I should probably update this blog more often. It would just be a matter of cross-posting from my other blog, but I'm lazy.
Anyway. Five words to describe me... These words were given by my friend Rachel.
Asatru
I've been to the Heartland Pagan Festival three times that I can remember: once when I was maybe 12 or 13, when I was 18, and this year, which happened about a month ago. I had just been initiated into Coven Pleiades a little before the one when I was 18, and one of the coven members gave me a Thor's Hammer necklace as a gift. I'm not sure exactly why, but wearing the hammer meant a lot to me then, and I wore it more often than I wore, say, my pentagram necklace. When I got to Heartland, I met Uncle Alaric (that's Alaric Albertsson, author of the newly published book "Travels Through Middle Earth", natch) for the first time as a semi-adult there and was introduced to Anglo-Saxon Heathenry through him. I went to a few workshops and two really good rituals (the first a blot to Woden and the second a very intense seidh meditation) and knew this was something that bore investigation.
I never really took to the whole Anglo-Saxon tradition, though, which is ironic considering I went on to focus on Old English later in my college career. The names were just never right to me. Woden, Thunor, the Freo... The names just never felt natural. I grew up reading The Mighty Thor, the Marvel comic which, while having not much relationship to the deity as presented in the mythology, still filled my head with that wonderful Jack Kirby architecture and costume designs, and led me to an interest in Norse mythology. And the Norse myths, as presented by the Icelanders, have always been the ones that have stuck with me... The names, the nine worlds, Yggdrasil, these are all things I felt a distinct yearning for once I started to investigate it, and Asatru has been one of the key facets of my religious matrix ever since.
Author
I am still not sure why I decided to be an English major. I guess it was because I liked Mr. Economon's classes so much in high school, but looking back I really cannot think of a specific time when I said "yep, that's what I want to major in." I came into high school believing I was going to be an astronomer, which really, really didn't pan out, and I don't recall coming up with a new career path during the rest of my high school career. Anyway. I got into Truman State and declared English as my major. And then I got really serious cold feet. I was not a kid who moved around a lot; I had lived in the same house since I was six months old, and while I had never really been one of the street-wandering "city kids" of Saint Louis, I realized as soon as it became clear that I would be moving away that I loved my city very much, and that I was going to miss it more than I could have realized.
There was never a point at which I believed I wasn't going to go to college, of course. That was unthinkable. But at the same time, the waiting was very hard. I would go up to Grand Boulevard three times a week just to watch it, feeling that I'd never appreciated it enough, that I'd never appreciated anything enough. I was so nervous and depressed that I was honestly a little worried about myself. And then I did something about it: I wrote a story called Jumping. Two things happened after I did that. The first was that I felt a lot better about moving to Kirksville; it helped me work out a lot of issues. And the second was that the minute I wrote the last word of that story, I knew that I wanted to write for the rest of my life. And I still do.
Bard
I was never a very good bard while I was in the SCA. It was clearly the aspect of the society I felt the most affinity for, but there were a lot of things about it I just never cared for (filking, songs for the Calon Army, whatever) and I never got as into it as might have been expected. Being disenchanted with one of the areas of the SCA I felt I should have liked the most is, honestly, one of the main reasons I've decided not to play anymore.
When I think of bards, I think of the scops of the Anglo-Saxon tradition, those people who were the tellers of the old sagas and stories, and I feel a strange and alien kinship with them. They were storytellers, yes, but they were far different storytellers than I am; as a professor of mine put it, while my stories will be judged on their creativity and originality, the bards of the pre-literate cultures of the past would have judged originality as anathema. In a world before written words, the bards were the only real link with the past, living repositories of the history of their people, and that made them more valuable than the tribe's greatest warriors. To change the stories was to destroy them.
Occasionally I will sense echoes of that tradition in the songs of Mikal the Ram, and it will send chills through me as I hear the ghosts of those long dead tale-tellers whispering still.
Music
I am honestly a pretty terrible musician. I don't know most of the terminology, and I just barely know my way around a guitar; my chord knowledge is pretty limited, and scales? Forget it. I think I make up for it with enthusiasm and a willingness to let other people show off when I'm playing in a band: there's a reason why Ryan plays lead and I always play rhythm, even when we're both playing six-string guitars.
