Guess What I Resolved To Do This Year

Have you ever lost momentum? Have you ambitions ever exceeded your abilities? This to me, is right, this is part of the nature of becoming. It's important to always be in the act of becoming. So by inclination I'm an autodidact. I thought, those years ago, that I'd like to learn how to paint, and I thought, I was interested in magic and maybe I'd like to learn the Tarot. Likewise, I wanted to know the future and wanted to invent a way that I could see it. So I started something, and then I carried it pretty far, and then I realized that I had learned, I'd gotten better than I had been. So I'm going back - this is my second pass. I'm going to finish this up on better terms, with better knowledge and better skill. That's the plan. If at first you succeed, try to succeed harder.

The Student is unaware.  At the beginning of a journey, disheveled and unready.  I've tried this once before and I liked the results, but I like this second pass much more.



The appearance of the sun was something that I was missing before, and which needed inclusion this time around. Representative time's passage - here the sun indicates the danger of distraction and the dawn of awareness. The student is intent but unaware, disorganized and lost in details. She can't see that the bus has emptied, that the world moves around her. And she can't see that she's losing track of her possessions

I wanted to include the minor arcana - the symbols of mastery and understanding and social position here - while indicating that their value is not clear to the student. She can't understand the value of these things and so she lets them fall to the floor unattended. The student loses things, misplaces things, the student is at the cusp of really learning.

The form of the learning is not distinct here though. Will she recover her articles and leave the bus? Will she sit unaware and become forgotten? The card alone can't answer that - but it's meant to cue this awareness. Are you missing what is happening around you? Are you going to learn something you didn't want to know purely by misadventure or are you going to catch on before it's too late. This is what the card asks you to consider.

I think that this time through I'm going to do something I should have done before - I'm going to give the story that I internally devise that helps me put the picture together.

0 The Student.

It’s 11 after 7 when he gets on the bus. There’s nothing auspicious about this because

the bus is almost always on time, it doesn’t mean anything that it’s on time
today. This disappoints him because he’d
really like to draw on the movements of the bus as part of his presentation
today. He hasn’t worked on his
presentation at all, but usually he has enough time to scribble it out in shaky pothole-addled lines during his journey
to school.

It may not work today – he’s almost sure it won’t. He’s put off this presentation – Prophecy of
Eschatology is probably his worst class & he worries about how well he’s
doing. He’s already in trouble with his
parents after his performance in his Raising Up a Moral Family in The Fallen
World exam. He’s not even close to
getting a decent grade in his best classes either. He’s very poor, as a Student, ineffective. He
knows this and he’s starting to really worry about it. It’s not helpful, going into Prophecies
either, It’s depressing in an uplifting way.

He kicks rocks at the bus-stop – a patch of gravel where
the sidewalk’s crumbled. Thinking: (it’s
only 8 after 7 – the bus not yet come) The
End Time is upon us but I have to do homework & prepare for a future even
though the Eschaton is certainly incepted.
He’s young yet & lacks the self-awareness to see how the conflict
between the preparatory mission of high-school is contradicted by the hopeless anticipation of the end of the
world. Maybe it’ll end before 3^rd
period. He mentions this out loud to
no-one. It’s dark still, this morning,
& cold. His hair is getting stiff in
the late autumn air, freezing up since he’s left the house with his head still
wet from the shower. Stiff so it snaps
without breaking in his fingers – just like ice crackling. It’s very distracting and he chooses to be
distracted instead of thinking hard about what he can say about the impending
collapse of the wicked global economy.
He has no idea that his hair is now mussed comically, that his buttons
are uneven on his shirt.

He is absurdly disheveled,
completely unprepared & utterly distracted by the competing messages of
powerlessness, diligence & commerce that surround him. The digital clock on the bank façade that
stands above the bus stop says 7:10 – he realizes that he should probably pray
for guidance but he hates praying because it draws too much unwanted attention,
too many people assume that he is crazy and he’s self-conscious about appearing
to be crazy. Because he already looks
like he probably is.

On the bus there are often crazy people & they
usually pray & often it’s full of curses and shouting. Sometimes a businessman will yell at someone
for praying too loudly. He tries to
think about this though. It’s come up
today & usually doesn’t – Prayer. You’re not supposed pray in public to draw
attention to your devotion, except that you really are supposed to be if you
don’t you express a deceitful shame in your devotion – but ostentatious prayer –
meant to draw attention. Which is wickeder? The crazy people aren’t ashamed at all. They are usually really crazy – not wicked –
they smell bad & curse & tare drunk.
Are they being ostentatious though?
He doesn’t much feel like they’re trying to be more devout than him or
anyone else. Praying is a contest to see who is more crazy. He decides it right then.

