With a Deep Bow, The Late Magician Welcomes You

Greetings, curious cats and taste-test newcomers. Well met, blunderers, knights-errant, subjects of synchronicity, wandering souls.

[winks to transitory spectators, anonymous voyeurs]

I believe in other worlds. They become possible by imagining, and then enacting.

This is the way. Always.

I’ve reached a point in my existence where I feel estranged to the ways of the modern world. I do not identify. On good days I’m a stranded alien anthropologist. This world is fucking weird. It’s comically, tragically, dumb. Brimming with astonishing feats and cult-y behaviors. It’s blood-curdling destructive. Spiritually confounding. Intellectually maddening.

Its means are artifice and spectacle.

Writing is my way to process. I can express and share what it feels like though the metaphor of Story. And maybe, possibly, hopefully, in some way help this world to steer away from madness.

I dunno. I’m mostly mad too. I write so I don’t become 99.999% solid gold mad.

My magic is a messy process where only perseverance grants the chance to create. I’m stubborn and fickle and reluctant and scared most of the time, and yet I have other facets that have long desired to share the stage. Here is their altar. Here is their laboratory. Here is their strings and wood and brass.

Since 2010, I’ve waywardly embraced the part of me that has long called to write. Had I heeded the call in my youth, I probably would have pursued traditional routes. But for better and worse, I’ve always had a deep instinct to experience the world on my own terms. It’s gone exactly how you think it would in a world defined by rules, hierarchy, and authority.

Ah, modernity and its cages of value, meaning, identity, and purpose...

My youth was spent navigating the gifts of lower class reality. Young adulthood was a brief dance with death and the criminal justice system. But I made it though. College wasn't in the cards, so I "got my shit together" by finding solid blue-collared work in the grocery industry.

After 25 years moving up the retail hierarchy, experiencing the industry and neoliberalism plunder the blue-collar middle class, I simply quit. I sold my house. I cashed out my paltry 401k. No plans other than to never betray myself again believing the lies of capitalism.

Of course it was a terrible decision. It did not go well. But continuing the status quo would have probably meant my eventual suicide, so I think I made the right decision.

In the years since, I’ve worked odd crappy jobs and leveraged poverty to provide the best medical care available for my T1 diabetic son and I. The Affordable Healthcare Act is a tortuous contradictory mess, but if you are destitute (at least in California), it provides what we all should have.

Writing is a terrible career choice, even for the industriously focused, but it's never been viewed as a career path to me. Maybe it will be someday, but that's never been the focal point of my desire to write.

There's just the ache. So I honor it.

Autodidacticly speaking, my life has been a comedy of errors. I’ll likely never feel like I have my shit together. Which is fine. Certainty is comforting, but have you tried UNCERTAINTY? Whee!

The thought of "plans" given everything that's in play—climate chaos, fast and furious gaslighting and corruption, the blatant creep of authoritarianism, corporate domination, overt and covert war through an unending kaleidoscope of surfaces and proxies—our present collective aspirations are folly, man.

The ruthless racket of it all is obvious and coming undone.

I'm not planning on my feeble and perpetually in emergency status pension being there when it's time, not planning on how to find a niche and build a traditional life all over again. Certainly not if it’s just being another character in someone else's dream.

No one can exactly know what lies ahead and how it will unfold. But I can say with certainty that the not-so-distant future has no room for the failing aspirations and routines of today. Yes, the call of our shared reality is still strong, still holding, but the turbulent consequences of its enactment become exponentially stronger by the day.

It’s a helluva time to be alive.

For those who’ve read this far, thank you.

If my weird dance in the corner speaks to you, there are ways to lend support other than the transactional curses of money. Share my work with friends and online connections. Introduce my work to collaborative creators, promoters, editors, publishers, producers, and secret agents of the mystic arts. Give feedback. Ask questions. Cheerlead. Morale is powerful.

That said, a “tip jar” is always available for monetary options of support, if you so choose. I have decided to not offer paid subscriptions due to Substack’s obvious political agenda. I do not want to support their aims financially.

So here it is—my humble invocation, my sincere invitation. Because all that matters is enabling the chance for something to happen.

Waywardly,

—C