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Being the COSMIC RELIEF forum for laughing at, bitching about, and farting in the general direction of popular culture (or singing its praises; hey, we're not picky). Otherwise known as...

COSMIC RELATE

Well, consider this your call to SHARE. **

My thoughts about what? you ask. Oh, the New Age movement...self-help and pop-psychology trends...silly business babble...stupid seminars and workshops you've been coerced into attending...your cousin the recovering alcoholic / sex addict / Barbie-doll-head swallower who is stuck in permanent 12-step autobabble mode...in short, all the stuff we poke fun at in Cosmic Relief.

But please note that your contribution doesn't have to be negative or cynical. We want to be fair here. After all, it's not about "us" versus "them," or cynics and skeptics versus believers and idealists. Life is more complex than that, as we found out first-hand (see Cosmic Connie's confessions elsewhere on this site).

We will be using this forum for our own occasional rants and commentaries too, and for quotes from other cynics and smart-asses. But we'd really like to see your stuff here.

Here's how you can join the forum.

E-mail your thoughts (text only, no photos, graphics or other attachments) to cosmic.connie@juno.com.
(Subject line: Ranting)

We also still accept snail-mail (it's low-tech, but it works). Send your snail message to:

Misguided Angel Press / 8919 Friendship Road / Houston TX 77080-4111 / Attention: RR&R

We'll assume it's okay to print your letter and name unless you tell us otherwise.

Note: As you can probably discern, this forum is not a newsgroup, chat group or mail list -- not yet, anyway. And we reserve the right to edit for length or clarity, though we promise we'll avoid doing that as much as possible.

Oh, and by the way, we have another forum for your contributions elsewhere on this site: The Utterly Appalling Poetry Corner.

And if you really want to join the twenty-first century, as Cosmic Connie finally did, visit her blog, Whirled Musings. Your comments are welcome there too!

Thanks in advance for helping to make this a really fun web psite.

  

"Eat your heart out, Berkeley; Houston is Spaced City"

An e-mail pen pal of ours is a genuine curmudgeon when it comes to matters metaphysical. It was, therefore, with a hint of apology that he revealed his snail-mail address, which happens to be in Berkeley, California.

"Yes, Berkeley," he sighed, "the very nexus of cosmic hooey."

No disrespect intended to our friend, but, frankly, we're sick to near-death of the West Coast getting all the credit when it comes to hooey.

Granted, any city that embraces the transcendental as fully as does Ber-zerk-eley deserves some recognition where off-the-wall ideas are concerned. We will concede, for example, that no university in Houston has ever subsidized the production of hallucinogenic drugs, much less distributed them to willing, if already spacey, grad students. At least none has publicly admitted to such. But to imply that the hilly city to the west is the Mecca of airy-fairydom... sorry, pal, that's carrying things a bit too far.

Houston, sir, is no Berkeley, but we do have more than a few cosmic claims to fame, mostly in the areas of pop-psych and what one pundit has called "McSpirituality." Consider this: Houston spawned not only John Gray, "Ph.D.", of Mars-and-Venus infamy, but also guru-ette Marianne Williamson, she of the sweet face but sometimes foul mouth ("A Curse in Miracles").

Then there's John Bradshaw, who almost single-handedly founded the shame industry and, growing bored with that, returned to his lab and developed a mutant strain of the inner-childishness virus --- which quickly spread to the West Coast and infected such luminaries as Barbra Streisand, Roseanne, and Steven Spielberg. Ever wondered why some of Spielberg's movies are so sappy? Now you know. A lot of the stuff that California takes credit for actually began its journey in a pair of cowboy boots, from the li'l ol' town on the Bayou.

And don't think for a moment that Houston's short on the blatantly cosmic. In fact, we doubt you'll find a town anywhere more heavily populated than the Bayou City with aging gypsies and psychics-who-lunch. To begin with, there's Houston's most famous metaphysical bookstore: Aquarian Age Bookshelf, which was founded by John Gray's late mom and surrogate aunt and which, not surprisingly, sported a shrine to "Doctor" John for many years. No complaint there; one must allow the eccentricities of proud motherhood. But the place is inevitably awash in what sounds like the product of flute lessons given at gunpoint. And upon entering, one is immediately bathed in the aroma of incense or burning herbal teas; we're just not sure which.

