Faso, ¿tenés?: 2015

By J. Guzmán

Faso, ¿tenés? is volume 7 of the series On Being

• Language: English
• Publisher: Loner Girl Press
• Release date: Mar 11, 2024
• ISBN: 9781957210186

J. Guzmán

J. Guzmán was born on January 14th, 1991, at 8:42 a.m., in Lewiston, Idaho, USA. She is the creator of On Being, a self-referential, metaphysical, diary case history where she psychoanalyzes her consciousness throughout Time, uses tools like astrology to facilitate the investigation, and documents the entire process. J is building a life-long, narrative, archival data set of her life for astrologers and other researchers to use to show exactly how their respective theories, methods, techniques, and practices function. J. is the ultimate research test subject.

Book preview

Faso, ¿tenés?

FASO, ¿TENÉS?

2015

ON BEING

BOOK VII

J. GUZMÁN

Loner Girl Press

other books in the series ON BEING

Volume 1 — The Thought Thinker is a Loner Girl: Teen Anxiety, Drug Use, and Existential Discontent

Volume 2 — The Loner Girl is an Existentialist: Self-Doubt, Irrational Feelings, and Internal Conflict

Volume 3 — The Existentialist Craves Nonbeing: Apathy, Dread, Self-Hatred, and Philosophical Pessimism

Volume 4 — The Loner Girl in London: 2011 & 2012

Volume 5 — When I Started Smoking Weed for Real: 2013

Volume 6 — The Loner Girl en Sudamérica: 2014

Copyright © 2024 by J. Guzmán and Loner Girl Press

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

For permissions and collaborations contact: [e-mail]

You can connect with J. on Instagram @jguzmanwriter, or visit her website https://jguzman.space

Sign up for J.’s newsletter called Nothing I Say is True: Open Letters to Void at https://jguzman.space/newsletter/. There you can get exclusive access to her life updates, current musings, personal essays, prose about topics she’s interested in, poesies, and streams of consciousness.

Although the following narrative is of events that actually occurred, the story itself is only subjective truth. All books in the series On Being are J. Guzmán’s personal experience, interpretation, opinions, and feelings, not the Objective Truth of Absolute Reality. Her aim is not defamation and she understands that every character has their own subjective truth regarding events that occurred, and that others’ perspectives could prove contradictory to her own. Characters’ names have been changed to protect their privacy and reputation.

Preface

I named this volume Faso, ¿tenés? porque por el año entero estaba buscando faso, y la mayoría del tiempo solo pude encontrar el paraguayo de mierda que me daba un dolor de cabeza. Más que una persona me dijo que la gente hace pis en las plantas en la creación del paraguayo, e incluso agregan cosas aún peores. I was so immersed in that almost-drug-addiction vibe, where all you can think about is how much you want to smoke. I wouldn’t necessarily consider an addiction to marijuana a legitimate addiction, at least in my own case, sino un deseo fuerte de fumar, una fijación intensa. ¡Quería quemar tanto! Quería estar volada para poder analizar mi conciencia de forma diferente, pero es re difícil encontrar flores reales en sudamérica, a menos que conozcas a las personas correctas. It was all I could think about. It’s funny because now in my life I have extremely easy access yet the intense desire and urge to use are basically nonexistent. Thank goddess! It’s annoying to be so fixated on something that you logically and rationally know isn’t gonna leave you completely fulfilled or satisfied when it really comes down to it.

Faso, ¿tenés? is volume 7 of the series On Being, and the second bilingual book of the series. It spans year two of the protagonist Ana’s adventures in South America and her trip back home to the States.

On Being is a psychological, metaphysical, self-referential, astrological, diary case history, serving as a qualitative, longitudinal research project investigating what it means to be. Basically, I, J. Guzmán (as the protagonist Ana) psychoanalyze myself throughout Time, document meticulously everything that happens to me and how I feel about it, and connect it to astrological theories and timing techniques. If astrology truly works, if it can be considered a legitimate system with rules and internal coherence, you’d have to see it working in relation to somebody’s real-life, autobiographical narrative.

Astrology’s language is symbolic and archetypal. If it works then you’d see themes arise in Ana’s life that pattern the alignment of the planets. I believe it works, but at this time I’m not an expert. On Being is my odd, self-induced, psychological experiment that serves as raw data for astrological analysis. As a kind of science, astrology needs a detailed and intimate case history, especially because it works in a highly contextual way. No one takes astrology seriously, at least the people in Science with a capital S. I think this is an error. The only way to find out is to learn the rules, apply them, and see if they work. On Being can help because it will contain a lifetime of contextual raw data for analysis, including the birth chart the whole structure is built upon.

