Well damn! It's been almost a month sicne my last entry. I could go on about my weekend and the hellish time dealing with the quest to find a tire that fit Gloria's newly aquired van, on Sunday after 6pm, but I don't feel up to it right now. But I will say I paid a LOT of tolls just trying to get off the Golden State Parkway and turn around, over and over again.

And in regards to the Led Zeppelin lyric used as this entry title: I'm also thinking of seriously quitting the band. I like doing the cover tunes, but this is just NOT what I want to do. At least not at the level of committment that they need. Plus it's frustrating working with an ignorant singer who wants to call all the shots.

And here's a reply I wrote today from a message board, in response to somebody saying "Hey do seances work? Because I want to talk to these 2 dead teenagers":

>>I don't know if they exist or not, but I'm hoping
>>that they do, because there are two boys (well, nearly
>>men) that I want to talk to. Any comments?

Well events known as seances do "exist", as somebody pointed out. Just about everybody from self-proclaimed mediums to bored teenagers in the suburbs have lit a few candles and tried commincating with the dead. But whether or not the resulting experiences have no other explainations is another story.

First of all, the effectiveness of a seance begs a lot of much bigger questions. Does the consciousness of a human being "live on" somewhere after death? If so, is it able to collect information spoken by a living human? Is it able to talk back to that human? Do the tools facilitate this? I don't believe any of these things to begin with (I find them to be very bold, unsupported claims) and thus I don't believe in seances either.

A much more rational explaination is that answers from ouija boards and pendulums and the like, are just manifested by one's own ego. (And by "ego" I mean the imaginative part of the mind dealing with self-identity and consciousness.) It may not feel like you're physically moving a planchette or a weighed string, but in fact you are.

If you use a ouija board to "talk" to those teenagers, you're just talking to your memories of them, and what your imagination builds on top of that. If you don't believe me, try this scientific experiment: Get three people who have never ever heard of the two teenagers, and have these participants sit at a ouija board alone. You can have pictures or articles of clothing lying around for "connection energy" if you want. But now see if they can come up with the teenagers' original phone numbers or birth dates. If they're really talking to the dead, it should work. But it won't.

Now that all being said, I am not so quick as to dismiss all such rituals as useless. That's one thing that separates Satanists like me from your run of the mill atheist. The psychodrama is admittedly entertaining. And conversing might prove to be a relieving psychological experience. It just ain't supernatural.