There is a feeling which permeates every waking moment of my life, as though it were some inexorable truth laminated on top of my reality, which is this: I am a Fool . . . a deliberate, intentional fool, which is the worst kind. Or didn’t you know??

Consider the tarot card. Head in the clouds, this guy is blissfully about to walk off his ass off a cliff into oblivion:

. . . don’t I know the feeling! I have only ever been this thing, so I can’t say for sure what it’s like to live any other way, but maybe it is not a bad way to go about it after all. Or anyway, after decades of bearing witness to the fates assigned to others whether they like it or not, there are certainly worse things to be than the Fool . . . things which are, put simply, not nearly as fun. Just like how the Devil is lying even when it’s telling the truth, I am always having fun even when I am not having fun, even if it means walking off a cliff just to find out what’s down there . . .

I think also that being the Fool keeps me honest in some way. I don’t know that there’s anything anyone could tell me about myself, even and especially the bad things, that I am not already paralyzingly aware of, and lambast or even torture myself with when no one else is around. If you preemptively toss the pie into your own face, what else can anyone say, really, to cut you down? (This is nothing to say of Jester’s Privilege, which insulates me from most harm and repercussion, but that’s a whole other thing.) And while it is true that I am completely deluded and, as an ex-girlfriend once put it, “vibrating past reality”, I at least know what I am and have made a joke out of it.

There is of course a major consequence to my godforsaken station in my life. By my own hand, I have recently got myself embroiled in a series of strange circumstances, some unraveling as we speak and some which wait for me in the near future, and I could stop it all right now if I wanted. Right this very second! And yet I cannot and will not let myself do that because . . .

I told you I was the worst kind. Though there are many paths, I can only go the one way, like an utter fool. Swerve me? The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. I dream of a heaven in which I am free of my own foolish self-ruining machinations, the endless wandering, the endless wondering . . . perhaps then I would actually have something or someone waiting for me at the end of this long dark trip, rather than falling through this galactic tube of time, this bottomless abyss where there is no certainty even for something as simple as tomorrow. Gazing upward with tears in my eyes, I am barreling straight off that cliff with a little white flower in my hand and a little white dog at my heels and I know it! Being as dumb as I am is a kind of hell. And yet even when I am crying I have to laugh. It’s like the fella said:

. . . a laugh’s the wisest, easiest answer to all that’s queer; and come what will, one comfort’s always left—that unfailing comfort is, it’s all predestinated . . . I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I’ll go to it laughing.

☆彡