me or have read BarkingShaman can probably guess, reading is a big part of my life. In addition to mid-grade SciFi and fantasy books (although very little fantasy for some time) I have developed a fondness for a specific kind of non-fiction in the past several years.

I enjoy reading books in which people persevere against great odds. Military non-fiction is a good source for this sort of thing as it often contains accounts of everyday people faced with unspeakable horror and terror and yet, usually through training, persevering. In my mind The Ship That Would Not Die and Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors should be considered classics of this genre.

Exploration of new frontiers is another source of these stories. The various books (and one excellent BBC miniseries) about Shackelton's failed Imperial Trans-Antartic Expedtion relate a tale that Homer could have written.

A very different kind of new frontier is ventured into in the book that I just finished reading about a man blind since age 3 who braves experimental surgery to regain his sight decades later only to find that his brain has lost the ability to process visual data.

It is interesting for me to look at how I relate to the figures in these various books. I find myself wondering, would I be able to ignore my own injuries and push away the remains of my closest friends in order to man an AA gun under Kamikaze bombardment, or would I freeze up? How would I have fared in Shackelton's party marooned on the pack ice for years? Faced with the chance of sight, would I choose to continue my happy life or at great physical and psychological take the chance that I might venture into the sighted world.

The inevitable (to me at least) follow up to these questions is, how would these people who I admire find me? What would they think of my admiration?

This is more than just a hypothetical question. There is an excellent book, Until the See Shall Free Them about the sinking of the bulk hauler SS Marine Electric. In addition to surviving in frigid waters aboard an overturned lifeboat, her chief mate, Bob Cusick broke the longstanding code of silence regarding the safety standards among the aging ships of the U.S. Merchant Marine. The changes instituted in part as a result of his testimony have likely saved countless lives.

Weirdly, this is where my this question comes almost literally home. Bob Cusick, unbeknown to me when I happened to mention the book to the teller at the bank, retired to my current town. In fact, his daughter walks my dog when she stays at the kennel and we almost rented a house across the street from him. The teller at the bank suggested that I drop a note for him there suggesting that we get together sometime.

I'll never get a chance to talk to Sir Ernest, or Ret. Admir. F. Julian Becton or the majority of the other names found in the pages of my significant collection. At least not unless I go find them among the underworlds and one lesson that I think most spirit workers get pretty fast is that you do not pester the dead.

The odds are better than even that if I wanted to, I could arrange to meet Mr. Cusick. The problem is that I don't know if I want him to meet me. I'm too afraid that I'd be found wanting by a man who I admire.

I've asked myself what my motivations are in wanting to meet him and the primary reason is that I want him to know that his story meant something to me, even though I'm not a merchant mariner. I've considered writing him a letter, could serve the same purpose, but I don't know what I'd end up saying.

Now Matter How You Look At It

2008-09-02T12:49:00.001-05:00

This is just too fucking far. I haven't really blogged about the overuse of SWAT teams and no-knock raids. Mostly because A) other people are doing it better than I would, especially Reason Magazine and B) well, go look at the link and tell me if you'd feel comfortable criticizing someone riding around in that.

Random Internet Fluff

2008-08-27T21:10:00.002-05:00

It's not all that often that I see something on the great series of tubes (quick nod there to Ted Stevens in honor of his primary win despite being under indictment & a nutjob) we call the internet that makes me laugh out loud. Since this did, I thought I might share it with you.

If you can't see the embeded video you can view it here.

2 down, 2.25 left to go

2008-08-24T00:30:00.002-05:00

Well I've just about completed the second of my five events for this crazy stretch. I only presented one class at SWIG but it was well attended and it seemed that the people who came got something out of it. It was the first time I had taught this particular class, "Walking Down Someone Else's Road: Working Outside of Your Pantheon and Comfort Zone," and I was delighted with how smoothly it ran.

I am always a bit nervous debuting a brand new class and that goes double for classes with a strong discussion component. If a group is engaged it can be so much more enjoyable for everyone than just me talking at a group of people for 90min. If they aren't though, there's the risk of running out of stuff to say before I've used up even half of that allotted time.

I now have a brief breather before things heat back up. In the interest of my preserving my health I've made the difficult choice not to attend the entirety of the upcoming Dark Moon Rising at Asphodel, but instead only come out for the day I'm scheduled to teach. I'll be offering my genitorture class "Mean Things to do to Guys' Bits," which was well received when I debuted it at Dark Odyssey Spring Fire '08.

Following DMR I'll be heading down to Maryland for Dark Odyssey Summer Camp (link NFSW) where I'll be teaching two introductory classes on energy play and sex magic, as well as my popular "Playing With an Intact Dick" class, and a workshop on outdoor sexual activity as a tool for building a relationship with the Land and its spirits.

I really need the breather before then. Summer just told me that I had an angry phone message from my mother. Somehow I managed to fuck up my step-dad's birthday (again). As you may know I just switched over to an iTouch for my PDA needs and a bunch of stuff got lost in the change over including the date for his birthday. I've been out the door first thing everyday and back after midnight so I won't even have a chance to pick up a belated card until Monday.

The moment DO Summer Camp is over I head back here for an invite-only gathering at which I'll be horsing Odin for a private ritual. Fun. Then it'll be back to my other jobs and hopefully to finishing the Bower Project that has been consuming the last year of my (mundane) professional life.

Brief FW '08 thoughts

2008-08-18T11:33:00.005-05:00

It's noon and I'm getting ready to head out for my trek back up to New Hampshire but I thought I'd take a moment to get down some initial thoughts from my trip to New Jersey for Floating World '08.

First off, I now know that I can teach classes that end at midnight even after a full day and have people get good stuff out of them, but it still wouldn't be my first choice.

wylddelirium is rocking fun to needle top with.

Sometimes the really important things that I have to say/do don't happen during class.

The new divination system is working well (I stayed the night before at my sister's house and gave a reading/demo).

I miss having a presenter badge (I'm pouting)

Not only do other people like watching someone bleed as much as I do, it can be more fun in a group.

950 people can be a smaller number than you'd think.

There is a sense of belonging that comes from really hurting someone in public and realizing that the people around you are not only cool with the fact that you're doing it, but also that you get off on it.

Things are mighty crazy right now. I'm leaving from here and in just a couple of days I'm heading out again for SWIG where I'll also be presenting. I'll try to get some more posting done but I expect it to be spotty and brief.

Reason Magazine on what a party game can teach us about warrentless surveillance

2008-08-10T17:07:00.002-05:00

http://www.reason.com/blog/show/127984.html

And now the other side...

2008-07-28T15:40:00.002-05:00

Since A Fire in the Head mentioned it, I thought I would take a moment to explain what is going on with my iTouch. In the description of BarkingShaman it says among other things that I am a small business owner, a subject and perspective that I don't write from or about very often. My perspective as both a consumer and a business owner shapes my experiences with the iTouch.

I know that the last thing the interwebs need is another damn iPhone review so I'll keep the review thing short and sweet: the iTouch is a spectacular piece of technology. Not only is it both useful and entertaining, but as a multi-touch interface (if only a 2-point) it is a glimpse into where computing may be going (for a more dramatic example see this post). What complaints I may or may not have about the iTouch itself are not worth mentioning here, I'm unlikely to say anything new.

My problems, such as they are, have much less to do with the hardware or software of the iTouch itself, but rather with the institutional mindset Apple seems to have taking during its development.

Let me explain why I bought the thing in the first place. When I leave the house in the morning this is the list of things I need to remember to bring:

Wallet
Keys
Cell Phone
Heckler & Koch P2000 and its holster
Pocket Knife
iPod
Pill Case
Pocket Sized Digital Camera when possible
Restoration Device (depending on what I'll be doing during the day)

(I also carry a back-up gun and back-up knife a lot of the time)

This list pushes me to the very edge of what I can plausibly carry and wear on my person. I don't carry a purse or “man-bag” because steady pressure on my neck or shoulder would be too painful to be practical. Already having to carry this many things doesn't leave me mental attention or physical space for the PDA that I need to have as well. This is why I bought the iTouch.

Since I am already carrying an iPod, I figured I could switch to an iTouch and have a combination PDA and iPod, although I'll grant that it means doing so in a larger package. I also considered getting a Blackberry and having a combination cell phone/PDA but I didn't like the interface at all. My plan would have worked perfectly but for one fact:

I am a Windows user. This is a fact that I am tired of apologizing for, whether to Mac users or Linux users. My business uses powerful CAD software that is not available for the Mac. In fact, I know of no industry standard CAD software that runs on a Mac platform. And I do not have the time or know-how to run Linux.

Since the business has to have Windows, I also have a cheap ($600) HP laptop that I use for my personal computing. This is where my iTouch problems started.

Apple doesn't really plan well for the possibility of having Windows users who buy their products. The place where this is most problematic for me is that the iTouch calendar can only sync to Outlook or iCal (the mac calendar program) and there are major problems with Outlook syncing. This is weird since it will sync to my Google contact list, just not my Google calendar. My calls to Apple support to try to find out if support for Google Calendar or Windows Calendar (the vista calendar program) would be forthcoming was met largely with the auditory equivalent of blank stares. I was also told by several support personnel (I talked to a number of them) that I should just use iCal, which is not available for Windows computers. Overall, I'd say that each support person (even the one who was able to helpfully tell me that Apple had no intention at all of adding support for anything other than Outlook) was puzzled by the fact that I didn't own an Apple computer. Non were any of them aware that new PC's shipped with Vista rather than XP.

This represents a level of institutional myopia that cannot be healthy for a business. I think that there is also an unhealthy self-confidence out of keeping with the fragile hold that anyone can hold on a market segment today. The idea that I'll eventually break down and pay $100 for a Vista version of a product so crappy that Windows replaced it for their new OS just so I can use my iTouch's calendar doesn't seem strange to Apple. They seem to think that I'd do that and more for the privilege of using their product. Or even worse, perhaps Apple believes that if they make great products which interface poorly with PC's more people will set their PC's aside and buy Apple computers.

This is stupid. Apple should be doing everything in their power to make me happy, including having their peripheral devices like the iTouch work perfectly no matter what OS I use. This way when it's time for my next computer purchase I think of them. Ditto with their tech support. If you make a product that is PC compatible you need to be up to speed on how it interacts with said PCs if you want customers to feel that you care about them and are knowledgeable, key factors in the decision to change brands.

I need a PDA combination right now. If I could wait six to nine months I'll bet someone would have something that would fill my needs as well as the iTouch does (I unfortunately thought the Samsung Instinct was a piece of shit). Somehow I doubt H&K will be releasing an combo PDA/9mm semi-auto.

The sad thing is that by itself the iTouch really is amazing. But when I connect it to my computer and try to use iTunes to do things like update my contacts I am very aware that I'm using a music player for something it was never really intended to do. I wonder it that isn't a good metaphor for where Apple's going

2008-07-25T19:23:00.002-05:00

A Fire In The Head posted an very interesting article about how the green factor of the new iPhone 3G has been almost completely overlooked, especially by Apple itself.

Names and Styles Change, the Anger Stays the Same

2008-07-24T12:16:00.003-05:00

Reason Magazine just posted an interesting peice on their blog about proposed legislation in Russia that would ban goth and emo style dress in public schools and government buildings. They also linked to an older piece about anti-emo "hunts" that have happened in Mexico wherein hundreds of teenagers chase down emo kids and beat the crap out of them.

It all reminded me of a conversation that Fire and I had a few weeks ago about the difference between when we were goth kids (on the outside, I'd say in many ways we still are on the inside) and what the goth/emo thing has kind of turned into. One good way to sum it up it seems is this:

Emo kids get beat up a lot, a lot of people hate them for reasons I don't understand. Even in the U.S. it seems that being an emo kid ain't the safest thing to do.

A lot of poeple hated goth kids too, but it seems like people didn't want to fuck with you if you were a hardcore goth. Part of the goth "thing" was that you seemed unpredictable i.e. "if she'll shove a safety pin in her own ear and wear it like that, what'll she do to me?" This isn't to say that a lot of goths didn't get the shit beat out of them somewhat regularly, but that is often part of how they became goths.

The Russians aren't the only ones to try to legislate goths away. Here in America they did it years ago, just not at a national level. I believe that in some ways that is what birthed emo culture as distinct from goth culture.

Fire put it this way: Emo is goth, except that you can only be angry at yourself not the rest of the world.

Part of the point of goth was that other people found it weird and a bit scary. That's how we stopped getting the shit beaten out of us. The problem is that when Columbine and the following shootings happened, people focused on the fact that goths were the ones with the guns instead of asking "what fucked these kids up?" The general public simply decided that being goth is what made them go nuts and shoot people. I've got news for you: the fucked up kids don't become the popular and successful ones in high school. So yeah, often they became goths. The people who committed those crimes were fucked in the head long before they put on black clothes and white makeup.

This however is a reasonable point, and one thing about our culture and society is that when there's blood on the walls, reason goes out the window.

During my adolescence and college years my mother was the vice principal at a suburban high school. I remember that not to long after the Columbine shooting I was home from college and stopped in to see her at work. It was pouring outside so I was wearing the black London Fog trench coat she had bought me a few weeks earlier. Here's another newsflash, London Fog raincoats pretty much come in black and beige, and if you spend a lot of time in the woods or a metal shop, and in college I did both, wearing beige is a really bad idea.

My mother was outraged. She couldn't believe that I'd wear a black trench-coat (did I mention it was a present from her?) in her school. My protestations that it was pouring cats and dogs fell on deaf ears. In the wake of the school shootings it had been decided that goth clothing was a tool of fear and terror and was outlawed in many schools.

They had rational sounding explanations, but under examination these explanations were often revealed as, well dumb. For example, my mother pointed out that you can hide a lot of weapons in a trench-coat. Absolutely irrefutable, and maybe a good point from a school security point of view. However, her school only banned black trench-coats. To point out how stupid this was, Fire carried on an entire conversation with my mother while concealing a nearly four-foot broadsword under the cute pale-red LL Bean trench-coat she had gotten from her grandmother. At the end of the conversation she drew the sword that my mother didn't know was there, proving that the black part was irrelevant. Not that it mattered.

I'm not trying to say that there aren't differences between emo and goth, to be honest, I know a lot less about the emo movement than I could. Nor am I saying that goth is dead.

Nor do I understand why it is ok to hate and assault goth or emo or in some places queer or foreign kids in school. The fact is that I think there are always going to be kids who teachers and adults will look the other way rather than protect. And whether it's legislation in Russia or goth kids being afraid to express themselves for fear of being looked on as potential dangers, what's really going on is society making it easier to look the other way.

2008-07-13T14:24:00.004-05:00

When I've thought about how I want to interface with my computer technology this is what I've always imagined.

For a newer and more beautiful video but without the explanations go to Mr. Han's website.

Once More From the Top

2008-07-09T13:50:00.002-05:00

It has been a long time since I posted here at BarkingShaman and a great deal has happened. For instance, while I rarely bark anymore, I now have a strong British accent which, like the barking is actually a manifestation of my Tourette Syndrome. Apparently it is realistic enough that native Brits have been surprised to learn that I’ve never been to their country. I’ll be writing more on that soon.

For now let’s talk a bit about the past, and a bit about the future.

First, the future: The next few weeks will see BarkingShaman essays talk about things that have happened while I was not posting, like the appearance of my accent. After that, I’ll be regularly posting essays about the usual BarkingShaman topics, life as a poly/pagan/spirit worker/business owner/who barks like a dog and talks like a Brit. Additionally, the Articles of Interest tab will be removed, and instead I’ll be directly posting links to articles on the web that I think are relevant to the theme of this blog.

And now the past: If I had it my way I’d be closing BarkingShaman not resuming writing. While my previous absences were generally caused by health problems, this long gap was not. Around the time of my last post, I had a first person run-in with how toxic this livejournal/blog/myspace thing can be. It didn’t involve BarkingShaman but rather something that happened in the real world, found its way onto the internet, and then back into the real world. The consequences were deeply hurtful and soured me towards this mode of communication in a bad way. With few exceptions, I stopped reading all blogs save professional political ones. And I decided that I did not want to participate in this mode of communication anymore.

And yes, I know that was childish. It wasn’t fun anymore so I didn’t want to play. But hell, with everything on my plate personally and professionally (both professions) I thought I had the right to be a bit childish about something. Turns out I was wrong.

The Boss Lady encouraged me (in a “Do this now” sort of way) to start Notes From a Barking Shaman in the first place, and now She says it’s time to get back to work. In this, as in all things, I do what She says. And in fairness, I enjoyed writing BarkingShaman the first time around and I know I can this time too.

I ask you to be patient with me as I get back into harness so-to-speak. Strange as it sounds, it takes practice to do this well (especially the writing quality), but as of today Notes From a Barking Shaman is back.

Stick around; I’ll be here.

-Wintersong Tashlin

Not Sure How to Feel About This…

2007-11-30T01:36:00.001-05:00

About a week ago I had an experience that I still don’t know how to respond to. I was looking through CNN.com headlines as I often do (thank you Google personal homepage) when I came across a news article of somewhat personal interest. The article was a brief business piece about a small company with a somewhat unique and specialized business model that is apparently doing quite well.

The kicker for me is this: Many years ago (pre-Summer even) Fireheart and I had pretty much the same idea for a business based around providing the same design and custom modification service to the same specific clientele as the business profiled by CNN. I’m not going to go into details about what this business is/was because it is irrelevant to my point and I am uninterested in debating the merits of said business. There were a number of reasons that we did not pursue our idea, some were financial, some technical, and some were based on negative feedback we got from people we ran the idea by.

