My Lent Book

As is the custom I have nicked from the Christians, every year I choose a book to be my Lent book. Despite not keeping Lent in any way at all, obviously.

This year it has rather chosen itself because in January I already started re-reading Robert Wang's Qabalistic Tarot, for something like the third time. I felt a pull towards it and a desire to read it again very slowly and let it sink in.

It's not an easy subject, or book, obviously, and I also felt strongly that to do so I should clear some dead wood out of my psychic space to enable the change to happen. In this case it meant getting together a number of individually very minor annoyances with the company that manages this building and putting them together into one complaint. Not to put too fine a point on it, it felt so clearing to do this that I now understand why cats zoom around the house after using the litter tray! I am delighted to say that they ignored this complaint so it's now with the ombudsman and out of my head.

Last year, after Lent, I also performed the exercise of reading all the way through the bible again. I used the New English Translation that has translators' notes online and read the Oxford Bible Commentary as a companion. I think this is the third time I have done this in my life, although the first while I haven't been one of the faithful.

The main thing this experience did for me was to reinforce what I already knew, that Christian topics of obsession are almost never based on what the bible actually says. For example I have commented here before on the biblical approach to 'the unborn', which is to treat them purely and simply as property and afford them none of the value given to people. The other major thing it reinforced was my conviction that the majority of Christians read the bible selectively at best, and probably repeat reading the same bits. Of course there are some who put in the necessary work to get to the bottom of the multivocal, repetitive, contradictory and disjointed text, but the road to atheism is littered with well-read bibles. Because if you read it and don't conclude that a lot of it is about land grabs and that God just loooves genocide, you're not paying attention.

I would have loved to have this book, actually by Richard Littler, the creator of Scarfolk, but sadly it doesn't exist.

Sense of Place: Made in Birmingham (Again)

This is Jess Phillips, Labour MP for Birmingham Yardley constituency. I fucking love this woman AND she voted against the whip for a ceasefire and resigned her shadow cabinet role in protest.

You just *know* she's thinking 'set of cunts', don't you? This is why people either like or loathe Birmingham: it reflects back what you give out yourself and most people can't take that.

Incidentally I see Labour and the Tories are reported to be closer in polls than they were. I really hope that continues because a Lab/Con coalition government with a Lib Dem/Green coalition opposition would be hysterical.

Agony Hound: Am I the Asshole for "Hiding" my Savings from my Fiancée?

This one has me honestly stumped and it's wild. The source was obviously Reddit although I found it on Instagram. As always click on the pictures to engorge them if you can't read them.

I'm not going to put any of the initial reactions to this, although the consensus was that he wasn't an asshole, because the opinions of the internet were literally all over the place.

For me personally it raises so many more questions than it answers. The first being the obvious one that he's been able to suddenly come up with the funds for his other half's bills with no explanation of where he got the money and she's not asking. Even though you would obviously exercise some caution about telling people about your finances, my impression is that he's being at least secretive about it. And why isn't his good fortune showing in his life style? How is it even possible that he's been extremely fortunate in life and she isn't able to see that in any way? I don't think he answered the question but I wonder what culture he comes from because literally telling your fiancée nothing about your finances until after you're married is utterly bizarre. It's also looking for trouble, because you would want to know about that before getting married, surely.

It's also apparent that they are not made for each other in other ways because he saw her reaction to this as giving him the 'silent treatment'. She also didn't like that he posted this on Reddit.

Although these people provide the material for me to opine about their lives, as a general rule I think someone who has to ask advice on Reddit when he has upset you by being basically secretive about where the money comes from, may not have the emotional literacy at that point to undertake marriage. And then to kick off the conversation by showing her the Reddit comments is just WTF.

However I find her as peculiar as I do him.

Yes it's unusual to manage to save up $160,000 and I'd be asking where it came from, it also isn't actually a huge sum of money. I have no idea whether it would even buy a decent house in the US but suspect it wouldn't. He's talking about this sum as if it's untold riches, but so is she which makes me wonder how naive she is.

