E3: Psychics are an Interesting Problem; S11: The Being to Courage (Tillich Scramble)

I thought I was making an episode about psychics. Then tarot showed up. Then Paul Tillich. Then existentialism, anxiety, compulsive behavior, counselling, sex, the AIDS era, relationships, death, survival, and the strange usefulness of being a socially marginalized person.So I kept talking.This episode starts with a question about whether I can “read” people. I can sometimes watch someone, notice what they're doing, construct a plausible story about what might be happening inside them, and tell that story convincingly enough that they recognize themselves in it. That can look a lot like psychic ability.I don't think it's psychic ability.I think it's observation, pattern recognition, storytelling—and putting a draft in front of another person.That's the idea I keep coming back to.A draft isn't necessarily safe. But it is safer than something that has become final.A final story about who you are.A final story about what happened.A final story about why you behave the way you do.A final story about what somebody else means.A final story about what you're supposed to do next.Once something becomes final, you can stop looking at it.I don't really want to do that anymore.I want to go back into old stories and disrupt them. Let one thought interfere with another. Discover that the question was wrong. Find out that the answer was only one possible story. Take the frame off and discover that I wasn't talking about one thing at all. I was talking about everything.That was part of what tarot gave me: something to push against. A structure that could generate a story without requiring me to pretend that the story was prophecy. In retrospect, that has a lot in common with what counselling became for me—not telling someone what their life means, but putting something on the table and seeing what happens when they push against it.The episode also wanders through sex, the AIDS crisis, fear, relationships, death, survival, my work, my history with addiction and recovery, and the peculiar permission I found in being gay to bring sex into conversations where everyone else seemed determined not to mention it.And, because apparently I don't know when to stop, the episode got longer and longer while I was making it.I pace when I record these. Usually I'm walking around with my iPhone, following associations until I lose the thread and then find another one. The movement is part of the thinking.That eventually produced another episode.I wrote a song called “Draft” about the idea that if you can feel a draft, there must be an opening somewhere. I decided not to put it at the end of this episode. Instead, it became its own episode—and that one gets considerably more uncomfortable.It goes into Dr. Laura Schlessinger. Being an asshole. 13th stepping in AA. Maybe 14th stepping. Maybe 15th stepping. Things I don't even know how to name yet.Maybe I'm just showing you the anal warts one at a time.Not all of them.I'm still figuring out how many I can show you and remain standing.So this episode is a draft.And maybe that's the safest place for it to be.