My favorite band when I was learning how to play guitar was the Ramones, and that probably has stuck with my playing style. I still like the Ramones, but my favorite musicians these days were playing a few years earlier than the 1977 era punk that was my first strong love: David Bowie, Iggy Pop, T. Rex. I like the heady mixture of intellectuality and sensuality that was present on a lot of their records, especially Bowie's Station to Station (which I named a story for) and Iggy Pop's The Idiot. My favorite record is still probably King Crimson's Red, which has the track Starless, which is in my opinion the highlight of western civilization.
Panda
I wrote this as part of an article in the final issue of The Perspective, the Writing Center Newsletter I edited at Truman: "As the year comes to a close, a harsh revelation is coming to me: in Kansas City, where I will be going to gradutate school in just a few months, nobody is going to know anything about me being a giant panda. This is surprisingly hard to deal with. The legend of Eric Scott Being A Giant Panda steamrolled to epic proportions, to the point that I have been approached multiple times by strangers and asked Hey, arent you the panda guy? Kathy and Mary Lou (my supervisors at the WC) have expressed disappointment when I didnt show up as a panda last Halloween. Theres STILL a Facebook group with more than a hundred members that support the question of whether Im secretly a panda. Frankly, its been beyond my control for so long that I have accepted it as part of my identity. I am Eric. I am the Panda Guy."
Most of those comments are still true. However, my experience at Heartland this year added another wrinkle to the Panda situation, because of how I ended up channeling the panda as part of my Vision Quest station. The panda now represents some element of my personality- I guess we have to call it part of the religious matrix I alluded to above- that is very contemplative, receptive and giving. I suppose it's the Taoist aspect of my spirit, which has always been kind of a background player: always there, never really the dominant aspect of my life, but a constant presence. So Panda has evolved beyond just a goofy nickname for me, I suppose, into something more than that. I guess this is what people mean when they talk about having an "animal totem"- it's not quite what I expected, but then again, what is?
-E
Anyway. Five words to describe me... These words were given by my friend Rachel.
Asatru
I've been to the Heartland Pagan Festival three times that I can remember: once when I was maybe 12 or 13, when I was 18, and this year, which happened about a month ago. I had just been initiated into Coven Pleiades a little before the one when I was 18, and one of the coven members gave me a Thor's Hammer necklace as a gift. I'm not sure exactly why, but wearing the hammer meant a lot to me then, and I wore it more often than I wore, say, my pentagram necklace. When I got to Heartland, I met Uncle Alaric (that's Alaric Albertsson, author of the newly published book "Travels Through Middle Earth", natch) for the first time as a semi-adult there and was introduced to Anglo-Saxon Heathenry through him. I went to a few workshops and two really good rituals (the first a blot to Woden and the second a very intense seidh meditation) and knew this was something that bore investigation.
I never really took to the whole Anglo-Saxon tradition, though, which is ironic considering I went on to focus on Old English later in my college career. The names were just never right to me. Woden, Thunor, the Freo... The names just never felt natural. I grew up reading The Mighty Thor, the Marvel comic which, while having not much relationship to the deity as presented in the mythology, still filled my head with that wonderful Jack Kirby architecture and costume designs, and led me to an interest in Norse mythology. And the Norse myths, as presented by the Icelanders, have always been the ones that have stuck with me... The names, the nine worlds, Yggdrasil, these are all things I felt a distinct yearning for once I started to investigate it, and Asatru has been one of the key facets of my religious matrix ever since.
Author
I am still not sure why I decided to be an English major. I guess it was because I liked Mr. Economon's classes so much in high school, but looking back I really cannot think of a specific time when I said "yep, that's what I want to major in." I came into high school believing I was going to be an astronomer, which really, really didn't pan out, and I don't recall coming up with a new career path during the rest of my high school career. Anyway. I got into Truman State and declared English as my major. And then I got really serious cold feet. I was not a kid who moved around a lot; I had lived in the same house since I was six months old, and while I had never really been one of the street-wandering "city kids" of Saint Louis, I realized as soon as it became clear that I would be moving away that I loved my city very much, and that I was going to miss it more than I could have realized.
