The Game Of Signs

It's hard to remember now who taught me to play the game of signs. It may have been my sister, who - being annoyed with my childish pleas for attention - told me to go outside and look until I found something. Then again, my cousins would also play this game when they'd run out of other things to do. Since we'd all had the sort of parents who tended to give us withering looks and tell us to entertain ourselves whenever we complained of boredom, it may have emerged out of sheer necessity. 

At any rate, being much younger than my siblings and there being no other kids in the neighborhood to play with, the game of signs became the solitary child's treasure hunt.

It's easy. First find an object. Any old object will do, as long as it catches your attention. Take this leaf, for example:

Which way is is pointing? Well, go that way. Keep on going until you find something.

Ah, here's a renegade marigold, growing out of place. How many petals does it have? There's five, so walk five paces (or five feet, whatever works). In this case, to the shrubbery, where a butterfly flits among the blossoms.

Following the butterfly (he was too quick to photograph, so you'll just have to trust me on this) leads us to a couple of twigs shaped  sort of like a "t"...

What begins with the letter t? Tree, of course, so we must head over to the biggest tree in the garden and see what we find.

A feather, hiding in a crevice. Feathers mean birds, and the place to look for birds is a birdhouse.

In the grass beneath the birdhouse tree, there's a lost penny. Maybe that's our treasure? Or perhaps not. If it's heads, we stop. If it's tails, we'll go on.

Tails. So we must continue, but a nearby rock helpfully points out the direction...

 where we find a heap of colored glass baubles. That fits my definition of treasure. Score!

Though when my five year-old plays this, his usual definition of treasure is bugs. Well, to each his own. You can find all sorts of things, when you play the game of signs.

What this is, really,  is just some imagination and playing close attention to things, and when you pay attention, you are bound to find something.

 It's one of life's little miracles.

Invisible Monster Update

A while back I posted here about the "invisible monster" of anxiety and depression, and my use of  theta wave isochronic tones to try to reduce it. I promised an update back then, so here it is. 

Originally, I had planned to use the use the tones regularly, then take a break to see if the positive effects lingered. As it happened, I couldn't take a break for very long, as the anxiety levels would start creeping up again. I also experimented with many of the different types of theta wave tones available. Some of them make very pleasant listening, but for my own anxiety reduction effects, I still haven't found any better than the ones posted in the linked entry. YMMV.

Despite these not being brainwave frequencies, I also experimented with tones from the solfeggio scale. Even though any scientific evidence of these being beneficial is suspect in the extreme, I've personally felt that some musical tones can have positive effects. 417 Hz is a very comforting sound to me, though 528 Hz seems to be most popular. Regardless, this method didn't help and actually was starting to make things worse. I kept at it for a while, because I really wanted it to work, but eventually couldn't deny the detrimental effects. I found Buddhist and Hindu mantras to be more helpful than these. Again, YMMV.

What I did find to be extremely effective - and gives a huge boost to any calming or anti-depressant effects of the tones - is combining another form of media with the sounds. There are a lot of  videos on youtube that combine tones with visuals or music, but I found creating my own version to be much preferable. Here's how I made it work: 

I'd play the tones with headphones, through a phone or tablet. Using the television in my bedroom, I'd select either a piece of music that had only pleasant associations for me, or video that I'd found particularly calming, pleasant or had especially good memories attached to it. The aim here was to keep my mood elevated and thoughts focused while in the meditative state and not have them veer off into some grim or frightening territory. With depression and anxiety, the thoughts are already trained to go in that direction, so it was important for me to counteract that.

With music, the volume on the television didn't need to be especially loud, just enough to hear it behind the tones. For some reason, this tended to work better than the tones that were already embedded in music. Not sure why - maybe it was simply down to the music being a personal choice.

With video, the one I find most helpful has a particular hypnotic effect. It's a section of a playthrough from a video game I once enjoyed, called Rollaway (or Kula World, or Kula Quest.) I don't play a lot of video games, but this one I recall being unusually happy playing way back in the day. Given what I know now, this makes perfect sense -  imagining a ball rolling away from you while you're standing still is an excellent hypnotic technique. (Go ahead, close you eyes and imagine it right now!). 

Here's the video, for reference: 

The music in this section of the game is also one of my favorites (Hiro, by Twice A Man). With this video, I don't even bother to lower the volume, as the ringing sounds of  the collected coins and keys, along with the music, strike me as both calming and upbeat. The combination of visuals and tones in this case create a more lasting positive effect. 

There are a few others that I've been working with, too. I suppose ultimately it comes down to which ones give you the effect you want. 

