Not at first. Not until I went by where that shop had been and it was gone, like it's supposed to be. And there I am, a million thoughts in my head, well, three or four, but reverberating thoughts like a million, and I have one of those epiphanies, and I put together the seemingly disparate details in the only pattern that would hold them all--mediocre writer pens mediocre story on magical paper supplied by gnomish shopkeeper resulting in story coming true.

Before that, I though it was coincidence. I thought maybe I had just gleaned something from the cultural unconscious. And it was pretty depressing, that the cultural unconscious would have on its mind such an insignificant little detail, pretty depressing, that this great moment of tapping, a moment one would say validates me as a writer, results in such a boring little story.

No I'm not going to tell you what the story was.

So maybe the revelation of the shopkeeper was more a burst of dopamine bringing me out of the depression, a desperate attempt to find a better answer as to what had happened. Pretty desperate, to decide that some magic had occurred to prevent me from doing what any writer ever hopes to do, write the real actual honest truth just so it wouldn't be the case the actual real honest truth I finally managed to get out was so pitiful.

The thing about those shopkeepers, and giving you exactly what you need, it's kind of a fate thing, a destiny thing, and so, really, my theory had only swapped one depressing idea for another, that it was my destiny, it was fate, that I told the real honest actually truth for a change, and the real honest actual truth was kind of dull. But that didn't occur to me at the time. I was too excited. I had power!

Even writers of the most outlandish absurdity are trying to say something that reveals some actual real honest truth about... about, well, whatever is being explored, in their heads or yours. And even the most boring dull inconsequential story can be, in the right context, outlandish and absurd. And later, when I found out I was wrong about the paper, it occurred to me that the real honest actual truth's being so boring dull and inconsequential was really just outlandish and absurd. I mean in the real sense of the word absurd.

You see, I went and wrote some more stories, and printed them out, and they didn't come true. And then I thought maybe it had to have been a story that wasn't written for the purpose of becoming true, so I printed out some old ones. No. But I sure did like that idea: that the only way you could make a story come true by using magical paper was to write one that was not intended to become true even though as I said all stories are trying to find or explain some truth. So you see how delicious that was? For me? That the real actual honest truth was that only that which is true by virtue of not meaning to be true was the proper ingredient for the magic paper?

But it wasn't the paper. Because I was on the bus taking notes for a different story, on a legal pad that I had gotten fair and square like a million others, well, three or four others, from the university bookstore. And even though I hadn't yet written the story, just sort of had it washing around in my head, it came true too.

You can rest assured I played with that one. I wrestled with idea of writing the story anyway, but changing it significantly enough to mess everything up. You know. Some small but essential detail. But then would the story just be reportage? Back to the old idea, that stories are just attempting to tell truths--and sometimes they fail. Or do they? Maybe the truth is so deep and powerful that it allows for things we only think are contradictory. Again, it's all about context, right? I mean, when seeming contradiction works, that's absurd. And in my story, the tiny detail I changed was so seemingly nothing, it's absurd that the truth it revealed about truth was so significant. It revealed, like I said, that truth may be deeper than we are able to realize.

Yes, I confess, I did more than wrestle with the idea of writing the story out after the fact, using my power to create paradox. I understand why supercriminals do it, now.

Well, I mean, it would have revealed that truth about truth if it had worked, because it didn't. I wrote the story out, changed the small detail, and nothing happened. I meditated on that one for a while. I even went back to where that shop was, sort of like an instance of trying to recreate the environment of the previous epiphany, thinking maybe another one would come in. What was the significance, I mused, not wondered, but actually mused, what was the significance of attempting to thwart truth in order to reveal truth but to only fail? Does that mean I proved truth was true by failing to show the truth of truth's lack of truthfulness? Or did I show that truth was untrue because untruth was not true? Both are absurd notions, and it was better than three or four bottles of wine.

Or would have been if I had gotten that epiphany. But nothing came. I did find out that the gnomish man had simply retired, that his nephews had come and either kept, sold, burned, or donated most of the stuff, and that the reason I had never seen the shop before was because I just hadn't noticed it. Other people had. It was just another boring slat in the sidewalk of the city. Not worth mentioning.

So I was back at square... well, I'm not sure which square it was, but again it was the point where I had somehow written something that came true without meaning to. And sure, I thought about that, about how it either could be the case that I had merely predicted what was going to come true, or I had actually created truth. So I went and read some books about determinism and decided it didn't really matter which was which; in the context of my being a being who can only see backwards through time, this particular chicken was the egg.

