I’ve always hated writing bios. (For myself - for other people, no problem.)
I’ve written a lot of them over the years. And never really felt like I had one I could just reuse over and over: “OK - that pretty much sums it up. What’s next?”
Nope. I’ve pretty much always felt a little chagrined when it was time to hit the Publish button.
Maybe like Whitman I contain multitudes. Maybe as a Pisces I just can’t commit to one self-portrait when I see myself as a fluid, cosmic energy being that’s continually morphing from one form into another.
At any rate, I took the easy way out and wrote four different short bios on my Substack “About” page - each one focused on a different aspect of my life.
I cut the fourth one to keep the About page short, but I’m pasting it here because you should probably know this origin story is as much a part of how I conceive of myself as the others three are.
I’m a trained hypnotherapist and I’ve done a lot of meditation and remote viewing. Here’s another possibility: I may be one of the oldest continually reincarnating beings alive on Planet Earth at this time. Possibly of Arcturian origin (as far back as I can remember) but definitely spent a lot of time in the Sirius system before coming to Earth. Fucked around with human women not long after we “created” humans by altering the DNA of higher primates with our alien tech. Felt guilty once I’d realized what I’d done (“You’re literally a god to them, dude!”) and decided to lash myself to the wheel of karma and keep reincarnating until I’d learned to unlock the species’ incredible potential from inside a human body.1 Also, I missed the friends I’d made here (the white lions in Africa, dogs, trees, flowers, the ocean, and birds from all over) and - basically - Earth is a really exciting place to be and I love her and want to help her get back to her ideal, natural state.”
“Let’s begin with the past in front” 2
So, yeah, basically…I’ve always had a pretty vivid imagination. Which was a double-edged sword (or a slippery trident?) for a sensitive kid growing up fundamentalist Christian in Flint, Michigan.
I was terrified of hell from the time I first remember hearing about it. The churches we went to believed in a literal Lake of Fire where the bad folks go when they die and the preachers (we moved a lot) would paint these graphic, vivid descriptions of how badly you’d suffer in Hell that haunted my subconscious and basically fucked up my mind not only in childhood, but deep into my 20s.
I got out of Flint and the church scene as soon as I could after graduating from the Christian high school at 17. And did the whole polar-opposite rebellion thing I’d seen so many other Christian school kids do after graduating: I discovered a powerful affinity for sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll — and alcohol.
I spent pretty much the next 12 years stoned out of my mind as much as I could afford to be. I remember I would quit drinking cold turkey every year on my birthday for 40 days, just to prove I could do it. But I drank every other day of the year. I couldn’t imagine actually living in this world (in my hellishly painful self-consciousness) without the numbing effects of booze.
During this period I worked as a newspaper reporter, bicycle messenger, construction worker, secretary, house painter, technical writer, school teacher, and a laborer on the Alaska pipeline. When the Internet came along in the mid-1990s I found I could paid to write and I did a few years in the corporate world working as a technical writer and editor for companies including The Coca-Company, Pfizer, and Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan.3
In my early 30s, I moved from Atlanta, Georgia back to Michigan. I had started meditating and keeping a dream journal and I was convinced my dreams were telling me I needed to live in Michigan again. I’d wanted to live in Detroit ever since reading Elmore Leonard’s early novels. A friend from childhood had a room open in his basement where I could land…
I got a contract with Blue Cross Blue Shield, right downtown near the Renaissance Center, moved into a greasy “residential hotel” on the edge of Greektown, went to work and cashed my checks at the liquor store, and eventually saved up enough money to rent a carriage house in Indian Village, across Jefferson Avenue from Belle Isle.
That’s where I was when 9-11 happened. With the 20-year anniversary of the 9-11 terror event coming up in three weeks, it’s interesting to reflect on how impactful that was for me.
I was reading a lot of Toltec stuff at the time, all the don Juan books, and I was getting sicker and sicker with the amount of alcohol I needed to consume to survive going to work in an “open environment” in yet another highly dysfunctional corporation. (I didn’t know what it meant to be an empath and I knew next to nothing about the importance of energy hygiene, or about shielding myself, or about grounding or running energy.)
