Missile Confessional

She was gorgeous, half my age, and a good friend of my soon to be estranged wife, but I'd like to think that those were not the reasons why. Sophie, who'd been invited over for dinner by my wife Justine, and with whom we were having drinks, looked at me across the coffee table with her bewitchingly brown eyes, after having expounded upon her subject for a good twenty minutes; "you'll love it", she told me, "it's right up your alley". Well OK, that's not what she actually said. What she really said was; "Tu vas l'adorer, c'est parfait pour toi".

She was speaking in French for a very good reason; she is French. In fact, so is my wife, and we were, all three of us, seated around a coffee table in our home which borders a small town not thirty kilometers from the Mediterranean ocean. If you've never been to the south of France, but have heard of it, through books, or via some rich uncle, I can assure you that everything you've been told about it is true: the sea, the sun, the hot Med chicks (Justine and Sophie being living proof), the relaxed lifestyle, no one being on time for anything, free healthcare, virtually free education. All of that is fact. It has its bad sides like the Mistral, the bane of all southern archers, but it sure as hell beats living in a third world police state like the U.S. of shitty A.

Unfortunately, most French people have drunk way too much Coke and eaten way too often at McDonald's (France is McDonald's second home essentially because the French don't know how to make fast-food.) to realize how much they have it made. Every year they get a little fatter and look a little more like bad copies of Americans, and every year there's some public service or other the French government thinks it needs to reduce or privatize, or some law defending labor rights they think they need to water down. I want to yell at them, tell 'em all that it's one seriously bad dream, that Americano shit they're gobbling down, but the French are far from being a stupid people, and they have a pretty good history of revolt, so I figure they'll eventually get the idea before it's too late... at least I hope so.

***

Anyways, beautiful brown-eyed Sophie had me totally convinced well before her concluding statements had concluded. Something about the whole thing just tickled my intuitive fancy for no reason I could tell at the time, and I had recently resolved to listen to my intuitions a bit more often. I don't know if you've ever done that sort of thing; listen to your intuitions, or your inner voices, or whatever, but it can get pretty weird in there, and it's definitely not recommended that you always actually do what they suggest either. Like if an inner voice of yours pops up and suggests that you kill your wife, or something. That might not be such a shit hot idea, even in the south of France.

It's definitely risky business listening to yourself, and that's why a whole bunch of people, including myself not so long ago, purposefully and willfully ignore whatever it is that's going on down, or up there. But then ignoring stuff results in a whole other bagful of problems, and when those problems hit, you aren't even gonna know why cuz you were so busy avoiding shit in the first place. So after a lot of ups and downs of the "What hit me?" variety, I ended up having a go at the red pill.

That's not the only reason I went red though. The other reason I'd recently started listening to my inner voices and such was because I'd just finished reading, if you can call it that, a pretty hefty book on High Magic. That's definitely not the kind of thing most people do nowadays, so I figure I better define my terms now, and real fast, before you stuff this book of weird tales back into whatever shelf you found it at the bookstore, or, more likely, you click your 'browse something else' button.

Unlike southern France, I can pretty much assure you that whatever you've ever heard about magic is false: the fireballs, the black masses, the witch's Sabbaths, card tricks, snake oil (well maybe not snake oil), flying brooms and dragons. None of that is what real magic is about. If you had said 'the unconscious', of the Jungian variety for example, you'd actually be way closer to the mark. A lot of the stuff Jung, and even Freud, talked about you can actually find in old magical texts way before the 20th century ever hit. The whole collective unconscious thing is absolutely not a surprise to anyone who knows a little something about magic. Magic is the science of what is hidden, and there is a whole hell of a lot that is hidden right there in our noggins, or under our noses if you like. So the basic idea is why not try and figure out what is hidden down there, and what, if anything, it might be trying to tell you.

Another more colorful way you might look at it, is that Magic is the intuition that there exists a fifth dimension, a sixth sense, a seventh layer, an astral light, which illuminates and permeates everything and with which you might be able to interact. In order to see it, or rather feel it, you've gotta be transformed, or initiated into the whole deal. That's what things like the Eleusinian mystery cult were all about, and that's the secret some secret societies prefer to keep to themselves. Nowadays though, you can self-initiate, if you read the right rare book in the right frame of mind, for example. But then you might find yourself all on your lonesome, without a guide and in a strange land, which ain't necessarily always a good thing.