I'm very wary of her reaction to this, that it made her feel inadequate. WTF is going on in this relationship? It's exhausting just reading about it.

My conclusion would be that obviously if they still see something each other (and strangely what they see doesn't come across in this post) they should start with some kind of counselling to make sure they're both on the same page and stop the relationship being this dramatic.

However my personal opinion is that they're not made for each other: the way of communicating drives her up the wall, he has to ask outside their partnership for help, her reaction to this annoys him, she (IMO) over-reacts by feeling inadequate at this. Phew, it's exhausting.

Fox News Tarot Reading

I am absolutely howling that a) Focks News had a tarot reader on at all when most of its viewers are 'Christians'* and b) what happened when they did.

*Speaking as a witch, of course I'm well acquainted with Jesus and can tell you right now from him he has very very few followers indeed.

Sense of Place: Bordesley Station Again

Nearly eighteen months ago, I posted about the least-used train station in the West Midlands, which has one timetabled train a week going into the city centre, and match day specials if Blues are playing at home. I won't repeat the history I copied from elsewhere and pasted there because I would get rude comments about not only stealing stuff but keeping on posting the same stolen stuff.

When I wrote that I had never been on the platforms; now I am delighted to say that by chance I caught it on one of its weekly openings and took the opportunity to nip up the stairs and have a look. Of course there isn't a ticket barrier, in fact there's barely a station, platform or anything else there.

The station is up on a viaduct so you enter through a gate under a railway arch and go up the stairs. There is only one staircase because there is only one double platform and the two other disused platforms, which I see no effort has been made to disguise in any way, apart from obviously having the undergrowth cut down now and then.

I can't begin to describe how desolate and weird it is on the station. More or less twenty feet up in the air, in a city with absolutely nobody around, is a very strange place to be, and I now have some more understanding of why railways are associated with ghosts and all sorts of strange experiences.

I found myself wondering what it would be like if they came to lock up the station without checking and just left me up there. I found myself thinking of all the cattle that arrived at the city at the station, and particularly found myself wondering how on earth they would have got live cattle down to ground level from the viaduct. Did an errant cow ever jump off the side?

But there is one pervading feeling there, which I picked up on in my previous post, and that is sheer rage. I think that's what makes it really weird. Despite my normal state of barely hidden rage I am certain that what I was feeling there wasn't my own rage. I also didn't get a clear source or reason for it, it was just 'free floating' anger as it was, and I haven't yet unwrapped it enough to think what it was about. When I posted about it before I commented that it was the sort of place 'an errant ghost train would drop you off to be tormented by a long dead stationmaster with a grudge, cheered on by the ghosts of all the cattle who had been transported there', and bugger me that feeling is even stronger on the platform. I'm not certain it would even need to be a specific entity such as a station master, because I just kept thinking of the cows. And all I can say is if it was their rage, bovine fury is quite something, and lasts a long time since it's at least decades since it was a cattle station.

Just to complete the weirdness, while I was standing on the platform feeling utterly unnerved a train to London Marylebone went through and the driver waved at me. I HAVE NEVER HAD A TRAIN DRIVER WAVE AT ME IN MY LIFE. What the hell. I'm fairly sure they don't wave at train spotters so perhaps he was waving to tell me there was no way I was going to leave there by train in the next week but it was still utterly strange. As if I'd entered some kind of portal into a different reality.

Without further ado, on with the pictures.

Image credit and a much more comprehensive and normal exploration: here

Agony Hound: My Boyfriend has Disappeared Every Weekend for the Past Three Years and I've Just Found Out He's Been Lying About Where he Goes

Tricky one this one, and gets more complicated down the page. It started off on Reddit but my source for it is on Instagram, here. If you have difficulty reading the pictures, clicking on them will open them tumescent.

Suffice to say that the advice given on both Reddit and Instagram was either that he was cheating on her with someone else or she was the side trick and he was spending the weekends with his wife. And that would seem to be the obvious explanation for the boyfriend vanishing every weekend and fibbing. But there's a plot twist...

