THE MISADVENTURES OF AN ESOTERIC INVESTIGATOR

I think I have to hypnotize myself in order to write something longer than a piece of flash fiction or a short story.  When I wrote my first novel, my friend and co-author did a major ritual on an ancient step-pyramid, the goal of which was energy, sustenance, and the foundation for a large creative project.  Right after that, we both found ourselves jobless with our rent paid and a great idea for a novel in the works.  We wrote like fiends for 60 days, about 8 hours a day, and then we had a manuscript on our hands.  Right after it was finished, it's like the spell was lifted and we got jobs and went back to our normal routine.  So disciplined, you ask?  No, not really.  I'm working on that because I feel it would be terribly inconvenient if I had to cast a writing spell on myself every time I wanted to write a book.  However, in a way, I see a writers hermit-like retreat to be a kind of magickal retirement, where one does the real work.

I went to two different schools, first to Madison Media Institute for graphic and web design, with a side bit of video and television production.  Then I went to Goddard with an emphasis on psychology, comparative religion and creative writing.  So far, I've only gone to school for things I've already studied on my own and thought, Hey, I'll get a degree, I'm studying it anyway.  Somehow this never worked out because, I think,  having to do it took the fun out of getting to do it.

Just about everything.  I can't imagine that alternate universe where I am childless, but it can't be a healthy place.  Having a child, especially so young, forced upon me all the things we normally don't get around to really thinking about and figuring out until we're much older.  I had to come to terms with mortality, the basic questions of existentialism, my place in the world, my psychological issues, my parents and sibling psychological issues, how these things get passed from generation to generation.  Suddenly I realized that I was put in the position that I would one day be gone and the only thing that would be left of me, my only true and ab9iding legacy would be my son, and thus, having children is really the only way we can program the future, how we can have any effect beyond the grave.  I realized that one of the main problems in the world (minus overpopulation and global warming and nuclear holocaust) was the fact that shitty people raise shitty people.  I was going to have no part in it whatsoever.  I came to realize that our parents have issues, lessons that they must learn and come to terms with and whatever they do not resolve and incorporate, or just 'get over', they pass on to their children, and the cycle continues forever and ever. So it was having a child that forced me to take that first real step, the first dive into the cold lake of self-knowledge.  I couldn't allow my parents issues to continue through me to my son, along with my own issues.  I then resolved to "remake myself into a superhuman pattern through which the infinite may more clearly shine".  I don't think I even realized it until you asked this question, but I think I may have floundered, like a pig in shit, rolling around in my subconscious, a waste, accomplishing nothing, in that childless alternate universe.  Having Ethan was the Universe's way of grounding me, keeping my feet on the ground so I could fly high enough to break through the clouds and let the sun shine through.

You have to go and ask the hardest question ever.  I call it Jeremyism.  Sometimes I call it the systemless system.  I just wrote a large paragraph and decided I'd lost my train of thought and realized its too big and non-linear and multifaceted to describe properly.  In short, the entirety of existence, the entire universe is consciousness.  All matter, light, energy, everything is consciousness.  That's why we can't find consciousness when we carve up a brain.  Because we're looking for something that just is.  Like trying to find a needle in a needle stack.  Take part Qabalah, part quantum physics, part Bill Hicks comedy routine, part Tom Robbins novel, part Tim Leary, part Aleister Crowley, part Ken Wilber, part Robert Anton Wilson, a large part of Carl Jung and shake well and pour through the filter of one Jeremy J. Parker and you get Jeremyism.  I didn't even use their ideas, but had to describe all this to myself and when explaining to other people, I've found these other people's maps are very good reference points.  We're here to move things from unconsciousness to consciousness, from potential to actualization, and make sure it means something.

I've often thought of France, since I have strange synchronistic connections to that country, the least of which is being born on Bastille Day.  Since I was about 12, I said I was going to be a writer and then retire to a manor in Scotland, on Loch Ness, write my memoirs and watch for Nessie.  My British roots and genetic inheritance also beckon for some time in England.  Either will be nice, but I plan on all three eventually.

INTERVIEWED by atomic_goo

I was randomly browsing through my LJ friends' friends and I saw her LJ name, antarcticlust and thought it was a beautiful polarity, a divine dichotomy of terms.  I looked at her user info and all it was was a great Bukowski poem I'd never seen before, which is still currently my favorite Bukowski poem.  Coincidentally, I had just gotten into the Buk at that time.  We started commenting on eachothers journals, then chatting, and it turned out she was moving to Madison, where I live, to go to grad school.  I met her when she arrived last June and took her out to dinner.  We were strictly friendly over the summer, even though we were fighting heavy chemistry, and we finally gave in toward the end of August and became an "item."  It's great, but it's always weird to say, "Oh, we met on the internet."

I'd have to say, currently, From a Balance Beam and the lyrics...

 It was in a foreign hotel's bathtub I baptized myself in change.
 And one by one I drowned all of the people I had been.
 I emerged to find the parallels were fewer. I was cleansed. I looked in the mirror
 and someone new was there. Still, I was as helpless as a chess piece
 when I was lifted up by someone's hand and delivered from the corner my enemies had got me in.
 But in all of my salvation I still felt imprisoned inside that holding cell that is myself.
 So I wait for the day when I'll hear the key as it turns in the lock
 and the guard will say to me, "Oh my patient prisoner you have waited for this day
 and finally you are free! You are free!"

I tend to use the more archaic definition of cosmology, the study of the universe in its totality and by extension man's place in it, or in general, a structure of the universe.  I consider all religions, mythologies and philosophies to be cosmologies.  I try to study every one I see.  I sort of view the Universe like the parable of the blind men and the elephant.  Three blind men run into an elephant and one grabs it's trunk and says, "An elephant is like a rope!"  Another blind man pushes on its side and says, "No, the elephant is like a wall!"  The last one feels it's leg and says, "The elephant is like a tree."  Whereas they were all in a way right, they were in the whole, wrong.  People and civilizations create cosmologies, their impression, their map of the structure of the universe, but they're all doing it from a certain perspective limited by society, culture, time and technology.  They're only mapping a little part of the whole thing.  Thus, theoretically, if I take every map ever made, every cosmology and figure out where they line up, I can put together a clear, or at least clearer, map of the universe.  Like those photo-mosaics, if I put enough maps together, I might get a good picture of what the elephant really looks like.

You ask a movie question, you get a movie answer :)  I would fight Genghis Khan with a baseball bat!  (Please tell me you've seen Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure!)

5. How did you come up with the username [Unknown site tag]jackshoegazer?

One day, walking through an ancient Aztec site in Wisconsin, I was thinking of an idea for a novel and the name popped into my head, fully formed: Jack Shoegazer, Esoteric Investigator.  I still haven't written a Shoegazer book, but I have plans for about five of them so far.  I wanted to get away from my fnord777 username because I didn't know that would be my LJ name forever and ever, and I wanted something original and "me" so one day I paid my $15 and got a name-change token and became jackshoegazer.