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  VEGAS AND BEYOND

  By Richard Johnson

  Copyright December 2011 Richard Johnson

  ISBN 9781476371399

  HOME!

  The plan was simple. But like all simple plans, went well astray. And it was because I thought I understood the Witches Pyramid. Or maybe I did too well?

  People have searched for the Witches Pyramid for thousands of years because it promised the possessor wealth and power beyond measure. So treasure hunters searched all over Europe and Egypt then, when they realized that the Horned God of the Witches (read Margaret Murray) was derived from Pashupati in India and Nepal, the search expanded east.

  Temples were looted, people tortured and still the Witches Pyramid remained hidden.

  Why? Because it wasn’t an object! Well, it was.. to an extent. I had it on my shelf at home for anyone to touch because I had made it myself one day when I was bored. I took a sheet of balsa-wood, cut four triangles and a square and glued the whole thing together with Elmer’s glue. Then on the base of each side I wrote, with a magic marker (how appropriate) “to will, to know, to dare, to keep silent”. The Witches Pyramid was an idea, a way of looking at things. It was the foundation of not only magick but of.. well everything.

  According to the Witches Pyramid, you can do anything IF!!!

  First, you decide what your goal is. To get a job, to seduce that hot chick, to cast a money spell, to win a fight.

  Second, you figure out how to accomplish that goal. Apply for the job with a good resume, tell the girl what she wants to hear, figure out the corespondences for the spell, study martial arts.

  Third, you decide that this goal is the most important thing in the world! You MUST get that job! That girl is THE most desirable woman on earth. You NEED that money or be on the street. Ignore the pain of being hit. And so you put EVERYTHING into that goal, holding back nothing! You get the idea.

  Then you simply do NOT go around bragging about what you did. It’s tacky! [insert smiley face]

  Hey, it’s no secret! Any good teacher in any school will tell you the same thing. So why did so many treasure hunters spend so many years killing so many innocents to get this?

  Because people refuse to apply value to anything that is easy to achieve. When I did Tarot Readings for $20, I sat at that table for days… alone. So I decided to go out of business with a bang! I changed the sign to $50 a reading and suddenly, people were lining up for readings! It was the same freaking reading but almost tripling the price somehow made it worth more to the customers.

  So, here I am, desperate for money. Two kids in college (both out-of-state) and a job that got outsourced to China leaving me unemployed. The company didn’t use that word for fear of unpleasant publicity. No, they announced that they were “seeking an international alliance with an industrial giant to improve productivity” which boils down to ‘we closed the plant, you guys go home and when the next season kayaks show on the market, they will come from China instead of the good ol’ USofA!’ No wonder the country is going to the dogs!

  The bad thing is that with the Recession, the Government redefined ‘unemployed’ to make themselves look better. Unless you are actively seeking employment in your REGULAR occupation, you are no longer classified as ‘unemployed’ so are ineligible for benefits. And really, how many kayak manufacturers are there left in America? I built the boats out of love for the sport, not money, so my savings were mainly to pay for trips around the world to paddle lakes and rivers you can only read about and most of those were paid for by the company and written off as advertisements. I paddled 300 miles of the Gambia River over ten days in Africa. Saw no crocs or hippos as the local Prez had ordered them all shot by the army for some reason. I paddled the Nile, the coast of Ireland, and even the Great Lakes. And that ate all my money but memories don’t pay the rent.

  So I am desperate. Really desperate! The credit cards were overdue, the rent was past due, and I was threatened with living in a cardboard box with only my kayak for company… and no woman wants to date a man without a good job or money. That’s why my wife left me. It was exciting to paddle white water but when she wanted a new car… there wasn’t any cash. So she split! Moved in with some guy she met via a dating ad and never saw any of us since.

  So I thought about this and decided that there were two solutions! I needed a job and money and the latter was immediate. Not, “can you wait for me to get a job then after a couple months I can start to pay you back” thing but I needed thousands of dollars NOW! Or else those red-notices from the utilities would spread to everyone else.

