People accused of doing magical thinking are basically being accused of doing something awful. Like Republicans telling us that if we cut taxes for millionaires and billionaires, working class and middle class citizens will prosper because of it. Of course, they actually know better. So, it isn’t really magical thinking. It is really evil magical thinking.
But when I am actually guilty of magical thinking, it is more along the lines of me pinning my hopes on an intuition brought about by calculations in my overcrowded imagination that are probably horribly miscalculated but that I need to turn out to be accurate and miraculously pull me out of my current difficulty. And then, because I intuit really, really hard… it turns out all right.
Magic is after all, merely what we call science and situations where something amazing is created, but we have no idea at all how and why.
Our movies nowadays are really quite chock full of magical thinking. Wish-fulfillment, fantasy, and violence-laden revenge stories are what fill the cinema with seekers of escapism and relaxation. That is magical thinking of an epic sort. Go see the Black Panther movie and “Wakanda forever” solves racism.
So, what is the point of this little essay? What am I actually thinking about the subject of magical thinking? Well, I needed a topic today to keep my every-day-in-April posting goal alive. And magically…
Every good Dungeons & Dragons game needs a quaint little magic shop to provide the appropriate magical boom-boom solution that isn’t obviously needed, but will prove essential to the adventure later.
For our game, where we had a choice of a number of screwy little magic shops that didn’t manage to blow themselves up, the main place of choice was Failin’s Arcanum Magickum Shoppe in Sharn. (Why “shop” has to be spelled “shoppe”, I’m really not certain. You have to spell things wrong to cast spells apparently.)
The shoppe is located in the Precarious District of Sharn, City of Towers. Visitors have been known to be crushed by falling parapet stones from above that may or may not have been wedged loose by a hobgoblin street gang. Failin himself is a rather morose individual with red hair and a connection to the Dragonmarked House Orien, the house whose magical dragonmarks allow the members of the house to do transportation magic. Failin was himself a talented geomancer, able to create items with bound earth elementals used for power and propulsion. He also collects items of great value from adventurers and commands impossibly high prices for them.
So, if you want to buy a Wand of Blinding Colors, a Bag of Holding, a Flaming Elf Skull of Timely Warnings, or a Deadly Drum of Druid Doom, he’s definitely your man and will only take twice the amount of everything you own in payment. If you want something more powerful or more arcane, you better be ready to slay a dragon for it and bring back the entire hoard as payment. Failin is rich in several different ways.
Working for Failin is his one and only servant, Gobbie. Gobbie is also a rare thing, a goblin you can trust. He was raised by dragonmarked humans and treated slightly better than the average goblin (who tend to be killed on sight by heroes).
Gobbie is also trained as a shield bearer, and carries a shield that is immune to dragon fire and most magical fire and ice. Failin rents Gobbie to adventurers for a high price, and Gobbie usually serves them just as faithfully as he serves his red-haired master.
And Failin’s shoppe is a place where you can find any number of magic users, wizards, warlocks, sorcerers, illusionists, thaumaturges, and other magicians. If you don’t mind risking a meeting with horrifying necromancers, you can find and talk to some of the most powerful people in all Eberron.
Some books come along telling a story that has to be taken seriously in ways that don’t make sense in any normal way. The Alchemist is one of those books.
What is an alchemist, after all?
An alchemist uses the medieval forms of the art of chemistry to transmute things, one thing becoming another thing.
Coelho in this book is himself an alchemist of ideas. He uses this book to transmute one idea into another until he digs deep enough into the pile of ideas to finally transmute words into wisdom.
There is a great deal of wisdom in this book, and I can actually share some of it here without spoiling the story.
Here are a few gemstones of wisdom from the Alchemist’s treasure chest;
“It’s the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting…” (p.13)
“It’s the simple things in life that are the most extraordinary; only wise men are able to understand them.” (p.17)
“All things are one. And, when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.” (p.24)
“And when he had gone only a short distance, he realized that, while they were erecting the stall, one of them had spoken Arabic and the other Spanish. And they had understood each other perfectly well. There must be a language that doesn’t depend on words, the boy thought.” (p.45)
All of these quotes from the book, as you can see, come from the first third of the book. There are many more treasures to be found in this book. I should not share them with you here. Just as the main character of the story learns, you have to do the work for yourself. But this book is not only an enjoyable read, but a map for how you can execute your own journey towards your “Personal Legend”. In fact, you may find that the book tells you not only how to go about making a dream come true, but, if you are already on that journey successfully, it tells you what things you are already doing right.
