Our Writers
What Is Scatter?
Scatter brings together divers genius from enlivened minds. Contrarian, traditionalist, outrageous, and wordsy, there is something here to offend almost every sensibility. If your mind can not bend, it will break on our shoals, so please take brittler brains elsehwere.
Dave Goodman
Dave is Scatter's Founding Germ, around whom other mental giants have congealed. You will find a shared sensibility amongst our authors that has grown out of a natural mind meld from Dave's delightful, wordsful, and occasionally exasperating brain.
A true modern day Renaissance Bro, Dave's polymathery could fill a dozen more blogs:
Orchestra Conducting Prodigy, Prep School Dropout, Veteran Full Time RVer (turned Full Time Expat), Inventor, Entrepreneur, Marketer, Fundraiser, Erstwhile-Raw Foodie, Eternal Foodie Foodie, Private Pilot, Economist, Natural Detoxer, Polyglot, Radical Centrist, And Some Things He Can Only Tell You About When You're Older.
Ramón Larsen
Ramón Larsen of New York City is Scatter's sex columnist. We don't let him talk about anything else because we are too busy reevaluating our lives after each of his posts. We'll let him explain why:
In the end, my purpose is love. Finding love, feeling love, reveling in love, and eventually bringing more love to a withered and loveless world. (click to expand)
Despite appearances, I am, in my essence, as pitifully romantic as an angst filled teenage art student, sappy, longing for things not of this earth, and for the divine love seeping in through the cracks in the sky to grant our mortal fleshes that brief respite from a cruel and hateful world.
What makes me different is that I do not “seek” love. What we seek, we nearly never find, and the journey becomes the worthy, if ultimately empty, goal.
My path is finding love. And like most great discoveries, I find it in the unlikeliest of places: usually exactly where I left it.
But reaching, grasping, dreaming of love is the surest way to push it out of our real experience forever. But the reverse is also true: delving into the darkness, the abyss, and occasionally the horror show of the human psyche, brings the arrival of love to our doorstep as surely as a hand delivered tchotchke from Amazon.
It is inevitable.
It is promised.
It is real.
The universe is, after all, dualistic. When we seek one thing, we manifest its opposite, because the two can never be separated - only our perception can make it seem so. So to discover what we really want, to realize the love that burns deep in our sappiest of hearts, we must turn to its opposite. And then it can never escape us again.
What that opposite entails is the subject of my writings.
It is as dangerous, treacherous, and scary a path as love is glorious, healing, and transplendant. It can not be otherwise: that the opposite must match the thing itself in energy and power. And the more we are willing to descend into the underworld, into the dark depths of our souls where only the blind and disfigured sea creatures live, the more profound, pernanent, and inevitable our joy in love.
That is my goal here: to guide you into the darkness of your soul, and the souls of your lovers-to-be, with a steady hand, pointing out the River Styx, Cerebrus’s howling, and the souls of the dead, misfortunate enough to wail in the depths below from their Icarian strivings for higher love. These and all the rest of the trappings of the journey I will show you along the path to that simple yet ephemeral desire of our hearts which ultimately motivates us all to achieve whatever we do in life.
But my guidance does not come cheap, and it does not come easy. After all, what price must a hero pay for love? My counsel is savage, unimproved, unredeemed, ugly, dangerous, and should only be pursued by those with a desperate calling for love that no art and no passing embrace can provide. Nothing in this world is uglier than the truth, but there I shall stand, up to my knees in the muck of it all with a scepter guiding you to the light beyond the darkness.
You will recoil at the horrors I will show, you will resent me for the truths I can not help but utter, and you will despise me for showing you the dark side of your Moon that you wish life had simply left out of the script but yet which, by the end, you will give eternal thanks for.
For that is the nature of our world, whether we like it or not, that the hidden parts of ourselves (and others) point us in the direction of Godly wholeness, and with it, the magnificent, puckish, and delightful love we all, at the very bottom of our hearts, seek as we traverse the twists and turns of our life’s adventure.
Come with me to celebrate the love and union that is our birthright, should we dare to win it. But don’t say I didn’t warn you. . . .
Roger Bloom
We are all about breaking the mold here at Scatter, and no one breaks it harder than Roger Bloom.
Far, oh so far, from the flaky crystal chick astrologers of popular imaginaion (or their Man from Marin Counterparts), Roger is a veryseriousman, mythologist, and veteran businessman.
Roger is, by his own admission, a Reluctant Astrologer.
In our words, he is a Genius.
Roger bills himself as an "Astrological Fundamentalist," cuttring through the stuff and nonsense of popular astrology and rigor-free new age archetypal masturbation (which is really more Ramón's department anyway).
Roger blogs primarily at innerpla.net, "Bringing The Stars Down To Earth," in what he describes as a Bullshit Free Zone.
But Roger has also innovated a practice for Business Partner Astrology over at astro.business. He has generously offered to share his work here for our edifcation and wonderment at what most of us thought (before meeting Roger) was complete nonsense.
We encourage skeptics and belivers alike to let Roger persuade you that there is more to "this astrology stuff" than meets the eye. In fact, Roger prefers to work with skeptics like himself because they are serious enough not to be fooled by the hoardes of New age astrologers who give him and his practice a bad name.
Read Roger's moving and mind blowing story here. We're sure that after a bit of exposure to his musings, your worldview will at least budge in the direction of the transcendent magic of the music of the spheres. Click here to hear more from Roger himself.