***

Three days after our little conversation over champagne and pistachios, I was at the local archery club shootin' bow for the very first time. Sophie was there too, but we hardly said a word beyond "Hi", and, "How are you?". I think I saw her at the club three or four more times before she moved off to another town. I might've invited her for a drink after practice one of those times just to see her reaction, which was a cool but kindly 'Sorry, I've got something else planned' type of thing that only a Latin woman knows how to pull off in just the right way.

Archery though, was love at first shot for me. I couldn't really explain it at the time, but it became an immediate obsession, even addiction. Whenever I wasn't shooting, I was reading up on all things bow and arrow. Some time afterwards, I came to realize that there was something just under its outer appearances, something occult about the whole thing, which nobody was talking about or naming. There's something totally ineffable contained between the moment just before you release an arrow and the moment it strikes it's target, something outside of time and space. You may be thinking I'm just talking a bunch of hocus-pocus, which I guess I am, but there's a lot of pretty weird shit going down with archery that you might not be aware of, but which is just pure and simple fact.

The bow and arrow is among mankind's oldest set of instruments, and we've been making and shooting 'em for twenty thousand some odd years or so. That's more than enough time for it to have entered Jung's collective unconscious, or the astral light, or whatever, and the old bow 'n arrow figures in more than one mythological anecdote. But probably the least mentioned thing about it all, or the most counter-intuitive, is that it doesn’t have a whole hell of a lot to do with aiming. Just to give you one undeniable example among many; at the 2012 London Olympics (the Olympics, not the para-Olympics) some Korean dude, who's legally blind in both eyes, won a gold medal in archery. At the time, he also held the world record at 70 meters. Google it, I do not lie.

The fact is, it's only when you stop worrying about aiming so much and start paying attention to all the other stuff that's going on that you start being able to hit the bull with any sort of consistency beyond sheer luck. You simply can't really aim in any way that resembles what most people think that verb means. If you shoot Olympic recurve, like me, you have a sight which helps you point your bow in the general direction of the Eye, but that sight is wobbling all over the god-damned place because it's screwed onto your bow which you are holding outstretched in your left hand. Olympians have all kinds of doodads sticking out of their bows that are partly there to reduce the wobbling (mostly the shock though), but it still wobbles, come hell or high water, no matter how strong and muscular your bow arm happens to be.

That's not the worst of it though. You might think that the trick is to quickly release the arrow just when the sight happens to wobble into the center of the target and before it dances back out again. It must just be a matter of good timing is what you could think, and that would be a very logical, but also totally erroneous, guess; it's just physiologically, and cognitively, impossible. The things is, by the time your eye registers that the sight is dead center and tells your brain, and then your brain computes that observation and sends a message to your hand, or, more precisely, your back muscles, to release, and then those muscles go into action, it's just way too late. Your sight has moved randomly back, forth, and around the center of that damn target more than a few times by then. So in essence, successful conscious control of the aim and the release is scientifically impossible. You've just gotta leave it up to something, or someone, else. Once you've made that intuitive jump, which is by no means easy, once you give up conscious control of your aim and release and just work on your form, that's when you can really start trying to 'hit the gold', as both archers and alchemists like to say.

***

Richard, a tall gray-haired and muscular ex-military type, is the adult coach at our club. To this day, I've never actually seen him shoot a single arrow, not even once. Marcelo, our club's top archer, says that's cuz he sucks balls, but Richard's the one who initiated me, in his didactic 'no exceptions' sort of way, and most of the time he knows what he's talking about. Like the time I told him I wanted to try shooting with an open stance, about a couple weeks after joining the club, because I'd seen a few Olympians shoot that way on YouTube reruns and I thought it looked pretty cool. Richard just totally freaked out on me, like I was calling into question all of existence or something. He pulled out the official FFTA (Fédération Française de Tir à l'Arc) book and shoved it right in my face, opened up at the page in question, where it said in black and white: Thou shalt use a square stance, or thou shalt burn in fucking hell! I did end up trying an open stance, when Richard wasn't looking, and my arrows told me it sucked, at least in my case, and at that time.

