We all have secrets that we think are shameful, it’s part of being human. I’m going to share with you what I consider one of my darkest secrets, and amazingly it has nothing to do with sex:

Despite being in my mid to late twenties, I still like to play pretend games. As an adult I suppose that wouldn’t be a problem if I kept said games to the bedroom but that isn’t what I mean. For a long time I justified my mental games by the fact that I also like to write, but I would be doing exactly the same thing even if I wasn’t writing.

What sort of thing do I mean by “play pretend games?” Well, I mean pretty much the same thing I did when I was ten, only I like to think that the scenarios have become more sophisticated. For example, I have a sci-fi world in my head that is incredibly complex. In the context of this world, I can explain in great detail what kind of spaceship any automobile on the road would be. I do this while requiring that I simultaneously stay true to the design intend and function of said automobile’s unique design features and the requirements and restrictions of the imaginary world. It’s both impressive and pathetic at the same time.

I have a “plot line” in this world that includes a character that I play in my head. I suppose it isn’t that different that role playing, except that I have never role played. As strange as it may seem, as a kid I was told by multiple friends who role played that I was not the “kind” of person they were looking to game with. Never quite been sure why that was, but as a consequence I haven’t actually gamed before. Fireheart has said on more than one occasion that she wants me to try to write this world up as a role playing game but I am not overburdened with time and I continue to insist that as a non-gamer I shouldn’t try writing a game. I certainly can’t be a game master for one, which is the next stage of what she would want me to do with it.

The reason all of this comes up now is that my company is failing horribly. We haven’t had any good paying work in a year. Moving to New Hampshire caused me to loose all the contacts I had cultivated in Vermont and with my worsened health; I haven’t been able to pursue new work actively enough. Also, we don’t have the money for me to have an out of home office. Without a public space it is much harder to go after clients or build relationships with the local chamber of commerce. Our office in Vermont only cost about two-fifty a month but I can’t afford that right now.

As a result, we have been looking into the possibility of getting me work doing CAD rather than design work to bring in some money. Temp agencies often have CAD work listings and are just as happy to contract a company as an individual. Without client work though, my SolidWorks (an industry standard CAD program that we pay a ridiculous amount of money to have and update) skills have become rusty. I needed an intricate project to work on that would push my abilities with the program farther than they had been pushed before. The project I came up with was designing in the computer, the small space ship that my Subaru Forester is in my mind.

I have now sunk just about 43 hours into the design and I can safely say I’ll need at least half again that, if not double, to finish and render the design. I have approached the project as if I was making a model. I have made the parts of the ship and then put them in a very complex assembly file. The rendering process is remarkably like painting a model.

It has been incredibly fulfilling to actually see the ship taking form in the computer in a form I can manipulate in three dimensions and has a lot of moving parts (I was thrilled to be learn limit-mates in order to make the wings open and close together). Of course, it is fulfilling to CAD-draft any design idea that one has only previously seen in one’s head, but it is somehow different when it is the spaceship. Part of that is the exciting challenge of designing around a set of rules defined by the technology of the world in my head rather than the real world. After all let’s be honest, I am never going to get to design a real space vessel, which was once a childhood dream, as well as the subject of more than one science fair project.

The process has gotten me asking an interesting (at least to me, but then it is my blog) question. When did I start to feel that this kind of imaginary game was not appropriate for someone my age? At what age did it stop being ok to play pretend? I can’t remember a specific moment or even year that I started feeling embarrassed by my mental games. I suppose I feel about my pretend games the way many people feel about masturbating. It’s one of those things that you feel you shouldn’t do, although you don’t quite know why and can’t seem to stop. Of course weirdly enough, I don’t feel that way about masturbating at all and totally fail to understand why some people do. Summerwind says he is equally puzzled by my embarrassment over my pretend world.

So what do I get out of this imaginary world? Being able to have many of the ordinary things I do in life have an element of excitement or fun makes the activities of daily life more interesting, which given the amount of effort these sorts of activities can take when my health is really troublesome, means it can make those activities possible. For instance having a complex story when I dislocated my shoulder several years ago made physical therapy more bearable. After all, I slipped in the kitchen and was trying to catch my fall is way less fun than a story about the optical-thermal ablative coating (long story, involves car washes and sparkly paint) of my spaceship failing and an energy bolt penetrating the cabin and my right shoulder, necessitating repair work and physical therapy to be re-certified as combat-ready (the TENS unit the therapist used was nerve stimulation to try to get the artificial replacement nerve fibers to synch with the remaining natural nerves).