Which is that she had it out with him and demanded to know what he was actually doing every weekend. When she did this he told her that what he was doing was volunteering in an animal rescue centre. The reason he hadn't told her was that he likes doing things to be helpful for other people and animals but had got bullied about it as an undergraduate. The experience had been so bad that he'd changed over to only doing things in a secret way and not talking about it.

I have a particular reaction to this that I think may not be shared by everyone: certainly the girlfriend found this very sweet and will decide what she wants to do. Although frankly if you're the sort of person who asks advice about your personal life on an internet forum you may not make your own mind up.

My instant reaction is that I'm not sure how this reflects on him or the relationship. While I totally appreciate how being bullied twists your life and motivates you to do strange things, I hope that he can move on from thinking that he would have to hide anything from his girlfriend. Frankly he's not putting the relationship first, this could still be seen as deceptive and she would be quite reasonable to feel very hurt that he didn't trust her enough to tell her what he was doing.

My concern would be that this might suggest a pattern of him thinking about his own needs and not hers: basically he's not thinking of them as a couple. I would still look on this as a red flag for her depending on how things progress after him coming clean. I hope she can communicate the effect this had on her and he can start trusting her.

Because with a 🍆 like that it would be so great if he was emotionally literate as well!

George Santos

Content warning: mental health, abuse

I am strangely fascinated by expelled Congressman and compulsive liar George Santos. How can anyone go through life just fibbing left, right and centre, and expect not to be caught out? It's wild.

In fact one of the reasons I'm so fascinated is that it happens I do know somebody like that who embroiders his history, and who has the exact same thing that you literally can't get a straight answer from him. When I met this person the people over us were sufficiently bothered that they asked him for his CV, which seems straightforward enough. I happen to know that it was a) fictional, b) voluminous and c) barking mad.

And that's the problem, that despite my background in mental health these two men make no sense to me. Typically psychotic beliefs just develop over time but don't change as these guys' stories do. Do they believe the fibs they tell? I can't believe that if someone was acutely mentally unwell enough not to be able to hold their own personality together, they would be able to function in life to, say, get up in the morning or carry on their normal activities. Nothing here makes sense.

I think there's a difference between my acquaintance (who luckily has an unusual name as well as a mania for publishing his lives on the internet so I can keep track of his changing story) doesn't profit by doing this. George Santos has apparently made significant profits from his lies, but my friend has never been well off and has had quite a disjointed life because of the need to keep moving on to a new fantasy when people catch up with him. In common with Santos my friend has also gone by a couple of different names, changing by deed poll, probably to match different identities. As a result the rest of his family currently have a completely different name to him. 🤦 He also has a history of saying he has various illnesses he didn't actually have.

It's also interesting to me that Santos has now started revealing things about the people who voted for his expulsion. The responsible thing, of course, would have been to reveal them using the appropriate channels anyway, since he knew them anyway. Revealing them as retribution feels like he was okay with everyone being corrupt as long as he was safe.

Time to draw some tarot cards! I'm expecting them to be all over the place which they nearly always are with people who are a bit psychopathic.

First it must be said that when shuffling the cards for this kind of reading I tend to take the ones that draw themselves to my attention, usually by sticking out or leaping out. In this case initially no cards stuck out of the deck, but then quite a lot did, and I picked the ones that felt prominent. This feels like his life and personality are very wide-ranging and he has loads of stuff going on, and obviously doesn't want to reveal everything. Frankly he may not be able to hold all his life together in his mind's eye, and may even see his life as a series of snap shots: I suspect this is something he has in common with my friend, who tends to talk about one fantasy at a time. 

First we have the King of Wands, which doesn't surprise me in the slightest. This king is Fire of Fire, the motive power behind the will. He represents the spark which starts things and is utterly unpredictable.

Next we have Justice, a Major Arcana card representing equilibrium or balance. I was expecting the cards to be all over the shop but nobody could put the word balance in the same sentence as Santos.

