Gardyloo #14
/Not every magical moment has to be a trick.
Extreme tipping on a late-nite Denny's visit.
Part of me hopes the waitress just picked it up, pulled it flat, then went and bought a can of Mr. Pibb with it.
I was excited to find out my insomnia technique from the last post is not a "just me" sort of thing. Rob Dobson sent along a link to this article which identifies a similar idea called the Cognitive Shuffle. It doesn't have the stream of consciousness element which is what I associate with pre-sleep thoughts, instead it's a technique that involves thinking of random objects spat out by an iphone app. I don't know if this more-structured form would work better or worse for me, but his understanding of why it works is basically identical to my hypothesis of why my technique worked for me.
I've been told The Magic Cafe is deleting any threads about The Jerx, Volume One that show up, despite the fact the book doesn't mention that place or Steve Brooks (nor does this site, very much, for that matter). I'm pretty sure it's some lackey who thinks it would upset Steve if a thread about something I did was left up. I've convinced myself that Steve is in no way that corny to get worked up about the mention of my site. But maybe he is? Who knows.
I'm not bringing this up to complain about it. I'm just bringing it up to tell you not to bother.
I think they think I'll be upset if they censor mentions of the site. I'm not. It makes me happy.
Similarly, I think people think I'm bothered if they talk shit about this site or the ideas on it. I'm not. I'm delighted by it. I guess I might be bothered if one of my magic heroes was doing the shit talking, but instead I get emails from those heroes telling me how much they like the site.
I started this site to propose some ideas that I thought were counter to common magical thinking. And to critique those sorts of ideas which I think lead to a lot of hacky, dull, uninspired magic and that have fostered the perception of magic as being populated by unoriginal, boring, creeps. So when people send me emails saying "this person is talking trash about you" and then send me a link to him performing, I think they expect me to get upset and tear into the guy. But the video is always someone in the mold of what I find terrible about magic. It's always that unoriginal, boring, creep performing hacky, dull, uninspired magic. I didn't expect that type of person to enjoy this site. So I'm not mad that he doesn't. If he did like it I'd probably put my cards back in the card case, put the card case into my ostrich skin card clip from Dan and Dave, put the clipped deck inside a change-bag to vanish it, put the change bag inside a square circle to make it disappear, then kick the square circle off a fucking cliff. Oh, and I'd set fire to my laptop because clearly I don't know how to use it.
You think you've had a bad day? I just realized I'm too dumb to understand the tweets of Chris Ramsay and Daniel Madison.
