KEY POINTS:
A while ago a friend of mine told me that, the very next day, she was going to see a psychic. A few days later, when I next talked to my friend, I asked her how it went. She said she hadn't actually seen the psychic yet because
the psychic had got the day wrong and mucked up the appointment. We both agreed this did not bode well, psychically speaking.
Now, as a rule, I'm pretty sceptical about psychics. Or maybe I'm just freaked out by the thought of actually meeting someone with real psychic powers.
The idea of sitting across from someone who knows a whole heap of stuff about me that I don't know because it hasn't happened to me yet seems a wrong and unnatural state of affairs. And no matter what cool stuff they might reveal about my future - that I was going to win Lotto or have a continent named after me - I would always think there was something they're not telling me.
I would become obsessed that there was some really, really bad news they were holding back, for fear of taking the edge off the good news - like I was going to win Lotto but come down with this hideous, incurable brain disease the next day which would compulsively make me spend all the money travelling the world watching the English rugby team play. How sad and tragic a fate would that be? Or that might just be me being pessimistic.
Having said that, I do think some form of psychic ability would be kind of cool. As long as it wasn't too specific and useless - like having the ability to predict what dessert people will have. That would not only be useless to society as a whole, but would also take the fun out of choosing. "I'll have the creme brulee because I'm destined to have the creme brulee, apparently."
In fact, to take this notion just a little further, I actually think that psychics - the ones with actual, true psychic powers - should have a duty to society to get more proactive in using their strange and mystical powers to help people.
There should, for example, be an 0900 psychic emergency hotline you could call to get instant psychic help with finding lost items around the house; or knowing what outfit you should say she looks best in when she asks you to choose; or whether you need to take an umbrella with you when you leave the house today.
Of course, every time you rang the 0900 psychic helpline, they'd have to answer the phone by saying "I knew it would be you" - that would simply add to the fun, I feel.
Well, at least for the first few times you phoned the 0900 psychic helpline, then it would simply becoming annoying and, well, predictable. And kind of smug, when you think about it, but I guess when you're a psychic freak a certain degree of "I know the future and you don't" smugness comes with the territory.
In fact, if psychics want to be full and functioning members of society, contributing to the best of their freaky abilities, then they should all stop being smug and go into careers like the ambulance or fire service.
The old saying about the ambulance waiting at the bottom of the cliff (or something like that) could literally be true if the psychic ambulance driver knew you were going to fall off the cliff. And that would be quite helpful, really. You might ask why, if he/she knows you're going to fall off the cliff, the psychic ambulance driver doesn't go to the top of the cliff to stop you from falling off.
Well, the answer is very simple: if you predict an accident and then stop that accident from happening then, it follows, the prediction was inaccurate and therefore invalid and you are a fraud of a psychic because why couldn't you predict yourself stopping the accident before it happened, rather than the accident itself. (As an aside, logic problems such as this plagued the Tom Cruise psychic cop thriller Minority Report. That and the fact it was crap.)
All of which leaves me with only one thing to say to all the psychics out there; one last message to send to you all that says everything it needs to about your freakish abilities and your failure to use them for good, rather than financial gain and personal glory.
And the message goes exactly like this: You know what I'm thinking.