I snapped this photo at the farmer’s market in Missoula, Montana yon Saturday. I bought the coyote face, too. It’s rich with possibility: add just one string and it’s a Halloween mask. Add two rubber bands and it’s a one-of-a-kind jockstrap!

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All kinds of dorky hobbies are out of the closet now that the geeks have inherited the earth. Sci-fi’s a big enterprise now (har har) … now that “Lost” and computer programming is big business, all the nerds like me are out of the closet and partying in the light, blinking while our eyes adjust to the brightness of the pop-culture spotlight.

Loving comic books was once an express ticket to a lonely lifetime in Mom’s basement. Now they’re big, big blockbusting big business. I dated an actual human woman once who took me to see “300″ and “Spiderman 3.” It was her idea. Here in New York, a grown man can wear a Batman t-shirt out in public without shame. It’s a beautiful thing.

Now that all us nerds are out basking in uncloseted comfort, we owe something to the rest of the world. We shouldn’t forget what it was like to be punished for something as simple as liking things the rest of the world didn’t get. We got to be respectful, got to be patient with strangers’ weird obsessions. Even when it’s really, really tough to get.

Seeing a guy on a unicycle just breaks my heart. I imagine him in a completely empty apartment, empty save for a pile of burger wrappers and dust bunnies … and a unicycle lying in the middle of the floor. He says aloud, “Well, that’s it. Everything’s gone, all of it. The worst is over, but one thing’s for sure: I’l never get laid again. Might as well learn to love this unicycle …” Heartbreaking. But it’s not my place to judge.

A Segway — that’s the unicycle 2.0. It’s even more pathetic than a unicycle because it doesn’t even require any physical skills to operate. Cops that ride Segways around might as well be on My LIttle Pony big wheels for all the respect they inspire. But I digress.

On one level it’s pretty easy to keep an open mind. Live and let live and just work for the weekend, and it’s all gonna be cool.

However, ferret lovers exist on an entirely different level altogether. Ferrets are kinda cute, I’ll give them that. But so are subway rats. Ferrets are long rats, plain and simple. And there’s something about die-hard ferret lovers that really, really creeps me out:

I keep watching this thing, over and over, and I’m trying to stop judging, trying to get beyond to a higher place. But man, NOTHING’S gonna make that okay.

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This post is part 2 of an ongoing series. Click to read the first and third installments.

Those dirty white doves lying by the curb alongside three little samurai hats made of coconut, their car-flattened heads some distance away — they’re not just some sick coincidence, a bored metalhead’s idea of art or a Hot Topic teen’s notebook dream rendered real. According to my neighbor, they’re part of a spell meant to discredit him in the DC Santeria community and rob him of some of his prominence and prestige.

We stood out in the road together Friday night, six beers deep into the evening as he explained, flicking the dead doves around with a stick. “This is sloppy work, too,” he said. “Amateur shit. This is some poorly hidden amateur shit and an embarrassment to everyone who practices Santeria. The spell was broken the second I laid eyes on this, and it should have been hidden better … in the bushes at least, or wrapped in some brown paper and then hidden where nobody could find it.”

According to my friend (who must remain nameless), someone else in the community is jealous of him and his standing. He believes this is an Anakin and Obi-Wan situation, an old former friend resentful of his spiritual growth, his influence over new initiates, and his role as an elder. If he is correct, the perpetrator of this spell owns a popular Botanica, a voodoo supply store that initiates new members into Santeria. Apparently, she charges for her services and for supplies.

“I don’t make any money off this myself. It’s my religion. I have my career as a network engineer and that’s separate. This is my life, my spirituality and to her, it’s her business, and I’m taking her customers.”

He adds “This was confirmed to me by both my Orisha and my high priest. That bitch wants to knock me down, to see me fail.”

That’s only part of the reason that there are two dead headless dove lying in the road by my house, in a direct line of sight from the friendly Santero’s apartment. There’s more. An offering of doves is an offering to Obatala, the owner of all heads who is always dressed in all white. See, the perpetrator of this spell was ordained under Yemaya, mother goddess and creator of the world, same as my neighbor.

Since they both have the same guardian angel, a direct attack via spells cast on the spiritual plane would harm both parties. By appealing to Obatala, the attacker hopes to knock off my friend’s “crown”, or cause him to publicly embarrass himself and lose status.

“Yemaya, she is the creator and the destroyer,” my Santero friend elaborated. “She’s a caring mother but defends her children like a she-wolf, like a grizzly bear or something. Yemaya Okoto is a pirate witch queen who defends her children by rampage, and that’s the the aspect I come under. Eleggua told her to go ahead with this spell, but he brought this to me through you, and now he’s told me to do what I need to do to defend myself.” He paused for a moment, looking into the sky, then continued, saying “Really, this is all so wonderful and it just reaffirms my faith in Santeria. This is so amazing, such a beautiful display of Eleggua’s power. I feel so blessed right now.”