Maybe this all sounds awfully stupid to you. Maybe it doesn’t. I am certain I’ll spend the next few days worrying about what people think, but right now I have a CAD spaceship with a retractable rocket assembly that I have to go figure the geometry for.

Those of you who have been reading BarkingShaman since its inception (or who have gone back through the archives) may remember the post “Apparently I’m a Neo-Nazi Racist Skin Head,” which was prompted by a challenging conversation I had with a representative from the Southern Poverty Law Center. The reason for my phone call was that I had found a SPLCenter page which purported to show Neo-Nazi or white supremacist tattoos. Imagine my displeasure to find that the SPLCenter had runic tattoos listed as hate symbols. Not specific runes mind you, all it said was rune tattoos.

At the time I wrote “Apparently I’m a Neo-Nazi Racist Skin Head,” the essay stirred up a lot of emotional responses both in the comments section and in conversations I had with people who read BS.

Today I received an email from the gentleman I had spoken with at SPLC. I am not entirely sure how he happened across the post (I assume SPLC does a google search for their name periodically) but he wanted to share his impressions. I am reposting both his email to me and my response for those of you who are interested.

-to *******@gmail.com-

I just happened to see your Oct. 19 posting about the conversation you and I had about neo-paganism and neo-Nazism. I appreciate the mostly evenhanded tone of the post. A couple of brief things: I didn’t think it was fair to say we would assume you, or a group you mention, are neo-Nazi — we very clearly understand that there are non-racial heathens as well as anti-racist ones. I think it’s certainly false that we would “automatically declare” Asphodel to be a white supremacist organization. We never do that. We look carefully at the ideology of every individual organization that we list as a hate group. We have never listed Asphodel or, in fact, other such groups.

ON the question of what percentage of, say, Asatruers are racist, that’s obviously very open to debate. I believe did mention to you Mattias Gardell’s scholarly book on racism within the heathen scene, and he certainly estimates higher than 10%. In any event, that really is open to debate, although I suspect the percentage is substantially higher.

That’s all. I just happened to see the post today, many months later.

Best,

Mark Potok
Director, Intelligence Project
SPLC

-my response (and no, I am not going to post Mr. Potok’s email address)-

Thank you for your email and I also want to thank you for the time you spent back then talking to me on the phone. When I called SPL I did not expect to get an actual person on the phone, and certainly did not expect you to take so much time for our conversation.

Having gotten your email, I have gone back and re-read the BarkingShaman post and I want you to know that I did not intend to imply that the SPLCenter had actually declared Asphodel to be a hate group, but rather note that it could happen if the organization was judged on such things as heathen tattoos (Raven Kaldera has a large runic tattoo on his forearm for example). However, on reflection, I can see how I could be misinterpreted, so I have edited the post to reflect that that was not my intent while maintaining the integrity of the essay:

[ It blows my mind to think that the SPL Center could look at a group like Asphodel for example, and declare it to be a white-supremacist organization. If they looked at the leaders in the community though, they would almost certainly identify at least Raven and myself as neo-Nazis if they were basing their judgments on our body modifications. ]

Unfortunately, there are a great many people who rely on the SPLCenter to guide their concepts of who is or is not hateful. As our world becomes more complex it becomes harder and harder for an individual to hold a coherent picture of the totality of a problem as complex as hate groups in their head. That means that people may not choose to investigate further a declaration from SPL regarding who is or is not part of a hate group.

For example, had my mother (who has donated to SPL for as long as I can remember and reads pretty much everything you put out) seen the picture on your website of the rune tattoo with the description that it was a white supremacist marking, my own body modifications would have immediately become very frightening to her. The same could be said for a pagan or heathen with these sorts of marks who was applying for a job in which a tattoo would otherwise be acceptable. When an organization like SPLCenter wields as the degree of influence that SPL does, great care must be taken whenever generalities become involved.

