Virgo 1° (August 23)

Somehow I got ahead of myself in the degrees department, I should have skipped some days over the last couple months, and now I’m like four days off, so I will wait until Sunday to remedy this, which is good I get some days off (for bad behavior). Anyway I have some notes to record…

Taylor Kitch, loving this sign actually from a evolutionary standpoint can be like given a clean slate to start again. To negotiate being a spirit in the material world, with an animalistic self. That is why a shepherd, living among animals is a good metaphor that develops the narrative.

I would ask Kip if he’s lonely . Also Dave. What motivates him? What scares him? He does tend to be alone after all. Also let’s face it people will read this to try to fix others. Starsky and Cox will ask them not to do that. Talk about the trans thing in the intro as well.

Intro notes. How to read the book as a whole. Will have Extra. Plaents in signs you could do this exercise (found on page 9) First of all anyone can do all the action items in this book regardeless of your sign because everyone (as your birth chart suggests) has all the signs and houses in them. Your sun may be in Leo but your Moon might be in Pisces. And you can choose from the following menu. For more specificity and hopefully more fun and fulfillment there are two additional ways you can pick action items from other chapters. First planets in signs. And also by house, and in both cases you will need to know your birth time and get your chart together.

The following blocks of text are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 731-735. I am reading through all of my Blagues, five per day, and posting some samples here. Now, in my sixth year of writing this Blague, by the time I get to my seventh, I will have journeyed through all the daily Blagues of my first five years. If that’s confusing I apologize. Year seven, I’ll only have to read through year six, once a day.  

Okay so where was I? Oh right. I was bleeding all over the nurse and just handed her my bowl and bag. As expected, the ambulance came and I was whisked off to the Valley Hopsital in Ridgewood New Jersey where one if not both of my parents arrived. I really don’t remember much. The gash in my head was as long as a caterpillar and they had to sort of cut or shave some hair on the left side of my scalp and I took a good number of stitches. Like a lot. It looked like I had had a lobotomy. I just realized that word actually means the removal of a lobe. Yikes. And my face was messed up. My nose was broken and my hole face was just a swolen mess. But somewhere in my mother’s mind this was adding up to an opportunity.

To say that I had a face that only a mother could love would be opposite of the truth. I’m not sure if anybody other than my mother loved my face but I don’t think people generally didn’t. But what became apparent is that, given her drothers, my mother would make a few changes. Now, I had already been diagnosed by my ear, nose and throat specialist whose office I believe I visited weekly with some kind of ailment regarding that triumverate of chronic sickness, with: a deviated septum. There had been talk about fixing it at some point. And why not. I had inherited the hook shape of my mother’s button nose only I inherited the size of my father’s prominent Roman one. Taken together, in drag and green pancake, I would make a very good wicked witch of the west. I was rail thin in my teens to boot.

So plans were being made. I was home ailing. And Spring break was imminent. We went to see Dr. Bagli who would be operating on my nose. Why was he a plastic surgeon. He was not unknown to me as he had twelve children and every grade, practically, had a red haired Bagli kid in it. My sister was close friends with one of the daughters. There was a son two years older than me and a girl in the grade behind me. They also lived next door to a close friend of mine with whom I casually walked over into the Bagli yard to play tennis as they had their own courts. I did mention Dr. Bagli was a plastic surgeon and though people didn’t flaunt their times under his knife we lived in an area of New Jersey where the ladies lunched and did little else. Anyway, I remember it went like this: “The doctor is going to reset your nose, fix the deviated septum and, ‘while his in there’, just remove the little bump.” The little bump? You mean the top of my hook which in minature looks so cute on your face, Mom. That’s right. Okay sounds like a plan. To be honest I was getting a bit psyched to have my nose reset in such a way. Did I think I was getting a nose job? Maybe, but it all sounded dandy and very Goodbye Columbus to me. I really didn’t like my looks so maybe this would help my confidence in that regard.

So Spring break was spent letting my black eyes heal which they said would take weeks but really mine healed in a matter of days. And they gave me what I believe were Percocets which neither parent monitored and I found went really great with a few puffs of weed. On top of that, my recovery was spent pretty much alone. My parents had had plans to go to Hawaii and my evil sister was in a manic upswing that saw her out every night partying with a fast paced coked up crowd (I can now say in retrospect) that was centered around a notorious bar, called Espositos, also in Ridgewood. I had been given a new set of crepey pale blue pajamas so I’d look together in my mother’s mind in hospital. So I lounged around the house in a state of narcotic bliss checking my profile in the mirror from time to time as the swelling went down. But I have to back up.

When I came out of the anesthesia post operation Bagli camed to check on me to explain what had happened and what to expect in the healing process in regard to my bandaged face and at what intervals I could begin the slow unveiling over the coming weeks. My mother hovered comic-ominiously, with a canary eating grin on her face, as if she were bursting to brag about something she knew she should keep concealed. In the movie version of this, the scene is shot from a behind-the-bandage p.o.v., looking up at Mom and Dr. Bagli looming. The doctor made some comment about my chin. How’s that. You made a little incision where? And what was that about silicon? What’s happening? Well, my mother said in her most faux dulcet tone, the doctor needed to add a little bit to your chin to balance things all out. At the time that sounded benign, but now, thirty some odd years later, I wonder if said silicon hasn’t slowly oozed into my bloodstream and rifling my body with cancer. I never thought I would have to consider my face to be a source of faulty infrastructure.

The irony is that the “work” I had done was so subtle nobody noticed except for Dan Leuwen who sat next to me for four years in home room and had a photographic memory of my profile. He was a rather fat kid who wore the brightest possible preppy colors, colors turned up, no socks in winter, feet stuffed into Topsiders or Bean Blutchers. He read the New York Times at his desk every morning with coffee, a precursor of the young conservative characters we would soon see in John Huges films or in Michael J. Fox’s Alex Keaton character on Family Ties. “Did you get a nose job?” Dan asked. They fixed my broken nose which was messed up after the bus accident so no, yeah, I would have replied.

Meanwhile, what bus accident? Nobody had known about that. We were late to school that morning and most kids were already in the building by the time Jeff swung his Jeep between busses. I’m now guessing that we must have been hit by a departing bus and if there were kids on an arriving one, they would have been quickly ushered into the school, nothing to see here. There had been no announcement of the accident over the loud speaker. Friends I spoke to in the aftermath of the accident while in bed at home waiting for Spring break to arrive had no clue until I told them what happened. The school seemed to what to keep it all very hush hush.

Knowing my father, who would never miss the opportunity to somehow profit on my misfortune, must have made some kind of deal. And, now that I think about it, he must have made some kind of deal with the Siegels next door whose son was obviously to blame for my injuries. I will never know what the terms of that might have been.

It was probably May, now, weeks after returning from Spring break, some with tans, some with new faces that nobody seemed to notice. (In truth my nose ended up somehow reverting back to its hook shape over the years, just as my teeth moved back out into a more buck position after the years spent in braces. The corrective medical measures of the seventies and eighties, apparently, weren’t meant to stand the test of time.) Anyway I was sitting in homeroom one morning when the vice principal knocked-and-entered the room and just said two words, my first and last name. My homeroom teacher, Mr. Caruso, who looked like an opera singer, actually, and spoke in a booming voice, delivering jokes and sermons, a wise wise-cracker, every morning, motioned at me then the door in a sort of combo point-snap-go combination, no words, and I was out the door, shut, in the hall way with the very tall vice principal.

“Under the circumstances,” he said, as he reached into his pocket, “I’m giving this back to you.” And that was all he said as he handed me my small black wooden bowl and nearly empty, cloudy, sticky baggie of not very good pot. Thanks? What else could I have said.

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Starsky + Cox are best known for writing books I guess. And yet it’s been a while since we’ve done so, but for our yearly Haute Astrology weekly horoscope books. Publishing has always been such an uphill battle. Editors at publishing houses I find are not on the whole very happy people. And most agents lie for a living. It can be a lose lose for anyone in any profession who has an agent unless you’re a super star because the agent’s relationships to the publishers, in this case tend to be more important than the agent’s relationships to the author, despite the fact the agent makes money off the author. It’s just that an agent needs publishers in their lives to sell books by an author who is typically, to their mind, a dime a dozen. There are rare instances where agents actually have blood running in their veins that wasn’t sucked out of other people’s, but on the whole they are leeches. Especially at the big agencies, which is why we dumped ours at WME about seven years ago after writing our second book and being lied to by our “team” of agents who, at that agency in particular, are completely devoid of souls.

And yet a writer would like to write books and have them published. Happily our writing is based on a practice that we can perform every day in person (or on Skype) with real people, and we are fortunate that we have an outlet for our thoughts and feelings on the subject with which we have become synonomous and that we actually make a difference in people’s lives, one divine soul at a time. And there are myriad other spokes to our brand, thank Goddess.Yet there is always that gnawing feeling to write another book in which to represent the evolution of our thoughts since last we published a weighty tome. So, starting New Year’s Day this year I sat down to write a book proposal, drawing on notes we’d been making over the years, and I completed it in a matter of days. And then what? I thought. I guess I have to “find an agent”, a notion that was most repellent.

In the meantime, I could hand the book to a couple of key friends in the business to get their feedback. I reached out. Crickets. I reached back out. And received some vague though helpful responses. Oh well. The truth became clear: I don’t feel like actually looking for an agent. I suppose, over time, I would peruse the acknowledgment pages of books I liked to see what authors had which agents and maybe I would reach out to this person or that over time. When I had the time. Which I don’t have much of. And anyway, I’m just happy I wrote the proposal because it helped order my thoughts. And we can always self-publish, although, despite the direct cash in hand from reader to author, less the amount to Amazon or iTunes, there is nothing like having a physical book in hand. Especially in hard cover.

Sextrology was supposed to be in hardcover. We only found out accidentally from our publisher after it had been all edited and was “in house” being prepped for publication, accidentally. The editorial director we worked with at Harper Collins accidentally cc’d us on an email sent to her boss, the publisher, who played good cop to her bad. “Don’t tell them it’s not hardcover” she wrote one fine shot day. WTF? Oh, we decided it would be better as a “trade paperback” just one of several uphill battles we had to have with the company during the lengthy writing period and preparation of our first book which, we told them, was going to be a game-changer in the astrological genre. We’re going to break the mold we told them as we wrote the book. That’s why we have a design clause in our contract. The book will be smart and chic and fashionable and funny and sexy and many other things never before expected from or delivered by an astrology book. Peole were not inclined to believe. But we did prove them wrong.

The book launched at Selfridges and Harvey Nichols in London, Edinburgh and Dublin, and Marc Jacobs stores everywhere, and at Colette in Paris and at similar shops in Geneva and Zurich and other cities and at Barneys New York when it was still something, with Simon Doonan decorating the windows on a Sextrology theme. Parker Posey came to the Barneys event which was funny and confusing to fans of Will and Grace on which she portrayed the manager of Barneys at the time.We did radio and tv in the US and Europe, we ultimately wrote columns for every publication and website from Paris Vogue to the Daily Beast. Sextrology made quite a splash. Several different production companies tried and failed to build a tv show around us, both in the U.S. and, ironically, mostly, in the U.K.. Ari Emanuel at WME physically handed our book to Charlize Theron with whom Stella met as she, too,wanted to produce a show about us but, once again, agents in the form of WME got in the way. That’s a long story in its own right. Suffice to say they lied to both Charlize and to us telling the other that we didn’t want to do the one type of project we both wanted to do. Lying for a living.

I could go on and on and on. And I’m sure I will. I always do. But I want to get to the main point of this particular Blague which is a little bit of magic and or cosmic humor:

I wrote the book proposal. And though I had pretty much resigned myself to the fact it wasn’t going to be circulated to would-be agents because I just couldn’t bring myself to do that, it soon looked like we would have a great agent after all. Through other successful writer friends we had met this great agent years ago and have stayed in touch socially. When asked what we were up to we simply explained we had written this proposal but didn’t have the stomach to do some directed search. Well you can pretty much guess the rest. The point I’m making is that somehow just the writing of the proposal was enough. Perhaps there was power enough just in that process and in the intention alone to bring this project to light that it sent out its own beacon of unspoken inquiry. And so when asked what was up with us in book world, the very simple honest answer was all that was organically necessary to make a connection. At leat that is the hope. As we are known to say: Most things don’t happen, but everything happens eventually.

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So picking up on the previous post, I was thinking I’ll have to share my publishing history with a new agent. the question is how to give them the whole story without seeming crazing and boring them to death. I will really have to distill it all to some kind of timeline but I figure I might as well kill two birds and just diarrhea-write it all out here so that I’ll have something to distill from and anyway there are probably some funny cosmic things that will come out in the airing, and, more importantly, and most probably: I need to exorcise some of the thoughts and feels around the whole subject of publishing from which I suffer a bit from PTSD.

Where to begin: Astrology was always a hobby and a passion growing up and something Stella and I found we shared when we first met. Part of our original shared starry philosophy was hinged on the fact we felt that males and females of the same were actually very different signs—we would later articulate that as: men and women of the same sign draw on separate energies and archetypes. But we were nineteen so cut us some slack.

