Sometimes the magic works.....

 ... and sometimes it doesn't.

That's a quote from the movie "Little Big Man" from 1970, with Dustin Hoffman.  This is not a movie review but those eight words stick with me because they are like life: sometimes it's good, sometimes it's not.  Sometimes the cards fall  your way, sometimes you bottom out, deuces and threes instead of tens and queens.

I am not a fan of the word "magic" or "magical" used in an every day context. To me magic is studied trickery, slight of hand, conjuring, fooling the eye, fooling the mind. Life isn't that. Yes, we all experience moments that feel 'magical' but I still don't like using that word for anything less than transcendence and that experience is too rare to even discuss here. So, leaving "magic" and all its incarnations aside, let's talk about luck.

(And now I am floundering because, honestly, I don't even know what I started writing about and here I am, still typing away.  I could/should start over but no, not taking that road. Whatever made me begin on this path will either carry me on or lead me astray and I will be fine with that.)

Luck: who has it? Who gets it? Why does it touch one person and not the other? Is there even such a thing as luck, just as is there even such a thing as magic? Do you feel lucky, are you lucky, has your life been blessed (!) with luck?  What the fuck is luck?

Don't know. Don't care. Yes, it's lucky, perhaps, if you find a $100 bill on the sidewalk. Yes, it's lucky, perhaps, if you put that $100 on a red square on a roulette wheel. And yes, it's lucky, perhaps, if that spin of that roulette wheel comes up red and you win a bunch of money.  And then what? Does your life change? Perhaps yes if you win $100,000.  But perhaps not.

So, luck. So, magic. Joan Didion wrote a remarkable book about the death of her husband and her daughter titled "The Year of Magical Thinking" which has nothing to do with luck or magic but explains, to me, that theory of what magic means to many. In our small and uncertain lives here on this uncertain planet, sometimes we want to believe something so viscerally that we think about it so much until it becomes real to us. We internalize it, we live it, we want it to be real and 'magically' it happens. It becomes real to us. It is, indeed, magical thinking. But at the same time, that thinking doesn't change the reality. It just smooths it over for a while. It mitigates the pain.

Whew. There is no resolution here. Just the recognition that it is time to go to bed. Thank you for following along.  More to come.

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