PART 2 of 2: I stare at my plate and swallow this lump in my throat. I feel pretty vulnerable, but I decided I might as well tell her how I really feel and open up about this for once, despite myself. I let out a quick sigh. "I find this stuff really embarrassing… but I think I can articulate this. I’m into bigger girls- I like soft stomachs, and the excess thing is really what gets me. Do you know what I mean?" Shasta pushes noodles around with her fork. I stare at her smearing sauce around the plate, waiting for her to say something. “It would be hot for me if a girl is eating to please me, to get bigger." I blurt. My face is red. The espresso appears beside me like magic. I pick up my coffee and stare into it as I take a sip, so I don’t have to look at Shasta. She doesn't say anything. She just twirls her spaghetti on her fork. I have no idea what she's thinking. I'm trying to survive the embarrassment of saying this to someone, for the first time in my life. I can barely even take a bite of my food. "So how is it?" I said finally. I probably made her feel weird about eating anything in front of me. "What. The food? It's pretty good... " Shasta says through a big mouthful of pasta. She starts winding more noodles up with her fork, “but it could always use more parmesan.” “Yeah, see? Who says less is more?” "Why are you with me?" Shasta suddenly asks bluntly. "What?" "I'm not like the girl in that video. I don't think I ever will be. But Cassidy IS. Why would you want me? Is this why you said I don’t make you feel dirty?” Shasta accused. “That you like the fact that I don’t tempt you like that?” “Uh.” I’m squirming in my chair. “Well…I think those are separate things. I like being with you. But I never ever wanted to see my weird fantasy in real life. I would die of embarrassment." “To be with a girl that looks like that, you would die of embarrassment?" She glares at me like she’s about to make a wager. I shrink further into my chair. "You’d sell your soul for a moment of pleasure, I know you would. The thing about individualism is that it is not hedonism per se. A master decides, a slave obeys.” The waiter is standing beside us now and we both look up at him at the same time. He gives a kind of nervous grin and offers to take the plates. I ask for a box for my food and Shasta looks at the back of the menu, and orders a slice of devil’s food cake, plopping the menu on the table and crossing her arms. I’m not hungry enough for dessert but I’m not going to impose on Shasta. I just wanted to have a nice night together. "Would you want to keep me on a leash in public? Isn't that a good comparison?" I said, argumentatively. "If I felt like I could get away with it, maybe it'd be kind of hot. Don't you think? Everyone would know that we're a couple of little freaks who have more fun than they do." Shasta casually said, as she takes the black plastic straw between her fingers and slowly sips her drink, making suggestive eye contact. "I worry about what other people think. I'm trying to get over it. Being with you and smoking weed are really helping. I can see that I don't have to feel so bad." I extend my leg under the table to find hers; to make physical contact as an olive branch of sorts. And with that, dessert arrives with a clunk of the plate. This cake slice is over the top- it is decked to the nines with whipped cream and maraschino cherries, and a pool of kirschwasser, with a generous dusting of shaved chocolate. The chef decorated the plate with a thin drizzle of chocolate sauce and 3 little circles of chocolate drizzle, I have to admit it looks pretty good. I comment aloud- “That’s not a devil's-food cake, that’s a black forest cake.” “And I’m free to decide that I wanted it.” Shasta states defiantly. Shasta has a tight lipped sheepish smile as she puts her cell phone on the table sideways, propped against the little plastic vase in the center of the table, like she’s about to take a video. “Hey B,” she stoops down low to the table in front of the phone, putting on an extra feminine, high pitched breathy voice with a hint of a fake midwestern accent, “I know my last video really blew up so I’m gonna make another one for you guys…” Shasta slides back and puts a big black fabric napkin on her lap, wriggles in the chair a bit, and scootches it forward with a squeak, and puts an elbow on the table. She lowers her gaze to mine, and picks up a cherry by the stem. “I’m going to eat this whole piece of cake for you. Over Christmas I’m going to eat and eat and get real chubby, and when you’re back, you can grab me by my love handles and fuck me like you mean it.” I’m gobsmacked, Shasta