i write, in part, because i want people to read my words and go "ooh ahh!" and tell me how wonderful my writing is. i also write because i think of things that i believe are worth saying; i believe my opinions and ideas about the way the world is can have a good effect in the world. people can read my ideas and perhaps be inspired or guided to do good things. and i write because i have to. it's my nature.

i do not write so that i can serve as a place for small-minded people to demonstrate how very little that matter. i do not write, and then publish to blogs (for example) so that someone with nothing of value to say can use my words as an opportunity to spew self-hating crap. but this is what happens at times. it's part of the territory. on my own websites, i can delete their garbage and block them as users, and on other people's sites, i can just ignore them (and frequently enjoy seeing myself defended by others; that is very nice).

i don't write for money (dammit) or fame or to make up for all the ickiness in life.

jimbus jones
thought of himself as a badass
used it as an excuse
to walk on the feet
of life, never an excuse me
forever an elbow to his neighbor

Today is the 5th Anniversary of the Day I was Crushed by a Woman Unable. I do not expect this to become a national holiday unless, of course, I achieve the glory and status that renders every moment of my life, significant or otherwise, worthy of celebration -- or notoriety. We'll see.

But today is the 5th Anniversary, that anniversary, five years ago today. I believe it was also a Tuesday; I thought about checking the date on iCal, but that would be really pathetic, and I'm obsessing quite enough as it is. To get spot-on accurate about the dates would be just too much. Bad enough the damage that was done. She had options, choices of what action she felt she had to take, almost all of which would have hurt me. Some would have hurt less than others; perhaps I should assume it could have been even worse. After the fact, when it was far too late for anything but what was done, I found that the one thing she could have given me was closure, just enough so I would not go totally fucking nuts. And although I have not gone TFN, I've gone close enough. Although it may simply be that she -- the idealized on-a-pedestal glowing golden memory of her, the She that has nothing to do with any reality either of us lived through -- provides some good writing hooks; if I poke at what was once an injury long enough, maybe I can recall some of the pain, or a memory of the pain, or something I can now pretend was terrible pain only because of the paucity of true emotion in my life; if I poke long enough to get the words flowing, I can stir up an idea of pain that gets the voice inside chattering.

time is moving past, quickly, a sneak attack on this moment, this right here right now, turn and blink stupidly and now is no more, turn and blink stupidly, you are no more, a new creature stands here now and in turn, turns and blinks stupidly, and so you all tumble down into the refuse pit of lost nows forever falling away just as you blink and understand...

"holy shit, that car's going to hit me!"

blink stupidly, or it might be a tear, the only one you'll have time for, blink once and before another, before the breath needed to scream, your prediction is manifested in pain that probably is not real because this is not real, cars do not aim at you straight at you like in a movie, blink into pain that is silent and everything else that happens is pure melodrama until at last the drugs and shock rub away consciousness and a form of sleep provides an excuse not to be here for a while.

and the children weep, mommy mommy

your ex gets a call and comes to take the kids to his place even though grandma's anger and fear needs the comfort of these little ones, but all of that is happening in now, time and energy and thought and feeling, now, waiting with open fangs to chew you when you wake, claws and bitter hard teeth (kiss me my sweet lovely, it lies) when you wake back into now but that is now and you are hidden safely ... for now ...

The night was cloudless; the streetlamps tinted the world yellow-orange. The moon, three-quarters full, was rising between the branches of the trees lining the street. The air was cool; the muffled sounds of television was dim enough to be ignored. The college kids several houses down were not in, and Tera was glad for that; no hip-hop being shared with the rest of the neighborhood, like it or not. A night for stillness and concentration. A night to try a very new way of doing things.

