My Buddy The Wizard

I met a wizard whilst walking down the street one day. Twenty-seven at the time, I'd lived a long and unfulfilling but at least stably uninteresting life. The bulk of my waking time was split between surfing the web, even at that point an archaic expression but the most common mode of time-wasting among my circle of e-friends, and working for minimum wage on an unset schedule of unfixed hours at a theme park. Meeting a wizard was thoroughly unlikely. I rejected by turns him, my state of alertness, my senses, my sanity, the un-druggedness of my morning coffee until finally I could only reject my skepticism, my materialism, my operational systematic schema of the world and what is in it, what is real and what matters. I'd finally rejected myself. And in all that time of doubt he never rejected me. So I said hello and asked him who he wanted me to kill but to this he waved me off. Unnecessary. Instead I was remade in his image, unreal.

To repeat because I think this warrants an extra-special level of your attention, I met a wizened old wizard on a corner down the road from the Subways I occasionally frequented. I asked him what he wanted of me. He kindly explained to me in the most soothing, most sonorous voice of anyone I'd ever met whose visage included a flowing beard and literal fire in his eyes that I was mixed around. Oh yes, I said to Him. Until I found you, my lord wizard I was lost but now I too am found. We have found each other. And finders' keepers until the end of time. Are you sure there isn't anyone I could kill for you, my liege. To prove my devotion. Perhaps my boss?

No, he sonorously, soothingly snorted in derision. I am YOUR servant, for the moment at least. I offer you one wish. Understand that I can move mountains if you so desire. Understand further that that is not a limit to my power but but a trifling example. I can move metaphorical mountains just as easily. I can move fictional mountains. If you so wished I could move The Magic Mountain to Tokyo circa 2020. Thomas Mann will have been a crucial influence on anime. I can move a mountain on top of a mountain and the entire scope of human understanding of gravity and all study of geology will be revised without a single scientist being the least aware. I am the photoshopper of the Gods. If I so wished, I could transform high and might Zeus into a mountain. How about Abe Lincoln? The railsplitter would be less than a snap. Reality would warp in place to bridge the gap from your reality to the revised one and it will make perfect sense to you that the 16th president was master of oratory who happened to be a member of the Appalachians. It goes without saying that I've played such games with your timeline and spacetime and euclidean spaceways before. But I will never let on, coquettish me. I must admit it amuses me to shape universes according to my whim. I'm sorry, my child, I am rambling and I wish to grant you your wish before sundown. So get on with it.

As you can imagine, reader, I was startled by this being and the scope of his powers. I asked him who he was. With a sigh and a tap of an allegorical wristwatch he recited his tale. Before the Big Big Bang (not our big bang which he referred to with a repulsive, propulsive chuckle as "the pop and fizzle of one soda can in the corner of an ice box the size of Jupiter" but rather the BIG Big Bang) he was a spirit of the ether. Apparently the last multiverse after eons upon eons of expansion dissipated into some kind of ether which he described as a cob web of snapped and unspooled bits of dusty, decayed Membranes. In this void he first experienced consciousness (whatever his existence prior he has no recollection), upon the web he first began to wander, gaining experience and thus wisdom along the way. He occasionally came across other solitary souls born of the ether. He harvested them, gaining their knowledge. In time he was the wisest being in all existence. In fact he was the only being. With that tidy summation he concluded his story as if I could and should be satisfied. What about the birth of the multiverse? How'd that happen? What've you been doing in all this time? - That was like yesterday to me, he explained. What do you mean what's happened? You call this multiverse "happening"? I mean really.

I was a tad insulted. Dismayed that I'd offered my devotion to this Star Trek reject, I asked him why he was granting me a wish. Was he bored with being like unto a god? Yes, he said. Being like unto a god was rather boring but that's why he became a wizard a millennium prior. It was a nice way to wile away his infinite time spent waiting for the inevitable return of the ether and with it new souls upon which to feast. Also, he enjoyed plying his trade. So much so that he was intent on plying it upon me. Why me, I asked. He seemed to be growing angry, if a rapid-fire barrage of cursing was symptomatic of godly psychology.

Aladdin never game me this much shit! Fucking Americans! Fucking self-consciousness. Literature has ruined you as a species, I swear.