just pulled this out of nowhere. “What?” I’m so shocked I’m almost laughing. She furrows her brow and crinkles her nose at me and takes the fork, she tries to lick the whipped cream sensually. I kind of feel bad for her. This is so left field that it isn’t working for me at all and I’m slowly succumbing to overwhelming secondhand embarrassment. Some things are supposed to stay on the internet. I gently reach across the table and grab her wrist. “Hey. I would never ask you to do this. This is a lot. No one should do this for someone else.” Shasta puts the fork down on the edge of the plate with a clank and crosses her arms. “It's just a fucking piece of cake. It doesn't matter. I think it would be really sad if sex wasn’t ever that good for you. If you suppress this, I doubt it will be any good for me either.” “Shasta.” I breathe her name. "I like you how you are. I don’t need you to change for me.” “I know you do. I know.” She’s avoiding eye contact for a second. “You’re calling my bluff, you’re ruining this for me. I was already kind of embarrassed, now I feel humiliated. I just wanted to play this game with you; to turn you on, so we could use some of that energy later tonight. You know. . . try again?” She stares at me while chewing on her bottom lip, tapping the fingers on her left hand rapidly on the table with a click click click. Her face is really red; she’s really flustered. I shouldn’t have said anything. It turns out she had put her hand down on top of the fork, and gotten her palm covered in whipped cream without realizing. She wiped it off onto a napkin, still looking mortified. I grab the second fork on the table and carve a chunk out of the slice of cake and take a bite. It’s really moist and flavorful, I’m used to having mediocre cake. It’s really good. As I swallow I try to do some damage control. “I’m sorry if I ruined it for you, can we start over? I think it’s sweet. I know it took you a lot of nerve to try something like this- we’re pretty much in public. I’m sorry I embarrassed you when you were trying to do something nice for me and you were being really vulnerable. Shasta, please. Let’s start over.” Shasta clicks her tongue and crosses her arms again, avoiding my gaze again. “Let’s just get the bill.” I put the rest of the cake in another takeaway box and paid.

>>12565 >>12564 Will there be supernatural elements or will it be this uncomfortable and boring the whole way through?

>>12566 This is the most uncomfortable scene. It's about wicca, drugs, and lust vs Christianity, shame, and grace... and there's a lot of magic and a lot of drugs, which are supernatural (canonically) to the narrator albeit somewhat realistically portrayed. >CHAPTER 1 (PART 1 of 2) The real trouble began when my brother Thomas started to resent his strict moralistic upbringing and “fall away from god” - first with scandalous and crude media, then drifting into smoking marijuana, and delving into the esoteric literature that had been circulating online in places like 4chan dot org. For my brother, his guilt and doubts made him pissed-off, and he embodied the punk rock spirit enough to figuratively die on any hill. This caused great strife for my parents and made everything difficult for him. If only he learned what I did from public school- to sit still, shut up, and stop twirling your ruler on the end of your pencil. I was simply too cowardly to externally rebel but I would be a tourist when we spent time together, and stick my toes into these waters. In his corner basement bedroom he showed me the meme culture of 4chan, told me about the wonders of marijuana, and taught me about chaos magic. My esoteric education initially started with little nuggets of what he felt was wisdom, like by quoting; “In the beginning was the word and the word was God, and the Word was with God. John 1:1” He informs me that this makes a profound statement on the fundamental quality of the universe being language and consciousness. Out of the infinite possibilities, this is the actual; and that the world we live in is maintained by belief. He used the example of a stop sign- the symbol that we call text is relative to a phonetic alphabet, and to English, which is always mutating. The word itself means less than the behavior that the sign impinges on those who behold and obey it as a social norm. All of this presupposes cars and roads, which have existed for a very short time on just one planet. The consensus of a group’s belief is required to maintain the nebulous idea of the signifier and its meaning, etc. In a sense, the sign is a kind of sorcery that controls the people who behold it. Text