So, my assessment today, having done this for a period of several months, is that these techniques have been more or less effective, at least for me, and none of them (save the solfeggio tones) have been detrimental. None have actually made my condition worse. Of course, my condition at the start was pretty damn bad, so this is not saying that I'm anywhere near "normal" for an average, non-depressed person yet. I still hold out hope, though.

Using my blog posting habits as a measure, I've been able to post more than in a long time. This is significant, because it's something that has to be planned, constructed and time being made to actually write something, as well as the power of concentration needed to do so - and it does create some amount of guilt for me because it feels more like "playing" than any kind of work. The fact that I've been able to do it shows improvement, I think. 

The invisible monster is not defeated yet, but the battle continues.

The Hidden Cameras

Follow These Eyes

The weather is warming and this music sounds about right.

The Grave Dancer

 Dream archive - May 24, 2009

In the dream, we are driving home late at night. The only light is the full moon, and I can see the silhouettes of  palm trees lining the road. Nearing home,  my  husband says, "there's someone outside the house".

I look up and see a glimpse of a veiled woman underneath my window. We know it is the grave dancer.

My husband pushes me down and says "hide, hide!"  He stands guard at the window, but we know she's out there. There are bells attached to the grave dancer's veil, and we can hear them outside in the dark.

The Mysteries Of Fate (And Other Publications)

While coming to the uneasy realization that I did not fit in with my peers and was indeed the proverbial square peg in a round hole, it made sense that I would draw closer to my cousins. We at least understood each other, and visits with them were always an adventure

It was in March of the year I was 11 that my sea-side cousin came up to Grandmother's house for Spring Break, toting a bagful of old Fate magazines. Her friends' hippie parents, she said, had stacks of them, and had given her these to keep. These were digest-sized magazines, printed on newsprint stock, full of (as stated on the cover) True Reports Of The Strange And Unknown.

These true reports might never live up to skeptical scrutiny, full of anecdotal evidence and personal accounts  as they were, but that was not a worry to me. As far as I was concerned, this was news from from the world of strange phenomena by people who'd wandered the territory, either by accident or design. The sense of wonderment that ran through the articles was very appealing as something that seemed - as near as I could observe - to be missing from the ordinary world.

Which isn't to say I was too credulous. Even today I only believe 50% of what I read, and which 50% is always liable to change. It didn't matter so much if it was objectively true, since perception is a funny thing. It was more that someone believed it to be true, and was willing to share their thoughts with the rest of us. The reader could decide for themselves. Also, the columns on Cryptozoology, UFOs and parapsychology provided a more detached view of things.

That said, one of the best parts of Fate were the ads.

 

Many proclaimed secret knowledge or hidden truths, to see into your future or past, or to bring good fortune. Many seemed to communicate with the (endlessly fascinating) language of signs and symbols.

This was satisfying to an unconscious mind devoid of spoken language but hungry for meaning. It made sense, too, because the invisible world was in so many ways beyond description. Words just end up in a tangle. A symbol gets right to the heart of the matter, the thing you know without being able to say how you know.

It seemed to us (while we sprawled on grandmother's floor among the pile of magazines) that the part of you without language was the part of you that perceived the Unseen. The part of you that just knew. That's what they called it in Grandmother's family, "knowing". It was no more complicated than that, really. To try describe it in words just confused matters.

Despite the appealing nature of these ads, I never had the urge to order anything. I was a do-it-yourselfer by nature. Learning about a subject was all well and good, but where was the fun in having it all done for you? I was content to ponder such subjects, but several of my cousins independently decided to take it to the next level.

There was an ad that had appeared, not in Fate, but in the back of  many other publications. It was for The Magic Power of Witchcraft, by Gavin and Yvonne Frost.

My recent Catholic schooling, with its emphasis on the dangers of the spiritual world, had made actually buying a book on witchcraft a bridge too far for me. Besides, I couldn't imagine how I'd explain such a thing to my mother when it arrived in the mail. The promises made in the ad didn't necessarily appeal to me, anyway -  spying on people's antics behind closed doors and the power to crush my enemies weren't my sort of bag. My cousins, however, had no such compunctions, and ordered away. The book even came with an amulet - that was pretty cool.

This state of affairs probably leads to a couple of questions, such as - why would buying a book on witchcraft be so much worse than the fortune telling, second sight and casual spell casting that already existed in the family? I suppose it was the ritual content, for one thing. These family quirks could be seen as "natural" or even "god-given" gifts that needed very little training to achieve - most of it was a matter of intent and grabbing the right signal from the ether, or whatever it was. No need to invoke any spirits, or anything like that. 

