There was always going to be a return to this thing.
In some form or another, for me, it was inevitable.
For as many bad things as it created or were done in its name, it was always the source of expression I resonated with the most of anything I’d ever worked on.
This was because I did my best to communicate with myself.
I was unconcerned with “maximal reach.”
There were specific things done, and set into place to ensure, from the beginning, that it wouldn’t be something that was able to have a broad reach.
I was looking to reach myself.
That is, I was looking to touch that part of myself that was the self I always had wanted to be, to aspire to, and ultimately, upon attaining, realize that I had only reached another false summit.
On my best days, I felt like my writing didn’t even come from the “me” that was sitting at the table pounding away on the keys – rather, it seemed to me when I really “nailed” it, that it was some future version of myself speaking back through time…
Extending a hand to the “me” that existed now, saying “This way. I can help you get there.”
Ultimately, what created a necessary long “cessation” of above ground, publicly accessible transmissions, was what I saw being done “under the banner” of OPWW, so to speak.
Morons, cop-magnets, real cops, and ultimately people not interested in evolving and moving forward as human beings but remaining mired only in the “trappings” of the project, that is to say, only the exterior “hard signal” aesthetic.
I won’t judge them too harshly – after all, it was my creation.
But I would watch, from some cave on the coastal rocks of the Northwest, from an ancient cobbled street in old Europe, from the back of a bar in Appalachia, from the edge of the fire in the dark woods, and I would see:
None of them.
The real quality of the Operation was what it brought out during difficult to attend and difficult to participate in events, and moreso, lifestyle.
I found friendships and brotherhood that exist to this day from those years, with individuals from quite literally, around the globe. Men of action, men of honor, men of worth.
Trappings don’t mean shit.
A porno mag can be stuck inside a copy of the Gutenberg Bible, and it’s still just vile smut.
Tee shirts, tattoos, slogans, all the rest- it didn’t matter whether I had created them or not…it was how I saw them used over and over again that disheartened me and made me step back in order to find a solution.
The solution was:
See who was still there when the dust settled, and who was miraculously long gone.
Whose lives looked the same after they discovered Werewolf, and after Werewolf was “over?”
Who understood well enough the appellation itself, and all that implied, so eloquently put into song by friends of “our thing,” black metal titans Marduk:
“Werewolf riding the end times
Werewolf behind enemy lines…”
So, I did just that.
I watched and I kept contact with those who kept contact with me. Those still “living it.”
It was few enough compared to the hundreds or thousands who had claimed some kind of “association,” but it was men I had bled and sweated with across the face of the earth, and I had no interest in abandoning those connections, and never did.
We kept talking.
Our crews stayed training, working together to build a good life among the ruins of the modern world.
I used the time to broaden my experience, and my horizons.
I increased my skill, widened my network, elevated my leverage.
All the time, I was doing the things that I said I would do when I began Operation Werewolf in that little beat up black notebook that I still keep like a holy relic:
“Operation Werewolf is rabid fucking resistance,” it began, as it delivered to me an edict from my higher self of how my life would be lived.
I did not attain perfection adhering to that edict. I let myself down many times.
But the Operation, as many of us have often said, is ongoing.
Perfection is impossible to attain, unless, perhaps, one turns their life into a single line of poetry, written with a splash of blood.
I’m still bleeding. Still trying. Still living.
And in the recent months, still realizing that politeness and compassion are always going to be good things, but my weaker self doesn’t need as much compassion from me as I sometimes allow myself to believe.
It needs an Iron Fist.
And when I feel myself tapping on my own shoulder, saying, “come on. This way,” and I ignore it…
I need a hammer to the face.
That’s what Operation Werewolf always was to me, and some people got that and resonated.
It was an exaggerated version of something, a concept deliberately over the top from its inception in that little notebook, terminologies, aesthetic and all, designed to shatter excuses with a sledgehammer and shake things up, to get The Fire burning.
I guess I, for one, still need that.
My higher self is still calling from somewhere in space and time, willing my current self to be like him.
Maybe that’s what enlightenment is, after all:
Listening to some version of yourself that exists somewhere, someplace, that is the best version of you that will ever be, in any reality, and doing everything you can to line up with that in this one we’re living in now.
I’m sitting in a tiny cabin in the woods typing this out to myself.
But I’m typing it to you too.
Whoever you are, reading this.
Maybe you feel like the world is a dark place, and you are alien to it, and uncertain of where to go, or what to do.
I’ve felt like that.
Maybe you feel, as Hemingway said, that this world is a fine place, and worth fighting for.
I feel that, too.
Fuck their world, but let’s not throw the good out with the bad.
We should be neither misfits nor miscreants, outcasts or “outlaws,” save from the world they’ve built without our consent.
Instead, we must, as ever, build our own while braving theirs.
This can be done, and we will see miracles and radical changes in our own lifetimes. I believe this with every ounce of my burning heart.
But in order to do it, we will need three things:
Strong Limbs. Pure Hearts. Actions Matching Words.
Welcome back, or, welcome aboard.
XCII
– Paul Waggener, Summer Solstice 2022