Fast forward another decade and we are living in the West Village in NYC and Stella is working in fashion and I am acting a bit while mainly writing for magazines and newspaper about entertainment and fashion for the most part. I would take “runway reporting” jobs in Paris and Milan to coincide with her being in those cities during fashion weeks. After hours, we would meet friends and read their astrological charts for fun. Many friends were stylists and editors for magazines. And as some moved up the mastheads at their jobs they would be in a position to hire us to do astrology features.

Wec ame up with our pennames stella Starsky + Quinn Cox (Stella Star Sky….Quinn Cox, a viable verbal massage of the word Quincunx) to disguise ourselves, mainly, from other editors at other publications I wrote for like the New York Times. After a few years of writing features for dozens of magazines one friend became the edtior of Teen People and approached us to write a regular column. We said we would if it could be a his-and-her format, befitting our gender philosophy on the subject, which was a great fit as Teen People was positioned to be the first unisex teen publication, geared to both boys and girls. It was a huge hit—both the magazine and the column. For our entire tenure there over the next several years our column ranked first among all the magazine pages with readers in market research and focus groups. We didn’t dumb down for teens, you see. We treated them like thinking adults. It was an aspirational column that kids cut out and pasted in their lockers and such.

Teen People was a huge success. At the time Ellen Degeneres had this joke where she said God’s waiting room had two publications: Guns & Ammo, and Teen People. The fact is that not just teens were reading it. It was a major guilty pleasure for adults, particularly urban influencers working in publishing, the arts, fashion and entertainment.

One such reader was Rob who had his own imprintat William Morrow. Now, the funny thing is: we knew Rob socially through a mutual close friend who died at thirty ,to whom Sextrology is dedicated—there is a major cosmic story regarding her which I’ll try to fold into this as I contemporaneously (a word contemporaneously made popular by the news of Jim Comey and his FBI memos) forge ahead, my fingers slightly ahead of my brain. I will try. Anyway we were visiting with Rob one day when he launched into praise about this horoscope column he read (secretly) in Teen People. Um, we admitted: That’s our column. After a big No Way! conversation, Rob intimated he was interested in finding these authors—us—to see if they—us—would like to write a book—would they!—us—and could we tailor it toward an adult audience and include sex and sexuality in the content. But of course. So we put together a proposal—we first blurted out the working title Sextrology on the beach with Rob in East Hampton—and he hooked us up with an agent whom we secretly called Lady Chardonnay because she seemed to perspire it after climbing the three stories of stairs to her office each time we met her—we always arrived earlier than she did.

Lady Chardonnay got a large sum for the sale of Sextrology, which I always wondered if Rob found ironic since he introduced her to us. It was a whopping sum expecially since we were first time authors and writing on the subject of astrology. But we weren’t complaining. In fact the book was worth every penny and has gone on to make our publisher millions. I should say that soon after we got the deal, Harper Collins bought William Morrow and desolved Rob’s imprint. He was gone which was scary and Lady Chardonnay (said she) tried to sell the book elsewhere before apprising us of the situation: that even though Harper cancelled most of Rob’s contracts they wanted to keep Sextrology (probably because it had sex in the title); and that we would be a “Harper Resource” book which was not great news. Harper Resource published things like updated editions of The Joy of Sex but otherwise they were kind of a dry resource book imprint at their core. Ut oh.

Starsky + Cox were determined that Sextrology would break the mold on astrology; that it would redefine the genre, that we would be dragging the subject out of the occult aisle and plop it smack dab in the designer display window. We had a design clause in our contract that allowed us to direct the look. I already said it was supposed to be a hardcover but the publishers lied about that and tried to conceal the fact they were making in paperback. The publisher and editors who inherited our book didn’t want to hear how we were going to launch the book at fashionable stores around the world, that celebrities (and royalty) would attend our events, that we were going to have early adopters of the book in mover shakers, intellectuals, artists, fashion designers, and other authors who referenced our book for their own works. They certainly didn’t think that we were the start of an entire new movement which is now, a dozen years later, known as Mysticore or the Now Age. They couldn’t believe we decided what our book looked like, let alone that we were given six figures for our first foray. They fought us at every turn and made our lives really miserable. Our editor lost a quarter of our manuscript “at the gym”. Yeah, you’ve no idea the litany of issues we encountered and why? Because when you’re not a known commodity or, more acurately, a celebrity you are treated like fucking dirt in publishing. But we were undaunted. And we proved “our people” at Harper wrong at every turn.

And I performed a Jedi mind trick on them as only a Libra can: A year after publication I contacted them about our contract and said “you see this bit about ‘electronic rights’ I’d like those reverted to us—and they did it! So before ebooks became a thing we had already got the rights back to publish the ebook of Sextrology ourselves. Of course that didn’t stop our publisher, on two ocassions, from trying to publishing the ebook themselves, losing our paperwork, doubting the rights had been reverted to us, taking the opportunity again to treat us like shit before they had to eat their words. Though publishers never truly apologize. Just last year I saw a new Sextrology ebook was going to be hitting the market—from our publisher!—it was every Amazon site in every country accepting pre-orders. Do you know how much of my time went into getting them to shut that shit down? They don’t care. They get a paycheck and flop around their offices caring little about the fact they might be messing with your livelihood and intellectual property. Harper Collins, in case you didn’t know, is owned by Rupert Murdoch.

So, okay our friend to whom the book is dedicated, the person who introduced us to Rob. She died around her 30th birthday. And we all to gather at her house to say goodbye but she died before any of us got there. But we all gathered anyway for the weekend. And Rob was there and that’s where we truly bonded. There was this friend of hers from her writing program at Binghamton called Peter. We bonded all together about a dozen of us that weekend and then went our separate ways. Email wasn’t even really that much a thing. Well, when we got our book advance we bought a house on Cape Cod in a sleepy little town that hardly anyone ever goes to. There was one bookstore in town and road down to the main beach. First, before I tell you the kicker I will tell you that I saw my then ancient history professor from B.U. there. Professor Schumann was heading to the beach one day and I recognized him from 1983 when I asked him if I should try to transfer to a better school in the U.S. or study abroad in France in Grenoble. He urged me to go to Grenoble which he called the Harvard of France and so I went and that’s where I met Stella. But if that isn’t weird enough: Upon moving to this town we went to the bookstore which had just opened that same month. Of course, Peter was the owner. We had moved to a town on Cape Cod with the money we got from a book deal from Rob with whom we connected at our friend’s passing and when we got to the town her best friend from her writing program had just opened a book store there.

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For our Afterglow Festival opener last year I wrote something fairly political for Stella and myself to perform, together and separately. Using the frequented Herring Cove beach in Provincetown as a metaphor for the political climate, the right and left, and their varied alliances with foreign power I wrote the following monologue for Stella to perform:

 Originally performed September 12, 2016 in Provincetown as part of the Starsky + Cox “Us and Them” show:

So if you know Herring Cove beach then you know that you drive out and you get to a fork in the road at the entrance where there’s a ranger station and you can either swipe left or swipe right. And really that’s what you’re doing because: If you swipe left you enter the lefty liberal beach of the gays and lesbians. The boys and girls, well, the men and women. Well the women first because they stick close to the beach entrance; not because they don’t like the exercise but because they have so much, shall we say, equipment—folding chairs and tents and typically dogs, if not kids, and books and hats and towesls and sweatshirts and floats and games and sporting goods and dinette sets and, you know, equipment—which is in sharp contrast to the boys who are further down and, depending on the tide, will have taken the short cut to that outer beach, “the boy beach” through the dunes, traveling super light, you know, with just a David Sedaris book, a towel and a TimScapes tanktop slung over their shoulder. So even if you swipe left you encounter that contrast, that sub faction.

However if you were to swipe right when you enter Herring Cove you really are swiping right, except if you venture really far out, which you can only do on foot, to the very tip of the beach where you will encounter a small colony of elite, off-the-grid libertarian gays, but for the most part, when you swipe right, it’s RV after camper after mini-van after trailer, many of which are festooned with right-wing bumper stickers and “populist” propoganda or patriarcal paraphenalia like those disgusting truck balls. Just a few weeks back, On my way out to visit my gay libertarian friends, I passed one vehicle with a bumper sticker that read Trump That Bitch. Yeah that’s what it said Trump That Bitch. I always travel with a Sharpie so I added a comma after Trump and drew a quick caricature of Ivanka. (Period.) I’m not proud of it. Vandalism. It’s typically not my style. But these are drastic times and the polarized duality of our existence here is stunning. Again, especially here. And it works every which way….

….The other day, I bumped into a friend as he pedalled back from his travel-light daily jaunt to the Boy Beach, who was terribly distraught because he felt what he called his “safe queer space” was being invaded by straight people. Apparently a forty something hipster couple was trying to cross the dunes to the Boy Beach with a stroller which must have been a sight and a big surprise to them and the fellows sunning themselves sans thong upon their arrival. And I get it. Provincetown has long been a refuge for the LGBTQ community for a century but as it becomes less marginalized, which is the goal, right, it loses it’s margin, it’s outer fringe. And so, yes, though it would be jarring to see some likely well-funded artisinal chocolatier millionaire couple in what appears to be19th century garb—she in a gunny sack, he sporting suspenders and a Smith brothers beard—crossing what must seem like the Sahara with a stroller, it’s just the way, it literally goes. This is where it’s going. I tell me gay friends here: You can’t have the World of Interiors, or House & Garden or Elle Decor or Guns & Ammo come and photograph your mudroom and then expect to keep out the Brooklynite offspring of the Fortune 500. You know the expression?…I think it was Shakespeare or maybe it was Christopher Marlowe…who said: First the gays, then the girls and then everybody else? It’s true. But I’m talking beyond that, beyond that. More globally.

It way goes beyond the domestic cultural wars playing out here microcosm. It’s global. Yes the global conflict is right here, in Provincetown. Oh yes. You don’t go to other boutique destinations like Key West or Palm Springs or Asheville or Marfa and see what we see here. I mean in terms of global dichotomy as far as we are concerned, there is a split, right, wouldn’t you agree, between the former Soviet Union, still espousing many of their cold war ideals, and the rising power in the world, that is China. And of course, closer to home, we have this dualistic vision of Mexico. The right seems to be all about the once and what could be the future Eastern Bloc—and the left seems to be more welcoming of China, and they are split down the middle on Mexico. And, though I don’t have as many Mexican friends in Provincetown as I used to, I certainly know a lot of people here who hail from the former Soviet Union and, at the same time, I’m being slowly introduced to our new friends from China. And I don’t have to fly seven thousand miles to understand the historic and cultural significance of this particular brand of global dichotomy—all I have to do is stroll from here to Canteen next door for a dish of sauteed brussel sprouts in fish sauce to get a sense of the cultural waves that are occuring out there on the world stage. With all the different factions that make up the Provincetown experience, it is said that walking down Commerical Street is like cruising the halls of high school with it’s myriads cliques and hoots—but walking down the street is also, in its own way, a playing out of the great race for world power and dominion, some factions driving pedicabs, some shielding themselves from the sun with parasols, some sticking to the tar in forshadowing of the dinosaurs we are to become. (take mic out).

To view the original Sabian Symbol themed 2015 Cosmic Blague corresponding to this day: Flashback! The degree point of the Sabian Symbol may at times be one degree higher than the one listed here. The Blague portrays the starting degree of for this day ( 0°,  for instance), as I typically post in the morning, while the Sabian number corresponds to the end point (1°) of that same 0°-1° period. There are 360  degrees spread over 365/6 days per year—so they nearly, but not exactly, correlate.

Typos happen. I don’t have a proofreader. And I like to just write, post and go!
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Virgo 0° (August 19)

Woops I just realized that I’ve gotten ahead of myself on the degrees. Meaning I forgot in this process to let some days go by.  So now I will wait until we actually do enter Virgo, which is not for another four days, to resume this Blague. I’ll see you Sunday!

And of course, the next card I pick is Death. Typically, this would weird me out, but what with having just picked the Devil, which was remarkably accurate given the last two days’ events, we are now indeed in a new era, if an uncertain one, where the pseudo peace has gone out of this place and the year ahead, busy as it will be, shall now be marred by this incident. Yet it is probably the push we need to get the ef out of Dodge. I am living like a specter here in any case, no longer a part of the fabric, cancelled in the landscape of the town at the end of the road, pushed and priced out, quite frankly, lest I were to live in tiny digs for too much money. They can have it, I mean this sincerely. I want to go North. Nothing will happen until the Spring, in any case. The trick is to stay healthy and to throw away everything we do not need so that when it arrives we can pull up stakes and bugger the freak off.

The following blocks of text are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 726-730. I am reading through all of my Blagues, five per day, and posting some samples here. Now, in my sixth year of writing this Blague, by the time I get to my seventh, I will have journeyed through all the daily Blagues of my first five years. If that’s confusing I apologize. Year seven, I’ll only have to read through year six, once a day.  

