Why The Fringe Mystic?

Or: Why I threw out my Shirley MacLaine books 30 years ago.

Why The Fringe Mystic?

Don’t you have enough love-and-light philosophers in your life? Enough New York Times, best-selling gurus? Enough spiritual, social-media sages? 

Haven't you had your FILL of modalities yet?

What used to be 15 minutes of fame has gone off the rails circa 2023. Everyone and his mother has a podcast these days.

So why add me to the mix?

First, I'm a reluctant, part-time psychic who, after forty years of reading people for free, took the plunge in 2020 and started charging for my services. (Palmistry and tarot.)

Second (and more importantly, by my reckoning), I'm an independent filmmaker. In other words, I identify (though I hate that word) more as a "creative type" than as a soothsayer. And although I lack the energy to elucidate why I am doing both, the creative part will always trump the lesser half.

If anything, I am offering you, the reader, a mature wine. And maybe one with a twist.

You see, the whole modern-day, love-and-light thing is simply not my style. And in many ways, I am an outcast among the outcasts of the modern-day metaphysical crowd.

In other words, I don't put much stock in what the NEW New Age is selling.

In the '80s, I was a teenager during the explosion of what I'll call the Hollywood New Age movement led by actress Shirley MacLaine. Spiritualism had made its comeback in the form of channeling. A channeler was anyone with a knack for performance art, anybody with the nerve to fake a half-assed foreign accent. (Or a less verifiable Lemurian dialect.) And Shirley was their cheerleader. Overnight, reincarnation had become chic.

And back then, I was all in. 

In many ways, I was born for the Akashic records. Because before then, nobody in suburban Canada had a deck of tarot cards. Especially not twelve-year-old boys. Especially not twelve-year-old boys who wandered local libraries looking for “ESP” books. But this was me around 1980.

So later, when Shirley came along, I inherited something besides the public library that could validate my mystical inclinations. Self-help books, New Age philosophy, Tina Turner chanting Buddhist mantras.

The natural next step?—was my inevitable crash and burn.

It started after high school in film school at a Toronto university when I slipped into a terrible pit of depression. Film school was my fragile mind's pathetic attempt at escaping a broken personality—one cobbled together using scotch tape and paper mache. Hardly strong enough to survive the real world.

After dropping out, and a few years later, I landed in a psych ward for three months in my mid-twenties (which was the mid-’90s). My crash had all the predictable trimmings: anti-depressant failure, suicide attempts, shock treatment. 

A part of me had to die. And a chunk of me wanted nothing less.

Now, I realize that flirting with death is something far from mundane. Not in every case, but in some. Somehow, standing at the edge of reality with the very thought of self-destruction, as sick as it may sound, might be more than just a psychiatric classification.

Here, I am hinting at something quite profound while NOT glamorizing suicidal ideation.

While on the psych ward, my best friend slipped me a copy of MacLaine’s 1985 bestseller, Dancing in the Light (which I somehow missed). He included a kind inscription, Hoping you will be dancing again soon—which, unfortunately, was a well-meaning flat gesture. 

You see, I had built myself atop a scrap heap of dodgy scaffolding. And self-help spirituality was little more than the cheap screws that held it together. It would take years, if not forever, to tear it all down.

Positive thinking, spiritual affirmations, and New-Age Shirley were a bust.

And from where I stand today, much of what MacLaine had ushered in over thirty years ago has evolved into something even stranger.

What started then as a handful of must-have books has exploded into a cottage industry: starseeds, dragons, fairies, unicorns (and that’s NOT a joke ). 

Since the Out-on-a-Limb era, thousands of books have taken things way beyond Shirley MacLaine. Fairy dust is everywhere. And if you don't believe in fairies, you probably won’t fit in. It's an all-inclusive menagerie. So you better know your pronouns—even if “they” applies to elementals.

In other words, the very thing that ills our modern world—a non-binary loss of identity—has infested the microcosm of today's New Agers. And having gone through a rebirth following the '80s version, I am unwilling to be capsized again. 

I am forging my own philosophy. And if I sound cynical, I'm actually quite suspicious. It's a slippery slope, today's bizarre broadband of beliefs.

In other words, I'm coming at my spiritual foundation from the ground up. Sort of. 

I am a mystical creative type packing two packs of tarot cards and a piercing knowledge of your fate and lifelines.

I write scripts. I make movies. I won't be mincing words. And I won't be pushing anyone else's book-read ideas.

And it’s a good thing that someone isn’t. At least, that’s my take on things.

So here's the pitch:

The Fringe Mystic is here to console you but WILL NOT be dishing out the typical love-and-light you might THINK you require. 

Be ready, however, to be dazzled by his accurate societal predictions. And by his fresh old spin on going within.

You might think he believes in nothing. But on the contrary, he believes in quite a bit.

Reluctantly but willingly, he offers you his visions, philosophies, and sometimes mystical insights. He promises you nothing you don't already know—or should know, at least somewhere deep within. 

He is neither an atheist nor a starseed. Nor an indigo child. But he was, in fact, put here for a reason. And so were you. 

He won’t be a member of some Galactic Federation or a champion of 5D Consciousness. 

But perhaps your meeting here, at The Fringe Mystic, is not entirely unimportant.

Or coincidental.