I don't necessarily feel this way today, mind you - I don't have any problems with such books or rituals when used wisely (though I do believe some of the books are booby-trapped - not necessarily the one mentioned above, but some of them are). Even so, I'm still not a big ritual person. For me, it's the simpler, the better in most cases. 

Secondly -  the question might be asked, does witchcraft work? Short answer: hell, yes, it does. If things were already weird before the actual practice of ritual magic came into it, things became really, really weird afterwards. Incredibly, flagrantly weird. There were reports of ghost lights and apparitions. Tales of levitation at inopportune times. Visions of the future appearing in bowls of ink. The night hag of sleep paralysis began to visit, and we experienced shared dreams. Some of us had to cover our mirrors, as things that shouldn't be seen there had begun to turn up. This is to say nothing of the mysterious aura (for lack of a better word) that began to develop around one of the cousins and her entire house. We had become weirdness incarnate. 

I suppose the moral of this story is that it's never a good idea to let a group of untrained pubescents practice ritual magic. It probably opened some doors to things we were not ready to handle. But it worked, all right. It still works, for good or ill. In the aftermath, some of us tried to put these things aside, or sought other forms of spirituality or faith, but it was not easy, or even very successful. It's like trying to disown your eye color, or the talent you inherited from your old auntie.

Today, so many in the family  - whether we consider ourselves practicing "witches" or are affiliated with a religion or not - can still feel the crackle of magic in the air if there's a working going down, or feel a spell or hex that's been thrown at us like sticky glue.We know how to listen to the invisible world with one certain part of our attention while keeping the rest occupied. We also know that we shouldn't think about it too hard, or want it too much, because otherwise it will run. These are things we know in our bones.

We can hide it (some of us better than others) under a guise of normality, because we know these things have no place in in the ordinary world. But underneath we know. We've had to embrace our inner weirdness.

I've come to think that the title of the magazine was accurate. Some things are fated. Ultimately, there really is no escaping your true nature.

Yay For Muffins

Join me in a short muffin break while I try to make sure my next post doesn't suck too much. Also, Happy Lunar New Year!

Strange Days

The first time I heard about Mothman, I was about three years old. It was  before I could read, at any rate.When the famous illustration appeared in the paper (probably attached to some retrospective, probably titled "whatever happened to Mothman?") my sister gleefully embellished it with dripping red fangs.When I asked her to read the story, she demurred, saying it was too scary, but since that excuse has never worked with any kid ever, I pressed until she relented.

 She said that Mothman appeared to people driving late at late ("when they've had too much to drink" said mom, from the kitchen) on long dark roads. He'd fly alongside the car, staring in at them with glowing eyes. I immediately imagined the road to our grandmother's house, which was just like that, and shivered. Oh, they were all quick to say that that Mothman wasn't real, it was just hallucinations and whatnot, but I wasn't so sure. I'd already heard my teenage siblings talk about Goatman, who (they said) lived out in the canyons, and Fishman, who lived under the third river crossing ("knock on the bridge three times and the water will  bubble. That means the Fishman is coming"). Mothman seemed to fit right in.

It was scary, but not so scary that I wasn't interested, and every time we drove the long, dark country road to grandmother's, I kept my eyes peeled.

Trips to the Grandparents were always mysterious events anyway. Despite our Grandfather's ban on talk of  such things, there was no avoiding the fact that Grandmother's family were weirdness magnets back to time immemorial. No one had to say anything, it was intrinsic to the people and the place. Still, the stories leaked out. Hexes and spells, fortune telling and ghosts, and all manner of unusual things. Grandfather (who'd married into the family) wouldn't hear of it, but Grandmother and her sisters might talk if they were alone. Some of the aunts, too, and the numerous cousins who were always around. Mother took Grandfather's dim view, but blood will out, and we cousins were just as likely to be found reading tea leaves as doing Mad Libs or playing tag.

Plus, their house was haunted. This was scary but also not. It was part of the landscape. It didn't matter if you didn't believe in ghosts, you still had to contend with their disembodied footsteps and cold spots or having the bed yanked out from under you by Unseen Forces. That was just a typical evening at Grandma's.

This being the case, when a girl who worked in my mother's shop said she had a book of ghost stories that was too frightening for her, I eagerly asked to borrow it. She brought it the next day, saying I should keep it. This was when I was about 7, and just beginning to read really well. The book was called  Haunted Houses  by Larry Kettelkamp, and quickly became my favorite reading.

