Portable Shrines

“Well you know John, the drug war is just an excuse to throw minorities in prison.”

The above is something my uncle, who’s a successful corporate attorney, told me after I was arrested for possession of LSD over a decade ago. It was precisely this advice that persuaded my Dad, who at first vowed zero assistance to cough up the $3500 or so dollars it took to hire a fancy lawyer to talk the charges down to the misdemeanor “attempted possession of LSD”. If it wasn’t for this money, which is little more than a demonstration to the courts that you’re not dirt poor, I might have struggled to have continued access to things like gainful employment and the ability to vote in our society.

The entire process of being thrown in jail and jumping through the endless hoops of the legal system (not to mention being financially drained) left me lower than I’d ever been previously or have sank to since. In short, they had broken my psychologically, which is what the system is designed to do. But in the process I learned a few things. For one, most drug charges are little more than a shakedown. If you can buy your way out of them, you’re probably not going to serve any serious jail time. Secondly, despite what organizations like NORML might tell you, you don’t have any fucking rights in matters like these unless you’re wealthy. It was a blatant case of illegal search and seizure, the cop’s story made zero sense, but you know how much money it would have taken to get that shit in front of a jury? Yeah, more than I had or my Dad was willing to spend. So really it’s just the cop’s word against yours and who do you think the Judge is going to believe?

All of last week’s Halloween festivities left me in the mood to write a horror blog this month, and in my mind, there’s nothing more abjectly terrifying than the drug war. The loosening of the federal government’s persecution of medicinal marijuana and the economic collapse (not to mention having a minority president who has openly admitted to smoking pot) have lead to an increasing dialogue about the legalization of the marijuana. Which is a step in the right direction for sure, but it’s important to understand that the war on drugs is more than just a war on people, it’s also a war on our spiritual development as a species.

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by John Gillanders…

“Art is magick because art transforms consciousness”
Alan Moore

The above nugget of cosmic wisdom was culled from the documentary:  The Mindscape of Alan Moore, which was released on DVD stateside in 2008 to little fanfare. When I just checked, there were exactly two holds placed on said movie at the public library, whereas comparatively the Watchmen DVD had nearly a thousand. Which is really too bad, and kind of a reflection on how we want the body of our art and not always the mind. To be honest, I ran out and saw Watchmen on opening weekend back in March and banished Mindscape to the bottom of my ever expanding Netflix cue before just getting around to finally checking it out last month.

If I were to recommend a cogent introduction to so called magickal thought, I’d suggest this to anyone far more than actually reading anything Aleister Crowley’s written (which I’m still yet to get much out of) – which is kind of the aberrant thing with magickal writing. Whereas, people like Austin Osman Spare and Crowley are often seen as the forefathers of western magickal thought, I’ve personally found it far more beneficial to read other’s interpretation of their work rather than hearing it directly from their own mouths. In fact, it was actually attempting to read Crowley that turned me off to all things magick for years.

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