Filed under: worldview
augusten burroughs’ life is so surcharged with meaning, it makes me imagine a life so full, it burst like an overripe nectarine.
these are stories told on a wall, more like graffitti than a mural: utterly shameless, painstakingly compulsive and downright hysterical. but like his other book containing memories from his sober intervals, his humor is dry. as in dry wit. the kind that makes me think of an angst-ridden house, m.d.
so i get to thinking how so many uncommon things could happen to just one person. who gets to be taken in by his mother’s crackpot shrink then later in life happens to hire the housekeeper from the underworld (among many other fantastic incidents)? maybe god hurled all these vibrant experiences towards augusten burroughs because he knew burroughs would make them look hilarious in several bestselling books (one of which was even adapted into a movie).
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so what does magical thinking mean anyway?
if i may put it over-simply, it is the belief in the interconnectedness of all things and forces. to use psychological jargon, we might say it is causal reasoning, though it does not rely on science. this may involve the universal belief in superstition, karma and amulets, as well as the personal belief in lucky charms/odd practices significant only to their particular bearers (like american idol 6’s gina glocksen’s small plush lizard(?) or that korean dude’s barefoot audition and performance).
burroughs recounts the correlation between thinking and happening. that is, you can make something actually happen by willing hard enough for it to happen. around this theme revolves one of his most barefaced stories: he “magically thought” of death coming to his overbearing ex-boss. and she did die in a freak accident.
which makes me go back to some of the audaciously unkind things i have conjured in my head through these years, all of which have happened one way or another. the most remarkable of them having only occurred last year when this pompous, fraudulent sales manager put out libelous stories about me in an effort to ruin my career. i refused to retaliate, but i thought hard enough for him to suddenly get a heart attack. which he did.
