The Illusionist

If we had been poets in the old days, we'd travel from estate to estate, and we'd get high and sleep with everyone's sisters, and we'd talk, to the rubes, at least, about anything but all the delightfully vulgar things we actually enjoyed spending all our time doing.

Waxing metaphysical and flowery and mysterious while trying to get into somebody's deliciously stinky panties.

But lo, we live in the Post-Hemingway Universe, and he ruined it for us, and then he shot himself.

Now we work the illusions of the calloused hands, the plumber's greasy ass-crack, we delight in the simplicity of the amish, weaving mud and straw into smoldering factories that dream of white picket fences, and we talk about all the delightfully vulgar things we enjoy spending all our time doing, and all the ones we don't enjoy, as well.

Until that became the lie, and the flowery metaphysical bullshit we used to sell became the truth.

But the fact is, there is no truth.

It's all just illusions cast by an illusionist, nothing more real than the shadow-figures of animals cast on a wall by deft hands to temporarily entertain and distract children.

And as complex as our work may sometimes be, it is not a justifiable cause for anything, it is neither the light that provides the shadow, nor the wall that harbors it, nor the hand that crafts it, nor the shadow itself.

As is everything else, it is just a simple willful manipulation of much more powerful forces.

And people like Hemingway kill themselves over these shadowy things that wouldn't even make sense to an Aborigine.

So I say we go back to dressing up in purple lace, and getting high all the time, and sleeping with everybody's sisters, and making folks happy while we abuse and degrade them.

By not pretending to be one of them, by taking responsibility for our illusions, by being the Evil Princes that we used to be and loving ourselves for it first and foremost and then loving everything else afterwards.

Screw this leaving everybody in states of false despair where they blame themselves for your appreciation and impossible-to-live-up-to misunderstandings of them, I see no reason why I wouldn't want to leave my victims smiling and laughing and humming happily like bees with bellies full of honey.

Its a much better display of my vulgar power.

And you may fool yourself but you aren't fooling me.

You aren't one of them.

And you don't love them or understand them any better than I do.

And you don't believe your own illusions any more than I do.

And I'm tired of watching you try to.

But wait!

Then why don't I use my fell power to leave you with a smile on your face?

Why don't I twist the shadows in the air and leave you laughing and humming happily like a bee with a belly full of honey?

Because you aren't one of them.

You are an illusionist.

Plus, I'm really not that good at it heh.