The Shine

Cheap bastard's guide to magic

I drove to Ogallala for a show. When I got there the place was locked up. That's not unusual because I often get to my shows hours before anyone else is around. After napping in the car for a few hours there was still no one around when I got up so I made some calls.

The show had been cancelled and no one bothered to fucking tell me. This made me a tiny bit angry. I may have said some bad words and punched the steering wheel. Which is unfair because the steering wheel didn't do anything to deserve a punch.

With no show I spent some time curating my vast social media empire. I saw one of my matches on YouTube. It had been watched by more than 80 people. I'm on my way to stardom now for sure. I should be doing more to promote myself but how do you start?

How can you promote yourself unless you already have a lot of followers? How do you get the followers in the first place? Maybe I should go down to the PC and sneak into a social media class. I wonder if WWE wrestlers ever find the time to train for wrestling.

People started showing up the venue so I went in to see what was going on. It was a craft fair. If you want a bunch of cheap garbage sold at expensive prices it was a hell of a scene. Since I wasn't interested in cheap garbage at any price I got a six pack of beer from the gas station across the street and sat in my car drinking and calling around for more bookings.

I got a DM from a guy who was offering me 100 bucks to come to his house for Star Trek cosplay. He said he had a uniform that would fit me. He knew because he made it himself. He was very clear that he knew my measurements and it would fit me perfectly. If I had been nearby I might would have done it despite the high chance of being chopped up and stuffed in a deep freeze. I told him to give me forty up front and I'd do it but he was too savvy for that.

All I had to show for several hours of work was a half-hearted maybe for a show in Casper next month. I have just one show in Pine Bluff in the next two weeks. Since I didn't get paid today that means that I have 200 dollars that I need to stretch until the Pine Bluff show. I'll need about 100 bucks for gas to get to the show.

I have a cool $100 to live on for the next fourteen days. I've got a bucket of chestnuts I collected that should hold me on food for a couple days. Let's be optimistic and say that I only need to live on 5 dollars a day.

How do soup kitchens work? Can anyone just show up? What about welfare? Or food stamps? Where do I find out about those? I can't just magic up some food. Even Jesus couldn't do that. He still needed some loaves and fishes to start with and he multiplied them. And he was the son of God maybe.

Finding out about magic made me wonder about religion. What if Jesus was a magician and all the stuff he did was not miraculous in the religious sense but magic? That would mean that one of the most potent elements of human history and life was a scam. It's really something to think about.

Thinking about it doesn't put food on the table though. I don't have a table, it's an expression. 

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