There was never a point at which I believed I wasn't going to go to college, of course. That was unthinkable. But at the same time, the waiting was very hard. I would go up to Grand Boulevard three times a week just to watch it, feeling that I'd never appreciated it enough, that I'd never appreciated anything enough. I was so nervous and depressed that I was honestly a little worried about myself. And then I did something about it: I wrote a story called Jumping. Two things happened after I did that. The first was that I felt a lot better about moving to Kirksville; it helped me work out a lot of issues. And the second was that the minute I wrote the last word of that story, I knew that I wanted to write for the rest of my life. And I still do.
Bard
I was never a very good bard while I was in the SCA. It was clearly the aspect of the society I felt the most affinity for, but there were a lot of things about it I just never cared for (filking, songs for the Calon Army, whatever) and I never got as into it as might have been expected. Being disenchanted with one of the areas of the SCA I felt I should have liked the most is, honestly, one of the main reasons I've decided not to play anymore.
When I think of bards, I think of the scops of the Anglo-Saxon tradition, those people who were the tellers of the old sagas and stories, and I feel a strange and alien kinship with them. They were storytellers, yes, but they were far different storytellers than I am; as a professor of mine put it, while my stories will be judged on their creativity and originality, the bards of the pre-literate cultures of the past would have judged originality as anathema. In a world before written words, the bards were the only real link with the past, living repositories of the history of their people, and that made them more valuable than the tribe's greatest warriors. To change the stories was to destroy them.
Occasionally I will sense echoes of that tradition in the songs of Mikal the Ram, and it will send chills through me as I hear the ghosts of those long dead tale-tellers whispering still.
Music
I am honestly a pretty terrible musician. I don't know most of the terminology, and I just barely know my way around a guitar; my chord knowledge is pretty limited, and scales? Forget it. I think I make up for it with enthusiasm and a willingness to let other people show off when I'm playing in a band: there's a reason why Ryan plays lead and I always play rhythm, even when we're both playing six-string guitars.
My favorite band when I was learning how to play guitar was the Ramones, and that probably has stuck with my playing style. I still like the Ramones, but my favorite musicians these days were playing a few years earlier than the 1977 era punk that was my first strong love: David Bowie, Iggy Pop, T. Rex. I like the heady mixture of intellectuality and sensuality that was present on a lot of their records, especially Bowie's Station to Station (which I named a story for) and Iggy Pop's The Idiot. My favorite record is still probably King Crimson's Red, which has the track Starless, which is in my opinion the highlight of western civilization.
Panda
I wrote this as part of an article in the final issue of The Perspective, the Writing Center Newsletter I edited at Truman: "As the year comes to a close, a harsh revelation is coming to me: in Kansas City, where I will be going to gradutate school in just a few months, nobody is going to know anything about me being a giant panda. This is surprisingly hard to deal with. The legend of Eric Scott Being A Giant Panda steamrolled to epic proportions, to the point that I have been approached multiple times by strangers and asked Hey, arent you the panda guy? Kathy and Mary Lou (my supervisors at the WC) have expressed disappointment when I didnt show up as a panda last Halloween. Theres STILL a Facebook group with more than a hundred members that support the question of whether Im secretly a panda. Frankly, its been beyond my control for so long that I have accepted it as part of my identity. I am Eric. I am the Panda Guy."
Most of those comments are still true. However, my experience at Heartland this year added another wrinkle to the Panda situation, because of how I ended up channeling the panda as part of my Vision Quest station. The panda now represents some element of my personality- I guess we have to call it part of the religious matrix I alluded to above- that is very contemplative, receptive and giving. I suppose it's the Taoist aspect of my spirit, which has always been kind of a background player: always there, never really the dominant aspect of my life, but a constant presence. So Panda has evolved beyond just a goofy nickname for me, I suppose, into something more than that. I guess this is what people mean when they talk about having an "animal totem"- it's not quite what I expected, but then again, what is?
-E
sallydollie:
just wanted to say thanks for the love on my new set in member review. your words really brightened my day! 
i hope your day is going well
i hope your day is going well