Magenta Isn't Even A Real Fucking Color.

March 2009.

Despair is like a blanket, you suddenly find yourself thinking this cold evening - cool, dim streetlamps overhead offering nothing to shake your mood. You hunch down against the wind, staring at the sidewalk, focused only on getting back home. It's hard to look forward to anything when the weather is this bad.

And then there was this sound. You can't describe it. It's low and haunting and sets your teeth on edge.

As you continue along, you make out more sounds. A bass line, voices, a drum beat?

What's going on in the little deserted strip mall you cross in the last little sprint before you get home?

You pass dark shopfronts, behind the glass of which you see where the previous tenants had removed ventilation shafts and dug the copper wiring out of the walls. You see light behind a crude mural of green and blue houses with smiley faces.

In the office of what used to be an apartment locator, a three-piece band is practicing. You see the drum kit and the bass amp, then realize the sound you first heard was the third member, playing a tuba with a microphone shoved down the bell and run through a rack of pedals.

You see other people near the back. They're not practicing, they're performing. Here, on what you've always taken for granted as a deserted street.

"What a strange thing to discover", you think as you knock on the door. It's warm inside, so you assume one of the band member's parents must have owned the office. You realize later it had never occurred for you to ask.

You've never seen any of these people before. None of these people had existed in your universe prior to this moment. Where did they all come from?

They're all enthralled by the strange trio commandeering the front corner of the office. You're unsure if they actually had songs, per se. A heavy dirge slowly transforms into a pulse, like an insect emerging from a cocoon, then slows to a crawl.

Surprises, you think to yourself. Good or bad, whatever you perceive as the world around you, and the rules that define it thereof, can instantly be revealed as an illusion.

The band triggers a couple of stage lights to punctuate a movement. Both lights are magenta.

Exactly.

Guy De Maupassant understood this capacity for change. His subsequent distrust of all perception, based on that revelation, eventually drove him mad.

Well, that and syphilis.

But Maupassant's writings reflected a symptom of the rapid, dramatic changes that defined the turn of the 20th century. Crystallized, they echo on throughout later history. We all feel similar growing pains in these "interesting" times, to paraphrase the old Chinese curse.

As the trio plays on, you hear the echo of the no-wave and post-punk bands they probably listened to as kids. Kind of like stars; you look at the sky and see light that was transmitted from a star now long-dead.

As true as this revelation feels to you right at this moment, what is the likelihood that anyone else in this building has reached the same conclusion at this moment? Does that make this perception any less true?

The lights flicker on again, and you're reminded that magenta isn't even a real color.

Anyone that went through high school physics knows that when we perceive color, we are not experiencing the actual color of the object, but rather the color of the light-waves reflected from it.

But the spectrum of light waves is a straight-line gradient from red to purple. There is no light-wave frequency for a color halfway between red and purple.

Of course, objects can reflect light-waves of multiple frequencies. That's how the gray-scale gradient works; from white to black, objects with those colors either reflect all colors at once (white) or absorb all colors (black), and gray covers every variation in between. But usually, when we perceive something that reflects more than one color frequency, we split the difference within the color spectrum, red and yellow being perceived as orange for instance.

But halfway between red and purple is green. By all logic, based on the way the circuitry in our eyes works, when we see magenta we should be seeing green.

At least, that's the best way you can explain it to yourself. You have a hard time explaining it to others, tonight being a prime example.

Your mind a bit cluttered and foggy, after the show you return home and marvel at the ability of the universe to surprise you.

Nothing even remotely like that show happens again in the deserted strip mall ever again.

The next time you pass the storefront, it's boarded up.