  There are two honest ways to make a lot of money fast. Honest being the operative word. Win the Lottery or win at gambling! But the problem is that if the lottery has 52 numbers and you need 6… the odds of choosing one number is 1-in-52. The odds of choosing the second number are 1-in-52x51 or 1-in-2652. The odds of choosing the third number are 1-in-52x51x50 or 1-in-132,600… and so on. The lottery wasn’t made to give money to people. It was invented to con stupid people into giving money to the dealers.

  So that leaves gambling.

  I had played strip poker on Air Force One more than 20 years ago when I was in the Air Force.. back when you could hitch a ride so long as you stayed away from the Presidential areas. But poker requires a lot of skill. Roulette was easier. Red-v-black or odd-v-even was 1-in-2 odds. Column 1 is 1-in-3 odds and so on. All I need to do was predict odd-even or red-black! It would take time but…

  I flipped a coin a dozen times and won 8-of-12. Not good enough. If I were a woman, it would be easier as women are trained to be intuitive while men are programmed to be logical. Well, the gestalt is that woman’s intuition is a fact and we in the magickal community believe in gestalt even when science tries to prove us wrong. Besides, if you are told your entire life that woman’s intuition exists and they talk about it all over TV and books and even in casual conversation, according to the Laws of Magick, it IS true! Really, 8-of-12 is only coincidence but we treat it as meaningful coincidence. And meaningful is only one step away from applied.

  I pulled a deck of cards and shuffled them, and lost as I tried to predict the card. Then I had an epiphany! Only a newbe reads tarot by following the book. The book is a guide, not a rule! Death doesn’t means you will die, it means that there will be a drastic change and loss. Put next to the lovers and it means that a) the love affair will end or b) one will die or leave or c)…. All depending on the situation.

  I was trying too hard.

  Blackjack only requires that I beat the dealer who has a rule to follow. I don’t need to know if the card is 3-of-jacks, I only need to know: low, medium, high or face!

  I tried it again without caring what I was doing and placed the face-down cards in four piles. Then when I was finished with the deck, found I was more than 75% right! My daughters could do that in 90% and was paying part of her tuition by gambling. Sometimes being a woman had advantages.

  I played with dice and cards and a coin for an hour, lost it, then had a glass of wine until the buzz appeared and returned to win more. Keep buzzed enough to slip into alpha-brain-wave rhythm and not care and it works. Finally, being just drunk enough, I opened the box.

  Once, when I had been stationed at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, I had been assigned to clean out an old hanger from the 40-50’s that was slated for demolition. There was a lot of junk there, most of it boxed and labeled for another hanger but there was one thing, under some trash, that I took. I know, it’s a federal crime but really… people talk about Area-51 not realizing that the USAF lets people go there. The real Flying Saucers were stored at Wright-Pat! So, I thought I’d have a real part of a r
eal UFO.

  The problem is that it worked! When I was walking home, exhausted from the work because the wife had the car, I kept thinking about home and… I was there.

  It took me months to figure the thing out. Somehow, if I was in alpha-state and focused on a place, I would be there. Not always, but often enough. Once I left in a dirty uniform and arrived in one freshly pressed. Once I was paddling down a river and being harassed by some kids in jet-skis and was so tired from fighting their wakes that I pulled to shore, had a beer or three (another illegality but hey! Who cares!) and wished I was home.

  I had to hitch a ride back to the river, rent a boat and go to the landing to collect my kayak and then paddle back to the parking lot to my car. The thing had sent me home, but not my car or kayak.

  So I figured that I could use the thing to get to Vegas! I had been there recently while paddling Lake Mead and there was an empty field next to my former hotel that was probably still empty so that would be my focus. So, after taking another drink of wine, finishing the bottle, and grabbing my ID and whatever money I could find ($23 total with nothing in the bank), I held my pocket watch that contained the thing (where else can you hide a real part from a real UFO?), focused on that field and went for a walk.