So You Want to Be a Mage? A PSA From Someone Who Got Drafted.

Spoiler: It’s not about the cool hat. It’s about cleaning up the messes you’re about to make.

Let's get something straight right off the bat.

Every time I scroll through the internet—which I do mostly out of a sense of morbid, anthropological curiosity, like watching a dog try to figure out a doorknob—I see it.

The Aesthetic.

You know the one.

The perfectly curated altar with the pristine white candles that have never been lit. The artfully arranged tarot spread on a velvet cloth, probably next to a cup of herbal tea that’s getting cold. The impossibly cool twenty-something with flawless eyeliner talking about “manifesting their truth” and “honoring the divine feminine” while wearing a brand-new Stevie Nicks-esque shawl that cost more than my monthly electric bill.

They call themselves witches, warlocks, mages, practitioners of the Art. And to them, it seems to be a brand. A lifestyle choice. A particularly moody filter you can apply to your life.

They’ve made magic into a hat. A very cool, pointy, wide-brimmed, possibly bespoke hat, which you can buy at their Etsy store. And everyone wants to try it on because they think the hat is the thing. They think wearing the hat makes them interesting, powerful, mysterious.

I’m here to tell you it’s not a hat.

It’s a job. A shitty, thankless, unpaid, 24/7/365 job with a zero-option retirement plan. And I didn't apply for it. I got drafted.

My name is Nathaniel Verone. Since 1997, I’ve been the guy they call the “True Mage.” And if you think that title sounds cool, you’ve been watching too many movies. It doesn't come with a corner office or a legion of apprentices. It mostly comes with headaches, weird stains on my clothes, and the lingering knowledge that the omniverse is held together with the cosmic equivalent of duct tape and good intentions.

So, you want to be a mage? Fine. Sit down. Shut up. Class is in session.

First lesson: take off the damn hat and listen to someone who’s been stuck cleaning up the messes left by people who thought it was all just a vibe.

The Grime Beneath the Glamour

Before we go any further, let’s talk about that aesthetic. The whole “witchy” look. It’s clean. It’s beautiful. It’s photogenic.

Real magic is none of those things.

Do you know what my “work space” looks like? It’s not a Goth-themed West Elm catalog.

It’s a basement workshop that smells faintly of ozone, old paper, and whiskey.

There are coffee rings on books that would give a university librarian a panic attack.

There are circuit boards and soldering irons next to bowls of salt and iron filings.

There’s a copy of a 17th-century grimoire I had to painstakingly translate from bad Latin, and I use a bootleg copy of The Anarchist Cookbook from a 90s zine as a coaster for my mug.

The "magic" you see online is sterile. It’s an idea of power, presented in a way that’s safe and marketable. It’s the acoustic, unplugged version of a raging heavy metal concert. It’s selling tickets to see a caged lion.

My job is dealing with the lion when it gets out.

The reality of this work isn’t in the pretty crystals you bought at a New Age shop. (By the way, most of those are about as magically potent as a paperweight, charged with nothing more than the energy of a severely underpaid supply chain.)

The reality is in the grit. It’s in the dirt under your fingernails from digging up a specific type of root at 3 AM on a Tuesday because the moon is just right. It’s in the headache you get from staring at a sigil for three hours straight until it burns itself onto the back of your eyelids. It’s in the sudden, gut-wrenching cold that fills a room for no reason, and the sinking feeling that you are suddenly, profoundly, not alone.

It’s messy. It’s research. It’s poring over texts that are 90% filler and 10% information that could get you killed. It's trial and error. So much error. It's the smell of something burning when nothing's on the stove. It’s the unsettling moment you hear a voice whisper your name in a dead-silent house and you know, you just know, it isn’t a draft.

It's not glamorous. It's not a fashion statement.

It's the stark, terrifying, and occasionally awe-inspiring work of interfacing with the source code of reality. And most of the time, the source code is a tangled mess written by a committee of insane gods who never learned how to comment their work.

My “Origin Story,” Or, How 1997 Ruined My Life

I wasn’t born into this. I didn’t grow up in a spooky mansion full of ancient secrets. I grew up in the 70s and 80s. I was a cynical, grunge-listening, coffee-shop-dwelling Gen X cliché. My life plan, such as it was, involved maybe managing a record store, writing a novel that would never get published, and arguing about the merits of Pavement versus Guided by Voices.

Then came 1997.

Let’s set the scene. Bill Clinton was president. Titanic was about to make everyone sick of Leonardo DiCaprio. Radiohead’s OK Computer had just come out and was the official soundtrack for feeling alienated and vaguely paranoid, which was my default state. I was 18 years old, working a dead-end job at a local library, mostly dealing with inter-library loans and trying not to get fired for reading on the clock.

The previous “True Mage” was a guy named Alistair. He wasn’t some wizened, Gandalf-looking figure. He was a seventy-something guy who looked like a retired geography teacher, right down to the corduroy jacket with elbow patches. He smelled of peppermint and dust. I’d known him for a few years. He was a library regular, always requesting the weirdest, most obscure books. We’d bonded over a shared appreciation for single-malt Scotch and a deep-seated distrust of authority.

One rainy Tuesday in October, he sat me down in a greasy spoon diner that has long since been demolished. Over vinyl seats cracked like old leather and coffee that tasted like hot, brown water, he laid it all out. He told me about the cracks in the world. About the things that crawl through them. About the thankless, endless job of being a metaphysical janitor.

