Fairy tales
Fe, fi, fo fum! Get greedy, they’ll chop you down, son!
I loved fairy tales as a little kid and still do as a big one. My favorites are the ones where the heroes get wishes, and they all go horribly wrong. Like King Midas getting the golden touch, and instead of becoming the richest man in the land as he desired, he becomes the poorest when he turns his family and all his homeys into gold.
There are a million versions of Aladdin, some less racist than others, and watching my man fumble his three wishes slays me every time. The only one who played that trap game right was Major Nelson from I Dream of Jeannie, and only because he knew it was way better to have Jeannie as some kind of friend than to get involved in the wish-making business in the first place.
Once, I was thinking about fairy tales during a shift when I worked as a door-to-door canvasser for a lefty political organization in Phoenix. I often thought about fairy tales when I lived in Phoenix, as the surreal vibe there hits like something straight out of one. The mere existence of a city of five million humans in a desert fit for none makes the place vibrate like a fever dream.
On that shift, we knocked houses in a fancy, gated community, and the massive mansions and colossal cars in circle driveways made me think of the Giant from Jack and the Beanstalk. I wondered what the Giant’s mama was like, and if she knew how her boy turned out. I wondered whether she was also a giant, and if she birthed Jack’s Giant out of a gigantic vagina. But that didn’t hit right at all.
I’m a mystic empath, and the vibrations I tune into signal on a soul level that most fairy tales are true stories. Storytellers have, of course, taken liberties over the generations, but the heart of the tale is always the truth.
I get the vibe that Jack’s Giant wasn’t always a giant. Instead, Jack and the Beanstalk is a spinoff, and the Giant fumbled his wish in the original fairy tale. He wished to be big and rich, and things went sideways. He got way too big for his own good, grumpy, surly, and paranoid. An isolated hermit gated off from society with no purpose other than ca$h money dance guarding his pot o’ gold.
The Giant was greedy and got grotesquely big at the expense of other humans by taking from them and feeding off their life energy. That’s why he’s paranoid now that the people will come for what’s rightfully theirs and chop him back down to size.
Later, during my work shift, a police officer stopped me in the street and told me that I wasn’t welcome in the neighborhood. It hit me that the humans who lived in these gated, grotesquely gargantuan cribs shared a nature with the Giant.
