Come to me at evendark,
Wrapped in flame and night;
Cover me in your cloak of fire
And set my soul alight
With blazing rage of culmination,
In revenge and hope and sorrow,
Then stand with me, by my side,
In the dawn of an alien tomorrow.

Life is cradled in a chalice
Of bone and blood and dream;
Death is Hades’ draining pull
At its fiery wine.
Come to me in Samhein dusk
With thy Staff incarnadine;
Then ride with me in midnight joy
Down Tartaros’ sorrowing stream
That dreams in ash and myrrh and musk
Through hells of Neptune and Mars,
Across the blazing desert of Time
And out to an Ocean of Stars.

Drift with me on the Sea of Night
To the crêpe-hung halls of Persephone;
On a bed of skulls and a cushion of wraiths,
Two screams embracing in Fire and Death,
Silver crushed by iron and gold,
Lace draggled through wet clay,
Moonlight shattered by trumpets and bombs,
Perfume over a ghoul’s breath.

Old man at evening,
Rocking slow, crowned in red light;
Beneath him – bodies.

Once upon a time, there was a very neurotic young caterpillar named Alexander, called “Alec” by everyone who knew him. Immature and divorced from the realities of the world, he lived in a fantasy world much of the time. As the lovely, warm days of Summer went by, and June and July were succeeded by August and September, instead of going industriously to work and then relaxing at tennis or golf the way that all his well-adjusted friends and relatives did, Alec began to spend most of his time in bed, dreaming his life away. After a couple of months of this, more and more often he was heard to declare he wished that he had never left the womb.

As time went by, and Summer passed into the first days of Autumn, Alec became schizzier and schizzier. When he wasn’t sleeping – which he was, most of the time – he began to create weird works of “art,” what he referred to as his “Womb-Cycle.” Called “Womb I,” “Womb II,” and so on, they represented his ever-growing preoccupation with what he called “The Alchemical Womb,” in which, he said, one could “return to the Source” and become “transmuted” into a “Magickal Child,” the “Inheritor of the Future.” He churned out these nasty, lumpishly amorphous productions, done up in eye-blasting psychedelic colors like something turned out during recreational therapy by the whackos in the back wards of the local state hospital, in ever-increasing numbers, each one uglier and stranger than the last. And he began to insist that his friends and family call him “Aleister,” scorning his rightful name in favor of something he’d dreamed up as part of his rapidly evolving fantasies, in which he was a wise and powerful wizard, Magickally transported from world to world by the grace of beautiful wings sprouting from his back, where he paid court to lovely princesses, drank nectar from fantastic, rainbow-colored chalices, and sired a thousand thousand children, all across the world. It was very sad. No one was sure what to do about it, but everyone agreed that if it didn’t stop soon, Alec was surely headed for disaster.

They weren’t wrong. By the end of September, he had finally produced his masterpiece: “Womb 40,” a huge, horrible lumpen thing that looked for all the world like some Brobdingnagian, purple-chartreuse-and-yellow plastic tear dripped from the eyes of a sequoia-sized Tom O’ Bedlam, hollowed out in the middle with a space just large enough to hold one good-sized caterpillar . . . say, one about Alec’s size.

Sure enough, bare moments after finishing “Womb 40,” Alec, yelling that he was now going to “return to the Womb of the World to be reborn in Light,” dove head-first into his latest creation and quickly rammed a plug into place behind him, covering the hole and concealing himself from those outside. A violent stench of Superglue leaked outward from the edges of the plug, filling his studio, followed by the sound of hammering from within the thing. Then, the odor of glue dissipating rapidly, silence fell. Only a note, pasted to the outside of his studio door, which was bolted shut from the inside, was left to let others know what had happened to him.

Now, all this time, Alec’s poor friends and relatives, industrious, sober, well-adjusted citizens who paid their taxes, worked hard at their jobs, voted regularly, and otherwise upheld their responsibilities in life, had thought that Alec was little more than a lazy bum. But when, about an hour after Alec had finally made his resoundingly artistic exit from reality, his friend Somerset, coming by the studio to see how Alec was doing, found Alec’s note, and frantically began to call up everyone to tell them what Alec had done, they realized that, rather than being just a ne’er-do-well shirker, Alec was actually a very sick caterpillar, his outrageous behavior really a clear cry for help. So they all raced down to Alec’s studio as fast as they could, many of them even leaving work to do so. There, they quickly broke down the studio door and began prying open “Womb 40,” using the crowbars chisels, and other tools handily spread out across the big trestle-tables along the studio’s walls, which Alec had been using as work-benches.

