The Audio Version, if you'd prefer
I had an... interesting experience this morning and into the afternoon that got me thinking. That's actually not what it did. It has, however, got me thinking, now that it's all over.
There is a lot going on with my life right now.
There is a lot going on psychically, there is a lot going on spiritually, there is a lot going on personally and in my relationships. There is a lot going on with my life right now.
I am a simple person – is a statement that I wish I could make. I cannot. Not and remain able to say that I am not a liar – or lying to you right now. I want to be a simple person. I wish I could be a simple person. Really – I listen to that song, “Simple Man,” and I'm just like, Yes, please. Let me take my time. I don't like to live too fast. Troubles will come and they do pass. I've found women, I've found love. And yeah – there's someone up above. Up above and down below and all around us.
I want almost desperately to be a simple man, to be someone I can love and understand. I forgot my lust for the rich man's gold decades ago, and all I've had for a long time now is my soul.
But I'm not sure I believe his momma when she says, “Boy, don't you worry, you'll find yourself / Follow your heart and nothing else / And you can do this, oh baby, if you try / All that I want for you my son, is to be satisfied.”
I've wandered off on a tangent and gone and hurt my own feelings by accident. Aw. But my Wylie Cat jumped in my lap when he heard me crying. Let me compose myself, here.
That song hit me like that because that part is what I sat down to write about, today. I have a WIP from yesterday I meant to finish, but I decided to let my day take a different course on a whim – a compulsion. And I'm glad I did. Which is probably not something many people say after making themselves cry following a multi-hour diversion which has left them really with more work than anything else.
But more work is what I keep saying I want for myself. It's just been figuring out which work I'm meant to do – or that's worth doing – that's been the problem. Maybe not so much, anymore.
Usually when I get up I putz around for a few hours while I try to convince myself that I should record the thoughts pounding like a song on repeat inside my skull. Sometimes I record them, sometimes I do other things. Usually I end up making something to eat. By then I know whether I'm going to be able to work on Rob or whether I want to talk to myself about football or whether I need to try to express some burr I've got caught up my ass. It seems like most days, lately, I've just been picking up my bass and forgetting to put it down until the best hours of my productivity window have passed and my fingers are blistered and sore.
But that's a good thing – because that means I can't really do it more than two days in a row – who wants to putz around on their guitar with blisters on their fingers for free? Ringo Starr didn't even want to do it anymore, and he was recording what might be the Beetles' best record (I say like I even know which record “Helter Skelter” is on – or like I know what the song sounds like. Lol, sometimes I just like to say things to stir up shit.)
And boy oh boy am I taking my time getting to the point, today. That's fine. I've come to terms with the fact that this thing I'm starting to write is going to take a while to get through. That's my move – complexity. It takes time and attention to get to the heart of any topic, and it's my blog – I can take the time and pay the attention to whatever I want, whether it's apparently on-topic or otherwise. Each of these is only a single petal in a much vaster floral arrangement.
Anyway, today, fingers blistered and sore from spending like six hours fingerbanging Betty, I decided to drink yesterday's leftover coffee and do a tarot reading. And then all Hell broke loose ...is not how I would describe the next several hours of my life.
Tarot is one of those things I find much more difficult to talk about than to do. There are many of those things – most things fall into that category, actually. But my thinking when I made this decision was threefold: I hadn't done it in a while; it was something I could do other than work on any of my pieces currently tagged In Progress; but what I was really thinking about was how the only time I ever really drum up any interest in what I'm doing with this thing is when I'm able to impress upon people that these things I'm writing, this experience I'm describing with Rob – this is all very much real for me.
I think that's why I've spent so much time talking about cultists and fraudulent people and my own struggles with feeling adequate to stand in front of you and claim to be an upright man: I'm not an upright man. I am a deeply flawed man. But I don't have anything to sell you - and to me, that counts for everything. Maybe you'll see that as this bulb unfolds and the flower beneath is allowed to take shape.
So, Tarot— Is a perfect place for me to have started all of this.
