Drive-Through Loki
Exhaustion leads to strange places. It breeds strange searches for comfort and nurturance, more often than not in self-destruction in Western nations.
I was heading home after a day full of small cuts and defeats, and on Broad Street, heading toward City Hall, I felt the urge to grab some form of comfort food. I wrestled with my morals: Go to Whole Foods and buy some organic chips or go to MacDonalds and get the most horrible, greasy disgusting food possible? The whole concept was to seek irrational security, and I had already been endulging on chips. So, I decided to make a ritual out of this conundrum.
This was to be an invocation of Loki, the gluttonous god of change and vice. I made my way to MacDonald’s, and went for the most endulgent thing on the menu, a Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese Extra Value Meal. Full of chemicals, death, overprocessing, MSG, plastic cheese, hydrogenated oils, and sodium. It’s gross.
The next step was to enter the state of ravenous consumption. Stripping down to my boxers, I found the back cushion that I normally use for gaming, and threw it up against my door, right next to my altar. I sank down into a full Al Bundy slouch, and let myself disappear, leaving my urge for food, my urge to cram myself full of the worst food around. It’s a weird, shadowy meditative state. The mental house cleared out, and the consumerist fool remained. I perceived a raspy voice, like the lead singer from MLWTTKK, giving me directions on how to proceed.
Then, by the fistful, I crammed the fries into my mouth and chugged the soda, feeling every lukewarm fry slide down. I savaged the burger, the cold cylinders of unrecognizable dead thing, just lost in a frenzy of eating.
Eventually, I made contact. The deity came in the form of a grinning black horse’s head, surrounded by green flame. This has a lot of importance, since one of the major mythological stories of Loki is his shapeshifting into a mare to distract a giant’s work-horse by mating with it, and subsequently giving birth to Odin’s eight-legged steed Sleipnir. The image had arms, but no discernable end, yet gouts of green flame would spew forth at random. Loki spoke, mostly of becoming unclean to persevere, and that to be pure was to become wholly devoid of life and change. He discussed passions, acceptance of consequences, and the moving in between of the ideologically-based Aesir and the passion-based Jotnarr, where being caught between a person can find the truth of existence. I can’t straight up remember all of it, but I do remember enough to know that I’ve been a whole sight different after performing.
The process of this can be repeated through the recognition of a source of guilt, and in a ritual setting, diving into the vice, if it be fast food, drugs, porn, what have you. Food is the only one I’ve done so far. Follow your impulses, be mannerless and gross, and follow each turn through the process. Just feel out what to do, and do it without restraint. The important thing about this is that it be done in private, so that any social mechanisms don’t inadvertently kick in and take you out of the effect. The goal is to get over embarassment of wanting, and often that same guilt fuels its own existence. This allows the participant to use the energy trapped by ideas of guilt to move forward in more transformative ventures. Internal censors afterward seem to become minimalized, and acceptance of desires become actualized. We’ll see what the long-ranging effects are.
