...choose your illusion...

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“Illusion is the first of all pleasures.”

-Voltaire-

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Eggs taste so much better when an old clown is serving them with a side of magic.

His name was Hewwy, and he wore a 40 year old shirt pit-stained in his body marker, artistic debris from a life spent working the tables of the family restaurant where I ate the dripping yolks of over easy eggs on waffle. He showed me his hands, flipping them back and forth like spatula on a flapjack to exhibit they were free of any accoutrement. 

Swiftly without warning both hands smashed down on the table. Where a tan glass of coffee and pulp rimmed orange juice had been standing just a moment ago, now stood only a couple of crumbs left from the blueberry muffin I had been taking turns dunking in each drink. Hewwy honked my nose and then pulled both glasses out from underneath my seat.  Somehow the coffee was still hot.

Where had my glasses gone? I spent the rest of my meal delighted by his clever clown craftiness.  How had he done that trick? Maybe the restaurant keeps hot coffee and orange juice in an invisible box beneath every seat? Or maybe my friends had conspired with Hewwy to trick and amaze me and held the glasses for him. The delight in that unknown wasn’t in figuring out the solution though. The less I knew about the making of the magic, the more joy I could take from it.

I elude and delude myself daily. My bagged ramen is gourmet because I add thawed corn, chopped chive and crack egg over it. Watching a TV show about hip hopping ducks is homework for making a TV show about be-bopping turtles. The meaning of life is hidden in the extra scenes of Dude, Where’s my Car? When I take a shower I say it is to get clean, but it is really an excuse to gratuitously rub my ass and balls. The magic is in the thinking that gets my doings done.

Reality is my illusion. The books I read, the TV I watch, and the choices of how I spend my time are all brilliant, unique decisions of value and importance (or so I think).  Maybe my greatest illusion is that I matter. I am ME and that must matter, I tell myself, consumed with the delusion that my ME is of such value and importance that I might tell you about it. But there are 8.1 billion¹ different MEs on earth and for every ME that dies, 2 more MEs are born in their absence.

How in a sea of 8.1+ billion different fully grown sperm people could my ME have enough value for your YOU? I’m not asking you to exit or quit reading. YOU shouldn’t give up on ME. Where else might you find non-harrowing tales of a hobo clown haggling the breakfast parties of central Chicagoan brunch holes? The magic is real. My ME is worth your time, just as your ME is worth my time. This is OUR time!

Magic is a collaborative art. No trick should trick the tricker. The magician practicing for himself has no way of knowing if he disappeared or not. Stand him on stage, splash a curtain of smoke for the scene, and regardless of how he manages to vanish, the audience will delight on his exit. We gain from the practice of others. All of us are magicians in some art we hide from the world until the day comes we can rob them of their breakfast glasses. 

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“Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.”

-Douglas Adams-

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The greatest illusion may be the word itself. Illusion means to mislead, deceive and hallucinate. But how misleading is it to think of illusion as deception? To perceive something that isn’t as is, is the hubristic id that drives sperm to become a human. If sperms accepted themselves as complete at eruption the world would look a lot less peoplely. But it knows it is more and drives forth to eat egg and make man. And man on being made doesn’t wiggle himself to an immediate grave. He takes the help of others, and accepts their tricks as truth. He eats jars of smashed beef and peas so it might make him grow. He learns language so that he might write essays on conjuring clowns. He wears clothes so that he doesn’t touch his ass and balls in public.

Our illusion is our unknown self. Our mystery. Our might be or might have been. And our illusion amazes us. I don't want to see Cindy Steiner from accounting show me her accounting. I know she knows that trick. I want the magic I haven’t seen yet. Show me how to make a game of Tetris in my speadsheet, Cindy. Show me where to eat breakfast and not get robbed by a clown.

The truth we believe to be is the most important truth. That’s the illusion. And when that illusion becomes reality, when the trick is performed, we shouldn’t stand by saying “would you look at that trick”. We should move on to the next one and the next one and eventually chop someone in half and have a dancing hamster rise from their missing torso. Chasing only reality is just a delusion. Hoping that a certain end holds an actual end is the actual end (as in kaput). We should chase illusions instead. We should fall so deep under our magic spells we create applauding audiences for whatever conjuring we can conjure. 

The waitress removed our coffee and juice and the old rainbow haired harlequin approached the table for one last trick.  Hewwy asked me to pull his finger and the plastic flower adorned to his breast pocket shot a spritzy splash of warm tap water into my face. We laughed together and I made it home inspired. I stared into my mirror and began to slowly smear white grease across my stubble. I wet a sponge and clamped it to my nose.

I won’t disappear into a cloud of smoke, but I am an illusion.

I am magic.

I am a clown.

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“Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”

-Albert Einstein-

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1. https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/