"Can you see the little man in the boat?"
THAT dickhead at the station owes me sixty bucks for sending me the wrong way and costing me half my appointment, and I’d go back and tell him too, but I’m too busy being given the flick by cab drivers who don’t like the cut of my jib or the look on my face as I shake my fist at Chapel Street and the world in general.
Finally I make it to ye little psychic shoppe half an hour late, after a quick duck into a 7/11 thanks to the intolerable stress of it all (I am always buying new packets of smokes at times like these, then leaving them half full in a drawer somewhere when I quit again the next day. I have about 15 open packs at home). The psychic shoots me an appraising — slightly mocking, I thought — look as the dreamcatchers jingle on the door behind me.
“Mercury retrograde, darl,” she cuts me short, flicking through some goddess cards and laughing merrily at the appearance of Lilith, goddess of pmt.
“Did you just say pmt?” I gasp. Still, she had a one in four chance.
I drink from my dainty white tea cup and then, under instruction, turn it upside down on its saucer and swizzle it anticlockwise three-and-a-half times. The psychic scoops it up and peers into it eagerly.
She makes a delighted noise. “You’re going to China,” she ejaculates, turning the cup this way and that. “For trade. I can see lots of junks.” She looks up at me for confirmation and I try to disguise “doubtful” on my dial.
“There’s a man in a boat,” she continues. “Possibly a Chinaman.” She guffaws. “Look at his brim hat and galoshes. He’s wearing a great big raincoat.
“He’s completely rudderless,” she lectures of the bandy-legged boatman. “Do not invest in this boat. He’s surrounded by driftwood and look — he’s got a geisha watching over him.” The psychic points out a face with Princess Leia-style side buns and I feel unreasonably jealous.
There’s more — “Do you live alone? (Sinisterly) You’re not alone” — but intuition tells me the reading is over when the psychic segues into a long soliloquy about Princess Diana.
Keeper? Well now I want corroboration from another psychic, of course.
Hey man, now you're really living 
Did you inform this ‘psychic’ that Geisha are not Chinese?
NOT a chinaman. But it is Princess Leia. And Yoda. It’s obvious. Only watching a Star Wars marathon is going to help you. Or reading lots of Carrie Fisher.
A spot of Carrie Fisher helps most things, I find. As does a spot of Jerry Stahl.