A Touch of Autobiography – by Styxenhammer

I’m an easy-breezy sort of guy and when I tune up the old steam wireless and listen in and hear a load of dog doos pouring into the sidewalks of the nation’s ears, I just like to scoop it up and process it a bit, repackage it up and send it back to the Establishment as it were passing it off to them as their designer goods. And it works! The guys who spew the colon custard accept it back as crème de menthe or Benedictine. Something to get their nasty claws into.

Talking of Benedictines I always try to show my spiritual side in my online excursive divagations; so as to be sending the porridge-spouters a smidgen of class-act back, to kind of shame them into improving their grasp on what they think is contemporary life.

You’ve probably noticed the pentagram and the black flag, the self-predatory serpent and the other stuff I have as my haute decor (also designer) backdrop for my talks. I like to have a lot of hocus-pocus and emblems scattered about and around me – makes me a professional, or at I think least looking like one – so I can be just like those lounge suited straight-jacketed corn-fed guys at Fox and CBS – they got nothing on me, sunshine!

You might know that some of my audience give credence to a rumour that I’m a priest of the Dark Arts when I’m not weeding and hosing-down my lawns and delightful veg and plants. Even here in the garden some of them say I grow mandrakes and ladies fingers, and star anise – for my erotic absinthe – and that I cultivate digitalis, coltsfoot, wild garlic and so on doing my apothacarial researches – which in the ancient parlance were known commonly as chiromancy.

BTW: How Che Guevara and Black Sabbath get together I just don’t know – but my wall does I guess?

You might think I’m just anti, an adversarial type, a controversialist, the kind of guy who freaks when he hears his neighbour has won a sum of money and he hasn’t – and you might think that being a straight guy in the media establishment is the ultimate goal I want to emulate, and that I chase after this like a green eyed monster feeding on the shreds of anchormen and women?

My fans also tell me that I have that academic look – the glasses and the hair and beard – just to have a beard right now is pretty radical it seems? And to be academic you have to have an angle to grind your axes on. I’ve been to school, yeah; I know a bit about best practise for the delegation of marketing management. I’m no dummy – I’m __edyucated.

And then I get guys come up to me when I’m in my garden just putting in a few potatoes and carrots for the season and these guys always seem to suspect – you know you can’t be a nature lover and a self-sufficiency freak these days without weird guys – do I have the right to call them that? - telling you you’re a survivalist or an arcane herbalist, or working for the Feds as a pharmaceutical chemical researcher or in the military or the National Guard, and that my garden’s a hotbed for making new-age Agent Orange or Los Alamos radium strawberries.

I get a little testy when it becomes too much and because so many of these freaks interpret me so oddly. Do I look odd? – I ask myself. I look in the mirror – the one I got from Seattle as a facsimile of Dr Dee’s - and what I see in it is just an ordinary kind of warlock-type undead guy with hands waving like scissors in a drunken barbers and a body swaying about like it’s top heavy and at sea, and jerky hectic head moving about pontificating on a Mr Bolton and a Mrs Trump, just as if the world is a kids’ card game of Happy Families and everyone’s playing and is after the full set to win.

And the words – the words just spill out of me like anchovies opened up from a blown tin can, full of gas and once-was-edible slush. I feel sometimes I can’t control my mouth. My Bible-bashing acquaintance tell me life’s all about keeping your tongue under control but mine just runs away with me, it goes ninety to the dozen like a Harley Davidson on Route 66 as if I were in a road movie, taken some amphetamine, and driving hard for the coast on magic crazy spice, on a mission to catch those words of mine that are being broadcast at the speed of light into the world ahead of me. Wow, that WAS a cool sentence!!

I guess you’ve realised that under this slow and easy guise I lay on for you viewers there seethes the heart of a criminalised troglodyte. You’d never believe it but sometimes I get so wound up! If I hear one more whine from anyone about me stirring my cup and talking over the grating sound of screeching ceramics…. Don’t people realise it’s my relaxation toy – like those eighties tiny Newton’s Balls and rubber house-bricks to throw at the TV – or those very squeezy hand held things you could pretend was your best friend’s neck or genitals? Yes indeed, I get a good vibe out of that spoon in that cup stirring and screeching It’s music to me, Motorhead got nothin on me and my spoon.

Back to my spiritual side; you might be wondering how I reconcile it to my obvious delight in poking around in the murk of the Dark Arts vis a vis – now there’s a cool phrase! – my planting anchovies and absinthe in the garden to sprout for the Mid Winter Solstice. To bloom on St Lucie’s Day around midnight right on that moment when the full moon rises in Virgo in the Seventh House and the Age of Behemoth is, according to my Old Moore’s Almanack, being ushered in by Pluto - not the dog - the King of the Underworld.

Now you might have heard said that ‘genius is to madness near allied”? No? Maybe not then – just go and get some education! Well my spiritual side is dark, as dark as Jim Carey or Leslie Neilsson – and that’s pretty dark. It’s kind of ‘near allied’ to straight religion and to the guys who take the straight religious services – Jimmy Swaggart and Rick Warren, those kind of guys – they are all pretty much like me.

I’m just their mirror-image – I’m doing the same things only it’s The Circus-Ridden Life I like to bang on about. So I’m just as spiritual as the next Necromancer or Resurrection Man; I’ve got Sweeney Todd genes in my blood. And more - I’ve looked into my ancestry and found that my great grandmother used to sell little skull and crossbones flags to the crowds when the public executions were on in the neighbourhood and they called a holiday to watch.

So get it – I’m pretty sensitive – and aesthetic – and discrunmi…..discurvib…. - I’ll just get The Free Dictionary loaded up – ah! discriminating, that’s it, discriminating, and no, that doesn’t mean the jury found me Not Guilty.

I have a soul just like you do, mine might be dark, hidden in a lead-lined casket during the daylight hours maybe, and hungry for thunderstorms and lightenings, and shrieking harridans and hunchbacked porters, spilt brains and garlic-proof vests; but it’s a soul and every bit as good and vulnerable as yours is.

So when you see me spouting, laid back, and arm-wrestling like air guitar, being assured and mighty and generally seeming to you like the type of guy you’d buy a dust pan and brush from at the doorstep, go beyond, seek deeper, and there my quivering heart just might be opened to you so that the full might and power of my troubled bowels are then likely to be poured out to you.

Kushti Mux Amandi – farewell -

Styxenhammer … aka: Lothair the Viking