FULL BLEED: AT THE TOUCH OF A WORLD THAT IS OLDER

Wrote this one yesterday, didn't get to posting it then.

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Time to write. Also time to watch kittens, under four months of age, maybe only three. This is not a workable plan, not if I have to write anything important. They're treating the keyboard as a small chunk of bridge that they need to cross on a regular basis, so I have to lift it away from them to prevent gobbledygook. Right.

So I guess I can write one of these instead.

Let's talk about something not important. Maybe not even real. Let's talk about magic a little. Oh wait, it is important. Maybe the most important thing we can even discuss. The fun part is we've already done it. If you've even read to this point, we've engaged in a small piece of magic. You get to the end and maybe it'll even be a big one.

You all know what I'm talking about, right? The fact not that I can type these words from outside of Folsom, California and then can be read anywhere in the world or even out in space, should you wish to spend your time in space reading this blog instead of looking out at the heavens made manifest. Not even that I'm typing this stuff on a device that weights a couple of pounds and can access a fragmentary though substantial chunk of all human knowledge if I just started typing what I wanted to read about and skipped past the AI summary. No, not even that, though it is remarkable, even if it's being dulled and walled and ultimately poisoned by billionaires and wannabe billionaires.

It's more fundamental than that. Way more.

It's that I can punch in this sequence of keys and produce longer sequences of symbols making words and taking those words and making sentences. Sometimes those sentences even add up to a coherent paragraph. If I apply myself, they can get all the way to a story. Maybe even a novel. Or so I've heard. It's been awhile. I might not be able to pull that one off. But other people can.

And what's more, those strings of symbols, whether they're printed on dead plant matter or glowing as volatile phosphors or excited electrons on a screen, can be decoded by another being of intelligence and read as an experience. Now, there's no guarantee of a 100% transfer from the writer to the reader, or that the experience is pre-determined either. You gotta accept that part of it. Part of the magic, I guess. Or a series of design flaws cascading into something not at all intended by anyone. But let's hope there's enough overlap to keep making this worthwhile.

That's it. That's magic. I know it's tough to see this in that light all the time. We're inundated with words over and over all the goddamn time, whether written or spoken. Yak yak yak. We've managed to make the miraculous and magical not only routine but boring and ultimately exhausting. That's okay, it's happened to a lot of things. Many things. Most things. Tough to see the wonder in a thing when you're absolutely up to your chin in them, and so much of it is nasty or just setting up a diatribe from a certain agenda or what have you.

Doesn't make it ultimately any less miraculous if you can step back from it for a time, time enough to see it and how we went from cuneiform to writing with light or broadcasting via microwaves or what have you. We can take ASCII (yes, I know there's other code sets, but that's the one I'm most familiar with) and use those 256 characters to describe any human experience or fiction or idea. Granted, they're not all gonna be good. But you are going to find ones that break your heart or open up your head.

And that's what magic is supposed to do, yeah? It can't all be conjurations of the numinous or forces from beyond the veil, the turning of lead into gold or speaking with the dead. The magic is the miracle that we're here and we can do things and communicate in this moment, and not only that, but receive communication from persons who've been dead for thousands of years. I'm not sure I hold a lot of hope in work from the now reaching the future. There's so much of it, we've gone all Time Wave Zero on things and cranked up the output ratio so that keeping any of it around, particularly on magnetic or electronic storage media, is not simply a matter of preservation but collation or classification. Gotta know what you're looking for in order to find it. And now there's so much of everything that unless you're very plugged-in or already on a mailing list, when a new thing that nobody knows about already comes out, it's already lost. There's not even churn. It's more like an event horizon. But yeah, an industry titan puts out something and everyone will talk about it. So I guess language is a miracle but market-based discourse is, ah, a bad miracle maybe.

We might be out here shouting; maybe nobody's gonna hear it in a hundred years or fifty or ten. But we go on in the hope that we will be heard, even if only by ourselves.

Magic in that, too. Something from nothing. Effort transformed. I don't know, maybe that's not enough for you. Sometimes it's not enough for me, either. Gotta push through that gloom and see the shining beneath it, even if it's dark but.

I was hoping to get to talking about my recent re-read of Hellblazer, a comic which had a big impact on me in the later years of the eighties and into the nineties. It's not gonna happen this week. Maybe I can start it over the weekend.

In the meantime, I need to get somewhere and get some pages going. It looks like recent events are going to transform my schedule so that Wednesdays and Thursdays are now effectively the weekend and I'll be working all those other days to get what needs doing done. Currently on page 170 or so of Missing Pieces. Should be well past by the next writing break which'll be after Tuesday next. It's going well and it's not. I still wonder if I'm any good at this whatsoever, but magic being mostly attitude, I need to start acting like it is. I'm told that I hold my work to a particular standard, but I wonder what that actually means for readability and clarity. If anyone sees what I'm seeing when I'm coming up with it, making these choices unconsciously, for a long time and in sequences I cannot exactly predict.

Until then.