Piercing Portents: learning to live with psychic flashes
I had my left ear pierced my freshman year of high school. This was followed by another piercing in the left lobe and a third in the cartilage, and finally a piercing in the right ear to balance things out.
I know it’s nothing by today’s standards, but back in the 90s I was freaking out nervous.
While I’ve always appreciated being able to accessorize my ears, I stopped wearing earrings about five years ago – officially because of corporate dress codes, but really because I took them out at work. one day and I just forgot to put them back. And also because I lost the small articulated hoops which were a bit my signature.
Ben’s ears are calibrated, so I mostly admire his instead of playing with mine. He also has a few other nuts and bolts around him, and last Friday, after returning to Los Angeles, he picked up an extra one. (Please accept the vagueness of this statement as permission to decide for yourself where the needle went.) I’ve never had jewelry below my neck myself, but I support Ben 100% in his body art endeavors – though I got a little worried this morning when one of the neglected semi-closed piercings in my left ear developed an infection out of nowhere.
It wasn’t serious and it was easily treatable, but neither was it my piercing that worried me. So I texted Ben like, “Hello! Be very careful with your new skin hole today, because one of mine is all swollen up and that sounds like a nice reaction. And he texted me back “Thank you, I’ll be very careful,” because he understands me and because he’s used to me talking bullshit like that.
Ben calls it my Spidey Sense, although it’s decidedly not a superpower, nor particularly useful. It’s just that every once in a while, a random thought or feeling pops up in my brain, and I’m like, “The broom fell; company is coming,” then the doorbell rang and everyone around me said, “Whoa, wait, how did you know this would happen? But I usually try to keep those thoughts to myself, because sharing them out loud is nine out of ten times harder than it’s worth.
In college, I had a reputation for being a seer, for I had unwittingly but accurately predicted a few events: Among a certain group of friends, I was simply known as the resident mutant. But then a friend of mine said, “I’m pregnant. Did you know that?” And I was like, “Congratulations! I actually didn’t know that,” and suddenly the people who had oddly bragged about my supposed abilities were all, “Ha! He did not know. He’s not psychic after all, the big fraud,” rendering all the other pregnancies I had successfully predicted moot.
But that’s just the Witch’s Way, isn’t it? When things are going well, everyone thinks, “Thumper is lucky to have a present!” And when things go wrong, that’s it, “Thumper sent his hellish spirit to jump on Good Parson’s cow.”
Eh. No matter. I was doomed to be burned at the stake sooner or later.
What sucks is when I’m angry and don’t watch what I’m saying, because sometimes a random prophetic statement flies out of my mouth without me realizing it. This is when things get messy.
My ex had a mild head cold once, which on the human flu scale was somewhere between last rites and the reading of the will. I was getting ready to do a solitary Full Moon ritual, and he asked what the purpose was, and I thought, Oh, I’m just going to worship the Moon Goddess. And he was like, “But I’m sick. Can’t you work for me instead? »
I admitted it couldn’t hurt, and about an hour later I came back into the living room and said to myself, “I’ve done some work to help you feel better.” And the rat bastard rolled his eyes and said, “You know I don’t believe that shit.”
“You’re going to get a surprise on your blood test,” I barked. “Not the first. The second.”
“What the hell does that mean?” He asked.
I had no idea what that meant, so I just shrugged.
He needed routine blood work a few days later, and he was quite horrified when he received his results, which were basically, “Your veins are full of angry ghosts and moldavite.” But then the lab called him back and said, “Our evil! There was a problem with our equipment, but we’ve rerun your sample, and all is well. You are absolutely not dying. Sorry about that.”
“Oh, okay,” I said after he filled me in. ” The second. It is what that meant.
He stared at me for a moment, then shrugged off and reiterated that he didn’t believe in such things.
And honestly, the only thing worse than being a bush league prophet is being a bush league prophet that no one believes.
It would be pretty epic if I could extract factoids from the Akashic Records at will, but like I said, that doesn’t happen regularly, and I have no say on the timing. will be happen. So I just learned to live with it. And I do so by following my own advice and asking myself these three important questions whenever an unknowable something or another Houdin comes to mind:
- Should I say it?
- Should I say it now?
- Should it be said by me?
I mean, if it’s a blood red vision of the apocalypse, so yeah, I guess I should probably tell someone. But if it’s just, like, “The cashier at Walgreens will see a green truck tomorrow,” or something that nonsense, it doesn’t hurt to keep quiet.
I also work hard to remind myself that the future is squishy at best – there are possibilities and probabilities, but none of them are set in stone. So anything I might see or say is just a potential future, not one that will undeniably come to pass, and as such I’m under no obligation to tell anyone. And that in turn helps me with my anger management issues because I’m much less likely to go Delphic Hulk if I stop, breathe, and think before I speak.
But I will still reach out to people I care about if I get a worrying signal on my radar about them. Ben’s new piercing is fine (and my old one is back to normal), and maybe I’m just a long-distance hypochondriac, or maybe he got my text and was inspired to wash well its pieces seconds before eating flesh bacteria could creep into the wound. There’s no real way to tell, and it really doesn’t matter. Sometimes it’s just nice to know that a person will always believe me.
In fact, just do two people. I was lazily chatting with my Minoan/IML brother Jody as I tried to finish this post (it’s technically not procrastination if I can pass it off as multitasking), and took a screenshot of the conversation, because its timing could not have been better, all of you:
Jody is coming to visit us this spring. I’m very excited to see if we transform into a psionic version of the Wonder Twins, or if being in the same room negates our powers.
Anyway, he says we are going to have an adventure. Since he chose to reveal his own precognitive experiences when he did, I really have no choice but to believe him.