May is Masturbation Month

It is actually scary how it has come round so quickly but this is the month to celebrate one of my favourite things, which is masturbation. It is especially significant this year since so many people are in isolation and it is a safe way to get off. Coronavirus is of course transmitted by water and when it comes into contact with a mucous membrane, it can be passed that way.
I am afraid that I haven't made any specific preparations for May this year - last year I stocked up on new porn specifically to wank to in May, but I have been nowhere near that organised this year.
Of course as a prolific user of porn anyway, it's not like I'm exactly lacking in that area. Recently I have discovered that all the exhibitionists from Tumblr have migrated to Twitter so I have found much good stuff there. I will also happily admit that I have at times used straight porn - always with men in, I am gay after all. I like the filthy porn made by Alexxa Vice - as wank material I can dream of being her, and frankly she shows me what I would have been like if a woman.

Tarot Reading Made Easy

There isn't half a lot of rubbish talked about tarot reading, to the extent that there are even people who think they can't do it! - You know who you are. So in line with my DIY ethic I thought I would give some pointers of ways to make reading easy.

1. There is no shame in looking up the meanings in the Little White Book that comes with the deck, as you go along.

2. There is also no shame in making a further study, because it can help to illuminate a particular school of tarot - Golden Dawn for Rider Waite and Crowley for Thoth, for example.

However my belief is that divination is really about opening up the inner eye and seeing the invisible so there are other strategies which can help with this.

3. A technique which rightly or wrongly I associate with Mary Greer is to describe the card. Try to avoid seeking to interpret but literally just describe. This technique is surprisingly powerful and is also telling when different people describe the same card differently.

4. Pamela Colman Smith's own advice was to assume the position of the characters on the card. This gives an automatic idea of what is going on.

5. There is also nothing wrong with a bit of whoo, and I personally often think of sentences beginning 'I see...' whether this is for a flat description of a card or a more interpretative view.

6. Aces are cards which can give particular difficulties and can be interpreted how you like really. Sometimes they are very good at giving a picture of what would happen if, say, a sword or some money was thrust into a situation. Sometimes they're seen as something new.

7. Court cards can also be difficult. They can be people, behaviour or attitudes. The way they are facing can be telling. Again assuming their position shows what they feel like.

Some people have difficulty putting together a whole reading and relating cards to each other. Before the trend towards spreads with set positions readers would draw a relatively large number of cards and just see what was going on. This is the approach I tend to favour.

8. It can be helpful to use a borderless deck for this - I learned with Morgan Greer myself. Like this the different cards become part of a whole scene.

9. If you have difficulty with this it can be useful to think 'Once upon a time...'

10. You can see it either as a progression in time or as distance in space from the querent. This is made more apparent if you designate a significator card to mean the querent.

11. Use social skills and non-verbals to see what is going on. Are the people in the cards looking towards or away from each other? What kind of place are they in? Are they happy or sad? What will happen if they carry on as they are? And so on.

12. A final technique which comes from the Tarot School of New York is the voice in the card technique. When we read tarot we are not necessarily represented by the people in the cards because it communicates with us symbolically. We might be a chair or an arch, for example. In this technique you let your eye hover over the card and see which detail catches your eye, and that is the card speaking to you.

Happy reading!

Lock down in Digbeth

I am writing this on the canal bank, where my hour's middle class exercise prescribed by the government has taken me.
I say middle class, because it is evident that general seeking of sex and particularly offering it for money have not been stopped by the lock down. Apparently if you're a rent boy you don't get furlough pay, and the two younger men in the local cruising zone have the characteristic mix of allure, threat and desperation which characterises their profession. The older men are looking for it but not thinking of paying for it, or else they would have got it by now.
Elsewhere in Digbeth the clubbing set are the most sober they have been for years and sunbathing at times of day they previously didn't know existed. I start my new job on Tuesday and am nearly as ready as I am going to be. I just need to trim my claws so they don't clatter on the floor.

On Seeing the First Bare Chest of the Spring

Coronavirus. It's a real indicator of what people are made of. Personally I'm loving being at home but I gather some people are being driven up the wall.
And today I saw my first bare chest of the Spring. I must write to The Times.

Sex and Rockets Review

I have actually finished my Lent book in Lent (for a change) largely because my employer's hopeless IT department means that I can't actually do any work 😋
I am afraid that I don't really recommend the book, for two reasons:
1. Parsons lived in two very specialised worlds, Thelemic magic and rocket science  and a huge amount of the book is spent explaining these two things. I can't speak for the rocket scientists, but for the specialist magical reader this means that what is explained is usually already familiar.
2. We learn next to nothing of Parsons' own inner journey to magic, and the book repeatedly says, if he made notes of this, they have not survived.
What does strike me is that even as a man in his thirties, people keep commenting that Parsons was relatively young and easily-influenced. I have a feeling there is this in a lot of magical people, because there is no natural niche for us we tend to try to find one and fail. On the other hand the magical person would surely benefit from a youthful ability to see anyone as possible?

Not Showing Up Well

The virus hasn't noticeably shown us humans up in a very good light, has it. What with hoarding bog roll, crowding together in beauty spots, and what have you.

Our politicians have also been caught on the hop. Sigh. 

You will all know how obedient I am, so am obediently keeping away from fools and am working from home for the first time of my life. In true Hound fashion my notice is in and I have been offered another role in the same organisation. I should be able to transfer but I told HR if they mess it up I will have an enforced break at home because I am not in the habit of being spoken to like that. 

I do like the way water is running clear: see I could have told them humans were the problem! 

Spirit of Place: the Automated Car Park in the Bull Ring

Source

Today a post about a car park, specifically the automated one in the 1960s Bull Ring. You can see it in the top picture: it is behind the long pierced wall. I heard an anecdotal account that this car park was 'never' used because nobody would trust their car to the automated machinery, however I suspected that it was probably used when it was novel and then stopped being used, maybe for the reason of distrust. In short succession I have found a published account of what happened and urbex-style photos of the abandoned car park:

MORE than 40 years ago the Bull Ring shopping centre announced a revolution in car parking.

Owners said they had developed a sophisticated automated system which would see the end of scratched wheel rims and craning your neck as you reversed your vehicle into tight spaces.

Heralded as ‘the future in car parking’ the 1964 scheme, considered the height of high tech at the time, featured a concrete rolling block, which could move Ford Anglias and Austin 1100s into a space – after a fleet of attendants manually pushed the vehicles into a bay.

But – despite the developers’ high hopes – the scheme only lasted for three days.

And the concrete rollers which could have blazed a trail for car parking, if they had worked, were finally demolished when the shopping centre was rebuilt in the early 2000s. Source

So it seems the mechanism didn't work properly and I have also read elsewhere that it was too slow and people wouldn't wait. The article this quote comes from is about the Cube, but there is another automated system, in whatever Beetham Tower is called this week. True to form, it has stopped working and people's cars were trapped inside. You can see a bit of the Bull Ring system working in the video below.

I was delighted to find these pictures of the interior, which I think were taken in the nineties. I am ashamed to say I didn't make a note of where they came from, so if they are yours, please leave a comment or contact me and I will happily attribute or remove them.