X. WHEEL OF FORTUNE
On one of the last days I lived in Seattle, my friend Paullette and I went down to the Emerald Queen Casino to meet the Wheelmobile. Inside the casino, there was a traveling puzzle board and wheel. People filled out applications to be randomly selected as contestants. Was it really random? I don’t know. Isn’t my belief, the thing I spent years writing a book about, that nothing is random? I’m not sure now.
I’ve been in the process of doing interviews for White Magic, and when I’m asked to talk about magic, I don’t always know what to say. For a while, I thought I didn’t need it anymore, but I don’t think that’s true. I would love to have some magic.
I haven’t been reading my cards much in the past year or two—maybe because there’s nothing I feel I need to divine, nothing happening in secret that I need to uncover, no future to fear. There is a future, of course, but early in the pandemic, I had to teach myself to stop anticipating it, because all I could think about was doom. But I did pull one card the other day, when I needed to make a decision that required intuition, because my information wasn’t enough.
I pulled WHEEL OF FORTUNE, which I consider a good sign. It’s a reminder that things are constantly in motion. I don’t know who this little being is that turns the wheel, but I know they aren’t me. It’s a reminder that I’ve had a lot of luck, more luck than I’ve had suffering I didn’t cause, though I’ve had a lot of both, and the wheel can spin to one or the other at any moment.
We didn’t get chosen to spin the wheel at the casino, by the way. But I was spinning the wheel by leaving Seattle and hoping for the best. I am obsessed with knowing what’s going to happen. I think that’s common. But without the unknown ahead of us, our world would collapse. We have to be living between the past we’re trying to make sense of and the future we’re trying, whether or not we believe in divination, to predict.