A homicide unit showed up at work yesterday. A girl was murdered on the Strip last Friday, walking from one of the bars at around 2 AM, and the homicide unit wanted to check the security cam footage at the venue to see if she walked by. From what I heard, she was followed and shot in the head. I asked one of the security guys why and he told me well that’s why they’re investigating. Apparently not too long before that was a drive-by shooting on the Strip involving two people getting shot by somebody from a bus, and I asked why that happened too and I forget what the security guy said exactly but it was something like well they’re crazy or I don’t know or because they wanted to. I thought the cause of most murders was personal conflict but anecdotally all I hear about is these sorts of shootings. Homicides are the second leading cause of death for 15- to 24-year olds, after accidents and right before suicides. I think when I heard about what the homicide unit was investigating part of me, of course, felt really sad and like I was holding my breath to create space in me to feel some sort of empathy about the tragedy, but mostly, I just wondered why, exactly.

The whole thing wasn’t as exciting as when Mia Khalifa showed up, probably, but I wasn’t there for that because it happened three years ago at the bar next door. It’s just something I learned from one of the rambly bartenders that night, after I temporarily forgot about the whole homicide unit thing. So he said she had two bodyguards with her and someone asked him, “Do you know who that is?” And he had absolutely no idea, but she’s a big name in the porn industry (I mean I know who she is, too?) and then somebody tried to show him (or maybe it was someone else?) porn outside. You meet a lot of interesting people there, like the man with a turtle on a string who smelled really bad that the assistant met once. She also saw a homeless man outside so she gave him a blanket and told the manager later and he responded, “Oh, the arsonist?”

So yeah, you meet a lot of interesting characters, and it’s fun. I think I’m a firm believer in the notion that the best things in life are free, and the second best things you get paid to do. I mean I don’t get paid much, eleven dollars an hour, but I make tips and people will buy me drinks and food if I’m nice to them, and I get to be nice to people, that’s my job. And everybody’s there to have fun. It’s not soul-sucking, it’s soul-giving. It’s actually rejuvenating. I was talking to another one of the security guys and we were talking about how often we were scheduled and he mentioned that he doesn’t work there very often, but he always feels better, or happier, after he does. I would say the same thing. I feel better after I work. Calmer, rejuvenated, refreshed, less neurotic, happier. Maybe it’s the music, or being outside, or being in an environment where everybody is having a good time, or constantly having to pay attention, or the silly conversations or the weird things that happen. Or just being so so tired after work, after being in the cold, that just sitting in your car feels great. The extremes of pleasure and what else. I liked it more during the summer though, where it was warm outside and I didn’t have to stick a heater under my woven blanket at my feet and blow the fuse and make the lights (and the heater) go out a few times every hour. So, the second best things you should get paid to do. I mean you spend a lot of time doing your job so you might as well enjoy it, maybe not as much as the free things (you know, music, sex, dancing, sleeping, relaxing), but still a lot. You shouldn’t trade your time for money, because time is your freedom and you don’t get it back or whatever. I still need to write a rejection for a job in project management at a healthcare company. It’s 70000 a year, but no way I’m moving or doing project management for 40 hours a week. I was tutoring my friend’s little brother this Sunday and he showed me this poem he had to read about being a drone pilot, this one: 

Twelve-Hour Shifts 

Jill McDonough

A drone pilot works a twelve-hour shift, then goes home
to real life.  Showers, eats supper, plays video games.
Twelve hours later he comes back, high-fives, takes over the
      drone

from other pilots, who watch Homeland, do dishes, hope they
      don’t
dream in all screens, bad kills, all slo-mo freeze-frame.
A drone pilot works a twelve-hour shift, then goes home.

A small room, a pilot’s chair, the mic and headphones
crowd his mind, take him somewhere else.  Another day
another dollar: hover and shift, twelve hours over strangers’
     homes.

Stop by the store, its Muzak, pick up the Cheerios,
get to the gym if you’re lucky.  Get back to your babies, play
Barbies, play blocks. Twelve hours later, come back.  Take over
     the drone.

Smell of burned coffee in the lounge, the shifting kill zone.
Last-minute abort mission, and the major who forgets your
     name.
A drone pilot works a twelve-hour shift, then goes home.

It’s done in our names, but we don’t have to know.  Our own
lives, shifts, hours, bounced off screens all day.
A drone pilot works a twelve-hour shift, then goes home;
fresh from twelve hours off, another comes in, takes over our
      drone.

