Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Lo and Behold

Some humorist once wrote "I'm so frazzled the only thing holding me together is static electricity."

Well, for me, it's either that, or the Black Arts.

Gee Wiz.

Almost the witching hour and I am wide awake. Maybe I shouldn't have napped when I got home from work around 8:30 p.m. But I was so tired the bed might as well have been enchanted. However, I came to around midnight and now Mr. Sandman eludes me.

I really should be sleeping. Three long consecutive days of more shooting ahead, and I'm helming the first two days. And while we have no lead talent yet for the first day's shoot - aside from the thousand-and-one other curses that often bedevil production - I am oddly unperturbed.

Must be that old black magic again.

Speaking of magic, do you believe in prescience?  The FreeDictionary defines it as :


prescience [ˈprɛsɪəns]
n
knowledge of events before they take place; foreknowledge



Now I don't need prescience to know that this is an odd segue, but - indulge me.

The other night I received news that made me cackle like the Wicked Witch of the West. It had something to do with some unfinished business - literally and figuratively - that I had predicted would soon meet its long-overdue demise. And lo and behold - the very fates themselves seem to have conspired to make my prophecy come true. So much so that a friend in the know actually texted me this afternoon to say how uncannily I had called it.

Ironically, the latest manifestation of its impending doom was the polar opposite of what I had been wishing for, but nevertheless, the end of the entire wretched enterprise is definitely near. I don't really care if the thing ends with a whimper or a bang, as long as it ends.

Die, damn you, and STAY dead.


It's a long and arduous tale which I might tell someday, but suffice it to say that it's not unlike Elphaba and the Ozians. No good deed goes unpunished, indeed, and my parting words a year ago, almost to the day, were these: "I will not actively seek to bring you harm. But having said that, neither will I lift a finger to help you. You are on your own, and on your own I know you have more than enough to self-destruct."

Well, mark my words, my pretty - and your little dog, too.

"Did you put a hex on it?" asked my incredulous friend.

Being neither witch nor warlock, I replied "No. But you know I've been cursing it to the high heavens for a good while now and if the heavens have finally heard me, then call it a hex if you will."

Our thoughts and our words can be powerful things, and I genuinely believe that if they are strong enough, they can take on a life of their own.

Even fleeting thoughts - like the one I had just this afternoon en route to a location check. An otherwise uneventful drive interrupted by a thought out of nowhere, as I rode half-asleep, about how I would like to add a certain yellow sports car to my hoard.

Yellow, brick road. 'Nuff said.

And rounding the corner, there it was, lo and behold. The selfsame sexy yellow number I had spotted in February along the same road. I didn't have time to stop the first time around, and resolved to go back for the vehicle the following week, but by then it was gone. I circled the area for a couple of weeks more after that, but the car had vanished. I had taken the route again many times since, and had not encountered it anymore.

Until today.

And this time around I ordered the driver to stop.

Whether I'll actually secure the thing is inconsequential now. What was striking was how I had just been thinking about it - and so impassively, at that, in contrast to the dark seething passion with which I thought about that other enterprise above - and just around the bend, my thoughts literally were made real.


Now I am no Cassandra, and if Apollo were to taunt me with a dark gift, prophecy would probably not be it. I'd rather be able to read people's minds anyway than predict their futures, but I suppose they're one of a piece. What seems to be arcane may very well turn out to be something mundane - I daresay even scientific. We pick up cues all the time - from speech and gestures, behavior and other intangibles. That's nothing but naturalistic observation. And causality doesn't require wizardry. Putting two-and-two together isn't paranoia, it's arithmetic. So combining cues and signs into a coherent, plausible, and probable outcome is child's play to those who've had lots of practice.

It applies to pretty much all areas of human affairs: love, work, life. Which is why we sometimes say we could see things coming a mile away. It's but perspective, literally and figuratively. I once read somewhere that clairvoyancy can be compared to seeing two trains on a single track coming from opposite directions, but concealed from each other by a hill round the bend. On ground level, you won't be able to tell that they will collide. But take the perspective from the air, and you can literally see what's going to happen next.

