If you’re a regular reader, you probably already know this stuff, and you might prefer to skip ahead to the meat & potatoes under the next heading, “The Fool’s Road.” I have some closing thoughts I think the long term readers might enjoy. This first section is for new folks finding the blog after its conclusion.

I’d needed an extended break to recover fully from content creator burnout, and to take care of some personal life stuff, but I’m finally prepped to rekindle a steady, weekly posting routine. The Nefarious Waif Tiny Blog Circus & Folklore School launches next week! Gentle, gothic folk-punk music and dark folkloric satire coming right up for the debonair and the over-it. This post is both the conclusion of Interrobang Tarot and the official start of the new act. Follow for free on Patreon to catch it! We’ll have one fresh, free public post a week there here on out, plus a second, behind-the-scenes process blog for paying subscribers.


There’s more than a book’s worth of material up on this site now. Here’s the part where we raise the parting glass, and write both the Epilogue and the Introduction at the end.


We’ll leave these archives up here as long as I can, while people still find them helpful, but I cannot guarantee that this site will stay up forever, in this political climate. It could go dark at any time if and as anti-LGBT laws change in the US. Print out the notes and spreads you want to keep now! You can catch the entire collection of fully illustrated, matching printouts, plus a color-coded organizational key here, or in the Patreon shop.


Past articles here may not reflect my current views and practices. In fact, I’m certain that some of them don’t, but I’m leaving them up for now as a record of one lower-case fool’s journey deeper into, and through, their practice. I’d been reading tarot for fourteen years before I began this blog, and I’d begun exploring folkloric witchcraft two or three years before, in my personal life. As this project ran its course, I organically grew out of the witch label, while diving deeper into folkloric studies, explored through the fine arts. I do still respect witchcraft and paganism, along with many other spiritual paths, even if they’re not where I got off the bus. 


Agnostic method thinking and animism are the twin-core worldviews I’ve always carried with me through every community and religion I’ve explored, and still do. Symbolic art is my favorite method of spiritual and philosophical exploration. All paths have something to offer, but I’d rather consider and relate to them all as an artist and a perpetual goofball seeker than an acolyte, guru, influencer, or priest.


This might be my Imposter Syndrome talking, but I’ve been a little concerned that a number of people have approached me or this space as a more serious, or perhaps differently serious therapeutic or pscyho-spiritual resource than I actually have the abilities, qualifications, or oversight to back lol. 😅 I was a feckless punk with a pack of markers, trying to break into graphic design here, while sharing exercises and resources that I found helpful for me at the time along the way. I encourage you as always to pair my offerings here with other resources and supports. I invite you to wring every drop of DIY support you can from the resources shared here over the years—with your critical thinking cap on. And I encourage you to create your own tarot spreads and exercises, and keep thoughtful, peer-to-peer, crowdsourced wisdom flowing. Bring your own wisdom to the table as you work with these resources!


All my writings are colored by a personal background of complex trauma and chronic illness. These experiences made me more compassionate, introspective, trauma-informed, and driven to help support others, but they also installed some biases towards cynicism, foreshortened future thinking, and perpetual discomfort in spiritual and religious spaces IRL—even fun and thoughtful ones—no matter how fascinating I find comparative religions, intellectually. Bear that in mind, and feel free to adapt these resources to your own needs.

This work has helped me and others build resilience, grow in artistry and lyricism, ride through grief, and stay playful and rebellious, while navigating some choppy waters, and that is worthwhile. I’m amused and bemused at the end of the night. But please know that magic and divination are not panaceas and they are not always stabilizing influences.


Spiritual and Rational worldviews don’t need to be antagonistic or mutually exclusive when we approach both thoughtfully, recognize what each do best, and grant space for mystery.


Practices like divination, introspection, journaling, spirituality, wisdom, magic, and prayer can connect us to options and healing, deepen our understanding, soften our grief, and tease out our creative gifts, but they do not always grant us control. 


The ability to read the future is not the ability to bargain your way out of a falling empire, an incurable disability, or a global crisis. Seers, environmental scientists, and skilled political theorists may find that you periodically bear witness to traumatic events twice—both before and as they happen—without the power to change history. (There is still a gift in this, but it hurts. Remember that something beautiful always survives.)


And proverbially skipping “off with the fairies,” muses, or gods will not shelter you from the humans. You may find that you need to watch your back in two differently misleading worlds if you go there.


