WEEKLY WTF
04-08-24 Edition
Free Shit~ 14
Sort of a Tim Burton/ Monte Python/ Evil Dead mashup.
Transmissions From the Desert~ 3
The Zombie apocalypse can be fun!
The Fool
I’ve never been one for big April Fools pranks, you know the ones, where you try to convince someone that some shocking or terrible shit has occurred. You let them stew in it a while until you finally decide to let them off the hook pronouncing with mischievous glee: “HaHa, April Fools fucker!”. Being a dispatcher, a person who on the daily tells people shit that they don’t want to hear, I’ve made it a personal protocol to not prank as such because if you do it once then forevermore every time you tell that person that you previously kidded some terrible thing they will be unable in their heart of hearts to initially believe your ass. A lot of time is then wasted saying, “No, seriously”. I do love a good jump scare though, I would jump scare motherfuckers all damn day if I could.
But fooling aside, let’s talk about the Fool. I’m talking about me and I’m talking about you. Is there anything in you that is repelled by the notion? If so then that quivering and resistant thing may be keeping you from the truth of your deeper nature, it may be holding you back. The word Fool is Latin for Follis, which is a pair of bellows meant to blow air, like for stoking a fire back in the day. So when you fool someone, you are basically blowing them… no, don’t be a dumbass. And speaking of dumbasses being a Fool is not the same thing as being a dumbass.
For a bellows to effectively blow air for stoking a fire it must be empty within. The Fool is indeed often considered “empty headed” but the actual archetype is anything but dumb. The fool is empty of knowledge and experience and yet enthusiastically charges forth into the unknown to fill that inherent emptiness within. It is an emptiness yearning to be filled but don’t get fucking trapped by the voids hungry nature. As soon as we think we know some shit then we’ve displaced some of that emptiness and as a result there is less room for growth.
The Fool archetype is all of us, as youngsters or as a person embarking on a new endeavor. The Fool is our forgotten innocence. The Tarot depicts the Fool excitedly looking onward and upward but about to step off a fucking cliff into unknown dangers. My rendition here is of a fool with a crazy-eyed mad glee, dangerously close to stepping in dogshit, holding a banana (because why the fuck not) with middle finger extended in apparent defiance of other peoples opinions and an open umbrella on a windy day standing at the edge of a pier about to be blown into the empty void of a sharks belly. A windy day it was indeed and that umbrella is inside out not by my manipulations but for realsies and I’m lucky to have not actually been blown asunder. The foolish shit I’ll do to scratch that gut itch knows almost no bounds it seems. But that’s the way, it’s how every success must begin. An excited rush, following that aspiring tingle in our guts. An aspiration that we feel must be done come what fucking may. We bumble through shit and fuck shit it up but if we persevere and keep bumbling through failure and disappointment following that foolish excitement we will eventually meet with success. Another key to success is to not get attached to your definition of success or married to a particular idea forsaking all others due to attachment and the belief that you actually think you know best. If you are attached then you’re essentially insisting that the quantum possibility wave of reality collapse only upon the singular object of your desire. By all means aim at the peak and aim hard but be watchful for other paths to appear that might be superior and beware of that thing when hiking where you think you’re about to reach “the” peak but it’s just the top of a fucking foothill, there are many peaks beyond that may be claimed. Remain fluid and reality has this weird way of rewarding non attachment with better shit- it seems to upgrade your success in a way. You see, failing at something we wanted to succeed at can lead us to even greater success of which we would have never fucking thought of had we succeeded at our lesser aspiration. Like claiming the top of a foothill and calling it Mount Everest like a dumbass. Said another way: it takes a lot of shit to fertilize and grow a rose bush.
The Fool is the beginner and do you know what’s cool about being a beginner and knowing you’re a beginner? You’re eager and willing to actually learn shit, you’re open to possibilities. Think of the potentiality of a person who is entirely about absorbing and learning, wasting zero time or energy trying to convince other motherfuckers or themselves that they know something. Young kids are like that, they want to know everything and if you tell them something they take it in lock stock & barrel. Unfortunately though, kids turn into teenagers and teenagers think they know fucking everything which is why they are so damn hard to teach as they barrage you with an onslaught of defensive sighing and aggressive eye rolls, do you see what I’m getting at? You can be an expert at a thing but if in the back of your mind you always have the attitude of a beginner then you’ll continue to learn shit. No one cares “what” you are or aren’t more than you do so maybe join that “not caring” club and take a little fucking breaky poo from self aggrandizement or self deprecation for a change.
Fools take the first eager step with both enthusiasm and ignorance, but step they do. And, after a shit ton of steps over soft grass and hard rock, up and down the mountain and occasionally into hot piles of dogshit, steps that lead to failures and successes they eventually wipe off the bottom of their shoe and become the Sage. But do they really… actually? Can a Sage be a Sage without the emptiness of the Fool within which all states and knowledge may come and go?
The Fool moves through the world expanding their bellows, essentially inhaling experience into the emptiness in their middle. As I mentioned that void has a sort of natural hunger because we are not down with emptiness, it terrifies the part of us that’s responsible for convincing itself that it exists separate from all other things. Emptiness is the punchline to a joke we are terrified to tell, the answer to a question we don’t dare ask. As a result, if there is a void, we want to fill it the fuck up. You, were in fact born, because your Dad found your Moms void and filled it.
