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From my book (not yet spell-checked):
"Intermission
Proofreading this six months later, there are several important happenings at this stage of my life that contributed to my psychic make-up and the course of spiritual rebellion I was set on, that I realise cannot go unmentioned. They happened concurrently.
At the time of my second feature, I was reading a mind-bending, identity-challenging, simply too out-there for words comic series entitled The Invisibles. It was so amazing; it felt like a magic spell that involved YOU; the reader. Indeed, I still believe that it was magic, in the most scientifically explainable way, of course, and it changed my life. Here’s a quick review to give you an idea of the comic’s beautiful, mindfucking, idea-birthing being, better describing it that I can:
“Once in a while you pick up and read a graphic novel series that absolutely changes your life. This is one of them. Along with other graphic novels like Watchmen, Sandman and V for Vendetta, this series of 7 graphic novels chronicles the adventures of a group (or cabal) of mystick modern-day sorcerers. It is a journey into modern-day occult practices, anarchy, time-travel, sado-masochism, deviant sexuality, transgenderism, anti-capitalism, anti-monotheism, ancient religions, alien abductions, magical-hermetic praxis, LSD and protoplasmic-alien horrors from the beyond.
The invisibles is about an "invisible" organization fighting a war under our very noses with the Enemy, who would try and enslave the world into brainless conformity. Always subversive, yet full of hidden and not so hidden cultural references, pulse pounding action, strange concepts and insane ideas, it is simply the perfect comic; and it never stops being very human as well, with emotions excellently portrayed in the true Morrison way. Among other things, it shows: LSD meditation trips, Tarot reading, the Beatles, The Marquis de Sade, UFO experiences, Glossolalia, the concept of Arcadia all the myths and conspiracies about London, Aztec Gods... ex-cetera. And that's just in this volume. Behind all that, there`s the message which it sends, the most important part of it all; through some philosophical meanderings, captions, and dialogue. It talks about how schools control you into conformity, the evil in the concept of a city, and, above all, Utopia, the world that the invisibles want to create, a place redesigned so everyone will get what they want, including the enemy. They speak about how paradise can ony be found in our heads, about the pastoral Utopia of Arcadia, and have a scene about outlooks on life with Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron. Another important theme is mental liberation of all concepts: the phrase that`s my title is what king mob says to dane when he must realise that all the impossible things he experienced were not just hallucinations.”
As you can see, this was just about as big a never-ending series of imagination-pleasing ideas as a futurist like I was turning out to be could hope for. It was so much joy to read, the intertextuality and self-referentialism inspired so much the second feature we made, entitled ‘The Secret,’ about two Welsh amatuer film-makers who accidentally discover their lives are based on a 90-page script, and endeavour to escape from the movie before it ends and they cease to exist. I loved The Invisibles so much, not just because of the arch characterisation and the global settings and the richness of the divergent scientific, religious, otherworldly (and so so many other) ideas, but because it married itself to my way of thinking - that reality and fiction are one and the same and time is not past, present, future, but one never ending beautiful moment - we dream so to one day make said dreams reality, and the only thing that divides our hopes and imagination with reality is time – which, as The Invisibles makes so apparent, in the case of characters existing in a comic book, is no time at all, because if all time exists within the walls of the first and last pages of a comic book series, then all is already written; one thing, the beginning and ending of time only a flicker of pages away from each other (and if the comic is a self-reflective mirror of reality, then what does this tell us about our perceptions of time, and our lives, as readers-as-character?)
So there was that, which had such an influence on my life and convinced me all the more satisfyingly that nobody’s view of what is right is any more righteous than the next persons; meaning I could do whatever the fuck I wanted, essentially, as long as it felt true to me, but there was also the forum of mad conversation it spawned on the internet – the boards at Barbelith.com.
