The Warlock And I

As a teenager my hobby was magic. Chattanooga, the city where I grew up, had only one magic shop and I soon became friends with one of its demonstrators. There was another fellow who worked there - a dark, brooding character who not only was a sleight of hand artist (and a good one), but a warlock as well. At least that was his claim. He was a male witch.

After awhile my friend had the opportunity to purchase the magic shop. He was a young man but his parents believed in him enough to mortgage their home in order to raise the funds to make the purchase. Briefly I worked for him in his shop part-time.

Mr. Warlock, I will call him, had a creepy persona. He also was a man of few words, but I always found a connection with the underdogs in life. Unfortunately his personality didn't lend itself well to his job and he soon was dismissed. Which is how I got hired.

One day when I stopped by the magic shop I found the regulars and the other employees in a huddle. They were discussing Mr. Warlock. Seems he had placed a curse on the shop in retaliation for his dismissal. This was taken quite seriously.

To make a long story very short, several months after taking ownership of the shop my friend was forced to go out of business - because of lack of sales ... or because of the curse. Believe me, many took the latter very seriously indeed.

The successful magician must be a good actor in order to put his magic over. Anybody can be taught to perform tricks. It is the ability to act the part that causes one to stand out.

Mr. Warlock was quite mysterious. There is no doubt about it, he made a convincing warlock. There was something uncanny, even uncomfortable about being in his presence. People took the curse thing seriously.

I didn't, but timing is everything, and Mr. Warlock's timing couldn't have been better. The magic shop my friend bought was an established shop. My friend didn't change the way the shop operated in any way. Yet still the curse at least apparently came to pass. Coincidence?

My Strange Life As A Blogger

Always I've considered my blogging efforts an  outlet, even as therapeutic at times.  A writer I'm not, so I never thought I was creating literature. I enjoyed reading other blogs and thought to myself, "what the heck, why I don't do that to sort things out in my own mind." I tend to be very introspective but I've never been consistent with my diaries and journals - until blogging made that easy.

When I started I believe I was at a very low place emotionally. I titled my first blog The Blushing Animal. My inspiration was a Mark Twain quote: "Man is the only animal that blushes - or needs to." I believe I had intended to collect evidence of the many ways we humans fall short of common  decency.

Then a strange thing happened. I soon realized that while I did basically agree with Twain's assessment, perhaps the majority of us (certainly I think it true of myself)  try to be decent humans. Oh yes, we fall short often and sometimes even tragically. I'm still not sure if the majority of us should be blushing or just redoubling our efforts to be nice, however, I just couldn't endure focusing on the negative. So that blog was very short-lived.

A more open approach was needed so Groping The Elephant was born. The little parable of the six blind men and the elephant by John Godfrey Saxe was my inspiration for this one. Gee, we all see things differently and all tend to be certain we are right - and we are ... in our own minds!

Groping was my first attempt to reconcile the spiritual person I originally was with the more nihilistic person I had become. Personal pain led to my bitterness. Scientific materialism was a great springboard for my cynicism. No matter how much I looked at the stranger side of life, always there was an effort to rationalize it all away.

I groped the elephant of life for quite a while before I decided I had changed.  I wanted to ease up a bit and show more openness to ideas I had pushed into the back corners of my mind. Though I always made it clear I thought of myself as just another blind man groping at something I was in no position to fully comprehend, I realized I was at times heavy handed.

So I scratched that one as well.

By now I was having trouble being consistent in my blogging. So Doug's Dribblings was born. The dribbling part referred to my infrequency. There also was a secondary image in my mind of slobber and drooling. I refuse to take myself too seriously. I know I turned off a lot of my cynical blogging friends (who probably wouldn't consider themselves so much cynical as realistic) who found me during my agnostic-on-the-way-to-atheist phase. (In the spirit of groping at the elephant I never thought it necessary to break my ties with these folks, and still don't if they are inclined to agree to disagree.)

Now I have a new internet service and I consider it yet another opportunity to start afresh. That is the why of The Strange World Of Doug B. So now my hair is let down even more.

