Self Assessment

I think in order to really take a self inventory of my struggles with communication, I have to at first make a self reflection of who I am, from where I was. For starters, I have not always been this outgoing, gregarious individual. I have since come along way in my personal struggles, but I have to acknowledge that was a part of whom I was. I began life in a very hard and aggressive home that for lack of a better word scared the living hell out of me everyday. My father is an alcoholic whom resented me because I was a symbol of every missed opportunity in his life. My father was an extremely smart man who was blessed with a very deep and introspective insight on the world that as a young man he would pursue in the avenues of science and philosophy. Unfortunately he took every opportunity he was ever afforded and then did the complete opposite. Because of his pain and rage he used the alcohol to numb his brain and used me like a punching bag to express his rage. Some of my earliest memories are of getting thrown around and beaten like a rag doll for something as simple as being a gimp child with a birth defect that would drain my father for the rest of his life. I have a vivid memory of being thrown down a flight of stairs, smashing into a wall and then careening to the floor with a sudden stop. Needless to say, I was in the emergency room quite often with head trauma and concussions during those formative developmental years. Doctors spent a great deal of time worried that had critical damage to my speech processing center of my brain, and they were right. I was quickly diagnosis with a severe speech impediment and that I had failures in my cognitive processing as well as my auditory processing centers. I was also diagnosis with severe dyslexia due to head trauma, short term memory issues and a few other learning disabilities. These medical statements rolled their way into my scholastic experience. When I entered the Chicago Public School system I was immediately given an Individual Education Plan or I.E.P. for short. An I.E.P. is basically, in short, is a legal document the school system needs in order to push through students that are expected to perform at below student levels based on some physical handicap. Apparently getting punched in the head by a large man qualifies you for an I.E.P. My particular document said that I was in need of services to help my handicap and everyday I would go to Speech Pathology in the dank, dark and freezing basement of the school. I was pretty much written off by administrators and I was shunned off into the corner of my Kindergarten classroom in the hopes that I would not be a drain on the schools’ resources. My teacher Ms. Lyle, however, saw something else in me. To this date I have no ideal why she did it, but Ms. Lyle began to tutor me personally. She would actually bring me to her house afterschool and pick me up in the morning to work with me in reading and writing. I know from experience that most teachers will go above and beyond for their students to help them excel, but this was much more than that. It was as if her need was maternal in nature because I most certainly saw her as a surrogate mother. Not only did I feel safe around her but I also knew that the education that she was exposing me to was essential to my survival. I worked very hard, and after a month of dedicated study I was reading at a first grade level and well on my way to much more challenging tasks such as math and logic reasoning skills. My speech was still impacted but I now had something very crucial in my life’s development. For the first time, I was empowered by new found skills in logic and reasoning and the awareness of my world almost instantaneously changed. My mind was unlocked and opened to any and all knowledge that it could digest. Now the world was no longer composed of the cockroach infested and slum lord ruled broken home on the wrong side of the tracks. The world held the possibilities that were only limited to my own imagination and will to fight. My childhood continued and was filled with periods of either sitting around in a wheelchair waiting for my bones to heal from multiple surgeries on my clubbed feet or running around the country with other child actors and performers. Still, my love of learning and reading continued unabated. Before I was in second grade I had read and digested the “The Space Shuttle Operator's Manual” which was an unofficial primer on flight operations for NASA’s vehicle. I was completely enthralled with the ideal of joining NASA and working in the Astronaut Corps going on as many missions as I could. It was a singular vision and it was the passion that I had that kept me motivated and moving past all the abuse going on at home. Around the third grade, I was having my fifth surgery on my feet and I was a completely immersed sponge all things aeronautically and astronomically important in the world. I have a vivid memory of watching the Space Shuttle Challenger launch with Christa McAuliffe and I was selected by my science teacher Mrs. O’Brian to provide explanations to my classmates as to what was happening while we watched the launch. I was annotating the broadcast of the launch, explaining every little thing that happened during the launch process. I was the center of attention in the room even after I proclaimed after explosion, “They’re all dead!” It was the first time that I came to realize that my voice and more specifically my words could influence the emotions and perceptions of others. As I understood the use of words and their influences, I began to become very introspective and I began a rigorous investment in philosophical and religious understanding. I forsook the Catholic Church and soon explored the other various Holy Books of the Judeo-Christian world from the Koran to the Gnostic Gospels. As I digested these works, I also sought Plato, Socrates, Kant and Machiavelli to supplement the ecclesiastical works with more mundane grounding in ethics and reason. From there I explored Buddhism and as you know Paganism. Later on in life, I began to come to a deeper understanding of my connection in the Universe and started my journey along the Path of the Warrior. High School and the rigors of adolescence were not good to me. I spent a good deal of time alone and ostracized because of my size and general lack of knowledge of how my peers acted. In this chaos there was no time to develop real socialite skills and my teen years paid the price. Everything from awkwardly trying to catch a date to the prom to dealing with conflicts with my peers became a giant struggle. This all came to a head the beginning of my junior year of high school when I was confronted by a very large mass of a bully during my lunch. Honestly, I cannot for the life of me remember what this young man’s name was let alone what he looked like. All I can remember is that he was from the football team and was intent of pushing me into a fight. When I was challenged, I did what I normally did which was to try and ignore him and his insults and all that served to prove was that he became more aggressive and began pushing me around the room physically. I felt that blind anger rising to the surface and I knew that I had a choice: I could let him be the aggressor and beat me up or I could take the first swing and still get beat up. My prospects were looking fairly slim. I opted for a third choice; I could fight back with my words! It was a glorious fight. Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Joyce were just some of the inspirations came to me as I fired a steady stream of off the cuff insults at my attacker. My words cut like red hot knifes through blocks of ice! I was pulling off what every nerd in the history of nerds has dreamed of doing: I used my brain to beat up a bully! It was one of the most proud moments of my teenage life as I verbally ripped my opponent to shreds. There was nothing he could do to fight back; I had completely outclassed and outmaneuvered him. The only response that he had was to swing at me and the Varsity Football coach tackled him to the ground before he ever made contact. At the end of the battle, my brain had bested the brawn of my enemy. Of course you can imagine the sort of impact this had on me. I now had a concrete proof that the power of words was great indeed. The pen truly is mightier than the sword. I spent my years in college engaged in wielding my new found skills with words with almost reckless abandon. I quickly found myself understanding that words and their applications can make people, for lack of a better parlance, do whatever you want them to do. Charisma plus vocabulary plus positioning equals a quick way to begin manipulating people to your needs. Now, the philosophically driven and responsible Rob would have used these skills for the side of good only, except that I was also practicing that noble of collegiate pursuits: heavy drinking. Pretty soon, I found myself the center of the campus’s attention and had people begging to be my friend or even still a hanger-on to leech off my notoriety. Life was good; or rather I thought it to be. I was completely “satisfied” living this hedonistic lifestyle tending to any immediate self gratifying need that I could bring to mind. As far as I thought, I had it all including the extra seventy five pounds that I decided to drink on to my body. Towards the end of this haze of alcohol and lust, I looked back on everything that I was “achieving” and it was hollow and bitter. In college, I had an English professor who would tell me: “If it wasn’t for your disabilities, you would probably be the next Albert Einstein.” I don’t see it. It is very hard for me to see any greatness within me. If I was born in China or Japan a hundred years ago, I most likely would have been cast aside as “unclean”. This is the reason why I fight as hard as I do. This is why I motivate myself to shine like the brightest beacon in the darkest night. Coming out of college I was a dark person who was filled with a lot of rage. I wanted to feel good about myself again, and since I was not exactly thinking, I made the connection that drinking made me feel good about myself. You know what they say about the children of alcoholics? Needless to say, it is very true. I was drinking, pretty aggressively almost every single day. I wasn’t even drinking to fulfill the chemical need that an addict experiences, I was drinking to feel empowered. I wanted to recreate that self empowerment that I had experienced at the end of high school and the beginning of college. I wanted to feel as if I was in charge of my path and I thought this was the solution. One night, when I was twenty five, I had just finished running a full night of karaoke and then DJ’ing the after party until three in the morning and I was full to the gills with drink. I decided that after about nine hours of heavy drinking, I was going to get into my car and drive home to my apartment off of State and Roosevelt. I was in Alsip at 119th and Pulaski. This trip normally takes around thirty five to forty minutes, and in my inebriated state I made the trip in less than twenty minutes and I have no conscious memory of the trip. It was this cathartic realization that made me turn my life around on a dime. Of course, none of this even resembles who I am today. This is a story about how I lost my way – that I had always used the power of words as a tool to help improve my life. Instead I lost site of all that and in the pursuit of what is hollow in the world, I could have done worse to my life than simply wasting seven years drunk. There are other things that of course happened here. There are other lessons that I have learned and other tools that I have acquired. This is not the place or time for that conversation. In telling this story, I am reflexive on how I have overcome so much in my life through words. There have an inherent power; in fact written words were for the longest time how people expressed power and magick in the world. When you are “spelling” a word, you would be creating a “spell”. There is a silent truth there. Words can change the world. My place within those words is to maneuver successfully in their application. Often too many times have I let my personality get the better of the intention behind my words. This is something that I have only recently become aware of. Recently - as in this self reflection. I have an extensive vocabulary, one that I have cultivated over the years and I have worked very hard to retain that vocabulary. When I use it, I am not trying to lord it over the person that I am speaking with. Typically I eagerly share the meaning of a word someone might not know because I tend to think that people would be proud to learn a new word. I know that always am, because it is so hard for me to do so. I try to make people comfortable with my laughter and smile because I know that for some people, including myself, interaction can be very stressful. The sad thing is that, I have built this very “positive” mental image of myself that when I speak with people I come off as a jovial inviting person instead of the very large man in front of them. For the life of me, I will never understand why people think that I am threatening. I can only see myself as this average build, average height young guy and not the large mass of a man that I am. It is important to remember that as your life changes you are only the sum of your experiences and the lesions that you have learn from them.

