Zines, Crypto, and a Christian stalker- 7/17/18

A couple weeks ago, I put myself through a workshop I developed about 25 years ago, to figure out what's most important in life at the moment.  My sister had a big decision to make in college back then, and I came up with a series of questions to help her decide what to do.  I've refined the workshop since then, and take myself through at least once or twice a year.  One of the things I decided to do after my last self-workshop was to write more about my day-to-day life as I build a living as a writer/artist.  So this is one of those posts.

I finished a zine, a little, self-published booklet, kinda like those in the clip above, and made the first couple of copies yesterday.  It's Club White Bear Zine #1, a membership club I'm starting where I'll write a bunch of my crazy stories, things I'm thinking about, and I'll add in some stickers, small copies of my artwork, and other random stuff.

After a morning session working on my latest drawing, one of The Beatles, I grabbed a bite at King's Mini mart by the Winston-Salem bus station, and sat on the blocks, big concrete ledges, to eat.  As I was doing that a white guy with a straight cut, untucked, blue, button-up shirt strolled slowly by among the normal crowd.  After my Monday morning rant calling out the local good ol' boys, I've been waiting for repercussions.  This guy reminded me of the hundreds of operatives I had to deal with in California in the early 2000's.  He carried himself like an undercover cop who thought he was blending in to the crowd, but might as well have been wearing a clown suit.  He stuck out that bad.  I watched him walk by as I ate my decidedly unhealthy pack of powdered sugar donuts.  I commented out loud, after he walked by, "Man you really look like a cop."  I wasn't sure if he heard me.

Then I head a block up the street to the UPS store to make the master copy of my zine.  I had 12 pages, both sides, covered with stories, photos, and background textures.  Those pages turn into a 48 page, 5 1/2" X 8 1/2" zine.  That's hefty by zine standards.  To make the duplication master, I photocopy one side of a page, then I take that copy, put it back in the machine's paper tray, and flip my master, and try to get it to line up so I wind up with a 2-sided copy, with both sides going the right directions.  It's a hit or miss process where I need to concentrate.

As I was trying to figure out which way to put the copies to get things to turn out right, the guy in the blue shirt walked by, looking at me intently through the big windows.  I really didn't want to talk to anyone at that point, I just wanted to make my zine master without screwing up a bunch of times.  So, of course, the guy walked in and came up to me.  He asked what I was doing.  I glanced up, and told him I'm was making a zine.  I went back to my work, and he kept annoying me as I tried to keep my attention on figuring out how to get the copies to come out right.  After I explained what a zine was, and that I made them to share my ideas, he asked what my ideas were.

Now, I've had literally several hundred, probably well over a thousand, people like this pop into my life over the years.  In the post-9/11 era of the 2000's, they ranged from local undercover cops checking out the taxi drivers for drug dealers and pimps, to off duty soldiers looking for potential terrorists, to full on high caliber federal agents.  There was an incident with another taxi driver getting into trouble that got me on their radar in March of 2000.  Or at least that's what I was thinking at the time.  Plus I was a taxi driver, listened to KPFK,  L.A.'s public radio, all day, and talked way to much about conspiracy stuff back then.  So I got all kinds of random people coming into my life to ask me questions for a variety or reasons.

I figured the guy yesterday was one of those, local P.D. most likely, doing a little "we've got our eye on you after that damn blog post" intimidation detail.  When I told him that I think a lot about the future, and future trends, and write about that. he asked "Have you read the scriptures?"  I didn't want to deal with him at the moment to start with, but after that comment, I really wanted this stalker to leave me alone.  You see, there's another category of undercover operative I've run into many times, undercover evangelicals.  In addition to traditional coercion, there are actually people in the evangelical community who have been trained in psy-ops by actual intelligence agency operatives, and trained in techniques to intimidate, investigate, and coerce people into their way of thinking.  Or just destroy people's lives, they're really good at that, too.  When you hear about gang stalking and that kind of stuff, and yes, it happens, that's usually who's behind it, in my personal experience.  Much like annoying drunk panhandlers, Jehovah's witnesses, or athletes foot, these people are hard to get rid of.

I told this guy, "Yes, actually I have read the "scriptures,"*  and I said I probably have a somewhat different take on it than you."  He asked if I knew what the scriptures said about the future.  I told him I didn't buy "all that."  Hey, you can believe whatever you want to people.  But the whole  "Book of Revelation/we're in the end times" thing is just a misreading of that book.  The entire book of Revelation is a dream or vision, it says so ("...in the spirit" Revelations 1:10 KJV).  It's not supposed to be taken literally.  It's either metaphorical, or in the case of Revelation, more likely allegorical.  There's probably an allegorical key to the book of Revelation that's been lost to history.  I don't believe the "end times" concept for the same reason I don't believe in the Easter Bunny or Santa Claus.  It's simply wrong.  As the late comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell put it, people are reading it for the denotation, not the connotation.  It's simply a grammatical problem.

The whole time I was trying not get into a long conversation with this "Christian" stalker, I was screwing up my zine master copies, and wasting a little money I didn't want to waste.  Anyhow, eventually he left, and I got the duplication master and the first couple copies of my zine made.

As he was leaving, the stalker said, "Well, I hope you find what you're looking for."  I replied, "I already have."  Life makes sense to me now.  But, working to actually put into practice everything I've learned is another issue, and I get really frustrated a times.  But that's the game of life.  As Joseph Campbell summed it up once, "It (life) is a wonderful, wonderful opera... but it hurts."  

Then I dropped one copy of my zine off to Rachel at Designs, Vines, and Wines (625 Trade Street), where several of my drawings are hanging.  Random people are always wandering in and out of there.  I wound up in a long and very interesting conversation with a guy totally into crypto ("don't call it crypto currency, those are two different things").  I've done a little bit of research, just to learn the basics (blackchain technology is gonna change EVERYTHING), but it was cool to get a deeper perspective on the whole crypto world.

All in all, halfway decent day yesterday.  Man, I ramble too much in these posts.

* In my 20's, when trying to make sense of the Bible, religion, and life itself, I read the New Testament, start to finish, at least four times.  I've read about 2/3 of the books in the old testament, start to finish, I read all the Gnostic gospels available, and much later read Edgar's Cayce's "Life of Jesus" book.  I've also read the Tao Te Ching, Marcus Arelius, various other philosophies, and listened to the six hour, Bill Moyer interview with comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth series, well over 100 times.  That's all in addition to going to Lutheran churches as a kid, and Methodist more recently, and other religious education.  All of that means nothing compared to actually spending most of my life seeking answers to the basic question, "What the point of life?"  That led me on a spiritual journey of trials, tribulations, and insights for most of my life.