They had to admit that while Alec may have missed his calling when it came to art, he was a sheer genius at engineering. Though fear for Alec’s safety – after all, how much air could there be in there for him to breathe, after all? – leant them enormous strength, it took what seemed to be hours before they were able to open up a large enough hole in the side of “Womb 40” to pull Alec out. Exhausted, but overjoyed to find him still alive, they were stunned and horrified to find that Alec, though breathing slow, shallow, regular breaths, was as unmoving as a doll. Eyes closed, he lay in a fetal curl, his limbs displaying the waxy immobility characteristic of profound catatonia, moving only when re-arranged by others’ hands, remaining in whatever position they put them in.

Appalled, his friends and family immediately called an ambulance. They followed the wildly wailing ambulance all the way to City Hospital in a caravan moving at dangerously high speeds, careless of road conditions and cops alike, concerned only for Alec. Somehow avoiding both crashes and the Highway Patrol, the long caravan roared into the hospital parking-lot just yards behind the ambulance carrying Alec, which had stopped right next to the doors to the hospital’s emergency room.

Anxiously they stood by while the paramedics gently, carefully lifted Alec, now wide-awake and raving, tightly strapped into supine near-immobility on his stretcher and covered from toes to chin with a heavy red blanket, out of the ambulance and carried him through the doors of the emergency room. As Alec babbled on and on about flying away on Magickal wings and finding the woman of his dreams, the emergency-room attendants, shaking their heads sadly, injected him with a massive dose of Thorazine and watched over him until, his eyes suddenly rolling back in his head and glazing over, Alec passed out. “Vee are going to have to keep him here for a few weeks,” Dr. Joy, the doctor on duty that night in the emergency room, solemnly told the crowd of anxious friends and relatives who had come in with Alec. “He iz vun sehr krank caterpillar. Chust listen to him – delusions of vlying. Vimmen mit regn-boygnenden vings. Ach – boor lad! It’s zecks, you know. Zecksshual rebression – it’s gone to his kop. Sehr umetik – zuch a patern . . .” he said, tsk-ing sadly.

Randi, one of Alec’s brother’s, tears in his eyes, told Dr. Joy, “Do what has to be done, Doc – I want my brother to have the best. – Oh, God, why couldn’t I see – why wasn’t I able to tell he was sick? I feel so guilty! Please, Doc – I’ll do anything to have Alec well again!”

Stephen Jay and Martin, Alec’s other brothers, agreed. “Please, Doctor Joy,” said Martin, “as long as Alec gets well again, nothing else counts! Don’t spare anything to help him!” He looked around at all the others, who quickly agreed, muttering, nodding, adding their own comments.

“Okay – vee put him on the Haldol, he’ll be right as rain in no time, don’t worry, don’t worry . . .” Dr. Joy soothed them. “Chust let’s get him into his own room, start him on a Haldol brotocol, he’ll be a new man bevore you know it!”

Everyone rushed to assure the doctor that he should begin whatever treatments were most likely to help as soon as possible. So the doctor rang for the doctor on duty in the psyche ward upstairs, who dispatched orderlies to bring Alec up to his floor and put him in an empty room, where they could begin treatment at once. Kind Dr. Joy then sent everyone home again – after all, there wasn’t anything they could do here, beyond what they had done already, other than lose sleep and get in the doctors’ and one another’s way. So his family and friends, with anxious backward looks, quietly filed out and made their way home, to wait for word about Alec.

That word wasn’t as long in coming as they had feared. Fortunately, Alec responded quickly and well to the standard treatments. After a couple of weeks on alternating courses of Haldol, Stellazine and Thorazine, Alec had calmed down considerably. Within a few more weeks, finally well once more (if somewhat sluggish, and now wholly and a little unsettlingly devoid of that enormous, rainbowed libido that had so plagued him with those sick fantasies of flying and oversexed alien women), he was released from the hospital, at last well-adjusted and ready to take his rightful place in society as a responsible citizen and member of the community.

Upon his release from the hospital, he was appalled to learn that at the time of his own catastrophic breakdown, many other young caterpillars, all about his age, had also exhibited exactly the same syndrome: delusions of flying, satyriacal obsessions with beautiful, alien, rainbow-winged females, Magickal thinking, the whole nine yards. Indeed, just as he himself had been, the majority of them had had to be routed out of one or another variety of horrible, self-created nest (eerily, like him, not a few of them had even referred to their nasty creations as “wombs”, and raved of being “transmuted into Magickal children”!)