There was a Cadillac for father’s escape every morning before I awoke, weekdays, and to bring him back home again after I was asleep at night. There was a Buick for mother to go to Stop & Shop and Sealfons, a dress shop in neighboring Ridgewood, and to have a boozy lunch at the Steve Wartendyke Inn where she would meet her decorator, Fred, the spitting image of Joel Grey, who carpeted, draped, fabric paneled, Italian tiled, door knobbed, linoleumed, painted, papered, corniced, sconced and labricaned and furnished all the rooms except for the would-be woodsy suburbanite rich kid. The interior of the house was frankly so beautiful, when one stepped into the otherwise ordinary looking cedar-shingled and suttered split level one had the sense of being truly transported.

Sister didn’t like eating with her brother—he must have put her off her food—so mother would feed them separatey, in shifts, and just drink her drinks and maybe eat late with father if he hadn’t already dined gluttonously on Steak Diane or some such post work with clients or his team of worshipful underthings, the only kind of underlings he could have; most likely he was fucking some new hire as rubbers could be found in his attaché case. But we were going to touch only briefly on the rich kid and get back to the beach bum so let us do that.

In the summer he only saw father, who stayed up north, on the weekends and not always then. So you can imagine how beachy and ultimately bummy things could get. With no watchful eye, mother drank increasingly, her own gaze not only naturally turning inward, now, but also veering off in different directions. Mother and sister separately seeked to get away with their own brand of murder and in time the beach bum followed suit, first in the 1910 six bedroom they rented two blocks from the beach and ultimately one they bought, which had seven bedrooms, one block from it. The first house belonged to a Pennsylvania family called the Traces. They weren’t Amish but they seemed like they were, all the boys having haircuts that looked like their father placed a bowl on their heac and cut around. They were in fact Catholic because the house was left to them by a late Monsignor friend of the family. The furniture looked like it belonged in a church. Everything was heavy and dark and overly carved and ornate. The wood surfaces, due to the salt air, could be scraped with your fingernail and cabinet doors and draws all had old fashioned keys in them; and when opened they gave off a heady whiff of age and repression and fear. There were crucifixes everywhere which will factor into a story that will happen a bit later, when the beach bum is eleven and he’s made to swear on these gory wall-hangings that he’ll never tell another living soul what is “about to happen.”

But for now, in the years leading up to that pivotal event he would awake, summers, and fix himself some cereal and grab his raft and head to the beach to meet Steven. On rainy days they would play Monopoly or hit the arcade. Steven found two abandon pidgeon babies and raised them. His plan was to teach Hawkeye and Chopper to be homing and carrier pidgeons. One of them pooped on the beach bum’s bare thigh. There was always a time, during the course of the summer, when he would need a break from Steven who was given to bullying in one way or another. The summer would often start out great, the pair sharing tales from the previous school year. Both were in school musicals, typically, and if they knew some songs in common they’d walk out to the end of one of the beach’s long jettys, sing on it and sing loudly to the sea. They would be taken by the mother and her gaggle of friends, all of them, too, from Jersey City, to Seaside Heights to ride the rides, eat frozen custard and suqirt water into clown heads in hopes of winning an ugly stuffed animal they’d never end up taking home. And those endless days of rafting and body surfing and the recovery time from chafed nipples or chestcolds from the constant water logging. They might build some fish nets out of old window screens and rub them with wet bread to capture some of the introduced fish in the man-made lake Como near their houses, which were only two blocks away. But soon they would tire of each other or one or the other would have visiting friends or cousins and be happy for the excuse to take some time apart.

Steven’s cousin T.J. would visit and that was always a natural break because Steven was strangely covetous of his time alone with his cousin, never sharing the experience, when the boys reached teen age this would be especially obvious. Many years later, decades after Steven’s death at the age of twenty-six, he would learn from Steven’s brother Barry some tidbits of information that cast some sensical light on the situation. Steven, who you might say was “all boy” had two older brothers, Barry and Michael. It would have been obvious to anyone who wasn’t eight years old, probably, that Barry and Michael were gay. Barry was the same age as sad Lisa and they had similar caustic personalities it seemed to the beach bum. He saw Barry treat Steven the same way Lisa treated him. Like an annoying non entity. Both Michael and Barry were seriously skinny, Michael in particular; and both wore binkini swimsuits and were rather hairy. You wouldn’t say they wore Speedos because that would suggest an athleticism. Michael looked like you could touch your middle finger to your thumb if you wrapped it around his bicep. He was tiny and lisped. Barry was quite tall and lithe and had the kind of terrible posture that would make a great female model. His sunk his chest, hunched his shoulders forward and jutted out his hips always collapsing into one side or other.

The first time the beach bum saw an avocado was at Steven’s house. He thought Steven’s father was foreign, from Israel he figured, not realizing that he could have a think Yiddish accent and be American. Steven’s mother ran the office of the biggest synagogue on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where Steven’s funeral would be prematurely held. Later in life he might describe Steven’s home and family environment as kibbutz-y. The household smacked of communal living. There were always huge bowls of fruits and vegetables, some looking exotic like the avocado—mangos, papayas and such that you might sometime see at the supermarket but never buy. During the week it was Steven and his brothers and his mother and her sister who might have been unmarried or maybe had a husband one never saw. There was Steven’s grandmother and her sister Bessie. Aunt Bessie. The bum called her Aunt Bessie and Steven’s grandmother grandma. Every day he climbed the steps to their front portch where they all sat in chairs or rockers, Grandma or Aunt Bessie would ask him, “how’s your sister?” Sometimes other great aunts would visit

Steven tormented his grandmother and Aunt Bessie but they didn’t know it. He would say obscene things to them to which they’d reply, “What honey?” Then he would make something up.

“I need a blowjob Aunt Bessie.”

“What Stevie, Honey?”

“My bike needs work. It needs a blow job.”

“That’s nice.”

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I’ve come to the conclusion that I suffer from a sort of pee shyness when it comes to being funny. Actually I came to that conclusion fully in writing the previous Blague, which I did just moments ago because (in case you haven’t been tuning in) I’m behind about thirty-four days/blagues and when I say behind that’s a totally arbitrary perspective but I just dealt (not yesterday) in the previous Blague with my weirdness about not being able to not complete things and I don’t want my Blague themes to blur so…the theme of “today’s” Blague is absolutely my inability to whip out my funny and let it flow in a loud and heavy stream. I bet you’ve never used this metaphor for humor before and I’m sure I never will again.

All my life people have been telling me I’m funny. Oh my god you’re the funniest person. Well you know Quinn (or Bill or whatever the fuck you’re calling me) he’s the funniest person. You’re the funniest person. Thanks. The truth is it’s true. But it’s only truly true when I’m with people super close to me. Not to say I haven’t been funny in public. I do write funny things and perform them on a stage. And I tend to write a lot of dialogue because I often perform with Stella as a duo. She writes her own material which is fantastically amazing, but she generally does so for her solo shows or for her solo bits in shows. Sometimes I write monologues for her to say. I’ve written bits and monologues for a number of people. I get my best laughs when other people are delivering the material I created. Most people won’t have realized I’ve written it and I don’t tell them. And hardly anyone reads this so it’s not like suddenly it’s going to go out on the AP service that I write comedy to be performed. Most people think of me as a producer, not so much the talent. Or they think of me as a sort of Desi Arnaz of performing astrologers of which there are exactly two: Stella and myself. Stella has terrific stage presence and when we’re together all eyes tend to be on her anyway. She’s tall and pretty and it’s the way it should be. She’s also a natural born actress and comedian. By the time I’ve hit the stage, typically, I’ve worn fifty other hats from producer to writer to publicist to ticket taker to promoter to the voice you hear introducing us from backstage—something I tend to do in my best Tony Randall voice. You’ve heard my Tony Randall story, right? Where I was in an improv/sketch comedy class and I had this funny act where I played Tony Randall and then a couple of days later I met him and he cast me in his Broadway company? Ah, yes, sometimes the Cosmic Joke in life is not ha-ha funny but eerily so and spritually transcendent. But where was I … oh yeah…

Funny. This Cosmic Blague is meant to be funny dammit. Or at least amusing in its story telling. I know it can’t always ring true on the “cosmic joke” theme because not everything seems as if the Universe is playing pranks on us. But it does enough of the time, right? Enough of the time that we begin a lot of our sentences to one another “you wanna hear something weird?…or you wanna hear something funny?… weird and funny being often interchangable. I’ll leave that for the Deconstructionists to decide. All I know is that it’s hard to be funny on command. Which is the reason I started this Blague: I thought that if I had to try to write something, again, at least amusing everyday then maybe it would exercise my “instrument”, you know, get my juices flowing, my comic mojo working. It’s possible it will. As I said, the first year, I immediately abandoned the funny agenda in favor of musing on these Sabian Symbols which capture, in a phrase, the energy of every day/degree of the zodiac. It became a crutch. It is far easier for me to be metaphysical or philosophical on demand. But not funny. And I’ll tell you another thing:

It’s actually easier, now, for me to tap into my psychic powers at will than it is my comedic ones. How about that? And I bring this up because there are similarities between these two forces. They are forces more than talents. Sure I believe you’re born with a sense of humor or not; just like you’re born with some psychic ability or not. But in both cases they have to be worked because they will go dormant or be lost all together. I can’t believe what I’m about to say: I think my psychicness can be a metaphor for my humor. Okay maybe metaphor’s not exactly what I mean. I mean it is a metaphor for it. But that’s not the point right now. I think that what I mean more acurately is: I should model the fostering of my humor on the cultivation of my psychic power. Then again I suppose I have. But I can really turn up the volume here. I suppose I’m back to metaphor: The thing about the psychic ability is that you can’t second guess it you have to act on it and speak up when you get some kind of “flash” however that might happen for you. It’s the same with humor. We learn that in improv where s/he who hesitates is indeed lost.

Stella turned me onto the Mike Birbiglia film Don’t Think Twice, have you seen it. It’s great. And he’s great. It’s all about an improv comedy troupe so the title sort of says it all. I respect Mike Birbiglia because, like many “comedians” I connect with, he really is just a funny storyteller and he’s very clever and I jus think he’s tops. He has his tricks as all comedians do but his aren’t glaring and I feel he works against them which I like. Oh, you see, I’m also a great critic of others’ humor. I’m a great critic period. Which is why I think I’m a Virgo rising. I say I think because I don’t actually know because nobody really remembers when I was born except for that it was morning. And we know it was morning because my Pisces diva mother complained that it was too early. But too early would be like 3 or 4 am, right, not 7 am exactly but I’m not a Leo rising I’m a Virgo rising which means that she didn’t actually have to get up that early. Never mind the fact she wasn’t in labor long because, as she would famously say, I started coming out in the taxi. But you know they didn’t take a taxi to the hospital–my father drove her. But taxi sounds so much more like it happened in a movie, which is the way my mother interpreted all the scenes of her life, in hindsight, with her as the put-upon secretly wise waif, a part that could have easily gone to Sandy Dennis or even Shirley Maclaine.

I loved Sandy Dennis. She used to teach at H.B. studios when I was a student there. I studied with Uta Hagen. You’ve no doubt heard those stories. No? I know I wrote about them in the past. I suppose I’ll have to go back through old Blagues and repackage them into these new Blagues into a funnier way than when I first put them down triggered by some Sabian Symbol I was using as a crutch. Well, they were a crutch to get me writing what I hoped would be comedy; though they weren’t a crutch in and of themselves because some of my metaphysical musings on those symbols are pretty interesting in and of themselves. I have several aspects to my personality. I’d like to say I have seven distinct personalities because that would be a very literal way of describing the prismatic personality of a Libra. See, I think about things all too often in astrological terms. Which isn’t always funny—especially not on stage. But since my stage persona of Quinn Cox grew out of my penname Quinn Cox I thought it would be a grand idea to make astrology funny. To be, as a duo, the Sonny and Cher of astrology. It sort of worked. It still can. But I’m not sure I’ve ever got the balance right. The thing is I’ve now become Quinn Cox, not just in the sense that that is how you (yes you) know me; unless you’re a very dear and old friend who calls be Bill or the magazine crew I worked with in England that calls me William, but in the sense that I morphed into my own creation that originated on paper. Wouldn’t it be smart, I thought, if we took the authors (our pennames) of Sextrology and brought them life. Through these invented characters we could express ourselves. Through the artifice of their creation we could tell untold truths. Little did I know that I would be swallowed by that creature Quinn Cox and that my life would become his life and his talents would become my talents. For it wasn’t until I became Quinn Cox, a character I penned to have been brought up by Celtic mystics and who himself had strong, for lack of a better word, supernatural, powers only to discover it was all true. All true.

——————————————

So there was a New Moon recently. And on the day of the New Moon we awoke to an energetic landscape that was buzzy and alive. You know the sort. Everyday, when you think about it, has a personality that greets you. And, most often in the Spring, there is a day that is eager to wake you like a dog licking your face. The morning of the New Moon was such a day. It felt like the last day of school or the day of the opening of your play or when you’re due to be given an award or something. Anyway it was a sanguine day, the opposite of gloomy, and we had two private clients that day by Skype to look forward to and we both felt fueled with insight and guidance.

