That's Magic!

Thanks to the power of the net, I've managed to start rereading 'Hellblazer' without starving the children of food and depriving them of clothing. I'm even going to finally read the last part of 'Rake at the Gates of Hell', which I never found anywhere in treeware in 10 years of searching.
If you know it at all, 'Hellblazer' is about John Constantine, a modern magician. (Not Constantine as in Keanu Reeves, even though the film wasn't as bad as I feared).
He's a character invented by Alan Moore, who is perhaps the greatest living writer. And Moore actually claims to have seen Constantine twice. Moore also, after his 40th birthday, became more involved with magic.
I was quite involved with the magic scene 20 years ago. I've had a few very unusual experiences. I guess I've kept out of it since because those experiences were nearly uniformly unpleasant. Not surprising, considering the environment I was in. But possessions and dead kittens are not really the sort of stuff to appeal to a guy approaching middle age!
I guess I missed the ecstatic side of magic mostly, and even when I did get that lovely flow of synchronicity running, I felt mistrustful about it back then.
Of course, it never leaves you entirely. There's still an appeal, even if these days I tend to be nearly as suspicious of that instinct as I am of all the damn god-botherers in the news these days. And I sometimes wonder what I still retain, even at work I might find myself in a meeting and catch myself using some of the techniques in basic magic - which are not so much magic really as a sort of self-projection. (Meaning people see you the way you want them to see you - glamour, it is properly known as).
We all seek meaning, they say. Personally, I think I've actually found meaning, and I try to live to that, and probably fail abysmally :-)