Eleggua is the Santeria trickster-god, and, according to Wikipedia “plays frequently tempting choices for the purpose of causing maturation.”

“See here,” my neighbor said, “look at the coconut shells here, by the doves. It’s the divination she threw before she left the sacrifice … see how the whites are facing up? That’s a ‘yes,’ from Eleggua, he’s telling her to go ahead, but he’s bringing you past these birds yesterday and having you e-mail me about it after we hadn’t even talked for a whole year. That’s random as hell, man, and that’s Eleggua for you, especially considering how we even met, man.”

It’s true. I met my neighbor because he’s the best friend (and spiritual godfather) to a woman I met on Myspace about a year ago. We went out on a few dates and then it sort of fizzled, more due to work, timing, and baggage on my part than anything else. I ‘friended’ my Santero neighbor last year and then fell out of touch with him and her, although I had no negative feelings.

I can’t say that I’m converting to Santeria anytime soon, but the fact that we all met last year and then I happened to see these dead doves in the road a year later and be moved to photograph them and e-mail them … it’s pretty staggering. I remain an open-minded skeptic, but I can honestly say that I’ve felt Eleggua’s power firsthand.

After many divinations, many questions asked of the oracles and many coconut shells thrown, it all comes down to this. My friend the Santero is the victim of a vicious spiritual attack by an enemy who was willing to perform a blood sacrifice to see him fail. By discovering the sacrifice and alerting him, I was the agent of the Santeria trickster-god Eleggua. Once he saw the sacrifice itself, the spell was broken.

My friend will retaliate, and nothing’s going to stop him. He’s not telling how or when, only that “a shield is built and the divination said that the situation is ‘an eye for an eye.’”

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This post is part 1 of an ongoing series. Click to read the second and third installments.

It rained on the last of the snow this morning, getting rid of the nasty slush but making a much nastier mess in the meantime.

Me my friend were walking around Adams-Morgan in the rain talking about nasty old snow. Like that one gross black clump you find under an abandoned car in like, June, and you think “DAG — how is that still even there?” Then we came across one tenacious chunk of dirty white slush. “That’s really hanging on there,” he said, and we went to investigate the tough little lump by the curb.

Turns out it wasn’t snow at all. It was two decapitated doves, tied together at the feet:

Two chunks of coconut lay nearby, along with the dove’s heads themselves:

Now there’s no getting around the fact that this is kind of nasty to me, as a middle-class cracker from Southern Virginia. Way nastier than some old black snow clump for sure. But it’s not as creepy as it seems to the uninitiated. After the initial rush of heavy weirdness settled, I remembered. I live right next door to a powerful Santero, a high priest of Santeria, a form of voodoo widely practiced across Latin America. Animal sacrifice is a big part of their practice, see.

I sent my friend, the Santero neighbor the first photo above and asked him, “Dude, was that you?”

I’d done a little Googling and learned that Santeros were sacrificing doves to either heal or kill Castro last fall, depending on how they felt about him. Maybe that was it.

It wasn’t. He didn’t do it, he says, and he hadn’t heard anything about the Castro thing. The ramifications are possibly more sinister.

According to what he told me, two doves are a sacrifice to Obatala, the father of peace but also the owner of all heads. If someone were to cast a spell over my Santero neighbor, they’d have to knock his spiritual “crown” off of his head. So he’s going to look into this, as soon as he gets home from work.

It kinda gives me the creeps, all this animal sacrifice going on right outside my house. I’m all for religious freedom and freedom of expression, and I do eat meat … but still. I mean, somebody threw two dead birds in the street out there, and they’re still there right now, just kinda rotting.

On the other hand, pigeons and rats die in the road all the time and I’m used to it. If anything, those doves make for more interesting roadkill than the grey feathered leather we usually get here. And those doves, they mean a lot to a lot of people.

Overall, I’m pretty excited at the situation. There’s a good chance that I am living in the crossfire of an escalating epic battle between two Latin voodoo priests, and how cool is THAT? A bunch of kids came skipping down the street this afternoon, passing a basketball and yelling “y’all play too much” with high spirits and they passed right over that vicious little offering. They moved right through the spiritual warzone, laughing, happy and unharmed.

I just got an email from my friend, who says “I plan to investigate via divination what this all means. and if it is an attack on me, then I am off to war. I have a few enemies in the community, that because of ego do not want anyone to prosper and my house happens to be growing, meaning I just initiated 2 more people into santeria last week…”

All it took was one look in the gutter to see something nasty and fantastic, incredible evidence that the world is full of mysterious magic. It’s all around us, propping up our humdrum lives in ways we barely understand and no matter how it seems at the surface, it’s pretty cool to know it’s there even if you don’t completely believe in it yourself.

There’s more to this story. Click here to see what the doves mean.

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