causes hallucinations in those that behold it, and acts as a crude telekinesis. You might also recognize this as Post-modern deconstructionist philosophy. My universe had started to be fundamentally made of Newtonian billiard balls as a burgeoning science student, so I didn’t get it. Then he told me that it was the apostle Thomas alone (which was his namesake) who touched the incorporeal body of Christ because he doubted. I was sitting on the carpet in his basement room one late fall afternoon in my senior year reading the back of a video game case when he stopped me with a leading question;. “So, do you want to touch the incorporeal body of Christ?” I replied to his code phrase while looking him dead in the eyes; “I want to put my finger in the wound where the nails were.” With that, lessons were in full swing. He pulled a shiny black shoebox out from under his bed that he had decorated with magical symbols and sacred geometry with gold markers. He opened the lid and pushed aside his marijuana paraphernalia to show me some lewd drawings he had made– girls in a chibi kawaii art style, with horns, wings, fangs, slit eyes, snake tongues, and pointed devil’s tails or mermaid tails– naked or scantily clad, and he said he was going to show me how to summon a tulpa (a daemon familiar) or a succubus. He told me he could tell my sacral chakra basically had a butt plug in it, I was so uptight, and that I was totally brainwashed by the church and our small minded family. As I leafed through the drawings, I thought to myself, “Damn, if only I could draw like that.” It took me years to fully grasp what he was trying to tell me but I’ll paraphrase what I learned here: A medieval sorcerer or an alchemist might have the idea that if they visualize a sexual object or entity by the power of their mind –by making drawings perhaps– that they are groping into the spiritual realm (rationalists can call this the platonic hyperspace) and retrieving objects. They are creating pornography and their magical vocabulary and thinking makes them in a way believe or say that they are creating or contacting a sexual entity. Although the tidiest perspective is that the sexual entity is a unity, especially from a materialist or Freudian perspective, the reason that it might be thought of as discrete entities, rather than one sex goddess, is because the objects of sexual interest, and real human women (or even a single dynamic person) are a plurality. There are many sexy archetypes and they are like different characters, different people. When trends appear, a magician is groping about their own personal unconscious for a caricaturized woman, either as they appear in society, or as a pure fantasy, into the object. This is objectification in a literal sense; The maid. The Arabian harem girls. The pink haired gamer grrl with cat ear headphones. A wizard makes these or invokes them with their mental powers. This is how modern advertising and tastemaking is done - to search hyperspace and bring things out into the material world. This could be done “on the natch,” but he assured me that magic is empowered by cannabis’ expansion of consciousness. It is difficult to be sensitive to spiritual energy otherwise. In the 20th century, people might be underwhelmed by this conclusion because we already have so much pornography. But that's because the deal with the devil was done, and now we have this underbelly of global interconnectivity in the sex industry, but we also have the social consequences of that. So when a wizard is manifesting this sexual energy, even outside of their dark tower, they can bring it into the real world by believing and acting on the belief that they are empowered with sexual energy: they don't need to necessarily reserve it like prudish people would. In this sense, they are enchanting the external world with sex and possibly creating physical things like brothels. My world was not enchanted in this way at all, not only because of my self imposed social isolation, but also because the only computer (except my brother’s) was in an open concept living room. I had no access to the magic of sex whatsoever. I eagerly listened to this esoteric knowledge- it was so edgy and fresh. I was on the edge of my seat. First I just experimented with sigils - I could make a drawing out of letters, starting with the first letter of a word I wanted to embody- say- courage- and I would draw a big capital C, and then circle the C with an O, and loop under both those letters with a big U. . . and so forth. I could tuck these into my notebook, my phone case, my wallet, or burn them, and if I believed it would work, then