I used to listen to Art Bell’s Coast to Coast radio show when driving across the desert at night. His shows were full of scary stories, UFO experts, weird conspiracy theories, etc. I loved it all. But Art is long gone—died in 2018, or so they say. I think the aliens finally got him, or else he’s being held captive in Area 51. Anyhow, the world is a lesser place in his absence, and now you have to just tune in to whatever is available on the airwaves if like me, you find it somehow offensive to pay for satellite radio. I would rather listen to dead air than pay for Air Supply.
Last week, while on a midnight run across the deserts of Nevada, dodging burros and coyotes that were darting across the road, I heard a news report. Wait a minute— back up: burros don’t ‘dart,’ they mosey… unless they are some sort of shape-shifting alien burros, that is. Well anyway, according to the report, which was fading in and out like my attention span, there has been an Industry Analysis report indicating that some 99,000 psychics are operating in the U.S. right now, and those seers grossed over $2.3 billion last year. That is a lot of tea leaves, palmistry, tarot cards, aura determination, chi interpretation and magic eight balls! The report said that the ‘Psychic Industry’ was one of the few discretionary industries that weathered the Covid-driven economic downturn with relatively minimal declines. Awesome! Of course, they would have known ahead of time that they’d be ok.
This made my wandering mind want to look into what it would take to become a Medium Land Surveyor (please spare me the weight jokes!). As I drove north on the deserted highway, I wondered how we could develop a fusion of Surveying and psychic prediction and capitalize on the synergy it would produce. Predictive Land Planning? Researching future records, (there’s an oxymoron for you), for a multi-dimensional ALTA/NSPS Survey? Clairvoyant Consultant, that’s me. Well ma’am, I see this parcel map generating 3 sets of review comments from the county surveyor. (that was an easy one!) I’m sorry sir, my Ouija Board says it needs more information before I can estimate what it will take to survey your boundary.
If this became a thing, I would want to jump on that bandwagon, the way I wanted to jump on the bandwagons for the metric system, learning GIS, buying bitcoin, doing podcasts, and making Tik Tok videos. That is to say, they all sounded good to me at the time, but I didn’t end up doing any of them. So, the chances of me actually making a large bet on being a medium are small.