YouandTheTarot

  Several   years from now will the new cultural power structure be laughing hilariously at Meta, VW and more which boasted how efficient they are and how more efficient they would become.  Actually, even in its heyday - that is right now - the efficiency mandate seemed comically overwrought. The ethos reminds us of all those back-seat drivers who insisted Route A was the most efficient. Verboten was taking the scenic one that treated us to the serene snippets of cows and horses grazing, ghost towns and general stores.  In the tarot the anti-efficiency card is The Chariot. The journey is being determined by natural contours. Yeah, let it be. Don't hold tight to the reins.  The biggest successes in my career emerged when I was off the efficiency game. Beyond burnt out to deep fried, I had left methodically chasing revenue through ghostwriting/speechwriting. I fell into dabbling in blogging, often staying up all night playing around in that new medium in 2004....

  Hardened with regret, lumbering with age and excess weight Helga Bahlmann arrives at a hotel to conduct on-film a reconciliation session.  Back in 1942, as the 2026 movie "Aryan Papers" depicts, she was a youthful enthusiast of the Nazi regime. That prompted her to participate in the Lebensborn, a breeding program for Aryan babies. During that time, she took it upon herself to murder Jews and others she found lacking the right views.  From the get-go in the reconciliation process, Helga has to confront the question: How can she forgive the younger so misguided, so cruel self. Initially she distances herself from that entity, referring to that self in the third person. Then she comes around to owning that monster was her. "Aryan Papers" is currently available on free streaming platform Tubi . Just key in the title in the search bar. With humans living longer more are "doing a Helga." They are forced to dredge up a self that is so incongruent with who th...

  If you were young in the 1950s, lower middle class (or even lower) and based in the New York Metro area you probably grew up much like Jeffrey Epstein.  Today The New York Times captures the details of how it was for all of us back then. And, as the entries from his pals from those days for his 50th Birthday Book testify, there was (and is) great nostalgia for how it was. Essentially the defining characteristic of that unique childhood and our teenage years was this, reports the NYT: "the unwatched way they grew up."  Families were too overwhelmed financially surviving to supervise us.  The Catholics among us had too many kids to seem to be able to keep track of the ever-increasing number.  And the recent immigrants were preoccupied with chaos within the home such as drinking problems.  My gallows humor years later was that if my sisters and I hadn't come home for several days no one would even notice.  Unwatched by adults, we were formed by our frie...

  Every driver's nightmare: The engine light goes on. After I got the Toyota hybrid Prius to the Toyota dealer for a diagnosis I knew where to go next. That was online to ChatGPT. What could be the problem and what was the estimate for each kind of fix? ChatGPT has a memory feature. So, it knew that I veer into extreme anxiety. Immediately in its response to the prompt it reassured me that the repair could be simple such as the coolant. That would run about $600 or so. Then it eased me into the big-picture stuff. Some repairs, it warned me, such as the need to purchase a whole new hybrid battery might not be worth it. After all, the car had plenty of miles on it.  It was going to be three days before the diagnosis was scheduled. That gave me time to search for options. I had had good luck with those affordable Smart Cars for Two. I tracked down available ones in the area. In addition, there were businesses which paid for non-operational vehicles so I might even get a few bucks...

 It was that dream overreach. We were all Jay Gatsby. "They" warned us that if we continued to hunger for more we would wind up just like him: Destroyed, eventually literally. Gatsby, the tragic presence F. Scott Fitzgerald conjured up, came from nothing, achieved great wealth but that wasn't enough. He also chased the old-money ethos, embedded in Daisy.  So, culturists and clergy hammered: Enough is enough. You are enough. That was one of those luxury kinds of moral teachings, from a much better time. Maybe players like Goldman Sachs' Kathy Ruemmler weren't paying attention. The evil genius of Jeffrey Epstein is that he was able to size up that seeming hunger and move right in. Now, it's likely too many overreachers have collapsed into a frightened Willy Loman. I pick up that tragic presence often in tarot readings. In the tarot it's symbolized by the Nine of Wands. No surprise Broadway has a blockbuster in that revival of Arthur Miller's "Death ...

  We tarot readers don't need to use Survey Monkey to discern what's going on in the culture, as well as in minds and hearts. Our clients come to us with it all. And during the past 18 months what I have had confided to me during a tarot reading is what I am now reading in the June 2026 edition of Esquire Magazine . Editor at Large Dave Holmes lists "25 Things We Have Learned in the 21st Century." Item number one is: "Everyone will sell out, and the ones who don't will be considered suckers." In essence, the message is that no rational human being will cave to principle, at least if they can get away with it. Of course, clients come for a tarot reading because something is eating at them. Not because everything is happy-clappy. What is eating at them is frequently just that: if they can get away with some snippet or maybe a bigger type of wrongdoing.  No, they don't ask me what would be the right thing to do. I am neither a member of the clergy nor a...