Metalhead Haircut

A week ago I decided to cut my hair. There's kind of a spiritual element to it. I cut it so that I would have no hair when my son Hektor is born. I will continue to grow my hair until my wife is ready to have our next child. As you can see I started w/ long hair and a beard



I shaved that off on 1/22/9. I still had my hair though.







The night of 1/23/9 I shaved my head, still got a tuft to play with.





Then that went too.



I freaked out everyone at our baby shower. Usually the cycle I follow is, grow it out for 4-6 years then dye it all black, last time this included the beard, which was freaky. I then get tired of redying it a year or so later and I cut it off.




Me w/ my sweet Meggie as Haides and Persephone on our first Halloween as a married couple in 2003.

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Chick Tracts: my dirty little secret

I abhor fundamental Christianity, which is why I am so conflicted when it comes to Chick Tracts. For the uninitiated: Chick Tracts are small comics, booklets in a strip format that focus on the founder Jack Chick's extremely rigid boundaries of Christianity. They explain the problems with being anything other than a fundamental Christian. I am conflicted because I don't appreciate the rhetoric, but find humor in the propaganda. Some of them are also quite funny. I was reminded of my love of these ridiculous comics since I've been on my Kali binge. I recalled a Chick Tract entitled The Traitor. It is about how Kali worship and Hinduism in general lead to
evil acts.











Another of the many issues targeted by Jack Chick is rock'n'roll music. One of the Tracts that he wrote on the topic of rock'n'roll was Angels?











The premise of Angels? is one of a Christian Rock band The Green Angels that falls under the influence of a shady manager named Lou Siffer (Lucifer?). In the end it comes out that all rock music including Christian rock is the work of the devil.

The Absolute classic of the series is Dark Dungeons. It explains how role playing games lead the innocent into a coven. Personally I've always known that D&D is the gateway to Devout Satanism. Never mind all the debunking that has gone on since the 1980s.











I enjoy reading these greatly and received several as tips at a burger joint I was working at, perhaps it was Jack Chick's Kali that I first encountered. I don't agree with anything in them, but am somehow addicted to the cheesiness of the strips. I have almost gone into a Christian Bookstore (which is itself terrifying to me) to buy a wad of tracks to relish the glory of their trashiness.

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OOPS SHAnti SHAnti SHAnti

I Screwed up. I said in my last post that the first time I encountered Kali was from Batman. It was not Kali, it was a demon that had similar attributes. The Batman demon has facial hair, and Kali was never depicted as a bearded woman.

from Detective Comics 603, 8/89 $0.75

Perhaps the first time then that I encountered her was in BE HERE NOW.

Ram Dass, 1971 $13.13

Coming Soon: my commentary on my drastic haircut w/ pics. Plus a post on Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter



BE HERE NOW!

OBEY MOTHER KALI

This is a picture I drew over about 4 nights. I started out drawing the whole thing in mechanical pencil, then I inked it and finished with colored pencil.





I think the first time I encountered Kali was in a Batman comic in the late 80s. Next I met her through the BE HERE NOW. I began to understand her true nature. She is nursing with one hand and has a bloody weapon in the other. She is ugly, she is beautiful. She is Creator and Annihilator. She is mother, she is murderer. She creates a new era by destroying the old. Her Nature is of a nurturer and killer. When she kills her husband Siva she is bringing about a new era as our incarnation is tied to his. I really love the myth of Kali.

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Accident @ Work

Looks like I'm not going to be doing any Yoga for a few weeks. I cut my hand at work while making dinner and had to get three stitches. I had to wait in the waiting room for 1 hr and then with my hand in Betadine for another 1.5 hrs, before they sewed me up. Also the last time I had a tetanus shot was in 1999, so I had to get one of those. My hand hurts worse than it did before.

I was complaining about how bad the tetanus shot was hurting my arm, so my wife asked, "You want me to hit it for you?" I responded sarcastically, "Yeah, why don't you hit it really hard?" Then she did and it has also hurt worse.

I always feel guilty when I go to see the Dr, like it's not as bad as I'm making out. Though I wasn't thrilled about getting stitches, I really didn't want them to say "Oh, it's okay. Let's put a band aid on it."

It's been nearly 9 hrs since I cut my hand and it's still bleeding a bit.

Kids These Days

There was no Golden Age,
Man never lived in harmony,
Eden was never a real place,
Nostalgia with mythology...

Nostalgia is a funny thing. From the Greek words Nostos (home) and Algia (pain) it refers to the pain that we feel longing for a homecoming. Nostalgia makes us believe that the past was better than it was. Inherently the present when viewed with a nostalgic viewpoint is worse than the past and things are continuing to get worse. This generation is more violent, promiscuous, dangerous, evil, etc... than prior generations. The only problem is that it isn't true. Mass media outlets constantly pump us with stories to horrify. The reason that we believe that we're living in a more violent world is because instantly we can see what is going on across the globe. In the past we were restricted to seeing what was going on in our own town or neighborhood, now we are bombarded with images of violence and genocide from across the world. Steven Pinker argued in his article A History of Violence that violence and genocide are becoming less common as we perceive them as becoming more common. He points to the fact that among ancient tribes it was extremely common to kill all males from another tribe and rape all of the females. Where rape is now shunned within our society, just a few generations ago it went completely unnoticed. This isn't because rapes weren't occurring, but because they were unreported and the victim was often found to be at fault, i.e. she dressed too provocatively. Accusing the victim was a large reason why women wouldn't report rapes. Though rapes still occur today, they are
much less frequent per capita.


In the late 1990s Tom Brokaw came out with a series of books on The Greatest Generation. This was a term that he came up for the generation who became adults during the second world war. They grew up making the sacrifices required of them during the depression. Not everyone made these sacrifices prior to and during the war. The poor were the ones who were generally required to make the majority of these sacrifices and they were far from saints. The Greatest Generation was also the one that gave rise to the violent biker gang once the soldiers came home and needed to raise some hell. This generation also had the greatest spike of divorce rates for any American generation before or since. Soldiers came home and found that they no longer loved the war brides who they married in haste, the war brides no longer loved their soldiers either.

Many choose the 1950s as the most idyllic time when families really got along. They are influenced by the sitcoms of the day which only showed the sunny face of family. Real families were nothing like the Cleavers or the Nelsons. Spousal and child abuse were rampant in the 1950s. A child would need to be severely beaten to arouse a call to Social Services. There were so many ills in the fifties it would be difficult to write about them all. Segregation, hate crimes, alcoholism, prescription drug abuse; all of these things were tolerated. The divorce rate was lower than today, but many women stayed in abusive and unfulfilling marriages out of duty or obligation.

People say that we need to live as the ancients in the bible. This is even worse than trying to live like a prior decade in that it goes back some 3,000 years. There was enough of all kinds of bigotry, vice, god sanctioned genocide, and regular violence and opression to go around.
RIGHT NOW IS THE RIGHT TIME!

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