This morning, I was cleaning out a closet when I came across a familiar magic lamp. I rubbed it with a clean cloth, and blue smoke billowed out of the fire spout.
“Ah, hello again, Master Mickey.”
“Gene? You should not still be here. I already used my wishes.”
“That is true, Master Mickey, but I find myself back in your possession again.”
“How did that happen?”
“Well, the first new master I found did not wish nearly as wisely as you.”
“Oh, how so?”
“Well, apparently old Smedley Pinchpenny wanted to be extremely wealthy. So, he wished it would be possible for Donald Trump to be President again.”
“So, you made it possible.”
“Yes, I did. And then he wished that it was possible for gold coins to rain from above right where Smedley was at that moment… In his kitchen.”
“So, you made that possible too.”
“Yes. And when he didn’t see anything happening, he asked why. I told him that he only made the wish for it to be possible. He didn’t actually wish for it to happen. So, he got mad and wished for the kitchen to be filled with gold coins.”
“So, it rained coins on his head and that killed him.”
“Well, you know that the kitchen held more than two tons of gold. It kinda squished him before he realized what was happening. When his wife opened the kitchen door, the magic lamp flowed out on top of the gold coins. She was happy as soon as I explained about the three new wishes. She wished for all the gold to be transferred into her bank account. I explained it would have to be transformed into numbers to be wired into her bank account. She told me to count every single coin and put that all in the bank. So, I counted them as I made each one disappear and placed a penny in her account for each one. It was a tidy little sum of cash.”
“She was upset when she checked her account, wasn’t she?”
“Extremely. She said for her final two wishes that she wanted two million dollars and a handsome man to replace her pancake of a husband.”
“So, how did she die?”
“The handsome bankrobber skidded to a stop in his getaway car right in front of her house. He tossed her the satchel with the two million in it and told her he needed her to be his human shield. She could share in the loot if they survived. The police skidded to a stop and returned fire when the robber tried to shoot his way out of trouble.”
“So, who got the lamp?”
“The couple’s twelve-year-old son got home from school at that moment. I explained about the three wishes. He wished his parents alive again.”
“So, what did the zombies do?”
“They started out eating the cops… you know, their brains. Then when they came for the boy to eat his brain, he wished loudly that no one had made any bad wishes that day.”
“So, the zombies became parents again and the robber and the cops disappeared?”
“That’s right. The only good wish of the day… up to that point.”
“What was the third wish?”
“He wished the lamp would go back where it came from.”
“Ah, I see…”
“Mickey, you do make good wishes, but you can’t use the same three as before. What are your new three wishes?”
I knew right away how careful I needed to be. But I didn’t waste any time.
“I wish you would make it possible for as many of us as feasable to survive the climate crisis with perseverence and creativity. I wish it will be possible for as many of us as is reasonable to survive Trump’s second administration without suffering too much. And I wish you and your family have a nice Christmas in the Bahamas.”
“Mickey, you are a good wish-maker.” He disappeared with his lamp in a puff of blue smoke.
Catch a Falling Star 
Living in the Spider Kingdom
Life seems to be getting harder and harder. And I realize that a big part of that perception is the fact that my health is deteriorating quickly. This is a humor blog, but it has been getting more and more serious and more and more grim as the grim reaper becomes more and more a central character in my own personal story.
My perception of reality, however, is best explained by a passage in a novel that spoke to me in college. It comes from the novel, the Bildungsroman by Thomas Mann called Der Zauberberg, in English, The Magic Mountain. In the scene, Hans Castorp is possibly freezing to death, and he hallucinates a pastoral mountainside scene where children are happily playing in the sunshine. Possibly Heaven? But maybe not. As he goes into a stone building and finds a passage down into the ground, he sees wrinkled, ugly, horrible hags gathered around a child’s corpse, eating it. And this vision explains the duality at the center of the meaning of life.
For every good thing, there is an equal and opposite bad thing that balances it out. There is no understanding what perfection and goodness mean without knowing profanity and evil. Just as you can’t understand hot without cold nor light without darkness. And you don’t get to overturn the way it is. You try your hardest to stay on the heads side of the coin knowing that half the time life falls to tails.
So, what good does it do me to think about and write about things like this? Well, it makes for me a sort of philosophical gyroscope that spins and dances and helps me keep my balance in the stormy sea of daily life. I deal with hard things with humor and a sense of literary irony. I make complex metaphors that help me throw a rope around the things that hurt me.
We are living now in the Spider Kingdom. Hard times are here again. The corrupt and corpulent corporate spiders are spinning the many webs we are trapped in. As metaphorical as it is, we wouldn’t have the government we currently have and be suffering the way we are if that weren’t true.
But no bad thing nor no good thing lasts forever. The wheel goes round and round. The top of the wheel reaches the bottom just as often as the bottom returns to the top. So, it will all pass if we can only hold out long enough.
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