when I'm with the wizard

[rm]

So, listening to the Wicked album obsessively. It's as Musical Theater! as something can get, which is to say, it's often not as musically smart as it should be, but it gets you every single time, and while not my favourite song, I've become preoccupied with When I'm With the Wizard.

And it got me thinking about my shit. The people I've believed in from afar (even when they were right there in my bed) who were going to make it all better and turned out to be ordinary or drab or cruel or distracted instead.

I've gotten smarter as I've gotten older. Chosen wizards harder to get to see fall. Gotten less angry with people for being human, both in the best and worst ways. Made up a list of things that maybe I still want, but I choose not to, because it's such a screeching waste of time.

But I'm still doing it, just different arenas, all the time. Although I prepare myself now. Think up all the ways they'll be unlikeable, frustrating, scary and useless. Think how they'll hate my tendency to talk out of school, or to laugh silently like I'm not allowed. Think about how they'll dissapoint me, and it'll make me better. Think about how adoring people for their flaws doesn't mean letting the poison anywhere near me.

But it seems I need the wizard figures, even if it's just to tell them to fuck off.

I know some of you suffer them too -- so tell me about them, past and present, where they're brilliant in your mind, and all the ways they've been or you expect them to be craven.

No reason for the question really, other than I like asking them, did nealry daily back in the bad old days of Voxxen, and I like other people's fairytales at least as much as my own.

Comments

on the subject of wizards

[tsarina.livejournal.com]

I have this absurd image of the wizard skipping down the road. It's really funny, and no I have no idea why it came to be, but I should probably hide under my desk and stifle the laughter before someone asks me if I've taken drugs today.

Re: on the subject of wizards

[rm.livejournal.com]

We're still recovering from that image here.
With the little hat and the snake stick too?

Re: on the subject of wizards

[tsarina.livejournal.com]

With the cane, and the absurd hat! Merrily down the yellow brick road. Bwahahahaha.

It's the rain I swear. It makes him restless.

[marzipan-pig.livejournal.com]

The people I've believed in from afar (even when they were right there in my bed) who were going to make it all better and turned out to be ordinary or drab or cruel or distracted instead.

this bit made ma almost want to cry.

I'd like to respond to this more, could I do so in email?

[rm.livejournal.com]

Sure.

there's no place like home.....

[labellerose.livejournal.com]

being named Dorothy, I always knew the Wizard was a fraud. But in encountering him the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion learned what they should have known already, that they could become who they truly were, and what they needed themselves to be.
They wizard was the catalyst, but they did the work on their own. I see wizards as people who come into my life for a time, and the lessons they teach may not be the ones they think they are imparting.

[feyandstrange.livejournal.com]

My Wizards were persons who occupied an office, or a position -- while on occasion the *man* in the office might fail, the office itself was the high ideal. That was how I consoled myself, or tried to. When the people in the offices began to show disrespect for the offices themselves, and for the people who served those offices and that country - that's where I had to walk away from the whole thing.

And sometimes I still miss it, and sometimes it still hurts. There are more reasons than just choice - health, education - which keep me off that particular yellow brick road now, but if the right wizard came along and restored my faith, made it all look good again and made me believe there wasn't dirt behind the curtain -- well, I'd be glad for anyone else fool enough to try that road, and I might cry for myself a little.

Never got close enough to any of them to have a 'relationship', and it wasn't right for that path. I feared dating those sorts; I dated weaker, intellectual men grateful enough to date anyone at all, because it was less hard on my ego.