He decides it exactly at 7:11 A.M. He gets on the bus
which is lit up within against the gloomy crepuscular Midwestern sky. He thinks that the bus is like the Solar
Barge of Amun-Re, that it will take him to school & then rise up in the
East & light the world. He won’t
pray to Amun-Re, falcon-headed king. He
resolves that whatever is supposed to happen will happen as preordained by
scripture & decides he doesn’t need to pray – unless he is supposed to, in
which case he probably will.

Since he doesn’t go to normal school he has to take city
buses & almost no-one else on the bus is a kid, they’re mostly people going
to work or coming home or are crazy. Usually. Sometimes when it’s very early in the month
there are a lot of crazy people on the bus.
Because they have to go downtown or wherever crazy people have to go on
the first week of the month. He tries
his best not to draw attention but it’s been three months now since school
started & on the first week of September he sat next to the worst smelling
lady who prayed the entire time. The bus
was empty but she sat down net to him.
He did his best not to look at her but had to glance over when she
started saying that someone was trying to fuck Jesus in the ass.

She kept saying that someone was trying to fuck Jesus in
the ass and that the man who was trying to do it was a snake who was fucking
Jesus in the ass – it seemed really blasphemous but also funny and he couldn’t
help but ok over and it was terrible because she was looking right at him and
yelling at him specifically. She was
telling everyone (just the bus driver) that she thought he must be trying to fuck Jesus in the ass. The bus driver didn’t seem to care which was discouraging because he was just a
boy and felt like the adult bus driver should say something. The lady kept yelling at him until he got off
the bus. He kept thinking that if she
really, truly thought that he was trying fuck Jesus in the ass that instead of
just yelling it at everyone she should have probably asked him to stop. Instead she just narrated it, like it was
something she couldn’t believe that she was seeing.

The lady didn’t come back in October but there was
someone else who came and sat right next to him at the beginning of that
month. Just the same. This guy had half of his hair in tight braids
& the other half was just wild, like he had to stop getting his braids done
halfway through. He didn’t say anything,
just sat down & scowled really hard.
When it was time for the Student
to ring the bell for his stop the man wouldn’t get up to let him off & he
had to climb out of his seat over the back of the seat in front of him. He tripped over the handrail and landed on
the molded rubber floor of the bus. The
driver laughed & self-consciously the Student
looked at the angry half-braided man – who didn’t laugh. He looked angrier than ever & started to
get up. The Student stood right up, panicking.
He scrambled out the open door of the bus without looking back, without
ever really gaining his feet. He fell on
all fours out the bus & scuffed both of his palms. So later, there were blood stains down the
legs of his uniform & one of the knees got a hole in it.

Now it was November & he hadn’t considered that he
might meet someone else, crazy, on the bus.
He was wearing the same uniform & the knee hole had spread so that
the flat bone of his kneecap poked through when he sat down. He couldn’t explain the relationship between
the hole in his pants, the bus and the angry man. It didn’t register to him that these things
had any corresponding interaction at all.
He had no awareness of his history, no narrative to explain any of his
actions or circumstances. He had a hole
in his uniform and there was no context beyond that. Without any sense that the past informed the
present, he wasn’t able, either, to extrapolate a future from his present. Life to him was only spiraling chaos becoming
more and more chaotic. Entropy behind
everything.

He struggled, at 7:11, with his bookbag – searching out
his Eschatology textbook, but he’d left it somewhere. He couldn’t say where, it just wasn’t in the
bag.

All of his textbooks were covered with the same
grocery-bag covers and couldn’t be easily distinguished from one another – what
he’d thought was End Times For the Repentant Sinner was in fact his
biology textbook – Dinosaurs in the Levitical Tradition. Interesting for the pictures but useless for
auguring his chances in the times of tribulation.

Sure that he must have packed something that could help
him – he rummaged furiously in his bag – coming up with some crumpled papers –
remembering suddenly that all of them, all the papers required both of his
parents’ signatures.