After he was done venting (and I encouraged him to do so. He clearly had some issues to work through) he gave me an ultimatum: make a wish or say farewell to my flesh. In a way I was happy he was pushing me on my way as, in all honesty, I really kind of wanted my desires realized, and right away. With that gift-horse-in-the-mouth looking out of the way I began to give serious thought to what my greatest desire might be. That led to thinking about my second greatest desire. Down the list I went. I began the chin-scratching operation to combine desires. I performed some off-the-cuff game-theoreticals. Calculations of utility. Cost-benefit analyses. At one point I had a crisis of ethics and wondered whether I should take into account the global "I" who'd want world peace or an end to all suffering as opposed to the personal "I" who'd prefer round the clock sexual stimulation. Ahh, but there's the rub, that maybe the best of all possible worlds might actually suck in a counter-intuitive way, whereas hot-and-cold running orgasms could only be awesome.

In the meantime the wizard had materialized a row of four chess sets with Jean Luc Picard, Jesus, Blaise Pascal and a clone of myself as opponents. Picard may have given him the most trouble, which the wizard heartily enjoyed, but the wizard took particular glee from demolishing the clone of me who, like me, was a shambling monstrosity at the game. After my clone lost the wizard took even greater glee setting my clone on fire repeatedly while screaming "Hellfire for you!" I tried not to interrupt this form of his grim glee. At least he was smiling was my thinking. But after a while of this I began to lose patience. Hey, wizard, I've made my wish. I will now bid you to do my bidding. -Let me just set you on fire a few more -No!

My wish is simple, wizard. I want you to rewind my life to the freshman year of high school. What I do not want is to lose any memory of my present life. In effect, I will be living the past half of my life over again.

Huh, really? Well that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. OK whatever, so be it. So how was it?

I need you to grant me another wish!

Of course you do! Of course you do! Not ten seconds ago I said to myself, self can you believe what that human just wished for? But I granted it nevertheless because your wish was my command. Your one wish. WAS my command. What do you know? Ten seconds have passed and here we are. So how was it?

Ten seconds? For the past 12 years I've been fucking my life over, and the past ten of them have been spent waiting for this moment when I'd have told you I learned my lesson and you'd fix everything and maybe I could wish for ten grand or a eternal youth or a donkey or fucking anything. Your ten seconds, my ten years knowing you'd be here waiting for me, waiting to get your laugh in and waiting to say alright give it another go. I spent the past five of those years trying to remember the exact date and time our meeting occurred. I got an apartment down the street with a telescope at the window fixed on this corner so I could stare over here and start my long awaited sprint to meet you to your face again. I knew you'd be here again! 15 years of fucking my life over in ways I never even imagined it would be fucked.

Oh, I know. I'm not omniscient but I've got something analogical to a head on my for-lack-of-a-better-word shoulders. Do you imagine I designed my physical form to grow this bundle of whiskers if I didn't have the sagacity to match. I have some common sense, human. What subject-matter was your feeble brain fumbling with those long hours you kept me waiting? Was it pornographic in nature? Were you imagining how great it would be to woo the homecoming queen. That's what teenagers still wet their dreams about, right? Or has that world-wide-webamathingy profoundly disrupted the natural order of sexual fantasy for you as it has so many of your pitiable generation? If I was you, the prior you, I would have considered asking someone who's had some life experiences under his belt for advice. Perhaps maybe me? If I was you I'd have asked me and I'd have told you that a quick cure for your obvious psychological neuroses would have been your best bet. Some rewiring, some DNA manipulation, some chemical re-balancing, maybe a new environment complete with better, more supportive friends, a fulfilling career...and boom, instant happiness. But you had to do things the hard way. Oh well, fuck off.

And without a sound or a flash or a ray of light or an animated anthropomorphism into a dove with or without a puff of smoke he was gone. So reader, I might as well tell you what happened.