 

On the cover was the tulip staircase ghost, and inside was the tale of the brown lady of Raynham Hall. This was the first time I'd ever seen the famous photograph of the alleged ghost descending the stairs.

The tale of the Brown Lady was chilling enough. but  it also had stories about Borley Rectory, the Tower of London, time slips, and assorted poltergeists. It had theories about time being another dimension, the possibility of astral projection and repressed emotions causing telekinesis.

It even had diagrams:

Needless to say, for the burgeoning weird girl and map nerd, it was a gold mine.

It wasn't exactly frightening, though. Even if the contents were enough to scare the spit out of the other girls at the second grade slumber party, it indicated something else to me. There seemed to be an invisible world of unexplained phenomena that existed alongside of us, only making itself visible occasionally. A sort of abstract world that lived within our concrete one. This was not a frightening thought to me, but comforting instead. It seemed that the world was full of mystery and the possibilities were endless. This was a good thing.

And anyway, you could feel it, couldn't you, the hidden world? Sense its existence somehow? Like a vibration in the air or unseen lines connecting everything. A bit like fishing. You could feel the tug on your line or tug the line yourself. Or sometimes it was a faint distortion of the air, like heat waves on a hot day. Some of the signs of this invisible world felt more dramatic, like the crackling energy of a ghost, or very subtle, like knowing someone's thought as if you'd simply thought it yourself. It was strange, and it wasn't 100% - these things came and went, like a radio going in and out of tune - but there was no reason to doubt it was there. Wasn't it obvious?

It would take a while before I would realize that not everyone held this view. Indeed, some people were not okay with this view at all. At Catholic school, it was more or less fine, because we spent a considerable amount of time learning about God and angels and other unseen powers. As long as you weren't dallying about with evil forces - and even if you were - no one would argue about the existence of the invisible world. In fact, you had to keep on your toes, because it was always watching you. And television in those days had shows like In Search of... and Real People. Even PM Magazine did segments about the Phillip experiment and things like that. But outside of church and television, things were rather different.

Upon entering public school at age 10, I rapidly discovered I was a freak. There was no interest in spiritual matters; instead, designer clothes and tennis held utmost importance. Also, shiny hair. Roller skating came in close behind. Well, at least I could roller skate. But still. Anomalous phenomena and preppies are mutually exclusive. Even my collection of Nancy Drew mysteries was suspect ("why don't you read anything about horses?") There was no room for weirdness in a place like that. Not unless you didn't mind being MARKED FOR LIFE. But as I said in the previous post, there's no escaping your true nature.

It was late one night during this unhappy time that I was wandering about the house, sleepless.as usual. Among the books on the living room shelf, one caught my attention. It had...I can't quite remember now...either a little green spaceman or a sea monster on the spine. I picked it up. It was one of my brother's old books, Frank Edwards' Stranger Than Science.

With a table of contents like this, it was irresistible:

 I opened it right toThe Devil's Footprints and kept reading until sunrise. Thus began my double life - Hello Kitty collecting roller skater by day, secret Fortean by night. I couldn't pull it off for long though. You know what they say - cuteness is only skin deep, but love of anomalous phenomena goes straight to the bone. There would be no denying my essential weirdness for much longer. I was a Hopeless Case.

I never did give up roller skating, though. :)

Februrary Musings

February is the time of year I'm most drawn to seek sustenance from familiar comforts. Maybe it's the feeling (left over from schooldays, perhaps) of being the dead zone of the year, a grey month punctuated with embossed foil artificiality.  Maybe it's because it was always around this time that my mother would go on a tear (a special, rage-at-the-whole-world sort of tear) making my already busted home life that much more wretched. It doesn't really matter, I suppose; just that when times are hard, people seek solace where they can. 

At the time I'm thinking of, I was an unfortunately tall and ungraceful girl stuck in that phase of puberty that seemed to go on forever, lonely and with few friends. It was also at this time, thanks to an offhand remark by a teacher, that my mother decided I should be a fashion model. Ho Ho. It seems like a cruel joke, but in retrospect, I suppose I should be grateful. Thanks to this, I was left alone to wander the malls of the city after our junior board fashion shows and Sunday supplement photos, which was probably the best part of being 11. 

Of course, being 11, the Hallmark shop drew me like a fly. It was even better than Spencer's (where you could get electric blue mascara and fiber-optic lamps). At that time, it was the only place that stocked Sanrio products,  which evoked a level of cute that made even me feel small and girlish.