Thanks again for your time both in our conversation and sending me an email,

Those of you who have been reading BarkingShaman since its inception (or who have gone back through the archives) may remember the post “Apparently I’m a Neo-Nazi Racist Skin Head,” which was prompted by a challenging conversation I had with a representative from the Southern Poverty Law Center. The reason for my phone call was that I had found a SPLCenter page which purported to show Neo-Nazi or white supremacist tattoos. Imagine my displeasure to find that the SPLCenter had runic tattoos listed as hate symbols. Not specific runes mind you, all it said was rune tattoos.

At the time I wrote “Apparently I’m a Neo-Nazi Racist Skin Head,” the essay stirred up a lot of emotional responses both in the comments section and in conversations I had with people who read BS.

Today I received an email from the gentleman I had spoken with at SPLC. I am not entirely sure how he happened across the post (I assume SPLC does a google search for their name periodically) but he wanted to share his impressions. I am reposting both his email to me and my response for those of you who are interested.

-to *******@gmail.com-

I just happened to see your Oct. 19 posting about the conversation you and I had about neo-paganism and neo-Nazism. I appreciate the mostly evenhanded tone of the post. A couple of brief things: I didn’t think it was fair to say we would assume you, or a group you mention, are neo-Nazi — we very clearly understand that there are non-racial heathens as well as anti-racist ones. I think it’s certainly false that we would “automatically declare” Asphodel to be a white supremacist organization. We never do that. We look carefully at the ideology of every individual organization that we list as a hate group. We have never listed Asphodel or, in fact, other such groups.

ON the question of what percentage of, say, Asatruers are racist, that’s obviously very open to debate. I believe did mention to you Mattias Gardell’s scholarly book on racism within the heathen scene, and he certainly estimates higher than 10%. In any event, that really is open to debate, although I suspect the percentage is substantially higher.

That’s all. I just happened to see the post today, many months later.

Best,

Mark Potok
Director, Intelligence Project
SPLC

-my response (and no, I am not going to post Mr. Potok’s email address)-

Thank you for your email and I also want to thank you for the time you spent back then talking to me on the phone. When I called SPL I did not expect to get an actual person on the phone, and certainly did not expect you to take so much time for our conversation.

Having gotten your email, I have gone back and re-read the BarkingShaman post and I want you to know that I did not intend to imply that the SPLCenter had actually declared Asphodel to be a hate group, but rather note that it could happen if the organization was judged on such things as heathen tattoos (Raven Kaldera has a large runic tattoo on his forearm for example). However, on reflection, I can see how I could be misinterpreted, so I have edited the post to reflect that that was not my intent while maintaining the integrity of the essay:

[ It blows my mind to think that the SPL Center could look at a group like Asphodel for example, and declare it to be a white-supremacist organization. If they looked at the leaders in the community though, they would almost certainly identify at least Raven and myself as neo-Nazis if they were basing their judgments on our body modifications. ]

Unfortunately, there are a great many people who rely on the SPLCenter to guide their concepts of who is or is not hateful. As our world becomes more complex it becomes harder and harder for an individual to hold a coherent picture of the totality of a problem as complex as hate groups in their head. That means that people may not choose to investigate further a declaration from SPL regarding who is or is not part of a hate group.

For example, had my mother (who has donated to SPL for as long as I can remember and reads pretty much everything you put out) seen the picture on your website of the rune tattoo with the description that it was a white supremacist marking, my own body modifications would have immediately become very frightening to her. The same could be said for a pagan or heathen with these sorts of marks who was applying for a job in which a tattoo would otherwise be acceptable. When an organization like SPLCenter wields as the degree of influence that SPL does, great care must be taken whenever generalities become involved.

Thanks again for your time both in our conversation and sending me an email,

I’d like to start by making a specific point crystal clear. People who know me well (or I suppose have ever been in a room with me) will find this truth to be self-evident, but I’ll state it anyway:

I really like sex.

However, circumstances have led me to an interesting question, namely “what is sex?” Everyone thinks that they know the answer, and that everyone else’s answers are the same as theirs. It’s just not true.

I am going to be teaching a workshop at Dark Odyssey Spring Fire this April on how to have ethical erotic play that includes spooky foo. As I’ve been thinking about my workshop, I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the nature of sex. For instance, and this will be too much info for some of you, I do not have anal sex with my husband. It is a source of some discontent on my part, but for reasons of his own this particular area of sexuality is off limits with him.