it would. He told me I should try drawing an entity that I wanted to contact, opening up communication with the transcendental other. I tried drawing women. I would start with a line for the spine and place the head with an oval with the diameter approximately 14% of the figure's height, transect the head with two lines intersecting at 90 degrees and place the eyes, the nose… the shoulders and the base of the hips with two more lines. Then I would draw two circles for the chest. Then I would erase them and make two really big ovals instead, because if I’m going to be doing this at all, I might as well go all the way... Every so often in my dark tower, I drew an abomination with one hand and after I was finished with it, I would hold the corner of the page into a candle and burn it, trying my best to bury my sense of regret or shame along with it. Cont

PART 2 of 2 The next thing I had to do is to try marijuana, as everything I had ever been told about it was allegedly a lie. He insisted it was holy, and the reason our protestant tradition was so empty was the lack of connection to a true sacrament. This insistence went on for months. After much badgering, on a winter walk through the forest, I finally took the pipe just to get him to shut up. I sucked on the glass as he lit it and watched it glow and glow until it was burnt down to the ash. After I exhaled that huge milky cloud of harsh pungent smoke, I haven’t been the same since. I never expected anything to happen, I had no idea about drugs beyond that they make you end up writhing and jabbering on a piss-scented mattresses, picking at your skin for bugs, stealing from convenience and liquor stores. I was assured no piss-scented mattresses would entail but otherwise had no expectation. With marijuana in particular, I figured if it did anything, it made you sleepy and chill and maybe hungry, and it had a yellowish ambiance. I didn’t think drugs did anything other than that- but in the aspen forest in mid December just before Christmas, when I took that first toke, I felt my teeth sinking into sand. I heard the crunches of snow under my feet reverberate in the deafening silence, and felt every sound tickle my ear like gold foil. I felt like the snowy forest floor I was standing on was a white jagged N64 polygon, one pixel thick, the only object in infinite blackness. The effect on memory and space, and my vision being chopped into frames, made me feel like I was skipping between parallel dimensions a couple times a second. It freaked me out. He finally brought me back inside and I huddled under a blanket, he put on some music and told me to relax. “Marijuana can’t kill you, you’re just high. This is what being high is.” When I was huddling under the afghan, I closed my eyes, and I was enveloped in tiny spinning robin’s egg blue and lavender pinwheels of minute and extremely detailed two-dimensional geometry. In the center of a mandala, I saw a tiny naked pink impish-looking girl with a mushroom for a head- she was seriously naught two centimeters tall, and she noticed me noticing her and made contact wordlessly. Her personality was bubbly, playful and amorous, and I could detect her lilting voice without literally hearing it. She told me she was my hyperspatial girlfriend- what I later hypothesize as some Freudian manifestation of a subconscious sexual structure- and she said the equivalent of “I’d do anything for you, senpai; I can be whatever you want me to be.” She proved this by transforming her appearance; contorting her pink flesh in all sorts of extremely abstract psychosexual ways. My cat jumped on me as this was happening and brought me back into the room. This encounter with the she-devil lasted less than 30 seconds. I was ringing like a gong with the implications for months. The devil pulled out all the stops when he made marijuana- it scared me bad enough that I didn’t smoke it again until college. I discretely asked Thomas to tell me more about daemons and succubi following this experience. He told me that a daemon is an entity that makes a contract with a human being- they offer something, and they deliver in spades, but there is always a price that is inherently inseparable from the reward. Technological prowess, fossil fuels, fame, or drugs- these are the material manifestations of a daemon: a succubus is a devil in the same regard. If someone chooses, they can form a relationship with a particular succubus (archetype) by repeatedly invoking her. Collectively, we are making or invoking her, like an egregore- when trends in sexual expressions appear. She can "possess" a real sexual partner through the projections