Nothing Better To Do
Further tales from the Riverside Vortex
So, I’ve written a bit about the time I’ve spent living in roughly this same area for the better part of my life. Off the top of my head, there’s:
The Following The Fire series
Now I have some random stories to tell that I’m just going to go ahead and link to the theory of “Songs” in Song of Hermekate.
I think I’ve found an example of a Song “In the wild,” and it takes the form of The Hexorian Movement. I think it’s a Song, given my understanding of how the movement formed and how it works…and some of the ways in which our work overlaps and syncs ups with the work of local Hexorians. My first flashpoint of recognition with them, aside from having instinctually been a “city mage” my entire life, was that yes: Cities are magical, and they live and breathe as entities of their own kind, even if it be merely an overwhelming gestalt of some form. Chicago’s streets and highways are like unto its pulmonary passages. The Loop as a Thing That Breathes People by night and by day.
After that, it was a magical technique I recognized immediately, because I’ve done it my entire life thanks to The Sony Walkman (and later, Discman): What they call “The Hexorian Drift” is something I remember distinctly doing for the first time myself with a Discman playing Tool’s latest album, Ænima. I did the same thing, only instead of getting in touch with any of the Hexorian movement’s deities, I got in touch with Rose, Ilyas, Minora, and some others…and I got in touch with my city and its vortex, which I have felt since I was a kid and which, I hear tell, other locals swear is real.
When I first did this practice, it was while living with my Uncle in Midlothian, not far from Bachelor’s Grove Cemetery, where I would hang out with one of, like, two local goths. I’m pretty sure I did one of my early “drifts” in those self-same woods. More than once. So it’s tied into the local “network” too. Merry Christmas!
The Chicago Vortex is supported by more than one “sub-vortex,” and for much of my life, it takes the form of an “energy vortex” concentrated in this area, and my somewhat-conscious relationship with it, over the years, as a sorcerer.
The magic I was doing with Vine, as well as other magic over the years before I ever learned about him, has been tied to two local towers in particular:
It was late one night as I wandered the streets that Ilyas first taught me the basic principles behind how places like towers, if concentrated along Ley Lines (“dragon lines”) as these towers were, served as gatherers and thus wells of psychic energy, which I much more recently learned was a similar principle to “telluric energy” in Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum if I’m understanding it correctly (still haven’t read that). The way Ilyas described it to me was colored by my understanding of Eliphas Levi’s Transcendental Magic: Its Doctrine and Ritual, which I had just recently been reading. This was also around the time I had the dream from Broken Homes Build Towers about the “sky vortex” that reminded me of Thrall’s vision of the Burning Legion in WarCraft III. It was that area.
And I realize, it was that vortex.
But anyway, Ilyas said that basically, the height and relative influence of these local wells of energy was a reflection of how much “mana” the place had, and he said this would also reflect its increasingly stark moral range, which would grow in both directions: Yes, just as tall as these spires of ours grew, and the grand visions they grow increasingly capable of supporting, these heights have corresponding depths. There is an Underworld. The higher the heights, the greater the The Depths. And the scarier the Things that might lurk there.
He taught me all of this in relationship to those two towers, with specific emphasis, one night, right underneath that tower in Riverside. He taught me this as we crossed the Burlington Northern Santa Fe train tracks, which stretched before us, passing MacNeal Hospital, where I spent so much time, and all the way straight into the city. As we crossed those tracks, Ilyas revealed to me how they served as an “artificially-generated Ley Line” that now tied those towers to the greater Chicago vortex, concentrated at that time on The Willis Tower (then known as The Sears Tower) and The John Hancock building. Little did I know, my relationship with this place and these towers also paralleled that of Anton LaVey, who “identified” with The Hancock tower by way of his alleged conception on the spot where it was later built.
I did say in one of my earlier posts that Ilyas could teach me things he hadn’t been initially ready to trust me with when we first met. Didn’t I?
Many of the strange tales here also involve my relationship over the years with my friend Matt and his girlfriend Raven, whom I first introduced in Relapse Season.
At that time, Matt was more of a “goth” if you really wanted to classify him, and he was given to wearing the occasional long, black skirt along with the torn, striped sweaters he favored, limp purple mohawk hanging over his eyes. Always did have those thick glasses, even back then. And he was also best friends with a kid named Jesse. Jesse was a skinny guy who went even farther than Matt: His best outfit was a form-fitting black dress with faux fur lining on the cuffs and the collar, all made up in white face paint with black lipstick and nail polish and mascara, and a perfectly-spiked black mohawk.
One of the inspirations behind my writing is Don de Grazia.