But, as in his own case, all of them had been successfully treated and returned, well and productive once more, to society – that is, except for a few who, rather than trying to seal themselves into one sort or another of nest indoors, had managed to escape into the wood before they could be taken, and disappeared. They were few and far between, though; and the unique epidemic had finally been stamped out, to everyone’s overwhelming relief and joy.

But now society had two new worries.

Here and there, reports were coming in of strange flying beasts flitting about, high above the city. So far, there hadn’t been many of these – but almost certainly they had to potential threats, possibly the heralds of some terrible invasion of the things to come, one that could wreak havoc, even destroy civilization. Some of these had been shot down, and the rest, seeing what happened to their comrades, had fled. So maybe they weren’t such a threat, after all.

But the other threat remained, and was potentially much worse in import: unlike previous years, almost no new caterpillars were coming in from the woods as Spring spread across the land. This was bad news. The caterpillar population now had a very narrow age-base, and was rapidly declining in numbers. Without a constant supply of young new caterpillars coming in each year to replace the older ones who had either died or, even now, though in a diminishing number of cases, suddenly gone insane and fled to the woods to make that strange, obsessive pilgrimage in search of “the Womb of the World,” there were fewer and fewer workers to carry out all the tasks necessary to the healthy functioning of a complex, progressive society. It might not be long before their numbers fell below the critical limit, and civilization began to fall apart at the seams for sheer lack of the material necessary to hold it together – ending not with the bang of an alien invasion, but rather with the whimper of extinction.

Already the cranks were beginning to preach that these growing problems were the result of the increasing urbanization of life. There were even a number of religious nuts – unfortunately, some of them with large, dangerously vocal followings among the citizenry – who claimed that the abandonment of the older, more primitive and pagan ways of life of their forebears, now of course shown to be erroneous and outmoded by science and the wonderful life which the wonderful modern high-energy technology and the progressive culture necessary to sustain it had brought to all, was responsible for these problems.

Some, mostly middle-aged or even elderly citizens, even went so far as to dress up in long linen robes and carry signs saying “THE END IS AT HAND – ARE YOU PREPARED TO MEET GODDESS?” and similar nonsense, picketing banks, shops, and places of entertainment all over the business district. By and large, insofar as it was possible, these were treated in much the same way as the delusional younger caterpillars had been: detained for treatment in the form of integrated protocols of Haldol, Mellaril, Stellazine, and other strong, effective psychotropic agents in the hospital, then released for continued out-patient treatment in clinics. But this wasn’t nearly as successful as it had been in the case of the younger ones. Unfortunately, many of these older caterpillars developed weird, even potentially life-threatening side-effects as a result of this form of treatment, and had to be taken off the drugs in order to save their health or even their lives. The CCLU was threatening to bring a class-action suit on behalf of these religiously manic oldsters, and the NAACC was already preparing go before the public with claims that the drugs used in the treatments were often used discriminatingly and illegally, to control or suppress dissent among members of minority groups, rather than to aid in the restoration and maintenance of mental health, as the Caterpillar Medical Association and the Caterpillar Psychiatric Association claimed. Led by Dr. Joy, who had become a sort of medical hero for his work in trying to stem the tides of epidemic insanity which periodically rolled over civilization, threatening everything built up for so long, by so many, which such care, the CMA and CPA worked day and night to defend their actions and efforts before the public – but it was becoming a losing battle. No matter what they tried, it all seemed to go for naught – and meanwhile, the situation, and with it, civilization, continued to deteriorate.

Well, the now well-adjusted caterpillar, older but wiser, thought as he thoughtfully read the latest issue of Barron’s over his morning coffee at his club one Saturday, at least we really whipped the problem of mass psychosis! Only the senile and the unreconstructed pagan religious nuts are getting sucked into those ghastly delusions, any more . . .

But then he blushed as he recalled his own delusions of returning to the womb, of flying, of those gorgeous, oversexed women from another dimension . . .

Thank God Dr. Joy got to me in time! he thought. Otherwise, it might be me out there, holding up those signs and ranting with the other nuts . . .

Meat. I can supplement with cheese as well as bean-&-rice dishes.