This holiday is going to be different. Different from the holiday I grew up with. Different than the celebrationless non-holiday I lived with for twenty years. And different from the new traditions we established, my kids and I, as we pulled away from my wife’s religion. The pandemic affects everything.
I was born into a family of Iowa Methodists living in North Central Iowa in a tiny farm town called Rowan.
I remember Christmas being the most magical time of year. I believed in Santa Claus. I felt like the Christmas magic that we saw in seasonal specials on TV in black and white were so real… the realest reality there could be…even if Andy Williams wasn’t the host of the program. Candy canes and Christmas trees and sitting on Santa’s lap being terrified of getting it wrong… and making him think I was asking for a talking Chatty Kathy doll even though I was a boy… FOR MY SISTER, SANTA! FOR MY SISTER… Oh, gawd, that really went wrong. And we had family gatherings where we ate pot-luck family meals with Swedish meatballs and turkey and mashed potatoes with brown gravy and casseroles of fifteen different kinds and nuts and candy…eating ourselves into a semi-stupor as we also did only three and a half weeks before at Thanksgiving.
And presents. Everybody gave presents. And Christmas Carols in Church.
But time goes on. You grow out of believing in Santa Claus. You even grow out of believing in Andy Williams. Perry Como was better. And it was getting so commercial. And Christmas shows we loved as kids seemed so simple and lame when watched again as young adults.
And then I married a Jehovah’s Witness. If you are not aware of it, Christmas originated as a pagan holiday, the Roman Saturnalia. It was a night of feasts and orgies and excess. And Jehovah’s Witnesses believe their beliefs are the only true beliefs, and celebrating Christmas is of Satan. I celebrated Christmas for the last time in 1994. I married in 1995.
For the next twenty years I did not celebrate Christmas. At least, not out loud where Brothers and Sisters in the Truth could hear. And the season became very austere and sanitized for me by the religious integrity of those around me in the faith.
But there were friends in the faith that lost their faith and left the congregation permanently. And the people around me changed. And I was beset by illnesses, mine and my family’s. And Jehovah’s Witnesses are very good at helping the sick. But, apparently only for others, not me and mine. They began turning away.
I am probably disfellowshipped now. They have turned away from me, and I am now isolated from all those who used to be friends and acquaintances. My wife is still a member of the congregation. And this is good because she desperately needs to believe. It is a good life for her and keeps her relatively well. But I know they disfellowshipped me, even though nobody told me so like they always do in such cases. My wife barely talks to me now. And this is probably because members of the congregation are supposed to shun the disfellowshipped, even if they are family.
But I bare no one ill will. That may be part of the problem. The Bible directive is to “Hate what is bad.” And blood transfusions and psychiatry are both bad things according to the Witnesses’ understanding of Bible commands.
I didn’t need any transfusions, and though I have significant stress and diabetic depression, I was never hospitalized for that. But I did kinda fake some disfellowshippable offenses so that I would be the one, and my wife would still be able to be a Witness. She needs it more than I do.
And, to be quite honest, I need to feel a little bit of Christmas now in my old age and infirmity. After all, it is a holiday all about making sacrifices in order to give gifts to others. I know that this post will make Jehovah’s Witnesses cringe. But now that they are shunning me, I guess they won’t be seeing this anyway. And I wish them a Merry Christmas in spite of it all.
It is, of course, one of the most powerful, masterful, and best-known pieces of music ever written.
Mozart completed the “little serenade” in Vienna in 1787, but it wasn’t published until 1827, long after Mozart’s untimely death.
The Serenade is incorrectly translated into English as “A Little Night Music”. But this is and always has been the way I prefer to think of it. A creation of Mozart written shortly before he hopped aboard the ferryman’s boat and rode off into the eternal night. It is the artifact that proves the art of the master who even has the word “art” as a part of his name. A little music to play on after the master is gone to prove his universal connection to the great silent symphony that is everything in the universe singing silently together.
It is basically what I myself am laboring now to do. I have been dancing along the edge of the abyss of poverty, suffering, and death since I left my teaching job in 2014. I will soon be taking my own trip into night aboard the ferryman’s dreaded boat. And I feel the need to put my own art out there in novel and cartoon form before that happens.
