Random Acts of Magic

This not exactly fiction, and not exactly true. It is not me speaking, but it is echoing my sentiments. I wrote this a few months ago and decided that posting it would be easier than posting some new material. Enjoy.

I find myself frequently an observer of random acts of magic. For example, sometimes events happen so as to make me believe that my dad is a sorcerer. He makes things appear that are not and should not be, but not for the fact that they are something that only he would imagine. He once summoned a delivery van for a completely fictional company, which sold a completely fictional product. He even went so far as to manifest an entry in the encyclopedia for that product, so as to convince me that the product, and then by association the company, was real. He likes to be right.

I once found a staff that a careless wizard had left in the back seat of a taxi. I tried to summon familiars and cast enchantments that would make trees dance around, but all I could really do was make a very sickly looking bat appear and caused a sunflower to become belligerent for about an hour. I still actually have the scar from that one. I probably need some instruction on how to use it. I would like to ask my dad, but the last thing he taught me to do was how to ride a bike, and that ended a bit disastrously. I still haven’t tracked down the owner of that staff. It sits in my closet and occasionally emits a few sparks. One of them hit a polo shirt and made it sentient for a few hours, but then it went back to normal.

There is a genie that rides with me on the bus sometimes. Once when he had forgotten his bus pass, I paid for him. In return, he gave me a stone that lets me hear peoples’ thoughts. But there is a catch. I can only read the thoughts of people who are currently or have recently been under the influence of cocaine or methamphetamine. This means that I usually can only read the thoughts of homeless men, and there are some crazy things that go through those minds. The stone he gave me is both small and unremarkable, and a little ugly in fact. I imagine that the stone would have been more powerful if I had done him a greater favor. Perhaps if instead of paying for his bus fare I had pulled him out of the way of said bus as it was traveling 60 miles an hour, he would give me a stone that could not only let me read peoples’ thoughts, but also control them. And these wouldn’t just be coked-out hobos I would be able to control. These would be your doctors and lawyers and corporate CEO’s. And let me tell you another thing about this stone: I can’t control when I hear the thoughts. When it is in my pocket and I walk by a homeless man, sometimes I will hear ramblings about the government’s program for using robots to take over local small businesses.

Sometimes, on foggy mornings, ghosts come riding out of the fog. They ride fog horses. I know that the horses themselves are not ghost horses because they look and behave like fog, they swirl like fog, I can see the individual drops of moisture in them. But the ghosts, they have this blue tint about them. I never understood why it was called the blues until I saw these ghosts. This particular shade of pigment is the most melancholy thing I have ever seen. And that is just the color. You should see these ghosts. They’re wearing dilapidating wedding gowns and old confederate uniforms. But still, they look like they are having the time of their lives, or they would be, if only they were alive, howling and whooping as they graze by me while I fumble with my keys before the caffeine kicks in.

There is one other instance in which I have seen a bona-fide ghost. I was walking in this park near my house, in a dense thicket of evergreen trees. I came round a corner and there is this cowboy sitting there, in the exact same transparent blue that the fog riding ghosts appear in. He was eating a blue tin of beans over a blue fire. When I saw him, it looked sad, it looked pathetic, I temporarily lost all hope and was at the same time mystified and absorbed by this solitary and inexplicable figure. He motioned for me to sit down across from him. He tried to explain something to me, something about his crimes and how he was so sad and so cursed as a result, but his explanation made no sense and went in circles. Then quit unexpectedly, he went on a rant about the romanticizing of the Old West, and the vapidity of it all, and then told me to shove my damn Levis and my damn dude ranches up my ass. Then he got up and walked off into the trees sobbing.

But ghosts are a bit of a downer subjects, and there are so many more magical things that are much lighter subjects. I see all kinds of crazy, wondrous type things all the time. My dad works for a company that is run by an even more powerful sorcerer, who once summoned an entire third world county, so that his company could have some place to outsource jobs. He also made the inhabitants of neighboring countries very hostile towards the people of this newly summoned country, so that when the company came under investigation for unethical practices in that country, it was simply invaded by its neighbors, and the company collected a fat insurance from the lost infrastructure that cost them nothing to create in the first place.

