Okay, Mickey, you have said you have confidence in science to the point of not believing in God… at least not the Christian imaginary sky-friend with the white beard and bad temper. But your use of magic words then makes you a hypocrite.
What? Magic words, you say?
You heard me. You use words that give you special powers. And you believe in them like some kind of anti-science religious zealot.
Thank you, Bruce Rydberg, for giving me this useful meme.
Okay, you caught me. There are certain words that do have super powers. I know because I have used them. (And Science is not the opposite of faith. Just ask Heisenberg.)
I first suspected that magic words really existed back in college. I read the book Dune by Frank Herbert. (Followed by every other book he wrote. I became a Dune-dream believer.) Remember the part where Paul uses the Bene Gesserit fear chant to get through the psychological test given to him by the Bene Gesserit witch? You don’t? You haven’t read it? I sometimes forget other people aren’t hopeless Trekkies and Sci-fi nerds too. I do know, at least in my head, that most people have real lives outside of their own heads. But I did develop a magic word to deal with times of stress and fear.
Really, Mickey? You chant this out loud when you’re nervous?
I say it in my head over and over to focus my spirit on what is truly important. Never out loud. I used this word to get through my wedding day in 1995 when a blizzard in Iowa prevented all of my non-Texas family at the time from attending. I used it the day my first son was born when the delivery had to be accomplished by c-section due to heartbeat irregularities. I used it the day an irate student came down the hallway towards me with metal ninja throwing stars, saying he was going to kill a specific student that was hiding in the History teacher’s classroom. Yes, it helped me think and act appropriately during some rather intense times. Sometimes a bit of nonsense injected into the middle of a tense situation makes all the difference in the world.
But that isn’t the only magic word that you made up, is it?
No, there’s the word “Paffooney” which you may have seen before in this blog. It stands for a picture of my own design put together with words I have actually written myself. Remember this?
It still works. I tested it myself this morning. It gives you a look at my artwork posted on this blog without risking the danger of going back through all my old posts and accidentally reading something that makes your head melt.
But, really, are your magic words only words you made up yourself?
No. I think the word “Truth” is a magic word. It can be used or misused for both good and evil.
This is very likely the magic word we need to defeat the orange-faced monkey we elected president. There are lots of words that have immense power. And all you have to do is believe in it a little bit… and use it intelligently.
Catch a Falling Star 
The Be-Bop Beat of Mickey’s Brain
Truthfully, when I look back at the string of posts in the picket fence of this daily blog, I fail to see the overall map of it in any semblance of pattern or order. Honestly, I did not set out to be purposefully wacky.
I did, however, set out to be purposefully surreal. I mean it, I consciously put bizarrely dissimilar things together in an attempt to find parallels and connections in unlike things because, not only is it funny and surprising, but is a comic act that serves to keep the mind nimble and never numb. I do think quite a lot. And I try to see connections between things where others wouldn’t. For instance, the Coppertone girl with her bare butt and Bullwinkle with his unicycle are both being threatened in a way that is both comic, and taking advantage of their inherent image of innocence. Neither will lose anything by it. The girl stands to brown her pale white behind in the sun, while Bullwinkle will probably land on his head and it will make a decent cushion to preserve him because of it’s empty and rubbery qualities.
I must also admit to a bit of the old telling of stretchers, the misrepresentation of the truth, the loquacious layer-onner of lies. Not Trumpian lies that land on you like elephants dropped like bombs out of B-52’s. Instead, fictions that entertain and elucidate. It is the most likely reason I keep saying connecting words and phrases like “truthfully” and “honestly” and “I mean it”. Those are words that liars love.
Yes fiction writers like me tell little white lies.
I have now published my novel Recipes for Gingerbread Children. It is a novel based on real people I have known and loved and listened to. It is about an old German woman, a survivor of WWII concentration camps, who loves to tell stories to children and bake gingerbread cookies, especially gingerbread men. It features a pair of teenage nudist girls who believe in going completely naked whenever you are indoors, even if you are in someone else’s house. It features Nazis, both in flashback and ghostly forms. It also features fairies from the Hidden Kingdom of Tellosia, a fairy kingdom filled with little three-inch tall magical people living under our very noses. And it has a werewolf in it, though admittedly a very young one. It is a comedy with its requisite sad parts, and it is definitely an example of surrealism. It is also full of lies… err, I mean fiction.
But the real purpose of this supposedly be-bop brain fart in blog-post form is not so much to explain my blog (because how do you explain a blog that goes from Flashbacks and Foobah to telling about Madman Trump to Another novel part… #37 to Centaurs to a book and movie review, to this eccentric and eclectic thing, which probably exists more to make alliteration jokes than anything else in the most musical beat I can bang out?) but to prove that I do often think about thinking and how things fit together and what it all means… and how to write a run-on sentence that adds to the effect rather than simply annoys. And, yeah, I’m doing that. And it feels like a good thing to do.
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Filed under blog posting, commentary, foolishness, humor, imagination, metaphor, Paffooney, self portrait, strange and wonderful ideas about life, surrealism
Tagged as goofiness, humor, justification for blogging, Metacognition