In the West “empty headed” is an insult. In the East “empty headed” is enlightened. The Fool is necessary to each and every person's experiential journey regardless of how you look at or regard it. How comfortable are you with it? If you’re not then you will try to rush through the Fool stage and prematurely latch on to the little knowledge you’ve gained so as to be able to regurgitate your meager learning to pretend you are a this or a that but you have only served to stunt your own potential and growth due to an inability to be relaxed in a state of not knowing, a subconscious attempt to fill the void of who you think you are. You’ve puffed out your chest and planted your flag in a molehill, proclaiming “I am mountain climber!” Become comfortable with the Fool in you and you will never stop unfolding. Plus it’s a draining pain in the ass perpetually pretending to conform as a this or a that as opposed to living an authentic existence giving as few fucks as is reasonably possible.
This void though, we just keep throwing shit into the damn thing. We try to fill it with objects and then if we realize that all stuff eventually wears out, breaks down or gets boring then we try filling ourselves with status. We want to be a this or a that and then we go about the business of convincing everyone we are a this or a that and vehemently defending our thisness and thatness. We fill our empty bellows with so much shit that we can’t blow anymore. It’s like being married, no more blowing for you.
If our bellows are too full and can’t blow the fires of inspiration, if we lose our innocent shiny eyed lust for life then despair sets in and we begin to question wtf this is all about, like, why even bother. We bought too much shit and now we need to work all the time to maintain said shit. Or maybe we’ve identified as being a person who is a this or a that based on where we work or how we work and suddenly our lives have sped by without ever really having lived. It’s such a trap, or at least it seems so until we do that thing we’ve been avoiding this whole time. Until we face the void and embrace emptiness, we’re kinda sorta fucked.
In the Tarot the journey starts with the Fool. I mean they literally call it the “Fools Journey”- helloooo. The Fool eventually becomes the Sage, but I think true Sages are more like Fools than anything else. Not to say that they are Fool-ish, they have simply emptied their bellows so they can once again blow upon the flames of aspiration to potentially help others burn their bullshit down. A Sage is a Fool who remembers where all the cliffs are because they’ve fallen off all of them and if there’s a cliff they haven’t fallen off they at least know how to land. They also have the supernatural ability to smell dogshit from great distances having stepped in so many piles. A Sage is one who has let it all go and is empty and thus has come full circle. A Sage is not foolish but is indeed a fooler when it comes to engaging with the seeking Fool. A true Sage already knows that there is nothing to be given or taught. An actual Sage knows that emptiness is inherent within everyone in equal measure. If a hole is dug, emptiness is revealed. No one fucking put emptiness in there, it was always there, behind the dirt, behind reality. All a Sage can do is help people dig their own holes. Trick and fool Fools out of their obscuring beliefs and into realizing their own emptiness so that when they finally do, they become the Sage archetype and they see that they’ve always been empty, but that their inherent emptiness is fucking awake.
There sure are a lot of fuckers out there who claim to be Sage types and want you to know it. And not only do they want you to know it, they want you to pay for it. Just be careful and have some discernment. Some are straight up faking it for money while others have had a genuine glimpse but that glimpse gets co-opted by their egos and turned into a narrative to throw into their hungry void and they in turn believe their own narrative, at least to some degree, but have obscured the glimpse of reality by doing so. It’s tricky business this journey, fraught with cliffs and sharks and lots and lots of dogshit. If someone tells you they are a Sage or a Saint or a Master be-fucking-ware. A wave upon the ocean doesn’t tell the other waves that it’s more salty or more oceany than them. A raindrop does not claim to be wetter than all the other drops. A drop that has woken up to their own wetness won’t make claims because by understanding wetness itself it sees the myriad forms of water all the same. It willingly splashes on the ground and evaporates into a cloud and rains again falling into a river and is drank by a duck of which is caught and eaten by a human then that moisture is pissed out as a drop and evaporated again and all the while it sees only a unified wetness within all those iterations and forms of water.
The Fool walks forth, ignorant of danger and enthusiastically keeps at it no matter how many cliffs she or he falls off or how many dog turds smoosh between her or his toes.
The Sage walks forth, knowing what the dangers are but not really giving so much of a shit anymore. He or she is not swayed by accomplishment or failure. He or she has embraced their own emptiness and does how a bellows do, they suck in air then they blow it out, sound familiar? They breathe and they exist and like the Fool they wander the path but where the Fool doesn’t know where he or she’s going, the Sage probably does but doesn’t really give a shit, they just breathe and exist through it all allowing everything to be just what it is.
I must now announce with some melancholy that this will be my last writing or content of any kind and tomorrow I'll be deleting all of my social media accounts. Just kidding, April Fools fuckers. Today is our day so go act a Fool or better yet go be the Fool. And being a Fool doesn’t imply recklessness or dumbassery, it is a sort of remembered innocence and excitement for existence. It is a relaxing into yourself and the knowledge that it’s ok for you to be you, just the way you are, and you become comfortable knowing that you don’t always know. The Fool is always there within you, behind all that regard for other people's opinions, obscured by all those shitty notions about yourself and hidden under a massive egoic scaffolding whose desperate design is meant to convince itself that it exists and who binds your inherent wakeful emptiness with thought forms and manufactured thisness and thatness . Lets put the “Cool” back in Fool. Ok that sounds dumb, how about just go be you. Toodaloo.
Alrighty, well… have the week you want not the week you’re given. It’s up to you. You’re the one livin’.
Toodaloo