A Letter to the Unawakened, or Do Something!

I close my eyes, and every time that I do I see a cataclysm that seems like it cannot be avoided. I see unspeakable horrors that await us around the corner, of long dead Gods returning to this sphere raging with jealousy and hatred towards the gifts of consciousness that the Divine bestowed on us. Of my comrades, friends and family lying on the floor of the charnel house that the battlefield of the End of the World becomes. To see that there are fates worse than death that awaits those who rebel against this horror that has not unfolded yet. I see all of this and more every time I close my eyes and the one and only thing that I know how do is to just fight back. You don’t have to be Awakened to understand any of this. You don’t even have to understand concepts like magick, mysticism or psychic phenomena to see that this plane of existence is getting ready to explode with a force of momentous energy that will alter the way that we conduct the day to day activities of life on this planet. You can see this change happening everyday as it sparks “normal” people to start acting in definitely socially accepted normal manners. From law abiding citizens to family driven supermoms and dads, the common human is starting to express their instinctual reactions to this dramatic change by doing things like randomly burning down their house and crashing their plane into the IRS building or going on a random shooting spree indiscriminately killing all they feel is appropriate. Their tanks are hitting full of the chaotic energy that is pooling around the world, ready to reach a critical mass and then really shatter our reality. This world is dramatically changing at breakneck speeds and we are driving straight for the wall with eyes wide open. I talk to non sensitive types all the time and they keep telling me things like, “something is happening”, or my favorite, “the energy feels off” as if it was something that was fact and not relegated to the annals of witches and warlocks. “Normal” people, or rather people who for a vast majority of their life lived as if their standard lemming-like “Sheepeople” was all that mattered, are beginning to see more than the three feet in front of them. These Sheepeople are slowly removing the blindfolds that cover their eyes and they are starting to realize that there is more to the world than their fucking lattes, minivans and bunko nights. People are starting to realize that a small little Muppet in the early 80’s was right – “Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter!” That there could be something to our lives that exists in more than the gaps in the trips to Starbucks; that we exist on the physical plane as well as a spiritual plane and that our connection to the Universe is deeper than we will ever quite understand. I think the British band Muse said it best when they said: “If you could flick a switch and open your third eye, you'd see that we should never be afraid to die” and that is a very simple yet hardcore fact. Why fear death? If we are merely the physical expression of our soul, then who care if the body gets damaged? Our bodies will fail; one day they just stop working, either from intentionally caused damage or they just give out because they don’t come with really great warranties. Our souls go on, just cruising on by waiting for the next moment to be reborn. But didn’t I start all of this with an apocryphal doom and gloom statement talking about end of days? Yes I did, but all of this is related. You see, if there is something that is chaotic and full of wraith and hate for us little people and we are beings that are physical expressions of our spiritual selves, then doesn’t behoove us to not want to let the whole thing go to pot? I mean, think about it, for the last 600,000 years (or 3,000 if you are a Christian Fundamentalist) modern human species has been running around on this planet. This is our home. It is the only one that most of us have ever known. If a burglar was to come into your home and try to steal your crap you would put up a fight. Hit that burglar with a baseball bat, call the police and have him prosecuted within an inch of his life, because you know, how dare that burglar break into your home and try to take from you….right? Then why don’t we fight for our larger home, you know the Earth? “Cause it’s not my problem” or “I’m not a dirty hippy” or whatever your narrow minded excuse is it is just a steady stream of bullshit. If you are going to be using words like “the energy of the room is off” then you are responsible to do something about it. I don’t care what it is either: volunteer to clean up the messes that we have collectively turned a blind eye towards, perform Reiki and send healing energies to the incarnation of the planet, teach and show the younger generations how not to make the same fucking mistakes that we seem to collectively keep making. Do something positive; lend your “energies” to fixing the problem that magickally inclined and non-magickally inclined folk seem to all be seeing. Don’t sit by and let this opportunity shoot pass you a Warp Speed. On a side note, if you are reading this and you have no clue to what I am speaking about, well I am sorry that you have stumbled on to my ramblings. However, you were shown this for a reason. It is for you do ascertain the reason; maybe you are supposed to make some profound change in your life. Or not, honestly I have no clue. Just don’t say this is a nonsensical rambling. Do something positive for your world, your family, your friends and yourself. Don’t just say it’s not your problem. This is all of our problems, face it….you got no where else to go!