I guess I didn't realize how much I loved my life. Not that I loved my life, but that there was a significant portion of my life that I loved. A portion I didn't want to alter. In fact, I didn't even want to change the major life choices I'd made in life: the schools I went to, the friends I met, the jobs I worked. And in order to preserve later aspects of my life I did my damndest to preserve earlier aspects of my life to the point where everyday I'd be writing impromptu scripts for myself. Besides which I didn't want to alter the world butterfly-effect style by alerting the public, even one member of the public, to major events of concern. Or so I at first decided until I realized I could never forgive myself if I let people suffer when I could have prevented it. But then wouldn't I be arrested as a loon or a co-conspirator when I said to high officials Hey, two planes are going to hit the WTC and they're like, whatever son, and then it happens and they're like, how did you obtain this information and I'm like, shrug? And then I'm in Guantanamo Bay. And even on a smaller scale how could I preserve my personal timeline as I'd first lived and loved it if I was playing hero, diverging so drastically from script? And the actual acting out of it! Imagine going back to a random day in your sophomore year and have to act like your maturation and adulthood had never happened and hey, these awkward kids you forgot ever existed are your friends and you can't stand them any more but you have to pretend you do and pretend that you have the same interests and pretend like you remember what you were like when you were their friend because you are a stranger to yourself at this point but you can't just say nah, fuck this and go hang out by yourself or skip school entirely because then you wouldn't have gotten the social support you did, specifically the homework help and essay ideas and that one teacher who really liked you wouldn't even understand you and how in the hell are you going to preserve that precious relationship because you need to get into the university you ended up in where you met Melanie, the girl you'd fall in love with, the girl you couldn't admit you loved, the girl on whom this whole wish was centered because all you wanted to gain by reliving life (you realized too late) wasn't to fix the experience of high-school which was unfixable but rather just to make the love of your life love you. Hell.

Of course of course of course it never worked. I went half-mad pretending I was my teenage self in high-school, writing essays like my pre-college self would write them, struggling to let nothing of my future life slip. It was torture, self-perpetrated on a daily, minute-by-minute basis. Twilight Zone episodes have been constructed of scenarios less psychological horrifying. Every moment I didn't scream was a victory. I lost my grip on my own personality. Faking my own smile at all that I encountered that refused to once more amuse, gratify or surprise me left me without a genuine smile of my own. Laughter, too, became nothing more than a prop.

Not all of my time was spent on routine self-deconstruction. My sanity would be nothing more than shreds in a pile at the base of my skull of perhaps pulp shot out into the front yard if I didn't have something to stimulate me. I could explore new music now that I'd heard everything KROQ had to offer the first time around. I was the first person in my neighborhood to discover Cat Power. I could watch movies I'd never had the time for the first time around. Napster was still in service so I could search out what the neighborhood Blockbuster didn't have in stock, which was practically everything it turned out. Of course, internet was a series of tubes at this point, bits of binary being run through by carrier snails, so I had to master a patience the practice of which I'd long forgotten. I finally mastered the guitar, and the keyboard while I was at it. Instead of asking for a playstation for christmas, I asked for a hip hop sampler and began playing with beats as I'd eventually have wanted. I wrote poetry that wasn't actually any better this go around but at least diverged from form. But none of it mattered so long as I was intent on running into Melanie again. And at this point it was my only intent. And then time wore on. It wore on me and it showed. By 17 I was balding, which was an unexpected, baffling and hope-obliterating development. So things were going kind of badly. Clearly I couldn't run through the good parts of my life exactly the same as I had before. Maybe Melanie wouldn't have been my friend if I was bald. Maybe this was a mistake to the likes of which jumping head first into a lion's mouth couldn't compare.

Caring was no longer an option for me. About anything. And then 9-11 happened. I posted a warning on my blog, not that I had any followers. I attempted suicide but couldn't bring myself to master that skill. I rationalized: Not so long as there was a chance of fixing everything. Not so long as I could meet up with the wizard again. And thus my plan was set. I had a new purpose to my life, a purpose that negated entirely everything I'd cared about in this existence. Hopefully, a purpose that would negate this existence entirely. I never went to college. I never met Melanie, not that I'd want to ruin her life by entering it, my own life in shambles. I worked a lot of odd jobs which is something I didn't even know I could do until I completely quit caring. I mean, it always sounded so cliche! Odd jobs? But it actually exists as a pseudo-career of sorts. I managed by it, waiting intently all the while for the reset button to be pushed. The reset button that doesn't exist. Maybe the wizard doesn't exist. Maybe He really made me in my image when I deified Him. Maybe he made me unreal in His image. I don't know anymore. I didn't kill myself when he disappeared. I didn't do anything. Th next day I went back to work.