House Of Cards

Shortly after high school, one of my good friends called to let me know she had visited a psychic. She was freaked because the woman she consulted with seemed to know so much about her personal life. At the time, and for many years to come, I was afraid of psychics. I didn’t want anyone telling me things I didn’t want to know. And there was also the question of fraudulence. Had I even wanted to see a psychic, how would I know if they were the real deal or just some charlatan trying to make a buck?

Fast forward to 2006. It was a Saturday night and I had agreed to meet my friend Tim at a popular Hollywood club. As is my M.O., I was running late, but I knew it didn’t matter. Tim is a big boy and very sociable. When I finally walked in around twenty minutes late, I found Tim talking to a group of four or five people. There were two from New York who were visiting a friend who had just moved to Los Angeles. Tim introduced me to the group and pointed out that one of his new friends was psychic. A million questions ran through my mind, but the first was, “How did Tim already find this out?” I hadn’t been that late, so clearly the cute and bubbly girl had used this information as an icebreaker.

After Tim declared, “She says she’s psychic,” I didn’t really know what to say. There was an awkward silence as I wondered how to turn this news into a conversation. The pregnant pause floated and then I rebounded with a question, “So what is it you see when you’re having a psychic episode?” I wish I could remember her answer, but the truth is I don’t. The setting seemed wrong for such a conversation. The club was fairly crowded and dark except for the laser light display. All of us were standing beside the bar, on the edge of the dance floor and the music was loud. By the time she answered, I had already judged that she was young and kooky, so I didn’t pay much attention to her response.

Eventually, Tim and I broke away and as was our custom, we closed down the club. After management had evacuated patrons from the venue, we stood outside talking. Little did I know I had received my first unofficial psychic reading. Apparently, while I was chatting with some of Tim’s new acquaintances, the psychic girl had informed him that there was an extremely dark energy going on with me, so much so that she asked Tim not to mention it. For some reason, she thought there was something going on with my grandfather (or that he had just died), but both of my parents’ fathers had passed away decades before my birth. I must admit I was annoyed and dismissed everything the girl said as trickery and buffoonery. I told Tim she was probably just using the conversation to flirt with him. Later, when Tim and I finally parted ways, I drove home thinking this is why I never wanted to see a psychic, for fear of being told something negative.

About a year later, I was visited by darkness and negativity. First, I was diagnosed with a rare form of thyroid cancer and while I was battling it, my mother passed away. In many ways I felt as if I had been thrown into the abyss. And the memory of Tim recounting the young girl’s story resurfaced. I wondered if this was the darkness she had (fore)seen.

In October of last year, on the recommendation of a friend, I sent my birth date to a reader of tarot. I never heard back from him nor did I reach out to him again. And then last Thursday, I received a call from the reader apologizing for taking so long. He had suffered a lot of personal problems and my reading had fallen off of his priority list. As such he had repeated another reading just before calling me. It is funny how the universe works. Just that week, I was suffering through quite a bit of personal turmoil and his call could not have come at a better time. Amazingly, he began to describe the exact situation that was causing me anguish and proceeded to talk in specifics about other issues that were going on in my life. At one point I was almost shaking from his accuracy. At the end of the call, I felt more peaceful and I thanked him for taking so long to get back to me. In some way, the reading of my cards had created order in the chaos.

For over a year now, I have had a deck of tarot cards at my house. I have two books on how to read them, but my study of them wasn’t all that eye opening. The main thing I do remember from one of the books is that tarot can be used to make sense of all of the chaos. And certainly all of us can use a little of that.

TO LEARN MORE OR TO READ AN EXCERPT
of my sci-fi/fantasy/adventure novel, “The Unveiling: 1.0,” please visit TheUnveilingSeries.com.