I didn’t start out there as a troll. Indeed, My first post was an amalgamation of ideas - some 60 pages of mad thoughts and amazing scientific theory that people were sprouting on Barbelith, all as a result of the effect that The Invisibles had on them (and amazing idea-spawning info it was, demanding to be put together, even though it came across as naive and ill-planned at the time). It was still a good chest of info though, very loosely lumped together. I was trying to contribute to the essential vibe of the place. I didn’t have any ideas to share of my own, really, I was busily caught up in the mindfuck I was experiencing on recently discovering the place. So I tried to mix and match everyone else’s ideas into some sort of mosaic document that could be referred to as the ‘best of Barbelith; thus far. Overall, it went down for better than worse…
But somewhere along the lines it all turned to shit. I was vibing trollish through the attention I was seeking more than anything else, although this attention-seeking behaviour was misunderstood. People rightly thought me happy to be abused in their reactions to my shocking and puerile posts (although always in the spirit of hounding out revolutionaries and having true free fun without any restrictions, as I thought The Invisibles was encouraging, although that was admittedly my subjective reading of it, and that was naive because if anything The Invisibles wanted EVERYONE to have their own righteous, self-reinforcing, joyously subjective reading), but what they couldn’t know that it was water off a duck’s back. It didn’t make me feel good to be abused, nor bad - years of bullying and being the freak of my peer-group had made me almost completely oblivious to it - it just didn’t affect me, because by that point I had such sound, fool-proof walls up that I knew for certain who I was and what mattered to me, and so the opinions and wrongly-cast assertions of a bunch in internet-entities had absolutely no bearing on who I actually was and therefore no beaing on me as a person - my fiction suit was quite simply not. real., and I took it for granted that they didn’t really consider their fiction suits really real either.
And if they did? Well, they were fair game for ridicule, being so involved in what was arguably a harmless, fictional reality anyway. If they wanted to got to war and take offence where none was meant, it was part and parcel of the fun for me (and a few other lighthearted souls on the board), because I didn’t give a shit. That was the truth of it. If anything, it just made the place more fun. Childish, I know, but if you don’t believe the world is anything but your playground, then you win whatever happens. Put another way - if I call you a smelly-ass giraffe, would you get upset at me, or would you just laugh and walk away?
So I got kicked off, and it pissed me off, because my feeling was I had a right to be there as much as the next person, because my truth was no more or less valid that the next person, and my feeling was that The Invisibles was about EVERYONE getting to live the life they wanted, and as Barbelith was not a real place but a place of imagination and ideas, it should be somewhere where everyone can say what they want and act as they please and not be persecuted. Looking back, it was a childish and naive way of looking at things, as my stirring up of the place meant it couldn’t function properly, but back then, it fuelled my self-righteous quest to get back on the board and do as I damn well pleased.
Registering new suits to get back to the board was all well and good, until Tom, the site’s manager, finally had to close down membership because I persistently came back time and time again. I refused to let this stop me, and I was so adamant of my right to be there, as well as having WAY too much time on my hands (plus, the challenge was so tantalising, and remember - I wasn’t getting any), so in time my subconscious, determined to get back, pulled a way out of the ether of the seeming impossible - I realised that old suits were registered under email addresses for places like hotmail.com that had since been allowed to expire through lack of use. I found a backdoor! I re-registered the Hotmail emails anew, hit up the forgotten password section on the site, and had the passwords for old suits sent out to me at the newly-registerred Hotmail addresses. Bingo, I had umpteen suits available to me, and I posted as much as I wanted, sometimes with as many as four suits at once, defending myself and making people wonder for YEARS how the fuck I was doing it. I was like a really bad case of Herpes.
It wasn’t just the ingenious backdoor avenue I came up with, or the honing of my ability to piss people off which would come in handy years later when I wanted to provoke a bad reaction from customer service personnel or the like. I also managed to convince poor Tom, of all people, via a craftily made up email address, that I was Grant Morrison, writer of The Invisibles, and that I’d shown up on the board like God coming down from Heaven above,. I was announced by Tom, and sick-inducingly worshipped by all the people who so hated me as my hated alias The Knowledge, and then I pissed off, after feigning to feel put out by a comment by my board nemesis Haus. Hilarious, and it also made me realise that it was EASY to convince people of something if they half-wanted it to be true anyway.
Barbelith, as well as a trove of far-out ideas and evolutionary thought, was an early exercise in perseverance and righteous apathy towards ‘authority figures,’ as well as teaching me how to come up with ways nobody had thought of to get on with it, and it proved invaluable to what I became."
Sorry if that pissed off anyone. Barbelith was just as invaluable to me as anyone else. I loved the place. The worst are full of passionate intensity, etc...
I've been travelling the world for ten years now. Been everywhere, most continents two o three times. The world is a mad, beautiful place.
I burn regularly, camping with Pink Mammoth collective. I'm a lot more mature now, but still hate the powers that be with a cheeky-grinned vengeance. I'm a yoga teacher and writer (to be). Loving life. Happy to say, never sold out and never will if I have anything to do with it.
My first book, 'I Can't Complain,' will be finished and out soon, hopefully...
I'm at http://www.facebook.com/andrew.calo but you need to holler if you're from Barbelith. I don't friend just anyone... |
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I'm in NYC and I was The Poster Formerly Known As HunterWolf, then thought I'd better shift to the business of finding things instead of hunting for said things.