It is not always within our powers to be any other way than however we turned out, but it is our responsibility and challenge to make what we can of that hot mess. Never let doom or magical thinking in the face of any hard knocks convince you you’re lesser than who you are, or could be.

The Fool’s Road is for everyone, and it’s actionable and livable, come as you are, and come what may. It’s not a religion. It’s a lifestyle and attitude that can blend with any ethos, religion, vocation, or level of abilities. It’s about calling the beauty of human potential into our bodies and spirits where we are right fuckin’ now. It’s about seeking, chasing, and surrendering to experience for experience’s sake. You don’t have to fix or transcend yourself, or “make it” anywhere to walk this path with integrity and a tender heart. 

The Fool’s Road encourages us to act and explore for exploration’s sake, with an outlook neither selfish nor conformist. You don’t have to accept with perfect, passive equanimity everything that you witness or experience, you don’t have to worship, you don’t have to win, and you don’t have to understand. You just have to keep moving, with your better nature at the wheel. 


But if you set off to make your fortune with the secret expectation and longing to transform from a village idiot into an emperor, a high priest, or a star—in this world or the next—you may be setting yourself up for another slapstick fall. Or worse! You may get exactly what you wish for and discover only then that it’s not at all what you imagined or desired.


We can all become living art projects, and we can all have and own what we make, but we don’t own what inspires and moves through us, and we don’t always get to choose or foretell what becomes of us. Choose what you make of your time for its own sake, as much or more than for the gamble of a payoff, reward, victory, salvation, retirement, rebirth, or afterlife that might never come.


We all have different viewpoints, gifts, limitations, challenges, and abilities. Not everyone is equally skilled at all things, not everyone is good here, obviously, and everyone’s an asshole on their worst days, but everyone who behaves with good-enough decency is equally worthy and deserving of respect, regardless of status, orientation, faith, abilities, appearances, or life history. 


I don’t tread it perfectly, and I never promised to *teach* tarot forever, but I (an idiot) dedicated to The Fool’s Road for the long haul.


If I set out to fiddle on street corners expecting to become a rock star, I’ll blow the project. If I mistake the muses for the self or the songs for the set of pipes that carry them, I’ll blow the project. If I place myself above the listener, I’ll blow the project. If I deny or refuse my gifts, I’ll blow the project, but so shall I blow the project if I deny anyone else’s gifts. If I think myself any more specially blessed or cursed than everyone else who still works at the same janky shopping malls I used to, I’ll blow the project. If I privately congratulate myself for being more “evolved” than the next guy, while spewing egalitarian social justice jargon for public gaze, I’ll blow the project. If I thought I’d earned the right to puff up my own ego while telling everyone else to check theirs, when we’d all do better to temper & craft our egos in even turns, I’d blow the project. If I believed that, for my troubles, I’d become in the afterlife anything shinier or more beloved than a sing-songy, dish-washing peasant who draws pretty pictures, I’d blow the project. If I forget that it’s plenty enough to be what you already are, I’ll blow the project. If I expected my beliefs to grant me some ticket the uninitiated don’t have to transcend off to a better world for myself—if I believed it was even possible to do such a thing with serenity of spirit while everyone left behind suffers—I’d blow the project, and I would transcend nothing. (Though I wouldn’t mind a good and thorough rest between this and the next romp around the Sun lol….) If I forget that we could still make *this world* a beautiful sanctuary for all life if living humans all cared about it as much or more than an afterlife that’s neither known nor guaranteed, I’ll blow the project. 


And if this next chapter doesn’t work out, or if I blow this particular project for any reason—as I very well could—I’ll suppose I’ll have to go frolic into some other cursed hustle, accept the dare of some other shiny side-quest, or wander deeper into Fairyland, chasing some other eldritch squirrel.


The Fool’s Road is not about holding yourself down as the lowest of the low, purely for lowness’ sake. Self flagellation is usually totes uncalled for (unless that’s your cup of tea?) and false modesty is just another form of posturing. Werk whatever you’ve got to work with! But as you go, whether your project is raising kids, making art, creating your great works, fighting for justice or a survivable future for the next generations, seeking real deal enlightenment, or dicking around, killing time on the slow lurch to the grave—all valid—don’t let ambition or grandiosity blow the project. No matter how deep we wander down our respective paths, none of us are ever above blowing the project. One must set out to fiddle on street corners to accomplish the goal of fiddling on street corners—no less, no more. 