There is so much I don't know about life and the Cosmos, but that's okay. It's always liberating to step outside of narrow confines that have either been imposed on you or that you have imposed on yourself.

I urge everyone to try it sometime. You may find you like it.

My job has kept me and has hindered my efforts to launch this current blog. I'm having to work at it as I find the time. But I foresee more time in the future (hopefully). In the meantime I'm keeping notes on the strange things I encounter and want to share with my readers, in my own life as well as those strange things that happen to others.

As always, I'm a bit uncomfortable with words like supernatural and paranormal. But sometimes it's confusing to define terms. I suppose I'm skipping slowly towards the fortean label. Really I dislike labels but can't deny their occasional usefulness. And I suppose I should add a note about my use of the word God or god. If when you see me use that you think of the popular or common  Jewish/Christian/Muslim concept, you will be misunderstanding me. I do believe everything - no, EVERYTHING - is divine and I believe there is a Supreme and divine mind back of EVERYTHING. Exactly what that means, I don't pretend to know. This blog isn't an effort to proselytize.

Five (Odd) Facts

My cyber friend Alice G of Whatsoever Is Lovely blog recently tagged me and some of her other blogger friends to give five facts about ourselves. So here goes and I hope I don't bore anyone:

1) I am a high school dropout. This one I'm not proud of. After my parents divorced when I was eleven, my school work took a back seat to other things, like goofing off and playing hooky from school. I swiftly fell from the top of my class to passing on a D average. I failed the ninth grade for excessive absenteeism, but was later passed into high school via social promotion, where I promptly developed an uneasy and unpleasant relationship with school guidance counselor. I had improved my attendance and my grades, but any time I did miss a day he was right there at the front door to hassle me. I was out sick on my seventeenth birthday (which in my state was the legal age to drop out of school), and even though I had not given thought to dropping out, promptly did so when my social worker snidely told me over the phone that he assumed I was going to quite now that I had turned 17. "Yes, you're right," I told him and slammed down the phone. (Maybe fact number one should have been that I was an impulsive smart aleck when I was a teenager; really I think I was just hurting really bad inside.)

Addendum: In my twenties I obtained a GED and enrolled in business college, graduating with honors.

2) I have memories of being a child and occasionally seeing otherworldly creatures, quite vividly. Up until my late teens I often (but not always or even usually) would be overcome when alone with a feeling there was another presence with me. I haven't experienced that so much in recent years, but do still have occasional auditory and, less frequently, visual hallucinations. I now tend to think of this as my personal muses.

3) My mother always related the story of how when she was pregnant with me she felt God had a hand on me in a special way. Although she was prone to miscarriages and had a dozen or so, even having to take to bed at some points in the pregnancies of my two brothers, she came through her pregnancy with me in fine fashion, actually having to be careful about her weight gain. When I was born she chose Nathan for my middle name, after the biblical prophet, and all my life that is what she mostly has called me. And she is the only one who calls me that. It is a special name between us and doesn't sound right coming at me from anyone else. (Now I don't think I'm any kind of prophet, but do confess to having had more than a few premonitions or examples of clairvoyance throughout my life.)  Really.

4) I am a habitual and vivid dreamer. My dreams are often intricate. My dreams have often served as guides in my life. I view them as a window into my soul. My waking filter, I'm convinced, hinders me from seeing more of what lies deeply hidden in my psyche. Consequently, I'm a big believer in the value of dream analyses.

5) My mother began buying toy guitars for me when I was five years old. Seems I always had one around when I was kid. When I was twelve, she took down her old Gibson acoustic and began teaching me guitar chords for real. At the time I took to it like a duck to water. Right away I wanted to use the guitar as a solo instrument. We were poor and couldn't afford lessons, so I wasn't sure how to accomplish that. But after a while I began to, as it where, pull the music out of the wood. I have always heard what is in there but often had to search to find it. Later I benefited from books on music theory and guitar. I can read music, but prefer to close my eyes and listen with my inner ear. Playing solo guitar has been symbolic of my loner lifestyle and individualistic way of doing things. I have never been comfortable following recipes for anything, but prefer to follow my instincts, to make changes and create variations.