For the first itme in his life it occurred to him that he
could, perhaps, deceive someone. Maybe
he could avoid his father’s anger (he’d be plenty angry – 2 D’s & an F –
all in Pre Calculus for the Innumerate).
I could just do it. I could.
He resoved then to lie, cheat & forge. Planned to commit himself utterly to crime
& deception. And so doing he reached
for a pen, absentmindedly searching his pockets, growing more assertive in his
search & finally with a dawning sense of futility realizing that he’d not
brought a pen & in his bag he only had a broken pencil to keep the scraps
of paper and trash company.

“Christ just look at you, whadda mess – Jesus Kid.”

The Student
never noticed the man getting on the bus, and didn’t see him sit down next to
him. Hadn’t even heard him until he
spoke. Now the man, wearing a suit,
smiling very pleasantly, even as he scolded – almost laughing – was snatching
the papers from the Student’s
hans. He produced a pen & very
competently scawled his father’s signature and followed it up with a very
elegant simulation of his mother’s signature.
He even went so far as to write a little apologetic note on one of
them.

“You don’t know this stuff? Or you didn’t pay attention? Here’s a tip – the tests are always on Tuesdays
– did you notice that yet?”

“They are? The
tests? Are?” The Student
really had nothing to say, the man had appeared and immediately taken hold of a
conversation that the Student had
already been having with himself. As if
the man could read his mind and as if it were natural that they discuss what
was on it.

“Sure, but maybe you’re just dumb. That’s okay – you can be dumb. Now.
You gotta get it together soon though kid. Jesus, you ever even see a mirror?” The man produced a comb & began
straightening the Student’s
hair. Unbreakable black plastic. Suddenly the Student became very afraid.
His father & classmates often called him a faggot & hye had a
dawning sense of understanding about what that actually meant. Was this man – combing his hair – on the bus –
was this man a faggot? Had he followed
him around and…

“Hey – how do you know my parents’ names!”

“Haha, Christ kid, yer a mess. Keep the comb, ya need it.” The man produced a cigarette and lit it. Tried leaning back on the rainbow-pattern
injection molded bus seat & looked grouchy when he found he couldn’t. “Shabby.
Dingy. Well, it’s still better
than you deserve – for sure. Christ you’re
a mess, yer a real mess. Listen. What’s it gonna take? This bullshit mighta flown in little kid
school but yer about to be shaving!
Christ! I bet yer kinda dumb
huh? You like to read? Learn?
Whaddya know about? Haha! Kid…
Alright – take this list…”

The man, whose fingers were thick & flat – bony, he
produces a notebook and begins to write.
His own handwriting is deft & precise. He prints the words & seems to anticipate
the bus’s inevitable pothole encounters – stopping his writing when it’s time. He had no trouble talking while he
wrote. “So you’re just gonna take
it? Keep that comb, you’re thinking –
this guy on the bus – comes at me. Is he
crazy? Is he gonna hurt me? Yer just sitting there waiting for what? To see if someone else? Who?
You think some adult’s gunna save you?
You got no fire in you kid. Do
ya? Nah, I called ya stupid and ugly
& you just sit there proving my point – how’d it come to this? Yer gutless.
Don’t even talk, listen. Take
this paper, read these books and comb yer fucking hair. I’ll check in on you. Lissen – I like you but you gotta work on being
likeable. Sometime soon yer gonna get
yer ass kicked – not by me – you’ll have it coming though so just know that.”

“Oh! Last thing –
school is bullshit – your school in particular – don’t wrry about it. Oh!
Almost forgot, I brought breakfast.
Here’s yer coffee, black, no sugar – easy that way. You wanna split this donut? Sour cream, they’re the best – I can’t eat a
whole one though. Take it.”

The Student
takes the coffe & the donut half (really about a third) and sits
amazed.

“Caffine & sugar kid, ya need em.” He watches the Student take a bite & a halting sip - his first ever – of coffee. It’s served him in a tall heavy Styrofoam cup
with a logo on t. After a bit of still
almost silence common to the early morning bus-ride the driver grumbles out two
stops & then the man in the suit smiles & reaches across the Student to pull the bell. “My stop.”
He gets up to leave and winks at the Student. “Go get em champ.”

So here is the first of the Major Arcana.  I'm trying harder to paint better, and I'm trying to give better indications about the cards meaning and I'm trying to do much more to make these a coherent, functional tool.  I really don't think that I will try to explain myself any further, except to say that I think my pace will be substantially slower than it has been in the past.