There is a kind of tired that sleep does not touch, and this episode is ninety minutes of two people circling it. The card came up world-weary — a woman on a throne with a whiskey in her hand and her eyes closed, shutting out the noise long enough to hear something. Then a second card turned up uninvited, the one Matt says has been stalking him. Between them they name the thing: the exhaustion is not personal. It was built. Card: Queen of Blues (Queen of Cups) — Rhythm and Soul Tarot, Stacy Williams-Ng. Illustrated after Bessie Smith. The deck is a southern deck. Stacy Williams-Ng looked at the four suits and wondered whether the four principal American musics would map onto them — blues for cups, obviously — and then found out they did. Every card has a song. There is a Spotify playlist. Matt has been reading from it daily since Mystic South turned him toward land and ancestors, and he notes, with the particular delight of a thing confirming itself, that the Magician in this deck is a conjure man. The Queen of Blues is Bessie Smith, gown and fur coat, glass of whiskey, looking — as Jaye Anne puts it — like the end of a long hard day. Come at me, bro. I don't even care. And that turns out to be the safe thing about her: she is too tired to spin up drama, so what's left is the actual question. What do you need? Her song is "I Used to Be Your Sweet Mama," which Matt plays on mic, and which is three minutes of a woman declining to keep doing this. Then the Four of Swords shows up, because of course it does. In this deck the swords are guitars, and the sleeping figure will not rest unless the guitar and the notepad are within reach — blades coming down into her head from the headboard. Not the peaceful RWS effigy. This reluctant, forced rest. I went so hard that I passed out while I was still going. Matt: that is not just a card for me, that is a card for the world right now. From there it widens, and the widening is the episode. If everyone is running in the red, who benefits? Listen: Spotify · Apple Podcasts In this episode * All mutable signs, terrible spatial awareness, and an elbow sliced open at 3 a.m. on a half-wall in Savannah * An Airbnb that used to be an 1800s Episcopal church — original stained glass, three-story ceiling, air conditioning losing badly * Bonaventure Cemetery, and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: a hoodoo woman on retainer to curse the judge, the DA and the jury * Lughnasadh, Lugh the master of all trades, fidchell, and the Irish folk band that shares the name * The Rhythm and Soul Tarot — four musical genres mapped to four suits, a song for every card, and a conjure man for the Magician * The Queen of Blues as Bessie Smith: too tired to spin up drama, which is exactly what makes her approachable * "I Used to Be Your Sweet Mama," played on mic, and the case for everyone calming down about a third of the way * The Four of Swords in guitars — rest you only get by collapsing, and why that is a card for the world and not just for Matt * Aéropostale on Thanksgiving: a thirteen-hour shift with no break, a five-minute break taken proudly, and learning what gets praised * Ninety hours a week to sell life insurance, and whose pocket the ninetieth hour actually lands in * Reading 1800–1850 and finding it sounds suspiciously like now — artisans displaced, and a new argument about who the enemy is * "Slavery denigrates white labor" — the tell that the fight was never about the master * White Trash, manufactured division, and an uprising coordinated over Discord that took nobody's life * Gödel, Bertrand Russell, and the proof that a complete system will generate statements it cannot resolve * Jaye Anne's reframe: logic is an air trait, not an earth trait — it only feels solid because it is moving * The letter B, the Buddhism class, and the several weeks it took a room to understand consensus hallucination * Why you do not want to kill the ego, and why the necessary thing is often the thing we dislike * Dream work, and the only question that matters: what does it mean to you * Chaos magic as the scientific method pointed at your own life * Is killing always wrong — and the West Wing episode about not being conscious for your own worst moment * Yellow fever in Memphis, bodies in the street, and the argument that we are doing better than we feel * The performance review as a loyalty test, and the question the episode ends on: how do you opt out? Lines that landed * I went so hard that I passed out while I was still going. — Matt * That's not just a card for me. That's a card for the world right now. — Matt * Everybody's going hard as a m**********r all the time. Just trying to get through the week. — Matt * I'm like a race car in the red. You know what happens when