Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen.
You know, it's been a
couple of days, and I thought maybe we should have a bit of a chat about
something a little odd and a bit close to my heart. This is, of course,
why I do what I do. Why, my loyal readers, I chose to study divination
and practice it for the general public. I know, it's probably the last
question on your mind. You're probably still waiting with baited breath
to see if any of my offered experiments and calculations will prove
true! However, it came up during a reading, so I thought I'd post it for
all and sundry.
The reason, folks, is that it won't go away. I
don't mean the astrological charts, or the cards, or the numerological
tables... And certainly not my eyes (I NEED those!) No, I mean the urge
won't go away. That horrible, burning urge. I'm sure some of you know
what I mean. I have a passion for this, it is simply what I do and what I
love.
It all started as a child (it usually does, I'm told) when
my great aunt taught me how to read palms. Nothing big at first, you
understand, just a few of the major lines and what the weird little
“wrinkly places” - I would later learn they're called “bracelets” -
mean. So, good student that I was, I'd sit at her feet and learn what
she would teach me since these lessons were kind of stretched out, to
make sure my folks didn't know. It was great fun and, quite frankly, I
was hooked! To think you could learn so much about a human being from
their hand and digits... Naturally, I had to know more. So the lessons
continued, quite a bit for a little eight year old boy, but I was a
dutiful student. Later on, I found a book on superstitions in the school
library that gave me, if not correct information, then the right words
to use when asking questions. This supplemented the education I received
from family, then a couple of years later, my first tentative steps
into practice as I read for friends.
The teachers weren't the
least bit amused, but then they never really are, are they? So it
goes... And so I went. As I grew older, I studied more and more, making
trips to the public library to pad out what I had learned. I began to
pick up all sorts of useful stuff, practicing diligently and putting it
to work with my somewhat captive clientele at my school. Once the
academic thrill of learning something nobody else knew wore off, I
learned something else that was equally important; I enjoyed helping
people with my knowledge.
It sounds downright diabetic, doesn't
it? The Divine Mr. R found his joy in helping people with stuff that
nobody takes seriously anymore... But it's true. As I grew older still,
moving through junior high, then high school, I learned to appreciate
the effect it had on a human mind. It was incredible to me how advice
and knowledge gleaned from hands, from some simply paste-boards, and
later, from planets and numbers could be so useful to the people I
worked with. However, it was no longer intoxicating. No, now it became a
responsibility, and one I took quite seriously. People didn't always
treat this as a fun afternoon's diversion, or a way to kill a lunch
break, no, people took this stuff seriously. They made decisions based
on my word. They probably might have lived and died by my word had I
said so.
So I stopped for a while... A long while, in fact.
Permanent retirement, I had decided. No more readings, no more charts,
no more pyramids or secret knowledge passed along to those who needed it
because I was frightened by the effect it had on people. I didn't want
the responsibility because I was a teenager. So, as all young men do
when they have no direction and are fleeing from something, I drifted
aimlessly for a few years. Nothing I did felt right, and I was never
happy. I was, in fact, downright miserable. So being full of hormones
and with no real ambition, I mostly focused my attention upon the
opposite sex.
So it went for years, working only hard enough to
pay my bills, and going out at night to chase women. College wasn't
really an option for me, despite the encouragement I received from my
former teachers and my family. Well-wishing only gets you so far when
you cannot afford books, let alone tuition. Dead-end job after dead-end
job, wasting my life for no real reason, only to forget my troubles
briefly in the arms of this woman or that.
I threw away years of
my life to this mindless, petty routine: Wake up, shower, go to work at a
job I hated (I went through four of these,) leave, go out and drink
myself into a stupor before meeting a woman, go home, fall asleep at 3
or 4 in the morning, repeat. Years of this until I stumbled into an
opportunity. A hotel in which I wasted years of my life was hosting a
psychic fair. I'm sure some of you have some experience with these, but
for those who don't, it is a place where a group of intuitive and/or
psychic readers get together under one roof, and the general public can
come in and receive readings from them. Most of them also offer classes,
have sales booths, all sorts of interesting things.
While this
fair was going on, I was working at a small restaurant in the hotel,
doing my part to help the locals destroy themselves with low-quality,
artery-annihilating food. A couple of waitresses that were off-duty that
day had come to have a look and ended up getting tarot readings. They
came into the restaurant and were talking about it with a couple other
servers who were on staff and thinking about going. They did not seem
pleased. The reader in question had treated them a bit brusquely and,
from what I gathered from the conversation, had done a bit of cold
reading (more on that in a later post) to try and make herself seem
better than she was, and she wasn't even entertaining about it. The
worst part was, this idiot was being paid more than me to sit there and
not give a crap about people who, from my experience, would use her
advice in their daily lives. This did not sit well with The Divine Mr.
R.
For some reason, I actually cared. Some weird, forgotten part
of me actually gave a damn about what I saw as pointless and petty.
Worse crimes in the world, right? But this didn't sit well with me for
some reason. So, I did something that, at the time, I felt to be
absolutely idiotic; I offered to read their palms. I offered to give
them both readings, something I had avoided for years after what I swore
would be my final one (senior year of high school, if you're curious.)
And
it turns out, they loved it. They loved it so much, in fact, I ended up
reading for the rest of the staff (and almost got fired for generally
forgetting I was working!) So it went, and I was – against my better
judgment - “back in the saddle” so to speak.
So that's basically
the why. Too long, didn't read: I give my readings and I interpret
charts for people because I have to, because I need to. This is my life.
P.S. If you're wondering why I chose “The Divine Mr. R.” as a name, my wife thought it would be funny.
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