For those of you who have been following me for a while, you know that I take a lot of twists and turns.
I think that’s part of being a writer.
You see the world a little differently. Something catches your attention—a moment, an image, a sentence, a question—and suddenly it becomes something else entirely.
A dream about Justin Timberlake turns into a 325 page Southern Gothic novel.
A food documentary turns into a ten-year blog.
And an errant voice text turns into an entire universe.
I did not set out to create Tarot Headquarters.
There was no plan.
No outline.
No carefully constructed fictional world.
There wasn’t even supposed to be a Gary.
I was doing what I’ve done for decades: reading tarot, talking through a spread, and using voice-to-text because apparently typing had become too much of a commitment.
Then voice-to-text misunderstood me.
Somewhere in the translation, a tarot card became a person.
His name was Gary.
And Gary was the Ten of Swords.
That should have been the end of it.
It was not.
Gary developed a personality.
Then he got a job.
For reasons nobody—including Gary—can adequately explain, he works in the Kitchen.
He makes coffee. He feeds people after emotional disasters. And he is fiercely protective of the beignets.
The Ten of Swords traditionally represents endings, collapse, exhaustion, betrayal, rock bottom, and those particularly delightful moments when life appears to have stabbed you ten separate times and then left you lying face down in the dirt.
But once Gary existed, I started seeing something else in the card.
Not a different meaning.
A person inside the meaning.
Gary was the person who showed up after everything fell apart.
He didn’t need you to pretend you were fine.
He understood that sometimes the ending really was awful.
But he also understood that eventually somebody needed to make coffee.
And that made me wonder:
What if tarot were easier to understand if the cards were people?
That question changed everything.
Because once Gary existed, apparently he needed coworkers.
The King of Swords became Charles Bentley: intelligent, controlled, relentlessly logical, and increasingly irritated that nobody else seemed particularly interested in following procedure.
The Knight of Wands became Rocco, a man who has never encountered a boundary he couldn’t enthusiastically misunderstand.
The Seven of Wands became Perry, defender of people, principles, and occasionally hills upon which nobody actually asked him to die.
The Nine of Swords became Sean from Risk Management, who identifies everything that could possibly go wrong, organizes it by probability, cross-references it with several things that have gone wrong previously, and then worries about all of them simultaneously.
His reports have tabs.
Miranda arrived with possibilities.
Donna arrived carrying absolutely everything.
Veronica brought the truth.
Linda brought grief.
Luci brought community.
And before I quite understood what was happening, Gary’s kitchen had become part of an entire building.
There is a place that exists somewhere in the vast, expansive space of the universal collective unconscious called Tarot Headquarters.
Tarot Headquarters exists somewhere between the shuffle and the draw.
This is not a metaphor.
Carl Jung probably had theories about where it is.
The Akashic Records certainly know.
Google Maps does not.
On Mondays, the building may have seven floors.
On Thursdays, it may have nine.
The elevator has eleven buttons.
There are departments.
There are meetings.
There is an Incoming Reading Display.
There are unauthorized personnel.
There are reports with tabs.
There are beignets.
And absolutely nobody appears to be in charge of Human Resources.
The strangest—and most wonderful—part is that somewhere along the way, Tarot Headquarters took on a life of its own.
Characters began developing personalities before I had completely decided what those personalities were.
Departments appeared.
Relationships formed.
Running jokes developed.
People started walking into scenes where they weren’t supposed to be.
Rocco, in particular, developed a troubling awareness and I could not physically stop him.
Eventually, I stopped asking:
What should happen next?
And started asking:
What would these people actually do?
That’s when I realized there was something much bigger underneath the joke.
Tarot has always been about people.
I’ve been reading tarot for decades, and one of the things that has always fascinated me is that the cards aren’t simply definitions to memorize.
They’re patterns.
Archetypes.
Emotional states.
Human behaviors.
They’re the person who can’t stop worrying.
The person standing at the crossroads.
The person carrying everybody else’s problems.
The person defending a boundary.
The person staring at seven possibilities and becoming completely incapable of choosing one.
The person who needs the truth.
The person who doesn’t want the truth.
The person grieving what was lost.
The person who finally understands that it’s time to leave.
We’ve met these people.
Sometimes we’ve been these people.
And suddenly Tarot Headquarters became a way of exploring that.
Not by changing tarot’s traditional meanings or stripping away the history and symbolism that make the cards extraordinary.
Quite the opposite.
I wanted to take those meanings and let them get up from the table.
Let them become human.
Let them have personalities, jobs, friendships, arguments, questionable coping mechanisms, coffee mugs, office politics, existential crises, and occasionally very poor judgment.
In other words:
Let them become us.
And now there are seventeen of them.
Gary. Rocco. Charles. Perry. Sean. Miranda. Milo. Hank. Amy. Wanda. Luci. Linda. Victor. Veronica. Barry. Roberta. Donna.
So far.
I have learned not to make promises about staffing at Tarot Headquarters.
The Major Arcana haven’t even properly arrived yet.
God help us all.
What started as an errant voice text has become part fiction, part tarot education, part psychology, part workplace comedy, and part exploration of the strange and wonderful ways human beings make meaning from their lives.
And somewhere in the middle of all that ridiculousness, it became something I genuinely love.
My first episode is now written and published.
So if you’ve ever pulled a tarot card, stared at it for a moment, and thought:
What the hell is this trying to tell me?
Come meet the people who work there.
You may understand the cards a little differently afterward.
You may understand yourself differently, too.
Or you may simply discover why Charles Bentley would very much like someone to explain to Rocco that “You’re not in the spread” is a complete sentence.
Rocco remains unconvinced.
Welcome to Tarot Headquarters.
Same people. Deeper meaning. Same dysfunction.
→ Visit Tarot Headquarters and read Episode One:
https://www.tarotheadquarters.com
Episode Two:
Missing Hope
Coming soon.
Because apparently one episode was never going to contain these people.
And somewhere inside Tarot Headquarters, Hope is missing.
This seems like a problem.
Sean has already started a report.