Decades ago when I first started awkwardly hanging around metaphysical conventions, I would often find myself, at some point, retreating to a quiet area in order to read the strange books and pamphlets I had acquired from the event’s participants. At those events, although filled with curiously thinking individuals, I seemed, as a teenage punk with blue hair and a jacket covered in spikes, to feel even stranger and more curious than those who were taking aura photographs, performing energy healings and retelling their encounters with spirits, angels and extraterrestrials.At one of these conventions is where I first met Marion. Though that first meeting’s conversation has been lost to the…