Just after breakfast we heard a loud bang upstairs. We ignored it until later when we’d finished our work. And when we went upstairs we saw that one set of books that ad been safely and tightly tucked into a very deep cubby in one section of our bookshelf had flung out into the room in a splay, which we didn’t touch. (It was four days ago and we still haven’t moved them by the way.) The books each had very strong significance, some of them to the very conversation we had had downstairs around breakfast when the crash occured. It spooked out even us. But not in a scary way. The overall energetic sense was benign, just like the tone of the day. Still very potent. I think of Glinda’s description of the Wizard of Oz “oh, very good but very mysterious.” The other strange thing is that I had just that morning, for the first time in months, resumed reading this biography of Carl Jung that I began months ago—the book had been bedside in the Winter when I moved it into our guestroom and I had just brought it back bedside, the night before, to read that morning upon waking. As with all books I read I removed the cover and it had been ages since I even knew where that jacket was.

Well, besides the relevance of each of the books that were splayed out like runs upon the floor, the book jacket to the Jung book was standing up on the eye-level shelf from whence the books cascaded—standing up and facing out as if one had placed it there so to read the back jacket, hands-free, while facing the shelf. Now, I know I needed to not let that autobiography be put aside for long. I know that I am meant to know more about Carl Jung then I do. I know that I will encounter myriad points of connection as I continue through the biography, and I’ll be back here picking up that particular thread of this conversation but we’ll leave that for now, just as we left the books on the floor, yet ready to move them as we know it will require some ritualizing of the experience. Do you think we’re weird? Not that I care.

Though we had planned to work after our second client we decided (or rather it was decided) we needed to go for a drive. Now one of the topics of conversation twinkling in the air around us that day centered on our previous existence as thirty-something home owners in a quaint town up Cape Cod a bit. Over a decade ago we would go for walks most afternoons in the village of Chatham and, without giving it any thought, it struck us that we should go to Chatham and take our old walk through the village to the beach. Great. Off we went and soon we were there strolling in the crisp Spring late afternoon air. We traced our old steps and we discussed how the old houses on our path had changed, many being renovated and losing their lovely old spooky gothic feel. Except for one stretch where it seemed all the neighbors had made a pact to keep things exactly the way they were since the last time, over a decade, we strolled through the quiet secret roads of the village. Then all of a sudden we happened upon a house with a separate barn against whose doors were leaning a sign on its side on which were written in big letters New Moon, next to a portrait of a crescent one.

Now you see that would have been kismet enough to happen upon a New Moon sign on the New Moon while strolling down memory lane in real physical form, but there’s more to it: This was the very sign that hung outside the New Moon restaurant to which we would go every night in the other little quaint Cape Cod town in which we owned our house and where we wrote Sextrology every day for many years, often so intensely that we didn’t have the energy or bandwidth to also shop and cook and so we would go to the only decent open restaurant in our town for dinner, as I said, most nights, over the course of several years and one year in particular when we reconnected with a dear old friend from our Paris years some fifteen years before that, an important connection that has recently impacted the writing of what will be our next book and, some of you might have guessed this, the one person in the world most connected, energetically to the books that flew off our shelf just that morning.

——————————————–

When I was a junior in high school I was hit by a school bus. Well, more accurately the car in which I was riding to school was hit by a school bus. I often grabbed a ride with my neighbors, my dear friend Karen Siegel who was in my grade and with whom I was thick as thieves, and her brother Jeff, a senior, who had an open top Jeep with a roll bar. Karen had a long perm and flakey skin from a surplus of acne meds and she talked staggeringly and moved shiftily and apologetically, on purpose, in what was a total aping of Diane Keaton in any Woody Allen movie ever, but especially Annie Hall. Jeff tried to look cool but he was a geek and had floppy blond hair and wore some kind of granny glasses. He looked like a Jewish John Denver.

There was one main road that full school busses traveled up to reach the large circular drive in front of our “regional” high school, and down which the empty busses would depart. And there was a small road, just one, that ended at that larger road, that we would arrive at, to make a left onto the main drive, timing our turn correctly between the arriving and departing busses passing in either direction perpendicularly before us.

“I think we can make it” was the last thing I remembered Jeff saying before the collision was over. One bus, I’m not sure now whether it was a full arriving one or an empty departing one, slammed into us. No Jeff you cannot make it you stupid nerdy muppet. What happened was the school bus hit us and we flipped completely over rolling on that bar which was living up to its name—can you believe that roll bar actually got use?—such that we landed upright again, a total 360. It was barely the eighties so we weren’t wearing seatbelts of course; so I think Karen and Jeff “stayed” in the car by virtue of centrifugal force but I, loose as a goose in the back seat, with said roll bar available for my own flipping pleasure, apparently smashed my head and face against it as we did the roll which, while upside down, must have “pushed” me back into my upside-down seat and luckily it happened so fast that we were upright again in a flash and it wasn’t so slow a roll that I was crushed under the roll bar or otherwise flung from the Jeep, until the very last moment of impact which I can’t help but imagine was like when Dorothy’s house landed on the witch of the East. Anyway, I was on the pavement.

All I knew were bananas and Bruce Springsteen. I don’t know if you’ve ever had amnesia but when you do you don’t actually remember anything. You just know a couple of things. I knew the smell and taste of something called banana, and I knew the sound of a sound and that it had a name and that name was Bruce Springsteen. I couldn’t tell you what a banana looked like or what it was. I just knew banana. And I couldn’t describe Bruce Springsteen or even know Bruce Springsteen was a person let alone a singer I just knew he was what had been in my ears the last time I knew I had something called ears. I was messed up. And I was bleeding all over the place and Karen, who had absolutely nothing at all wrong with her, was pulling me to my feet. I don’t know if it was Jeff or the voices in my head but all I could hear was “don’t move him, you never move an accident victim.” But either Karen didn’t give a fuck what her fucked up brother, who would only sustained broken forearm, was saying OR she couldn’t hear the voices in my head so she walked me to the nurse’s office.

I wasn’t quite back in reality but bits and pieces were beginning to return in jigsaw fashion; but obviously I was not in my right mind because the first thing I did was reach into my pocket to dig out my black wooded bowl and cloudy, sticky baggy of what was left of some larger amount of not very good pot and hand it to the nurse who was probably sixty and slender with some Reagan era version of the 1940s hairdo she wore in her twenties, which was tucked under her white cap to match her pristine tight startk white polyester—school nurses actually looked like nurses once, remember—onto which i was somehow dripping blood.

“Oh dear,” she said. I remember that distinctly. Because I recall thinking she was more concerned about the blood I was getting on her dress than she was about the fact that my head was actually a blood fountain that was spurting all over her. Then again “oh dear” was probably due to the fact that she probably had never touched a bowl or a bag of pot before as this was something she only experienced heretorfore in the abstract via the propogandist anti-drug films they still trotted out since they first showed them to students in the 1960s for us to see in health class, in which, she made cameo appearances. Actually, i think it was a triple-layered “oh dear”; she was actually saying “oh dear” about the blood on her dress, the blood spurting out of my skull, and the bag and bowl I was simultaneously shoving into her hand, all at the same time. Three “oh dears” said all at once. And why would I give our lovely innocent, to me, then, rather elderly nurse my bag and bowl? Because somewhere I was aware that people in uniforms of some sort would be arriving and that I shouldn’t have that shit on me. It never occured to me I was giving it directly into the hands of a school official that would, of course, bring it to the principal who was not, and never would be, my pal.

I’m going to stop there. It’s a long story and I’ll tell you the rest tomorrow!

To view the original Sabian Symbol themed 2015 Cosmic Blague corresponding to this day: Flashback! The degree point of the Sabian Symbol may at times be one degree higher than the one listed here. The Blague portrays the starting degree of for this day ( 0°,  for instance), as I typically post in the morning, while the Sabian number corresponds to the end point (1°) of that same 0°-1° period. There are 360  degrees spread over 365/6 days per year—so they nearly, but not exactly, correlate.

Typos happen. I don’t have a proofreader. And I like to just write, post and go!
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Leo 29° (August 18)

Today was a horror show. Visitation from the Farmer turned ugly as he had a break with reality and screamed at us and accused us of things that were so far from truth. Not sure how much longer we will be able to sustain this and I’m already working out some kind of exit strategy so that we might live more in peace. In some ways it is a blessing since I no longer have to await the other shoe dropping—it happened. And now I no longer have to even make small talk. And should there be any refusal of renewal I will have the pleasure of seeing that process through. This is the end of all bullying in my life full stop. I am no longer available to it. I wondered why it was I pulled the Devil card for the first time after not pulling cards at all and this was my answer. Of course the farmer is a Capricorn to boot, the picture of the horned goat. Dead to me.

The following blocks of text are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 721-725. I am reading through all of my Blagues, five per day, and posting some samples here. Now, in my sixth year of writing this Blague, by the time I get to my seventh, I will have journeyed through all the daily Blagues of my first five years. If that’s confusing I apologize. Year seven, I’ll only have to read through year six, once a day.  

From April 2017, afloat, as I recall:

As people are drawn to the Light and want to see and play with him, this makes the sister darkness so, so angry; especially, when the adoring pilgrims are her peers, other six-, seven-, eight-, nine-, ten, eleven-year old girls. I can speak now but what to say that won’t land me in more terrible trouble? I need a new role to play. I must drive my true, eternal character of Light ever inward pretending to bid it fast farewell and learn to play another more temporal role.

Enter the Performer, the first main gig of which was playing the character of juvenile vaudevillian. Make ‘em laugh, make ‘em laugh. In the late sixties and early seventies, genuine vaudevillians were in their own sixties seventies and eighties. Ed Sullivan was still on television, both presenting and preserving these acts intact. Variety shows were all the rage , as were holiday specials in that form. Laugh-In. The Smothers Brothers. Andy Williams. Bing Crosby. Bob Hope. They all played host to exciting new artists and stage-and-screen veterans alike. There were three major television networks. And the same pantheon of fading entertainment gods being suffled around by night in living color appeared by day, on the weekends, in old, younger black-and-white versions of themselves in edited movies from the thirties, forties and fifties; and the jevenile Vaudevillian would match the fresh newsprint faces with the leather, bloated colored ones in pastel polyesther suits and tuxes, and fuscia, lime and lemon gowns positioned against sparkling midnight blue and azure and gold and burgundy curtains or cutaway geometric cardboard set pieces, most typically in some sanitized take on a flower-power theme. One’s eyes were glued, no other options.

And as if that wasn’t enough: there were the impersonators, particularly those who performed on a syndicated show called The Copy Cats where the real aging stars were made into even more caricature than they already made of themselves. This was my in. I could imitate the imitators. And if my performance of the material wasn’t funny enough in its own right I could get laughs and attention, anyway, for the mere fact that I was a four-year-old attempting it. James Cagney. Jack Benny. Carol Channing. Richard Nixon. Liberace. Humphrey Bogart. Mae West. Groucho Marx. I would doo them all which secured smiling moments from an otherwise absent or maniacally raging sire. It was, like most things, lost on my mother who was still having an unspoken relationship with my previous Light incarnation, dressing him up—in navy or forest green or maroon one-piece jumpsuits, overall rompers that buttoned at the shoulder, over button-down shirts with Peter Pan collars in respectively pale shades of baby blue, mint green and let’s not call it pink; oh, with matching hat of navy, forest or maroon on some equestrian theme, with an under chinstrap that snaped closed at the ear like a jockey’s—to take him, after soft boiled eggs or a Carnation Instant Breakfast, to the post office, supermarket, bank, dress shop, shoe store, drug store, with its soda fountain (for a vanilla egg cream) and endless hours in the beauty parlor with fat, elderly ladies under giant dryers to be coiffed with giant headresses made of their own teased, sprayed hair. I would be oohed and ahhed over; but, for the most part, overt displays of affection were not shared between mother and Light. it was a cool casual affair of telepathic communication and easeful ritual agenda that ended, in any case, when, still at age four, he entered kindergarten where he played a now dual role. More on that a little later.

On weekends now, the only time he saw father who left for work, weekdays, before he awoke and returned well after his bedtime, he was the performer full stop, doing his impressions, patter between songs or carrols, depnding on the scenes, often tunes from his Disney movie compilation albums. Hi-Ho. Supercalifragilisticexpialadotious (which he could say backwards). Zip A Dee Do Dah. The Bare Necessities. Bibbity Boppity Boo. And he’d begun to free-style with his impressions adding Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Elmer Fudd, Foghorn Leghorn and all the Warner Bros. cartoon characters to his repetoire. He learned they were all voiced by the same man, Mel Blanc, whom he also noticed was listed as the voice of Barney Rubble in the credits of The Flintstones which he watched along with Lost in Space and I Love Lucy religiously after school before dinner. He not only added Barney Rubble, which could mistaken for Yogi Bear, to the act, but he began drawing all The Flintstones characters then cutting them out, coloring them on both sides, making his own version of paper dolls, allowing him a desired form of play without raising eyebrows or real wrath the way attempting to play with Barbies or other such figures might do; because waking the two beasts in his household was the absolute opposite of the plan which was: to evade, avoid and otherwise distract them.