That's the thing about archery; your ultimate arbiter is where your arrows land, and every arrow is a cold judgment which strikes just seconds after you release. They really don't care how you feel about things, and they have their very own opinion which brooks no argument. The problem is, you don't necessarily know what the hell their judgments actually mean, especially as a beginner, and you sure as hell can't see yourself, or look in a mirror while you're shooting. So any coach, even a guy that can't shoot for balls and believes there's only one way to shoot and no other, is a lot better than no coach at all.

That's the other thing about archery (no matter what Richard says); there is definitely more than one way to shoot. In fact, every archer has his or her way of shooting which may resemble, but is not a copy of any other archer. You don't have to believe me though, just watch any archery tourney at any level; there's some basics, even a lot of basics, which everyone does more or less the same, but absolutely no one shoots exactly alike, and when it comes to what's going on in an archer's head, I can guarantee you that there's even more variety.

The long and short of it is that everyone needs a coach, but if you only do what your coach tells you and never look any farther, if you go by the book, whatever book that might be, you will never ever become a master archer. In the end, only you know how to shoot like you, and only you know what that feels like. Only you can tell you how to shoot like you. They're your arrows that render judgment, and it's you that's gotta learn how to read them.

The next question you might ask is; "Well how the hell do you know how to shoot like you?", and I don't really have a clear cut answer for you there. The suggestions I get come in my dreams, or when I'm thinking about something else entirely, or when I'm meditating, or when I'm staring wearily at six arrows sticking out all over a target like I'd just blasted 'em out a sawed-off shotgun from waist level. I'd tell you more precisely where I think all those suggestions might actually come from, but it wouldn't help, and I wouldn't be doing you any favors.

***

Whatever his negatives are, it was also Richard who indirectly got me to draw a more solid link between archery and High Magic. I'd like to claim it was a positive one, that first correlative experience of mine, but actually it had to do with the darker side, or maybe grayish side, of the whole magic deal. The thing is, magic is like any other tool that's been invented; it cuts both ways, and you can do just as much bad as good with it. In this particular case, I figure it wasn't all that bad, and it was kinda fun in a weirded out sorta way:

At the end of every practice, Richard has the habit of getting a little competition going between us students. Usually he would just have us shoot a volley of six a few times and see who got the higher score. But a couple months in, Richard thought of something to spice things up a little. First we had a six arrow shoot off, and then the person who made the highest score would get first shot, followed by the next highest scorer etc., in the next phase of the competition. After the initial shoot-off, Richard stuck up a balloon about two fists big on the target wall that each of us would get to shoot one arrow at in the previously established order. He also stuck up another balloon about half the size of the first one, and another half that size again. The idea was that when the first balloon went down you started shooting at the next smallest, and whoever hit the most balloons won the tourney.

I should probably mention here that almost all the archers I know have a balloon fetish. There is something totally satisfying about hearing a balloon *POP!* cuz your arrow just penetrated it. I mean like, really satisfying. Anyways, I had won the shoot-off and had first go at the biggest balloon. A two fisted size balloon at twenty yards is actually not all that hard of a target to hit, even for beginners like us, so I was feeling pretty confident. I figured I would get it on my first shot which meant, according to Richard's rules, that I also got to shoot my second arrow right away at the second, single-fist sized balloon, instead of waiting 'till everyone else had a go. I just had to win this tourney of Richard's, and my determination was like a freight train.

So I set myself up, all confident-like, then do my initial draw, line-up and sight, expansion, and release... *squeeeeak*. There was definitely no sexy *POP!*, just this tiny, whiny, shitty, squeaky sound, and my arrow right up against a full, pristine, and un-punctured balloon. Not only that, but now five other archers were gonna get to shoot at the thing before I had another chance. I knew that there was just no way in hell that balloon was gonna survive the onslaught, and I was hopping, crazy, mad. I mean, we aren’t even talking about missing by a millimeter here, or a thirty-second of an inch, or whatever; my arrow was rubbing right up against that sucky little balloon. We are talking about a god-damned single micro-meter as being the source of my utter downfall.

