By the twisting of fate

Two incidents of pure prescience have been visited upon this blog in the past few months. Or, to put it another way, magic has come in through the side door, as it does. In the first incident I outlined the secret curse of my library system, a problem manager at a library branch location that was calving off employees like a dying glacier in the sweltering arctic of the global warming era. No sooner had I articulated this deep, ten year long problem of my library system than the offending manager suddenly fled her job under mysterious circumstances and lifted the curse in a single move.

Then, oddly, I wrote a letter to a Bald Eagle, asking it to not fly above me when it accompanied me on walks, but rather to fly beside or in front of me, so as not to strain my neck, for to gaze upon a nearby Bald Eagle was irresistible to me. I'll admit to the silliness of the post. I am aware that it may be hard for you to fully credit the strangeness of my walk on the river the day after I wrote it. But I swear to you that I have never in my life been so close to a flying Eagle, despite the great many I have seen here in Minnesota. One hovered and glided sometimes as close as five feet from my shoulder, and, even when it drifted farther away, it always stayed scrupulously at my side. It never positioned itself, in thirty minutes of my walking, at an angle the least bit difficult for me to see.

So wishes are suddenly being answered here. Strange wishes, wishes I did not know were wishes, joking wishes, but they are all answered nonetheless.

And it makes me wonder, what shall I wish for? I have the ear of the gods here. What dreams would I like to see made real? I have a magic space right in this nest of words. What seed shall I plant? What spell do I invoke?

But no, that is not the nature of magic. There is nothing that works like that.

The gods are not wise so much as mercurial. Sometimes you can get what you work for, but that's just science. By the laws of magic, and by the holy and unholy world alike, you can never get what you wish for. Wishes can only come out better or worse, above or below, east or west of how they were cast.

And so here, where over and over the future is predicted, and what is written magically comes to pass, the future will again and again be conjured up.

But not by me.