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Magic (ooohh!) I believe in magic. Now, I don't mean fairies and spells and such carry on. I guess a part of my mind is still open to such things, but, pretentious as I am, I'm an adult... What I believe is that places, items, people, have exactly as much magic as you choose to put into, or take from, them. By this I don't mean any of that personal or sympathetic magic stuff (bloody Morrison wankery), what I mean is you get from things what you take from them - including magic. I have a fair few examples from my own life, but the best (read: easiest to articulate) would probably be Wellington. When I went down a while back, my life in Auckland wasn't up to terribly much. I was flatting with a person I hated more and more every day, I was getting fairly fed up with most of my friends, I hadn't worked in a while, and walking the streets of this ugly, soul-destroying city was starting to take it's toll on what little mental well being I had left. So anyway, on a whim, I hopped into a car, and went down to the city of my scorched birth. I went with one of my best friends. When down there, I hooked up with another one of my best friends, who I had barely seen since she had moved there years ago. I met some people through my travelling companion - Cool people; artists, living their dreams, rather than just talking about them, as did the philosophasters of my gray and sucking home town. The city was beautiful and open, rather than the cramped, over crowded mess I'm used to. People walking everywhere calmly, instead of impatiently forcing their way through crowds. I was going new and exiting places with new and exiting people - Something I haven't done in far, far too long. Even the people down there that I already knew, I exclusively liked - a far cry form the steaming herd of people up here that I tolerate, or am frustrated by. I left the city of the beautiful extremely reluctantly, vowing that I'd be back soon, and permanently, too. Wellington was magical to me - The place, the people, the things I saw and did. People were putting the magic of themselves into that city, and I was taking it. I can't really describe the feeling of hope, the feeling of happiness that Wellington gave me - It showed me that there was something better. Life was not exclusively negative. Now, was I reading too much in to Wellington? Hell yes. Is it all as great as I make out? Of course not. Went down a few months later, and, because of a whole slew of different (or indifferent) circumstances, it wasn't as magical. However, magic is where you find it, where you take it from, and I found it there that week. Oh hell, you want this sort of carry on, go and read ODDCULT, a column where a young man named Alistair Pulling says this sort of thing much better than I can. There's not much of it (I think he lost the impetus) but what there is gets at what I mean very nicely... --Apathy Jack |
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