2013-04-24

Exotic Charms

What is the most exotic thing about me?


It's not often that I write an autobiographical post - the whole Welsh "don't blow your own trumpet" thing - but I thought I'd just reveal a bit about me here for a change.


I come from rainy, wet and windy Wales, in the United Kingdom. Those of you who have heard my audio files know that I speak with a very British accent. That would subliminally paint me as the villain in most movies and TV shows you ever heard if - apart from Doctor Who, that is - but the exotic accent is the least of it. Turns out that my accent is exotic even among Brits - people do puzzle over my origins, even those who are native Brits.


I am sinister - as in "left-handed." I was ambidextrous in school, but gravitated towards my left hand exclusively.


I also follow a Left Hand Path. If there was a local temple of Set, I'd probably be a member. As it is, you can consider me a Solitary, in that I practice alone. Why would I join such a group, given the chance? Certainly not for the excuse to wear leather and black, smoke pot and listen to Black Sabbath records backwards - anyone can do that. It's called "stupidity," and people get medals for it.


The path I do follow is Chaos Magic - the path forged by Austin Osman Spare and codified by the likes of Phil Hine and Peter K Carroll. Remind me to tell you about it some time.


I write about my favourite fetishes - you know them already. Hypnotism is by far my favourite, because of all the fetishes I write about, hypnosis is one that I can actually use to great, deeply erotic effect.


I speak a variety of languages - including, would you believe, Klingon. Naturally, I speak Welsh as my birth language - but I've also more than a passing familiarity with French, Italian, Portuguese and Japanese. If anybody asks why I learned those languages, I reply: Fun.


I belong to a family line, Proffwyd ("The Prophets"), which has traditionally been associated either with second sight, or insanity. Not sure whether it is the second sight which has skipped my generation, or the insanity, or whether both of them chose to land right in my genome. In any case, both are exceedingly good adaptations to this crazy world.


I hand code HTML and CSS in my sleep. I write poetry, and that includes such exotic traditional forms as sonnets, Villanelles and sestinas; I use Vedic mathematics to compute figures in my head; oh, and last but by no means least, I can solve the Rubik's Cube.


However, I think that what really gets people who meet me is my down-to-earth manner. My life is filled with strangeness and exoticism - yet I remain composed in the face of weirdness. Weird, you see, is my normal - and while you'd expect someone with such a grounding in the bizarre to be, well, a bit on the bizarre "taking-a-bath-in-baked-beans-for-charity, Great-British-Eccentric, a-bit-loopy" side himself, well ... the fact that I can hold conversations on topics such as mathematics, science, history, geology, botany as well as other, more ordinary topics, has regularly floored people who expect me to be the sort of person to, well, turn up for meetings dressed like a Klingon, or to have a room in my place turned into a dedicated shrine full of Star Trek memorabilia, and so on.


I mean, consider the following. I hypnotise people. What sort of merch should I be displaying in my house? Posters of strange men waving hunter-style watches at vulnerable, scantily-clad women? Inverted pentagrams? Baphomet posters? (Actually, I think that my world map in the living room and my plans for a giant poster of the Periodic Table of the Elements to adorn my bedroom wall should be exotic enough ambition for my home, thank you ...)


What really matters, to me, is not the trappings of strangeness surrounding me in my daily life. What matters for me is the ability to keep a handle on it all, and make it all part of my daily life - as if, by such immersion, I am showing the world that the world I inhabit is not like theirs at all; and that their world is somewhat lacking, compared to the world they could be inhabiting, if they could but learn to but loose the bonds of fear and inhibition which have shackled them to their parents' idea of what their lives should be like.


And it's the fact that I can enjoy such a life, while still being so stable and (outwardly) normal, that is likely to be the most exotic thing about me.


Anyway, I'm sure there must be plenty of questions you might want asking. Follow this link and you'll have some answers.

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