It almost worked but there were unforseen downsides. For instance, he couldn’t have realized that Apollo was also the god of yet another abstract—talent—a word of worth and measure—a talent is a weight placed on one end of the scale to balance and measure what was on the other , so really very Libra Scales indeed. He wanted to lull the beats with a little razzle dazzle; he didn’t wish to anger the wicked sister by winning any praise from her preferred paternal parent who was finally finding a reason to brab about the vaudevillian cartoonist who had otherwise brought him nothing but shame and sadness.

———————

Visibly and vividly ashamed that Light seemed a little too much himself in his loafers, having tried to outfit him in sports-themed costumes like a footballer player, squeezing Light into jerseys, putting coal under his eyes, and slapping on a helmet so heavy Light’s wee neck could barely support it, he who had spawned what he considered the real monster could not see this Light through the trees of his own would-be shame and embarrassment. But the emergence of the new vaudevillian characeter gave the brute an idea.

We can’t teach him to throw or hit anything but we can dress him up neat and manage his new act, tailoring it in a direction that won’t further embarrass or disappoint; still it would take some doing. In the meantime, one might hang one of his drawings in the office, one of Fred or Barney or Dino; so long as it wasn’t Wilma or Betty or Pebbles. Even Bamm Bamm would be a no. And let’s never talk about the homemade paper dolls of America’s favorite prehistoric family. A yabba dabba doo too far. On the whole, though, the vaudevillian is giving us something to work with. A statement like that, delivered to Mother, would be met not with a blank but rather an inward focused stare, like someone in a trance, which, to be honest, she was for the majority of her life. Besides, she was resigned to the fact that nothing was ever up to her. She had all but lost the Light, now, but for perhaps in summer, sometimes, when she had more moments alone, needing to be stolen, always, from sister when she’d be preoccupied with friends, her relationships with which already exhibiting signs of psychological complexity and paranoia.

So gone were the Patrick Dennis rompers with matching caps which, now, at age five, are replaced with microadult garb: suits or slacks and jackets, both single and double breasted, and with solid or striped ties and shoes, both brogues and loafers, an hints of irony there being lost on the one dimensional mind of the executioner of this sudden makeover. Hair was straightened, side-parted, brushed and sprayed—”the dry look” courtesy of English Leather. This would all have been considered sophisticated and butch. The juvenile Vaudevillian did not argue but what he was told.

Somehow looking like a tiny town mayor had a funny effect—it drove the little girls at the vaudevillian’s school crazy.

The Jersey City school of the performer’s early apartment-dwelling life was about four blocks away, the last uphill. In sadistic fashion, he had be directed by his sister that he had to waituntil she reached on full bluck ahead of him before he could start walking to school himself. The girlfriends who accompanied her would steal concerned looks back at him and, given his new dry look, they were probably relieved as he seemed far less vulnerable outfitted like Nixon than he did as the boy in the tailored onsie whom one might readily call Pee Wee if, as a stranger, you saw him waiting, sad, for that one-city-block cushion against him to be established. His name was William and, when it came to cartoon characters he most loved, subconsciously identifying most with, Chilly Willy, the lost penquin who cried ice cubes when Bugs Bunny would agandon him in his quest to get back home to….”Hoboken?” (said with Mel Blanc alarm).

But the sadness soon wore off because every girl in kindergarten was in love with the little boy in the suit with the hair that never moved that smelled like they didn’t know what. Especially Simone. Simone was a tiny, gorgeous creature, an African American girl who, if she were to be cast in the act, or join the one-man-child cult, of mini adults might find herself being styled like Leslie Uggams or Barbara McNair. She was beautiful but it would have broken the spell for him to express have epressed that sentiment because Simone thought the performer was hard to get—if she only knew what was to become of him—and so she would chase him from the school, yard, down the hill all the way past Lolly’s Candy Store to the crossing guard at West Side and Audubon avenues in hopes of getting a good hug grip and landing a kiss which she actually managed to do about half the time. The performer’s costume shoes were inexpensive and used to kill his arches and by the time the bell rang at three o’clock he was nearly half crippled and couldn’t always get away fast enough.

From where he sits now he remembers for the first time ever the day Simone stopped chasing him. I think someone had a talk with her mother who had a talk with Simone because she seemed to switch from undying love to hate in a moment. But not before the day his mother got to slip in some costuming of her own in which she sent him to school without her husband’s knowledge: it was a full brown wet-look suit with a sort of snake or alligator pattern you could probably peel off, if you tried, like the finish of a bad faux snakeskin handbag. The trousers were shiny high-waisted bell bottoms, the jacket a short bomber style, fittingly paired with a white “silk” shirt that had a built-in aviator scarf at the color you could wrap around. Oh, and with a Jackson-Five style ghetto-newsie cap. Simone must have been a combination of excited and confused by the albino mini Michael Jackson (six years that child’s junior) who was born in 1958, same as Madonna and the vaudevillian’s evil sibling.

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Though the Van Pelts were lovely and kind to each other, the cartoon Lucy and Linus did remind the young vaudevillian of his own relationship with his mean-spirited sister, six years his senior. And given the fact that he was the object of affection by girls chasing him, Sally Brown’s pursuit of Linus seemed to sum that up as well. Linus had great expectations like Pip in, well, Great Expectations. He believed the Great Pumpkin would appear. An idealist. He gave great speeches like that on the true meaning of Christmas. So he seemed like he might be a Libra, too, ticking so many boxes about that sign—a little cartoon oracular god. One day the notion of researching the name Linus occured and, sure enough, he is a famous Greek orator and son of the god Apollo who energetically rules Libra. So that all made sense. But Lucy truly loved Linus and would do anything for him. The performer’s mean sister needed a psychologist—stat—though one would never trust her to be one.

The vaudevillian, as mentioned, was encouraged to act and impersonate—better to sing the Baloo songs from Jungle Book than, say, the Fairy Godmother song from Cinderella. And when it came to impersonations he was urged to stick to Cagney and Bogie and even Nixon and to cut Carol Channing and Mae West from the repetoir. When the family went to Disney world around when it first opened, and the performer went on the road, taking his first flight, Newark Airport was swarming with stewardesses in signature colors and styles of their respective airlines. Later, when he saw a Courrege fashion show he flashed back to this. But now, our, say, six-year-old vaudevillian started doing comic bits, suddenly turning to follow flocks of uniformed stewardesses like one of the— thank the gods never chasing them, whistling— Marx Brothers he was more subtly emulating, much to his patriarch’s delight. And by now he had added dancing to his act of heretofore comedy, impersonations and song, stopping short at magic or hypnotism.

At the Skyline Cabana Club in Jersey City, where the all Jews, Italians, Irish, Poles, Germans and other last hold outs before the great white exodus to the suburbs would ensue, the young vaudevillian had made quite a name for himself since he joined that summer club (think Coca Cola Kid) at the age of two. His mother made sure he was completely potty trained so he could be kept in some kiddy pool somewhere, baby-sat by some pimply teen. By five, he was in Day Camp but, so deep into his characters, he couldn’t stand being with people his own age. Kids. (He would sing that song from Bye Bye Birdie, as part of his Paul Lynde impersonation.) And he would escape Day Camp any chance he got to join the ladies day-drinking and playing cards by “the big pool” trying to keep it together enough for their husbands’ arrivals post work. He was constantly being bribed back to Camp with bubble gum. It was never Bazooka which he liked but Double Bubble which tasted like chalk, so these bargains never really took.

Each camp day ended with all the groups, a few per ages five through twelve, gathering in the “Teen Shack” to eat black and white ice cream with those wooden spoons that gave your tongue splinters and to sing Skyline’s anthem and then “Day is Done” which was to the tune of Taps, which was depressing. Meanwhile on the “patio” the band, all dressed in matching maroon or navy jackets with white shirts and little black bowties would be setting up their instruments. At 5’oclock, after Taps, the vaudevillian would run to the patio, sticky with a thousand spilled Cokes, as the band began to play The Alley Cat, oh so slowly, deliberately. He would drop his little AlItalia Bag his parents got on their trip to Rome in which he kept his damp towel, bathing suit and the noseplugs he never wore and began to dance—Ba dada da da da da dada da. Ba dada da da dada—aiming literally, to beat the band. It became a thing; and the arriving Dads and slightly or not so slightly loopy Moms would circle the patio to watch Little Billy, the name he was now using professionally, cause those musicians to sweat through their shirts and into their maroon or navy jackets before they even got through the first number, because the performer was blessed with speed and agility. His true Light self would get to surface without anyone really being the wiser and it would course, unseen, through his limbs and lift him an imperceptible millimeter off the ground so that he could step and spin and clap and turn and beat that band, ultimately, at the speed of him.

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I had been to the beach once, to Seaside, New Jersey, in the summer of 1967. I can still smell my first wiff of salt and the tarry smell of the piers and boardwalk. I was three and yet this might have been the first emergence of the performer, if not specifically, the vaudevillian.

We were visiting the Latillas, one of my favorite family friends of my parents. They had three daughters—Debbie, Diane and Donna—all with bright red hair. Donna, the youngest and funniest, was a good four years older than me. Diane, who was cool and athletic with freckles was my sister’s age, and Debbie, who looked a good deal like Deborah Walley, a young starlet, one of the Gidgets, who later played the daughter Susie on The Mothers In Law, was a few years older and seemed to personify the sixties with her portable 45s record player, hairbands and flower print bikinis.

These kinds of visits were tricky because you had three girls showering me with attention which the meanspirited sibling thought should have gone to her. No chance. I was a three-year-old who held adult conversations and was up on the latest crazes in television and music. The Monkees of course topped my list of favorite “artists.” I was a big Mickey Dolenz fan because he was the funniest and seemed to sing the best. But my favorite song in the summer of 1967, hands down, was A Little Bit of Soul by The Music Explosion. The lead singer looked like a redhaired Dolenz or, more accurately, the older brother of Johnny Whitaker, who played the little boy Jody on my favorite pathos-packed television show: Family Affair.

Not only did I know every word of A Little Bit of Soul but I had invented this dance to go with it. The dance had no real moves except locking my knees and kicking my lower body into the fastest shake, as if a blender were turned on in my nether regions, and then I would do different patterns with my arms not unlike one would dance the Macarena.

The first summer of the seventies was to be our last at the Skyline Club. Things were changing. 1971 began what would be decades of summers spent in Belmar, New Jersey. In 1972 we left Jersey City for the suburbs, moving to Wyckoff, New Jersey which had one black family that were “whiter” than we were. Suddenly the vaudevillian was killed by mitosis, splitting into two completely separate entities, the barefoot beach bum and the woodsy suburbanite. At various points over the next few years they might blend together only to polarize that much more completely.

The performer had had a circle of good male friends in Jersey City, many of those who attended school with him also spending summers at Skyline. His best friend was called Mark and the performer sought to spend as much time as possible with Mark who disappeared for what seemed like an endless spell due to a bout of rheumatic fever. There were a few boys who lived in the same complex of apartments but they tended to be a bit tougher. The performer’s closest companion there had been a tomboy called Jenny with whom he formed the PDPC (the pull down pants club) meetings of which entailed hiding in the bushes and showing you mine if you show me yours.

One tough kid, a year older, who lived in the apartments was called Steven. He was wild and hyperactive and could flip over the chain link fences that enclosed the patches of grace around the buildings like a cat. The thing about Steven was that his family spent summers in Belmar. So Steven became the only Jersey City kid with whom the beach bum kept in touch and meeting up each Memorial Day became a ritual that was repeated for two decades.

Belmar had been the beach the bum’s parents had frequented in their teens, since the train ran there from Hoboken. Belmar had a fairly wide boardwark that ran the length of the town and into Spring Lake in the southerly direction ending at Sea Girt and all the way through to the end of Asbury Park at Interlaken. Spring Lake was filled with mansions, many of them empty, a seventies ghost town of former turn-of-the-century glory. There were two giant hotels, mostly empty or abadoned, one maybe called The Monmouth, the other Essex & Sussex. In the guilded age, Spring Lake was like Newport Rhode Island. The Kennedys used to stay at the E & S—the town had a big rich Irish population. And even around teenage, girls used to come from Ireland in summers to work in the hotels. And the E & S had a ball each summer. When I attended in the 80s I wore something John Cryer would have in Pretty in Pink—a tuxedo with formal white jacket paired with red converse hightops and of course i had floppy hair and one drop earring.

But back to the early seventies and the mitosis. The beach bum never wore shoes. The soles of his feet were perpetually black. He wore hooded sweatshirts and overalls with pocket tees. He went rafting—that is riding waves on those yellow and blue sided canvas rafts—for twelve hours a day till his lungs ached with water log, preventing him from breathing in, and his nipples were rubbed raw, bleeding and scabbed by the constant friction of the unforgiving fabric. He was sent to shops on Ocean Avenue for cigarettes for his mother, Carleton, Salme, True Blue 100s. He swiped them and smoked them and took quarters from her purse and played skeeball and pinball in the town’s two arcades. One was tiny and around the corner on 8th and Ocean and relatively safe; the other on 14th and Ocean was a bit dangerous, rough kids mingling with troubled teenagers, a blend of surf and drug and petty crime culture. It would ba few years until the beach bum would go there, but eventually it would happen.