Some would argue that this means that Summer and I have not had sex in almost two years. I would strongly disagree. We have a lot of sex; we just don’t have that particular type of sex. However, if your idea of “sex” is based on the *insert tab A into slot B* model than you could make the argument that we have been having doesn’t count.

Even the *tab A slot B* world view has its problems. How for instance to you define what tab A or slot B even is. Many conservative arguments against gays are based on the idea that the only true sex is the penis-in-vagina variety. President Clinton brought the question of whether oral sex counts into the public consciousness. I think it is safe to say that now, over a decade later; the question has yet to be resolved in the public sphere.

It could be argued that the oral sex issue has been beaten to death. Let’s try less familiar territory. In gay sex there is a practice called “docking” in which an intact (not circumcised) man rolls his foreskin over the head of his partner’s penis. There is a tab A and a slot(ish) B involved, but is this “sex” in such a literalistic worldview? I somehow doubt the current president of the United States will be accommodating and bring this question into public discourse through his indiscretions, as much fun as that would be.

I suspect that many of the readers of Barking Shaman discarded the *tab A slot B* concept some time ago. This doesn’t necessarily mean that they have a better grasp of what sex is.

The magnificent Lee “Bridgett” Harrington passed on this definition of sex from one of hir partners: “Did someone get off? If yes, then it was sex.” I must admit that there is an alluring elegance to the simplicity of this definition. I think it is safe to say that in most contexts it can be applied without problem. However, just in the course of my conversation with Lee, we found some circumstances this definition doesn’t quite cover.

The first and perhaps most obvious is the case of professional sex workers. If a prostitute or porn star has professional sex and someone comes, the sex worker may not really consider the experience “sex” even if they were the party orgasming.

Similarly, there are situations where one activity, even with the same people involved, can be sex one time and not another. For instance, take CBT. If, as a shaman, I engage in some form of genital torture with another person as part of a sacred endurance ritual, I would not call it sex. However, if I was shoving needles through someone’s dick to get him (or me) off, that would be different, even though the act and the participants might be the same.

The question of what constitutes sex is largely academic for most people. However, for folks involved in the BDSM or Kink communities the question takes on greater import because the lines are more blurry. A friend of a friend is a serious dom who is in a relationship with a woman who is not interested in BDSM at all. They have had several conversations about whether it is ok for him to go to play parties and flog other women. He had to explain to his partner that for him, this was a form of “sex,” and if she was going to allow him to go play in that way she needed to first understand that. It took time for her to understand what he was saying because she couldn’t imagine getting off on what to her was a non-sexual activity.

Even outside of these communities the question is not always as straight forward as we might think. In college I knew a young woman who broke up with her boyfriend because she repeatedly caught him cheating on her. What makes this weird in my mind is that he was cheating on her with himself. In this young woman’s word view, the fact that her boyfriend masturbated was a betrayal of their relationship and constituted cheating. Most of the people I am close with are rather sexually open (some would say debauched) and to us this is a crazy idea. Neither I, nor my friends can imagine telling a young man that he can’t whack off, but then we don’t really considered masturbation to be “sex” in the same way that this young woman did.

Clearly this isn’t a question that will be answered here today. I could probably write at length about how I personally define sex, but what would the point be. While we all may have different ideas of what sex is, we should each make an effort to understand our own internal process on this subject. Gaining a better idea of what we think of as “sex” will help us to understand ourselves and in some ways be more tolerant of those around us. Defining our personal concept of sex and sexuality makes it clear that we need to remember not to assume that other people share our definitions. Anything you can think of someone, somewhere, probably gets off on it.

That’s part of what makes it all so much fun.

Readers of Barking Shaman are familiar with my questioning of identity. The very first BS post was about the hard-to-define nature of my personal identity.

As I have written about before, most notably in “Undercover :-)” the eclectic nature of my life makes my interactions with other people simultaneously easy and hard. In this essay, I’ll be looking at that subject from a different perspective.

“Outsider” is a word that has defined my sense of self to some degree or another for my entire life. It is a role in society that had become familiar to me before the spooky shit even became a notable part of who I am. Being the barking guy sets one out as different pretty quickly. Being the barking, overweight, nerdy, gay (and flaming) guy takes that to a whole new level. Once the gods got involved it went to another level still.