I don't know exactly what came over me at that point, but I very clearly remember uttering a curse, just under my breath, so nobody heard. What I said was; "None of you mother-fuckers is gonna hit that damn balloon before I get another chance at it, so help me God!", and I meant it with all my darkly competitive and puerile heart.

I can see and hear what happened next like I was still there: *thock*... *thock*... *thock*... *thock*... *thock*. "Yes! Y'all missed, bitches!" I set myself up, even more confident now. Draw... line-up and sight... expansion... RELEASE!... *thock*, I miss by like a foot. My anger and frustration is renewed by a putrid underground stream: *thock*... *thock*... *thock*... *thock*... *thock*. What the hell? I've got a third chance at it?... *THOCK*, I miss again, and so does everybody else after me.

Three rounds was all it was supposed to take to get all three balloons down, so Richard's a little surprised. He gives us another three rounds. We all shoot our last three arrows, in the same order, at that same overly resistant piece of overblown rubber. Eighteen more *thock*s ensue. Not a single *POP!* to be heard anywhere, and we are all outta ammo now. The six of us, plus Richard, slowly walk up to the target board, and that's when it actually dawns on me that something very very fucked-up has happened. Richard is saying something like, "I've never seen anything like it", and a couple of the other archers express their disbelief in various manners as well, but I remain silent. I am staring at a veritable forest made up of thirty-six arrows, which is no more than two feet wide in diameter, and which absolutely covers the entire area surrounding that balloon. It's like the balloon had actually pushed those arrows away from it. It's such a beautifully strange sight that nobody moves to take out their arrows. As I stare, something deep down inside of me is punctured and deflates.

"Alright", Richards says with determination, "Pull out your arrows, get back down to the line, and fire at will!" That knocks us all out of our stupor, and we all get our arrows and head back. I've given up on the whole thing, and I just don't care anymore. I mean, who cares? Back on the line, somebody hits that stupid little balloon before I even have time to draw: *POP!*, the relief washes all over me, and I feel like an ex-con just outta prison. *POP!*, I hit the second balloon, which is half the size of the first one, on my first shot... *thock*...*POP!*, I hit the third tiny little balloon on my third shot, and win the tourney.

***

It was at that point that I figured I could use a bit of advice in the magic department. The problem is, there's not a whole lotta people you can talk to about that stuff without getting strange stares, or invitations to go see a psychiatrist. In my case, there was only one guy I could think of who might have something useful to say, and that was this stuck-up dick-wad called Archibald. Archibald is an acquaintance of an acquaintance I met at some party or other, and he was the guy who had mentioned that book on High Magic and told me I might like it. I have no idea why I took him up on the suggestion. I was half (probably fully, actually) drunk at the time, but somehow his suggestion had stuck in my mind, and a week or so later I actually ordered a copy and then actually read it.

It took me awhile to get his number, but I finally managed to get in touch with him. After a few niceties; "Hey how's it going, remember me?... I loved that book you suggested... The book on High Magic..."; I get around to telling him the story about what happened at my archery club.

- "Ah yes, that's the Splatter Effect. Quite common really.", is his first snotty little response.

- "The Splatter Effect?"

- "Mhm, most operative mages are aware of it", he says, like there's a mage on every street corner shooting fireballs from their hazel wands where he comes from.

- "When a spell is cast, some of its effects will most often splatter onto the caster as well. That's why you couldn't hit the balloon either, not until you released the curse somehow."

- "Oh, OK, thanks dude." I'm about to hang up and then quickly put his number on my phone's blacklist when he adds,

- "It's not as bad as the Boomerang Effect though."

- "Uh huh."

- "That's when a curse doesn't actually hit its intended target, and is deflected, or fails somehow. It then swings right back towards the caster, usually with rather nasty consequences."

- "Right... I'll keep that in mind, dude", I say, thinking the exact opposite.

- He chuckles, says "You do that, dude", and hangs up on me.

