Saturday, May 21, 2005

Prologue To Fracture Lecture

Readers beware.
This is a true story about the fight between good and evil, about perseverence and the will to carry on. It is about humanity, it is about spirit. But most of all, it is about magic. And that is why, dear readers, reading this will not exactly be a walk in the park.

Sure, most of us are used to magical fantasies and find it easy to read or write them. That is because magic happens in a galaxy far, far away. Or in middle earth. Or beyond the yellow brick road. Or in Hogwarts. Or on the fortress planet Zircon 5. See thing is, Zircon 5 is much like the tabla player in Marilyn Manson - non-existent. The rest of those locales wouldn't smell reality even if it farted, and that is why magic is always so tolerable.

Because it is so disconnected from our reality. We can comfortably read magic so long as we know that we would not be zapped to Bangladesh by Emperor Palpatine's Sith Lightning. Or if the Uruk-Hai start to give Al-Qaeda a run for its money.

What if magic seeped into the fabric of reality and becomes something tangible, something so real that we can no longer leave it in the backwaters of fiction? So real we cannot ignore it? And what if magic seeped into...Singapore?

Sure Holywood tried to fuse magic with real life in movies like Last Action Hero and the 2-hour long Neverending Story. But you know that in the end, they're just movies as real as Indonesian democracy.

Magic in Singapore, however, is a lot more impossible than that. Magic in Singapore is like American democracy.

See, in the usual circumstances, you need a bunch of weird people, bright ethereal lights, and long cylindrical objects, like staves or wands, to facilitate the existence of magic.

Singapore has no weird people, except those in Hwa Chong Institution; even they study the exact opposite of magic - Communism. Bright ethereal lights would cost too much with PUB in charge. And the only long cylindrical magical object Singapore has is in my pants.

To top all that, magic in its purest, non-Ronald McDonald-at-children's-parties form is not allowed to properly develop in Singapore. Wiccans in Singapore will find that their religion/cult/lifestyle is not legally recognised here, despite a populous following. Singapore only accepts two Wiccans: Saturday and Sunday.

I paint to you a bleak picture for the existence of magic in Singapore, but I assure you; in the tale that is Fracture Lecture, it is indeed very possible...

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