Long story short, 9-11 shook my tree hard. A week or two before Christmas, Blue Cross fired the entire web department, all contractors working paycheck to paycheck. Then they asked me to hire on as a salary guy. (My boss took me out to dinner at a bar on the river, had a couple too many drinks and started telling me what losers my coworkers were.)
I thought about it for a minute, said no thanks, and walked away from that whole scene.
It wouldn’t have been “a path with heart.”
Not long after that, I had a spiritual experience on an airplane. I was flying back to Detroit from my friend’s wedding, where I’d stayed drunk for so long I had a three-day hangover so vicious that I literally wanted to die. I fell asleep as soon as the plane lifted off from New Orleans and woke up in the middle of the sky with an inner knowing that I actually could live without alcohol. It was weird, and weirdly compelling, and I got home to the carriage house and poured out the rest of my booze.
I spent the next year taking unemployment, smoking a lot of dope, lying on the couch in the carriage house listening to Beck’s Sea Change album and feeling sad and lost. I knew I had to change my mind or I wasn’t going to make it much longer, but I didn’t know how to do that. But if I could really quit drinking, maybe it was possible?
I made a decision I was going to live free or die - a decision I’d have cause to regret as my life in the 3D world bottomed out completely. Eventually I was homeless, then I lived in a friend’s garage and then in the basement of Dr. Bob’s chiropractic center on Woodward Avenue near 6 Mile Road, where I worked part time at the organic juice bar.
For the next several years I felt so lost. My family told me to get a job and basically disavowed me, the friends who still talked to me looked at me with a mixture of compassion and pity. I was the crack-up, the crazy guy. But I knew I needed to get free of the emotional baggage and heal the psychological trauma I’d carried my whole life.
I couldn’t explain it to anyone and I’m a hard-headed dude, so I’m sure I pushed away suggestions from more than a few well-meaning people that might have made those years easier.
I ended up moving to New Orleans unexpectedly (an exact prediction by a Hare Krishna palm reader I met at Dr. Bob’s one day). One of my oldest friends set me up with a work-for-rent situation there. I was reading everything I could about spirituality and personal development and obsessively studying astrology and I started developing some useful spiritual tools. Although it took many more years than I had hoped or expected, my mind and my heart were becoming clearer and clearer. I was learning to trust my inner guidance and learning how to filter out the good from the bad in the inner world.
I was becoming free. Reluctantly, I hung out my shingle as an astrologer. My first two clients were another astrologer and a famous psychic. They brought me more clients. I started writing a weekly horoscope column on my website and almost before I knew it I had thousands of weekly readers around the world.
I went to Peru and did ayahuasca. I got licensed as a hypnotherapist and studied under Stephen Gilligan at Trance Camp. Over the next decade or so I refined the tools I’d developed and the insights I’d been given. With the help of clients who were willing, like me, to experiment in the inner world in order to get free, I developed a framework for working with the inner child, past lives, and ancestors to heal trauma and build personal mastery and inner authority.
During this entire period, I didn’t own a television. I rarely paid any attention to the news, even on the Internet. I thought I had cleared all of the brainwashing. And then 2020 happened.
(to be continued)
In the meantime, please help me grow this newsletter and tell your friends!
Moot point now, having done the requisite contract revocations. Which is a whole ‘nother series of posts I can do if you’re interested. The planetary nightmare we’ve been living for so long falls apart completely once enough people realize they’ve been tricked into selling their souls by agreeing to bad (horribly, terrifyingly unfair and abusive) contracts written up by the controllers.
The subheads are lyrics from the first song on Ween’s White Pepper record. I don’t know what the lyrics of Exactly Where I’m At are supposed to mean — the Ween fans are eye-rolling me now — but there’s some resonance there with how I’m perceiving the current psychic landscape of the world.
I did almost all of my time in the corporate world working as an independent contractor. It was the best of both worlds - you got paid at a much higher rate than salaried workers and you weren’t stuck with one company for too long. The one place I actually got hired on as a salaried employee was The Coca-Cola Company. The corporate culture (which didn’t really exist as a concept yet) in the division I worked for was so toxic, I quit exactly one year to the day I got hired. My coworkers — many of whom had families to support and didn’t feel they could afford to quit — turned my cubicle into a makeshift freedom shrine after my exit.