Escape from Coolville. Sherman Sutherland

cup cards, a lot of swords. From the looks of these cards, I’d say you have an active love life.

      OTHER ME: Dude, you totally suck at this.

      ME: You don’t have to be a butthead. I’m just reading your cards.

      OTHER ME: What’s up with the Death card in my first position?

      ME: We like to call it the card of transition.

      OTHER ME: That’s just so your callers won’t hang up on you right away.

      ME: True. But if you look at the picture on the card, you see a guy swinging his scythe in the middle of a burned field. Farmers do that all the time so their crops will grow better in the spring. I’m more interested in this Queen of Swords in your second position. It suggests a quick-witted woman in your life. Plus you have three different Cup cards. Cups are the cards of love—

      OTHER ME: Yeah, yeah. And Swords are the cards of the mind, and Coins are money and Wands are strength. I know all that. But I don’t have any kind of love life at all.

      ME: But this inverted Four of Cups in your sixth position. A new, loving relationship in your future—

      OTHER ME: Dude, I’m telling you, I’ve only had sex once in the whole last year. Remember? two months ago? after I got kicked out of that stupid Halfway to Halloween party? Catwoman? the bushes behind Konneker Hall? How could you forget that?

      ME: As I recall, that was followed by a campus police escort to my dorm, where they saw my Hawaiian themed room and all those plastic plants I borrowed from Shively Hall.

      OTHER ME: Yeah, that part sucked. Catwoman was fun, though. But that’s as close as I’ve been to a girlfriend since Ashley.

      ME: Maybe there’s somebody else. Somebody you don’t know about.

      OTHER ME: How could I not know about it?

      ME: Your eighth position represents the people around you, and the Two of Cups is one of the clearest signs of love in the Tarot deck. As you look at it, you see—

      OTHER ME: As you look at it, you see there’s another card stuck to it, Mr. Psychic: an upside-down Knight of Cups. What’s that supposed to mean?

      ME: The inverted Knight of Cups here suggests that you also have a romantic rival, somebody sneaky and distrustful. Who do you think that is?

      OTHER ME: Dude, seriously, I don’t have a love life.

      ME: The rest of these cards look right, though: transition in your first position. The Three of Coins representing your recent past. The Hanged Man in your seventh position—you feel like you’re in limbo right now, right? The Knight of Swords in your ninth position says you hope to act bravely when the need arises.

      OTHER ME: You could say that about anybody. Just tell me if I should go back to training or not.

      ME: Often the answers to such questions are already inside of us.

      OTHER ME: Isn’t that a line from The Matrix? Could you please just answer my question?

      ME: Which question?

      OTHER ME: Should I go back to training or not?

      ME: In your tenth position, you have the Chariot, inverted: defeat, stagnation. If you stay on your current path, you have that to look forward to.

      OTHER ME: But that’s just it: I don’t know what my current path is. I’m in the parking lot of some rest area in Virginia at three in the morning. Does that mean that the path I’m on now is to a beach in Florida, or am I actually just here for the night and I’m actually headed back to work tomorrow? I don’t know. It’s like I’m in the middle of this big forest with all these trees and no path whatsoever. I don’t even know which direction I’m supposed to go to find a path, or which direction I want to go, or which direction I can go. It’s like The Blair Witch Project inside my head, except without the witch and the shaky camera and that super annoying chick who should’ve died before the movie even started.

      ME: The Six of Swords here in your fifth posit—

      OTHER ME: God, you’re annoying. How do you get people to stay on the phone with you so long?

      ME: That’s a very good question. What I try to do first is empathize with the caller. Let them know I understand what they’re feeling. For example, you feel like somebody else is always in charge of everything you do: Go to school. Get out of our school. Do what we tell you to do when we tell you to do it. Say what we tell you to say when we tell you to say it. You don’t feel like a real person, but more like a puppet on a string or a video game character that somebody else is always controlling. When you were little, you used to picture what your life would be like when you were twenty-two. This isn’t what you’d imagined. Sometimes you wish the earth was flat so you could just drive off the end and float into peaceful nothingness. Sound about right?

      OTHER ME: Yeah, I guess.

      ME: I can also keep people on the phone by going off on a lot of tangents. Make them think we’re just having a normal conversation. Time goes a lot faster that way. Open-ended questions help a lot, too. Half the time, they already know the answer to whatever question they have; they just need to hear it out loud. The main thing, though, is to never let the conversation stop. Always keep it moving, moving, moving, and you too can be an excellent telephone psychic.

      OTHER ME: If you’re so great why are you on probation at work?

      ME: Let’s not talk about me. We’re here to help you.

      OTHER ME: Which you still haven’t done, by the way.

      ME: What is it you really want?

      OTHER ME: I want to be like Matt—remember? freshman year? Used the last of his money to buy a plane ticket to California without knowing a single solitary person in the whole entire state, met those Bud Light or Miller Lite models on the plane, they hooked him up with a landscaping job for, like, twenty-five bucks an hour, and now he’s got it made. I wish I had the balls to do that.

      ME: Yeah, you are a wimp. I don’t need to be psychic to see that. Maybe you can start small. What can you do besides flying to California and hoping for a job?

      OTHER ME: I don’t know.

      ME: What would you like to do right now?

      OTHER ME: I’d kind of like to get out of here before that weird guy at the picnic table comes over here and does something.

      ME: What’s he going to do?

      OTHER ME: I don’t know. Something crazy. Can we just leave?

      ME: I guess. Where are we going?

      OTHER ME: That’s what you’re supposed to tell me. Where should we go?

      ME: How the hell should I know?

      June 7

      I can’t get these two monster truck announcers out of my head:

      “Forget everything you thought you hated about PowerPoint.”

      Forget it all.

      “ATS training will make you hate PowerPoint like never before.”

      Like never before.

      “Phrases flying in.”

      One painful word at a time.

      “Lame sound effects!”

      Whoosh!

      “We’ve got that and more!”

      So much more!

      “Graphs and charts!”

      Red and blue!

      “Venn diagrams!”

      Shaded!

      “More