Choose Wisely! – A Waffler’s Guide to 
De-Ambivalancing 

Flipping a coin is as ancient as the human thumb, which developed on the human hand beginning in 433 BC after the Romans invented hitchhiking. Back then, the process of throwing a hunk of money aloft to settle a dispute was known as »navia aut caput« which, depending on the translation, means either »ship or head« or »while you’re looking at the coin in the air I’m going to stab you in the colon so I can rob your livestock.« Throughout history, the coin toss has been used to solve quandaries as significant as who should board the fated flight that killed Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens in a fiery crash, to who will have to tell the world that two of the greatest rock musicians of all time died because of f***ing coin toss. With the advent of crypto-currency, observers who had nothing more important to think about wondered how one might flip a Bitcoin. The answer came via an Instagram post in which FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried demonstrated the »laptop toss«. Had it not been for the industrial ceiling fan in his mansion, he may never have been arrested and charged with Lavish Stupidity.

Apart from being Aleister Crowley’s favorite card game apart from Cloven Monkey Paw Blood Poker, the tarot deck can be a powerful heuristic for de-rusting your choosing machine. For one thing, the spooky symbols and terrifying images on some of the cards (The Hanged Man, The Burning Tower, The Dave Matthews Concert) can be enough to make you throw them down the laundry chute and pick an option out of sheer terror. Apart from that, though, a professional reading from a charlatan I mean practitioner can help you sort through the thorniest considerations of your situation and relieve you of all your heavy money. Alternatively, buying a deck and blindly plucking out just one card can offer a bit of pagan-tinged clarity. Supppose you’re not sure whether you should conjure the deity Pan. And suppose you sift through and land on the card labeled The High Priestess (Rider-Waite Tarot) aka The Popess (Tarot de Marseille) aka The Lady in the Horny Orb Hat Who Got Wicked High on Uncle Jerry’s »Special« Grano-la (Uncle Jerry Tarot). Well, this card symbolizes female intuition and the surety that none of your actions will result in you quivering in a pathetic mass in the corner with absinthe dripping from your nostrils. If she arrives inverted, with her freaky hat pointing toward the carpet, it means you should not do anything ever again. Rather you should lock yourself away in the basement with your poor family who never did anything to deserve this treatment.

Like the Tarot, the Ouija board freaks us out. It looks like the dullest version of Trivial Pursuit known to man-kind; that’s until you realize that the plastic stylus allows spirits from beyond to spell out answers using the alpha-numeric characters embossed in Western font against a swiiiiiiiiiiiiiiirly background because ghoooooooooooooooosts. Of course, you have to place your hands lightly on the stylus in order for it to move. Ghosts can’t move styli by themselves, silly. Anyway, when the Spiritualism movement took hold of the U.S. in the late 1800s, charlatans I mean swindlers I mean mediums developed multiple ways to supposedly communicate with the dead. Turns out what’s really at operation might be something called the »ideomotor effect« by which your subconscious inspires muscle movement without your conscious mind getting involved. This, it turns out, is also the reason my dad winked at that nun in Copenhagen before the arrest. So, in that way, a Ouija set might be the ideal tool for telling yourself what you actually want. Much like when you slap your hand down on a coin after flipping it, and wish that you had thirty million more coins so that you could pay someone else to make all of your decisions for you. From Majorca.

There’s a saying in the US military: »cut your hair you pinko scum!« There’s also a saying about the importance of reconnaissance but whoever coined it was lost on an information gathering mission to the Southern Nordic village known as Killy Killy Stab Stab Murder. The point is that advanced research can inform an inner conflict. In alpinism they used to call this practice »rub your nose against the mountain«. That was before it was understood that one’s feet might be a more useful region of the body to hike with. In practice, fact-finding might look something like this: you’ve been offered two positions, at different companies, with nearly identical salary, benefits, and room for advancement. Neither job seems particularly onerous (apart from both of them being, in fact, jobs). Commute, co-workers, mandatory use of psychedelics, all the same. How do you decide? Elementary. Just kidnap an employee from each company, steal his or her access badge and pretend to be employed at each workplace for a year. That should be enough time to learn the boss’s username and password at both places and embezzle fourteen million dollars. At that point, you can move to Majorca and start your own company, otherwise known as paying someone else to make all of your decisions for you.

When all else fails, randomness can be as pointed and incisive as a dart aimed at a balloon clenched in a former employer’s teeth while blindfolded. Just as we all used to thumb through our high school yearbook with our eyes closed, stab an arbitrary page and yell, »I want you to whack my knee-backs thrice!« – one can use the same technique for electing whether or not to have major surgery. We call this the Putting-Theology-to-practical-use-for-a-change technique. Simply pull your favorite sacred tract down from the religion shelf in the library. Doesn’t matter which one. Could be Dianetics or The New Testament for Dummies. Squeeze your eyelids shut and riffle through it until you feel moved to stop and jab the doctrine. You’d be surprised how helpful this can be. For example, once upon a time my wife and I were at intractable odds. She wanted to name our soon-to-be-born daughter Violet. I, on the other hand, thought we should name her Pitchfork. We couldn’t come to terms. So we went into my study, and I hauled out my edition of the Bhagavad Gita. My wife wrapped a tea towel fully around my face and cinched it with a necktie to make sure I couldn’t peek. I blindly ruffled through the illustrious volume until my wife screamed »NOW!« at the top of her lungs, whereupon I lunged at the page with so forceful a forefinger I nearly broke a nail. (Which would’ve been disastrous. I’m a hand model by day.) When we unraveled the cloth from my face, the word I had landed on was »Pitchfork isn’t even a name you f***ing a**hole! Stop being such an obstinate loser, not to mention a degenerate drunk, before your wife takes up with that soul singer she’s been having an emotional affair with over Instagram.«

So we named our daughter that instead.