Apology
I'd like to apologize for one of my last entries, "My Brief History of Magic," which I swear on my mother's life I have absolutely no recollection of having written. This sort of thing happens to me more often than it should (you could, I suppose, argue that it should never happen, and I would be in no position to argue with you); I have a name for the growing collection of words I have somehow produced without retaining any memory whatsoever of having done so: blackout pieces. "My Brief History of Magic," however, would be easily the most personally disturbing of my blackout pieces to date, in that I not only do not remember writing it, but that I can not even conceive of having written it. I am virtually certain, in fact, that it is not my work at all.
I'm really not kidding. I received an email from a friend that said, "That was a sort of strange bit of nonsense. I didn't know you had any interest in magic, or is this another of your reinventions (and by that, of course, I mean lies)?" This message seriously confused me. What the hell was he talking about? It bothered me for a couple hours, so much so that I finally called him and asked for an explanation. "I was talking about that thing you wrote today about magic," he said.
"Where?" I asked.
"On the damn thing you do," he said. "Don't make me use that ridiculous name. You know, the website?"
I still had no idea what he was referring to, and I was starting to suspect that he was somehow trying to pull something over on me. I finally went downstairs and took a look, and what I saw seriously disturbed me. I am almost prepared to swear that "My Brief History of Magic" is not my work. I know nothing whatsoever about magic, and I have almost as little interest in the subject as entertainment. To the best of my recollection I have never read a single book about magic, and though I own literally tens of thousands of books on all sorts of strange and obscure topics, I'm virtually certain I do not have even one title on the subject. I don't drink anymore --I haven't, in fact, had a drink in almost 15 years-- but I certainly remember that terrible feeling of waking up on the morning after a terrible bender and being both frightened and appalled to discover that you can't recall what you did the night before or how you made it home. Reading "My Brief History of Magic" brought back those unpleasant and queasy mornings in rather too graphic detail.
I was particularly shocked by the weird accumulation of arcana and inexplicable details in "My Brief History of Magic." I have never in my life heard of any of the people, places, tricks, or titles mentioned in the piece, and was understandably curious to know whether these things were all purely fictional or whether they perhaps had some basis in reality, even if it happened to be someone else's reality.
I did a Google search for the first half dozen or so names and book titles that appear in "Brief History of Magic," and was disturbed to learn that all of them were in fact "real," in a manner of speaking. I have to admit that I was even more disturbed than I would have been had I discovered they were purely fictional creations. It would be one thing if I had made up all of this information in a hypnagogic stupor, but the apparent grounding of the piece in historical fact, however ridiculous, implied that there had been some kind of research; a text or texts had to have been consulted, and I refuse to believe that my habitual oblivion has become so close to complete that not only could I have written some words that I do not recall having written, but also could have read some text or texts that I do not recall having read (or even having had in my possession), and that all of this could have happened at some time in the last several days, and left absolutely no traces of memory in my admittedly miserable, exhausted, Etch-A-Sketch of a skull.
I refuse to believe that. And I'm forced to conclude that somehow, while I was at lunch or away from my desk at some other point in the day, some one of my colleagues --or, even more likely, a group of them-- sat down at my desk and posted "Brief History of Magic" to my web log. I can't live with any other conclusion. I wish I could say I have a fairly solid hunch as to who, specifically, was behind this mind-fuck, but unfortunately every one of my co-workers is a possible suspect. It's that kind of place, and I now recognize that I need to get in the habit of logging off of my computer every single time I move away from my desk for even a few minutes.
In the meantime, I apologize for the inexcusable breach, as well as for that wholly inexplicable and wildly digressive --not to mention preposterous--entry on magic.
7:21:51 PM 
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