In truth, I do not think that the market was ready for this idea back then (which accounts for some of the negative feedback mentioned above), and I believe that the people who are running the business profiled on CNN are probably better suited to this particular line of work then we were. All that said, here is my internal debate:

Perspective #1

Be pissed off. Not with the people making this work, huzzah for them. Rather I could be pissed at myself and Fire for not pursuing what was clearly a good idea after all. As a designer I feel an attachment to my ideas and designs, event the ones that went no where. This experience is a bit like debating buying a scratch ticket but eventually choosing not to, only to have the person behind you on line strike it big (with the caveat that buying a scratch ticket is easy and making a good design idea into a successful business is one of the harder things that a person can set out to do).

Perspective #2 (the healthier one)

I can take this as a vindication of my (and Fire’s) intuition as a designer. An idea that I had (though clearly we weren’t the only ones) is now a successful business model. Granted it is someone else’s business, but I had the idea too, and now it is working. In a removed way (as in, I didn’t do any work at all) I can be a bit proud of these other peoples’ success. I’d like to be able to gain a measure of confidence from this experience. At the same time, when I look over our current proposed project list I want to do everything in my power as Project Manager (yes my actual title) to ensure that this doesn’t happen again.

The truth is that I feel both of these things. I wonder, if Fire and I had taken a different road, would our names now be up on CNN? Or were we right to pass on this idea because it just wasn’t the right one for us? Just because these people succeeded in no way guarantees that we would have.

Lastly, I just want to clarify incase I haven’t been adequately clear: I DO NOT think that these people somehow “stole” my and Fireheart’s idea. It was a good idea, and I imagine that many people other than us had it. The difference, as with all successful design is that these people took thought to action and for that I wish them only the best success.

My Mistress… Nüvi?

2007-11-10T01:15:00.001-05:00

On my way down to New Jersey last month I found myself entered into my first rigid D/S relationship. Now, as readers of BarkingShaman know, BDSM is a major part of both my sexual and spiritual lives. However, given that I am already the Boss’ bitch, it would be hard for me to enter into a submissive relationship with anyone else. Yet here it was. She speaks with a British accent and I do whatever she tells me to. Her name is… Garmin Nüvi Model 200. Actually she can speak with an American accent too but the British is way better.

I suppose I should explain. The Garmin Nüvi is a GPS based navigational unit. You program it with where you want to go and it creates a route and directs you along it. My mistress is a lower end model (she was quite on sale) so she gives instructions (“In point seven miles, turn right, then keep left”) but doesn’t give street names out loud. I just like to think of her as giving me some measure of independence.

I realize that I am being glib, but in truth the experience of using the navigational unit is extremely strange. We tend to want to think of ourselves as masters of our own domain, pilots in our own spaceship if you will. To some extent, the navigational unit changes that. This is especially true when you start using one; doubly so if you are as bad with, and stressed by, following directions as I am.

Intellectually I can understand that making turns when the sultry British woman tells me to is little different than following the print out from Google Maps. However, there is an emotionally qualitative difference. If I am busy listening to Lost Men, the Story of Shackelton’s Ross Sea Party on audio book and I forget to check my directions printout, well I’m screwed. The Nüvi won’t let that happen though. She’ll interrupt and give her directions whether I want them or not. If I miss my turn anyway, she’ll rebuild my route to get me to my destination despite the error of my ways. Although I could swear that the way she says “recalculating” has a bit of an accusatory air about it.

What this means is that rather than the pilot of my own spaceship, I am now more like a co-pilot. Perhaps a better analogy is that of a tank driver. The tank commander tells the driver where to go, and he does. He isn’t directing the tank; he is just the interface system between the commander and the tank itself. I believe that if the Nüvi could just take my little Subaru over and drive it to Edison, NJ herself then she would. Since she can’t, I become the interface between the computer and the car.

I should clarify that I certainly don’t always feel this way. When I am going somewhere I am even somewhat familiar with I tend to treat the navigational unit’s input as a strong suggestion. Choosing the road that I prefer leads to a feeling of “that’s right bitch, you will recalculate my route, because we’re taking this road whether you like it or not,” rather than feelings of being taken to task for failure.

Where I take the role of the submissive interface system is when I am in territory that is totally alien to me. I remember stopping on my way to New Jersey at a rest stop and looking at the map next to the bathroom to figure out where the hell I was. Not in a progress sort of way, but in the more literal sense of “where is this road in the world?” (running parallel to I95 btw)

The scary thing was, if the unit had suffered some form of critical system failure, I fear I would have panicked. I cannot be sure of that. I like to think that I would have driven until I found a rest stop and bought a good old fashioned map of the state that I was in (I am never thrilled with the 50 state road atlas that I always keep in the car). More likely I would have called Fire or Summer or someone else I could expect to be near a computer and asked them to direct me to my destination. I also had Google Map directions, but the Nüvi had chosen a significantly different course from Google so I can’t be sure how useful that would have proven.

All of this has led me around to the question of whether computers will be replacing us. Frankly, if my role in the transportation relationship is primarily that of the interface between the Garmin Nüvi 200 and the Subaru Forester, then I can be replaced, maybe not yet, but not too long from now. However, the important thing is that I had a reason to be going to NJ, and the Nüvi didn’t. Specifically, I was driving from New Hampshire to New Jersey to take care of someone close to me who had had major surgery. It is this kind of motivation that I think it will take a lot longer for computers to come around to.

There are people who worry, including me sometimes, that becoming more integrated in our lives with our machines will make us less human. I think that it could free us up to spend more time on our humanity. I enjoy driving a car, but if I could tell the Nüvi to take the wheel (as she so clearly wants to do) what could I do with that time instead? Maybe someday I’ll be able to replace this mistress with her great granddaughter and find out.

Just incredible

2007-10-18T00:48:00.000-05:00

Lee just showed me Lisa Bufano's work and it is simply amazing:

Main Page

3 short videos

She is an incredible example of creating beauty and wonder from loss.

Important reads

2007-10-15T23:38:00.000-05:00

Uganda Cleric Calls For Annihilation Of Gays

&

Int'l Rights Group Accuses Bush Admin. Of Funding African Violent Attacks On Gays

Bit o' Advice

2007-10-14T13:36:00.000-05:00

Excerpt from an email I wrote to a young questioning (and perhaps a bit self hating) probably queer guy. I'd be interested in hearing what other things people think are important?

A couple of points:

1. you don't have to commit yourself to a label, "Questioning" is perfectly acceptable, especially in a group like a GSA

2. Bars are so NOT the way to go! (ed. note: he was bemoaning that he is still too young to get into bars and he felt that that meant that he can't meet other guys) GLBTQ people pick people up in normal places, like (possibly) through GSA meetings, clubs, bookstores, coffee shops etc. If you are working to have a healthy attitude toward being gay or bi or whatever, anonymous sex with guys you pick up in a bar or who pick you up really won't give it to you. Look up porn on the internet in the meantime, you'll be better off (something I still do regularly and I have a boyfriend).

3. Whatever you do, do it really safely. You are in a prime position to pick something up that you don't want. I have met a lot of people our age who knew all about safe sex, but when the moment struck it all went out of their heads. They thought with their dicks and in some cases paid too high a price. Also, if you are having negative feelings about maybe being queer (and there's nothing wrong with that) don't let yourself do something stupid because deep down you feel like you deserve it or because being queer or having queer sex is icky and dirty anyway or something. This applies to hooking up with guys who treat you like shit. Unsafe sex isn't just about disease.

4 (and last). I know that this may be too personal, but I'm putting it out there anyway. When you decide to hook up with someone. Be clear in advance with yourself and them about what you want to do. If you only feel mentally or physically up for something simple ( i.e. mutual masturbation) there is nothing wrong with that. Anyone who tells you otherwise isn't worth it. DON'T think that just 'cause someone is queer that they are going to immediately (or ever for that matter in some cases) love anal sex or have an easy time with it. I know LOTS of guys who are not fans of anal sex, and a huge number of guys who had bad introductions to it because they went to fast in starting the practice before they were ready or with someone who they were comfortable with or just because they felt pressured even though it didn't interest them.

Quick note on point #4: I don't want people to think that I'm against anal sex. I'm not. At the same time I know a lot of gay guys who aren't that into it, or didn't have a good introduction to it. I think that the points I make there are important because they aren't the kind of things that young and/or inexperienced guys hear.

Cartmanolalia

2007-10-03T23:31:00.000-05:00

I have conflicting feelings about something that happened this evening: South Park ran an episode in which Cartman pretended to have Tourette Syndrome.

I’m afraid that this may make my life and the lives of a lot of other people with TS more difficult for a while. I’ve mentioned this to a few people in the last week since I found out that the episode was coming out, and they’ve been dubious. Here is my reasoning: one of the biggest difficulties that people with Tourette face is the worry and reality of not being believed by other people when they try to explain their tics. In days past I’ve had people (including police officers) tell me that I was faking the TS in order to get away with socially inappropriate behavior. I specifically can remember an officer telling me (this was years ago) “Yeah right kid, I watch LA law. Now shut up!” And LA Law was an adult show, and the character on the show wasn’t faking. South Park’s target audience is the exact age group that would be most likely to pretend to have Tourette because it sounds fun. The fact that Cartman is full of it isn’t going to help that perception one itsy bit.

On the flip side however, I’ll be the first to admit that Tourette (and often South Park) can be funny. The Tourette Syndrome Association put out a preemptive press release which honestly sounded a bit like a dorky kid complaining about being picked on.

The release says among other things “We are actually surprised it took the creators so long to use TS as comedy fodder in this program, since no disability, illness or controversial topic is off limits to them,”

The problem with the way this is said is that the TSA makes it sound like a bad thing. Whether it is Judit Ungar (the TSA president)’s cup of tea as comedy goes or not, this is what South Park does. The argument being made essentially is that this episode is in bad taste. I have not yet seen it for reasons I’ll discuss soon, but I can already tell you that it is indeed in bad taste. How do I know this? We’re talking about South Park. I cannot think of an episode that wasn’t in bad taste. That is the source of their comedy. Tourette Syndrome is hardly being singled out for special treatment. If GLAAD got upset every time South Park mocked gays, they would have to hire someone full time just to write press releases about South Park.

I could wish that if South Park just had to do a TS episode, they could have gotten more creative than having Cartman fake having Tourette so he could say bad words. For the gods’ sake, I had a tic about Flying Penis Man. There has to be more comedy to be found in Tourette than in having an already foul-mouthed six year old be, well foul-mouthed.

So on the one hand, this could make things unpleasant, especially for school kids with TS who’ve already got a good bit on their plate. On the other hand, this is the sort of thing that South Park does, the sort of thing that sometimes makes South Park brilliant. I feel strongly that if I’m going to laugh when Matt and Trey are putting some other segment of the population on the chopping block, I’d better not be too pissed when they put us Touretters there too.

Excellent Op-Ed from General Clark

2007-09-20T03:39:00.000-05:00

I don't usually reprint articles in their entirety but I feel strongly about this one. Interestingly, two of my and Fireheart's teachers, Marten and Kaerith told us repeatedly years before the invasion of Iraq, that the U.S. military was going to be in trouble in the next war because it would likely be fought in places where cruise missiles couldn't go and solders would have to.

From the Washington Post as reprinted in the Concord Monitor:

Testifying before Congress last week, Gen. David Petraeus appeared commanding, smart and alive to the challenges that his soldiers face in Iraq. But he also embodied what the Iraq conflict has come to represent: an embattled, able, courageous military at war, struggling to maintain its authority and credibility after 4 ½ years of a "cakewalk" gone wrong.

Petraeus will not be the last general to find himself explaining how a military intervention has misfired and urging skeptical lawmakers to believe that the mission can still be accomplished. The next war is always looming, and so is the urgent question of whether the U.S. military can adapt in time to win it.

Today, the most likely next conflict will be with Iran, a radical state that America has tried to isolate for almost 30 years and that now threatens to further destabilize the Middle East through its expansionist aims, backing of terrorist proxies such as the Lebanese group Hezbollah and even Hamas in Gaza and the West Bank, and far-reaching support for radical Shiite militias in Iraq. As Iran seems to draw closer to acquiring nuclear weapons, almost every U.S. leader - and would-be president - has said that it simply won't be permitted to reach that goal.

On to Iran?

Think another war can't happen? Think again. Unchastened by the Iraq fiasco, hawks in Vice President Cheney's office have been pushing the use of force. It isn't hard to foresee the range of military options that policymakers face.

The next war would begin with an intense air and naval campaign. Let's say you're planning the conflict as part of the staff of the Joint Chiefs. Your list of targets isn't that long - only a few dozen nuclear sites - but you can't risk retaliation from Tehran. So you allow 21 days for the bombardment, to be safe; you'd aim to strike every command-and-control facility, radar site, missile site, storage site, airfield, ship and base in Iran. To prevent world oil prices from soaring, you'd have to try to protect every oil and gas rig, and the big ports and load points. You'd need to use B-2s and lots of missiles up front, plus many small amphibious task forces to take out particularly tough targets along the coast, with manned and unmanned air reconnaissance. And don't forget the Special Forces, to penetrate deep inside Iran, call in airstrikes and drag the evidence of Tehran's nuclear ambitions out into the open for a world that's understandably skeptical of U.S. assertions that yet another Gulf rogue is on the brink of getting the bomb.

But if it's clear how a war with Iran would start, it's far less clear how it would end. How might Iran strike back? Would it unleash Hezbollah cells across Europe and the Middle East, or perhaps even inside the United States? Would Tehran goad Iraq's Shiites to rise up against their U.S. occupiers? And what would we do with Iran after the bombs stopped falling? We certainly could not occupy the nation with the limited ground forces we have left. So what would it be: Iran as a chastened, more tractable government? As a chaotic failed state? Or as a hardened and embittered foe?

What about China?

Iran is not the only country where the next war with the United States might erupt. Consider the emergence of a new superpower (or at least a close competitor with the United States). China's shoot-down of an old Chinese satellite in January was a wake-up call about the risks inherent in America's reliance on space. The next war could also come from somewhere unexpected; if you'd told most Americans in August 2001 that the United States would be invading Afghanistan within weeks, they'd have called you crazy.

Any future U.S. wars will undoubtedly be shaped by the experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan, however painful that might be. Every military re-fights the last war, but good militaries learn lessons from the past. We'd better get them right, and soon. Here, the lesson from Iraq and Afghanistan couldn't be more clear: Don't ever, ever go to war unless you can describe and create a more desirable end state. And doing so takes a whole lot more than just the use of force.

The lessons from past conflicts aren't always obvious. After the demoralizing loss in Vietnam, the United States went high-tech, developing whole classes of new tanks, ships and fighter planes and new operational techniques to defeat then-enemy no. 1 - the Soviets. We also junked the doctrine of counterinsurgency warfare, which we're trying to relearn in Iraq.

After the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the U.S. military embarked upon another wave of high-tech modernization - and paid for it by cutting ground forces, which were being repeatedly deployed to peacekeeping operations in places such as Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo. Instead of preparing for more likely, low-intensity conflicts, we were still spoiling for the "big fight," focusing on such large conventional targets as Kim Jong Il's North Korea and Saddam Hussein's Iraq - and now we lack adequate ground forces. Bulking up these forces, perhaps by as many as 100,000 more active troops, and refitting and recovering from Iraq could cost $70 billion to $100 billion.

Somehow, in the past decade or two, we began to think of ourselves as "warriors." There was an elemental purity to this mindset, a kill-or-be-killed simplicity that drove U.S. commanders to create a leaner force based on more basic skills - the kind that some generals thought were lacking in Vietnam and in the early years of the all-volunteer military. Now, in an age when losing hearts and minds can mean losing a war, we find ourselves struggling in Iraq and Afghanistan to impart the sort of cultural sensitivities that were second nature to an earlier generation of troops trained to eat nuoc mam with everything and sit on the floor in preparation for their tours in Vietnam.

One of the most important lessons from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan - and Vietnam, for that matter - is that we need to safeguard our troops. The U.S. public is more likely to sour on a conflict when it sees the military losing blood, not treasure. So to keep up our staying power, our skill in hunting and killing our foes has to be matched by our care in concealing and protecting our troops. Three particularly obvious requirements are body armor, mine-resistant vehicles, and telescopic and night sights for every weapon. But these things are expensive for a military that has historically been enamored of big-ticket items such as fighter planes, ships and missiles. Many of us career officers understood these requirements after Vietnam, but we couldn't shift the Pentagon's priorities enough to save the lives of forces sent to Iraq years later.

Grad school for generals

That brings us to the military's leaders. We need generals who are well-educated, flexible and culturally adept men and women - not just warriors, not just technicians. Why aren't more military leaders sent to top schools such as Princeton, the way Petraeus was, or given opportunities to earn PhDs, as did Defense Secretary Robert Gates' military assistant, Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli?

For years, Congress has whacked away at military-education budgets, thereby driving gifted officers from the top-flight graduate schools where they could have honed their analytical skills and cultural awareness.

Still, let's not be too hard on ourselves. As an institution, the U.S. Armed Forces stands head and shoulders above any other military in skill, equipment and compassion, and its leaders are able, conscientious and loyal.

But shame on political leaders who would hide behind their top generals. It was hard not to catch a whiff of that during last week's hearings. The Constitution, however, is not ambivalent about where the responsibility for command lies - the president is the commander in chief.

Surely here is where some of the most salient lessons from recent wars lie: in forcing civilian leaders to shoulder their burdens of ultimate responsibility and in demanding that generals unflinchingly offer their toughest, most seasoned, advice. Gen. Tommy Franks embarked on the 2001 Afghanistan operation without a clear road map for success, or even a definition of what victory would look like. Somehow, that was good enough for him and his bosses. So Osama bin Laden slunk away, the Taliban was allowed to regroup, and Afghanistan is now mired deep in trouble and sinking fast.