You can go to any part of this town and find a place just as aggressively inter-dimensional, if less famous. Hell, we've got subdivisions bigger than Berkeley, with flakes... ah, metaphysicians... lurking in every one.

Then there's the cult connection. The late leader of the Heaven's Gate cult wasn't a native, but he did officially begin his career as a loony right here in Houston. And let's not forget that a late skywatcher / radio personality / attention junkie who gleefully fueled the Comet Hale-Bopp hysteria on the Net --- only to subsequently and loudly whine that it wasn't his fault the Heaven's Gatists offed themselves --- also called Houston home. Let's also not overlook the scion of one of our wealthy socialite families, a young man who stirred up a minor scandal a few years ago regarding his alleged affiliation with a racist cult called Infernal Values... er, make that Eternal Values. (Out of respect for the Wyatts, we won't mention his name.)

Face it, this place is a cauldron.

Which, as far as we're concerned, is another reason to be darned proud of Houston. While Houston's former first lady and her P.R. heavies labor to spiff up Houston's image and present Our Town as something more than a bastion of big trucks, big hair, big roaches, and big hoo... uh, internationally acclaimed topless bars, there's an entire facet of Space City that we feel has been overlooked. A whole active community thrives and wriggles just outside the mainstream. In fact, they're everywhere --- "they" being the folks who talk to angels or trees or 600,000 year old entities...and those who can read the future by playing connect-the-dots with stars, or by seeing patterns in a Tarot deck, a wad of tea leaves, or windshield bug splat...and, of course, those who claim to be the one true bridge to the new Millennium.

Just outside the mainstream they may be, but make no mistake about it: a lot of perfectly normal looking Houstonians --- among them, quite a few of Houston's movers and shakers --- are buying into this stuff. They're shelling out $100.00 an hour and more to astrologers, "intuitive counselors" and dog psychics, and rumor has it that more than one member of the bold-faced-type brigade gets her feet read every time she gets a pedicure. If that's not proof that cosmic craziness is firmly entrenched in our culture, we'll kiss a Cavalier King Charles spaniel.

Though skeptics are wringing their hands over all this, we think it's a sign that Houston is a truly progressive place. This is a city where all roads lead to the New Age, a town that's crawling with folks whose mission in life is to Enlighten the Unenlightened (to paraphrase the official motto foisted upon us by the aforementioned PR heavies). Gilley's and Urban Cowboy chic might have been our big claim to fame twenty years ago, but nowadays, we go in for psychic fairs. Hmmm.... Houston Psychic Fair & Rodeo? Has a bit of a ring to it, doesn't it? Tell you what, someone really had their cards in tune when they named this place "Space City." Hooeyston, we have lift-off!

As if all this weren't enough, we have another advantage over anywhere in California: staying power. We'll be here when Berkeley rejoins the lost continent of Atlantis as just another artificial reef.

This piece copyright (c) 1998 by Connie Schmidt and Ron Kaye

For more about Houston, click here.

From the Spring 1998 issue of the Universal Life Church News comes a dire warning about . . . well, we don't know quite what it's about, but it sounds pretty darned serious. In fact, it was serious enough to make the front page of the newsletter. Tagged by a clip-art icon of an apple, and the provocative caption, "WAS EVE FRAMED?", the un-bylined article warns us:

What I am going to say is confusing and hard for most people to understand or accept. Every religious change that has taken place on this planet has involved a female dominate (sic) seed working to promote the power of death.

Here is something you should understand. There were two seeds in the world and they were in Adam. One of those seeds was a killer type seed. Did you know that every living thing that exist (sic) on this planet is a KILLER?

WHICH SEED IS WORKING IN YOU?

And that's the article in its entirety. Definitely something to think about as we plan our fall gardens.

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