I am not saying that I am a master on the level of a Mozart. My name is not Mickart. But I do have a “key’ in the name Mickey. And it will hopefully unlock something worthwhile for my family and all those I loved and leave behind me. And hopefully, it will provide a little night music to help soothe the next in line behind me at the ferryman’s dock.
Japanese Manga is a complicated and difficult-to-understand thing. Of course, it is also a very beautiful art form when done well. There are many features of Japanese culture that play a prominent part in the comic book genre known as manga.
It is a strange fusion of the art of Meiji culture in Pre-War Japan and the Western influence of the U.S. Occupation forces after WWII. You read the comic from right to left, opposite to American comics, and the dialogue in speech balloons go from top to bottom rather than horizontally.
A manga by Akamatsu
I first discovered Ken Akamatsu’s manga brilliance in 2004 through Half-Price Books copies of his manga series Negima! I was reading the last two Harry Potter novels at that time and the Harry Potter-ness of the main character, Negi Springfield is what attracted me. He is a ten-year-old boy who is secretly a wizard. He is also so accelerated in school that they make him an English teacher in a Middle School where they give him an all-girl class. Of course, Negi is definitely NOT like Harry Potter. I learned that after three books worth of Negi’s magic sneeze that blows girl’s dresses off and all the other accidentally-seeing-middle-school-girls-naked jokes. Gushering nose-bleeds and the most-important girl character, Asuna, constantly ending up standing in front of the older instructor she has a crush on stark naked soon convinced me that Japanese humor and sense of adventure are very different from their American counterparts.
Negi Springfield is the little guy in the middle… Of course he’s the teacher.
The students in this ten-year-old teacher’s class are a diverse group of girls. One is a deadly ninja. Another is a dead-shot gunslinger. A third is an expert swordswoman who fights with a katana in each hand. Several of them wield magic like their teacher.
The adventures in this multi-book story are filled to the brim with magical battles, martial arts, demon summoning, Japanese festivals, and the many ups and downs of young love.
There are lots of instances of girls losing their clothing. Some of it happens in Japanese outdoor baths and spas. Some happens by magic. And some happens completely by accident.
Though, the writer seems to focus on it an awful lot.
Ken Akamatsu has been at the business of creating very similar manga stories for many years. He started in 1994 with A.I. Love You.
He has written three series since.
Love Hina came before Negima!
UQ Holder! is his current manga series.
So, I love the artwork of Ken Akamatsu. And it isn’t necessarily the story that makes it so good. The stories are chaotic and full of things that make very little sense to American sensibilities. And I do like artfully done naked girls. But the real attraction for me is something that I can’t quite name.
I just know it is there. Ken Akamatsu definitely has it. Whatever it is. (Maybe it IS naked girls?)
Chances are… I could wear a foolish grin, like a Johnny Mathis Moon in the sky…
I could waltz… all alone in a dark room, never seizing on the chances to fly…
But there’s a time… meant to let the summer in…
And love songs… all make me wonder… Why?
Silly, I know. But silly and surreal is how I go, how I deal with the time. A song in my head leads to rhythm and metaphor and rhyme. And it takes me from old winter and the waning of the moon… to the silly month of June… And my dancing shoes were never quite so spry.
Chances are… if you really read this, you will know I am depressed.
My life is all unfairly messed.
And I barely can get dressed…
To go tripping cross the floor, dancing awkwardly toward the door, ’cause I’m in need of so much more.
But in a poem I find it… the very reason that I rhymed it… like the crooning song that’s stuck in my old head…
I will catch it, and I’ll bind it, like a fool who hopes you’ll find it, and the treasure will be revealed before we’re dead…
Chances are… that you hear that silly tune, as it reels across the page in silent spread. And the song will slowly stop, as I dance a final hop, and the answer is brightly shining in my head.
As a family, we play Dungeons and Dragons. Well, all of us, that is, except Mom. It’s basically against her religion and means the Jehovah’s Witness version of Hell for us. (Which is a spiritual condition where God refuses to talk to you, and play checkers with you, and then you die.) But let’s not discuss that here. I don’t need her to start thinking about reasons to divorce me. She accepts that it is a thing we do and like and keep mostly to ourselves. (I just rolled a 15 on a twenty-sided dice to succeed in that charm-enemy spell and avert disaster.)
As a family we have chosen to use the Eberron campaign available from Wizards of the Coast, the company that now publishes all official D&D stuff. It is a medieval/Renaissance sort of setting where magic is every-day common and takes the place of science in the real world.
