A hundred years ago people pretty much didn't live after 40. Disease, poverty, war and racial divides were a way of life and death, the medical breakthroughs in antibiotics and the ability to transplant organs just a dream of a few who could actually afford to have dreams. When you look back on history it's pretty obvious why people clung to religion to make it from day to day...They didn't have any room for spiritual evolution because they were focused on their now instead of their children's tomorrows.  Those who were able to break their bind to home, family and community and get an education beyond their controlled world discovered there was more to living than simply surviving, than having a family and watching the younger generations continue on living while they grew old and left out of the world at large. Even today with the Internet humanity still looks for that 'Small Town' feel, they seek out those who believe like themselves, they read works by th...

I need to be clear about this...I didn't attend Bible School because I had some guilt about the life I'd led or some huge revelation like Saul/Paul. I had no problem with most of my life up until that time dancing with the whole Dark Magick experience and I saw/did a great many things that I've come to discover it's best not talking about it to just anyone, moments that I can't explain and you probably wouldn't have believed had you not seen it for yourself. I started out my spiritual life with the whole 'Gaia' aspect of Witchcraft and moved almost effortlessly into the dark side where, yeah, I did get just a wee bit careless now and then. For the most part. There were a couple of things that almost drove me insane, that burned images into my mind so strongly I couldn't remove them, couldn't drive them away and that part almost killed me because I refused to sleep, eat or do much of anything normal. I ended up taking care of the problem in a ...

I hate being labeled. When I registered for college there was a space for your 'Ethnicity' and I checked 'Other', always have. I didn't want to be known as any specific 'Type' because I've always known we are never just one thing. To my parents I was a son, to my sister, a brother, to my friends as Mike and it just goes on and one. A single word, a label, can never describe a person and yet we're still stuck with having them attached to us. Artist. Man. White guy. Witch. Minister. Writer. Anarchist (Antichrist?).  I've had the displeasure of having several Psychiatrists slap several labels on me and I really don't know how to spell them so I'll just leave that to your imagination. In the 80s you could rightly say I was an alcoholic and drug abuser and you'd be right.  Still, they're just words. Images that, by themselves, elicit singular images...Most of the time. We have this place in our heads that say an 'Artist...

This last month I've had a lot of talk time with my sister and that's brought back a whole lot of memories, some good, some great, some I'd rather never think about again...But that's the whole thing about life. You have to take the whole package that comes with it, family, friends, enemies, and, sometimes, strangers who may become more or might just vanish as fast as they showed up. My life has been an adventure, a series of errors and mistakes bundled with the great fortune of meeting and knowing some of the best people in the world.   And then there came the whole what happens after we die thoughts. Bottom line: NOBODY KNOWS! NO ONE!  Zilch. We all have ideas and call them 'Faith'. We hope there's another chance at making our Karma finally work out. Maybe you believe in Heaven and Hell (I don't). But I started thinking about the whole 'Judgement' thing and, having the unpleasant experience of being before many a judge and a mili...

A couple of years back I was given a rather startling, though not unexpected, diagnosis and I determined I didn't want to die stupid...Or ignorant is perhaps a  more apt word. I grew up on the south side of town, all my friends were of different races and I never really thought about things like racism and bigotry and the like and kind of felt proud of that fact. But, then again, I was white. Poor, yeah...Still white.  I guess in high school I started to realize there was a difference. My friends were picked on because they were hanging around a white guy and I was called a few names because I hung around everyone who wasn't white. I shrugged it off. Or ended up in  a fight...Whatever. Then a close friend of mine, Hispanic, shot himself because of his relationship with a white girl...There was a whole world of hate going on in his life that I didn't see until after the fact. He survived but the future he once had as (What I saw) one of the best artists I ever knew w...

This was going to be about censorship because Facebook decided to censor the painting I placed on my homepage. I have never understood these groups who make the decisions as to what a person can or cannot see, mostly because they're always contradictory or just plain stupid. For instance, FB allowed this picture:  But decided this one was too 'Sexual': Makes no sense to me. Still, it got me thinking about how we go through life censoring or own stories, our 'Real' selves because we're afraid we might alienate someone close to us or lose us a friend or family member (Which has happened to me on more than one occasion). A lot of times we work around our personal history, insinuating and not just saying because those who love you will stick by your side and those who don't, well, the decision on what to do or say isn't always easy. But these parts of our lives shouldn't be hidden because they helped make us who we are which, most of the time...

The Stone Age...More truthfully, the late 60s. Casa Grande was a small town in the middle of nowhere, only had a few shops, lots of bars, a drive in theater and the main theater downtown,  and you could probably walk the entire place in an hour and virtually everyone you saw on that hike you'd know, by reputation if not personally. Pretty much true of all small towns. Not a whole lot to do for entertainment, legal anyway. We had a library over at Peart Park, looked like a miniature fort built out of Adobe, small, only four main rooms of books and a swamp cooler that would cause the books to curl during those hot days of summer. I spent a lot of time at that place, reading almost everything it had to offer and that included a bunch of biographies and autobiographies...For most this was as close to the outside world they'd ever come and dreams were what kept most of us going back then. We knew nothing about the unrest throughout the world, this is Arizona, after all and almos...