Here are five short stories, my retelling of  events that happened to me I'm calling "True Tales." They illustrate magickal concepts in a way I think is much more interesting than simply describing those concepts. The Gods May Have Plans for You that You Don't Expect I was living in a house in the city of Encinitas in the North County area of San Diego. I was sharing the house with a man, Michael, and his son, Joe. Michael had been working as an engineer in a company that made amplifiers for people who wanted to boost the transmission power of their amateur radios. People who did this referred to themselves as HAM radio operators. Michael had also studied acupressure and

It was about fifteen years after the events in True Tale 1 when I returned to Las Vegas. This is how the experience came to be. I had been studying music since before I was in grammar school. By the time I reached high school, I was pretty good at playing rock organ. To my disappointment, all of the rock bands from my high school were really, really bad. A friend of mine since junior high school, Ricky R., played quarterback on the football team. I was left guard. He played organ in a band. He used a small, "chord" organ, which, beside standard keys, had neatly-labled button where pressing one would play chords of several notes. I never saw him play using more than two fingers. So

When I was about five, my father had a massive heart attack died. My mother, without a job and left on her own to manage a home and two young children, couldn't cope and had a nervous breakdown. My brother and I were sent from our home in Los Angeles to live with relatives in Chicago. My mother, with the help of a psychiatrist, began to recover. One evening, my brother and I, desperately missing our mother, sneaked downstairs and called her on the house's only phone. In tears we begged to come back. The call had a startling effect on my mother, shocking her into reality and, with the help of her psychiatrist, began a quick road to vast improvement. Soon, she had a job as an

The other day I was at a friend's house and we began talking about books. I have several thousand books on various occult topics. Some are very old. Others are quite new. My friend and I both knew of people who had well over ten thousand books, although most were fiction, especially fantasy or science fiction. I started wondering about why people keep large quantities of books. For me, it is so I can do research. Why people keep vast quantities of fiction, since I don't do that, I can't say. But when you go into someone's home and there are shelves that make the place look like a bookstore or library it's, I don't know, impressive? weird? It certainly tells you a great deal about the