In Iraq, President Bush approved war-fighting plans that hadn't incorporated any of the vital 1990s lessons from Haiti, Bosnia or Kosovo; worse, then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld fought doing so. Nation-building, however ideologically repulsive some may find it, is a capability that a superpower sometimes needs.

At the same time, the United States' top generals must understand that their duty is to win, not just to get along. They must have the insight and character to demand the resources necessary to succeed - and have the guts to either obtain what they need or to resign. If they get their way and still don't emerge victorious, they must be replaced. That is the lot they accepted when they pinned on those four shiny silver stars.

Above all else, we Americans must understand that the goal of war is to achieve a specific purpose for the nation. In this respect, the military is simply a tool of statecraft, one that must work in tandem with diplomacy, economic suasion, intelligence and other instruments of U.S. power. How tragic it is to see old men who are unwilling to talk to potential adversaries but seem ready to dispatch young people to fight and die.

So, steady as we go. We need to tweak our force structure, hone our leadership and learn everything we can about how to do everything better. But the big lesson is simply this: War is the last, last, last resort. It always brings tragedy and rarely brings glory. Take it from a general who won: The best war is the one that doesn't have to be fought, and the best military is the one capable and versatile enough to deter the next war in the first place.

(Wesley K. Clark, the former supreme commander of NATO, led alliance military forces in the Kosovo war in 1999. He is the author, most recently, of A Time to Lead: For Duty, Honor and Country.)

Design on a.......Pentagram?

2007-09-14T01:24:00.000-05:00

I rarely write anything about my other “professional” job in the pages of Barking Shaman. The use of the term “professional” rather than “mundane” is not an accident. While my training is in the design of assistive and consumer products, most of the money that the company has made in the past year has been in the design (both physical and magical design) and creation of custom, unique, sacred tools.

I’ve wondered of late why this work hasn’t found its way into BS before. I think the biggest reason is that people in the pagan community tend not to really understand what it is that I do. In my interactions with other pagans and magical folks I am often referred to as a “craftsperson.” I have deep respect for those I consider to be “craftspeople.” That is one reason why the term makes me uncomfortable. I am not a “craftsperson.” I think part of me would like to be, but I’m not.

I am a product designer. Both in my magical and material work, design is the primary focus. As a metal worker, I am certainly adequate. And there are not all that many people making sacred tools with access to a TIG welder or a Bridgeport vertical milling machine, which adds an element of uniqueness to what the company can offer. These things are not the reason someone hires me though.

When you give a craftsperson your money, you do so because they can make something that you can’t. A key tool in my magical and shamanic working is a soul-bonded sword made by Daniel Watson of Angel Sword for instance. Even if I had a limitless amount of money (and no demanding goddess breathing down my neck or family for that matter) so I could devote my life to the art of sword making I don’t know if I could ever produce something so lovely. This is why Mr. Watson can charge over $20,000 for his finest work (which is very fine indeed).

While my company does fabrication work and to a high standard, fabrication is not really what we are paid for. When someone hires us, especially in the case of mundane design rather than sacred tools, what we are being paid for is to think. I am not trying to say that my clients are unintelligent, or that I am more so. Rather, I spent years (perhaps as many as Mr. Watson had by this point in his business) training in a specific way of thinking and looking at the world.

Training in design strongly influenced my and Fire’s way of doing magic as well. We are often referred to as good “energy technicians” by people in the pagan community. It’s true that our way of doing magic is quite technical. We approached the study of magic much the way we approached design and our methodology and symbol system for spell construction owes far more to the Lemelson Design Center than to Llewellyn Publishing.

However, I’d say that there is a difference between energy “technician” and energy “designer.” I see a magical technician as someone who has perfect form in their magic, so nothing is wasted or out of place, whereas, a magical designer is someone who creates something new on a regular basis, especially to solve a new problem. I try to be both. I have known good “technicians” who don’t create new magic, and people who are brilliant at coming up with new ideas and spells but who have sloppy technique.

My main focus in the business at the moment is a sacred tools project that involves very little magic at all. However, the client’s needs are myriad and the challenge of meeting all of them has been surprisingly daunting. It has been the worst kind of design process. At our first meeting when the client described their needs, I believed that the design would flow smoothly and quickly. My first impression was mistaken, and I have had to fight to keep the slow destruction of that beautiful mirage from getting me too down on the project. Weeks of work (although with my health, I don’t exactly get to put in full days) and the design is finally taking shape in the computer. Like any good design, magical or mundane, when it is finished most people will look at it a think “well, that doesn’t look too hard to figure out.”

This is a problem for us as designers, fabricators, magicians, people who sell a service and now sometimes sell a product. At the top of BarkingShaman in the “about me” section is a picture of a CAD design of a product we produced for a client. It was a specialized ordeal tool designed to be worn on the head. Influenced by the Kavadi ritual, the “crown” had twelve surgical steel spikes that were fully adjustable but could be removed for sharpening or autoclaving without loosing the adjustment. Made from scratch, it also incorporated extensive magic to open the crown chakra in a dramatic, yet controlled way, and provide a structure and containment to the opening, leading to greater safety in use compared to other, less controlled chakra opening aides. The design process on the crown was extensive for both the physical and magical design. The fabrication ran about forty hours. The client for the crown was a major figure in the pagan demographic.

Although our client was quite happy with the results, the few other people who had expressed interest were turned off by the amount of money we were asking to produce another crown. One offer was %12 of the actual cost.

Like Clan Tashlin, with our unusual magical system and nameless Lady, the company is struggling to find a place in a broader community that doesn’t really “get” what we do. As I was sitting with the client whose project I am currently working on, I realized that there may quite literally be no one else in the world that can do exactly what we do. That is to say, how many people or companies have a shaman and more that one magician to address the spiritual needs of the client’s design but also have the training to identify and solve the myriad technical problems posed by the design’s necessary criteria? Finally, we have the resources of an industry CAD program, a small but capable fabrication shop, and cultivated contacts in both the magical/pagan and design worlds.

Our biggest problem in magic, sacred tool work and in presenting Clan Tashlin is that what we offer seems to come from a different place than many people in the pagan demographic. Our approach has at times turned people off or created interpersonal conflicts. In a community where “intent” and feelings are often seen as being paramount, a technical approach to magic, a Lady who doesn’t tell her name, and sacred tools designed in SolidWorks CAD are not always an easy fit.

A note about posting

2007-08-29T01:24:00.000-05:00

I've received some good feedback on yesterday's posting re: NRA membership and wanted to let people know that if health stuff continues as it has, I'll be resuming a posting schedule over the next few weeks. I know that I've said this before, and yes, I even meant it, but I really am trying. That said, I'd still rather leave BS un-updated rather than post crap, which unfortunately is all I've been turning out on the writing front lately. I have a few articles that the Lady is really pushing for me to write, and I use BarkingShaman to keep my writing skills up the same way that I make spaceships in SolidWorks to keep my CAD skills honed.

And before anyone else asks: No, I have no clue why Blogger barfs up the total content of BarkingShaman to people who feed it on LiveJournal if I haven't posted in a while. I didn't set it all up, a friend did that for me. I'd like to assure people who are driven crazy by this happening that I won't be offended if they just go back to reading it the old fashioned way.

The Lady willing, we'll be seeing more of each other in the weeks to come...

Wintersong Tashlin

NRA or Gay (try 2)

2007-08-28T01:45:00.001-05:00

The subject of my rather eclectic life is one that has been addressed in many past BarkingShaman essays but I am afraid it is a theme that has not yet been played out.

Today’s conflict regards my queerness and my gun ownership. I realize that this also is not an unfamiliar topic in the pages of BS but I am in a real quandary.

The basic question would seem at first to be rather straightforward. Do I join the National Rifle Association (NRA) or not. Unfortunately the situation is a touch more complex than people in either the liberal or conservative camps would like to say. Let’s start with one basic premise: I do not believe that the NRA is an anti-GLBT, or even in many ways anti-liberal organization. The NRA’s official position is that they are a one-issue group and that issue is the 2^nd Amendment and the support of all American’s right to defend themselves and engage in recreational activities involving firearms. In my research I have thus far seen no evidence that is not the truth. However, life is rarely so simple.

While the NRA may not care about any issues outside of their mission, the politicians who they support are not so focused. Many if not most of the political players supported by the NRA due to their 2^nd Amendment stances are dedicated to the preservation of so-called “traditional values” which has become a code word for an anti-GLBT and pro-Judeo-Christian agenda (I don’t know if I’ve felt so much a Hampshire College graduate as when writing the preceding sentence). Additionally, the NRA “base” such as it is, has a reputation, which appears somewhat deserved, of not being very open minded to people who are different than themselves.

There have been several high(ish) profile examples in the last few years of anti-GLBT attitudes finding their way into NRA events. Charlton Heston, when president of the NRA made some rather strong anti-gay comments at official NRA fundraisers, and a few years ago a national NRA conference broke down into a hearty session of gay bashing. Given that the National Rife Association is ostensibly single-issue, this would appear incongruous as well as inappropriate.

More importantly to my mind, the gun owning community, of which the NRA is the central force, has done little to nothing to support or reach out to the gay community. Given the large effort in recent years on the part of the NRA to get women shooting and to emphasize gun ownership as vital to the self defense of women, it would seem that the GLBT community would be a logical next step. The GLBT shooting group the Pink Pistols has shot at the NRA home range at their headquarters, but I have been unable to find any public statement of support from the NRA for the Pink Pistols or for GLBT people using or carrying firearms.

I am reluctant to give my support to the NRA because the persistent feeling I get as a liberal-leaning libertarian, queer pagan is that they don’t really want me. Certainly my interactions with many NRA members have done nothing to change that perception. I have been told flat out that the NRA does not want gay members and worse, that the NRA does not want gays to be allowed to carry guns. The representative I spoke to at the National Rifle Association headquarters was clear that neither are true, but had no explanation as to how many NRA members could have gotten that idea.

Enough about why I do not want to join the NRA. Why I might want to do so:

First off, many local gun clubs require that prospective members belong to the NRA. When we lived in Vermont, we shot at the local National Guard Range free of charge. Here in New Hampshire though we have yet to find a good place to shoot that is low cost, despite our willingness to shoot outdoors year-round. It makes more financial sense for us to join a gun club (and no, Summer and I are not eligible for a family rate at any of them, and Fire doesn’t shoot nearly as often as we do) than to pay $14 an hour per person at the public range in Manchester. It should be noted that I believe that part of the reason that these ranges require NRA membership is that NRA membership carries with it injury insurance for injuries that happen at NRA member ranges.

At least as important as joining a range though is that the NRA does work to preserve the rights of Americans to own and carry firearms. This is something that I’ve come to support very strongly. I do not believe that the government disarming the populace makes life safer for the public. One of the legacies of being brought up Jewish is that I was raised from a young age with the awareness that the government and your neighbors can turn against you. The thing I remember most from holocaust survivors coming to speak to classes and groups I was part of as a child and a young man was the message “never ever believe that it can’t happen ‘here’ because that’s what we believed and look what happened.”

What this debate comes down to is a question of which is more important to me, the advancement of GLBT rights or the continued right to have a firearm.

There is also the additional factor that my upbringing was very anti-gun. Although there was a gun in my house growing up, both of my parents are strongly in favor of restrictive gun control policies and I was brought up to believe strongly that guns are, for lack of a better word “bad.”

I still haven’t made up my mind but I am leaning toward joining the National Rifle Association. I have gotten to this point by looking at the most extreme possible outcomes:

A) I join the NRA and my $35 is some form of tipping point that leads to a severe curtailing of GLBT rights. Worst case scenario, and hopefully we have a slim chance of shooting our way to the Canadian boarder (I did say extreme). Slightly less extreme, and we loose things like partner benefits and the ability to hold certain jobs, etc, but at least if Billy-Bob and his friends decide on a fun night of fag bashing, we’re able to bash back.

B) I instead give my $35 to HRC or some other such GLBT group and a new era of GLBT rights comes about but the Great Britain style curtailing of gun ownership rights becomes the norm in the U.S. The problem with this is that the next time our drunken homophobe neighbor takes his illegal firearm and decides to drive away the fags, he might not stop with Summerwind’s car (you probably know that this is what happened to us, and yes it was an illegally purchased firearm).

I’ve trained in many weapons, from the prehistoric bolas to staff, pocket and combat knife, and even sword fighting. I can tell you from experience that when the gunshots are outside your window a long knife and a baseball bat provide slim comfort. It is worth repeating that we bought our first gun because the local chief of police told us that they would be unable to respond quickly enough if said neighbor decided to try again.

I am a strong believer in the kind of protective legislation that the leading GLBT rights groups are fighting for. We’ve benefited greatly from workplace and housing anti-discrimination laws for instance. However, I don’t believe that you can make people stop feeling and believing as they do by making laws. Truthfully, I think that’s a good thing, even when those feelings and beliefs are hostile towards me and mine. I hope that GLBT groups will keep trying to change hearts and minds as well as government policy.

That said, I want to be able to continue to protect myself and my family from those who may cross the line from hostile beliefs to hostile actions, and the NRA is the organization that works to make that possible.

Since I'm Feeling Lazy

2007-05-18T17:05:00.000-05:00

I know that I haven't had a good post about being a spirit worker in quite some time. However, I took a lot of medication last night and then ended up having to stay up with the dog until dawn, so today that state of affairs will not be changing.

Fortuitously, my beloved sweetie over at Artsy Phu posted an excellent essay on that very subject this morning. Go check it out.

This way I don't need to feel bad about not having posted much in this vein in a while:

http://artsyfoo.blogspot.com/2007/05/after-hiatus.html

Amazing

2007-05-16T21:04:00.000-05:00

One of the more incredible and beautiful things I've seen on the net in a long time:

Thousand-Hand Bodhisattva Masterpiece

Backscattering My (and Your) Bits for Fun and Safety

2007-05-11T10:26:00.000-05:00

Could we be on the verge of a whole new world for exhibitionists? The TSA (Transportation Safety Administration, not be confused with the Tourette Syndrome Association) has begun installing backscatter machines in airports. These are specially designed X-ray machines that penetrate clothing but not skin, yielding a perfect picture of what a person looks like in the nude. From the photos on the web from demonstrations and the diagrams on the TSA website the term “perfect” is totally justified. Not only will an operator know what non-metallic items you may be carrying (obviously it can detect metal too, but looking for non-metallic items is what sets it apart) but said operator will also be able to tell how large one’s labia are.

This technology is distressing to me I’ll admit. Not because I give a fuck about being seen naked by a security operator, but because it is designed to detect the very sort of weapons that my family used to travel with, hardwood and plastic knives for instance. The risk of being singled out for a search caused us to change travel tactics a while ago, but that is not the point.

Now, there are steps being taken to preserve peoples’ “privacy” as much as can be done when giving them a radioactive strip search. Originally when I heard about this technology, the plan had been to use a computer algorithm to fuzz out the subject’s bits. Apparently this is no longer the plan. Whether stymied by technology limitations or the risk of people exploiting these known blur spots to hide weapons, I don’t know. Now the computer blurs the details of the face and the operator of the machine who is actually viewing the images created by it is in a separate room and never sees the individual in person, hence never seeing identifying features. At least not identifying features one can see with clothes on. I suppose the idea is that the tech can say “There is someone in Concourse A at the moment that has the biggest dick in the universe, I’m just couldn’t tell you who he is.”

This then implies that a great deal can not be determined from all the other details of a person. Not true. A more accurate statement I imagine would be this: “There is a guy in Concourse A at the moment with the biggest dick I’ve ever seen. He’s about six foot two inches tall. He weighs about two hundred and twenty-five pounds. And he is built like so…” and on.

As I implied earlier, there is one population who I think could benefit greatly from this technology: exhibitionists. As long as some stranger is going to be looking at you with your clothes off, you could have some fun. If someone is going to be invading your physical privacy, invade the sanctity of their mind a bit. I know that for myself, I am not really an exhibitionists (although I write a blog, so there is that) but I know that I am not going to avoid wearing a T-tape and strap (the method of foreskin restoration that I have been using) just because some stranger is going to be looking at my bits on a computer screen. However, I am simply not changing my behavior because of the backscatter machines. I think that where folk could have a lot of fun is with deliberate changes.

If you have labial piercing for instance, use a chain to hold the lips apart to make a pretty butterfly for the nice man (probably want to fix that as soon as you are through security, sounds uncomfortable). I have a picture on my computer of a flaccid guy with a Barbie doll arm coming out of the end of his foreskin. Bet that would look strange on a backscatter X-ray. This could be a whole new market for the butt-plug horse tails that are sold at events like the Fetish Flea Market. Imagine being the security screener puzzling that out during a busy travel time. The list could go on and on.

If backscatter machines do in fact become widely used (right now they are only in a few airports) then I’m sure the TSA will eventually set policies regarding deliberately fucking with the technicians. However, I suspect that there could be a pretty spiffy First and Fourth Amendment case built around the issue.

I say that regardless of your policy on people smuggling weapons through security, the backscatter provides an opportunity to fuck with people that is just too good to pass up. As long as strangers will be looking at me naked, I am tempted to make sure that they never forget me, whether they see my face or not.

*5/14/07 Editor's Note* Due to concern from multiple individuals regarding the possibility of certain facetious comments I made in this post being taken out of context, I have removed the second to last paragraph from this essay. There was concern that certain sardonic suggestions I may have made could be construed in such a way as to imply that I personally, Clan Tashlin, and/or Brigantain Designs LLC could be some sort of terrorism or security concern. While this is absurd, I have complied with suggestions that I remove the objectionable paragraph as it did not contribute substantially to the content of the essay.