He said it’s one of his favorite poems. He was also reading Robert Frost’s mending wall and Ode to a Grecian Urn. 

And so the best things are free, the second best things, you get paid to do, and the necessary things you pay for, I guess. Like clothes and food or whatever. But those things are fun, too, and the necessary things are free too, like sleeping. So really I guess there is no competition or hierarchy and it’s all a jumbled uncategorized mess like it’s supposed to be. It’s all good.

The black kitten I nabbed from the possum trap on the middle aged Satanist’s porch is doing well, but I accidentally stepped on the free range snail that’s been living in my shower since last August this morning. I felt bad. He shouldn’t have been under the bathroom rug in the shower to begin with, and I turned and crushed him under the rug and felt and heard the crunch. I’m watching these lectures on human sexuality from Stanford on YouTube and did you know humans tend to be socially monogamous. People respond best to intermittent rewards. I want to find out more about the spiritual closed offness of America.

I was reading this book, Shaman and the Magician, by Nevill Drury, published in like 1982. I was flipping through it, I found it on the Routledge Studies website. I really like their postscript. And I read this other book, “The Awakened Brain” by Dr. Lisa Muller, which I really liked. I’m still trying to finish the Electric Kool Aid Acid Test. 

Western society is severely lacking a spiritual aspect to it. I mean we have like tarot cards. I believe the meaning of life is without words, it’s there. And everything important can be learned without words and without thinking, but simply feeling and perceiving. Alan Watts maybe said something like life is not something to be figured out but to be experienced.

From Shaman and the Magician:

“The essential aim of this book has been to show some of the interesting parallels that occur between traditional shamanism and the more visionary aspects of magic in modern western society. It is probably appropriate for me to explain why I undertook such a comparative study in the first place.

As Michael Harner notes in his exemplary work, ‘The Way of the Shaman’, we have been content in our contemporary scientific world to pass over the folk-wisdom of shamanic cultures, ostensibly because the societies from which these beliefs flow are unsophisticated and technologically simple. In the same way that western doctors have only recently had to confront the Taoist belief system underlying Chinese acupuncture—since for surgical anesthesia the technique itself obviously works—so too shamanism has provided an alternative body of knowledge pertaining to altered states of consciousness.

Our society does not normally operate in such an ‘altered state’: indeed the fabric of technology, management planning and industrial production would collapse if shamans rather than scientists, engineers and operations controllers were running things! However, our technological strength in modern society has been our mythological undoing. Deus is now firmly within the machine, rather than ex machina. Our dominant frameworks of knowledge have been those postulated by philosophers and scientists drawings on the latest advances in chemistry, biology, physics and mathematics. Anything smacking vaguely of ‘prescience’ has been firmly relegated to the domain of superstition and wrong thinking. Indeed, two pre-eminent figures in the history of twentieth-century thought, Sigmind Freud and Jacob Bronowski, were both most anxious to denounce occult and metaphysical approaches and remove them as thoroughly as possible from any incursion into contemporary systems of knowledge.

The revival of modern western magic and the renewed interest in ‘native’ cosmologies and shamanism as found among the Amer-indian cultures, for example, show that a ‘mythic backlash’ has taken place. It has proven to be unsatisfactory, and indeed possibly pathological, to attempt to repress the vestiges of mythological thought in modern man in the vain hope of eliminating ‘superstition’ with the advance of science. Clearly we humans require domains of mystery; we need to know where the sacred aspects of life may be found and how to understand the intuitive, infinite and profoundly meaningful visionary moments which arise in all of us at different times. 

And yet our dominant western culture is hardly supportive in this regard. We are surrounded by an urban technology which has done its best to demystify the world. Stanley Hopper has written, appropriately, of the ‘impoverishment of symbols’ from which we have all been suffering and notes that in our consumer culture, mythological traditions have been so inverted that

“Ahura Mazda is known today as an electric light bulb, the spirit Mercury is the name of an automobile and Pegasus, splendid in the antique sky, though recognised almost everywhere today is recognised nevertheless in the diminished guise of the Flying Red Horse—trademark for a gasoline”

By contrast both shamanism and magic offer techniques of approaching the visionary sources of our culture. Both systems of thought structure the universe in ways that are deeply and symbolically meaningful and which fully accommodate enlarged horizons of human consciousness. We learn how to transform the profane world and be reborn in the cosmos.

Why shamanism? Why magic? We need them both.”