This sorcerer CEO apparently lives in a mansion inside a glacier, of which he is constantly rearranging the insides according to his whims. He also reportedly rides a hydra to work. But I have not seen any of this, so I do not know whether or not this particular magical happening is true. But I see many things that I know are true, because I see them with my own eyes. I see happy spirits flying out of instruments and speakers that work their way into peoples’ ears and help their brains vibrate at the optimal frequency. Sometimes, spirits jump out of the TV and beat people over the head with 2x4’s. I watch the spirits at the DMV poke people to make them agitated. These spirits also live wild on the street in New York and Boston. There are spirits that live inside onions that get angry when their homes are destroyed, and retaliate by trying to destroy the eyes of the destroyers. These are related to the spirits in chili peppers, who assault the tongues of those who try to eat them. I see them swimming around in bottles of Tabasco sauce and in bowls of salsa. There are also malicious confusion spirits which swim around inside bottles of alcohol.

But there are more spirits out there than the ones that directly affect our senses. I know that cars have spirits. Whenever there are two or more cars left vacant in a parking lot, the car spirits jump out from under the hoods and dance around. Buildings have spirits, sometimes even individual rooms do. They like some people, and dislike others. You can talk to them sometimes by putting your hand on the wall, but you can’t use words; you can only show them memories and hopes. I once got the fire sprinklers in a parking garage to turn on that way on a very hot day.

Most technology operates on some sort of supernatural principle. I know that this sounds like a bit of an oxymoron: how can it be technology, the application of a scientific theory, if it relies on the supernatural? Science is all just an orderly form of magic anyway. Most analog technology relies somehow on the presence of a little man with a crank, in accordance with the conventional wisdom of small children. With digital technology, things get a little more complicated. These are operated by teams of very small and very tempermental gremlins. Sometimes the gremlins cooperate, and sometimes they don’t. That’s just the way it works. When they break, you have to send them back to the manufacturer. The electronics are not actually being fixed. What is actually happening is that a gremlin soothsayer is trying to negotiate with the team, oftentimes ot no avail.

But there are more agreeable teams of gremlins, which live in pacemakers and satellites, things that have to work. The best behave gremlins we sent out into the far reaches of space on the Voyager probes, where they ambassadors for our discretely magical world.

You don’t believe me? Then why don’t you ask the merfolk that live in the tank of my toilet! Why don’t you ask the Jersey Devils and Phantom Kangaroos that live in the park down the street! Why don’t you ask the elves that meet in my basement as they plan their coup to overthrow the Leprechauns! Why don’t you ask my mailman, who is a troll in disguise, and now has to pay the rent on an apartment after he got evicted out from under the highway overpass! Ask the dragon that lives in the bathroom in that gas station by the Mondo-Mart! Ask the family of griffins that have nested in the bell tower of St. Luke’s! Ask the crazy neighborhood cat lady who actually can control her cats and make them do her bidding! Ask my friend who got herpes after being seduced by a succubus. Ask the centaur who landscaped my back yard! Ask the barista at the Starbucks near my house who shoots milk out of her fingertips! Ask the mole people who sued the city for putting a subway tunnel through their colony! Go to the storage room in the public library where gravity has been shifted by about fifteen degrees! Go to the thrift store where the pants dance around once the shop closes! Go anywhere, look hard enough, and it will pop out at you! There are so many things, so many random acts of magic, happening all the time and you just have to look for them, that’s all it takes!

I wish I could show you these things. I wish I could show you some of these random acts of magic, or maybe even commit one or two myself. Would that change things? Would I somehow be able to show you that the world is beautiful or that everything is alright and that you shouldn’t have to be sad about what doesn’t happen? Would I be a better person for that? Am I just some asshole who doesn’t even really know what’s going on, so he makes things up in his head to compensate? I want to show these things to you.

I could get that staff out of my closet and make sparks fly around. I could get out my little genie rock and tell you what bums on the street are thinking. I could wake you up early one foggy morning and show you the ghosts. I could crack open my DVD player and show you the gremlins inside. Would that reconcile everything in this crazy universe?

I guess I’m wondering if telling you about these magical happenings would make any difference at all, make you ok with your role in the world, show you that it’s something we’re all a part of. But even though you don’t think so, even though you were never smacked over the head with a formal notification, I know for certain that you are capable of random acts of magic.