In the present, now,  the beach bum is in Belize. He’s done a bit of snorkeling and saw great schools of big silver fish which practically disappeared when they faced you the were so thin. They swam up to us like dogs wanting to play and be pet. Then we closely examined the tiny underwater worlds of plant life, each its own microcosm, wherein we spied real versions of Dory and Nemo playing with their friends.

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I’m sort of at a point where I can go anywhere so I’ll try to stick close the the storylines I began. Meanwhile, Libra is the seventh sign of the Zodiac and there are seven colors in a rainbow—Light through a prism. This is reflected in the renaissance character of the sign who on the shadow side might be dismissed as a dabbler or dilettante.

As I’ve said at the start of this suite of posts: I have been many people, at least seven, yet others have little to no idea of that. But hell is them. And so is heaven. At this point in the saga, there are two basic personas being performed, to remind you—the beach bum and the woodsy suburbanite which might also be called the rich kid; it isn’t truly accurate that the actor playing the character was a rich kid but he thought so at the time so it might still be fitting. We will focus on the beach bum for the most part in the next several posts; but just a few words, first, on the rich kid:

In 1972, at the age of eight, he moved into a four bedroom split level with a “rec room” and a sun room in a new development of an old Dutch town in New Jersey about fifty miles from the George Washington Bridge. He had already began piano lessons and was being clasically trained, perfomring recitals and competiting for ribbons and certificates of efficacy. That character was something of an offshoot. One might imagine, in the movie version, that his mother might be played by Sally Kellerman. Because it was in this regard, and in this regard only, that his real mother was pushy and unrelenting in her desire for him to practice and make her proud.

Anyway, he experienced a great deal of culture shock at first because he showed up in this town of Wyckoff with city wardrobe—kids back in Jersey City wore dress clothes to school; it wouldn’t be suprising to see them in vertical striped trousers and sometimes even sports coats. But for a good visual reference you might think of the way the kids dressed the first season on The Brady Bunch. In Wyckoff, kids wore Levi red tag 501s paried with Puma or Addidas trainers and either logo printed teeshirts or striped rugby shirts with pure wool sweaters, with accents of macrame bracelets, sometimes puca beads, all of which constituted a negligent rich-kid style. These new people played soccer, not stickball. They had basketball hoops on regulation poles instead of chain link garbage cans to sink the ball into. They played ice hockey not bottlecaps, the owned several tennis rackets with cat-gut strings and road skateboards. They wore ski-jackets and left their lift tickets on their zippers. The soundrack to life at this point was Carly Simon and Joni Mitchell and Jim Croce and Seals and Crofts, James Taylor, George Harrison not the tail end of Motown. These people didn’t know a Temptation from a Pip. They didn’t watch Soul Train. These more urban strains were fading fast into memory which, at eight years of age, can be distant in an instant.

I should back up a bit. Mother had a sister from whom she was estranged. When pregant with Light, mother got a call from her. Aunt said: You’re going to have a boy and he’ll be born on my birthday. She was right. Aunt was the Shadow light cast so Mother retreated and the burgeoning rich kid didn’t meet Aunt until he was aged thirteen, though he did receive gifts on their birthday. A good five years before that, while still in 1972, mother ran her shopping cart into her sister’s as Aunt had recently moved to the neighboring town of Franklin Lakes where sister was already a freshman at the regional highschool he too would one day attend.

In September 1972 I had my own room for the first time. It was tiny and featured a lot of plaid, which it always would, in various color schemes, over the next nine years. Still the room had to fit two twin beds because grandmother, Nanny, ” would have to share it about fifty percent of the time. Sister, on the other hand, had a large room with a double bed and all new furniture, yellow, with matching headboard, drapes, bedpreads and shag carpeting. She had a stero and Uncandles. Partly because whe was older, but mainly because she was a nasty, spoiled, sulky depressive, the parents were always overcompensating in hopes she’d lighten up but she only got darker and they not only stopped trying they changed tack completely and she became an outright target of a different kind than her brother. At this point he viewed her as a closed door at the end of the hallway sealed with a two-word spell—go away. The muffled sound of Cat Steven’s song Sad Lisa would play over and over on a near endless loop.

To view the original Sabian Symbol themed 2015 Cosmic Blague corresponding to this day: Flashback! The degree point of the Sabian Symbol may at times be one degree higher than the one listed here. The Blague portrays the starting degree of for this day ( 0°,  for instance), as I typically post in the morning, while the Sabian number corresponds to the end point (1°) of that same 0°-1° period. There are 360  degrees spread over 365/6 days per year—so they nearly, but not exactly, correlate.

Typos happen. I don’t have a proofreader. And I like to just write, post and go!
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Leo 28° (August 17)

I could not get to sleep last night for the life of me. I felt very Sunday bluesy, which is only being compounded by this first day of a determined dry spell. I pulled a card for the first time in a year and of course it was The Devil, an accurate and fitting reveal given the turning point from fleshy pleasures to more long term eudemonic intent. The dearth of family and the facing of math and mortality amid this, the darkest time in history, with its omnipresent gaslighting, all at once hit me. So I did what I needed to do to survive: I watched seven episodes in a row of the Mary Tyler Moore show. I didn’t get to bed until nearly two and I awoke at six, so today will be focused on just one thing: Fully appreciating every nook and cranny of the sample material already written for this book as a framework for what I will do in each and every chapter. And that’s it. That’s all I need make happen today and it should not be too tall an order to accomplish.

The following blocks of text are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 716-720. I am reading through all of my Blagues, five per day, and posting some samples here. Now, in my sixth year of writing this Blague, by the time I get to my seventh, I will have journeyed through all the daily Blagues of my first five years. If that’s confusing I apologize. Year seven, I’ll only have to read through year six, once a day.  

It’s so important to get away with friends who remind you who you are. I don’t really have the benefit of being around folks who “knew me when”; most of the people who know me in my current life only do so superficially. Even (or especially) those I see most often these days. In the mirror of many people’s eyes we can’t help but become colored by what we feel is their perception aka misperception aka underestimation. We realize how we’ve allowed ourselves to be slowly whittled away. And then we reconnect with loved ones who see us as our best selves, not just our old selves, but also as people who are still realizing their full potential.

I once had a past-life regression session. It totally blew my mind. I flashed back to lives where I felt a sense of great status and authority. In my present life I was young and waiting tables. Having felt/remembered what it was like to feel a great sense of personal value, I quit my job waiting tables and started to expect more from my life, experience, and relationships.

I can’t say I outright envy people who are, and always have been, surrounded by large families or those who live in societies where they’ve had the same friends for long periods of time, but I do feel these characters are constantly reminded of their best selves, buoyed by loving expectation. In this sense, others support a strong sense of self when a rotating cast of characters can erode it.

I often feel like some deposed royal who had this formal life of grandeur, a fact that is lost on the characters peopling my new life where I don’t speak much to them of my past. And then, metaphorically speaking, there comes a time to pull the trunk out of the attic or haul it up from the basement, to start rummaging through the contents of ones previous existence, trying on garments of old glory, polishing the finery, outfitting oneself in ones true, original adornment.

It’s not healthy to feel unrecognized or undervalued; and its up to we, as individuals, to make sure said elements don’t ooze in. We must remember ourselves. And pinpoint where our giving has morphed into being taken advantage of and where allowed ourselves to depreciate. That is our fault. And we are reminded to outfit ourselves in our own true glittering glamour and to rise to our full height and not stand for others thoughts or behavior that don’t truly reflect our own true power and worth.

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I had a waffle today. And yet I feel less you-are-what-you-eat than I ever have. It is a total cosmic blague that I always seem to be at my chubbiest when I have to be wearing the least amout of clothing in front of the most amount of people. My weight has constantly fluctuated these last twenty-five years of my life but it really is true that, as you get older, you really have to limit your calorie intake. Especially when you’re five foot some-lie-of-inches. It’s easy to be confident when you’re in some kind of fit shape. That’s a cinch. What’s really a show of confidence is being on display when you’re more a blob. Now that takes strength of being and character.

Sean Bean was once nearly as fit as his name—that was my little bit of Gertrude Stein for you— and Thelma Ritter—she looks exactly like her name.

It seems that no matter how many days, weeks, I eat just soup for dinner I no longer lose the ten pounds standing between me and my ideal weight. Actually my ideal weight is ten pounds less than that but I’ve already jettisoned that lunacy capsule of hope to return to the poundage of my early twenties and am now settling for that of my early thirties.

So right now I’m on a boat off the coast of Belize and it is really hot and so I’m in my air conditioned cabin catching up on these poor belabored blagues, attempting to get through this particular one because I have two more already hand written waiting on deck. Not to belittle this one but it is something of filler I won’t lie. But I did figure I would just keep typing until something of seeming thematic importance were to arise from the black characters on white page.

Last night we had a Full Moon party on board and it was certainly was the most fun and weird and vivid of the nights. I didn’t wake up once and dreamed of ancient houses with cracked tile and giant wardrobes and vine covered walls. There were visitors all in red robes as if part of a commencement and we were having a bit of fun with them pretending the wardrobe was a secret elevator. None of this will make any sense to you.

Went to the Hemingway house in Key West on Sunday which it didn’t feel like. Failed to see much of the town but what I didn’t see I didn’t love. And forget it weather wise: I could never stand this level of humidity. I’m a dry heat queen for sure. Anyway, I can at least say I’ve been there. We are going to see some Mayan ruins and go swim with whale sharks. Yes sharks. But apparently they eat plankton (sp?) not people. I have to get my snorkel on. I dread trying to squeeze my pudge into a wet suit. Oh well.

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In astrology the first sign of Aries’ motto is “I am”. If I had any motivation to add to a sentence beginning “I am” the predicate would be “a poet.” Now that might sound hifalutin but I think you can be any kind of artist, creative, not only a writer, and be a poet. I happen to be a writer, for better or for worse, but even in that: my motivation to be poetic would be save space; that is to pack in as much information (if not meaning) in the use of as few words as possible. Poetry would be a shear expression of laziness for me.

I am trying to keep poetic economy in mind as I am currently writing a show. It’s a sort of warts-and-all affair. It’s the opposite of a Palimpsest the definition of which is: a manuscript or piece of writing material on which the original writing has been effaced to make room for later writing but of which traces remain; something reused or altered but still bearing visible traces of its earlier form. The main them of what I’m writing is hinges, instead, on the knowledge that what I’m putting down is actually wrong and left intact despite the fact.

Picking up from what I was saying in the previous blague I’ve come to a point in my life where I realize that most of the people who populate my experience have no idea who “I am” or whom I’ve been for that matter. And, for the record, I’ve done next to nothing to alter that fact.

I’m not terribly comfortable one-on-one with people—it makes me awfully self-conscious. I’m much better in a group (or on a stage or addressing an audience, like here, in writing). I’d venture to say that I’m ironically much more at ease being intimate in a forum of some kind. On stage, especially, is where I can reveal myself most intimately and thus provide a bunch of people truest insight into who “I am” all in one fell swoop. And have them pay me for it, which is a perk only in that I always donate all monies made by any theatrical venture back into my non-profit endeavors, which (as this sentence runs on) are designed primarily to help other artists find a stage, a live platform, from whence to create, perform, express themselves. So it pains me, I’d be a liar to say anything to the contrary, when people forget or don’t appreciate this fact.

But this is part and parcel of my current illumination on the subject of personal value: I have to up my worth game. But I digress.

I was talking about people not really knowing me or not stopping to wonder how I got here here. Who am I, anyway? Where did I come from? What were my past lives in this life, which have put me in this place where I help others so seemingly unassumingly?*

*In recent years when I’ve “acted out” or “up” it was typically because I felt overlooked, not recognized, such that causing scenes, playing scenarios, became the shadow side of taking stage, which I wasn’t doing enough.

But that’s my own fault. When we don’t take license we tend to “lose it.” But no regrets. Especially when it comes to people: I’ve never lost a true friend, though I have had a hand in pushing away people were placeholders thereof.

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So, okay, who am I…what are the selves I’ve kept cached…who have I been…where do I come from… Well, I shall tell you. Let me first say that it might be a Ligra male thing to seem “abstract” or “conceptual” to others—the Scales representing those forms in life, being the only inanimate symbol in the Zodiac—that is to say “unsubstantial”; but, all things being paradoxical, the opposite is also true: I for one have been so many selves, some by chance, some by accident, all as a necessary means of survival. I’ve inhabited so many characters in life it’s little wonder that, as an actor, I ended up playing relatively few roles.

It will take me days, weeks, months maybe to illustrate them all; but I think the doing of this might be the crux of this Cosmic Blague Mach III, as I am now in the third year of this venture (the second ending rather abruptly somewhere last June or November, can’t remember.)