I get to be game master and creator of the basic plots and stories. My three kids, Dorin, Henry, and the Princess are the player characters who interact with the world and determine the outcomes of the adventures through the rolling of Dungeon Dice.
I want to assure you at this point that my eldest son does not actually have a watermelon for a head. Maybe metaphorically, but he is easily the smartest and most likely to be a leader of my three kids. His character routinely pursues ideas like replacing his arms with magical metal arms, or grafting additional arms on his body. He has chosen the phoenix to be the symbol on his personal flag and coat of arms, but his artifice roll to create the magical ship’s flag turned out to make it look more like a pigeon that someone set on fire. (You have to watch out for those rolls of “1” on a 20-sided dice.)
Henry, my middle child, likes to play a halfling. The little hobbit-like character is the one called upon to disarm all the tiger traps and poison-arrow traps that line the dungeon tunnels ahead. He is a problem-solver in real life. And he wants to be an architect. In D&D games, he is often the first one to run up to danger and look it in the blood-shot eye.
Every D&D group needs a wizard or some other magic-user. Ours has Mira, the Kalashtar mind- wizard. My daughter’s character can use mind powers to float in the air, pick up and throw things with her mind alone, and figure out ways to do things using as little physical effort as possible. Oh, and she loves to eat chocolate. (The character, I mean… or is it actually the daughter? I don’t know. It is sometimes hard to tell them apart.)
In our last adventure, we went to investigate the evil doings going in Evernight Keep, a castle in the country of Aundair. We were able to not only defeat the evil mind-flayer, Dr. Zorgo, who had turned everyone into golems in the castle, but also to win the castle and the title of the Duke of Passage. Now that they own a castle, my little band of adventurers will have to defend it, and I know of one old game master who will definitely throw all kinds of evil challenges at them.
Rowan, Iowa… Not the place I was born, but the place where I got to be a stupid kid, and have the lessons of the good and god-fearing life hammered into my head hard enough to make a dent and make it stay with me for more than half a century. I got to go to grade school there. I learned to read there, especially in Miss Mennenga’s third and fourth grade class. Especially in that old copy of Treasure Island with the N.C, Wyeth illustrations in it, the one Grandma Aldrich kept in the upstairs closet in their farm house. I got to see my first naked girl there. I learned a lot of things about sex from my friends there, and none of them were true. I played 4-H softball there, and made a game-saving catch in center field… in the same game where my cousin Bob hit the game-winning home run. But those were things kids did everywhere. It didn’t make me special. There was no real magic in it.
Being a farm-kid’s kid taught me the importance of doing your chores, every day and on time. If you didn’t do them, animals could get sick, animals could die, crops could be spoiled, the chickens could get angry and petulant and peck your hands when you tried to get the eggs. Cows could get grumpy and kick the milk bucket. Cats could vow revenge if you didn’t direct a spray or two at their little faces as they lined up to watch you milk the cows. And you never knew for sure what a vengeful cat might do to you later, as cats were evil. They might jump on the keyboard during your piano recital. They might knock the turkey stuffing bowl off the top of the dryer when Mom and Grandma and several aunts were cooking Thanksgiving Dinner. And I know old black Midnight did that on purpose because he got to snatch some off the floor before it could be reached by angry aunts with brooms and dustpans. And all of it was your fault if it all led back to not doing your chores, and not doing them exactly right.
But, even though we learned responsibility and work ethic from our chores, that was not the real home-town magic either. I wasn’t technically a real farm kid. Sure, I picked up the eggs in the chicken house at Grandpa and Grandma Aldrich’s farm more than once. And I did, in fact, help with milking machines and even milking cows by hand and squirting cats in the faces at Uncle Donny’s farm. I walked beans, going up and down the rows to pull and chop weeds out of the bean fields at Uncle Larry’s farm. I drove a tractor at Great Uncle Alvin’s farm. But I didn’t have to do any of those things every single day. My mother and my father both grew up on farms. But we lived in town. So, my work ethic was probably worth only a quarter of what the work ethic of any of my friends in school was truly worth. I was a bum kid by comparison. Gary G. and Kevin K, both real farm kids and older than me, explained this to me one day behind the gymnasium with specific examples and fists.
Being a farm kid helped to forge my character. But that was really all about working hard, and nothing really to do with magic.