When I say data, what I’m referring to specifically is exact times – of events, activities, conversations, interactions, ideas, sudden realizations, etc. While initially exploring astrology’s principles and symbols, I realized that exact times are the holy grail of the system, so I began to incorporate them with greater frequency and intensity. I started to make note of the time when anything interesting happened to me. That way I can get the chart of the moment for a vast array of life experiences. It’s fascinating to see how the chart of the moment speaks to and describes whatever event it belongs to. This is a meta, up-level way of living one’s life. You’ve got the initial experience, but then you’ve got the secondary, zoomed-out experience of seeing how the initial experience connects to this matrix-like system running in the background. I’m into self-referential commentary, obviously. I can’t just live my life; I have to find patterns and connect it to something greater.

If you don’t have those exact times, you can’t know the Ascendant (AC) and Descendant (DC) points or the Midheaven (MC) and Imum Coeli (IC) points of the chart. Not having exact times, and subsequently not knowing where these points are located, is the equivalent of not knowing which way is north when looking at a map. When trying to read a map, this is crucial information. You have to know which way is north because then you know by default which way is south, west, and east, and then you can decide where to go. Without knowing which direction is which, you’re completely lost and the map doesn’t help you.

Most stories and examples we have to convey how astrology works never include exact times. The examples we have are always either a much broader view of a person’s life – commenting on how the astrological placements of their chart relate to the overall vibe or success/failure of their entire life – or one single, remarkable event of their life, speaking to astrological timing techniques (but like I said, usually without any exact times).

Yeah, we’ve got loads of examples to demonstrate how astrology works. And they’re great examples, don’t get me wrong. But I find so many problems with them. We’ve got celebrity examples, but these eventually get boring and repetitive, because they’re recounted over and over again. We rarely hear from the actual person whose life the examples come from, either. We never get the opinions and feelings of celebrities about the intimate details of their life. We only know what the general public is allowed to know, which is the most external aspect of any event. We don’t get to ask them directly about how they felt about it or what it meant to them, or what time, exactly, it happened. You can’t get as far with celebrity examples because you don’t know the nitty gritty, intimate details. Yeah, everyone knows who they are and their major life events are aired out to the public, but do you know what they were thinking at 20:12 on December 23, 2020? Do you know all about their inner conflicts and contradictory desires and secret passions and delusional cognitive dissonances and relationship struggles? And if you do, was consent given to share and analyze them publicly?

Even if somehow we could get their opinion directly, it’s likely that they can’t comment on the astrology of it all. They’d be vaguely excluded from the conversation, like when you hang out with your friends that are a couple and you feel like the third wheel. They’d be able to speak to their experience but couldn’t participate in that meta up-leveling, and would be excluded from important parts of the conversation. If you’re hanging out with people that are speaking a language you don’t speak, how can you be expected to contribute valuable insights to the topic of conversation, even if your experiences are the topic of conversation?

Plus, half the time we don’t even have a confirmed birth time for these people! This is what kills me the most, because even if you have the date of birth, not having the birth time leads to an unsatisfying, speculative situation that makes me question why we would be using this person as an example to demonstrate anything. If you don’t even have the birth time starting out, you can’t build a structure of data and examples using that person’s experience as evidence. It’s not scientifically sound because the foundational chart isn’t there.

Sometimes we do hear from normal, accessible people that understand astrology’s language, but the examples of their life experiences are painfully superficial. They’re short stories about one, specific placement related to a single event, and these people are always encouraged to keep it brief when sharing their experiences – on podcasts, for example. And then we never hear from them again to follow up. It never seems to be a serious, in-depth analysis.

Although I talk so much about exact times, it’s not simply their involvement that I believe makes for a better investigation. It’s the long-term, continual, consistent application and incorporation of the exact times with respect to a single reference point (the birth chart) that would make for a truly scientific study. It’s not just including a few exact times here and there; it’s the saturnine, steady, repeated occurrence of exact times, in varying contexts, referencing the same person’s story. We need deeper terrain than random, unconnected, one-off examples from multiple people. We need personal, intimate stories, specific examples from real life, emotional complexity, nuance. Something that demonstrates the paradox and subtleties that being implies, but on a longer time scale. We need all of these things, and we need to connect them to one birth chart. We need a longitudinal case study.

With On Being I provide this longitudinal structure in the form of a first-person, self-referential, self-psychoanalytic narrative that anybody can use to apply practically astrology’s technical concepts. If you have my compiled life history and exact birth data, you can show how transits, annual profections, secondary progressions, zodiacal releasing, solar arc directions, return charts, midpoints, lots, Vedic astrology’s planetary periods, etc., etc., work practically in reality over a long time span. It’s much easier to explain how the techniques work when you have multiple years of detailed case history to analyze, and the person it belongs to is accessible and cooperative regarding public astrological analysis. Plus, you can see how all the different techniques work in tandem; you can see how they are all variables influencing each other in this cosmic equation we call life.

This is On Being.