The first character I played was indeed an abstract one, as if my earliest life were an allegorial play in which my character would surely have been called, quite simply, Light. This, too, befits the sign of Libra, the cardinal-air sign (translates to light) with its abstract archetypal god being Apollo, god of light and all symbolic abstractions thereof—goodness, reason, order, art, truth and prophesy, to name just several.

As Light my role was to personify goodness. And being strawberry blond with pale brown-yellow or golden eyes, I looked the part. I remember pre-language, knowing I was puregoodness—my favorite color was white like the apparel of angels, cherubs or classic infant immortals. I could have lived on all white food and often did: vanilla ice cream, shakes, malts, Maypo, white chocolate Easter bunnies, Jiffy Pop…Vichyssoise, Fettucine Alfredo…I was sent not to combat but to counteract and -balance the dark bitter chocolate forces of vice embodied most readily by my father (and his whole Italian family with their low thinking and their plastic slip covers, swarthy olive complexions, petty thievery, heavy thighs, excess body hair, bookie joints, poker chips, pungent antipasti, tripe and drama, deceit and constant deaths) and my wicked sister who blammed me for ruining our wall-to-wall carpet by letting the cap off a black magic marker, which seaped into a circular spread in all directions like her jealousy and her deception and her cruelty and her lies, knowing full well that I, pre language, didn’t yet have the words with which to defend or advocate for myself, and sickly relishing the fact that I, Light, would be abusefully punished, hit, an earth-struck angel in a pit of corporal punishment.

Light thus escaped out of his body, casting himself elsewhere, slipping out of this cruel worled ruled by sister darkness, through duvet covers and pillow cases and, yes, through wardrobes and sometimes walls, into timeless prismatic worlds of color for whole eternities, long enough, surely, to find respite and reappear with a plan to out-reason and out-fox and out-shine with whole inherent gleam, glamour, goodness, as a force thereof, biding terrestrial time until Light obtained the oracular power that was his birthright. Light’s terrible weaakness was his want to be loved by his tormentors, one of whom inhabited the twin bed on the other side of the room from his crib, the other pushed together with mother’s own twin bed in the next room. She, golden haired with alternately blue and green eyes, and fair, near blue with translucence, might have been Light’s only hope but she isn’t strong. She isn’t Light but Water, dissolution. She’ll stay, an almost willing captive, her phosphoresence but dim in the prevailing darkness so very like a jellyfish, and sometime medusa.

I had to wait, keep myself under a bushel, play dead, not shine yet…

To view the original Sabian Symbol themed 2015 Cosmic Blague corresponding to this day: Flashback! The degree point of the Sabian Symbol may at times be one degree higher than the one listed here. The Blague portrays the starting degree of for this day ( 0°,  for instance), as I typically post in the morning, while the Sabian number corresponds to the end point (1°) of that same 0°-1° period. There are 360  degrees spread over 365/6 days per year—so they nearly, but not exactly, correlate.

Typos happen. I don’t have a proofreader. And I like to just write, post and go!
Copyright 2020 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Get your HAUTE ASTROLOGY 2020 Weekly Horoscope ebooks by Starsky + Cox

Leo 27° (August 16)

Woke up this morning…well, let me start again: I woke up first after just a few hours of sleeping and thought I cannot be up again from the middle of the night. I drank a full glass of water then finished the wine on my nightstand, endowing it as a sleeping drought, which worked. I had the most enchanted coda to my full night’s sleep. I dreamt of the color scheme we need, moving forward. It is now completely emblazoned in my mind what blue, yellow, pink and green need happen, like dull and dusty candy. Then a dream of S. coming through the outside and office door into the dining room just at the moment I saw a tiny blue bird alighting on a lamp in the corner of the kitchen. I held out my finger and it flew and perched, it’s long beak curved slightly downward, and I presented it to her. The tone of the day seemed set. I didn’t quite achieve what I thought I would or should, however it will be thirty days now, to the day, until I have to go under, and for that I need to be in as tip top shape as I possibly can be. I shall begin tomorrow, just one day “behind schedule”; and yet I have minimalized every bit and bob on my real and metaphoric desktop and feel unencumbered by what might have been too many moving parts.

The following blocks of text are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 711-715. I am reading through all of my Blagues, five per day, and posting some samples here. Now, in my sixth year of writing this Blague, by the time I get to my seventh, I will have journeyed through all the daily Blagues of my first five years. If that’s confusing I apologize. Year seven, I’ll only have to read through year six, once a day.  

From 2017:

It’s been awhile since I’ve had a full on panic attack; but this weekend just after falling asleep I was awakened with extreme existential angst. In attempt to unpack these feelings in the light of day I think these episodes have always derived from the same core reality: Each one of us is alone. Sometimes this notion hits my hard. Having neither parents or children; and only an evil sibling I’ve no intention of ever seeing again; and no contact, let alone relationships, with wider family at large I can find myself very much hoping that I die before Stella, who does have a loving immediate family.

Cheery subject I know but I find this very much to be in keeping with the sign of Aries which hits home the fact that, when it comes to it, we fly solo. What has made this realization more poignant in recent years was the necessary loss of certain bonds which didn’t serve me and the conscious decision, regarding other friendships, to stop doing all the work—always being the one to reach out—to see just who would or wouldn’t make the effort to nurture a relationship.  Sadly, more often than not, I heard crickets.

But don’t get me wrong—this is no pity party. Au contraire. It is very liberating to know where reciprocity exists and where it doesn’t. Quality bonds are priceless, while a quantity of them has never meaned much. I don’t have a work environment that includes any other person than the one I love and live with. I have never been part of a team. I don’t belong to any mafia. And though I do consider myself as belonging to a couple “communities”, creative ones especially, I have mainly witnesses a ramping up in narcissism in these realms. The so-called “downtown” artistic community, for instance, has only seemed to increasingly ape milieus we all used to pooh pooh. How it is that a large number of people I know live under the delusion that they are perpetually on some red carpet or behind some velvet rope is not only depressing it’s literally revolting.

And nobody needs me around feeling disgust. Admittedly, I’m a social cynic but it’s not because I’m a pessimist but because I’m an idealist with great expectations which, it goes with the territory of having them, are regularly dashed. Moreover I never expected to get to my advancing age and feel that my peers were all still playing out a high-school popularity game. Instead of locker lined hallways where the drama of heirarchy is played out, it now happens along the twisted corridors of social media. I seriously doubt that my “friends” who have really been swept up in this sort of reality-show living think I see through to how desperately sad and lonely and insecure they are. They likely don’t even realize themselves that their perpetual display of puffery is symptomatic of the emptiness they refuse to let themselves feel, let alone embrace.

I am so thankful for the panic attack of existential angst that awakes me. It is a reminder of the emptiness that underscores all reality. I find the emotional work that stems for this experience so important and necessary. It reminds me to look to my books, to read the great ancient works that have always guided and sustained me on the solo journey that is my life. I am so grateful to have grown up in the anonymous seventies and eighties where we didn’t have a mobile audience—says the Blaguer who will post this installment in a matter of minutes. Truly, I can’t imagine what it’s like for young people who have grown up with phones and laptops attached to their bodies. My idea of happiness is still getting lost in a city neighborhood, out of reach to anything but serendipity or walking an endless beach where I can’t get a signal.

I know people who can’t be alone. I’ve never been one of them. If anything I have to be careful not to isolate too much. Even in my youth I often felt like that Rhesus monkey then kept in a separate cage who freaked out when put in a cage with a bunch of others of its kind. I’m no stranger to social anxiety and yet, time and again, I am always suprised at how comfortable I actually am in the company of others. Why that is forever a shock I’ve no idea. I never need to bolt from a party or anything like that; but I’d be a liar if I didn’t admit that I would always rather be alone than in company where I feel far more alone than when I actually am.

Emptiness is a contradiction in terms; because I believe that if you were to youremove everything you can see and touch that there would still be “something” there. Call it spirit or energy or a creative intelligence or what have you—when I’m alone I feel a natural communion with the All which isn’t nothing. It’s Everything.

———————

To view the original Sabian Symbol themed 2015 Cosmic Blague corresponding to this day: Flashback! The degree point of the Sabian Symbol may at times be one degree higher than the one listed here. The Blague portrays the starting degree of for this day ( 0°,  for instance), as I typically post in the morning, while the Sabian number corresponds to the end point (1°) of that same 0°-1° period. There are 360  degrees spread over 365/6 days per year—so they nearly, but not exactly, correlate.

Typos happen. I don’t have a proofreader. And I like to just write, post and go!
Copyright 2020 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Get your HAUTE ASTROLOGY 2020 Weekly Horoscope ebooks by Starsky + Cox

Leo 26° (August 15)

Having turned a corner I am now officially writing a new book and, in so doing, unless I have something really pertinent to say in the present, which today I do not, then I will refer you to the below:

The following blocks of text are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 706-710. I am reading through all of my Blagues, five per day, and posting some samples here. Now, in my sixth year of writing this Blague, by the time I get to my seventh, I will have journeyed through all the daily Blagues of my first five years. If that’s confusing I apologize. Year seven, I’ll only have to read through year six, once a day.  

Two years ago, I began this Cosmic Blague project of writing here daily for an entire year, after which I began a second year, only to throw in the towel not quite halfway through another turn around the whell. The thrust of year one was to meditate and muse upon the Sabian Symbols which are images, divined by a blind seer, that illumine the cosmic energy of the day slash astrological degree of the Zodiac. I can’t do that again—and yet I probably won’t completely avoid doing so. As with the aborted seconed year of this project I provided a link to the corresponding day. Here is that original post entitled “I’m A Homo Sabian Too”  (there is an introductory one that precedes corresponding to the Equinox.)

Yesterday morning we hit zero degrees of the Zodiac, the Spring Equinox, a time for new beginnings, but I wasn’t feeling very beginnerish. The first degree of the Zodiac’s Sabian symbol is “A Woman Just Risen from The Sea; A Seal is Embracing Her”. And, like Aphrodite/Venus, we all emerged fromt he Sea sign of Pisces into the birth sign of Aries—the Seal is a symobl and totem of dreams and imagination. We emerge from the misty dreams of Pisces with those reveries clinging to us still. Sometimes nightmares cling, too. Which is why I was rather reluctant to start this project once again: Because I haven’t been feeling all that optimistic as a result of universal external influences. But I’ve come to realize in the last twenty-four hours that this is all the more reason to commit again to this enterprise. We don’t always reenter into our experience suffused with dreamy inspiration—sometimes we have nightmares to shake and, yes, from which to learn.

I’m tempted to say that I won’t be mentioning certain people, or rather a specific person, in this Blague. He who must not be named indeed. But that would be unrealistic and counterproductive. We have to name the nightmare and that name is Trump. It’s a terrible name which is fitting. I think it’s important to name him because he is perhaps the last gasp of the patriarchy diminished to an orange mass of spoiled brattiness. He has done terrible things and we have only begun to learn the extent of them. But what struck me most sharply was his refusal to shake Angela Merkel’s hand. He will shake any man’s hand, even if he has made enemies with said man. But he won’t acknowledge a powerful woman. Trump, I’ve come to infer, has mother issues.

The woman rising from the Sea, each year, with the first tick of the Wheel, is a reminder that Nature, both Earthy and Cosmic, is Female. She is the source of life. She is the dream from which we all emerge. The dream that is existence. We are figments of her imagination. We are details of her reveries. And some of us are terrors—tangerine dreams—errant emanations who have turned their back on the dreamer, whistling in the fleeting graveyard of a lifetime, imposing futile will, investing in their eternal retirement in hell. Ultimately powerless, such terrors must be checked, our recurring nightmares cured once and for all. We don’t do this by any other means than by examinine and excavating our own psychology, the traumas that give rise to ingrained patterns, repeating and repeating. That is not renewal. That is self abuse, self inflicted.

How can Trump be president you ask? Because that nightmare—a haunting, of the our collective negative behaviors that now torment our conscience—this is the demon of our own cultural creation. This is what we get for not being unerringly kind and kindred. Every time we turned a blind eye to racism, to sexism, to oppression, to greed, we had a hand in creating this coral hobgoblin. This is the slimy seal with which we have emerged this time around the Wheel and its best not to ignore it but to shine the brightest light upon its salmon skin. In full glare of loving and compassionate activism It will dissolve like Capn Crunch in the milky environment of true Mother Love, the witholding thereof being the ultimate culprit for this sleazy condition in which we uneasily, temporarily find ourselves.

––––––––––––––––––––––––––

My mother used to tell me how she had to fight and, I think, ultimately, drink to silence her “impressions”, empathetic Pisces that she was. Sometimes I would catch her unawares sitting in a kitchen chair staring unblinkingly, only her gaze seemed to direct inward not out. I didn’t experience what she experienced as a child.

I do remember moving objects when I was very small, something I never repeated, though I’ve tried. And surely I did enter the fairy world, for lack of a better term, through duvet covers and sometimes even the odd pillow case. But there was nothing in my youth or teens of the psychic about my experience except so far as my mother was concerned. I would get a flash that she was about to phone me and I would suprise and entertain friends and roommates by saying the phone is about to ring and it would be my mother which it was. I chalked that up to her not me.