So what to do? I just started writing. I mentioned this sort of thing to a friend, okay, I'll admit, a lady friend, okay, I'll admit, the sort of person who I would like to be more than a friend, I asked her what she would do if she discovered she had a power like this, hoping she would somehow guess that I in fact did have this power, that I therefore had the power to make her more than a friend, and that I hadn't, yet, obviously, showing what an incredibly noble and swell guy I was. Such a leap of intuition would have been impossible, of course, not even absurd, but merely unlikely, no matter what context you put it in, and of course she didn't make that leap. How do I know she didn't? How do I know she didn't make this conclusion, and kept it to herself, for whatever reason? Because I just know. I just do.

Fine, have it your way: I know it because I wrote another story, and parts of it came true, and there was in the story a part where I said something about her coming to that conclusion, so the truth of that was made apparent by how the other parts did or did not come true. I'm not going to tell you more about the story. I will tell you about how it got written. But because what the girl said, what she said she would do, if she had this power but she didn't seem to have control over it or know when it was going to happen, she said she would only ever attempt to write very noble, meaningful, inspiring works, and write them all the time, she would sacrifice herself to it, she would write the sorts of stories that make the world a better place, and she would do it until it was a better place, and then she would be able to do it forever.

That part threw me. That part and the way she looked at me when she said it. Why would she be able to do it forever? Because, she said, in a perfect world, it would stay perfect, no matter how it came to maintain that perfection, whether through the will of a god or the pen of a writer.

A nice prospect. Neat, in the clean sense of the word. In a perfect world, perfection is possible. If truth is a kind of perfection, if truth is what it is and is perfectly so, then, truth is true because it's true to be true.

So I did, I mean, I began to write all the time, like I said, and noble stuff too, perfect world stuff, all beautiful, though, to be sure, just a little dull, I mean, there was conflict, but even the conflict as a means by which to motivate the plot was fairly dull, I mean, in the big scheme of things, I mean, in the thick of it, in the midst of it, before you know what was going to happen, it might seem pretty bad, but since I knew what was going to happen, and since I hung on the conflict all the details necessary to make it all work out in the end, even the short-sighted context of the conflict's being horrible wasn't so bad.

Yeah, I was working on three or four levels there. The was the context of the temporary truth, which was not the ultimate truth, because the context was defined by it's not being the larger context, which defined the larger truth, which you get at the end of the story, which was all contained in the context of attempting to write something that would make the world a better place, which was all within the context of failing to do so often because I didn't have any control over when it happened, which is absurd, that I was going to succeed by failing, that is, control that which I couldn't control by making attempts I knew would fail, and all of that, all those levels and contexts and truths, all of them wrapped up in the capsule of my having this magical ability.

It can mess with your mind, if you let it, and I admit I did, and I got distracted, and I ended up re-writing another story that had her in it, I mean, this was a story that was already written, I just touched up some sentences here and there, corrected some typos, did it on an old printout (not the "magic" paper) with a red pen, jotted some notes, and then they came true. But just the notes, and the parts they referred to, and somehow, some of the words that had been misspelled, the ones I fixed with the red pen, and absurd as it sounds, those words came true. But not the words around them.

That's how I decided she had not come to the impossible conclusion that I did, in fact, have this gift, that I had not abused it, that I was therefore noble, and thus, of course, quite savory to behold or to be held by, as we used to say. Because you see, in this story, which I am telling you I wrote long before all of this started to happen, there's a passage where I write that she does know, but it was not a passage I corrected, or jotted some notes next to, and since none of the other parts untouched came true, that part must not have come true as well.

You might be confused by know. Lord knows I am. I just told you that I had written this story before these events had happened, and yet in this story there was a passage relating directly to the events. Yeah, I know, it looks like I had had this gift longer than I knew, that I had been, on occasion, writing things that came true, and not knowing it, and it took the events preceding the faux-epiphany of the shopkeeper and the magic paper to reveal to me what I had done, and now, you see, had been doing. But there's a problem there! I had written then that she does in fact come to that conclusion, which, this latest episode revealed, was not the case!

The only way I could have written that she did come to the conclusion was to have also written that I had made a conjecture to her about having the ability to write things that would come true, which I did, in fact do. Well, that's not actually true. You see, it's that depths of truth thing again. Like saying an oak is a tree (true) and then saying a tree is an oak (not usually true). And I'm not even going to bring in Platonic ideals and the notions of synecdoche and metonymy. Because, oh man, I could.

See, the story I had written had been about something else entirely, about some other episode of my talking to her about some idea or notion, and I was doing some dreaming, to be sure, but the point is, I was writing about her, and the way she looked, and the way she smelled, and the way her bottom lip does this sort of half-curl, half slant thing when she's amused by some epiphany, and it was all poetic, and I didn't even say in the story, what, exactly, the idea I related to her was, just that I hoped she would glean that idea was actually true about me, and I was noble for it being true. And for the sake of completeness, the part where I was talking about telling her the idea, I did put some notes on that, and you know what those notes said? "Be more specific here."