It's too bad that Mad Magazine's maddest artist, the late (and very much lamented) Don Martin, isn't alive to do portraits of President Obama. Hinged feet and all . . .

Have you ever made an honest assessment of the skill-levels and general competency of people? If you have, you'll have noticed that way too many of them don't know how to tie their shoelaces properly. If they've actually mastered that and gone on to tie-tying 101, they've never gotten much farther. I've gotten emails from groups that earnestly insist that there's a global conspiracy of big pharmaceutical companies and their policy-makers who are trying their deadly best to kill off most of us so they can rule the rest. Guess what? If there is such a conspiracy, and they really are trying to do that, the people they're most likely to kill off are the very people who raise, process, and distribute the food they eat, build and maintain the systems that bring running water into their homes, and otherwise produce that which they need for survival. Shooting yourself in the ass isn't a good way to conspire about anything, which means that such conspirators are too stupid to pound rocks, which means that they don't exist. What you do have are a bunch of stupid, venal bastards who will stoop at nothing to line their pockets with your hard-earned wealth -- and, because of the way they go about it, will end up losing all they've taken from you and more in the lawsuits they inspire with their idiot policies.

Furthermore, bureaucracies are absolutely necessary to the running and maintenance of everything from public utilities to vast government programs. Bureaucracies aren't conspiracies. They are far, far worse. They're superorganisms which ultimately develop such a metabolic momentum that in effect they operate themselves, the same way in which Hal 9000 or a too-complex computer platform like, say, Windows Vista will. The bureaucrats end up being along for the ride, and only that, and the ultimate goal of any bureaucracy is to perpetuate its own existence -- which it will attempt to do, even if, especially if, that means killing off its own employees. Think Scientology since the death of L. Ron Hubbard, or even before his death, and you'll see what I mean. The most appalling horrors in the world have been wrought by monster bureaucracies, such as Nazi Germany. The Nazis themselves were as horrifying as they were because essentially they were happily wedded to those bureaucracies, and each one deserves a place in the worst areas of Hell. But without that giant bureaucracy their ability to wreak havoc on the world would have been miniscule, and the history of the 20th century would have been very different than it actually was.

By themselves, as individuals, people aren't very good at doing things. But put them together via a bureaucracy, and they can make the foulest of conspiracies look like a choir of angels, because what a bureaucracy really is, is a step-up transformer for human-caused disasters and human evil, and it will flatten any conspiracy that dares to get in its way the way a 3-trailer semi combo on a 10% downgrade slope will some poor coyote that wanders out into its path. Merciless. Remorseless. Relentless.

Don't waste time worrying about giant global/universal conspiracies. Worry about bureaucracies, instead. Much more realistic and productive.

Gomez and Morticia Addams. Second favorite: Fester Addams and his girlfriend Dementia.

I don't take them, myself. They're not worth it, and I'll never take them. Here's one more reason why:

I know someone who used to be a good friend, who has been taking very strong antipsychotic medications for some time. They do keep her from having psychotic episodes, which she used to have, very bad ones. But they do something else, too, and that "something else" is sinister as hell.

She used to be a rather staunch conservative. She lives in West Virginia, which is more conservative than otherwise, so this isn't surprising. But last year, a couple of months before the elections, she not only went for Obama, but refused to hear anything good, however true it was, about Republican candidates. Any Republican candidates for anything. Why? Because Dubya "is a traitor to the country." Oh, really? I think she'd also started to pick up on 9-11 "Truther" garbage about that point, as well.

It's her right to vote for anyone she pleases, to have whatever opinions she wants to. But if you ask her for her reasons for this switch in political outlook, she becomes completely coherent and literally cannot explain why she now prefers liberals and the Left over conservatives and the Right.

If you're reading this blog, you've probably already seen the entry I put up earlier today about the latest "hate crimes" bill now in the Senate. I forwarded the original email that came from to her, and prefaced it by stating, quite truthfully, that the style it's written in is somewhat hysterical, and that it glosses over the differences between gay sex between consenting adults and pederasty. I pointed out that this bill, like numerous others before it, is an attempt to criminalize the thought-processes of those accused of certain crimes, and also prevent people from effectively defending themselves and their loved ones from attempted or actual assault by predators, which it does. This would set ugly precedents in law would move us ever-closer to a police state like that of George Orwell's 1984. Her response: "Lies! Lies! Lies!" And a lot of other things that made it clear she was reading into the text of that email as well as my introduction to it things that weren't there, and either ignoring what was there or else believing it to be just great.