And then he told me he was done. His time was up. He was clocking out.

And the “mantle,” as he called it, had to go somewhere.

There was no flash of light. No angelic choir. He just slid a dented, silver Zippo lighter across the sticky table. He told me to take it. I thought he was just giving me his lighter. I picked it up, and it was cold. Impossibly cold. The kind of cold that feels like it’s leeching the heat from your bones.

And that was it. I felt something… shift. Like a file transfer I hadn't authorized. A sudden, massive download of information, of history, of weight. It didn't feel like power. It felt like dread. It felt like responsibility. It felt like being handed the keys to a car you know is haunted, has bad brakes, and a full tank of gas.

Alistair finished his coffee, paid the check, and told me, “Sorry, kid. It’s your problem now.”

Then he walked out into the rain and I never saw him again.

That was my grand, mystical initiation. A greasy spoon, a bad cup of coffee, and a lifetime appointment to a job I never wanted.

No chosen one narrative. No epic prophecy.

Just a cosmic game of hot potato, and I was left holding the spud.

So, What’s the Actual Job Description?

If you ask a hundred people what a “mage” does, you’ll get a hundred different answers, mostly involving fireballs, lightning bolts, and talking to dragons. All wrong.

Here’s the real job description. I’m a border agent. I’m a librarian. I’m a plumber. I’m a therapist for things that don't have mouths.

I’m a cosmic janitor. Most of my work is just… cleaning up. Someone reads a passage from a book they don’t understand and accidentally invites something hungry into their home. That thing starts chewing on the psychic foundations of their apartment building. I get a "feeling"—a sort of metaphysical alarm bell that feels like a migraine mixed with deja vu—and I have to go deal with it. “Dealing with it” rarely involves a cool magic duel. It usually involves a lot of research, a lot of patience, and a ritual that feels more like performing delicate, spiritual surgery than casting a spell.

I’m a librarian for screaming books. There are objects in this world, and texts, that are… loud. They have their own will, their own intent, and most of it is bad news. Part of my job is finding these things, containing them, and making sure they don’t fall into the wrong hands. It’s less Indiana Jones and more deeply paranoid supernatural archivist.

I’m a reality plumber. Sometimes, things just break. A place where the barrier between our world and… elsewhere… has worn thin. You get leaks. Time might loop for a few seconds. Physics gets drunk and stumbles around. People see things out of the corner of their eye that don't make sense. I have to go find the leak and patch it. The patches are never perfect. Reality, I’ve learned, is full of shoddy repair work. A lot of it is mine.

I’m the world’s most specialized, unpaid IT support technician. The most frequent problem is user error. The universe has a set of operating rules. They are complex, counter-intuitive, and mostly undocumented. When people who don't know the rules start trying to hack the system, they cause crashes. They open backdoors. They download viruses with names you can’t pronounce. And then I’m the one who has to try and fix it, usually with the cosmic equivalent of telling them, “Have you tried turning it off and on again? FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, DON’T ACTUALLY DO THAT.”

There are no epic quests. There is no great war between good and evil. It's a quiet, constant, grinding effort to keep the machinery of the world from shaking itself apart due to entropy and human stupidity.

So Why Am I Talking About It Now?

For almost three decades, I did this job in silence. It was easier that way. Less complicated. I dealt with my messes, kept my head down, and tried to maintain some semblance of a normal life, which mostly meant paying my rent and pretending I wasn't having a quiet conversation with the ghost of a long-dead philosopher in my kitchen.

But then the world changed. The internet became… everything. And the bad information started spreading faster than I could ever hope to contain it.

I'm not talking about harmless fantasy. I'm talking about people on social media giving out instructions for rituals like they're sharing a recipe for sourdough. They’re taking fragments of powerful, dangerous systems, stripping them of all context and safety protocols, and serving them up for likes and shares.

This is a problem. A big one. Because in magic, intent is a force of nature, but so is ignorance. You don’t have to believe in gravity for it to kill you if you step off a roof. And you don’t have to fully understand a ritual for it to go horribly, spectacularly wrong.

My motivation for writing this isn't altruism. It’s exasperated self-interest.

Every time one of you tries a half-baked banishing you found on a forum and accidentally invites a parasitic thought-form into your life, it creates a ripple. That ripple eventually reaches me. It’s another blip on my radar, another mess to clean up, another late night spent trying to convince some pan-dimensional freeloader that it can’t stay in a college student's dorm room, no matter how good the Wi-Fi is.

I'm tired. I’m getting old. And I’ve decided to try a new tactic: preventative maintenance.

This newsletter, this collection of notes and rants, is my attempt to create a user manual. It’s the FAQ I wish I could just point people to. It's the brutally honest, cynical, "here's how not to get yourself erased" guide that doesn’t exist anywhere else.

I'm not going to teach you how to become a wizard. I'm going to teach you how not to become a statistic. I’m going to tell you which parts of the machine you should never, ever touch. I’m going to explain why the pretty, sterile magic you see online is a dangerous lie.

It won't be comforting. It won’t be "love and light." It will probably shatter some of your favorite illusions. But it will be the truth, at least as I’ve come to know it from the trenches.

So, welcome to the mess. Try not to touch anything just yet. We have a lot to cover.

Whatever. Let’s get to it.

- V