Spell game

These witches had way strong spell game.

Humans are magical. We’re the only species that uses spoken language to communicate. We cast energetic spells with our words, which carry immense creative and destructive power. We must, therefore, take personal responsibility for being impeccable with the Word.

The words “please” and “thank you” truly are magical. I’ll add a third magic word, “help.”

We should always say “please” when we want something and “thank you” when we receive something of value, no matter how small. If we want help, we should ask for it clearly.

We’re word wizards, witches, and warriors. We all gotta step up our spell game and help our fellow humans remember how to laugh and love.

Love is the most powerful force in Nature. It’s the energy that holds everything together. 

Giving the gift of unconditional love activates the universe to energize our dreams with the power to come true.

∞

I’m a staff member at a local park and rec center, and it’s the best job I ever had.

The park is a sanctuary for neighborhood kids, and my coworkers and I are in loco parentis for a big crew of them. The hardest part of the job is restraining myself from wagging my finger at little kids like Dikembe Mutumbo when I block the dog mess out of their shoot-from-the-hip jump shots.

I love my job, so I usually come to work feeling super grateful that my duties are to play with kids and I’ve got my health. I don’t come to work super cheerful every day, as life’s full of pain, and I’m only human. Once, I came to work feeling downright negative.

Like attracts like, which is why I tend to hole up when I’m feeling negative and can’t shake it. I almost called in when I saw that I wasn’t snapping out of negativity like usual, but I didn’t want to let my coworker down. Less than an hour into my shift, I felt like I completely let my coworker down.

I’m a high-vibratin’, astral-travelin’ man. If I’m feeling some kind of way, I tend to call in the crazy.

This time, I called in a twentysomething man who looked like a cross between me and Childish Gambino. He could be a ca$h money dance millionaire for all I know, but I got the vibe that he was unhoused and on hard drugs. He was totally gone. Tomorrow, he wouldn’t remember anything that he did today. Today, he might not even remember his own mama’s name.

He came in hot by cussing out a mom and her twin girls, who were multiracial, wore the cutest matching braids and couldn’t have been more than four years old. They looked like they could have been my kids. They looked like they could have been his kids. But they weren’t. This wasn’t that sort of a situation.  

I’m a tall human, and usually, when this kind of thing pops off at the park, I’ll walk towards the person with a smile, arms open and at my side, and they’ll take it down a notch or leave. Not today. This time, the exact opposite happened, and my man dialed his cuss game up to 11 and made the twins cry.

I sat on a park bench to figure out my next move, and then things got weird when he sat down right next to me and pushed me not lightly in the chest. To this day, I have no idea how I didn’t knock that man, who I had by at least 30 pounds, into the next dimension.

Some days, I feel like the version of me that did knock him into the next dimension. But the version of me that’s sharing this reality with you didn’t do that. Instead, I politely requested him to help me by not cussing families out, please and thank you.

I hoped he’d say something like, “Indubitably! I accept your offer and shall skedaddke along. Perchance, might I first have a spot of tea before embarking on my journey, kind sir?”

That’s not how it went. Instead, he cussed me out and pushed me again. 

I could tell he wanted me to hit him so badly. He wanted to elicit human emotion and receive some kind of touch from a body, even if it meant pain. He was like a wounded puppy.

I felt this human’s pain and wasn’t going to hurt him. But I wasn’t going to sit there like a dope and literally get pushed around, either. So I got up from the bench, but then he started following me, and imitating my mannerisms, and basically just clowning on me. Some of the caps were pretty good, too, especially the ones about my limp and wide nose. 

While I was the bigger man, he was the quicker one. I couldn’t shake him, and at one point I just took off and booked it. 

We were a ridiculous pair: a 6’4, middle-aged mixed brother and his smaller, younger doppelgänger playing chase in the park. It was like a bootleg version of that movie where the old Will Smith got his ass kicked by the young clone version of himself, only I was bobbing and weaving instead of getting my ass kicked. And I’m not that old. 

When I could feel myself gassing out, I tried hitting him with various combinations of the magic words, but my spell game was way off, and he kept jamming me up.

The only words that man needed to hear that day were, “You’re arrested.”

Which I had to deliver while pointing a finger at my mini-me because this counted as a “citizen’s arrest” per the park police officer’s instructions when they eventually showed up (thanks to my coworker, who called them), even though they had already cuffed him and placed him in the squad car.

The experience was equal parts bizarre, humiliating, and comical.

At least I didn’t lean into the words like I was an umpire calling strike three in the ninth inning of game seven of the World Series. Instead, I sounded like the mixed-brother version of Siri giving straightforward directions to the soccer field. (The mixed brother Siri, DeJoshdre’, is the imaginary son my wife and I have in the digital dimension, where things get really weird).

Some people are so far gone that we can’t reach them, no matter how strong our spell game is. In those moments, we do our best, take our lumps, and keep it moving.

After keeping my wits and being polite with that poor unfortunate soul, using the magic words and being polite with someone behaving like a mere jerk is child’s play.

When someone’s behaving like a jerk, and I hit them back with kindness, they usually don’t cuss me out and jam me up. They usually apologize for having a jerk moment and ask how they can help me. Way more often than not, they grant me everything that I desire.