I am a psychic, psychic man. I'm sensing you don't believe me...

Usually in my home we wait until the house is completely empty of food before we go food shopping. We both cook and we're both good scroungers so often we skate by for several days after, seemingly, all the food is gone. Needless to say, what with the multifarious demands and scheduling pile-ups of modern life, we don't always go shopping the very moment the food runs out but at some point, perhaps quite too long, afterward.

Whole Foods (aka: "whole paycheck") is good for this, because they have a full-service deli, salad/bistro/burrito bar you can eat at when you get there. We like to show up, get a bite, then do our shopping and take it all home. However, the post-luncheon coma that sets in after chawing down a chile verde burrito on a spinach tortilla is a powerful impediment to getting the chore of shopping done. They do say never to shop hungry, but nobody ever considered the other end of the spectrum, where, full to the gills and ready for a nap, you just belch "aw fuck it" and waddle home with nothing but a wedge of mozzarella and a hummus tub. I usually credit Whole Foods with possession of keen retail science (quite overly so) but they have missed this one pitfall - that is, unless their grocery offerings are merely a shiny trap to lure me into losing 8 bucks on a limp green burrito.

Anyway. The other day we hit the counter for grub before getting behind a cart to do our grocery schlepping. I ordered the above, a chile-verde chicken burrito with cheese and black beans and no sour cream but yes guacamole. A rotund and listless woman in a white chef's coat took my order. Her face had a puffy and breathless look, as if she'd spent several hours too many in the sun and just been slapped in the face. There was nothing more her expression could have done to let me know my need for food was the last thing on earth she gave two squirts about. Well, I guess she could have yawned.

As she milled around, shovelling ingredients onto an increasingly overwhelmed tortilla, I gazed through the sneeze-glass at the gathering pile and thought "she's going to forget the chicken." Sure enough, after wrapping it and putting the sticker on and all, she caught me halfway to the register and desperately confessed she'd forgotten the chicken in my burrito. I handed it over and watched aghast as she chucked it and made the entire thing again. I might have protested the waste, but you see, I was too busy being puffed with arrogance over my precognition.

As she again buried too much rice in too-wet black beans with all the grace of an earth-mover, I stood there, reaching out with my precognitive senses into space and time for a truly meaningful event to foresee as long as the metaphysical tornado still had its eye on me. I couldn't really think of much of anything. The things that came to mind were mundane and selfish impulses, such as how large my upcoming tax bill might be, or vague but important-sounding questions my humanism shoved at me, like whether everything would be all right, or downright dumb shit my brain just farted in desperation, such as whether George Bush would lose the next election.

Did I mention I was only there out of an extreme need for food?

There my psychic experience ended. No answering the phone before it rang that afternoon, no impossible card tricks that evening, no rabid midnight sketching of a nuke going off in New York City while my cats paced eerily about me. Nothing. Once more, ESP had proven entirely real for me but in a single, random, meaningless moment, and again likely never to return for another 15 years.

That's right. It's happened before. When I was in my early teens I was struck by a strange urge. I stopped what I was doing, tapped my brother on the shoulder and said, "I'll bet you that Poison video is on TV right now." We went to a place where there was a television and sure enough, the second he turned the tube on, there they were, rocking their hairsprayed cocks under green lighting, having Nothing But a Good Time.

I crossed my arms in triumph as my brother, flabbergasted but reluctant to admit it, suggested possible explanations for my feat. A neighboring house must have had the TV on and I'd heard the song through a window (mmm doubtful in that suburban landscape of 3,000 square foot single-families). Or perhaps the fillings in my teeth had momentarily resonated the broadcast signal into my auditory canal. That one sounded so plausible I was sure, for half a second, that I'd heard of such a thing before - people who hear radio stations through the plate in their head or whatever. "It 's a cock-sucking cable channel," I frowned.

I don't mind having an only extremely occasional and quite meaningless superpower. I mean, really. Superhuman is superman, whether it happens day or night or on Tuesday-falling Boxing Days. And I have reason to be hopeful. It's true that the particular Poison video in question was popular that summer, and the odds were more than remote that it might be on at any given moment. But I ask you: what are the odds that an obese and sunburned sandwich slinger will fuck up your order? In the exact way you expect?

I can only conclude that, however long the cycle might take, my powers of psychic perception can only be getting stronger. In another 15 years, I may have developed a truly frightening power to divine important information. And if this turns out to be nothing more than dressing exactly like Jay Leno each morning, the day before, down to the color of tie and socks, I'll still be proud. After all, what the fuck have you foreseen recently?