Bad Judgment

Here I am again, at the front desk of Monster Halloween. An employee and I just smudged the building; though I said to Dave, of Mind Wave Comics, that if there was energy in the building that was negative, in need of clearing, it was that we have filled this building that was once filled with flowers, with fossil fuel derived costumes, costumes accessories and home decor. Then again, the basement is full of wheelchairs, and the men who built the building thought nothing about the use of the sun to heat a building. And by smudging I mean only the burning of sage and the speaking to ancestors and the Goddess and the Earth that I acknowledge my place in the arrangement. Which came at the end of a long day, after a day in which I had been accused of a kind of theft by one of the partners, and today, the next-door Vikings, upon whom we have been depending, losing another game in inglorious fashion.

Sales have been tracking significantly lower than last year's. We've built what I wager to be one of, if not the coolest Halloween store in America, and few people have seen it, and far fewer still have supported us with the dollars that are required to maintain it. As to the accusation of theft, I brought this upon myself, as I used a business credit card to pay three personal bills.

That I did not have the means to pay the bills when they were due, otherwise, does not change the fact that I didn't tell the partners what I was doing. That I fully intended to pay them back with the cash that, at the time I did not have because my credit union puts a seven day hold on my pay check, does not in any way prevent the assessment of this as bad judgment - which then calls into question everything I do and every decision I have made, in the management of this Halloween store in downtown Minneapolis (including everything I said that helped lead us here.) I did this at a time when this particular partner is particularly anxious about being over-extended. He asked a multitude of his business mentors about it, and every one of them told him to fire me. He didn't, because he would have to quit his job, and he has a wife and a kid. That he could fire me, without any harm to Monster Halloween or HD Masks, is not a risk he is willing to take. That I thought I had built sufficient trust, in my service to the partners and their businesses, was plainly naive, and perhaps a sign of a greater naiveté that has lead me to that service? It is all reason again for me to question what it is I do and where I am, and why? And wonder again how it is I have come to this strange place.

I've been dancing again, on the street, though it isn't as much fun as it was in Uptown, last year. The traffic is heavier and the drivers are angrier, colder. I surmise they are all working downtown and they hate their corporate jobs, driving home from those jobs when I am trying to embody joy, there on the curb in my orange afro and wacky jacket and gold and glittering bronze shoes. It's also true that I haven't really worked out the new dance playlist; and, the aforementioned partner no longer seems eager to have me out there, representing the store. He'll have to fire me to keep me from dancing (for Monster Halloween), though.

My heavenly blue morning glories are still doing well, flowering every morning and making seed. I've been listening to Terence Mckenna again, dissatisfied with the vast majority of discourse I encounter, and I'm struck by my desire to explore the internal landscape, of dreams, and altered consciousness. I mean to map that landscape, as much as I am able. Part of me wants to take my potatoes and morning glory seed and float down the Mississippi. But I would rather be here, taking my house off the grid, planting fruit trees, tripping periodically and having the time and stability to contemplate it while reporting faithfully.

Because as much as I get down on this fossil fuel derived endeavor we call civilization, I wonder too if we are not somehow the Earth becoming conscious of itself, or attaining some form of higher consciousness through this increasingly connected, boundary dissolving species, Homo sapien sapien? I am curiously drawn to this notion of Mckenna's that we as a species are being drawn toward some singular point by some strange attractor, and that point will mean a change unlike anything the human mind is capable of imagining.

But then, I am human, and I make mistakes, and I am prone to errors in judgment, and I and my ideas about anything are ever to be questioned. I don't claim to be right. I only claim to report faithfully.

And now that I think about it further, I used that card a fourth time, to buy wine making supplies - wine which is now spewing out of carboys and their air locks, all over my sister's kitchen floor.