Maybe It Isn't a Small World After All

2007-05-11T00:24:00.000-05:00

“The world has gotten smaller.” The phrase has become clichéd as the atomic age has gaven way to the internet age. Young adults entering the workforce today have never lived in a time when they couldn’t sit in their homes or workplaces and communicate with people who are on the other side of the globe as easily as they could talk to someone from the next town over. Combine this ease of communication with high speed transportation such as jet airplanes and it is easy to see how one’s concept of the world could be far more inclusive than in any time in the past.

This phenomenon has been especially invaluable for small and widely spread groups of people. Online support groups for people with rare illnesses is one of the more common and representative examples of this. Certainly the pagan demographic relies on the net quite a bit to maintain cohesion.

However, of late I have found myself wondering if this “smaller world” stuff is an illusion, and perhaps a dangerous one at that.

The world hasn’t gotten smaller, that is a simple fact. NASA probably would have mentioned it if it had. Our perception of the world and the people on it, has changed enormously in the past one hundred years. Charles Lindbergh’s historic transatlantic solo flight was just eighty years ago. We went from the first solo ocean crossing in an airplane to the first footsteps on another world in forty-two years. This is a pace of change unprecedented in the history of humankind. With the radical changes brought about by engine powered transportation and the advent of instant communication (starting with the telegraph) it is no wonder that we have a world-concept that would have been completely alien only a couple of generations ago.

There have been many authors (and bloggers for that matter) who have addressed the issues surrounding the pace of change on our world. I am going to try to stay away from that worthy subject. Rather, my concerns are more personal and have more to do with how this “smaller world” idea effects what one of my friends affectionately refers to as her “zombie apocalypse plan.”

The “zombie apocalypse plan” (ZAP) for those of you who don’t know, is one’s plan(s) for what to do in the event of some form of society impairing calamity. I have mention in the past in BarkingShaman that our Lady has been pushing us to make plans that allow for the possibility of “civil unrest,” so our ZAP takes that into account. Being spirit workers and magicians also opens up the chance that a situation may arise requiring some form of ZAP of a magical nature that most people may remain oblivious to.

Personally I believe that most likely ZAP situations are will have both mundane and magical/spiritual components. There are many reasons that I and many other spirit workers, non-spirit working magicians or even completely non-spooky people, feel the need to make zombie apocalypse plans (and just to clarify I don’t mean “zombie” in a literal sense). Those reasons could take up an entire BarkingShaman post in themselves, if I thought it would be appropriate to post such things on the internet, which I don’t.

The reason that building zombie apocalypse plans makes me think of the false nature of the “small world” perspective is that the process of putting together ZAPs has made me realize just how physically inaccessible many of the people important to me are. If one chooses to take automotive transportation out of the question for a moment, and unless you drive a diesel car or truck you should, most things become pretty fucking far away.

For instance, the supermarket I go to is just five minutes away from me by car. However, on foot that 1.77mi suddenly seems like a bit much just to grab one thing. My closest friend to me is fifty-five miles away, a two day walk at best. People dear to me in distant places like Australia would be as lost to me as if they were on the moon for all the ease of contact if things fell apart. Anyone who has through-hiked the Appalachian Trail (which I have unfortunately not done) will tell you that the world is just as large as it has always been.

Tashlin as a clan, (as opposed to as my last name, the clan came first lest you think me that full of hubris) has worked hard in the past several years to build relationships with many people, mostly in the pagan demographic. It is sobering for us to realize that if the shit hits the fan, most of us will be on our own. The tendency in the last several years for spirit workers to gather and relocate to specific geographic regions is quite disturbing in this context.

Stepping away from the ZAP situations a bit, it is also concerning to realize how shallow our sense of unity and power as minorities really are. Many communities, including the pagan and GLBT communities use the internet to maintain a focused sense of identity. That unity is where power comes from. I’m not trying to say that without the net, towns would not have pride parades and covens would not meet for Samhain. However, without the national and international coverage of the Veterans Administration’s delays and hand wringing over making the pentacle available for the headstones of troops killed in battle, I don’t think that the pentacle would today be an option for the families of deceased service members. Most of that coverage came through the internet. It doesn’t take a terribly paranoid though progression to see how GLBT or pagan rights could be more easily curtailed through limiting online access to related resources (the same arguments being used to circumvent the Equal Access Amendment in order to ban GSAs in schools could be applied to GLBT websites for instance).

I’d like to say that I don’t think that my “zombie apocalypse” concerns are anything but the ramblings of an overactive imagination. Unfortunately I can’t. For one thing, the Lady and Var have made several unlikely predictions over the past nine years that have come or are coming to fruition. I’ve learned that it is unwise to ignore the desires and instructions of the gods. For another, we live in a world where not only it is illegal for gays to congregate in some countries, but the religious leaders from at least one country that is horrifically oppressive to queers has won over many disaffected people here in the United States. Not to mention that three current candidates for the Oval Office have declared that they don’t believe in evolution (I know that point is a bit out there but it makes my brain hurt so I am mentioning it).

It is one of my dearest hopes that we will never find out first-hand how big the world really is in the way I’ve discussed. Just the same, when building one’s zombie apocalypse plan, it is vital to consider just how far away one’s friends and allies may really be if the planes aren’t flying, the cell towers aren’t routing, and instant messenger is once again as distant a dream as moon rockets once were.

A Different Kind of "Whispering"

2007-05-04T09:41:00.000-05:00

As is immediately evident from my highly infrequent posting, my neurochemistry shit hasn’t been adequately worked out. I have a large file of uncompleted posts where my brain just gave out on me. I am leaving for the Pagan Kingdom of Asphodel’s Beltane weekend in just a few minutes but first I wish to share…

Our minds work in strange and unfathomable ways. Sometimes a great deal can be learned about a person from one or another unique personality quirk. Other times you can at least get a good laugh. I’m guessing this will be the latter, but if anyone has a deep insight into my psyche, feel free to share.

My partners have taken to calling me The Penis Whisperer, bet that’s not a sentence you hear everyday. The reason for this bizarre and social inappropriate nomenclature is this:

When I see a penis, whether in person (always preferred) or even in a picture, I immediately and involuntarily imagine in my head what its voice would sound like if it could talk. I realize this is probably a pretty weird thing. I should note that I am not actually saying that other peoples’ (or my own for that matter) penises talk to me, they don’t. All I am saying is that I have an idea in my mind of what they would sound like if they did.

For some reason however, this information seems to call to mind pet-psychics when I tell it to other people. I am not sure what the “talking to penises” and “talking to pets” connection is in other peoples’ minds, although I am confident that a psychology graduate student could do a thesis on the subject. Aside from the fact that I DON’T TALK TO PENISES (just really want to make that point clear).

Despite that key point, I give you a glimpse into the cable access show that will never be:

Imagine it in your mind: A bare stage set with two chairs and a plain backdrop. In one chair sits a twitching Wintersong (would need to suppress the vocal tics so as not to scare them into silence). In the other chair sits a nervous looking middle aged guy, maybe a bit rough looking. A construction worker would be ideal. He’s explaining his problem:

“I just don’t know Penis Whisperer. Lately the little guy just hasn’t been himself. I’ve tried getting him interested in things, but every time I try to play with him he just doesn’t seem interested the way he used to be. There was a time he’d be the one to get all up in my lap and make it clear that he wanted to play. Now I have to try to get him going and he is more and more resistant it seems. It’s even worse with my wife. Whenever she decides to play with him he just goes all passive and plays dead. I don’t understand what he is trying to tell me. Can you get me some answers Penis Whisperer?”

He would then unbutton his pants and drop them around his knees. The camera would zoom in for a close up of Wintersong examining the gentleman’s gentleman parts and making the “listening” expression made familiar to many by the work of legions of pet psychics and John Edwards (crossing over dude rather than presidential candidate) knockoffs.

The Penis Whisperer would then make some generic recommendations about trying new games, new toys, and switching over to silk underwear and the show would end for the week. Before long there could be a book deal and a popular syndicated show on basic cable. At first the right wing would be all up in arms, until some enterprising individual found a way to connect Penis Whispering to finding redemption in god and there’d be a new wave of religious themed generic genital talkers (“your inner labia say that you should have waited until you were married).

I have to head out to Cauldron Farm for Beltane, my bits and I hope you have a good weekend.

New Feature

2007-04-18T22:35:00.000-05:00

In the next few days I'm going to be testing out a new feature for BarkingShaman. On the right side of the screen will be a list of links that will be updated anywhere from a few times a day to once every few days. These will be links that are of interest to me or that I think might be of interest to readers of BS. Like the blog itself these links will be eclectic, ranging from topics such as paganism, shamanism, GLBT issues, libertarian issues, and things that are just plain funny.

Issue Fatigue

2007-04-17T22:09:00.000-05:00

Readers of BarkingShaman know that I am passionate in my beliefs and that many of my personal beliefs are not all that popular. It has not been a good several weeks for me on this front and I am finding myself quite prone to burning out.

First off, those of you who have read “Ritual Mutilation and Discovering Normal” know about my staunch opposition to routine male circumcision and know a bit about the road that led me to that position. I have done a great deal of research into the subject and history of circumcision and other male and female genital mutilation practices and consider myself quite educated on the matter. Several weeks ago national and international news sources covered the announcement that the United Nations has endorsed the practice of male circumcision (ideally removing as much inner foreskin tissue as possible if you read the research) as a method of preventing the spread of HIV/AIDS.

This was an announcement that had become inevitable. There has been some research over the years that has shown that circumcised men have a reduced (some say as much as %70) chance of contracting HIV during unprotected heterosexual sex with infected women. This is far from an adequate level of protection to not require sex with a latex barrier and is only relevant in reducing one specific form of transmission (female-male heterosexual intercourse). Despite this, the New York Times proclaimed in an article on male circumcision “Last month, scientists invented the AIDS vaccine.” While the U.N. and the W.H.O. have only endorsed circumcision for high risk/low tech areas such as sub-Saharan Africa, there is clear evidence that the American Academy of Pediatrics will again be endorsing circumcision for all newborns, this time to prevent AIDS. Additionally New York City has announced a proposal for the city to pay for the circumcision of all gay men in New York despite the total lack of evidence of circumcision’s effects on HIV transmission during gay intercourse.

I could go on at length about the issue. Certain points jump out at me, such as the fact that these studies were halted early and that they have not been submitted for peer review. Or that there has been European studies that indicate that intact (non-circumcised) men are more willing to use condoms and are less prone to skin tearing during intercourse. Additionally, circumcision has been described as a cure in search of a disease. The list of diseases that circumcision has been claimed to “cure” or “prevent” is astounding (from the familiar such as cancer to the crazy such as club foot or lead poisoning). I do want to clarify that it would be completely hypocritical for me to criticize what someone chooses to do with their body. If an adult, male or female, wants to radically alter their genitals that is totally their business. My objections focus on children who cannot consent or people who are being presented with circumcision as an preventative for the contraction of HIV/AIDS by medical authorities that they have no reason not to trust.

I belong to several email discussion groups from the “intactivist” (anti-circumcision) community and over the last few months I have found that I have been just letting the emails pile up. I simply cannot handle the overwhelming ground that has been lost in this fight. Every time I hear about or talk to another parent who may have been considering leaving their son intact but now has been swayed to circumcision, or worse who has taken their child or young teen in for a circumcision in the face of this new “data” I just find myself feeling sick. Same goes for talking to circumcised men who know feel that they do not need to use protection for sex since they now “know” that they can’t contract HIV/AIDS because of their circumcised status.

Second off, I live in New Hampshire. In the last few weeks the New Hampshire legislature has been poised to pass legislation creating a civil union registry for non-married couples. As you might imagine, many vocal people in my area are more than a little upset by this. There have been many calls for the government to put the matter to a public vote. Given that the state also just legalized gay adoption statewide (it had been left to the counties) there is a groundswell of opposition to gay rights issues (and gays in general) in my area of rural NH. Each letter in the op-ed portion of my local paper proclaiming the hatred of society possessed by people in non-traditional relationships reminds me of the fact that my family is neither welcomed nor safe where we live. Every “destruction of family values” that I read reminds me of how we came to own a number of firearms and why I don’t like to leave the house without one.

Firearms are yet another of my buttons that are going to be pushed in the next few weeks. Following the grotesque tragedy at Virginia Tech the media is already afire with calls for tougher restrictions for the ownership of firearms. This ignores the fact that someone crazy enough to kill 30+ people isn’t going to care about buying an illegal handgun.

Since owning a gun myself I’ve become more conscious of other people carrying them and this has led me to an interesting realization. When I was in Washington DC recently, I noticed how many government people (such as security guards at the Smithsonian Udvar-Hazy Center) carried firearms. Normally this doesn’t bother me, but NH does not have reciprocity with DC (besides with no one can carry weapons on federal property). I was interested to see that I was uncomfortable being around so many armed people not because I wasn’t armed, but because I wasn’t permitted to be armed.

These are just three of the public issues weighing on my mind. I’ve ignored several issues closely tied to my spooky life deliberately. First and foremost I am a shaman and a magician. Recent events in my life have brought this more and more to my attention (not that I have given up on the business that I own, just that I recognize the realities of what my first “profession” really is). These issues are in varying degrees mundane ones. I find myself having only so much energy that I can devote to any one of them before it begins to intrude into my “real” work, be that the spooky stuff, the business, or my managing my health.

As I find myself “burning out” I struggle to maintain some involvement in the issues that matter to me. I know that I cannot let myself become consumed by the shamanism anymore than I can sit in front of my computer doing CAD work hour upon hour. Trying to make a difference in these and other issues helps me remember to distance myself from the shaman work in order to recognize that the mundane world is just as important as the spiritual one.

Once upon a time, I created a mental “rosary of belief.” This is a technique we teach our students wherein one makes specific mental note of incidents that reinforce their beliefs in magic or the gods and spirits in order to create a mental “rosary” to refer to when the rest of the world tells them that there is no such thing (if you are curious we modified the idea from something said to Shinji Ikari in Evangelion during instrumentality). Today, I find myself forced to do the same thing with issues that are important to me. I know that I cannot allow my faith or connection to matters of importance to me in the mundane world falter if I am to do my job adequately.

As a shaman there is an incredible temptation to focus on that part of me that is forever in death, but I have come to know that it is just as important to give equal energy to those parts of me that dwell in life or in the mundane world. Passionate beliefs, even unpopular ones makes that possible.

ps. For an insight into the kinds of issues that I follow that cross the line between spooky and mundane more starkly than these go here.

Ambiguity Part 1: Home for Someone Else's Holiday

2007-04-03T02:03:00.000-05:00

One of the more difficult lessons about growing into adulthood has got to be that nothing is ever straightforward when one is an adult. The layers of ambiguity that sometimes seem to smother the world were beyond my ken when I was a child.

This is a subject that I’ll be addressing in several BarkingShaman essays over the next while. Right now, foremost on my mind regarding this topic are the events of this evening.

Tonight was the first night of the Jewish holiday of Passover and my mother asked us to come over for her seder. There was never any doubt that I’d be going. I try to go see my parents for holidays that are important family times. As a rule Fire and Summer come along whenever one or both of them can. After several years of awkwardness, my mother no longer asks me to attend religious services at her synagogue, but I go to her home at least for diner for most major holidays.

So it was with a minimum of hassle that Fire and Summer took early days from work and the three of us plus the dog bundled into the car for the two hour ride to my folks’ house.

Anyone who has attended at Passover seder however, can tell you that it isn’t just a meal. Rather, the seder meal is a ritual in itself. For a number of reasons, I have avoided Jewish worship services and rituals as thoroughly as I possibly can since leaving Judaism to serve my Lady. First off, a Jew by birth leaving the religion is a really big no-no, and not just from a community perspective. Judaic law is rather clear on the allotted punishment for idolatry, which for a Jew consists of worshiping any god but the god. I prefer to stay below the radar of the god of the Jews to whatever extent I can, and not just because I believe it to be the polite and ethical thing to do.

Additionally, my Jewish faith and identity was an important part of my life and upbringing. I do not regret my choice (such as it was) to dedicate myself to the Lady or to become a pagan. However, I would be lying if I told you that being forever cut off from such a pivotal part of my childhood and family life does not hurt, it does. I know that Judaism was not the right religion for me, and far more importantly, the god of the Jews was the wrong god for me for many reasons. On the balance, I would far prefer a devout life as a pagan than a secular life as a Jew, which was what would have happened given the disconnect between myself and the Jewish god.

Unfortunately (or perhaps inevitably, given its nature) Passover was always my favorite holiday in the Jewish calendar. It is also the only holiday whose ritual is traditionally done in the home rather than the synagogue.

The fact that my parents accept who I am so far as to invite both my partners (plus our dog) to their home for a family holiday is invaluable to me. Especially given my health situation of late, our lives would be infinitely more difficult without my parents’ support. At times like these though, it can be a challenge not to shove the complete reality of my life in their faces. I know that my religious path is a source of pain for them (especially my mother) and I try as best I can to minimize its impact on them. However, I do this to the best of my ability without diminishing who I am and what I do in my religious life.

For instance, I have two tiny “token” tanto knives that represent the two knives I carry in my shaman work. One token is polished and one blackened with cold-bluing to stand in for my full-sized polished and rusted knives that represent life and death. I usually wear the tokens on strings hanging from my belt loops. I am bound to tell anyone who asks what they mean, and I do not choose to leave them at home when I go to see my mother. Part of being Her shaman-magician is that I am forbidden to lie when asked about aspects of my spooky job. This means that I have explained to my mother the meanings of my shamanic tattoos, tools, and hair cut (for those who don’t know, I shaved my waist length hair off during my death ordeal cycle and have kept it shaved for over a year since).

