I really, truly wish I hadn't read these two stories -- the one about the Secret Service having long ago convinced printer manufacturers to build covert document-ID technology into their laser printers, and the one about Japan's phone company building a "videogame" headset that uses electrical impulses to direct your body's physical movements -- within ten minutes of each other. Anyone who says science fiction isn't the most important field of literature in the world is simply not paying attention.

Updated, five minutes later: And by the way, the U.S. government is going to digitize your passport. Happy traveling!

The first time I walked into the Eye of Horus -- Pittsburgh's most prominent occult shop until it closed a few years back -- I quickly began to feel like General Custer decked out in full uniform, popping into a Native American tribal council to ask cheerfully after everyone's health. As four or five pairs of eyes turned suspiciously in my direction, I grew very aware of the fact that I was decked out in a bright blue-and-purple shirt with a screamingly garish design, while the store's employees and other patrons alike were all wrapped in variations on a theme -- the theme being black and the variations being ebony and charcoal. Their sharp, exasperated glances from betwixt the shelves of tarot cards, candles and assorted tomes seemed to suggest quite clearly: Go away, you frivolous creature, this place isn't for you.

Part of me wanted to somehow communicate to them that, despite my lack of proper mood fashion, I didn't deserve their otherworldly scorn -- that the difference between a truly devout follower of science fiction (me) and a truly devout follower of paganism (them, presumably) was a difference in manifestation of worldview, not of worldview itself. We were both unsatisfied with what society had handed us through textbooks and Bibles; we both identified ourselves as belonging to the entire earth rather than to any one geographical piece of it; we both sought cosmological truths in places that most of our neighbors and family would scoff at.

But another part of me was shy and nonconfrontational, and maybe realized that these particular people at this particular moment didn't seem too likely to be hip to what I was thinking. So instead of trying to strike up a conversation, I quietly flipped through a couple of Robert Anton Wilson books and then just slunk out of the store.

Fast-forward several years, to the day when a new sign reading "Innervisions" appeared over a South Side storefront on the corner of Carson and 11th, a block and a half from the Eye of Horus' old location. A smaller sign advertised psychic readings, but a glance at the bright, colorful hodgepodge of figurines, caftans and trinkets in the window revealed what looked more than anything like a street bazaar that had moved indoors.

Wandering inside through the racks of Eastern clothing, rune-inscripted jewelry and exotic teas, I found a diverse and gregarious bunch of individuals exploring the new place: a part-time stadium security guard raving about the under-21 club nights at Pegasus, an inscrutable goth of indeterminate age and his equally stoic female companion, a punked-out young Melissa Etheridge fan, a couple of clean-cut shoppers curious about the tarot readings -- and the proprietor, one Lady Morgan, contentedly holding court amid them all. Equal parts den mother Edna Garrett from The Facts of Life and a sort of after-hours Glinda the Good Witch, Morgan remained thoroughly free of pretension while discussing topics ranging from mind-over-matter healing to vampiric personalities to the joys of hunting collectibles on the Internet.

As it turns out, Innervisions' melange of the spiritual and the material reflects a conscious effort on Morgan's part. "I'm trying to walk this thin line between serving the metaphysical pagan community and not alienating the rest of the world," she says. "I love the pagan community dearly, because I'm part of it, but it's not enough to float a store. And a lot of nice people who come in here aren't of our way -- and they still like cool stuff."

Figuring out how people can coexist in harmony with others seems to be Morgan's paradigm of choice. Her mostly aesthetic-based inventory suggests a deliberate avoidance of the big focus on books and spices that fuels Into The Mystic, the pagan-themed store nine blocks up Carson Street. And she's happy to see both youngsters and older shoppers checking out the store: "I feel like a sort of goodwill ambassador for grownups," she laughs. "I don't see why there has to be such paranoia between generations."

One thing Morgan says strikes a particularly resonant chord: "I like juxtapositions of the absurd." Some people, I can't help thinking, would say this description applies perfectly to the inexplicable presence at one end of Innervisions' otherwise new-agey window display of several Spider-Man and Captain America lunch boxes.

But as an longtime believer in witch/geek solidarity, I've got to say it makes perfect sense to me.