Item 109 | What the Deuce?! -- Fearless Cultural Mania
Autographed copies of Adventures with the Mojave Phone Booth are now available!

Next exhibit
--------------
What the Deuce?! home page
If I were to design a coat of arms for myself, I'd have to work an X/hand image in there somewhere. (Along with a Deuce of Clubs, obviously.)

Once I tried to get a gypsy palm reader to read my left palm (because of the fact that it's not an actual palm line), just to see what sort of hokum she'd come up with about it. But she would read only right palms. I asked her, what if I didn't have a right hand? All she'd say was, "But you do have a right hand." She was a non-hypothetical gypsy.

Turns out—according to the palm-sized Palm Reading book (with magnifying glass) I got at The Enchanted Forest (Salem, Oregon) -- that it is perfectly permissible to read left palms.

"Your left hand reveals your private side—your fantasies, hopes and dreams. Your right shows how you present yourself to the outside world and how you interact with it on a day-to-day basis."
Well, maybe it's good she didn't read my left hand after all. (But take that, anyway, goddamn non-hypothetical gypsy.)

Strangely, the book goes on to say:

"Regardless of which of your hands is dominant, you should concentrate on the markings and signs of your right hand for the purposes of this book."
So I guess, what? It's the outward mask that matters? Strange business, this palm reading stuff. Almost seems made up, if you ask me.

X Marks the Palm
(-sized book)

"I looked up / There's a hole in my hand / AND IT REALLY HURTS"
Shitbirds, "Not Of This Earth"

There's an X in my left palm.

It's not a natural marking, but a scar I got when I was visiting Oregon as a kid, up at Welch's, near Mt. Hood. We had just arrived for a picnic and all the kids ran to check out the indoor pool, which was housed in a glass building surrounded by chain-link fence. Some of us climbed to the top of the fence -- kids are smart. Then some of the kids started jumping off the fence backwards. See what I mean? Smart!

One of us didn't quite make it.

The tops of chain link fences are often twisted or blunted in such a way as to make them less prone to imitate the behavior of pruning hooks. This fence was the Rich Little of pruning hook imitators. As I pushed backwards off the fence, my left palm got caught on one of these jagged hooks & the weight of my body pulled it through my hand. So I was stuck hanging there by my palm, until someone could go and find an adult to lift me off the fence.

What sis had to say about the event