I truly believe the real magic to be found in Rowan, Iowa, my home town, was the fact that it was boring. It was a sleepy little town, that never had any real event… well, except maybe for a couple of monster blizzards in the 60’s and 70’s, and the Bicentennial parade and tractor pull on Main Street in 1976, and a couple of costume contests in the 1960’s held in the Fire Station where I had really worked hard on the costumes, a scarecrow one year, and an ogre the next, where I almost won a prize. But nothing that changed history or made Rowan the center of everything.
And therein lies the magic. I had to look at everything closely to find the things and strategies that would take me to the great things and places where I wanted to end up. I learned to wish upon a star from Disney movies. I learned about beauty of body and soul from the girls that I grew up with, most of them related. And I invented fantastical stories with the vivid imagination I discovered lurking in my own stupid head. I embarrassed Alicia Stewart by telling everyone that I could prove she was a Martian princess, kidnapped and brought to Earth by space pirates that only I knew how to defeat. And I learned to say funny things and make people laugh… but in ways that didn’t get me sent to the principal’s office in school. Yes, it was the magic of my own imagination. And boring Iowa farm towns made more people with magic in them than just me. John Wayne was one. Johnny Carson was one also. And have you heard of Elijah Wood? Or the painter Grant Wood? Or the actress Cloris Leachman?
Yep. We were such stuff as dreams were made on in small towns in Iowa. And that is real magic.
Posting every day keeps the imaginary writing muscles toned and renews my basic energy levels. But it also becomes a chore on certain days. Like today. The weather has got me down with arthritis woes. Typing like this is it not as easy as it should be. And when I have to labor at it to make the paragraphs flow, sometimes I just turn it all into rambling babbling. I spin my mental wheels and get nowhere.
I can use this post to tell you, however, that I have now started a new work-in-progress. I have already pounded out the first four thousand words of The Wizard in His Keep.
This is the final story in the arc of the character Milt Morgan. This story has been gestating in my brain since 1995. Though, if I am honest, it began with fantasies I had back in fifth grade. The main character, Milt Morgan, is half me and half the other Mike from our gang back in Rowan in the 1960’s. Back when Mike and Michael were sometimes good friends and sometimes the brains behind evil plans and terrible tricks. He supplied the devious know-how, and I provided the creative spark that lit the schemes on fire.
But this story is advanced to the computer age.
Milt Morgan is 50% me and 50% my best nemesis, Mike Bridges
In 1996, Milt Morgan was a 34-year-old video game designer living a double life in a high-tech, state-of-the-art computer lab. It is then that he mysteriously kidnaps the three children of his child-hood friend’s sister and takes them away to a magical world that only two people in the entire world have the keys to. Milt is the Wizard. The other Key-Master is Daniel Quilp, the Necromancer. A battle for the soul of the world must take place, and Daisy, Johnny, and Mortie Brown are a part of it.
Anyway, the words are beginning to pile up again. And again I have made something out of nothing.
Johnny Brown in Purple Glammis (the Magical Kingdom)
The book I am talking about in this 3-year-old post is now available on Amazon.
Catch a Falling Star 
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
Some books come along telling a story that has to be taken seriously in ways that don’t make sense in any normal way. The Alchemist is one of those books.
What is an alchemist, after all?
An alchemist uses the medieval forms of the art of chemistry to transmute things, one thing becoming another thing.
Coelho in this book is himself an alchemist of ideas. He uses this book to transmute one idea into another until he digs deep enough into the pile of ideas to finally transmute words into wisdom.
There is a great deal of wisdom in this book, and I can actually share some of it here without spoiling the story.
Here are a few gemstones of wisdom from the Alchemist’s treasure chest;
“It’s the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting…” (p.13)
“It’s the simple things in life that are the most extraordinary; only wise men are able to understand them.” (p.17)
“All things are one. And, when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.” (p.24)
“And when he had gone only a short distance, he realized that, while they were erecting the stall, one of them had spoken Arabic and the other Spanish. And they had understood each other perfectly well. There must be a language that doesn’t depend on words, the boy thought.” (p.45)
All of these quotes from the book, as you can see, come from the first third of the book. There are many more treasures to be found in this book. I should not share them with you here. Just as the main character of the story learns, you have to do the work for yourself. But this book is not only an enjoyable read, but a map for how you can execute your own journey towards your “Personal Legend”. In fact, you may find that the book tells you not only how to go about making a dream come true, but, if you are already on that journey successfully, it tells you what things you are already doing right.
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