It was usually only the more advantaged girls at school who had access to the such adorableness (you knew a popular girl had a made a mistake on her social studies test when you smelled the heady scent of strawberry or bubblegum eraser). I was never one of those girls, but patience and careful use of my pocket money bought a small and secret entrance into the world of cute. 

Even if I never felt I truly belonged, it was some solace to imagine this sweet and tiny girl-world, some Hello Kitty land where nothing bad could ever really happen. I decorated my copy of A Little Princess with stickers and carried it around everywhere, even if I related more to Becky the scullery maid than to Sarah Crewe. They were like talismans, really. Some charm signifying an existence I wished to understand. 

My other main solace (and one maybe more true to my personality) was comic books. Not superhero comics - that was my brother's thing. None of that muscle-y guy in tights business for me. Unless it was Captain Hero. Riverdale, USA was another safe haven. Wacky, but safe. And Jughead, dear Jughead, was my guide. Betty was cool, too, but  Jughead's almost Zen weirdness was an inspiration. 

I knew Jughead. I was Jughead. Just a girl and not so lazy (or gluttonous).

Witness this classic, drawn by my favorite, Samm Schwartz::

See? Not even being kidnapped by a religious cult phases him very much. His main complaint is that their god's name is Harold. Who couldn't get behind a guy like that? 

My treasured collection of double-digests helped me embrace my inner weirdness, which is a good thing, 'cos there's just no escaping your true nature. 

Which, by the way, will be the subject of the next post.

Confessions Of A Map Nerd

 I admit it - I'm a map nerd.

But it's not just any old map that strikes my fancy. It's not things like precise mileage that interests me - though I do feel a certain thrill upon learning that the nearest Bath and Body Works is 10.3 miles away (or an even stranger thrill at the odd directions that Google maps gives to get there - why is it necessary to circle the block first?). No, the map has to be special, unique, or peculiar somehow.  

For instance, MUFON's live UFO map is a thing of beauty and perfection. And I'm not even that interested in UFOs. I mean, The Truth Is Out There, and all that, but unless they are buzzing my house or rustling my livestock, it's just not that much of a concern. But (at least here in phantasmagoria-land) that map is glorious.

Or maps that are temporarily, oddly specific, like this one of the downtown area, marked with little ghosts for Halloween festivities. Suddenly, it looks as if that boring old warren of shops is awash in spirits. Very conveniently located ones, too.

 

Especially nice are hand-drawn maps. I always like to receive invitations to out-of-town weddings, despite not enjoying big social occasions very much. It's because they usually include a hand-drawn map to the venue, printed on little cards. When you collect something as random and ephemeral as that, you'd be surprised  at what begins to look like a free gift.

Even better than that is the found hand-drawn map. Usually discovered crumpled on the sides of roads, or in the damp grass on the edge of  a lawn. Like this one:

One wonders how so many come to be lost in such a way. Do they fly out windows as the driver squints at street numbers? Or is the seeker so thrilled at reaching their destination that they joyously fling their map to the wind? There is always a sense of mystery about them. Who drew them? Why and what for? Was the journey dreaded or highly anticipated? Or something more in between? The chances of ever knowing is slim indeed.

The particular map above has a nice synchronicity attached to it. One summer evening, we were walking along while I bemoaned how I wished that fate, the universe or whatever it is out there would send me a guidebook or a map. What direction should I go with my life? Just then, the wind (or the Cosmic Joker)  blew this crumpled bit of paper at my feet. Judging from what's drawn there, I can only surmise the universe was guiding us away from Myron's restaurant. Which is unfortunate, really, since Myron's macaroni and cheese is most excellent.

As far as psychogeography goes, there is pages worth going on in that tiny scrawl. Just take the area marked "underpass". That's really the MKT railroad bridge, which has a nice echo underneath for screaming (no child can resist) and popular for teenage activities ("Do you wanna go throw eggs off the MKT bridge?" said every high school class for the last 90 years). Or that little bit of stream (unmarked, but seems to have a tiny  dot over it) that feels like it should belong in another world. Plus many, many more things that I may or may not write about one day. 

Even Google maps can sometime reveal secrets only dreamt of, quite literally. Off and on, I'd had a dream that there was an extra, hidden street in our neighborhood. It seemed so realistic that it haunted me, but it was  impossible; I knew every nook and cranny of this place. It must have been one of those dreams like finding hidden rooms in your house. Until I looked at the satellite view and saw  - wonder of wonders! - there was a hidden street in the neighborhood.

Maps. Ordinary, utilitarian items containing infinite mystery.