THE GOBLIN NEWSLETTER 97

I had a vivid dream a while ago. I was back in highschool, I attended a  Catholic Highschool in East Oakland. It was very Californian in that it wasn't very strict & it was trying to "be good" in the face of imposing some kind of Catholic education on top of where America was at. The students tended towards a doe-eyed liberalism masked with cynical humor & spiced with alcohol, weed & gangster rap. There was a dress code, but it wasn't anything too strict. I was able to dress as a spiked & studded Chaos Punk somehow... anyhow, in this dream, I was out in the commons, four big grassy squares surrounded on three sides by the school. Suddenly I was surrounded by students, who were then joined by staff, then the extended families, then alumni & their families, all people who were related to the school in some way. Thousands & thousands of people. It wasn't an active sort of aggression, it was a passive, loose clustering. They weren't speaking but they were beaming the words, "Let us kill you." into my head. I was trying to laugh it off, "Come on, what the hell, that's not going to happen." Then they began to rationalize why I should let them kill me & I completely understood. Then I woke up. This dream explained a lot of things to me that I hadn't previously understood. Centrally, I realized that I developed a Christ Complex while in highschool & that it wasn't intentional, I absorbed it from the school & the contradictions of the Catholic system itself. Maybe more importantly, I came to understand what it actually means to threaten these support structures, even one as minor as a High School, that so many people rely on. Then I start thinking about someone like Jesus Christ, this Jewish prophet who went against his own people & against the larger Roman system in the name of this transcendent "good". Of course he is killed & he is then transformed from an actual, dangerous living person into a symbolic motivator, a masthead ultimately lashed onto the front of the charging Roman system that he was fighting against.