This morning I saw the little bald man who looks like Picasso. Cat Stevens was singing in the background, a recording I assume. The man is not Picasso, of course. No one is Picasso these days. He looks like Picasso. I told him that once and he wrinkled his forehead as though I had insulted him. Perhaps he thought I said "a Picasso", which would be a very different thing, it's true. He hasn't spoken with me since then. He avoids eye contact. This only makes him look more like Picasso to me, since Picasso never looked me in the eye.
It's a world of mundane magic, my boy, and you have to invent your own wonder. The truth is all around us, not hidden at all, but we completely fail to see it. We hardly understand anything very well. We have bad magic, poor medicine, an unimpressive tome of faulty secrets. But we can make fire and we can make water. We can fly big metal birds. We can rumble across the planet in massive herds of strange metal buffalos. There is no magic, no real magic, in all of our fire and smoke, in all this noise and destruction. Our only real power is the spark of skin touching skin, words whispered in the ear to make the soul burn. Magic is something you do, not something you know. Make as much magic as you can, my boy. Everything else is just technology becoming obsolete before your eyes, bad theories replacing worse theories.
I have to ask myself if Picasso exists. There is evidence here and there that can only be explained by Picasso's existence. But where is Picasso? Does Picasso exist today? This fellow at the coffee shop is not him. He's a knockoff, a fake. Is it sad if there is no Picasso in the world? "Death makes angels of us all, and gives us wings where we had shoulders smooth as raven's claws." A dead guy said that. He was alive at the time.
Hello, friends. I trust you're getting by, making magic when you can.
Later. Love.
