'State of Ascension' and 'The Mothman Prophecies'

Well hello there. I haven't posted on DoseNation in quite some time - and I'm most certainly not content with that. Hopefully I can help the post-Burning Man lull - that horrifying hangover/reintegration into society period of your lives that makes you question everything and wonder what really is real. Actually, this is just going to make it a lot worse, but who cares, because we're all already way the hell out of our minds anyways!

My first issue to address is my new book. Here's part of my post on that:

"It's tentatively entitled State of Ascension: The Impact of Politics, Drugs, Religion, and Society on Personal Belief Systems, and the Downfall of Contemporary Civilization. The book is full of cynicism and hilarity, political and countercultural hijinx, spoon-bending Zen philosophy, the sobering reality that we may be doomed as a society, and more! Who knows if/when it will ever be published, since getting anything at all past the corporate media stonewall is hell these days - but I'll keep you updated. Perhaps I'll put it out through this site in installments - we shall see."

Anyways, the book is an attempt to quantify one person's reality through the usage of universal Jungian archetypes and Taoist light/darkness to illustrate a psychedelic or mind manifesting spiritual journey through life. It's a metaphor for the universal microcosmic experience that we are all currently having, in other words, what we perceive as life. So I thought I'd put that out there, take it for what you will.

My second issue to address is The Mothman Prophecies, which changed my life... for the worse probably, but it's still awesome to watch after drinking a bottle of Robotussin, that's for damn sure.

In the movie, after a horrifying time loop subsides, a daemon of pure energy that refers to itself as "Ingrid Cold" manifests itself as the fabled "Mothman," which, according to dozens of actual eyewitness testimonies from Point Pleasant, West Virginia, is a nebulous black being capable of flying over a hundred miles an hour without moving and has two giant red beams of light for eyes embedded on its chest. The Mothman is seen in a blinding flash of intense light, and frequently leaves burn marks on organic material in the area where he has manifested himself. Those who bear witness to the Mothman's manifestation frequently begin bleeding from the eyes and ears and/or go insane, presumably from either radiation sickness or simply from witnessing something so horrifying that their minds and bodies cannot handle it.

"Ingrid Cold" begins contacting the main characters using electrical signals that mimic a human voice. He speaks to them through the telephone, television, and yes, the bathroom sink, predicting mass casualties that begin coming true one by one, culminating in the collapse of the Silver Bridge.

Overall, The Mothman Prophecies is one of the most genuinely horrifying and darkly psychedelic films I've seen in recent times, if for no other reason than that it accurately represents the schizoid delusions of reference and incredibly synchronistic happenings that so frequently accompany a hallucinogenic drug binge, and that always seem to include a complete disintegration of reality as we know it.

The fact that the script ("based on a true story") is very loosely based on a book of the same title that documents what "actually" happened at Point Pleasant, West Virginia, lends the movie some small level of frightening realism. It is speculated that the citizens of Point Pleasant were either suffering from some sort of mass hallucination caused by a government experiment, hallucinations from chemicals from a nearby munitions plant that had been inoperable since World War II, or were actually being contacted by some reasonably omnipotent entity of free-energy just outside of time and space. Other possible explanations include Jungian mass disease in the collective unconscious manifesting itself in widespread delusion, a community wide drug trip of some sort, the opening of an extra-dimensional rift, or least fun of all, a simple fabrication of a ridiculous story on the community level. Perhaps it was some combination of all of the above - we will probably never know. What we DO know however, is that The Mothman Prophecies is one fun movie to watch after you've had a bottle of 'Tussin (or two - except by that point you probably won't be able to actually perceive the TV screen as a visual sensory object)!