However, even before the spooky crap, I discovered that there is a real power to being on the outside. Being the flaming barking kid added a new set of social complications, but it also removed a significant number of social pressures as well. Once the option of fitting in is no longer on the table there is really no obstacle to being you. If some of my friends in high school enjoyed my company because of the novelty of being around someone who regularly screamed about Flying Penis Man in the mall, well there were many more who just liked that I pretty much had no need to try to hide who I was.

Once the gods got involved though, things got far more complex. Even in a historical context, the shaman is almost always an outsider. The title of this post is a reference to the fact that in many tribal communities the shaman’s home was on the outskirts of the village far from other people’s homes. In my opinion, adjusting to this role is one of the most common reasons that people fail to make it through shaman sickness. Unfortunately, failing to make it through shaman sickness often involves dying or at least going totally bat-shit crazy.

Living where my family does (while being who we are), has gotten me thinking a good bit about the subject of being outsiders. The addition of several taboos, some specific to one or another of us, others applying to all three of us, have complicated our existence in Middle America. In the case of some of these taboos, I can clearly see their purpose beyond separating us out from other people, even though that is a side effect. Other taboos I suspect exist for the purpose of making us different. All this raises an interesting question, namely what is the specific spiritual value of “difference?”

I suppose that a fairer question would have been to ask whether there is a spiritual value to being an outsider. However, part of being a spirit worker is accepting that sometimes the gods know what they are doing. Since the condition in question seems to be so prevalent in both modern and historical traditions of spirit work, I’ll work from the perspective that there is some reason.

The first and foremost reason I believe that the universe makes us different from society is that if we are going to be doing spooky work it helps not to give a shit that we are doing weird spooky work. If the only way we were set apart was that we were doing spirit work we could easily come to resent the work for setting us apart. As this would be counter-productive from the perspective of the gods, it makes sense for us to be set apart in other ways as well.

Witness the prevalence of body modification in the spirit work community. A significant number of spirit workers I know or have worked with have in some way modified there bodies in the service of the gods. In my own case, I have tattoos, a brand on my leg, and stretched piercings. I can explain the spiritual reasons behind each mod. While tattoos are perhaps the most common body mod I have seen among spirit workers, they are far from the only ones. Most of the modified spirit workers I know are required by their patrons to explain the spiritual significance of their body mods if asked, further setting them apart. A permanent body modification also makes it harder to tell the universe to f-off and try to leave the spooky shit behind. Other ways I’ve seen spirit workers set apart include the prevalence of non-traditional professions, relationships, gender-identity, and sexual practices.

But aside from making it more palatable to be doing this weird spooky crap, is there power to be found in the role of the “outsider?” I think that there is. For one thing, many of us find ourselves in the position of ministering to other people. The outsider perspective can be a valuable tool in doing that kind of work. Being an outsider also makes it easier in my opinion to be honest with clients, even when being honest means being brutal. It can also be important to be recognized as “different” by people who come to us for spirit work. There aren’t any Master’s Degrees in being a shaman (none that count at least) yet people need to feel that a spirit worker is “qualified” the way that they expect their doctor or therapist to be qualified. Being perceived as different and spooky can in a strange way make people feel more comfortable and confident in our skills.

I’d like to put forth a theory though. I believe that being an outsider in society in one way or another makes the literal working with the spirits or gods easier. The non-human are the ultimate outsiders in society. Being already disconnected in some way from other people makes it easier to make the jump to working with the spirit world. I also think it makes us more trustworthy to the spirits. In a more specific example, the fact that as a shaman I am “dead” in some not-small part is an essential component for me in my interactions with the literal dead.

I believe that accepting the idea that being different has spiritual and magical value, rather than just being another difficult side effect of this kind of work, is essential to having a good attitude toward the work that the gods want done. Not that it is an easy thing to do. However, the gods have amply demonstrated their willingness to take options away. Witness the aforementioned taboos. As long being different is going to be a factor in many of our spiritual lives, we may as well work to see the bright side rather than engage in the mental and spiritual equivalent of closing our eyes, spreading our legs and thinking of England.