Then we have 8 of Pentacles, which the Golden Dawn called the Lord of Prudence, another word nobody could mention in connection with him: an indication that when faced with someone as fluid as George Santos the tarot tends to revert to snapshots of aspects of the person's life and personality. Interestingly this is an accurate reflection of what both my friend and George Santos do: tell one fantasy at a time and don't reference the others they've told. In this of course, if they actually are consciously lying and don't believe their story in the there and then, they are spectacularly bad liars. Lying, surely, requires an ability to make your lie hang consistently with the rest of your story and they don't even try. It's possible, of course, that they think everyone does this, and that there is no such thing as truth, everyone telling the story that suits them at the time. If this is the case, the roots of doing this will certainly reach all the way back to childhood: not necessarily abuse but some very inconsistent and incapable parenting, probably in quite a desperate situation. Normally the 8 of Pentacles has a significant reference to work or study and is sometimes called the apprentice card. It is seen as a positive sign that you aren't where you're aiming for yet, but you can get there. Ironically it has a more negative connotation that you're focussing on the small things and not paying attention to the whole picture: those snap shots again.

Next is The Emperor, another Major Arcana card which I wouldn't expect to be around George Santos, but I must remember that this reading has been triggered by my wondering at the fictional nature of his public persona! The Emperor represents the setting down of battle in exchange for rule of law: it's very stable and settled. The Hebrew letter attributed to it indicates a vision into the inner world which nurtures this stability.

Finally we have Strength, yet another Major which is the only one I would have expected to be here! It represents the subduing of nature or animal impulses. Again this may sound odd, but it's the first indicator we've had that animal instincts and impulses even exist in him, and they must surely be present for someone to lie his way into the US Congress.

Perhaps putting this together it's not as contradictory as it seemed to start with. We have an ability to make things happen, even if it is completely unpredictable, leading to an (attempted?) balance or equilibrium. This is spurred on by Santos's ability to work at things, although his tendency to focus on the snapshot in time and inability or unwillingness to look at the whole thing, is what messes this up for him. The Emperor and Strength (and the other cards indicating stability or equilibrium) I think also indicate his self perception or what he wants to happen: it ain't gonna happen but this is the tarot reading of someone who's barmy.

There is another imbalance here, though. In a reading of only five cards he's got the disproportionate number of three of the less numerous Major Arcana. These represent the greater powers in life, the sort of things we can't always control. To get that number suggests he really isn't in control at all. I get the distinct impression of someone who's feeling out of control, trying to control his life but doesn't have the ability to do it in a way which doesn't involve fibbing and so self sabotaging. I think he's one of these people who've had (not necessarily through anyone's fault) an upbringing which hasn't given him the ability to function in society or have sensible coping strategies. If you like the problem is one of poverty rather than violence. This poverty of agency is reflected in only one 'pip' card, the ones which represent actions or events we can control. He's also unfortunate enough to get the apprentice card, reflecting a need to learn how to carry himself. He's also unfortunate to get as his sole Court Card (representing people or personality characteristics) one of the most fiery and unpredictable.

This guy's a trainwreck of inability to live and unstable will and instincts, fighting with his desire for stability and equilibrium. 

It's entirely possible he just didn't understand that standing for Congress would expose him to a level of scrutiny that would reveal the way he carries on his life. But as a final question I have to ask tarot what on earth possessed him to stand for Congress when what has actually happened could well eventuate? He gets one of the barmiest answers you could wish for: the 8 of Cups, Lord of Abandoned Success. This is usually seen as a positive card, the uneven arrangement of the cups suggesting that the success the person is abandoning was somehow wrong and they're reaching for something better or higher. It's possible he has a poisonous combination of poverty of ability and ruthless ambition, or he may have seen Congress as something he deserved or the rule represented by the Emperor. 

But we know his failure to hold his story together was always going to screw the ambition up. This may sound rather uncharacteristic of the fiery Hound, but I'm feeling rather sorry for him in a way I wasn't at the start of this reading. Still wouldn't lend him a fiver and expect to get it back, though.