See, if I were clever – if I were smart and wanted to make money at this thing – I would have themed these PLogs from the beginning. More than that, I would have insisted that Rob make up a divination session with his clients. I know that he even says to the Tavernmaster after visiting with three of his clients that he doesn't actually divine for them. Doesn't matter - we should have done it. In fact, we still could - few enough people have read my work, how fraudulent would it be to go back and make major changes to the beginning now?
In fact, that's my very real impulse right now - through this past week or so.
But I didn't – because I didn't know what I wanted to say, just that I needed to talk and maybe I'd find something to talk about in all the noise. And that's still what I'm doing, don't worry – if you were worried I'm going to change everything up and become a corporate dick and lose all my amateur charm, that isn't going to happen. In that you can believe.
Divination as an art is something I can't speak to with any real authority. Or, rather, isn't something I've practiced talking or thinking about to a degree that I feel confident that I can and remain cromulent: I haven't been educated in Tarot. I have no teacher, have read no books – haven't even read the interpretation manuals which have come with the decks I have owned front to back; and in that way I maintain a very deliberate ignorance of the deck and its possible combinations of meaning.
This isn't a perfect blind. No scientist, no matter how credulous, would accept this as valid experimentation. But they don't think that ink blots are valid for glimpsing a patient's habitual thought patterns, either - so maybe they can cool it on what they think is valid and what they don't. And maybe that's what this is – maybe that's what it all is for me: a sort of stream of consciousness, a Bible Code of my mind, and I'm some sort of para-narcissist Kabbalist.
Sometimes I make jokes that I just know nobody is going to get. But, hey, if you laughed at that – we should be best friends.
Anyway— I used to play a lot of card games. Euchre and Hearts, especially. And while I can't do it, I sort of understand how counting cards works – and I know enough about probability to know I don't and can't fully comprehend probabilities. That's another way of saying that I don't read Tarot credulously, asking how it could be probable that a result which seems to synchronize with the question I've asked or the answer I'm seeking would appear from the deck. Neither do I try to debunk it.
See – so much of the “paranormal” conversation – that is, those arguments around the reality of phenomenon such as psychic and spiritual abilities, ghosts, aliens, cryptids, reptillian overlords, angels, magick, time police, ancient astronauts, the flatness of the world – is mired in discussion of beginnings, of possibilities and probabilities – with debunking.
When I read Tarot, when I feel like I'm having a non-normal experience, I don't question whether it's happening. Not when it's happening. Because there is no question. That can come after - but the answer is never satisfactory. You're wrong, Momma - I won't find satisfaction.
Last night, as I was lying down for bed, when I felt the indescribable sphere of influence enter the bedroom and push its way inside my own psychic sphere – I did not question that it was happening. I felt it. I knew it happened. Instead of looking to the source – which I knew was my Trickster, but whom I still do not want to see – I closed my eyes and waited for him to leave. Japanese ghost movie style.
Instead he made a huge banging noise against the door to the bedroom and woke up my girlfriend – who shouted at my Wyliecat for climbing up onto the bookshelf he knows he's not allowed on. Which... is how she remembers it. That isn't what happened. She yelled at him - but he wasn't on the bookshelf. He'd headbutted the door or something - made the hugest booming noise I've ever heard him or any cat make against a partially-ajar door.
But that's neither here nor there. Because what happened isn't what happened.
That's how this stuff works. It can change our perceptions, our memories – it can even make us think the absurd and impossible are totally normal and unremarkable and not worth remembering.
And it can also hack scythes at our neck with enough force to cut the leather of our jackets - for those familiar with the story behind the first Conjuring movie.
Anyway— I've been thinking that I need to do a better job of describing myself and how I live within this mess which is my life. Because if you were to spend a day as a fly on my wall, you wouldn't think I do much besides dicking around and neglecting myself. And I think the story of my Tarot reading this morning is the perfect way for me to describe myself to you, to describe what Robert and I are trying to do here, and – I don't know, maybe I can actually teach you about magick a little bit instead of saying things that could so very easily be faked by a person cunning enough to pull off the confidence game of a cult leader.
Which.... Yeah, I can't do that. I'm too honest. But, as always, I'm getting ahead of myself.
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