Is that why inspiration and its cousin, divination, seem to come when our thoughts are floating?

And speaking of floating, lookee, lookee, lookee here. Earlier this evening, as I was sitting on the throne, my thoughts idly turned to my general taste in men*, and I considered ruminating about it in a blog post.

Well, lo and behold.


*Let me qualify that. I've had guys of all shapes and sizes, but just for sex, I find that I prefer the less-conventionally attractive. It's not unique; plenty of us have that inexplicable "er" fetish.


But my lovers - meaning people I actually have meaningful moments with long after the joys of sex have gone - have all been uniformly goodlooking. And by "uniform" I mean they seem to fall into a particular physical mold. Coincidence? Let's see what loose thoughts turn up.

13 comments:

  1. haha you really had to put a disclaimer for your exes. lol!

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  2. @ icarusboytoy : Oh, it's not that I worry any of them might stumble across this blog - which is one of the joys of illiteracy. I just don't want people to think I throw myself at just any monstrosity.

    I do have standards. They may be low, but they are standards just the same :P

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  3. I always pride myself for having that uncanny knack of knowing how things will turn out. I always thought it was something special. I still think it is to a degree, but as I look back on a number of situations, I realize that what I saw was the most logical outcome given a set of details.

    Perhaps, there are just men who see things unfold faster, or view events at an angle different from the average joe. Since the mind works in weird ways, it flashes snippets of the "unknown" in the most "random" occasion (most likely in between the time of the original event and the happening). Then again, that's not random anymore. Haha. :)

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  4. wow, methinks i need your help with this attract-what-you-think affair. make a business out of this, you'd be rich... erm, make that even richer. hehe :P

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  5. the problem with a cassandra complex is not that she knew the future but that she came up against the karma or habitual entrainment of all individuals, who can only understand the truth from their own thought stream and nothing beyond, and demanded that it be different. cassandra is just another variation of an individual holding expectations of others so intensively that they imperil themselves.

    the "how it should have ended" is very funny in itself and also an important lesson about the consequences of "ends justify the means"...

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  6. @ jace : "Perhaps, there are just men who see things unfold faster, or view events at an angle different from the average joe."

    Nicely put. The information may be there and it may be available, but one needs the acuity to perceive them and the gift to make the connections between seemingly-random and unrelated things and events.

    I guess it's not unlike imagination : the ability to make intuitive mental leaps that fill in the gaps and see the whole picture.

    @ Darc : People already have made businesses out of this. They're called "self-help book authors."

    @ LOF : Well, Cassandra's biggest problem was that she spurned the advances of a god, and one knows that gods - and not just Greek ones - do not like being rejected.

    Anyyyyyyyywayyyyyyy...I never thought of Cassandra as being a prisoner of her own close-mindedness. Interesting perspective, there. I always thought it was the Trojans who were pig-headed and poor Cassie, like Elphaba in Wicked, was only trying to do good.

    But then again, they should've known the path that good intentions pave. And it wasn't the Yellow Brick Road.

    P.S. Glad you liked the vid. I watch it every time I need to have a good laugh. Never fails.

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  7. if cassandra rutted with fiery apollo, would it've singed her pubes?

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  8. @ Ternie : Well, you don't need to be a soothsayer to figure that out.

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  9. the blog post was entertaining. like riding your train of thought but without the pending collision.

    "Oh, it's not that I worry any of them might stumble across this blog - which is one of the joys of illiteracy."

    But it was this comment (or rather, reply) that almost made me fall off my chair. way to go, rudie. hahaha

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  10. @ Nyl : Your first line made me smile.

    I love how you're one of the few who quote me from the Comments Section. I understand you, engel, Kane, and one other unidentified person had dinner recently.

    What a feast that must've been.

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  11. We were with Sensei Jerry and Mak from One Minute Before Dawn. We saw Inception together although Kane left before the movie began.

    I'm not gonna say we didn't talk about you. hee hee

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  12. Rudeboy,

    Like the way I guessed your age, and where you studied, eh? There are clues all around, if we can only see.

    I read your blog, can you guess what I see?

    Kane

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  13. @ Kane : You see between the lines.

    And then some.

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