magic house

Magic House, November 2007

I have never been good at keeping a blog. On the other hand, I used to be an excellent diarist. After taking this photo, I scrawled in one of my most tattered journals: "I had a blissful weekend in Olympia . . . fantasizing about an abandoned house in Priest Point Park that before unwittingly was and now holistically is my obsession." And that was it. Laughing in the face of well over two dozen diaries flooded with disjointed poetic prose on everything from communism to alcoholism, I have only that one sentence honoring this "obsession." It's lack of substance is an eerily fitting companion to this one almost-accidental image I captured that chilly afternoon; together they paint a ghostly portrait of a place that hardly existed. Which, in both my literal and figurative books, is perfect and true.

I'm writing this blog because I'm pregnant. I'm supposedly opening the door for an entirely new human experience, and would prefer to commit myself wholly to that project when the time comes. I promised myself that I would "finish my life's work" before taking on this kind of responsibility, but didn't take into account the crippling exhaustion, relentless headaches, or dire anxiety that sometimes comes with building other people's bodies.

What I mean to say is, I've been doing a terrifically crappy job of writing my story.

Writing about how little I've been writing just might be the first step in getting back to work. According to completely arbitrary medical concepts, I've got five and a half months to "complete" something that has been brewing since I was fifteen years old, mutating and morphing from cosmic chaos into something only-slightly-more concrete, mostly in total secrecy, for over half of my life.

Magic House is the third most important character in the story that I've been writing, and no doubt the first most compelling, mystical and real. Before discovering Olympia, Washington in my early 20's, the setting of my story had been "imaginary," a wet, watery world that I stole from my own fevers and dreams. Yet the Puget Sound negated any supposed authenticity; it WAS the water I was dreaming of. And the San Juan Islands to the north, I would soon discover, WERE the islands I wrote of so fondly. The cultural differences were irrelevant in light of the soul of the land, the barely perceptible humming vibration of the still water that was so unmistakably familiar. It seemed to me that the goings on of the strange characters who peopled my private Puget Sound were living right along side the more tangible reality, just a few inches behind a thin veil.

The first time I slipped and slid down the steep trails of Priest Point Park, I not only fell in love, but I knew that this was the very park in which I'd placed the the dilapidated, forgotten old house that my motley gang of imaginary friends reclaimed and turned into their home. Years later, when finally introduced to the house in person, I quietly accepted that my story was not mine at all, and that there was much more to the world than meets the eye. Overwhelmed as I was by the intoxicating vibes that radiated from what could be nothing less than some kind of a magical vortex, I left with only that one blurry photograph. Now, long after the fact, I can't help but kick myself for being such a tripped-out space-cadet hippie weirdo moron. I should've filled the whole freaking memory card.  

Because, once more being true to form and it's fate in the Story Realm, Magic House disappeared. I never got to see it again.

My love explores the Magic House Grave Yard

A couple I met along the trail to where it once stood told me that it had been torn down, for a long list of obvious reasons. The piece of land that it occupied had been reseeded with native grasses and wildflowers, and, with the exception of the odd cultivated rhododendrons, rose bushes and wisteria vines, the land rather seamlessly reconnected with the wilds of the park itself. Just as it did in my story. Along with the initial sorrow at its loss came a massive, second tidal-wave of enchantment and fascination. 

As of last spring, the only remnants of Magic House were along its beach: relics of its hundred year-old foundation. My love and I collected a number of shells, rocks, and hard-to-find, ever-prized bricks; I count these among my most prized possessions. He told me the other day that even these things are completely gone now. And he would know - he's been immersed in his own story revolving around his own Magic House for just as long as I have, and at one point in time his equally mysterious and strange structure sat on the tip the small peninsula jutting out of downtown Olympia. At that time, his Magic House and my Magic House could see one another across the calm waters of Budd Bay. Along with giving our main characters the same names before we met, the two of us could have used magical coincidence alone as grounds to wed, but there's more socially-acceptable reasons behind our marriage, as well.

The Beach Ruins

When the world prompts you to write with such deliberate, uncanny, mysterious tactics, you feel a little like you have no choice - like when crazy people hear the voice of God telling them to do outrageous things and they land themselves in jail or worse, only somewhat less fanatical and definitely less dangerous. But I feel for those people. And my own mild lunacy gives this whole silly hobby of mine a touch of dire desperation; if I don't do what the Puget Sound tells me to do before it's too late, surely something terrible will come of things. At worst, Seattle will be destroyed by a horrific earthquake, but more likely, I will simply lose my strange connection with the Story Realm, and live a long, boring, uninspired life. And I'd like to set a better example for my future child than either of those.