As much as I value the fact that my folks have us all home for the holidays, it is hard not to resent it when they appear to be pushing me back into the broom closet, so to speak. It brings my mother joy, or at least peace, to pretend for the duration of the seder that I am still Jewish. Striking the balance between pleasing the mother who raised me and being true to my other Mother is an especial challenge during this particular ritual. The cautious dance of watching what words I don’t say during prayers to avoid swearing falsely to the god of the Jews doesn’t do any great wonders for my mental state either. An amazing number of Judaic prayers are some form of swearing of fealty: “you are our god” etc.

I imagine that the careful dance of balancing the reality of who an adult child is with how their parents might want to perceive them is hardly one that is unique to people who have departed as radically from their parents expectations as I have. I am also well aware that my parents are rather unique in how completely they have been able to accept those radical deviations in the course of my life. My parents and I have an understanding which applies most times: I don’t ask them to be happy with the path that my life has taken and they don’t try to change that path. The logical continuation of that agreement is that they generally don’t push their unhappiness with my path on me and I don’t shove the evidence of that path in their faces.

Just as adulthood is not nearly as straightforward as I expected when I was a child (imagine my shock to find that so far no one has given me a manual!), compromises feature far more prominently than the child I was could have imagined. When my mother asked me to read the four questions in Hebrew tonight (and with no transliteration no less) I could have refused on the grounds that it was not a terribly comfortable thing for me to do. However, that discomfort has led to me staying up late thinking and writing. Come the dawn it will be all but forgotten. The unhappiness that refusal would have caused my mother would have lasted far beyond the next rise of the sun.

I like to think that this decision is the sort of thing that distinguishes me today as my parents’ adult child rather than just their child.

Audacity Is An Hold System Trying to Make Me Feel Guilty

2007-03-27T00:53:00.000-05:00

How does one define audacity? Dictionary.com has this to say:

1.	boldness or daring, esp. with confident or arrogant disregard for personal safety, conventional thought, or other restrictions.

2.	effrontery or insolence; shameless boldness: His questioner's audacity shocked the lecturer.

Me, I prefer:

1. Telemarketers that call you up with an “all our representatives are currently busy, please stay on the line” message

2. Telemarketers that do it over and over again.

Now I know what you are thinking. Actually I have no clue, but I hope at least one of you is thinking the following “Wintersong, why the hell don’t you guys put your name on the Do Not Call List? Of course, I would hope that if you thought that, you would immediately say to yourself “this Wintersong fellow sounds like a sensible if perhaps overly eccentric sort, I imagine he has thought of this (apparently between thoughts you moved to England).”

Of course we thought of that. Our number is on the Do Not Call List. However, there is an exemption made for charitable organizations. Or more importantly, paid telemarketing companies working on the behalf of charitable organizations. We get a lot of these. We’ve been getting a lot of these for some time, but I will admit I may have exacerbated the situation.

You may or may not have deducted from previous posts on BarkingShaman that I struggle with depression. Or more accurately I live with depression since for some reason the term “I struggle with” always evokes images of high school wrestling in my mind. Which is weird since I’ve never wrestled, my high school did not have wrestling, I’ve never attended a high school (or any other kind) wrestling match. Despite the stereotypes, I never even masturbated to the idea of high school wrestling.

Strange brain associations aside, anyone who lives with depression, like many other neurological issues, will tell you that the medication that works great one week may not do crap the next. During one of these “medication not doing crap” periods, I answered a charity telemarketing call. We’d been getting a huge number of them at the time and saying “no” to disabled vets, retired police associations, active police associations, and such was not doing anything positive for my sense of self-worth. Hanging up on poor bastards that probably get called worst things in a day than some serial killers get called in a lifetime didn’t help either. Interestingly, I have since determined that most or all these calls may have been coming from the same call center.

When the fourteenth caller called (ok, couldn’t have been more than fifth but you get the point) I relented. Actually I tried to get him off the phone but he kept saying things like “Surely you can free up just fifteen dollars for our returning wounded heroes” although as depressed as I was, my brain chose to interpret it more like “If you just give us fifteen dollars I won’t have to kill this kitten I have here.” In the interest of saving kittens or war veterans or my own sanity I did so.

To say that the rate of calls has not slowed would be both obvious and completely predictable.

However, we have gotten quite good at dodging them. For financial reasons we do not have caller ID, but after a while we reacquired the pre-caller ID skill of recognizing the several seconds of empty line that often is what greets you when a telemarketing firm’s auto-dialer is moving more quickly than its agents. If you know this sound, or lack thereof, you can put down the receiver or hit the “off” button before a voice filled with the “I know I’m not fooling you, and you know that I know that I’m not fooling you, but my manager might be listening” kind of artificial cheer comes on in order to ask you for money. If you can get off the phone before this happens, you can do so with no guilt. The computer doesn’t give a fuck if you answer or not, it just auto-dials the next person having diner, a shower, or sex. Hanging up on the computer has a null effect on your daily “how big a shit have I been today?” meter.

In response to either a much higher rate of outgoing calls than staff, or to people getting better at the sound of silence trick, one of the companies that calls our house has now added the hold message I mentioned at the beginning of the post. As my problems with insomnia have yet to be resolved, and perhaps as a result (or perhaps for some other whacked out reason) my thought processes have mostly not been up to much deep thinking, I have spent a decent amount of time wondering what the reasoning behind this message is.

I simply cannot conceive of an remotely healthy individual who patiently waits on hold when a telemarketer calls. It is obvious that the call is from a charity telemarketer because it says so right in the message. “Company A is a paid solicitor calling on behalf of the Pay Us Not To Kill Kittens Foundation. All our agents are currently with other callers. Please stay on the line and a representative will be with you shortly.”

After much (way too much) thought on this question I’ve decided that there are very few groups of people who this particular method could work with: the very stoned, the very drunk, the very senile, and the very mentally challenged. All groups of people that have members who, when hearing that message might conceivably get confused into thinking that they were the ones who had made the call and wait for a representative to assist them. Even taken together these groups cannot account for much in the way of revenue.

Perhaps they are hopping that, baffled and weirdly compelled, people will stay on the line just to see how long it takes before they are transfered to an agent. In this case, it is a method that is likely to only work once.

Combined with the fact that there is a movie coming out about rouge man-eating killer sheep, this has to be a bigger sign of some sort of end of times than gays getting married or the availability of a vaccine to protect against cervical cancer. The right wing needs to reevaluate their priorities and get a handle on this automated telemarketing thing. It would be a shame for them to spend all this time looking for Satan in internet pornography only to find that he’d been in the telephone system all along.

You can expect that plot to hit the theaters in a few years, once the killer-sheep people decide to do a new project.

Playing Pretend (yet having nothing to do with sex)

2007-03-09T13:18:00.000-05:00

We all have secrets that we think are shameful, it’s part of being human. I’m going to share with you what I consider one of my darkest secrets, and amazingly it has nothing to do with sex:

Despite being in my mid to late twenties, I still like to play pretend games. As an adult I suppose that wouldn’t be a problem if I kept said games to the bedroom but that isn’t what I mean. For a long time I justified my mental games by the fact that I also like to write, but I would be doing exactly the same thing even if I wasn’t writing.

What sort of thing do I mean by “play pretend games?” Well, I mean pretty much the same thing I did when I was ten, only I like to think that the scenarios have become more sophisticated. For example, I have a sci-fi world in my head that is incredibly complex. In the context of this world, I can explain in great detail what kind of spaceship any automobile on the road would be. I do this while requiring that I simultaneously stay true to the design intend and function of said automobile’s unique design features and the requirements and restrictions of the imaginarily world. It’s both impressive and pathetic at the same time.

I have a “plot line” in this world that includes a character that I play in my head. I suppose it isn’t that different that role playing, except that I have never role played. As strange as it may seem, as a kid I was told by multiple friends who role played that I was not the “kind” of person they were looking to game with. Never quite been sure why that was, but as a consequence I haven’t actually gamed before. Fireheart has said on more than one occasion that she wants me to try to write this world up as a role playing game but I am not overburdened with time and I continue to insist that as a non-gamer I shouldn’t try writing a game. I certainly can’t be a game master for one, which is the next stage of what she would want me to do with it.

The reason all of this comes up now is that my company is failing horribly. We haven’t had any good paying work in a year. Moving to New Hampshire caused me to loose all the contacts I had cultivated in Vermont and with my worsened health; I haven’t been able to pursue new work actively enough. Also, we don’t have the money for me to have an out of home office. Without a public space it is much harder to go after clients or build relationships with the local chamber of commerce. Our office in Vermont only cost about two-fifty a month but I can’t afford that right now.

As a result, we have been looking into the possibility of getting me work doing CAD rather than design work to bring in some money. Temp agencies often have CAD work listings and are just as happy to contract a company as an individual. Without client work though, my SolidWorks (an industry standard CAD program that we pay a ridiculous amount of money to have and update) skills have become rusty. I needed an intricate project to work on that would push my abilities with the program farther than they had been pushed before. The project I came up with was designing in the computer, the small space ship that my Subaru Forester is in my mind.

I have now sunk just about 43 hours into the design and I can safely say I’ll need at least half again that, if not double, to finish and render the design. I have approached the project as if I was making a model. I have made the parts of the ship and then put them in a very complex assembly file. The rendering process is remarkably like painting a model.

It has been incredibly fulfilling to actually see the ship taking form in the computer in a form I can manipulate in three dimensions and has a lot of moving parts (I was thrilled to be learn limit-mates in order to make the wings open and close together). Of course, it is fulfilling to CAD-draft any design idea that one has only previously seen in one’s head, but it is somehow different when it is the spaceship. Part of that is the exciting challenge of designing around a set of rules defined by the technology of the world in my head rather than the real world. After all let’s be honest, I am never going to get to design a real space vessel, which was once a childhood dream, as well as the subject of more than one science fair project.

The process has gotten me asking an interesting (at least to me, but then it is my blog) question. When did I start to feel that this kind of imaginary game was not appropriate for someone my age? At what age did it stop being ok to play pretend? I can’t remember a specific moment or even year that I started feeling embarrassed by my mental games. I suppose I feel about my pretend games the way many people feel about masturbating. It’s one of those things that you feel you shouldn’t do, although you don’t quite know why and can’t seem to stop. Of course weirdly enough, I don’t feel that way about masturbating at all and totally fail to understand why some people do. Summerwind says he is equally puzzled by my embarrassment over my pretend world.

So what do I get out of this imaginary world? Being able to have many of the ordinary things I do in life have an element of excitement or fun makes the activities of daily life more interesting, which given the amount of effort these sorts of activities can take when my health is really troublesome, means it can make those activities possible. For instance having a complex story when I dislocated my shoulder several years ago made physical therapy more bearable. After all, I slipped in the kitchen and was trying to catch my fall is way less fun than a story about the optical-thermal ablative coating (long story, involves car washes and sparkly paint) of my spaceship failing and an energy bolt penetrating the cabin and my right shoulder, necessitating repair work and physical therapy to be re-certified as combat-ready (the TENS unit the therapist used was nerve stimulation to try to get the artificial replacement nerve fibers to synch with the remaining natural nerves).

Maybe this all sounds awfully stupid to you. Maybe it doesn’t. I am certain I’ll spend the next few days worrying about what people think, but right now I have a CAD spaceship with a retractable rocket assembly that I have to go figure the geometry for.

2007-03-01T18:17:00.000-05:00

Sorry again LJ folks if you got a whole bunch of the follow up to Neo-Nazi Skin Head. I've been having some technical difficulties with Blogger these last few days. Just bear with me and I'll work this shit out. -Wintersong

Follow up on "Apparently I'm a Neo-Nazi Racist Skin Head"

2007-03-01T17:30:00.000-05:00

Those of you who have been reading BarkingShaman since its inception (or who have gone back through the archives) may remember the post "Apparently I'm a Neo-Nazi Racist Skin Head," which was prompted by a challenging conversation I had with a representative from the Southern Poverty Law Center. The reason for my phone call was that I had found a SPLCenter page which purported to show Neo-Nazi or white supremacist tattoos. Imagine my displeasure to find that the SPLCenter had runic tattoos listed as hate symbols. Not specific runes mind you, all it said was rune tattoos.

At the time I wrote "Apparently I'm a Neo-Nazi Racist Skin Head," the essay stirred up a lot of emotional responses both in the comments section and in conversations I had with people who read BS.

Today I received an email from the gentleman I had spoken with at SPLC. I am not entirely sure how he happened across the post (I assume SPLC does a google search for their name periodically) but he wanted to share his impressions. I am reposting both his email to me and my response for those of you who are interested.

-to winsongt@gmail.com-

Hi,

I just happened to see your Oct. 19 posting about the conversation you and I had about neo-paganism and neo-Nazism. I appreciate the mostly evenhanded tone of the post. A couple of brief things: I didn't think it was fair to say we would assume you, or a group you mention, are neo-Nazi -- we very clearly understand that there are non-racial heathens as well as anti-racist ones. I think it's certainly false that we would "automatically declare" Asphodel to be a white supremacist organization. We never do that. We look carefully at the ideology of every individual organization that we list as a hate group. We have never listed Asphodel or, in fact, other such groups.

ON the question of what percentage of, say, Asatruers are racist, that's obviously very open to debate. I believe did mention to you Mattias Gardell's scholarly book on racism within the heathen scene, and he certainly estimates higher than 10%. In any event, that really is open to debate, although I suspect the percentage is substantially higher.

That's all. I just happened to see the post today, many months later.

Best,

Mark Potok
Director, Intelligence Project
SPLC

-my response (and no, I am not going to post Mr. Potok's email address)-

Thank you for your email and I also want to thank you for the time you spent back then talking to me on the phone. When I called SPL I did not expect to get an actual person on the phone, and certainly did not expect you to take so much time for our conversation.

Having gotten your email, I have gone back and re-read the BarkingShaman post and I want you to know that I did not intend to imply that the SPLCenter had actually declared Asphodel to be a hate group, but rather note that it could happen if the organization was judged on such things as heathen tattoos (Raven Kaldera has a large runic tattoo on his forearm for example). However, on reflection, I can see how I could be misinterpreted, so I have edited the post to reflect that that was not my intent while maintaining the integrity of the essay:

[ It blows my mind to think that the SPL Center could look at a group like Asphodel for example, and declare it to be a white-supremacist organization. If they looked at the leaders in the community though, they would almost certainly identify at least Raven and myself as neo-Nazis if they were basing their judgments on our body modifications. ]

Unfortunately, there are a great many people who rely on the SPLCenter to guide their concepts of who is or is not hateful. As our world becomes more complex it becomes harder and harder for an individual to hold a coherent picture of the totality of a problem as complex as hate groups in their head. That means that people may not choose to investigate further a declaration from SPL regarding who is or is not part of a hate group.

For example, had my mother (who has donated to SPL for as long as I can remember and reads pretty much everything you put out) seen the picture on your website of the rune tattoo with the description that it was a white supremacist marking, my own body modifications would have immediately become very frightening to her. The same could be said for a pagan or heathen with these sorts of marks who was applying for a job in which a tattoo would otherwise be acceptable. When an organization like SPLCenter wields as the degree of influence that SPL does, great care must be taken whenever generalities become involved.

Thanks again for your time both in our conversation and sending me an email,

2007-03-01T10:53:00.000-05:00

I figure I might as well ask you folks for some help with this. I have been experimenting with different layouts for BarkingShaman. My concern is that I have had some complaints from folks who don't like having to continuously scroll down when reading long posts. However, I lack the training to modify the Blogger html templates to make my columns wider by a small amount and the stretched templates don't seem to be easier to read because they are just too wide.

What do people think? Are the narrow columns a problem or should I leave the layout basically the way it has been? In the meantime I'll keep fooling with colors and fonts to try to make BS as easy to read as possible.

Wintersong

For the LJ folks

2007-02-28T23:17:00.000-05:00

Hey, I was just looking at Josh Tenpenny's friends page and it looks like BS sent most of itself out again. I apologize to anyone who feeds BarkinShaman off of Live Journal. In preparation for making my next set of hard-copy back-ups of BS I went though and screwed around with the formatting of all the posts and for some gods unknown reason Blogger decided to send it out again.

sorry sorry sorry

-Wintersong

Let’s Talk About “Sex” Baby…

2007-02-28T16:00:00.000-05:00

I’d like to start by making a specific point crystal clear. People who know me well (or I suppose have ever been in a room with me) will find this truth to be self-evident, but I’ll state it anyway:

I really like sex.

However, circumstances have led me to an interesting question, namely “what is sex?” Everyone thinks that they know the answer, and that everyone else’s answers are the same as theirs. It’s just not true.

I am going to be teaching a workshop at Dark Odyssey Spring Fire this April on how to have ethical erotic play that includes spooky foo. As I’ve been thinking about my workshop, I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the nature of sex. For instance, and this will be too much info for some of you, I do not have anal sex with my husband. It is a source of some discontent on my part, but for reasons of his own this particular area of sexuality is off limits with him.

Some would argue that this means that Summer and I have not had sex in almost two years. I would strongly disagree. We have a lot of sex; we just don’t have that particular type of sex. However, if your idea of “sex” is based on the *insert tab A into slot B* model than you could make the argument that we have been having doesn’t count.

Even the *tab A slot B* world view has its problems. How for instance to you define what tab A or slot B even is. Many conservative arguments against gays are based on the idea that the only true sex is the penis-in-vagina variety. President Clinton brought the question of whether oral sex counts into the public consciousness. I think it is safe to say that now, over a decade later; the question has yet to be resolved in the public sphere.

It could be argued that the oral sex issue has been beaten to death. Let’s try less familiar territory. In gay sex there is a practice called “docking” in which an intact (not circumcised) man rolls his foreskin over the head of his partner’s penis. There is a tab A and a slot(ish) B involved, but is this “sex” in such a literalist worldview? I somehow doubt the current president of the United States will be accommodating and bring this question into public discourse through his indiscretions, as much fun as that would be.

