By Dan Sheehan
When I get bored, I like to imbue objects with incredible power. I’ll pluck a rock off the beach, hold it in my hand and really feel it. I’ll note the particulars of the way its weight is carried, the contours of its shape. If I’m feeling freaky, I’ll give it a secret name or designation of some kind. I’ll imagine it radiating with something beyond my understanding, developing a little gravitational pull of its own that’ll bring it into and out of the lives of others. Then, I’ll pitch it back into the waters of Lake Michigan.
In the days that follow, I’ll think about the rock and how it’s out there somewhere, mattering. Were there some massive supercomputer that could tabulate all the rocks in the world and the amount of people thinking about each of them, the rock I’d chosen would be spared the great morass of zeroes that awaits the majority of the world’s pebbles, stones, and boulders.
But time comes even for memorable stones. Eventually, as my attention moves to other things, the rock slips back into that morass, into some generalized memory of rocks I’ve done this with. So much of what we as humans do involves the repurposing of great primal ingredients into smaller, pointless things. Ancient marine life become oil, old growth trees are reduced to toilet paper. If only for a moment, it feels good to take a simple thing and make it more. Magic players know this well.
My Grandpa Joe had this tradition he’d do with his grandkids for their thirteenth birthdays. He’d give them one hundred dollars on the condition that they spent it all with him on one single day at the Orland Park mall. The money’s conditional nature was the extension of the man’s joie de vivre, his belief that life is best lived a little selfishly and with an eye ever-fixed on what makes you happy. He didn’t want any of the kids’ parents to try convincing them that what a *good* child would do is save the money for college or invest it or something. He fostered an environment of blatant birthday decadence reserved only for the young and young at heart. And so, in December of 2003, he took me to the mall to spend what now amounts to 177 dollars in 2026 money.