***

Not long after my unheeded telephone conversation with Archibald, I met up with Marcelo. Spring comes real early in Provence, and sometime in March the club opened up its outdoor training facilities which meant I could shoot anytime I wanted, rather then the once or twice a week I could get in during the indoor season. Once or twice a week had become nowhere near enough for me, and in fact it isn't really enough for anybody who actually wants to get serious about shooting bow.

Archery is like any learned set of complex motions; it takes A LOT of practice to get anywhere near decent at it, unless you're some kind of natural prodigy, which I definitely am not, since I've always sucked big time at any other sport I've tried. The general rule of thumb is that you need to do a thing about ten thousand times before you can even start becoming expert at it, so if I stuck to shooting about a hundred arrows a week, that meant it would take me about two years to get any good. I guess that amount of time might be just fine for some people, but not the archery fanatic I had become, so once Spring came along, after something nobody in their right mind would consider calling Winter, I ended up shooting pretty much every morning. Most times, the only other guy at the range was Marcelo, who like I said, is the club's best archer.

Marcelo is pretty much the physical opposite of Richard; a short half Italian half Vietnamese guy with constantly amused and mercurial gray eyes. He's this retired professional guitar player and front-man who's seen alotta ports and alotta girls, but who has relaxed and smoothed out over time, like a fine old wine. He says he meditates for two hours every night before going to bed. I can't really imagine how anybody could do that, but I've never seen him bothered much by anything or anyone, and I can definitely be a real pain in the butt.

Once Marcelo realized I was serious, a few weeks in, he started coaching me, his method being Richard's total opposite as well. The main difference is Marcelo knows when to shut the fuck up, which is most of the time, and when he does have some advice, or a pointer, he never bangs you over the head with it. Pretty much everything about Marcelo is take it or leave it, although if you do leave it, and then eventually come around to taking it, you get a sarcastic but playful earful.

The thing Marcelo knows, that Richard doesn't, is that the archer's mind, the beginning archer's mind anyway, is highly susceptible to negative influences, and he's real careful not to say too much or jinx things up. Nothing ever appears to be written in stone with him, and everything's a suggestion you might want to consider. Most of the time he just lets you stew and waits for you to be all desperate before he passes on some half-veiled hint or two. I'm not gonna tell you any of his secrets except maybe one; the absolutely most important thing in archery is to keep your eye on that target, and never ever waver in your confidence and your will to strike gold right up until the arrow actually strikes it, which at fifty or seventy meters can take some time.

Some of the stuff he told me could be kinda off the wall. Like the time he caught me swearing after having made a particularly bad shot. He turned around and looked at me with these half sad, half disappointed eyes and softly said, "John... you must learn how to accept yourself". I kinda got the feeling at the time that he wasn't really talking about archery anymore. Now, I'm quite certain he wasn't.

***

Alotta things about archery started clicking into place while I was shooting with Marcelo. One of those things was ceremonial magic, whose concepts I began to apply to archery almost inadvertently. If you happen to know something about ceremonial magic, but maybe not enough, and if you're the literal-minded type, right now you're probably thinking 'bull-fucking-shit'. And in a way you'd be right, because absolutely no one is gonna take a ceremonial sword to an archery range and start making signs of the pentagram in the air with it in all four cardinal directions, or start mumbling Latin or Egyptian phrases while waving their hands around before a burning bowl of incense placed at the foot of the archery target. Well, not on a public archery range anyways, unless your chief aim in life is to end up in a padded cell at you friendly neighborhood institution.

My ideas about ceremonial magic as applied to archery weren't a completely conscious thing at the start. They mostly slowly built up over time, but the first thing that happened was pretty sudden, and if I could take it back now, I most definitely would. There I was, smoking my standard third morning cigarette along with a big café latte, while appreciating the warmish spring weather from the comfortable position of my back yard terrace. There I was, calmly smoking away, when this totally whacked out idea hits me out of nowhere, totally unbidden. Right then and there, I decide that I should quit smoking. Not only that I should quit, but that I should quit for archery of all things.