I suspect that many of the readers of Barking Shaman discarded the *tab A slot B* concept some time ago. This doesn’t necessarily mean that they have a better grasp of what sex is.

The magnificent Lee “Bridgett” Harrington passed on this definition of sex from one of hir partners: “Did someone get off? If yes, then it was sex.” I must admit that there is an alluring elegance to the simplicity of this definition. I think it is safe to say that in most contexts it can be applied without problem. However, just in the course of my conversation with Lee, we found some circumstances this definition doesn’t quite cover.

The first and perhaps most obvious is the case of professional sex workers. If a prostitute or porn star has professional sex and someone comes, the sex worker may not really consider the experience “sex” even if they were the party orgasming.

Similarly, there are situations where one activity, even with the same people involved, can be sex one time and not another. For instance, take CBT. If, as a shaman, I engage in some form of genital torture with another person as part of a sacred endurance ritual, I would not call it sex. However, if I was shoving needles through someone’s dick to get him (or me) off, that would be different, even though the act and the participants might be the same.

The question of what constitutes sex is largely academic for most people. However, for folks involved in the BDSM or Kink communities the question takes on greater import because the lines are more blurry. A friend of a friend is a serious dom who is in a relationship with a woman who is not interested in BDSM at all. They have had several conversations about whether it is ok for him to go to play parties and flog other women. He had to explain to his partner that for him, this was a form of “sex,” and if she was going to allow him to go play in that way she needed to first understand that. It took time for her to understand what he was saying because she couldn’t imagine getting off on what to her was a non-sexual activity.

Even outside of these communities the question is not always as straight forward as we might think. In college I knew a young woman who broke up with her boyfriend because she repeatedly caught him cheating on her. What makes this weird in my mind is that he was cheating on her with himself. In this young woman’s word view, the fact that her boyfriend masturbated was a betrayal of their relationship and constituted cheating. Most of the people I am close with are rather sexually open (some would say debauched) and to us this is a crazy idea. Neither I, nor my friends can imagine telling a young man that he can’t whack off, but then we don’t really considered masturbation to be “sex” in the same way that this young woman did.

Clearly this isn’t a question that will be answered here today. I could probably write at length about how I personally define sex, but what would the point be. While we all may have different ideas of what sex is, we should each make an effort to understand our own internal process on this subject. Gaining a better idea of what we think of as “sex” will help us to understand ourselves and in some ways be more tolerant of those around us. Defining our personal concept of sex and sexuality makes it clear that we need to remember not to assume that other people share our definitions. Anything you can think of someone, somewhere, probably gets off on it.

That’s part of what makes it all so much fun.

On the Edge of the Village

2007-02-28T01:19:00.000-05:00

Readers of Barking Shaman are familiar with my questioning of identity. The very first BS post was about the hard-to-define nature of my personal identity.

As I have written about before, most notably in “Undercover :-)” the eclectic nature of my life makes my interactions with other people simultaneously easy and hard. In this essay, I’ll be looking at that subject from a different perspective.

“Outsider” is a word that has defined my sense of self to some degree or another for my entire life. It is a role in society that had become familiar to me before the spooky shit even became a notable part of who I am. Being the barking guy sets one out as different pretty quickly. Being the barking, overweight, nerdy, gay (and flaming) guy takes that to a whole new level. Once the gods got involved it went to another level still.

However, even before the spooky crap, I discovered that there is a real power to being on the outside. Being the flaming barking kid added a new set of social complications, but it also removed a significant number of social pressures as well. Once the option of fitting in is no longer on the table there is really no obstacle to being you. If some of my friends in high school enjoyed my company because of the novelty of being around someone who regularly screamed about Flying Penis Man in the mall, well there were many more who just liked that I pretty much had no need to try to hide who I was.

Once the gods got involved though, things got far more complex. Even in a historical context, the shaman is almost always an outsider. The title of this post is a reference to the fact that in many tribal communities the shaman’s home was on the outskirts of the village far from other people’s homes. In my opinion, adjusting to this role is one of the most common reasons that people fail to make it through shaman sickness. Unfortunately, failing to make it through shaman sickness often involves dying or at least going totally bat-shit crazy.

Living where my family does (while being who we are), has gotten me thinking a good bit about the subject of being outsiders. The addition of several taboos, some specific to one or another of us, others applying to all three of us, have complicated our existence in Middle America. In the case of some of these taboos, I can clearly see their purpose beyond separating us out from other people, even though that is a side effect. Other taboos I suspect exist for the purpose of making us different. All this raises an interesting question, namely what is the specific spiritual value of “difference?”

I suppose that a fairer question would have been to ask whether there is a spiritual value to being an outsider. However, part of being a spirit worker is accepting that sometimes the gods know what they are doing. Since the condition in question seems to be so prevalent in both modern and historical traditions of spirit work, I’ll work from the perspective that there is some reason.

The first and foremost reason I believe that the universe makes us different from society is that if we are going to be doing spooky work it helps not to give a shit that we are doing weird spooky work. If the only way we were set apart was that we were doing spirit work we could easily come to resent the work for setting us apart. As this would be counter-productive from the perspective of the gods, it makes sense for us to be set apart in other ways as well.

Witness the prevalence of body modification in the spirit work community. A significant number of spirit workers I know or have worked with have in some way modified there bodies in the service of the gods. In my own case, I have tattoos, a brand on my leg, and stretched piercings. I can explain the spiritual reasons behind each mod. While tattoos are perhaps the most common body mod I have seen among spirit workers, they are far from the only ones. Most of the modified spirit workers I know are required by their patrons to explain the spiritual significance of their body mods if asked, further setting them apart. A permanent body modification also makes it harder to tell the universe to f-off and try to leave the spooky shit behind. Other ways I’ve seen spirit workers set apart include the prevalence of non-traditional professions, relationships, gender-identity, and sexual practices.

But aside from making it more palatable to be doing this weird spooky crap, is there power to be found in the role of the “outsider?” I think that there is. For one thing, many of us find ourselves in the position of ministering to other people. The outsider perspective can be a valuable tool in doing that kind of work. Being an outsider also makes it easier in my opinion to be honest with clients, even when being honest means being brutal. It can also be important to be recognized as “different” by people who come to us for spirit work. There aren’t any Master’s Degrees in being a shaman (none that count at least) yet people need to feel that a spirit worker is “qualified” the way that they expect their doctor or therapist to be qualified. Being perceived as different and spooky can in a strange way make people feel more comfortable and confident in our skills.

I’d like to put forth a theory though. I believe that being an outsider in society in one way or another makes the literal working with the spirits or gods easier. The non-human are the ultimate outsiders in society. Being already disconnected in some way from other people makes it easier to make the jump to working with the spirit world. I also think it makes us more trustworthy to the spirits. In a more specific example, the fact that as a shaman I am “dead” in some not-small part is an essential component for me in my interactions with the literal dead.

I believe that accepting the idea that being different has spiritual and magical value, rather than just being another difficult side effect of this kind of work, is essential to having a good attitude toward the work that the gods want done. Not that it is an easy thing to do. However, the gods have amply demonstrated their willingness to take options away. Witness the aforementioned taboos. As long being different is going to be a factor in many of our spiritual lives, we may as well work to see the bright side rather than engage in the mental and spiritual equivalent of closing our eyes, spreading our legs and thinking of England.

Slight Hitch in the Plan (and my chest)

2007-02-20T22:47:00.000-05:00

When I wrote "How do You Define "Quality of Life?"" I had no idea that I was coming down with the flu, which has now struck all three of us. Due to this unfortunate eventuality I won't be able to write much in the way of a post for this evening as I had promised.

I don't want to leave you with nothing though so I give you this quote I found in "Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors." The book is an incredibly well-written account of one of the finest moments in the history of the United States Navy and is a must read for anyone interested in the study of heroism and bravery.

When Great men blunder, they count their losses in pride and reputation and glory. The underlings count their losses in blood.

- Theodore C. Mason, Battleship Sailor (1982) as quoted in Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors by James D. Hornfischer (2004). p.358

I Guess King Arthur He Ain’t

2007-02-19T01:00:00.000-05:00

Let’s begin by making one thing perfectly clear: I have never served in the military. Leaving aside the minor issues of my fondness for cock and predilection for barking like a dog, not to mention a childhood history of using psych meds (most of the meds used to treat Tourette are on the military’s “never mind” list), I don’t think the military has much use for someone who can’t even lift his cat without major pain. Long before my neck injury or even leaving for college, I spoke with a Coast Guard Reserves recruiter. I was rejected because of the TS and having taken the drugs most commonly used to treat it, but looking back now I think my swishy hips and bent wrist would have constituted “telling” under DADT.

All that said, for spooky reasons I have studied physical and magical combat in a tough school. Before my injury I was a pretty damn good hand to hand and knife fighter. Now, while not a competition grade shot by any stretch of the imagination, I am quite competent with a variety of firearms. As a combat magician I have been in combat situations which left their own kinds of scars (that’s right kids, cut up your astral body bad enough and it scars too).

My reason for bringing all this up isn’t just to make myself feel better in the face of my second bout of bronchitis in a month. Instead I am trying to establish a foundation from which to criticize… His Royal Highness Prince Harry of England.

Actually I suspect that it is not Prince Harry that deserves my distain but rather the British government and perhaps some elements within the Royal Family.

The reason for my vitriol is that His Royal Highness is deploying to Iraq soon with the rest of his regiment of the British Army. Troop Leader Wales as he is known by his soldiers has been trained to command four tanks and eleven men. How will those men he has trained with and commanded going to feel when they are sent into combat sans the Prince. That’s right, as second in line for the throne of England, Prince Harry is not eligible for combat duty. He is too important.

The media has proudly pointed out that the Prince (and his brother who also is a military officer) is continuing a long line of military service. His father was a navy pilot. His grandfather abandoned his Greek and Dane royal titles to serve in the British military in WWII and his uncle served on board an aircraft carrier in the Falklands War. When the British government wanted to remove Prince Andrew from his dangerous posting during the Falklands War the Queen and Prince Phillip supposedly overruled the government in order to keep their son on that aircraft carrier.

These recent military exploits, and let’s be honest the Falklands War wasn’t Britain’s most dangerous hour and while flying planes is a dangerous practice it is unlikely Prince Charles was ever in anymore jeopardy then if he had become a tour bus driver, are only the surface of the British Royal military tradition. To make a broad and historically dubious generality: there is a historical tradition both in and out of the British Isles that members of the ruling family lead their troops into battle.

If we accept that broad generality, than should the current generation of British Royals have chosen not to join the military it would have been a break with family tradition. However, to join the military but be held out from combat surely makes a mockery of a traditional role of royalty that goes back millennia. It would be one thing if His Royal Highness was in a non-combat position within the military. That would be a way to get the invaluable experience of military training and contribute something back to the country without putting himself at great risk. However, Prince Harry is trained to command tanks for gods’ sake. I don’t think there is such a thing as an administrative tank commander.

My partner Summerwind, who lived for many years of his young life under British rule (first in England then in Hong Kong before the hand off to China) assures me that this all makes perfect sense from a British perspective. He has rightfully pointed out that the House of Windsor doesn’t do a whole lot of governing anymore. Rather, they are a symbol of Great Britain and the embodiment of British fortunes. While they don’t make law anymore, they still fill the traditional role of sacred kingship in the sense of being the country. Summer says that it could be devastating to the moral of the British people to loose a crown prince in combat.

However, Prince Harry is the same young man whose grandparents refused to evacuate London during the Blitz because if the citizenry couldn’t leave than they wouldn’t either. I know that there is a huge difference between the war in Iraq and the Blitz of London (although I bet the Iraqis could find some similarities awfully easily) but that doesn’t change the disparity between Elizabeth II’s refusal to leave London and keeping Prince Harry out of combat while his fellow troops go off to fight. All that changes is the scale of people affected.

What will it mean to the troops who serve with the Prince when they go off to get shot at and kill strangers while he stays in as safe an environment as you can have in what remains essentially hostile territory. Imagine the resentment of coming back from a bad patrol, dirty and bleeding, knowing that the man who could be your future king (obviously a concern or he’d be allowed in combat) stayed behind so he wouldn’t get hurt.

I’m not British, and unlike Summerwind I’ve not even had the experience of living in another country (or in his case, three). However, unlike the majority of my countrymen I believe that done right, there is value to be found in the monarchy model of government. Even in the extremely watered down form that the British still have a monarchy there is a spiritual and magical role played by the existence of the royal family.

The British schoolboy in Summer says that it makes sense for Price Harry to be held back from combat duty because of the potential damage his death might do to the country’s moral. At the same time though, the spirit worker in me wonders about the damage to the luck and fate of his country caused by his or far more likely his government’s unwillingness to risk his death when so obviously willing to risk the death of his subjects and comrades.

Enter Goths Smiling

2007-02-17T01:59:00.000-05:00

Picture a room full of goths. Make it a small dance club, a crowded small dance club. There’s a band performing and the club is far more crowded than normal, enough so that the air conditioning system is running even though it is fifteen degrees outside and a blizzard is scheduled to start within hours.

Got that in your mind? Ok, now picture all those people smiling.

That’s right, smiling.

Sounds pretty crazy but it is a sight I saw myself a few nights ago. Even crazier, it wasn’t the first time I saw this unusual sight. Personally I have now experienced this phenomena three times. That is because I have seen the Cruxshadows perform live exactly three times.

There is a good chance that you have never heard of the Cruxshadows, and an even greater chance that you’ve never seem them perform. Fortunately for you that will have no effect on the rest of this essay. The Cruxshadows are alternative/darkwave/goth band who have been playing music for about fifteen years. Like many bands in their genre they seem to be more successful in Europe than the states, although their most recent single got in the Billboard Top Ten Singles when it was released.

Aside from the fact that I am generally quite fond of their music (after all, Fire and I drove two hours to see them and then three hours home in a blizzard and considered it worthwhile) what amazes me about the Cruxshadows, and their singer/songwriter Rogue is their ability to bring joy to a crowd generally resistant to outward expressions of such (or really any) emotion.

At the recent concert I watched with amusement as an attractive young woman clearly struggled to maintain an air of angst/impassivity for a solid several minutes before abandoning all pretenses and grinning like an idiot.

The image that stands out above all else from the evening though is of Rogue standing in the middle of the crowd on a bar stool. At this point I should mention that he periodically steps into the audience and walks and dances through the crowd while continuing to sing using his headset microphone. He went and got a swiveling bar stool and spun himself around in circles while singing using only his own movements. People who know me will be shocked to discover that the reason this stands out in my mind is not directly related to the sight of Rogue’s gyrating hips.

Rather what stands out is his total confidence. This is a pretty risky, albeit impressive stunt. For a band with their punishing tour schedule, an injury to the singer could be disastrous. However, I don’t believe Rogue was ever really in any danger whatsoever. There is no doubt in my mind at all (and I suspect the same could be said for him) that if he had lost his balance he would not have hit the ground. There simply isn’t any way that the audience would have let that happen.

I have seen other performers who possessed incredible “presence.” Rogue, and to a lesser extent the rest of his band (especially the electronic violin player, Rachel who is unbelievable) are exceptional but not alone in this area. It is not the remarkable blend of intimacy and power over and with the audience that is most significant in my mind. Instead it is what the band seems to do with it, namely make people feel good. One might even say good about themselves.

Don’t misunderstand me for a moment; the Cruxshadows do not sing exclusively happy songs, far from it. I may be wrong, but right now I fail to think of a single song of theirs that I would call “happy,” weird perhaps (try listening to the song “Carnival”) but not happy. At the same time they generally lack the brutal despair of say, early Nine Inch Nails. Their music tends to revolve around the human condition, sometimes in a mythological context sometimes not. One of the finest songs I have ever heard honoring the sacrifices made by soldiers and warriors is “Winterborn(This Sacrifice)” off of their album “Wishfire.”

I have spent the last several days trying in to grasp and explain the effect that the concert had on the crowd. There was clearly a good deal of energy and foo flying about, but at the time and in retrospect I have been unable to pin down exactly what it was. I will say this, if in the middle of the concert Rogue had told everyone to take off their underwear and put it on their heads they(we) probably would have. If he’d told them to go kill some guy they(we) probably would have done that too. Where the real power was though is that there is no way he would have asked that and that is how he got such power in the first place. He conveys an intimacy and with it a trust that as a shaman I know I should distrust, but instead find comforting even in retrospect.

As a shaman, I would love to know what about Rogue and the Cruxshadows inspire these feelings. However, as an audience member, I honestly don’t want to know. Attending a ritual and being able to enjoy it purely as a participant, rather than analyzing its effectiveness/structure/spiritual impact is a privilege that one gives up when one becomes a spirit worker. This concert was a rare opportunity to recapture some of that feeling of magic (rather than foo) and I see no need to look behind the metaphorical curtain.

How Do You Define “Quality of Life”

2007-02-16T16:42:00.000-05:00

Readers of BarkingShaman may have noticed that it has been some time since my last post. The reason for this is simple: Lunesta stole my brain. Those of you who watch television will remember the creepy advertisement for this particular sleep aid in which a big glowing luna moth repeatedly flies by. I can personally attest that the atmosphere of that ad is really what one feels like falling or trying to wake from a Lunesta assisted sleep.

The reason that I am sleeping the sleep of the glow-y moth is that I haven’t really been sleeping otherwise. An examination of the time stamps on some of the older BS posts will bear out my point. Unfortunately, I simply can’t get the clouded feeling out of my head through the course of the day. If I have also used morphine (on the advice of my doctor) this is even worse.

On the other hand, let’s make a list of the downsides to using Lunesta:

A) Thought processes are indisputably slowed throughout the day.