She wasn't like that before. Moreover, her ability to compose a coherent email, one minus typos, spelling errors, etc., was once a great deal better than it is now. Intellectually she is going steadily downhill. She's in her 30s now. At this rate, she'll soon begin to exhibit obvious symptoms of early Alzheimer's.

You have to wonder just how good for someone those antipsychotic medications are, and whether there are better ones out there, which wouldn't rob people of their intellectual skills. Even more, you have to wonder why her psychologist hasn't asked the same questions and found something better for her client. I could come up with all sorts of very paranoid answers to those questions, but they would only be speculative. I merely note that maybe that particular class of drugs, like so many others, aren't the world's best things for people to ingest.

The following message, which was sent to me in an email by info@conservativealert.com, is written rather hysterically, replete with exclamation points and all-capital letters as emphases. It also glosses over the distinction between adult gay males and lesbians who have no interest in sex with children, on the one hand, and pedophiles, on the other, which is injust and based on erroneous assumptions. That said, however, it concerns a bill crafted by Democrats now in the Senate which would be one more step toward George Orwell's world of 1984 and a Gestapo-style police force that could arrest anyone, at any time, on the mere suspicion that that individual had committed "thought-crimes." Think that's overblown? Read on . . .

This CONSERVATIVE ALERT is a special message from:



Senate Democrats are Pushing for Vote on the 'Pedophile Protection Act' -- Select Below to tell the Senate to reject the so-called 'Hate Crimes' bill:
https://secure.conservativedonations.com/rm_hatecrimes/?a=2691 ( Read more... )

Everything that happens anywhere in the universe generates patterns. Those that happen here on Earth generate patterns that can be seen by us. The events of the last two decades have set off patterns which, more and more, show the ultimate extinction of all complex life on Earth -- not as a result of conservative policies, mind you, but rather actions and policies of the Left. In effect, the Left is slowly committing suicide, and taking the rest of the living world down with them. Why are they too stupid to see this?

With every horror that happens every day, I am glad that I am close to the end of my life, and that I've never had any offspring, who would have been corrupted, enslaved, and destroyed by the monsters who, more and more, have been taking over my country. I will make a prediction: Soon most Americans will wish they were dead, and those who have had children will wish they had not. The one mercy in all this is that the bastards who've done this to us all can't stay Death's hand, can't keep us from dying at our appointed time, whatever that may be. Once we are dead and gone, we are beyond their control. I swear they want to empty the Earth out -- but once they have, will they wonder why it is so silent, so quiet, so haunted? And will they wonder why they can no longer find anyone to find solutions to all the terrible problems that arise? And will they then have any good reason to go on living themselves? Their hubris has no bounds. And Nemesis awaits in the wings.

http://jordan179.livejournal.com/132479.html

This is something that should be on Tales From the Crypt. :-)

"Now that I've got your attention . . .
"Every time I take a stab at debunking pseudo-science topics like UFOs and the 2012-doomsday predictions, it’s like kicking a hornet’s nest, judging from some of the comments posted here.

"Some of these counterpoint arguments from readers are tied to references in clips on YouTube (truly a cesspool of idiocy) where self-styled 'experts' try and sound authoritative in front of the camera. More often than not these 'whistle-blowers' assert having special knowledge about 'government conspiracies.' They’ve discovered the Internet is a bottomless pit of people who feel powerless and suspicious of everything. Healthy skepticism is good, which means followers should not unequivocally swallow the tall tales from self-proclaimed 'insiders.'

"Occasionally I’m going to give out a Pants-on-Fire award to those individuals who make outrageous claims that are simply incredulous [sic]. Either they were duped or have endless other motives: selling books, videos, articles, going on a lecture circuit, getting onto radio shows or CNN’s Larry King Live (he loves UFO tall-tales), or simply bolstering their sense of self importance.

"My first winner of the Pants-on-Fire Award is to former Air Force Sgt. Karl Wolfe who was referenced in a comment on this site. First listen to the YouTube video from 2001 and then we’ll separate fact from fantasy: . . ." More: http://blogs.discovery.com/cosmic_ray/2009/07/journey-to-the-dark-side-of-rationality.html#more

http://thespacewriter.com/wp/2009/06/26/crescent-moon/

What if Earth never had a moon? Would we still have figured out that there were other worlds out there?