Part of me feels like a perpetual "circus act", like I'm quite literally going out here on stage "every night" to perform bigger and more fabulous tricks for a stunned, applauding audience. Besides Winona, I always hope there is someone else out there watching and enjoying the show.

Years and years ago as a teenager, I had so little but my hopes were so huge. It's not wrong "to hope", when we don't know any better and hope is all we've got. There's a certain "magic" in anticipation, but I invested my capital in "the wrong things". I used to think that somehow "projecting emotion" on the universe was enough "to get results", as if "that was it's own kind of magic". The intuitive stirring of wind on a pond's surface, the raising of a praying mantis's finger.

My concept was that "I could get to heaven" by WILLING it, believing that a magical existence lay just beyond the prison bars of life. But there is a practical distance between "magical heaven" and then "what you can practically expect" on this earth. To some, a concept of heaven would be standing, incorporeal, in pure, white light with the equivalent of 1000 cc's of pain-killing medicine lighting up every single nerve ending "like a Christmas tree", "everything louder than everything else" in intensity. To others, heaven would be a tropical paradise on an island somewhere. . . . . . but they would still be rooted very much down here in "the world of flesh", and "needing to go to the bathroom" if it even occurs to them to think about it "in that way".

My mistake was doing crazy, irrational things reaching for "a magical conception of reality" that never existed-- getting my idea from books, movies, and rock songs-- instead of working rationally "and with commonsense" toward a realizable goal where the relief after putting in the hard-scrabble discipline "is it's own kind of magic".

In other words, I was a failed magician. . . . . and I beat my head "bloody" against the bars while others, particularly the girl I remember back there who I loved, looked at me "like I was stupid". When it comes to love & dating, the teenage ideal is supposed to be a world "of casualness and smoothness" and here I was making a repeated fool out of myself. His stunts would backfire, he'd slip and fall, he'd only embarrass her with his endearing stupidity that ultimately endeared himself to no one, but only to his own flailing fool of a misbegotten clown.

A man, in order to impress a girl, has to be effective.

And here I am, all these years later, plying in "magic" of a different sort. Part of me feels as if I must earn the wonderment and joy of that 15 year-old girl back there, as if I'm a magician waving a wand over a top hat with a bit of fatherly stage patter that suggests mystery and pulling a white rabbit out of a hat to give to the lil' Lady-Bug and let her take home, and imagine is her baby for the day she settles down and becomes a very sweet mother. And she'll tell her daughter "to understand" when a boy tries really, really hard.