xxxxxBeneath the living mirror of Heaven, beneath the world of our desires, there are streets with secret names. They connect the back alleys of civilization with the urine-stained vacant lots of the cosmos. They take you to the Occult Underground.
xxxxxYou can't call information for the Underground's phone number. It doesn't advertise in Rolling Stone. There are no maps that show its borders. Yet you know it exists - or rather, you know it has to exist. You know it in your bones.
xxxxxYou know because you've heard the rumors. A song that drives people to suicide. A man whose face melts with each dawn. A videotape that shows the birth of a Goddess.
xxxxxThere are lots of rumors. These are different. The people you hear them from are different, like the weird drunk in the bar who lit his cigarettes without matches, or the street performer whose juggling pins pirouetted in unison between his hands. When you asked them how they did it, they smiled and said, "Eh, it's just a trick." Then the drunk sloppily pulled a quarter from behind your ear and the juggler dropped a pin and the moment was gone. But that feeling of truth remained.
xxxxxFinally you knew what it was: the look in their eyes. Once you noticed it, you couldn't help but see it. Maybe every week or two you'd pass somebody on the street and for a second your eyes would meet and there it would be. You can't describe that look. Sometimes it seems like the hunger of a junkie, and other times its the smug satisfaction of a fat tycoon. In the mornings when you're half awake, on the weekends in the nightclub bathrooms, you catch yourself staring into the mirror, looking for the look. It's not there yet. But you feel it coming on, the way the tickle in your nose tells you you['re getting a cold.
xxxxxThe Occult Underground is not made up of ordinary people. It comprises obsessed visionaries, mystic degenerates, hardcases with doctorates, dallen pagans, renegade scholars, drug-dealing hermaphrodites, actors who refuse to be seen or heard, military vets bent for Masons, children raised as Gods, sewer dwellers, kill-crazy psychos inspired by Logan's Run, worshipers of cardboard boxes, those who know the language of cats, secret societies of grocery store clerks, the followers of James Dean, holistic terrorists, stigmatic talk-show hosts, that kid in third grade who ate his thumb, autistic clairvoyants, old souls in new bodies, practitioners of Tantric channel-surfing, JFK-suicide conspiracists, people who believe we never landed on the moon, people who believe they landed on the moon, and people who believe they are the moon.
xxxxxThese are your people. You are one of them. Every one of you knows a secret nobody else understands. It is not enough to believe in something. You have to BECOME that belief. The belief that the world is you and when you change yourself the world changes with you.
xxxxxBeats the straight world any day of the week.
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