Did you know that “skinhead” was not originally synonymous with “Neo-nazi?” Now, these days, we would still have to argue that much of its original culture was still toxic colonizer cultur nonetheless, but it wasn’t originally about any sort of overt racism, and in fact, there were black skinheads. I learned all about that in de Grazia’s novel, American Skin, which changes the names of places, but is basically about the punk scene in the city we all grew up in.
Anyway, I bring it up because that’s basically what Matt and Jesse did. It was weird how it all lined up. See, I had been living with Matt and his family around 43rd and Gage in Lyons for a while. And I was not the best house guest, it’s true, but that story was also a bit more complicated than that. But let’s just put it this way: My mother loaned his mother her entire life savings, and his mother never had the wherewithal or sincere intention to pay it back. And when I got wind of this and confronted her about it, she threw me out. That was the first time I made the trek from Lyons, via the footbridge over the Des Plaines River that brings you right up to the Riverside Police Department. I remember the walk because (talk about “the trenchcoat mafia,”) I began the walk wearing a black trenchcoat with my backpack and luggage and an honest-to-gosh sword hanging from my belt. It got confiscated by the cops on my way to my cousin’s house on Burlington.
The next time I saw Matt and Jesse was A Very Strange Night. But We’ll get to that. First, I want to talk about this transformation Matt and Jesse underwent.
I never could make heads or tails of Jesse’s end of it, even though his was the one I knew more about for various reasons (one of which being he dated one of my Riverside cousins). I know Matt was probably influenced by his older brother, Ernie, who was honest-to-Gods the leader of the Royals (a gang) in this neck of the woods. So Matt and Jesse started looking up to The 77th and Harlem St. Skinheads (and there’s one of two “77” tie-ins, the other being the local intersection of Harlem and Ogden, also known as State Routes 43 and 34, which each add up to 7. Route 34/Ogden is the local branch of Route 66).
Jesse made the most dramatic shift, to the point that he literally earned himself the nickname, “Jesse The One-Month Punk,” because that’s about how long it took him to save up for his first punk wardrobe. One day he’s wearing the dress, the next day he’s wearing a painted, studded leather jacket with bondage pants. Different body language and everything. Started listening to both old-school punk and Oi bands as well as gangster rap, carrying weapons like knives and billy clubs in his car (I know from the time he and Matt managed to recruit me to show up for a rumble at Diversey Bowl that never ended up materializing). I remember Jesse telling me he was into Machiavelli’s The Prince, and I learned just how literally he ended up meaning that. Matt, he went right along with Jesse, even though he and I would sit up nights in his basement talking, and there, he was able to clearly see and articulate how stupid Jesse was being about all of this, but would remain strangely opaque to it himself.
Anyway, every one of us: Myself and my three cousins from Riverside, and their whole friend group—all of us remember The Very Strange Night and the way we lined things up later.
A Very Strange Night
As far as my cousins and I can tell, the following things happened at roughly the same time:
Matt, Jesse, and a friend of theirs stabbed up a high school graduation party in Riverside.
My cousin Augusta and a bunch of her friends got in a strange car accident, I think it was on I-55 (which picks up Route 66 from Ogden via Harlem, I note with interest).
From Augusta’s angle and all her friends, they said it was really, really strange how the timing of the accident synced up with Bad Religion’s song Bored and Extremely Dangerous. There’s a part where it slows down and a bunch of bells ring, just like Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, and everyone is still chilled to the bone about how the impact of the accident synced up exactly with those bells in the song. They talked about that moment for weeks.
I experienced my end as satisfying “payback,” the next morning.
My cousin Mike, along with a friend of his, were walking down the street in Riverside, just around the corner from the Riverside Water Tower and the police station. We ourselves were headed to a graduation party. We got spooked because a cop car rolled up on us and asked us if any of us were 18. We were all nervous because only I was, but all of us were smoking, and we thought that’s what this was about.
So I told him I was 18, and he asked me if I wanted to make $10? And I said, “sure.” So we all went to the police station, where I stood in the very lineup where my former friends Matt and Jesse were identified for their role in the stabbing. Right next to them.
I was probably one of the last familiar faces Matt saw before he went to jail for it.
I came out to my cousin and his friend and they were like, “Dude, who was it? Who was it? Mike was saying he felt a disturbance in the Force!”
After I told them, it was all we could talk about the whole way to the party. And when we would all come together later that evening and tie everything together from the night before, it became an evening none of us would ever forget.
Those quiet, solemn moments by a bonfire, holding a beer without a word as a chill breeze marks the moment.
”With nothing better to do….to do…..to do….”