I am not sure if I can explain how not like me that idea was, and looking back with the benefit of hindsight, I now highly suspect that it was actually some nasty little demon that gave me the idea, and not me at all. Not only was I a two-pack a day smoker and a cigar lover, but I had spent years explaining to everyone I know that I'd rather take the risk of dieing a few years earlier than having to suffer from a lack of smokage for the rest of my life. Then, if they're willing to keep on listening; I explain how you've got a higher chance of being run over by a car than getting lung cancer, and that the World Health Organization published a 20 year longitudinal study that indicated that there were no negative effects from second hand smoke, and then buried the study, and that in general, smoking is just an enjoyable past-time suffering from the persecution of our Puritanical Overlords, just like booze had been previously, and witches before then. In any case, whatever my regrets are now, I quit smoking on my terrace right there and then. I made up some story about nicotine causing hand tremor which was not good for archery, which wasn't the real reason either, because absolutely nobody I know would have believed me if I told 'em it was for health reasons.

Some time later I figured the real reason for my quitting smoking was that ceremonial magic requires personal sacrifice in order to be really effective, and I must have decided, totally unconsciously at the time, that giving up tobacco was the best sacrifice I could make. In the old days, people used to sacrifice a goat or a cow or something, but that's not as effective anymore because most people don't have any livestock grazing in their backyards, and killing somebody else's chicken that you bought, especially when hundreds of thousands of chickens are sacrificed daily for our consumption, will just not do the trick. It's gotta be a personal sacrifice, and quitting smoking was about as personal and drastic as I could get without chopping off body parts.

***

The other parts of ceremonial magic; all the hand-waving, and mumbling, and calling on the spirits etc. are a lot harder to pull off right, and came to me slowly over a much longer period of time. It's not difficult for the reasons you might think though, cuz it's not about trying to follow difficult IKEA instructions. The whole point of the thing is to find enough inspiration to be able to enter an altered state from where you can cast your spells, and what really inspires you might not be what the guy who wrote that book is inspired by. On the other hand, it is generally a very good idea to look for inspiration from stuff that's old and has had some time to enter the collective unconscious, or the astral light, or whatever. Praying to your cell phone, for example, probably ain't gonna work all that well unless you have some crazy cell phone fetish, in which case it isn't really a cell phone you're praying to anymore anyways.

For my inspiration, I looked to the Greeks, who got theirs from the Egyptians and then added stuff to it. For the Greeks, archery is ruled by Diana, whose influences pass through the moon and all things silver. Competitive sports are ruled by Helios; the sun, and all things golden. In theory, that means I wanted to invoke those two gods through some kind of ritualized set of actions, but not in a manner which would draw attention to myself. I will not divulge the exact details of my practice here, cuz it probably wouldn't help, and because it's my secret, but I can give you a general idea:

Helios is invoked during my warm up, where I combine a specific mental visualization with a particular set of physical actions. From the outside it looks like some kinda yoga thing. After that, I do this movement to create a protective silver circle around myself that looks like a Tai Chi move.

Diana, who of course is the most important god with regard to archery, is invoked while I'm actually shooting. There is a certain neck, head and upper back position I use, a certain feeling, a specific visualization, which calls Diana unto me.

A bit later, I added Orion to the mix totally by accident, because I have always been deeply inspired by the constellation of Orion in the night's sky, though I have absolutely no idea why. What happened was that one time while I was shooting, the position of my hips reminded me of Orion's belt, and from then on I invoked Orion while I was shooting as well. The really fucked up thing, that I only found out way later, and way too late, is that in Greek legend Orion was killed by Diana, and that's why he got to be a constellation in the first place: the Hunter and the Huntress, the Huntress and the Hunted.

***

What is most obviously magical about archery was in fact the absolute last thing to enter my consciousness. I really don't know how it could have taken me so long to realize that the altar, the target, is a perfect mandala:

- The two outermost circles of the official FITA (Fédération Internationale de Tir a l'Arc) archery target are white, and represent Air. They are worth 1 and 2 points.

- The next two circles are black, represent Earth, and are worth 3 and 4 points.

- The two middle circles are blue, and represent Water. They are worth 5 and 6 points.

