I am very intuitive and always have been. I just know when something or someone is not right, not telling the truth, inauthentic, when something else is lurking beneath the veneer, when and sometimes why people put on fronts to cover their pain, their shame, their secrets. That is not to say I know the details—but the vibe I get immediately. And sometimes when I have found out the details, their veneers or front face makes perfect sense. In other words, a lot of us have perfectly sound reasons to keep our secrets to ourselves and those reasons are not necessarily nefarious. Suffice it to say I was born a vibe receptor and It’s been both a blessing and a curse To Know.Without Knowing How I Know.

Anyhow, the first time I can remember my Bullshit Detector being activated was November 22, 1963. It was a cold rainy November day in the Northeast. My third birthday was less than two months away. My mom had left to buy some groceries downtown. My older brothers were supposed to be babysitting me—they were upstairs in their room. I was watching Bugs Bunny, wrapped up in a blanket in front of the tv on the floor. All of a sudden the emergency broadcast system broke thru to announce JFK had been shot and that the regularly scheduled “program” would be cancelled and live coverage of the event would be aired instead. Annoyed by the disruption, I tried to switch channels, but every channel had a similar or same message. So there was nothing else to watch but the news coverage of the assassination. I don’t even think I realized the significance of the event until later, when my mother came home from grocery shopping, soaking wet, bags in arms, sobbing. (They had announced the news over the loudspeaker at the store.) But even before her return—just watching those newsmen in their suits report what they knew about the assassination, I just knew in my soon-to-be-three-year-old psyche, that while the event was real, the story of it was bullshit. And it wasn’t that the newsmen themselves knew they were lying—they didn’t—I just somehow knew, even in those initial reports, that there was far, far, more to the story than we would ever officially be told.

Fast forward throughout my sixty plus years on this planet—there is neither the time nor the words nor the numbers to count or recount all the incidents big and small where I have sensed a rabbit hole.

BTW…pretty sure the cartoon I was watching that day was the episode where Elmer Fudd is chasing Bugs Bunny with his shotgun and he sings “Kill the Wabbit!” in an operatic fashion.