Early Morning Musings of a Former Occultist [?]

6:00 am. I wonder. Did I perform that ritual right? Well, according to the book, I had to gather all the ingredients (which would require me to go to the Safaris, and risk my life having an early and terrible end, my body getting eaten by lions, and my privates, by deranged gorillas mistaking it for a banana, just to get hold of them), put them into a tub, fill it with water, and bathe in it upon the Friday moon light. I think I did it just fine. Oh, damn! I forgot to light three red candles before chanting the incantation and rolling over clockwise three times! Now I’m gonna have to do it again. Going butt-naked on a Friday night dipping my body in stinky muddy shit with all those itchy leaves and buds of odd plants is not funny, to tell you, let alone ridiculous. Goddamnit.

7:00 am. I’m having my breakfast at McDonald’s, reading a sentence or two in the fifth chapter of “To Light a Sacred Flame” with every bite of my Big Mac and fries. After the physical and mental digestion, I wonder again. Where the hell am I gonna get that fancy foggy crystal ball and that weird-looking pentagram-printed black cloth? I’m as sure as hell I can’t get that stuff from 7-11. From an occultism shop, perhaps. I imagine being face-to-face with a nutty occultist poser trying to give me a prediction of how young I would die and in who’s hands, through the color of the aura I am emitting which only the nutter alone can see.

7:30 am. I’m standing at the stop to catch the next bus, still reading the book while staying alert for pickpockets. Now, I muse. Who among my friends could help me make a voodoo doll out of dirty cloth and cotton balls? Ah, Kathy, probably. She used to be quite excellent in our Home Economics class back in junior high, sewing to be exact. Maybe she could help me stitch the cotton-ball-stuffed parts of the doll together into a fairly realistically-looking witch’s doll. Ugh, yeah. Maybe she could.

And who to use voodoo magic on? I dunno. I’ve absolutely no idea. Nada. Nothing. I had better master the voodoo ritual first before pondering on whom to use it on. It says in Voodoo for Dummies, “Choose a place where you will not be disturbed by external forces even for a single second. Your bedroom with its door locked would be fine. Another idea would be to perform outdoors on a Tuesday midnight, blessed by the Moon, when the power of the ancient magic of Voodoo is at its peak.” Hmm, no. That’s not the place for me to do it. I’ve seen scenes in “voodoo” movies where the performer goes to some cave-y place with stupid things hanging from the ceiling to do his ritual. Maybe it gives more spirit to what he’s doing, or something. That should do the trick.

8:00 am. I’m in class now, pretending to read “Sociological Indifferences”. “Potion-making for Potion Idiots”, being way a smaller book than my Sociology 198 textbook, gives me much opportunity to learn about the bewildering complexities of potions while sporting my usual I’m-such-a-smartass-college-kid-that-you-can’t-get-me-to-talk-to-you-while-in-class-unless-you’re-a-girl-and-you-want-me-tutor-you-at-home-tonight facial expression. Potions are a more concrete evidence of magic, and are universal, for that matter. They have ingredients (see first paragraph for more information) that you mix together, brew, and after while, drink, unlike spell magic which is only done by silly wand-waving and chanting some Latin-wannabe gobbledygook and has no certainty that it would take effect. Potion-making is universal in that the potions are fixed, definite, constant, as opposed to spell magic, where spells vary through time, from language to language.

9:30 am. The class is over. And I’ve lost interest in occultism. Maybe I might open my books once again some time in the future. And when’s the future for me? I dunno. But definitely not soon. Not as soon as a year or so. I guess doing eccentric stuff is just not my thing. Maybe it’s others’. Maybe it’s yours.