Tera could scarcely believe she was actually going to do this; she was so unconvinced, she refused to even think about it. She turned herself over to the instructions that had come to her, not thinking of where they had originated. She listened, as she had been doing all evening, to the singing inside. Voices and words and music that changed greatly but never ceased

She stood, still and breathing rapidly, her arm still raised, the sense of power no longer with her, the voices no longer shouting, the urgency now removed. She stood, unmoving, unthinking, incapable of thought that did not terrify her, and she stood and listened to the song which was now the quiet crooning of a voice that desired nothing more for her than peace. Rest, healing, peace. She dropped her arm to her side; her vision returned to a focus that was on the sidewalk at her feet, the branch in her hand, the coming of night. Moving carefully, hoping not to jar herself into thought, she turned around and walked back home.

By the time she had reached her house, she was in the process of talking herself into believing that her eyes had played tricks on her, that the boy had merely dropped, feet first, from the branch, that he had never been in no danger and that her scream of "No!" had perhaps frightened him more than the fall. The drop. Her mind was quite willing to believe that story, but when she tried to tell it to herself, to convince herself further, the sound of those words created a horrible clashing screech with the song being sung from the place inside her. The song was telling a different story, and her desire to be just an ordinary person whose eyes had played a trick on her in gloom of late dusk fought against the insistence that she admit to the truth of what she had done. The fight was not a fair one, not for her, who, whatever her faults and shortcomings, was an honest person.

Her tears frightened her. She had not cried this hard for her parents, and the moment that thought came to her mind, she immediately told herself this was some displaced, delayed reaction, the shock of the attack on her tree simply a door for the grief for her parents. She knew there was some truth in that, simple and obvious as the psychology was, but there was more than that. She knew there was more, but, and this was what frightened her about her tears, about the crying that had come after so many years, from a time long before her parents had been taken so quickly from her, from a time when she was not aware that these kinds of feelings could exist, her tears frightened her because she heard voices somewhere inside her describing the grief she was feeling. Voices inside her, not speaking, not words spoken with clarity

Tera was wielding what she liked to refer as the "magic wand." Far from magic, an ordinary tv remote, not even with a lot of the fancy extras that come with fancy televisions and other gizmos, the wand did allow her to control the huge set she had inherited from her parents when they'd died, one of the few appliances she had kept. She sat curled up in the other big piece of furniture, the overstuffed couch that was so comfortable, she occassionally considered moved a fridge next to it and setting up camp for weeks. So far she had resisted that temptation, and she usually resisted the temptation to spend hours half-awake with the vast screen providing mild entertainment and minor outrages.

But it was 6:07 p.m., and that meant the news hour. Wand raised, held in place on her knee, her thumb flicked skillfully through the many evening news programs she watched, flipping from channel to channel, trying to avoid the most inane moments and catch anything that was either news or meaningful. She saw the hour she spent chasing madly through the channels as a game, a challenge: recognize in only a few seconds that one item was fluff, switch to another channel just as they began a piece on the economy, or what the police were doing, or perhaps the spread of a new flu. Click click, up to channel 7, the local CBS station, but they were at some strange pet show (ferrets in costumes, from what she could tell), so another click-click-click, skipping channel 8

The world was so much poorer without it, so she invented magic.

"I suppose," she said to herself that night, as she lay in bed unable to sleep and still not convinced that she had indeed invented magic, "I was somehow the right person, in the right place ... right time ..."

In time she came to understand that she was indeed the right person, but to her dying day, she never knew why. She simply was, and that was all the explanation she ever found for why it was she, after thousands of years of human experience and possibilty, she who achieved the impossible. Before her, magic was a story and a game and a dream. Then one evening, she performed the first magic, and then it was merely a matter of refining the art and teaching others.

Telling, of course, is so much simpler than living. For her, the time before magic was the life of one person, and the time after, a different person, the two connected by little more than memories and flesh. Both lives were full and difficult, rewarding in their different ways, and neither could have existed without the other. And on one warm summer evening, the two lives intersected, both living through a set of experiences that were so thoroughly mundane that no outcome more important than a good night's sleep should have resulted. As it was, she invented magic and changed the world forever.