It was eerie. Not five minutes after I sat down in the chair, the psychic across the room began to utter details about my life. She kept her eyes closed during all of this and her first remarks were dead-on.

“There is a woman in your life. A dark-haired woman, very pretty.”

The room reeked of incense. Somewhere, a tabletop fountain gurgled and sputtered, mimicking the sounds of nature. I sat very still, hands folded neatly, as the ageless woman shared her visions.

“This young lady is a believer. You are skeptical, yet you want to believe.”

I nodded gravely. Sunlight slanted into the room and yet it seemed very dark. Eerie, yes. The woman with the tie-dyed skirt had spoken two sentences and both were undeniable. There was a dark-haired lady in my life. She was a believer and I was not.

I was prepared to drop to my knees and proclaim my acceptance of this woman’s remarkable ability. I was prepared to indulge in her marvelous prescience and implore her to tell me more! Tell me all, so that I might conduct the remainder of my life under the guidance of her wisdom!

Then reason found its way through the narrow sunlight and sweet incense smoke. Five minutes before, I had walked into this woman’s home with my new girlfriend, the dark-haired lady in question. Five minutes before, we had shared a joke about my reluctance to indulge in this sort of quackery.

The tie-dyed woman had not drawn knowledge from some spiritual vein. She had drawn very practical conclusions from what she had seen and heard. In fact, the slacker was not even trying very hard to deliver an impressive telling of my fortune.

“Tell me more, oh tie-dyed slacker,” I beseeched her, in not so many words. Because I was curious now about how she might proceed. Would she guess my weight? Would she predict a windfall of wealth because she had spied my Geo Tracker outside and intuited that I could not possibly get any more destitute?

For the next 15 minutes, I choked in a cloud of incense and charlatan hocus-pocus as the woman delivered stab after benighted stab.

You have a sister, no wait! A brother a dear relative, anyway who is very far away.

I have a brother in Annapolis. Far away is relative.

You enjoy your work, but you feel it is time for a change. You have grown tired of manual labor.

Yeah. That reporting gig is a real back-breaker.

You miss someone very deeply. Someone you loved and who is now gone.

Right again, Madam Ambiguous. My dear dog Daisy, my third-grade teacher, that shifty-eyed hussy from the Portland bar whom I drank pretty, fell in love with, and then lost when I went to the men’s room. Oh, how do I live with this pain and loss?

And on and on. One vague shot at perception after another. I was gracious, thanked her at the end, and forked over $40 I could have gleefully spent on beer and carnival rides.

It’s not that I dismiss all psychics as shysters. It wouldn’t surprise me at all to learn there are those who have developed, through evolutionary quirk or intellectual pilates, abilities for preconception or clairvoyance. Little is known about the unused portions of our brains.

But I always imagine the true mystics as Tibetan monks or wild-eyed reclusives who spend days on end in quiet introspection. I never trust the person who hangs out a “psychic” shingle and charges $40 for readings between Tupperware parties and Pampered Chef gatherings. I mean, they strike me as people who spent time on serious deliberation over whether to take the job pitching time shares or foretelling the future.

I may get beaten up over this by those of you who swear your entire life was laid out by a perfect stranger who only charged $29.99 and who then disappeared in a cloud of red smoke. There are those of you who will swear you had a frank and earnest conversation with your Grandpappy Gus by paying just $399 for the medium who contacts the dead through a form of wireless connection that makes T-Mobile look like a Tinker Toy.

And I want to hear those stories. Because I am not all that jaded and cynical. I used to dabble with Ouija just like everybody else. (Oh, great spirits our Little League championship is today. Can you tell us who will be pitching for Barney’s Hotdog Bombers?). I would jump to my feet if somebody invited me to a seance. Like Mulder, I want to believe.

It’s just that my one and only visit to a psychic was a big, fat letdown. I could have gotten the same educated guesses from an auto mechanic and he might have at least timed my spark plugs.

I want to hear great success stories about true providence or divination. I want to hear about life-changing advice from genuine seers. I want to believe.

Mostly, I want my 40 bucks back.

Mark LaFlamme is the Sun Journal crime reporter. If you want to tell his fortune, e-mail him at [email protected].