A Message For Supporters

When I was thirteen, I was a freshman in high school, and I thought I would get myself a Rocky Raccoon and get really good at it and then I’d go out around town and girls would be so charmed by it that they wouldn’t be able to help but drag me to bed with them. 

I wasn’t exactly wrong. If I had gotten a Rocky Raccon and mastered it to the point where it really seemed alive, girls (and women) would have been charmed by it. Where I was mistaken was in thinking that this ability with a puppet would translate into an ounce of poontang. What did I know? I was a young idiot. No woman was going to be seduced by that. More likely I would have ended up like most young puppeters: sticking my dong in the puppet at some point.

As a young kid, I was interested in almost anything even tangentially related to magic: puppetry/ventriloquism, origami, juggling, shadow puppets, optical illusions. 

In my later teen years, my interest narrowed more towards "just" magic. But that was still a pretty broad  category. Certainly my interest was always on close-up magic, but I would spend time learning about escapology, stage illusions, card cheating sleights.

As the decades wore on my interests narrowed further to the point where now I pretty much only care about tricks that are performable in casual situations with a carefree vibe and without having to carry a bunch of shit with me. 

This is a big change from someone who used to contemplate building himself an Interlude illusion despite having no stage-performing aspirations.

I think I imagined I would just keep it in my living room.

The perhaps-obvious, perhaps-counterintuitive observation here is that the more I’ve narrowed my interests in magic: the more I perform, the greater number of tricks I’ve mastered, and the more impact I’ve had with magic on the people in my life.

Why do I mention this now? Because I feel my interests narrowing again and that may affect the types of things I cover in the Keepers monthly magazine.

Digging into the Zero Carry concept and pursuing the Carefree Philosophy has put me in a mindset of eliminating as many props and gimmicks as I can while still keeping a varied, robust repertoire.

I’m really leaning towards two opposite ends of the spectrum: Zero Carry tricks that I can do anywhere without carrying anything special, and Wonder Room tricks where the prop is on permanent display and is something that stands out as an unsual object, for performing when I’m at home.

The fantasy is that if you broke into my home, you would not find drawers and drawers full of secret magic props and gimmicks (like I have now). Instead you would find a small library of magic books, a couple different magic-related displays (one of decks with interesting backstories and one of unusual objects), and that’s it.

That’s the long-term goal. I don’t know if it’s fully achievable. But as an intermediary step, I’d like to limit my “secret” props and gimmicks to stuff that can fit in a shoebox, rather than filling up a large storage cabinet as it does now.

The rest of my repertoire will live in my head or be “housed” in an appropriate location.

So, as I said, this may affect the type of material I cover in Keepers. I’m going to be learning more towards magic that doesn’t require a special object to perform (unless that object can be seen as a display piece). I’ll probably be pulling more from books and videos as well.

I mention it because I know some people prefer when I review “stuff”—like individual tricks you can buy. They don’t mind having a storage bin full of magic. They like collecting physical tricks and objects. And if that’s you, you may feel like you’re getting less value from the monthly magazine and might not want to continue supporting, which is fully understandable. I just wanted to give you the heads-up that that’s the direction I’m feeling pulled in at the moment.

To be clear, this may entirely change as well. I don’t really plan each step along my journey with magic. I just sort of follow my whims. In fact, as I was writing the beginning of this post, I started thinking, “You know, I really should get a Rocky Raccoon. That looks fun.” So who knows. The magazine may fully be spring-puppet related in a few months.