Theep Doughts with Hack Jandey
If you light yourself on fire,
The world will pay to watch you burn
Well, I suppose I did the first part, but failed to capitalize on it, much to my chagrin and, uh, pain. I used to have this whole schtick about how I called the loss of my faith and all the attendant personality collapse as "the burning down" (nods to King's X for that phrase), but I realize, belatedly, that I was just on fire. And not in a good way.
Ridiculously, I didn't even lose my faith proper like, but just sort of locked it in a sub-basement in a dark cellar, at the bottom of a locked filing cabinet, in a disused lavatory, as it were. The best substitute I could come up with was a very ersatz "paganism" that was inherently dissatisfying and never manifested the kind of substance necessary to replace any wisdom tradition.
I mean, seriously.
The best that most modern neo-paganism can come up with is a sort of hedonistic nihilism lightly dipped in a batter of volk and bad anthropology. And I'm not even against earth-honoring spirituality, or the acknowledgement of all the reality behind the high strangeness documented by Forteans, psychic research, UFO experiencers, and many, many, many private individuals, including myself. It's just that, for the most part, after sojourning among the modern Western pagans for roughly twenty-five years, I came away with nothing but air and some regrettable dalliances that, it turns out, went entirely against the part of me I had locked away all those years ago.
Twenty-eight years.
Lurching about like a human torch, setting anything flammable alight, brewing up an ever-more corrosive anger inside, spreading my misery to others, hanging on to a vanished past and still angry over it - but never taking responsibility for my part in the disaster.
Pop culture plunder in this post: opening two lines from "Aut0matic Writing #17" by Course of Empire; the title is a Spoonerism of a popular old Saturday Night Live segment; there's a chunk from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and of course my boys King's X.