It's enough to make one giddy!

I mean, do you see what had happened there? I once again exercised my power to write things that come true. This time it was with the red correcting pen. Something which had not been true became true. Indeed, the story I wrote inspired me to talk to her, and then the talk with her inspired me to work on the story. So a non-truth, when juxtaposed with my ability to create truth, caused something to happen which itself was the non-truth becoming true, all revealed or caused by this power as wielded in the red pen after-the-fact. Non-truth caused itself to become true. Am I making sense? I had done something wacky when I started writing about the power. The power was affecting itself, therefore. I mean, I might have accidentally written "I have never had this power."

That's pretty messed up. And I don't believe it's possible, that anyone has the power to become powerless. Maybe if you toss in entropy, but I don't believe in entropy either.

You might wonder, say, was she in all the stories? The ones that came true? She was, until I realized she was, and then when it happened again, she wasn't. I thought, too, that maybe the magic was in her, that it was writing about her that was what was making these stories come true, but I got a little suspect when I realized how many stories I had written about her that hadn't come true, and sure enough, a little while later, I wrote another one, which had nothing to do with her, and it came true, and for the record, since I am cataloging all the physical details, i.e. the ream of paper, the legal pad, the red correcting pen, this time it was just something I wrote on the chalk board.

I was making an example for someone about how a "story" doesn't have to be a certain length, that a just a sentence or two can tell a whole story, that it would be kind of a cool idea to write a really long story that was just a whole bunch of very shorts stories, that it would be sort of neat to make some of the smaller stories contradict one another, and that this could sort of motivate the larger story, and that depending on the level of truth the reader explored the smaller stories at, either considering them thematically or their plots within their little mini-contexts versus the larger one, the reader could come to wholly different interpretations, maybe even contradictory ones. We were just being silly, talking like this, and to make an example I wrote a few sentences on the chalkboard, and they came true, and it was uncanny, and the person I was talking to witnessed it too, and remarked on it, saying--get this--thank god that sort of thing doesn't happen more often!

I didn't ask what that was supposed to mean. I knew what it was supposed to mean. Words and sentences are capable of so much more than merely truth. They're even larger than the larger truth that they are larger than mere truth! There either is or is not some fundamental truth. That's a true statement. But with words, I can say, I can write out, I can make grammatically correct that there neither is nor is not some fundamental truth. And if you emphatically disagree with that sentence on the grounds that it does not make sense, then you have to admit (take a deep a breath) that there is or is not neither no truth or no not truth. You insist the latter is the case. Maybe I insist the former is the case. But don't you see, I'm using words that don't make sense. And it makes sense that they don't make sense. You can make sense of their not making sense. Words are saying things that aren't, precisely for the reason that it's the only way to say what is.

And so, if some dude came along, and started writing all this down, and he had the ability to make things come true just by writing them down, then he could make it be the case that either the truth is not true or that the truth is true. In the case of the former, everything falls apart, with one keystroke printed on yellowing paper, with one scratch of his pencil on a legal pad, with one swipe of red pen, with one mark of his piece of chalk, everything falls apart. Or, by those same means, he makes it the case that the truth is true, meaning, of course, that before he had written it, it wasn't true at all. Which is somehow worse.

So you can see why I had to stop writing altogether. I mean, sure, I tried to take that girl's suggestion, and write beautiful noble things, but the magic seemed to only occur when I was not aware that I was writing, as it were, and I, by definition, have no control over that whatsoever.

Off I went to meditate. Maybe if I became able to always write beautiful noble things without meaning to, that is, I would be just jotting notes for a class or something and not thinking about what I'm doing, but because of my meditation training I am taking these notes so beautifully, that if they do come true it would be a beautiful thing. It was an interesting proposition. To make beauty accidental, and thus, to make truth accidental, to make it such that truth was exactly what had been prepared to be unprepared.

I think it worked, too. I mean, I meditated, and inundated my mind with beauty, and was all at peace and crap, and sure enough, I would look over grocery lists and phone messages and I would be struck by the poetry of them, how I had somehow arranged the words in exactly the best way they could have been arranged for the sake of rhythm and meter; there was this one note I took to remind my to ask a doctor something, and it was just three words, "ask about sneezing," but it said so much, and it was so beautiful, that when I did ask the question about sneezing, I was so struck with the beauty of it that I never even heard what the doctor said at all.

But, what really worked was that I had somehow gotten control afterall of being not in control, and in this way, pretty much rendered myself powerless. By making it so that all my unaware writing was aware of itself by being colored by my meditation training, I shut the power out altogether.

I feel safe now. I feel like I can write again. I mean, I wrote this, didn't I? And none of it, not a word, is true. I made the whole thing up.