2021 has been a wild ride, and it’s not even halfway done.

Due to Covid, this year hasn’t exactly been rife with in-person performance art opportunities, but Ventura’s 5x5x5 series curated by John M. White marched bravely onward via video, thank God.

So, after workshopping pieces in my backyard with mannequin parts, dirt, ladders, invisible skateboards, and bananas, I finally came up with something crazy from my childhood called 1979 Norwegian Choreography for Skateboard & Banana — check out the pics & video! The piece is simple, but it took 3 bone-jarring days to choreograph and shoot, so by the end, my legs were DESTROYED from all of that faux-skateboard jumping.
 

I just finished writing THE OCCULTIST, a new streaming/TV series pilot about a failed archeologist who becomes an occult detective — I’m so so so excited about this one, because it combines my eternal love of Indiana Jones and my obsession with the occult that dates back to my childhood — and the script just became a finalist at the 2021 Los Angeles International Underground Film Festival — yesssss!

Plus, DARK SILO, the script I co-wrote with KayDee Kersten, was a finalist in ScreenCraft’s 2021 Action & Adventure contest after winning Best Original Screenplay at the Burbank International Film Festival. Agents & producers: I am so ready for youuu!

My preliminary schoolwork toward my Ph.D. in Parapsychology is finally done. It concluded with a thesis paper called The Liberating Power of Image in the New Thought Movement, which is a feminist take on how the concepts of image and seeing in the metaphysical “mental sciences” (Religious Science, Christian Science, etc.) can liberate one from the raging patriarchy in Western modes of being & seeing.

My doctoral dissertation is up next. I’m still plotting what to research — my list is crazy long and growing: metaphysical healing, shamanic & witchy practices, chaos, E.S.P., ghosts, even aliens…. There are too many topics I’m excited about to choose. Maybe I can incorporate them all? Hm….

I hope you found something fun and fulfilling over the past 6 months to keep you sustained & inspired through this pandemic horror show. For me, it was my wife, dog, friends, and a lot of margaritas, followed by tons of running. I’ve racked up the miles from Los Angeles to Sedona, dropped 10 pounds, ran a half-marathon virtual race, and just started training for my 5th full marathon, with hopes of qualifying for the Boston Marathon this year (assuming my legs ever recover from all that make-believe skateboarding…lolol).

So, if you drive past a pale, bony, dehydrated blonde dude who is tripping through the asphalt streets of Burbank like a loon, please don’t run him over! Wishing you a healthy & beautiful summer!

I had my most intense ghost experience in 1990 during my freshman year in college. My roommate and I were studying one night when our dorm room suddenly became freezing cold, even though the city was a sweltering 80 degrees and we had no air conditioning. The nerves in my skin started buzzing—like TV snow—as if I’d suddenly been draped by an invisible blanket of static electricity. I looked up from my book just in time to see a man standing in our room. Our room’s door was locked, yet somehow he’d gotten in without a sound, and now there he was, obscuring the entire door with his wide 6’5 frame. He was opaque and dark—a shadow man—with no discernible features except for two glowing yellow eyes. I glanced at my roommate, who was staring at the door with his mouth and eyes wide open, unable to speak. I looked back at the door again and the figure was gone. I asked, “Did you see that?” And my roommate replied, “The eyes!” Doubting myself, I glanced down at my book, and to my shock, saw an afterglow of the man on the white of the page—an after-image burned onto my retinas like a camera flash. I looked to the left, then the right, and the image moved with my gaze. How was that possible, if what we’d seen hadn’t emitted some kind of energy?

