Confessions of a Shaman

I know many of you that will read this will initially believe that I have gone insane. That is fine by me. I have. Sort of.
That however is not the entire story. I will explain the story to you in this comminique as well as I can remember. Parts are often hard to explain because really there are no words for some of the things I have experienced. I only ask that you read my account with an open mind. Be skeptical, ask questions, and dont hesitate to contact me if you feel I have left something out or have presented you with a question that I have not also presented an answer to.
My name is Tristan Lee Taylor and right now I am nineteen. The first day I began to understand and recognize this experience, I was fourteen. I was in eighth grade and I was living with my father in a trailer park. It was unlike most trailer parks in that it was clean and had respectable people in it rather than a crowd of drug ridden and worthless trash. He was living also with his girlfriend and her two children. Jason was her youngest at five and was as old as my half sister Lenee; her daughter was slightly younger than my little sister Kendra. I had an older sister, Cathyrn, and we all lived together in a single wide.
We lived in a small town in Missouri called Lebanon. It is a rotten town. I hate it still. It is trash, like someone cleared out a landfill and everyone who had found refuge within the rubble was transported there to collectively destroy each others lives and to shred individuals of any personal power they could. I lived on the edge of town so things there weren't as bad but school was always hell. If you were cool you were a farmers son or something similar, usually your parents owned a small business or worked for the school or had high end jobs. Money was everything. You had to be the biggest jerk you could be because everyone elses ego was in so much turmoil that if you werent they would hunt you down. Like dogs. Your social objective was to become unapproachable, to make it seem as though you really didnt care about anyone but yuourself, to hide in the crowd and send of an aura of hatred toward anyone misfortune enough to cross you. But that is something I did not do. No, I just didnt care. I was honestly at the stage where i didnt care if someone called me friend or foe, something that everyone else had to lie to themselves about that and it confused me. They wanted to be carefree, and so they worked hard all day to put that kind of additude out there. Thier insecurity and discomfort at the sight of anyone with individuality was honed to a sharp edge by thier youth ministers. Thier parents ran the town, or thought they did. Some of us had poor parents, but mine was by far on the bottom echelon.
We were peaceful enough, had our spats but eventually everything blew over and there was never a real vendetta to be obtained or an arguement ensuing. I had only one friend at the time named Tyler. There was beginning to be family disputes more and more, I was noticing that I was much smaller in the world and that it was growing bigger every day and than even reality seemed to be getting worse. I really didnt understand what was occuring at that time, mainly because I was wrapped up im myself so much and had experienced so little. One night I was so deeply disturbed as to begin crying, there was very little that could make me cry, I had an extremely bad childhood so all the scary things in the world became pale specters compared to reality. I was aware how much life could hurt but also became aware of a certain beauty, an intanigble virtue in the world that had not yet been named. In my sorrow I looked to the moon and said, "If you are listening I want you to know that you are the only one who is really there. I can see you in your splendor so I know that it is true. You are pouring your rays on the earth and on me and I feel it. If you are listening you are the only one who is. Help me and I will follow you for the rest of my life." And so the promise had been made. I didnt know it was real. I knew I meant it. Nobody had clarified to me that to say something is to make it real. So I continued living my days and watching things get worse and worse. One night I got into a physical fight with my father, the next night I was leaving to live with my grandmother.
She couldnt handle me. I was absurdly rebellious. If anyone told me something to do, I did exactly the opposite, or so she thought. I was gone within a week. She had called my uncle, John, and his fiance, Jennifer. I was to live with them. In school I was taking my first year in high school and I enjoyed it slightly more because the crowd was stratified more than in junior high. We didnt all have to do exactly the same thing. I was developing a strong friendship with Tyler and we were often inseperable. I took Latin because Greek Mythology had always interested me. I had no idea it would be the source from which this all started. One week we were told there would be a contest and convention in Columbia at the college and that we were encouraged to attend. I did and my uncle and his girlfriend gave me fifteen dollars extra to buy what I would.
The day we arrived we were allowed to go downtown and shop and eat before the convention. We were assigned partners to stay with. I gave mine the slip and walked into a bookstore I had noticed but he was unwilling to browse through. One of the aisles was furthest away from the others so I went quickly to it. I found the names of the books there interesting so I pulled a book off the shelf. It was about Wicca, whatever that was. I read further and began to understand it was a book on modern witchcraft. I didnt know such things existed and for this to be true I would have given anything. Often you get what you ask for, and if you know what to ask for the results arent always unpleasant. I paid six dollars and fifty cents for a copy of one entitled: "The Secrets of Modern Witchcraft Revealed" by Lady Sabrina. It was new looking, but not for long.