we put on that person, or the way that a person presents themselves. A week or so before Christmas I was lying awake in bed in pitch darkness, considering all of this. I really really really wanted a girlfriend. The concept of a real sexual partner was foreign to me as I had no real world experience with women– they terrified me. In lieu of talking to a real girl, I had tried to pray to God to help me get a girlfriend but he never delivered. With what I wanted, I knew the Lord would never approve. If what my brother was saying was true, and so far all evidence proved that it was, then I might be able to use these esoteric teachings to my benefit. I was lonely enough that I figured I’d give it anything a try. It was a Saturday night. Under the full moon, I crept out of bed and opened a drawer in my desk to get out a pad of sticky notes, a lighter, and a pencil. Here’s another myth for you. In the beginning of time, God created the earth, and the animals and Adam with his chiseled body and prickly face. God created Eve as a foil with softer smoother features. In his divine humility, God endowed Eve with a distribution of lipids that we call secondary sexual characteristics with a tasteful moderation. Men and women were given God’s blessing to enjoy respectable romantic partnerships- He saw that it was good. Satan created marijuana, drop tuned distorted guitars, and chocolate, but he wasn’t finished. Somehow a she-devil was brought into existence, some call her Lilith, but the stories are varied. It’s almost like Satan was . . . not exactly permitted. . . but somehow ended up with the brushes and the chisel to decorate an archetypal woman of his own. This project was his Cystine Chapel- and he had an overindulged taste for the gothic and baroque - like a baker with a piping bag who didn’t know when to quit. In a dark tower he concocted a triple decker cake with pudding between each layer. Fondant, modeling chocolate, Maraschino cherries, a reduction of kirschwasser, gobs of whipping cream, chocolate ganache, caramel drizzle, crushed walnut, slivered almonds, ladyfingers- ornate in lavish excess. He wanted to see what Estrogen could really do. He decided to make fat girls. And once they were unleashed into the world, I never had a fool's chance of making it into the book of life. This was the reason that the devil was cast out of heaven- for causing God himself to feel shown up; or at the very least– to blush. I crept as quietly as I could to the bathroom at midnight and closed the door, keeping the light off. With my trusty red bic, I lit a few candles and began the incantation. I bent down onto my knees and traced an invisible pentagram on the bathroom floor with my finger. “Dear Satan,” I put the pad of sticky notes onto the closed toilet seat and whispered to myself as I furiously drew a figure; “send me a woman with thick thick thighs and big huge breasts. Send me a woman with more than enough to grab, a muffin top, and luscious red lips and wavy dark hair.” I drew really big ovals over the frame in a pin-up pose and linked them together with curvilinear lines. “A girl who really really loves me for who I really am.” I penciled in all the details and shaded her to emphasize the shapely form. I made a sigil: G. . . I. . . R . . . L. . . F . . . R. . . I . . . E . . . N . . . D. I took a pin and pricked the thick skin of my thumb, and as it started to bead, I spread blood onto the drawing. I was considering jotting down the emotions I would feel when this reality came to pass. At that particular instant I felt a little bit of dread creeping in, mixed into my almost maniacal chuckling and guilty pleasure. I scrawled under a capital E for emotions; “Grateful. Enamored. Seen. Horny. .. Uh… Fulfilled.” I wrote the fake postal code H0H 0H0 and held the paper to the flame, whispering the words “Fecund. Rotund. Nubile. Fertile.” The flames – yellow and green– slowly consumed the sticky note. I stared at the black curling glowing edge of the paper, reciting; “May it be so, may it be so, may it be so!” As the flames approached my fingers, I tried to drop the burning paper into the sink but realized I was holding it by the sticky end and I couldn’t drop it. I panicked and flailed my hand wildly to try and dislodge the burning paper, “fuck fuck fuck oh shit!” and the smoldering bits fell finally, leaving my fingers lightly singed. I went to bed and tried to sleep. By the time Sunday morning came around, and I had combed my hair and sang in the choir, I felt profoundly alienated, but with a cynical smugness. Underneath all of this was the creeping feeling that I am certainly going to hell.