- Then you have two red circles which represent Fire, worth 7 and 8 points.

- Finally, you have the two central yellow circles which all archers call 'the gold'; the 9, and the perfect 10.

But it gets better:

Within the innermost golden circle is a third, hidden circle. It is 'hidden' because the line of its circumference is drawn much lighter then the other lines, and it quickly disappears from sight when you step back from the target. This hidden inner circle is called the X, and it is worth no more than the more clearly delineated circle just before it; ten points. But up on the score board, you get a Roman X, rather than the simple Arabic 10 that you would get if you had gotten inside the second golden circle, but had missed the third hidden one. It feels like eleven, or even twelve points, when you do hit it, which is not all that often, but for the outside world, it is still a ten.

And that's not all:

At the very dead center of all official archery targets there is a tiny little Greek cross. Archers don't actually call it a cross though, they call it 'the spider'. And if you hit the spider, which might be never, you can feel the waves flowing back to you from the target like a sonic BOOM.

***

What's actually even more difficult than finding inspiration through the ceremony itself, is choosing a purpose for it. I mean, you aren't doing all of this for nothing, right? Finding a reason for your ceremony is a pain partially because it seems like a pretty simple thing to do. It's like you have a magic ring that grants you wishes, and you just have to choose what to wish for. Simple, right? The thing is, most people, including myself, don't actually know what the hell they really want, and then there's the unknown risk of actually getting what you wish for, if you do know. Knowing yourself well enough to have an inkling as to what it is that you desire, and then being willing to take the risk of getting it, is, I've come to believe, beyond the capacity of most of us. You might think you know, but often it's just something you tell yourself to feel better about yourself, or to make people around you feel good about you, and that just won't pass muster in a magical ceremony. Magic works when your whole being wishes a thing, because a magical working must be a triumph of the will which emanates from your hidden golden center.

Archery solves this little conundrum quite nicely because the purpose is right there in the middle of the mandala, and for most of my short archery career my only desire was to hit the gold. I'd like to think I was pretty successful at it too. Only five months in from shooting my first arrow, I was the third best Olympic recurve archer at my club; right after Marcelo, who's been shooting every day for twenty years, and a buddy of his, both of whom are the Regional champions in their age categories. I'd also earned my FFTA white, black, blue, red, yellow, and bronze arrows, which most people take a few years to get, and I was beating out a lotta folks at the club who'd been at it for a pretty long time. The fact is, I've sucked all my life at every other competitive sport I've ever tried before archery, so I figure what I did was no small personal feat, and I'd be stupid not to think it had something to do with High Magic as well.

If I'd stuck to the whole mandala and hitting the gold thing, I wouldn't be where I am now; in this darkened room, writing for God knows whom. I'd probably be winning some archery tourney somewhere, feeling the sonic booms and X's flowing forth. Instead, I had the brilliant idea that I could add in other purposes to my ceremony and my missiles.

The first thing I thought of was to shoot to successfully pass this competitive national exam to become a high-school English teacher that I was busy not preparing for. That spell failed miserably, for a reason I've already mentioned: I had actually no desire whatsoever to teach English to a bunch of snotty twelve year-olds who had no interest in learning the language anyways. I'd applied to write the exam entirely to please my wife Justine, who figured I needed to get a life.

The second spell I cast was to become ten years younger, cuz I prefer Millennials, and that one definitely worked.

The third thing I tried, despite all the warnings, was a deadly curse, perhaps in part because I was now younger, and less wise.

***

It is true that Justine and I's marriage had been flailing about looking for a good reason to self-destruct for awhile already. Maybe it was because we never had kids, but mostly it was my own shitty fault, and someone not as good as Justine probably would have skedaddled ages ago. For the past few years, we had managed things by avoiding certain subjects, or talking around them, or forgetting them, but then I had that great idea of quitting smoking for archery, and proceeded to blow our whole arrangement up.