a race car gets in the red and you keep going? It's gonna blow. — Matt * I'm too tired to spin up drama. What do you need? — Jaye Anne * It's gonna be all right. It's not gonna be fun, but it's gonna be all right. — Matt * To get an A at life, just ignore your own bodily needs. — Jaye Anne * Did you die, Jaye Anne? — Matt * Your master's not your enemy — it's actually each other. — Matt * They're too busy fighting each other to unite against the real problem. — Jaye Anne * Stop searching for something that doesn't exist. — Matt * Logic is not an earth trait. It is an air trait. Everything comes literally out of thin air. — Jaye Anne * There is no stillness in the air. — Jaye Anne * It is a consensus hallucination. — Matt * The ego is absolutely necessary. You do not want to kill the ego. You want to understand the ego. — Matt * The most important question is: what does it mean to you? — Jaye Anne * Is killing always wrong? I cannot answer that question. I don't think that question has an answer. — Matt * You got asked to wear a mask, not be burned. That's an improvement. — Matt * Not only do I have to do my job, but I also have to perform. — Matt * I just want to opt out of the machine. How do you just opt out? — Matt * The cards have a funny way of making you talk about the thing that you actually need to talk about. — Matt * Stay tuned to yourself. — Jaye Anne Referenced * Rhythm and Soul Tarot — Stacy Williams-Ng; a southern deck mapping blues, jazz, gospel and soul to the four suits, with a song for every card and a companion Spotify playlist * Bessie Smith, "I Used to Be Your Sweet Mama" — the Queen of Blues' song, played on mic * Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil — John Berendt; the 1997 film with Kevin Spacey and John Cusack, and how Spacey got House of Cards * Bonaventure Cemetery, Savannah — active since the 1700s, above-ground crypts in the marshland * Lughnasadh / Lúnasa — Lugh, master of every trade; fidchell, the Irish game nobody has fully reconstructed; and the trad band Lúnasa * Kurt Gödel — the incompleteness theorems, and Bertrand Russell's attempt to derive all of mathematics formally * White Trash — Nancy Isenberg (Jaye Anne couldn't place the author on mic); manufactured racism and sexism as class control * A recent uprising coordinated over Discord — leaders arrested rather than killed, looters made to give it back, families protected (Jaye Anne thought Nepal, unconfirmed on air) * The West Wing — the PTSD episode, and not being conscious for your own worst moment * Pulp Fiction — the race car in the red * Mystic South — the turn toward land, ancestors and conjure * The Memphis yellow fever epidemic — bodies piled in the street, and the spots where it happened What we left unresolved Nearly all of it, and Matt says so out loud: I have no idea if this podcast made any sense to anybody. It felt very much like soul bearing more so than actually talking through something. Whether logic was discovered or invented, and whether that distinction even does any work. Whether there is any version of engaging with the machine that is not simply performing for it. Whether "things are better than they were" is perspective or anesthetic — Jaye Anne holds both, and does not collapse them. And the one the whole episode circles without landing: if you cannot go at half speed and get half the result, and the only available setting is all-in, then what exactly is the move? Matt asks how you opt out. Nobody answers. Jaye Anne takes it home instead by pointing back inward — stay tuned to yourself — which is either the answer or the only thing anyone can actually do on a Tuesday. Chapters 0:00 — Ten episodes in, and everything's mutable 5:54 — Savannah: an Airbnb that used to be a church 9:50 — Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil 15:04 — Lughnasadh, Lugh, and the pull toward older things 17:20 — The Rhythm and Soul Tarot and the Queen of Blues 22:59 — Bessie Smith, and everybody's frantic 28:43 — The Four of Swords has been stalking me 30:32 — A race car in the red 32:36 — The Protestant work ethic and the thirteen-hour shift 37:15 — 1800 to 1850 sounds suspiciously like now 40:08 — The real enemy nobody's fighting 48:33 — Gödel: stop looking for certainty 49:55 — Logic is an air trait, not an earth trait 54:52 — Consensus hallucination and the necessary ego 60:37 — Chaos magic is the scientific method on life 63:41 — Is killing always wrong? 69:45 — Better off than we think 81:31 — How do you opt out of the machine? ~1h24 · One moment: Matt holding up the Four of Swords — guitars for blades, a woman who won't sleep without the notepad in reach — and saying it isn't his card, it's everyone's right now. 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