Maybe spiritual truths are simple by default, and icon & verse lend little but hypnotic frippery. 

-Mystery is mysterious. 
-Love is glue. 
-Liberation starts within.
-Do real things more gently and don’t be a dick. 


Maybe consciousness and spirit are fluid, and all works, like all persons, are temporary and situational. Maybe it’s worth being a soft, small, human messy-bitch and playing with foam-bubble projects while we can all the same. 🤷🏻 Maybe the world doesn’t need to be saved or judged or escaped or razed and rebuilt anew, but tended and attended by lots and lots of slow and dusty hands that really love it.


There’s no indication that any of this is glowing up or going anywhere particular. We all have to dig into our work, at least in part, because we want to for the sole and sheer fuck of it. 


Let’s go have “an experience.” Let’s see where it goes…. How many pebbles and shells can we stick on this one before chaos and entropy sweep the sandcastle back into the sea?


That’s not to say we should refuse good art, good works, good virtue, good living, or good fortune when they happen to find us, as one or more likely will at some point. It’s that entitlement is the death of decency, certainty is the death of possibility, and mysticism is enticing but treacherous terrain for anyone who’d rather not become an asshole. (Though anyone who wants to can play there, at your own sweet pace.)

This World will hurt you again and again. Stay in it.
This World will surprise, delight, and overwhelm you. Stay in it.
This World may never connect you to what you’ve been seeking. Stay in it.
This World will draw you into communion with something else if you let it. Stay in it.
This World will reshape & transform you in ways you can neither predict nor dictate. Stay in it. 


That’s the final Key, but let’s keep playing it as Nothing Keys. 


Lark around in the dark and the light of day. Start shit, try stuff, wander over the ridge just to see what’s there, fuck around and find out, roll with the punches, take the joke and crack another, yes-and a thing, sow mirth and bullshit, allow yourself fuck-ups and do-overs, do a worthwhile thing imperfectly, roast the kings, speak the truth, humiliate your own self in sweet ways, love slowly and gently, live rough and tumble when the wheel of fortune carries you low, get scrappy, meet all on the road as equals until proven otherwise, stay cleverer than your abusers and wiser than your oppressors, trick the bastards into their own traps and skip off with a song in your step, claim no certain gnoses, freely share what you have to give, listen to every experience, laugh at your own ding-dong absurdities and missteps, and refuse joylessness even within misery. 


Go lightly, stay low, and go lightly, you beautiful flames. 


***


Grandma’s worried. No joke—grandma started asking questions about whether some of us might or might not be “dabbling” an itty bit in “witchcraft.” Ruh-roh. Three decades too slow on the uptake, but okay. Not to worry, grandma!


 I’ve retired. 😉😇🙏


If I ever, in the habit of casting so many cards, “let The Devil in” 🙄 then surely I also let The Sacred Fool, The Magician, The Priestess, The Pope, The Empress, The Emperor, The Lovers, The Charioteer, The Lady & Lion, The Hermit, The Justice, the life of The Hanged Man, the light of The Sun and Stars, and the rest of The World in too.


And what did I do with them in that event? 


I made amiable, wastrel dorks of them all, and learned nothing. #method 


—My work here is complete.—

I thank you for your readership, your kind encouragement, and your support over the last decade. I thank the vast majority of you for making my job as a moderator and web host pretty fun as the internet goes, actually. It’s a high burnout game for all bloggers. This was not sustainable for a large number of complex reasons, including many of my own issues, but *most* of you have been lovely! My personal bandwidth and window for this work was always finite, and closed right on schedule. 


I’m pleased with what we made here, and I’ve got some other stuff to get to… If indie-rock/folk-horror satire & song with a side of shit-posty musings on cunning, sacred foolery, bullshit-clocking, and modern-traditional lore in the digital age sounds like your jam, we’ll pick right up where we left off at Waif School. (This is a free and public school for the working class. It’s a slightly different vibe than Interrobang was, but should be fun!) Follow for free on Patreon to catch the new blog as it drops! 


May your cards be as lanterns, blinking buoys, and arrows of light, illuminating safe passage through the ashes and storms of this trashy, troubled, micro-plastic age, and may your own visions and kitchen-table wisdom steer you ever true. 


Gentle Readers, good night.