Nomad Codes

episodes appeared to be reruns. I weathered collegiate video porn and scratchy 8 mm films of embarrassing childhood flubs, highproduction fantasies of future triumphs and tests of the Emergency Anxiety System. But as the tatters of autobiography flapped by, they also begged the inevitable question: well, how did I get here?
    As a kid growing up in Del Mar, an upwardly mobile suburban Southern California beach-town, I was exposed to about as much traditional spirituality as you can string on a pine tree. I was a child of Gilligan’s Island , Bugs Bunny, The Hobbit , and the sandy arroyos and red-rock cliffs of my hometown, wild places where my friends and I created fantastic playgrounds of elves and superheroes on the way home from school.
    When I hit teendom in 1980, my fondness for such reveries bloomed into a fondness for drugs, especially LSD, pot, and psilocybin mushrooms. My friends and I stoked the dying embers of the California counterculture. We read Carlos Castaneda and Be Here Now , traveled to Dead shows, took psychedelics seriously, and meditated at the local Siddha Yoga joint. I was a huge reader, and became particularly fascinated by religion and the occult. Like the Lovecraft stories and science-fiction classics I also devoured, the “metaphysics” section of the mall bookstores offered up coherent but astoundingly imaginative worlds that somehow mirrored, mocked, and resolved the tensions of the rather disappointing one I greeted everyday. Because I was basically raised a heathen (I learned the Gospel from a scratchy copy of Jesus Christ Superstar ), I had no sour taste of dogma in my mouth; I found atheism boring and accepted the appealing if somewhat fuzzy notion that all paths led to God. I met Hare Krishnas, yoga freaks, witches, I Ching Taoists and mystical Catholic teens wielding Ouija boards; I bonded with heavy-metal Satanists and born-again Christian surfers.
    I had many dreams, trips, and experiences that bordered on the fantastic and occult, but it’s pretty easy to write them off today as a morass of bubbling hormones, naivete, and a drug-induced eruption of what psychologists call the “primary processes” of the psyche. In any case, the inevitable loss of that adolescent magic was hastened by the Ivy League college professors who initiated me into the deeply skeptical traditions of critical theory, deconstruction, and other post-everything razzmatazz. I was taught that neither science nor common sense nor Enlightenment categories of knowledge were fixed in stone; I grew to believe that all claims about reality took their place in an ambiguous and shifting network of language games, historical constructions, and political power grabs.
    Though it took me many years to wed my younger seeking self with the East Coast intellectual I was coming to be, the postmodern house of mirrors also confirmed my already strong suspicion that reality can only be glimpsed through a kaleidoscope of overlapping and even contradictory points of view—an “aperspectival” sensibility first nurtured by psychedelics and the motley spectacle of California’s spiritual culture. And so I came to see the world as a carnival of hybrids, of people and places and things woven from nucleic acids and epiphanies, money and mind, sex and technologies. Though I found traditional religious claims as suspicious as any absolute truths, I understood that people’s gods, myths, and everyday spiritual practices were irreducible strands in the webwork of the real.
    After college, I found myself a freelance writer, covering the popular culture of the day—rock music, television, digital media. Like the religious historian R. Laurence Moore, who once wrote that he followed religion the way others followed baseball, I continued to track the spiritual and religious dimensions of our world, and I did so with the same enthusiasm and curious fascination I brought to the colorful subcultures that populate our age. Unlike religious traditionalists who bemoan rap stars and the horrors of heavy metal, I found that many of mass culture’s fandoms, images, and electric rituals distinctly echoed the more populist and imaginative expressions of religious activity in earlier ages. And so I followed those echoes: Star Trek fans who held Neopagan rituals; Elvis devotees who found in the King the solace they no longer felt in Jesus; computer games that raided the occult; freaks who turned raves or Dead shows into psychedelic Eleusinian