Quitting smoking, if you're a real smoker like me, and not some fake-ass party smoker, puts a lotta stress on a guy, and there are not a whole lotta ways to relieve that stress that are actually all that satisfying, or much more than a band-aid on a gaping wound. I ate more, I chewed gum, I drank too much, I applied nico-patches, I did it all, but there was always certain times when the stress was too much for me anyways. And at those times, I got into this bad habit of letting Justine know just how I really felt about things between us in a bit too much of a direct sorta way. And when you give out, you gotta expect to get some too, which is exactly what Justine got around to doing.

Justine hit me at my weakest moment, just when I was falling asleep; the whole bedside conversation deal. It wasn't like she said something I didn't already know, but her saying it aloud forced me into a state of mind which was totally unknown to me until then. All she said was that she wasn't really into having sex anymore, which we weren't having much of for quite some time at that point anyways. I guess other people might've come to some other arrangement, but I am definitely an 'until death do us part' type of guy, believe it or not, and what Justine said got me deep down inside, somewhere wild and savage, that I hadn't heard from much recently, or ever.

I can't remember exactly what my answer was, that night in bed, because from that point on everything turned into a red haze that lasted for weeks. It's still difficult for me to explain why I did what I did, but I can tell you how I felt; I felt like a pressure cooker whose safety nozzle had been blocked up, I felt like a wild animal caught in a bear-trap and gnawing its leg off. Every girl I passed in the street I wanted to fuck silly. I had all the sexual energy and rage of a sixteen year old, but with the conviction that my desires would never be exhausted again.

What I ended up doing felt like pure survival instinct. What I ended up doing was I started imagining my wife's death. Not me killing her, just her death. Most often death by road accident, or death by falling off her horse, or whatever worked. And one time, just one time, I imagined her death while shooting bow. I regretted it right after, but I had done it, and I couldn't figure out how to take it back, or maybe I wasn't really sure if I wanted to.

***

I woke up in the middle of the night, a few days after I'd shot my curse, to see my calmly sleeping wife facing me, but instead of her visage, I saw a flesh-less skull. A week after that, Justine came back home from work in tears because her gynecologist had found suspicious lumps in her breasts and had had a biopsy done. Another week passed, and the results came in; they were benign.

The night we got the results, the arches of my feet swelled up so's I couldn't walk, but all I was worried about at the time was not being able to go out and shoot the next day. I slept with my feet higher than my head, and by morning the swelling had disappeared. That same morning I went off to the range without another thought in my head, and happily shot all day under the hot southern sun for my very last time. That night, every inch of my skin which had been exposed to the scorching sun during the day, was covered in extremely itchy little boils filled up with a clear yellowish liquid. My GP tells me it's some kinda allergic reaction to the sun, which is doctorese for "Sorry son, but yer shit outta luck".

*post-mortem*

My nails are black with dead skin, dried blood, and the oily liquid that spurts out of the boils as I scratch them. I cannot stop scratching. I can never stop the damned scratching. The more I rip my diseased bleeding skin off, the more pleasing it becomes.

I live here, in this darkened cell of mine, like a vampire, but with none of the good sides of being one. I mostly sleep during the day, and if I really must go out while the sun is still shining, I cover myself from head to toe, and wear a scarf and gloves, which gets more than one stare in the middle of summer, in the south of France.  

Lately, the moon has begun to wax, and I have taken to coming out at night, my blistered hands upraised to the moon's tingling light, as I pray to Diana. She spoke to me the very first night. Well, she didn't actually speak, cuz Diana doesn’t talk like you or me. What she really did was shine her cold silvery light right down inside of me, and then her words bubbled up. What she said was, "Whenever you cast your hatred upon others, it is because it is you whom you truly hate". And the first thing I thought of wasn't Justine, it was how I'm constantly cursing people all the time. How I can't even get in the car and drive five miles without cursing half a dozen fellow drivers along the way. I rarely have a thought about anyone without denigrating them somehow. Why is it that I hate myself so? What have I done?

*

Last night was the final night of the waxing moon, and Diana chose that moment to leave me with a secret. "The moon is my silver bow, and with it I forever shoot the sun", is what she told me.

*

It is cloudy today for the first time in weeks, and I am going to go to the range. I will shoot for my feet. I will shoot for my blistered hands. I will shoot for my love. I will shoot the sun.

****