B) Within fifteen minutes of taking a Lunesta my mouth fills with a bitter metallic taste. Drinking or eating is extremely unpleasant. This taste lasts for in excess of 36 hours after taking one Lunesta. Aside from just sucking, this has also caused severe dehydration.

C) I shit you not. When I started this list I had four things to list. Three of them were mundane and the last will be spooky. However (and I swear I’m not making this up), I no longer can remember what the third point was.

D) I think my spooky shit is suffering from the sleeping drugs and mental dulling. I have learned to address this sort of thing before She addresses it for me.

E) I think what C was supposed to be was that the cognitive dulling has made it very hard for me to do things like keep up with BarkingShaman or my business. Honestly, I am not sure if that is what it was or not, but I think so.

F) Nope it wasn’t. I just remember what I was going to say. I have had a headache for the last several weeks. The doctor says it is unlikely to be caused by using the Lunesta (although admitted that dehydration was a possibility) but I remain unconvinced. It isn’t as bad now, but it is still there after over two weeks. The doctor I saw (while mine was in Honduras) explained that I had a complicated medical situation so anomalies like multi-week headaches had to be expected.

So how do you define “quality of life?” At what point does the frustration of not being able to do the work I need to do (or remember where the fuck my wallet is for that matter) overcome the increased comfort of being able to sleep at night. Lunesta is supposed to be non-habit forming but I must confess that the prospect of a full night of sleep is tempting beyond belief. I suppose you could say that it is the sleep that is habit forming not the Lunesta, but the idea of not taking it tonight fills me with anxiety.

So in the interest of maintaining a useful quality of life (and not getting my ass kicked by a certain deity) I am making this pledge: Today is February 16^th. There will be another BS post tonight (meaning before next dawn not midnight) and it won’t be one of these “in my life” posts. Rather it will be an actually commentary essay like most of the posts in BS. In addition, there will be an essay post on the 22^nd, 24^th, and 26^th.

The only exception is that there is a chance we may be going to Portland ME tonight to see the Cruxshadows again since Summer was sick when Fire and I went on Tuesday. If I am going to a concert tonight then I won’t be posting this evening.

If I can maintain a quality standard of writing, and I can tell that I have failed in this post compared to previous ones, then I will continue to use the Lunesta and work through the fog. If however, I am unable to even successfully write for BarkingShaman than the Lunesta will have to go and another option sought out.

-Wintersong Tashlin

This is CNNOnion?

2007-01-24T00:16:00.000-05:00

Someone has missed the point. To be fair I am unsure as to whether or not I may be that someone, but from where I sit the world is making my brain hurt. Witness this image.

At first glance it looks like an ordinary post-SOTU CNN Online front page. However, if one is to look at the lower right-hand portion of the image something is awry. That something is the “BREAKING ONION NEWS” box.

For those of you who don’t know, The Onion is one of the most successful online satirical newspapers (there is still a print version put out as well). Onion headlines often cut to the heart of the absurdity of the American experience. Their post-9/11 coverage attracted some of the widest publicity, prompting Newsweek to affirm that The Onion really is “America’s finest news source.” A recent article, “Amazon.com Recommendations Understand Area Woman Better Than Husband” is an excellent case in point. Of course, The Onion doesn’t always rely on current events: “Why do all these homosexuals keep sucking my cock?” is a timeless piece of… journalism.

Perhaps it is apparent then why I am so flabbergasted (fun word, don’t get to use it often enough) by the presence of an Onion link as part of CNN Online. For one thing, there have been too many distressing instances over the past several years in which it has been hard to tell that an article on CNN wasn’t in fact a spoof from The Onion. And for its part, the Onion has carved out a web presence and a loyal following from pointing that sort of thing out. Can either outlet remain true to the intent of their content when existing in this sort of relationship?

Ok, they probably can both do that just fine. The Onion has demonstrated time and again that they don’t really give a fuck what the world thinks as long as people laugh, and CNN is probably incapable of seeing the irony of having fake news headlines next to such “legitimate” gems as “Beefier High School Football Players Verge on Obesity” and “Sea Lion Wanders on to Dairy Farm.” (Sea Lion headline found originally here on CNNOnline, although it goes to an affiliate website)

I have been sick lately and having pain problems to boot (being sick means I can’t have barking tics which means more physical tics and hence more pain) so I have been sleep deprived and this evening I added two Benadryl on top so perhaps this seems weirder to me than it really is. Hence the screen shot. After all “CNN Online to Carry Onion Articles” sounds, well like an Onion article.

It’s Not Paranoia If It’s True

2007-01-18T19:23:00.000-05:00

As I have discussed in BarkingShaman previously, one of my roles in Tashlin is to monitor news, weather, and international affairs for information that I feel is relevant to who we are and what we do. As I have also indicated on this blog, I feel that the United States and the world are entering into what could prove to be a very difficult and scary time. The Crazy Years as they were prophesized in Robert A. Heinlein in his famous Future History.

I have been told time and time again, maybe by some of you reading this blog, that I was looking for enemies where there weren’t any and that I was allowing a persecution complex to make mountains out of molehills.

Read this article and tell me if I am crazy to be afraid. Before thinking that this has nothing to do with us because it is happening in another part of the world, please note that the majority of the churches that have broken their ties with the Episcopalian Church in the U.S. have allied themselves with the Anglican Church of Nigeria, the country this article is about. In fact, the head of Nigeria’s Anglican Church strongly pushed for and supports the law discussed by the article. By extension we can assume that the members of the American churches that have chosen to place themselves under his leadership feel the same way.

Ordinarily I would just post a link today I will reprint the entire article:

Nigeria Prepares To Vote On Bill To Outlaw Meeting Gays
by 365Gay.com Newscenter Staff

Posted: January 18, 2007 - 5:00 pm ET

(Lagos) Legislation that would strip gays and lesbians of all civil rights has passed its final hurdle and is set for a vote in Nigeria's Parliament.

The bill started out as a ban on same-sex marriage and has been revised to make it a crime for more than two gay people to be in the same venue at the same time.

It prohibits LGBT social or civil rights groups from forming. It would be illegal to sell or rent property to same-sex couples, watch a gay film or video, visit an LGBT web site, or express same-sex love in a letter to one's partner.

The legislation goes so far as to make it a criminal offense to impart information of HIV/AIDS to gays or for non-gays to meet with any group of gays for any purpose.

The penalty would be five years in prison with hard labor.

Gay sex already is illegal in Nigeria with sentences up to 14 years behind bars. In the mostly Islamic north homosexuality can be punishable by death.

Last year it became a crime for same-sex Nigerian couples to travel abroad to marry.

"Nigeria seems certain to legislate one of the world's most sweeping and repressive anti-gay laws, unless international pressure is bought to bear on the Nigerian government," said Peter Tatchell of the London-based LGBT human rights group OutRage which has been monitoring the situation in Nigeria.

"The bill outlaws almost every expression, affirmation and celebration of gay identity and sexuality, and prohibits the provision of sympathetic advice and welfare support to lesbians and gay men," Tachell said.

The new bill has the support of Nigeria's Anglican Church, and its leader Archbishop Peter Akinola who has been at the forefront of opposing gay clergy in the denomination. Conservative Anglican churches in the US have aligned themselves with Akinola.

Impetus for the legislation followed the legalization of same-sex marriage in South Africa.

Last year Zimbabwe passed the "sexual deviancy" law making it a criminal offense for two people of the same sex to hold hands, hug, or kiss.

Hanging on the course of this damn cold, so to speak

2007-01-12T12:23:00.000-05:00

It is not a great day today. About four days ago I developed a sore throat and it is developing into bronchitis, an ailment that I get several times a year. Ordinarily this would not be a huge deal. I am accustomed to this after twenty-plus years of struggling with this specific ailment and I know that while I might feel like I am dying I, it will be better in a few days.

Unfortunately, I do not have a few days. I am scheduled to go up in a “superman” style hook suspension with Rites of Passage on this coming Sunday. Now it looks like I probably won’t be able to. There is a chance that I will be doing well enough tomorrow (Saturday) that I will be able to keep the appointment, but if I am not doing better by early afternoon I’ll have to call and cancel.

This situation has got me thinking though. The dominant thought is something along the lines of “what the fuck am I thinking?” It’s not that I don’t want to do the hook suspension, I do. It’s just that I imagine that the majority of the population would be delighted at coming down with an upper respiratory and sinus infection if it meant not having between eight and ten modified fish hooks driven through their flesh and used to hold them off the ground. Yet here I am, depressed by that very fact.

I suppose that the most logical conclusion is that I am just whacked in the head. Something in my make-up is skewed in a way that makes going up on hooks a good thing. Certainly there is an element of truth to that. My recreational use of sharp and/or unusual objects is a well established fact in my circle of friends. Pain is an integral part of my sexual experience of the world and I find the contents of an EMT’s supply bag far more erotic than scented massage oils.

It would seem that the pondering could stop there, but it can’t. There is more going on than just my brain being weird. For instance, I don’t find hook suspensions erotic. I have had hooks put in me, I have gone up in a suspension once before, and I have certainly seen many pictures of various people in various forms of suspensions. None of those things make the blood rush away from my head.

Nor it should be noted to I place any great weight in ones ability to withstand physical pain. I have been up on hooks once before. If being suspended was about proving something, then once would have been enough. People who do really crazy painful shit don’t impress me all that much. Admittedly, depending on what they are doing, I might find it hot. But that doesn’t mean that I think that they are better people for being able to withstand pain. This is the same as not being awed by someone who can play a sport well enough to be paid millions of dollars. Or can play an instrument well enough to pack Carnegie Hall. Impressive skill in one area, but do not make you a superior person overall.

I know why I want to do this suspension. The other hook suspension I did was a four hook, “suicide” style hang. It was an integral part of the last of the four ordeals from my shamanic death cycle. It also sucked. A lot. First off, it was chilly out. There was some very serious spooky shit involved in the whole thing. And it was a four hook suicide suspension, which while putting in the hooks is easier, is a much more intense hang than an eight or ten hook superman. Not to mention that a “suicide” is much harder on the back and neck, not areas where I am doing great to begin with. Based solely on that experience, I would be unlikely to do another suspension.

However, I had been interested in being suspended for a long time before the ordeal. I am planning on doing this next hang because I want to find out if suspending is something that I could enjoy/find meaningful. There is no way to separate the “ordeal” from the “suspension” in my previous experience. It is important that I go up in a way that will let me focus on experiencing the suspension itself. This is also the reason I wanted to do a superman since that style is a less painful hang than a suicide. Obviously the placement of the hooks is more intense, both because of the number of hooks and the locations they need to be placed, but I can handle getting the hooks.

This train of thought clearly leads nowhere. Why I want to do this suspension doesn’t really say anything about why I wanted to do one in the first place. I have some ideas though.

First off, and speaking only for myself, there is an undeniable connection between sexual ecstasy and spiritual ecstasy. I am not saying that I find sexual experiences spiritual or spiritual experiences sexual, but there is a similarity in the mental states and afterglows of both. It might make some sense then that if pain is can take me to places sexually that I couldn’t go otherwise, that it might have the same effect on a spiritual experience.

There is also something to be said for doing something that is powerfully other in the pursuit of spiritual enlightenment of some sort. In both ritual and magical practice we talk about “creating sacred space” and/or defining the protected boundaries of a working. “Going” someplace in one’s head is aided by literally “going” someplace in the mundane world designed for that purpose. That can obviously take many forms. Sacred space can be a sacred grove that has been used for worship for years and it also can be burning some incense and lighting some candles in your bathroom. One common thread in most forms of sacred space though is separation, usually physically. And again that can mean a place that you only go for this purpose or it can mean closing the door to the room you have made a sacred space.

The “separation” of being suspended is undeniable. The feeling of something on which we are supported is a constant in our existence. One of the only clear memories about the suspension itself from my fourth ordeal was looking down as I was lifted off the ground and seeing the earth beneath me but not touching it. You could look at a suspension as the power of the spiritual “lifting you up” and overcoming the power of the mundane in the form of the gravity holding you down.

Surely a bit of discomfort is worth that. You can’t have a powerful experience if you are unwilling to put out anything.

If I am not feeling better I won’t be able to hang on Sunday. Nor would it be as meaningful or enjoyable if I did try to suspend with a sinus infection and bronchitis. But I console myself with the fact that I will do it. If I have to cancel, I’ll try to reschedule at the same time. As strange as it may sound, this is something that I want to do. If other people find that hard to understand that is ok. I don’t entirely understand it either, and I don’t think that will change just because I do it again.

UPDATE 12/13/07- I called Emrys from Rites of Passage this afternoon and canceled my suspension for tomorrow. I now have a sinus infection and bronchitis. Aside from being a really bad idea, I don't think I'd get much out of a hang in this condition. He said to call as soon as I felt better and we could reschedule. On the other hand, I think that my puppy is way more unhappy than me, she got back from the vet's office this morning after having all her girly inside parts removed. I am guessing that sucks more.

Too different a difference...

2007-01-09T00:28:00.000-05:00

After a few months of giving it a shot, I have decided that I have to stop seeing the local physical therapist I have been working with. You might remember the post I made, More Than Just a Difference of Opinion regarding the radical differences in our beliefs. The post generated 17 comments at the time.

At that time most of the people I spoke to about the situation advised me to find a different care provider. I did not do so, and I do not regret that decision. The gods above and below know that my personal beliefs and way of life would not mesh well with the beliefs of the majority of the populace (especially here in New Hampshire). However, I feel quite strongly that it is my obligation, especially as a shaman and community leader to work with people of different faiths and belief systems. In one of the earliest posts on BS I wrote about the need to put matters of faith aside in the interest of having a functional multicultural society. Certainly I would hope that a prospective client not choose someone else's company rather than my own due to my paganism.

However, as was pointed out by many at the time, physical therapy is a much more intimate form of interaction than sitting on a public transportation committee. I feel it is necessary to reiterate that fact that this physical therapist has never failed to be professional, courteous, and even kind to me over the course of my treatment. The only exception that comes to mind is being subjected to several weeks of Christmas carols, but I can surely deal (although the Muppets album was a bit much, nothing like Kermit singing about the birth of "our" lord and savior).

I have finally come to the conclusion that I am unable to be comfortable with, or fully trust her in the way I have to for the care to be effective. Also, I have issues with giving her my, or my insurance company's, money.

I buy Shell gasoline because they have a good employee care rating with HRC. I take pride in the fact that the company that makes my car advertises exhaustively to the GLBT community. Yet for something as intensely personal as physical therapy, I see a woman who honestly sees nothing wrong with a public school teacher telling a Muslim student during class that she is going to hell unless she abandons her evil ways and embraces Jesus Christ. A woman who feels that it should be illegal for me to even have the health insurance that pays for my treatments because my coverage is through Summer's company's domestic partner insurance plan.

Unfortunately, I have yet to figure out how to best handle the situation. First of all, I can't just stop making appointments. I need physical therapy and she has my prescription in her files, which I will need to make arrangements with another provider. More importantly, I think it is appropriate for me to make the reasons for my departure known. I am a shaman. That means that I have an obligation to not shirk away from uncomfortable truths, and from sharing said truths when appropriate.

I have decided that I will write her a polite letter explaining my reasons for leaving. It is vital that I not sound bitchy, elitist or like I expect everyone to cater to my personal view of the world. I see nothing wrong with her holding her beliefs as dear as I hold my own. I just cannot be comfortable working with her because of the intensity of both of our beliefs, not solely hers. Belief cannot be "wrong" or "right." That is the nature of "belief" and what distinguishes it from fact.

No one believes things that are not true in their experience of reality. Accepting this makes interacting with those who disagree with you much easier. But, as I have discovered, that only works up until a certain point. I hold no ill feelings toward this woman. That is a surprise to me, but I find that it to be the case. That doesn't change my inability to be comfortable having this form of relationship with her. A fact that I find leaves me a bit disappointed in myself. Unfortunately, my health and financial situations do not permit the leisure of trying to work this out at this time.

I would be interested in how readers of B.S. think I should approach the writing of this letter. Especially what points you folks feel I should make a specific note of. If you have ideas, feel free to either post in the comments or drop me an email.

This can't be all good

2007-01-07T00:31:00.000-05:00

I am actually working on a new post, which can be expected in the next few days. This however couldn't wait. Here you have the temperature statistics for the town where I live for the date of January, 6 2007:

(via AccuWeather's website)
Yesterday, 1/6/2007 in *******, NH

High Temperature:

Actual: 69°F
Average: 31°F
Record: 69°F in 2007

Low Temperature:

Actual: 50°F
Average: 10°F
Record: -20°F in 1904

Precipitation:
Actual: 0.34 in

“It’s on my side, yes it is…”

2006-12-31T18:26:00.000-05:00

I am of course referring to time. One legacy of working closely with the deities that we do is that I have a pretty fluid concept of how time works. Var, our Lady’s highest servant (although it could be argued that they are of equal status, just doing different jobs) supposedly functions outside of what we think of as normal time. I’ve heard him try to explain how this works, and while I don’t think anyone listening really understood what he was saying, he definitely conveyed the idea that our concept of time is limited by the perspective of our experience of reality.

All that said, I don’t think that most people have as rigid a concept of how time works as they might think. Witness the following.

A few hours ago I received a phone call from next year. I don’t mean that I got a message from the Bosses about what was going to happen next year. I mean that my cell phone rang and the call was from 2007, while I am still in 2006. At first glance that sounds awfully crazy. But some of you may have already figured out what I am talking about.

Regular readers of BarkingShaman might remember that my partner Summerwind is in New Zealand for three weeks (now closer to two). He called me a few hours ago to wish me a happy new year. Where I am it is the afternoon of December 31st 2006. Where he is it is midday on January 1st 2007. Hence I was talking to someone from 2007 while I was still in 2006. Surely that makes perfect sense, a rigid concept of time should allow that, right?

