“Yes, but he’s so bad at it.”
At least, that’s how I remember the line going. It’s been a hot minute since I watched a favorite childhood show, Invader Zim. Dib and Gaz, brother and sister, are talking, and Dib can’t understand how come Gaz doesn’t care that Zim, his nemesis, is trying to take over the world. He’s been trying to prove everything to her, and she assents: Of course, she seems to roll her eyes, the new kid with green skin and giant bug eyes is an alien trying to take over the planet—but why should I care? He won’t take over the world because of a fundamental flaw.
And it reminded me of another childhood favorite, Pinky and the Brain, though not a particular scene. Often the Brain’s wonderful plans are undermined by his associate, Pinky, but just as often, it’s his own flaws that trip him up.
And is this not what we see in real life? Geniuses are sure they’ve found the spell for ultimate power, but there is a law in magic of a circle. Give up your soul for power, but if your soul is not your soul, then who’s power is it? It is Christie’s Hound of Death, for what our overlords send on us will come back onto them. It is a greater magic, for it is reality.
I enjoy listening to conspiracy theories, but I don’t really take them seriously. Don’t get me wrong, when the schizo on the street looks up at me and tells me that Trump is listening in on his thoughts or the clerk at the register explains how a bunch of vampire lizards are planning a new world order, I believe them. Who am I to doubt?
But I don’t worry with them, which only seems to distress them further. I sometimes think it would be fun to practice lizard like motions and find a trick to squirt blood from my eye—just to confuse them—but knowing these people, I’d probably get lynched for my joke. The joke, though, is on these supposed lizards.
They seek the end of history and will be forgotten to history as time simply marches on. Sometimes they “win.” Then a new dawn startles them as everyone leaves them to the circle they made to bind the world. The Ouroboros has eaten its tail and shrunk around them like a prison. Outside their magic rings, the world moves on, and all they have is dust.
Dust itself can be a beautiful thing when caught in the light or seen dancing in the wind, but only as it shows the light or the wind—it’s glory is in something else, in the glorifying of another. Such is the glory of the writer and the painter and every other form of poetry—the glory of loving something glorious, something other than yourself.
Dust they win, and they leave the light and the wind to the world outside the world they conquered.
Narf.
Tale Told 