(Natashas’s first pickles of the season, from garden to Ball Jar in less than an hour).

This unemployed thing is way too busy for me. I got a fabulous swim in the sparkling blue Big Pink pool in the afternoon. It was a sunny day in the soggy mid-90s. I got in a run to the Commissary- I had not been there in months- and then started to think about what needs to get done before I drive to Indiana tomorrow.

I am kicking myself about that. I think I mentioned that I have decided to accept Gabriel García Márquez’ cosmic lens of Magical Realism, and a pal sent me a magical joke:

“This skeleton walks into a bar and sits down on a stool. He looks at the bartender with his eyeless sockets and says: “I’ll have a beer and a mop.”

A mop, get it? The joke fits into my current world view perfectly. I have mentioned before that I am absolutely convinced that there is a deeper relationship between the living and the dead. The Mexicans understand that- their “Day of the Dead” celebration connects the magical spirit world with the one we inhabit in a profound manner.

I cannot explain it- it may be all on our side, in the realm of the living, since our neurons are still firing (or mis-firing) and we are perfectly capable of seeing portents in random things.

But of course, the evidence of our senses suggests otherwise. There are too many instances of things that cannot be that are.

I have certainly been guilty of Magical Thinking myself lately. Like the realization that I really had agreed to be in Auburn, Indiana, to make a short presentation on behalf of Raven, and had not considered how I was going to get there. I was going through some of his papers, and I felt the eerie sense that touching what he had touched was brining him close enough to almost touch.

It was a case of thinking that my thoughts by themselves could bring about effects in the world, like teleportation, or maybe the belief that thinking something corresponds with actually doing it. I don’t think I am clinical- I have just been busy.

In that realm, the one of the brain, magical thinking is a condition that causes the patient to experience irrational fear of performing certain acts or having certain thoughts because they assume a correlation with their acts and threatening calamities. Of course, you cannot tell if it is actually irrational until events prove that you were wrong. It is only paranoia if they are not actually out to get you.

So I am going with Márquez as I contemplate the Pennsylvania and Ohio Turnpikes and the way West. Maybe the State Patrols will be in paisley-painted Crown Vic Police Interceptors floating above the surface of the road.

The is a lot of magical thinking going on since the Zimmerman verdict. People of color and those melanin-challenged citizens are both conducting exercises in magical thinking. Two completely disparate world views, believed fiercely, are at work. In one, teenagers are hunted down and executed by vigilantes. In the other, lawless youths terrorize neighborhoods. Both are complete belief systems, a complete ying-and-yang.

I can see both sides, viewed through my Márquez lens, and I have heard them expressed with high emotion.

I have no idea what to think; the melanin-challenged plurality of the population do not, I think, regularly think of race. To them it is almost irreverent. For those citizens who are not of that hue, I think they feel themselves defined by it. More magical thinking, or maybe a matter of fact acceptance of the nature of this particular society, and its history. I confess I have not felt a palpable tension like this in a long time- at the Class 6 Store where a woman of color asked me a couple weeks ago about why a young man should be shot down?

I did not have a good answer, or rather, the answer I had was not anything I wanted to say. Anyway, I was trying to puzzle my way through the world of Magical Thinking and its intersection ours when I realized the afternoon had flown away and it was Willow time. I thought about hot hot it was, and whether I should drag my butt from Big PInk and sit in the cool darkness of the bar. I called Old Jim to see if he was going, and he announced that he was already there. Decision made, nothing magical about it.

I changed my t-shirt into a more formal aloha ensemble and made a last pass through the email.

There was some exciting there. Natasha sent a picture of the pickles she had made from the first cucumbers to come from her sprawling garden. Heck, it isn’t a garden- she planted enough to make it reasonable to call it a truck patch.

I marveled at the cool green goodness. There is real magic in the world, and it does not require that much thinking at all.

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com