The Writings on the Wall

Saturday, July 12, 2008

On Magic

I do believe in magic. I was born and raised in a magic time, in a magic town, among magicians. When I was twelve, the words was my magic lantern, and by its green spirit glow I saw the past, the present, and into the future. We all start out knowing magic. We are born with whirlwinds, forest fires, and comets inside us. We are born able to sing to birds and read the clouds and see out destiny in grains of sand. But then we get the magic educated right out of our souls. We get it churched out, spanked out, washed out, and combed out. We get put in the straight and narrow and told to be responsible. Told to act our age. Told to grow up, for God’s sake. And you know why we’re told that? Because the people doing the telling were afraid of our wilderness and youth, and because the magic we knew made them ashamed and sad at what they allowed to whither in themselves. After you get so far away fro it, though, you can’t really get it back. You can have seconds of it. Just seconds of knowing and remembering. When people get all weepy at movies, it’s because in that dark theatre, the golden pool of magic is touched, just briefly. Then they come out into the hard sun of logic and reason again and it dries up, and they’re left feeling a little heartsad and not knowing why. For the briefest of instants, you have stepped into the magic realm. The truth of life is that every year we get farther away from the essence that is born within us. We get shouldered with burdens, some of them good, some of them not so good. Things happen to us. Loved ones die. People get in wrecks, and get crippled. It’s not hard to do, in this world of crazy mazes. Life itself does its best to take that memory of magic away from us. You don’t know its happening until one day you feel like you’ve lost something, but you’re not sure what it is.


Robert McCammon

posted by Zee Puppette at 3:32 PM 2 comments

Wednesday, July 2, 2008

On Love

“Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor, suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life…You give them a piece of you. They didn’t ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like smile at you, and then your life isn’t your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like ‘maybe we should be just friends’ turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It’s a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-y
ou-apart pain. I hate love”.

- Neil Gaiman
posted by Zee Puppette at 5:47 AM 0 comments