However, the more you try to parse it out, the less sense it starts to make, not more. Summer and I exist on the same point of the time stream, what we think of as “now.” But a concept of time that allows “now” to be many different times doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. How can now be 5:50pm on the 31st here AND be 11:50am tomorrow (from my perspective)? We accept that that is the reality, but do we try to understand it? I don’t think most people are very comfortable trying to do so. If something in the world happens, such as an election. The people in New Zealand don’t get the results before we do, even though they live in “the future.” Rather it just happens on a different day.

Look at it this way. If the terrorist attacks of 9/11 had included simultaneous strikes in multiple parts of the world, some countries would mourn the tragedy of 9/11, while others would mourn the tragedy of 9/12, even though the attacks would have happened at the same “time.”

We manage to maintain in our minds two separate ideas of time and how it works. One concept is built around the idea of a universal “now.” That is the place on the stream of time which lies between the past and the future, and is occupied by our reality. The other concept is built around clocks and the relatively arbitrary baseline of Zulu (GMT/UTC). This other concept of time, which bases our idea of “now” in relation to Zulu time is what allows for the idea of it being different times in different parts of the world (24 parts actually). Although the two ideas should be incompatible, we maintain both in our minds and function just fine using one or the other when convenient.

Every now and then though, the two collide. My conversation with Summer was a good instance. It was simultaneously the 31st and the 1st. Yet obviously we were communicating in real time, or as close as transmission lag would allow.

I could go on further about this subject, but I don’t know if I could achieve any greater clarity in doing so than I have already done (or failed to do, you decide). The possibilities that this conflict raises are profound. If we really can maintain two disparate time concepts in our minds, surely we can maintain more than two. My experiences with Var have showed me that the possibilities are truly endless when one ventures into the realm of time. Interestingly, a dictionary search (as I just discovered) of the word “var” notes that it is the root word for words describing multiples, such as “various” or “variable” or “variation.”

As spirit workers and/or magicians, I believe, and so does the rest of Clan Tashlin, that we have an obligation to try to examine our spiritual or spirit driven insights with regards to how they interact with the modern world around us. As spirit workers, we sometimes get glimpses “behind the curtain” at the way the machinery of our existence works. In the last few years I have heard about several theories of experimental math or physics that describe many of the same concepts of time and the fabric of reality that Var has tried to explain to us.

I don’t think I’ll ever truly understand how times works. At the very least not while I am shackled to this meat-puppet and meat-brain perspective of corporeal existence. But that doesn’t mean that I can’t be awed by the fact that it does in fact seem to work, or at least our brains trick us into thinking that it does.

I like TV... and that's ok

2006-12-26T15:45:00.000-05:00

Summerwind is away in New Zealand with his parents and sister for the next 20days-6hours-55minutes (I have a little count down timer on my google page). Fireheart has gone to Washington, DC to see her folks in exchange for her parents paying for new brakes for her car.

And I have gone to my mother’s house for a few days (with the dog). In the time that I have been here I have had an important realization: I like television. In fact, I think I’ll say it again just for good measure. I like television!

We haven’t had cable TV at our house for a few months because we were trying to save money. We haven’t. The money spent on extra books, magazines, and shows downloaded off of iTunes has equaled out to the same amount. We have an appointment for the cable guy to come in a few days. But that is not the point.

My parents have nice cable. Full out digital with all the premium channels. Last night I sat for a few hours and watched a marathon of Mythbusters, a favorite of mine that is not available on iTunes. It felt great.

In the spiritual, intellectual, and academic worlds that I have lived in for the last eight years, liking TV is frowned upon. Kind of like having a fondness for the occasional Twinky is frowned upon in… well in the same groups of people as TV. Actually, there is a remarkable similarity. Just as I have talked about liking the occasional junk food splurge, I believe that many people in these circles also like their television.

If you are reading this post, I am guessing that you also masturbate, maybe even to pornography. I think that for some people, TV is like masturbation. You do it. You know your friends do it. Maybe you and your friends do it together sometimes. But you don’t tell everyone about it.

If you think that I am embellishing here, well maybe I am. My lasts post have been all serious and shit and I need a break. Still, try going to an open public pagan gathering and after ritual saying loud enough for lots of people to hear “Hey, how about last night’s Survivor?” I’m more of a Project Runway man myself. Surprise! But the point remains the same.

When I was in college, when your family got a television was a mark of pride, the later in your life the better. “Well, I didn’t have a TV until I was thirteen years old!” The older you were when you started watching TV the more “intellectual” you were. This wasn’t everyone by any stretch, but plenty of the people I knew.

I have written in BS about using junk food and television to create mundane space. As a way to get away from the spooky shit that pervades the lives of those of us on the spirit worker path. There is great value in that, but it isn’t the only thing that TV is good for.

TV can just be entertaining. Sometimes you can just watch it because there is something on that you want to see. No better reason is required. Of course, it can also be mind-rotting crap. I will be the first to admit that. Like junk food, you can’t over indulge. And like pornography, sometimes it is hard to find something you like, and tempting to just go with what is there rather than try again later.
I’m looking forward to having the choice to do so again. I like watching endless West Wing reruns sometimes. I’ll have to be careful that I still get work for the company done until I get an office outside of the home, but the same goes for books and porn already. Maybe I’m just a bit crazy, but I don’t think that liking to watch TV makes me less spiritual or intelligent. Like with my increased tics, I think I will endeavor not to care if people agree with me about that.

I am a shaman and a magician. My goddess owns me. I bark like a dog. I am queer and poly. And I also like my porn and my television. So there!

"Life is demanding, without understanding"

2006-12-22T13:32:00.000-05:00

“Life is demanding, without understanding.” Those immortal and some would argue, incomprehensible, words lead us into tonight’s topic, signs. Or more accurately, Signs.

Superstition is an inevitable professional hazard when one is a shaman, spirit worker, or magician. Knowing when something is coincidence or fate, a sign from the gods or just a freak occurrence, or even a sign of something but maybe not something spooky, is one of the hardest and most constant challenges in such a profession. There are obviously tools available to us to help make these sorts of distinctions. Divination, prayer, watching for omens, cross-checking our experiences with those of our colleagues and friends, even keeping an eye on the news, can all help us differentiate the likely possibilities.

The entire process of looking for Signs of Significant Things is complicated greatly when the Bosses tell you that you should be looking for Signs (for convenience and not sounding like a wanker that is the last time I am going to capitalize that word unless it is necessary for differentiation) but not necessarily what those signs will indicate or when you should expect them.

Of course, there is a second part to the question of recognizing something as a sign vs. just something that happened, and that is what, if anything, should I do about it? We’ll look at that question in a bit.

One issue that seems to have gripped many people both in and out of the pagan/spirit worker world is that of the weather. I live in New Hampshire which is not all that far from where I grew up in central Massachusetts. So even though I have recently moved, I still have a pretty good idea of what typical weather has been over my lifetime. This hasn’t been it.

This point was driven home especially hard as I was, well driving to Cauldron Farm for the Asphodel Yule ritual. My new car has a little outside temperature readout at the bottom of the speedometer that has proven to be surprisingly accurate to within a few degrees of other thermometers. Granted we left for the farm in the middle of the day but the temperature on our drive held steady at just about 52F. Hard to get into the Yuletide spirit when one can walk around comfortably in short sleeves. At least I can when it is that warm outside. This was not terribly out of synch with the year so far. We have yet to have a snow storm with more than an inch of accumulation on the ground which is ridiculous for New England.

While this has been going on here in New England, the Pacific Northwest has gotten slammed with several unusually severe storms, one of which dropped two feet of snow on Seattle, Washington, which is unheard of.

Has this been an anomalous year brought about by an unusual El Nino pattern, or is this a sign of something more significant? Perhaps related to global warming? More importantly for those of us in Clan Tashlin, what does this mean from a magical perspective? In the records of Clan Tashlin we have notations of severe storms or unusual weather making it much easier for different things to pass between the worlds (this year kids it’s like Samhain, only everyday!). Actually, this year hasn’t been that bad, but we’ve certainly seen periods when it has been in especially in areas where the barrier between the worlds is already weak. Unusual weather patterns can screw with a lot of natural cycles; there was just a report that in Scandinavia they are noticing that several species of migratory birds aren’t migrating. At the Farm I noticed that there was fresh green growth on the ground.

As land magicians we see many ramifications of this sort of thing. Certain kinds of energy flows and patterns are greatly impacted by weather abnormalities, not to mention disrupted growth patterns like non-migrating birds or fresh undergrowth in the wintertime.

Let’s get back to the discussion of signs though. Our Bosses have told us repeatedly that there are a lot of changes coming down the pike. Many of which will greatly impact people, sometimes in ways we might not like so very much. Should we look at the disrupted weather patterns, whether caused by global warming or not, as a harbinger of that phenomena? Or should we write it all of as sometimes the weather does wonky stuff?

I believe strongly in global warming and doing whatever we can to minimize it. I also believe that changes have been set in motion, including certain aspects of global warming, that will be beyond our ability to change. Part of Clan Tashlin’s job is to work on adapting to the changes coming over the world. This is why I operate a design company that does sustainable design and personal defense technology as aspects of its business focus. It is also why the Lady and Var trained us so extensively in understanding the energy and magics of the land.

Part of my job in Clan Tashlin is to monitor world events, political, social, economic, and geologic/meteorological. I also try to maintain connections with people who have demonstrated accuracy in precognition and divination. I have to work hard to try to avoid falling into the trap of believing that everything is a sign of something else. At the same time, too much skepticism can blind us.

Of course superstition or a tendency to regard “coincidence” as significant generally applies even more strongly in the everyday lives of spirit workers. In fact, I have heard it argued that the more one does this kind of work the less one believes in coincidences at all. In fairness, I have most often heard that argued by me. Lore is filled with omens and portents and they often play a major role in our lives as spirit workers.

Some spirit workers cope with this question by assuming that everything that happens has some deeper meaning. Others reject the notion of omens and signs entirely and ignore spooky indicator that are staring them right in the face. I like to think that most of us choose some middle road. As I mentioned earlier, divination and a connection to the gods and the universe are tools that help us differentiate the signs from just stuff that happens. Some spirit workers talk about a “feeling” that they get when something is a sign vs. just a duck crossing the sidewalk in front of a porn shop. Everyone has their system, but no matter what it is, superstition is an undeniable part of this life.

While most spirit workers have their own system for determining if something is a sign or not, one thing that is often not as simple is the question of “what do I do with this info?” Some schools of thought hold that it is best to ignore omens or signs because the universe has its way of doing thing and you shouldn’t get involved. Others hold the opposite view; if you have noticed or gotten the sign then it is your job to do something with the information. The same question applies in matters of precognition.

Back to what prompted me to think about signs and spirit work, the abnormal weather. Very few people in the spirit work world think that the weather changes mean nothing. When hurricane Katrina leveled New Orleans last year there was a feeling that something serious was coming. As I mentioned earlier, many of our gods have been telling their servants that shit is coming down. Is the weather a part of that? And if it is, then what?

As a land magician, I consider weather magic in all but the most select circumstances to be dangerous, irresponsible, and an expression of hubris. Asking the gods for a favor with the weather I don’t see as such a big deal, but a magician influencing the weather themselves tends to be a bad idea. So what I am asking has nothing to do with the weather itself. But should we be taking the strange patterns as a sign of things to come? And if it is, should we be putting in place contingency plans that our Bosses may have given us? How long is too long to wait?

“How long is too long to wait?” Like the question of the signs themselves, it is a question that applies to far more than the current unusual weather. In monitoring world events for Clan Tashlin I am seeing far more worrying things about in the world than some strange weather patterns. Signs? Or maybe the world is just working that way. When is something a sign? When is something just a happening, a duck walking in front of a porn shop, so to speak? Like the discussion of signs and what to do with them, it may be the most difficult, and perhaps the most important question that almost no one is asking.

I promise the next post won’t be as intense as the last few.

Ritual mutilation and discovering "normal"

2006-12-18T18:54:00.000-05:00

I’m re-posting an essay that I wrote for another website regarding a subject that is very important to me. I have been active in the movement to end routine infant circumcision for many years. As someone who considers themselves part of the body mod community as well I fully and wholeheartedly support anyone’s right to do whatever they choose to their body. What I don’t support is body modification on someone unable to give consent.

There has been talk in the news recently that circumcision could be an effective tool in the fight against HIV/AIDS in Africa. It is argued that mass circumcision could reduce the transmission of the HIV virus in people not using any other protection by 40%. This may be the case; there have been ongoing problems with certain aspects of the research.

I am afraid that the American Academy of Pediatrics will reverse their position that circumcision has no proven medical benefits in the face of this new data. The majority of sexually active men in this country are currently circumcised, yet our HIV/AIDS rates are not substantially lower than those of Canada or Western Europe and Britain. The situation here is considerably different than that of Africa, but that is not the issue. The issue is one of consent or lack thereof. Circumcision removes healthy and important erogenous tissue, a fact accepted in most parts of the world, although occasionally debated in the US.

Those of you who read BarkingShaman are aware that I do not shy away from tough subjects; that I am in fact forbidden by my Boss to do so. In addition to the subjects I have addressed here before, such as religion, sex, and politics. Since this is a subject I will probably be weighing in on again, here is the essay I wrote for blOUCH, a genital integrity site:

Ritual mutilation and discovering "normal" - Wintersong Tashlin

I was born in New York to Reform Jewish parents. I was circumcised at eight days in a traditional Jewish ritual circumcision. This means that my parent’s family and friends were all there to witness and celebrate the occasion of my public genital mutilation. I am told that a lovely brunch was prepared for everyone attending.

On the advice of her friends and family, my mother chose to leave the room where the ritual was taking place before the actual cutting of my genitals, and only returned after I was done screaming. Not one Jewish parent I have spoken to finds this remotely hypocritical, a fact that amazes me. The one time I asked my mother about it she said she just couldn’t stand to see me in that kind of pain. Couldn’t see it, but had no problems arranging for it and absolving herself of her clear guilt by simply not being present during it. I love my mother, and I understand that her person faith prevented her from even considered not having me cut, but the fact that she would not witness what she was cheerfully helping to prepare brunch for, makes me hate her just a little bit.

Because my genital cutting was a traditional Jewish ritual, it was done freehand with only a guide plate to prevent damage to the glans (well damage right then, circumcision could be said to “damage” the glans in the form of desensitization). It would be many years before I realized how dramatic the damage to my penis was.

Growing up Jewish, a religion I should disclose that I no longer belong to, I had no idea that circumcision was anything but the norm. I was a sexually interested child (and gay) from a young age and over the course of many sleepovers I saw many of my non-Jewish friends’ penises as well and, this being the early ‘80 they were all altered in the same way as mine.

I still remember the first time I ever saw an intact penis. I was eight years old and attending a Jewish sleep-away camp for the first time. The boys section of the camp had group showers for the different age groups, but the grounds keeping crew used the same shower rooms and they were mostly European college students who would come to America to work for two months and then spend another months touring the US before class resumed. Most of them were not Jewish, and being European, not circumcised. The first time I saw an intact penis I had no idea what I was looking at. The only conclusion I could come to was that the man’s penis was diseased or malformed in some way. It would be until I was a teenager, taking sex ed, and more importantly looking at gay porn that I would realize that his penis was the “normal” one.

Looking back now, I can clearly see that my adolescent sexual development was strongly shaped by the nature of my circumcision. Because so much skin had been removed, having an erection was often painful. As strange as it sounds to others, I had no idea that this was not normal. The only penis I had experience with from the inside was mine and this was how it worked. I also did not find the skin tearing or even bleeding a bit during erections or masturbation to be strange. Since I had always grown up with the idea of a circumcised penis as being the norm, surely I couldn’t be having problems connected to having been cut.

Right before I left for college, I learned about foreskin restoration on the internet. My interest at this time had nothing to do with being unsatisfied with the function of my penis. Rather as I became more and more involved in Neo-paganism and spirituality, I felt that something about my body was just wrong. Then, in several meditations I found that when I tried to visualize my body, I kept feeling that that something had to do with my genitals. Finally when I mediated with the intent of finding out the origin of this feeling I found my body being pictured as having a foreskin and the feeling of wrongness being gone. This was a strange idea for me, that having a foreskin could be more “normal” or “natural” than not.

After getting to college and becoming sexually active I would, of course discover that pain and bleeding are NOT normal parts of having an erection. This strengthened my interest in restoration. The first several months of trying restoration were discouraging to me as I did not seem to have any change in the tightness of my skin or the discomfort of erection. This was until my partner at the time noticed that I was gaining penile length. I would “gain” over and inch and a half of penile length, allowed for by the loosening skin freeing shaft tissue previously pushed back into the body, before any skin mobility would begin to show.

Years later, I am finally getting closer to being finished with restoration and some of the feelings of unhappiness with my genitals have eased. It has taken me years and years longer to restore than most people in part because I choose to go very carefully to minimize the impact of the radical and irregular nature of the mutilation itself. Also, I have at times given up for months at a time because of the knowledge that my restored foreskin will still not be the one that was taken from me (re-desensitization of the inner skin and glans always gets me going again). My partner of five years is intact from birth and the difference in our status caused issues early on in our relationship as I struggled with feelings of jealousy and inadequacy.

The question I find I ask myself regarding the circumstances of my own mutilation is this: how did my mother bath me and change my diaper for the seven days before the ritual and not find herself satisfied that I was perfect the way I was. How did she look at my body and think to herself “He’ll be even better after we cut some of him off.”

My mother considers my anti-circumcision activism to be a personal attack on her. This is fair, since I consider her endorsement and arranging for, my involuntary genital mutilation to have been a personal attack on me.