I miss the magic shop in a decaying Victorian house near the clock tower in Covington. I miss the antique shop across the hall that was run by two Vietnam vets. That shop was laid out in parlors with lush sofas and manikins with SS and Napoleonic era uniforms. The owners specialized in militaria.

I think they served tea while I looked at $15,000 Scottish Baskethilt swords. The characters that came in there didn’t seem to mind my Zen monk dress. Some dressed like Native America warriors and carried their original $12,000 Kentucky rifles in deerskin sleeves. They were always trading–never satisfied. A few of them made their living as extras and consultants in movies.

I bought cheap swords for my shamnan’s coastal mesa. One day someone asked me if I was a witch. Silence fell over the room. I paused a long time before I said, “No.” It seems that witches bought supplies in the magic shop, but I could never catch one in there.

I was told that a young Jewish man spent his family money on SS memorabilia and had several full dress uniforms. It was a wonderful example of trying hard not to be your parents by joining the enemy.

There was a peculiar energy in that shop. The relics had long lost their owners and their function. I remember picking up a WWII Japanese Arisaka rifle with its shoulder stock split by a tranverse bullet round. It was from Iwo Jima. I read the yellowed government letter allowing the GI to bring it home as a trophy and the story of how he had shot its owner. The round had shattered the place when the Japanese soldier rested his cheek, and had killed him instantly. No one that touched the piece gloated over it. A long time ago a stranger vanished in the black sand of Iwo, and another stranger came home to tell the story. It was war. It was a fact of war.

Covington was where Jerry Springer wrote a check to a prostitute while he was on city council. He had to resign but later he was elected mayor of Cincinnati.

To me the beauty lay south in Kentucky, my home state. 75 miles south you were in the bluegrass and if you took the back roads out of Georgetown east or west, you passed the new and the colonial versions of horse farms with their stone English fences.

Cincinatti always seemed to be the start of the Industrial North. There was that weird stretch of bowery bars across the river on the west side where alcoholics cashed their SSI checks. There was a guy in that neighborhood that ran a rock shop guarded by two dobermans. He had a copper cross made by pouring molten copper into a water filled mold. I still have it, along with a flawless black prehistoric shark tooth I bought the same day. Difficult relics to describe as they reside in the pre-conscious.

There were peculiar stores up by the university, and I’ve never seen them in any other state. One side of the store displayed neat rows of hash and crack pipes, lighters with skulls, giant belt buckles, silver Iron Cross Rings–a lot of Goth and Biker stuff. Across the isle were sex toys, adult playing cards and games and the only inflatable pig with functional orifices I have ever seen. I had a harder time getting my mind around that pig than I did the Japanese rifle.

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