The man continued visiting us over the next two weeks with increasing frequency. Every time he appeared, my roommate and I would feel our room go abuzz with cold static and our hair would stand up. The static energy was so powerful that we could tell where the man was in our building—even if he was at the far end of the hall, we could feel where his energy was coming from in the same way you can feel the Sun’s heat with your eyes shut. The man visited at all hours, including the dead of night, until we started losing sleep. The cold static was rubbing my nerves raw to the point that I felt hypersensitive to the thoughts and emotions of others. When the static was around, I gained a measurable amount of psychic awareness, and my roommate was having the same experience. For fun, one of us would draw a picture, then focus on it intently, to see if the other could pick up on the thoughts and draw the same picture. The results were uncanny; again and again, with increasing accuracy, we were able to reach each other’s thoughts. The other students in the dorm thought we were possibly insane, but they couldn’t argue with the fact that our arm hair was standing up, and that we seemed able to know what the other was thinking in test after test.

I had my first out of body experience during this time of raw nervousness. One evening while walking up a path to our dorm building from class, I felt a surge of “jangly nerves”—an energy that seemed to come up from the ground and wash over me—and suddenly I was flying, like a Chinese dragon with a long tail that was still attached to my physical body. My dragon-spirit “body” flew up the path to the dorm, down the hall, and up the stairs to a small living room where I saw my friends sitting around talking. Then, in a flash, my spirit retracted, slamming back into my body. All of this had occurred in the blink of an eye. Not sure if what I’d experienced had been real, I ran to the dorm, down the hall, and up the stairs to the living room, where I found everyone—all the students I’d seen in my vision were there—except one woman, Laura, was standing, while in my vision I’d seen her sitting. I asked her, “Were you just sitting on that couch a second ago?” To which she answered, “Yes. Why?” So it was true: I’d visited the living room before I’d arrived.

After 2 weeks, my roommate and I couldn’t take it anymore. Our nerves were fried, and we were averaging 2-3 hours of sleep per night. Desperate, I researched everything I could find on exorcism, cleansing, repelling ghosts, you name it. I finally settled on a series of shamanic rituals that involved communicating with the ghost, and relocating him. I chose the ground outside of the dorm as his new intended home. Naked and alone in the dark of the dorm room, I carried out the exhausting ritual over several hours, during which the ghost communicated that he was lost. I reassured him that his new home in the earth would be comforting, and less disruptive to everyone around him. He agreed to be bound to his new home, which I sealed by burying a jar in the dirt right outside of our dorm building (which, appropriately, was called “the Shire” in the Middle Earth housing complex on the campus of U.C. Irvine). I walked back inside the dorm building, and felt a quiet sense of peace—the static energy was gone, and never returned while we lived there.

Several years later (around 1996, I think), a friend who knew the above story handed me a copy of the university’s newspaper, which included a news article about the incident. The reporter had written that the Shire was apparently experiencing a haunting, and that the ghost bore a resemblance to a ghost encountered several years earlier during which a “shaman had been brought in” to exorcise the building. The story detailed the exorcism—including the burying of the spirit in the dirt—and then said that recent building construction around the Shire had no doubt released the ghost back into the wild….

This past weekend I traveled to Bodie, California’s only Gold Rush ghost town. Nestled in a grassy meadow in the high Sierras about 75 miles from Lake Tahoe, the town stands frozen in a state of arrested decay with clapboard buildings spitting nails under a blisting sun.

1800s gold miners braved isolation, fires, disease, -40 Farenheit winters with 20-foot snows, dynamite accidents, gunfights, and stabbings to work their claims worth $35 to $100 million in total, depending on whom you ask. The clothes, hats, boots, beds, blankets, dry goods, cans, bottles, dishes, games, toys, false teeth, glass eyes, tools, horse-drawn carriages, art, books, magazines, and other belongings of the miners and their families lie right where they left them as they fled violence and firestorms…or died.

The town is still. The leaning houses & outhouses, church, town bank, hotel, bar, general store, cemetary, morgue where you can see tiny coffins lined up for babies, and Chinatown where murdering gunslingers smoked opium, gambled, and screwed hookers stand in eerie quiet. All you hear is wind in the grass and your boots in the gravel. Several times I peered through a dusty window and could swear I saw movement—a shadow, maybe, or a face darting from view. I loved it though it smelled of death.

E.S.P. overload.

Photos are posted here.