In Rome in 1984 Stella and I met an old man who spoke in tongues whom we “understood” on a transmissionary level; in our Hoboken apartment in 1988 we saw plasmic scenes of partygoers from the 1920s superimposed upon the visual landscape of our interior. We had a ghost cat that visitors would also see and almost trip over. But it wasn’t until the early 1990s, living in New York’s West Village, where we did for a good long time, that my so-called gift emerge.

In clubs and in bars with a good buzz on was how it began. Inevitably the struck-up conversations with acquaintances or veritable strangers, I would start getting messages. People wouldn’t think I was crazy because I was eerily accurate in my verbalizations; in the moment I didn’t judge, while, next day, I chalked it up to quasi drunken stupidity. Now I know that drinks would relax the veil between me and it. I wasn’t a professional astrologer then, never mindsome form of metaphysician. These little episodes were foreshadowing. But, slowly, over time, I did begin to trust these impressions which  were being received increasingly in sober moments. I simply thought: cool, I have inherited something of my Celtic mother’s gift which might amount to a tiny party trick perhaps. No further expectation.

Year’s later as we began doing astrological readings for people, the sharp focus of doing so seemed to have the same effect as the fuzzying out that drinking enabled. Impressions were coming to me through the very opposite end of my mental spectrum—that of a concentrated openness to the symbolic patterning on a individual’s astrological chart. We were (and are) continually trained to read people’s charts, the result of which is already forever astonishing—the accuracy of a technical astrological reading will always remain inexplicable as to the why it works. But, more and more, there was something extra available to me. Training my mind technically, consciously, intellectually via the complexities and intricasies of one’s chart at hand seemed also to open a window somewhere in the back (or, to be accurate upper-left side) of said consciousness where these flashes, impressions, or rather, imperatives were asking to be articulated.

I pick a Tarot card every morning. Doing so is never the same twice. Our minds are never exactly in the same state when we do some ritual behavior—they state always varies at least by tiny degrees. This morning I was shuffling absent-mindingly to the point that I forgot what I was doing, lost in some early morning daydream, the to-dos of the day yet to creep their way in. Suddenly I “heard” a pick me from one of the cards I remembered I was fondling. I did. It was the Magician. And its appearance immediately inspired the theme of today’s installment. In a way my so-called psychic ability, as transient as it can be, is the Universe’s ultimate Blage on me.

————————————

Aries is the sign of the Self. But this is not to be confused with selfishness. It’s more like putting the oxygen mask on first before you can help others. But help others you might.

As I watch the mostly older white men on the right shuffling in and out of meetings in D.C. all I can think is that they couldn’t be more divorced from the concept of helping or serving others. They don’t even pretend anymore like they might have done forty years ago. Reporters are seen as an annoyance. It’s like these lawmakers are part of some royal family. Meanwhile, the British royal family, for instance, is suffused with the understanding that they are born to serve the people, despite their trappings of wealth—and really they’re not ostentatious.

I was reading Edmund White’s  The Flaneur recently, one of a thousand books Stella has put in front of me knowing I half-jokingly admit “I don’t read.” But it was a thin book and it was about Paris and I could knock it off in a morning. There is a bit about a loyalist bar on the rue de Rivoli. And how the crowd there wants to bring back the French royal family, such as it is. The notion seems absurd at first. Until you realize that the royalists’ argument is that a royal family would do more for the people than those elected. It’s starting to make more sense to me.

Just because the people in power didn’t get there by divine right doesn’t mean they don’t act like it.  Perhaps its not a divine right endowed upon them by a god but rather a lobby but they still act like they are appointed as if on by high. And they tolerate the rest of us whom they seek to oppress. Noblesse oblige now seems more modern a concept than what is passing these days for democracy wherein those who have don’t feel obliged to provide to those less fortunate. No. Even the income-based Affordable Care Act (that’s the name of it) where the rich pay a little more to cover those who have not is too much to ask from these entitled assholes.

Not that Britain is any great shakes these days but, despite the fact they have a royal family, they are way more (social-)democratic than we are—their health care and education system is a testament to that. Remember the Age of Enlightenment? The Social Contract? Reason? (All Apollonian/Libran terms in my astrological view). How about the Declaration of Independence? The founding fathers took a page from the royalists’ book: They were going to play the role of father to the nation and thus take care of and provide for others as an outcropping of their own inalienable fullfillment of selfhood.

Now we have to look at Paul Ryan’s smug mug. Or that giant orange pig face which, I’m sorry, shows signs of constant drug abuse. We have to stomach the chinless droolings of Mitch McConnell, the ignoramity of Rick Perry, the impatient, “tolerating”, violent insouciance of pretty much the entire GOP. We’re sorry to bother you we’re just trying not to starve, be enslaved and die. Sorry. We know you’re busy being paid healthcare on our taxes and getting lobbyist kickbacks and book deals and industrial contracts. Our mistake. Sorry, sorry, sorry.

To view the original Sabian Symbol themed 2015 Cosmic Blague corresponding to this day: Flashback! The degree point of the Sabian Symbol may at times be one degree higher than the one listed here. The Blague portrays the starting degree of for this day ( 0°,  for instance), as I typically post in the morning, while the Sabian number corresponds to the end point (1°) of that same 0°-1° period. There are 360  degrees spread over 365/6 days per year—so they nearly, but not exactly, correlate.

Typos happen. I don’t have a proofreader. And I like to just write, post and go!
Copyright 2020 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Get your HAUTE ASTROLOGY 2020 Weekly Horoscope ebooks by Starsky + Cox

Leo 25° (August 14)

The following blocks of text are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 701-705. I am reading through all of my Blagues, five per day, and posting some samples here. Now, in my sixth year of writing this Blague, by the time I get to my seventh, I will have journeyed through all the daily Blagues of my first five years. If that’s confusing I apologize. Year seven, I’ll only have to read through year six, once a day.  (For thirty days this paragraph will include this parentheses to say: I realized that in the summer of 2016 I actually didn’t post for some time, such that for the expanse of two months, I will continue to number the past Blagues, as above, five at a time, but there will be nothing to post from that period.)

This also from 2017 when we were setting off on holiday (for the first time?) on Calypso, Belize I believe. Bien possible:

It’s so important to get away with friends who remind you who you are. I don’t really have the benefit of being around folks who “knew me when”; most of the people who know me in my current life only do so superficially. Even (or especially) those I see most often these days. In the mirror of many people’s eyes we can’t help but become colored by what we feel is their perception aka misperception aka underestimation. We realize how we’ve allowed ourselves to be slowly whittled away. And then we reconnect with loved ones who see us as our best selves, not just our old selves, but also as people who are still realizing their full potential.

I once had a past-life regression session. It totally blew my mind. I flashed back to lives where I felt a sense of great status and authority. In my present life I was young and waiting tables. Having felt/remembered what it was like to feel a great sense of personal value, I quit my job waiting tables and started to expect more from my life, experience, and relationships.

I can’t say I outright envy people who are, and always have been, surrounded by large families or those who live in societies where they’ve had the same friends for long periods of time, but I do feel these characters are constantly reminded of their best selves, buoyed by loving expectation. In this sense, others support a strong sense of self when a rotating cast of characters can erode it.

I often feel like some deposed royal who had this formal life of grandeur, a fact that is lost on the characters peopling my new life where I don’t speak much to them of my past. And then, metaphorically speaking, there comes a time to pull the trunk out of the attic or haul it up from the basement, to start rummaging through the contents of ones previous existence, trying on garments of old glory, polishing the finery, outfitting oneself in ones true, original adornment.

It’s not healthy to feel unrecognized or undervalued; and its up to we, as individuals, to make sure said elements don’t ooze in. We must remember ourselves. And pinpoint where our giving has morphed into being taken advantage of and where allowed ourselves to depreciate. That is our fault. And we are reminded to outfit ourselves in our own true glittering glamour and to rise to our full height and not stand for others thoughts or behavior that don’t truly reflect our own true power and worth.

To view the original Sabian Symbol themed 2015 Cosmic Blague corresponding to this day: Flashback! The degree point of the Sabian Symbol may at times be one degree higher than the one listed here. The Blague portrays the starting degree of for this day ( 0°,  for instance), as I typically post in the morning, while the Sabian number corresponds to the end point (1°) of that same 0°-1° period. There are 360  degrees spread over 365/6 days per year—so they nearly, but not exactly, correlate.

Typos happen. I don’t have a proofreader. And I like to just write, post and go!
Copyright 2020 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Get your HAUTE ASTROLOGY 2020 Weekly Horoscope ebooks by Starsky + Cox

Leo 24° (August 13)

The following blocks of text are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 696-700. I am reading through all of my Blagues, five per day, and posting some samples here. Now, in my sixth year of writing this Blague, by the time I get to my seventh, I will have journeyed through all the daily Blagues of my first five years. If that’s confusing I apologize. Year seven, I’ll only have to read through year six, once a day.  (For thirty days this paragraph will include this parentheses to say: I realized that in the summer of 2016 I actually didn’t post for some time, such that for the expanse of two months, I will continue to number the past Blagues, as above, five at a time, but there will be nothing to post from that period.)

Also from a trip down 2017’s memory lane:

From a classical standpoint the first-born children of the gods are the archetypes of the first sign of Aries—both war gods, Ares and Athena (Roman: Mars and Minerva), these front-liners are two sides of the offensive/defensive warrior coin. Life being foremost a battle for it, we send these toughies forth.

The biblical archetypes are Adam and Lilith (the first wife of Adam) who was too like him—they battled for the top sexual position—and no compliant, though ultimately more dangerous, Eve. The symbol for Athena and Lilith is the same, a delta/triangle about a crossed staff. Athena despised her warlike brother Ares, familiarity in nature breed contempt, perhaps.

Anyway, all of these figures are alphas, as Aries people tend to be. Alphas being what they are, they tend to operate solo as a rule, not being the best team players on the planet. And like the first born gods they energetically draw upon, they approach life with a certain carte blanche. (White, along with red, is the Aries color. ) Full license, a blank slate. Think of Adam going around naming everything as if he was the only person on the planet. Ahem. Aries people (again, people of any sign are the most vivid example we have of that sign’s energy) tend to act this way. They don’t ask for permission, and rarely for forgiveness.

If you were the only person on the planet how would you act? Well I find that this time of year is a good time to contemplate that thought. Consider the indvidual shoots fighting their way through the soil, feeling the pain of being born—we are all of us, for the whole of our lives, like those bursts of life. Our attention needn’t be likewise undivided. We are the only ones. You are the only one. You are free of comparison. There is nobody with a better job, more famous friends, a more successful business, a more touted podcast, more hits on their websites, more likes on their posts. Life is hard enough to embody with singularity. And, as such, it can be the simplest of things.

Without compare, we can focus on what our singular purpose might be. Without consideration, we have license to “name” everything we see and encounter and experience. We can call a spade a spade. There is no competion. There is no contest. There is no race. (Insert double-ententre inference here). There is no rushing. There is no deadline to doing the one singular thing you were born to do: Become yourself. This is the true meaning of the sign of Aries’ rule over “birth” and “selfhood”. We must imagine what life would be like if we were the only one on the planet. What would we do then? Who would we be if there were no second opinions or outside influences? How would we dance if nobody were looking? Surely, we would embody our birthright. It would be second nature. There would be no clock ticking. We would simply be. The Aries motto is “I am”. We would go at our own pace. Again, life would be simple and though it mightn’t be always easy, there would be nobody stopping us from making it so, as best we might.

To view the original Sabian Symbol themed 2015 Cosmic Blague corresponding to this day: Flashback! The degree point of the Sabian Symbol may at times be one degree higher than the one listed here. The Blague portrays the starting degree of for this day ( 0°,  for instance), as I typically post in the morning, while the Sabian number corresponds to the end point (1°) of that same 0°-1° period. There are 360  degrees spread over 365/6 days per year—so they nearly, but not exactly, correlate.

Typos happen. I don’t have a proofreader. And I like to just write, post and go!
Copyright 2020 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Get your HAUTE ASTROLOGY 2020 Weekly Horoscope ebooks by Starsky + Cox

Leo 23° (August 12)

The following blocks of text are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 691-695. I am reading through all of my Blagues, five per day, and posting some samples here. Now, in my sixth year of writing this Blague, by the time I get to my seventh, I will have journeyed through all the daily Blagues of my first five years. If that’s confusing I apologize. Year seven, I’ll only have to read through year six, once a day.  (For thirty days this paragraph will include this parentheses to say: I realized that in the summer of 2016 I actually didn’t post for some time, such that for the expanse of two months, I will continue to number the past Blagues, as above, five at a time, but there will be nothing to post from that period.)

Also from 2017:

The first sign of Aries is all about form (Taurus, which follows Aries, is about content). You can’t have the latter without the former. Form, former. Oh never mind.

So what is the formation of your day. Never mind what is the formation of yourself. We talked about Aries being the framework the other day, now we go a bit further. Take a look at your life. What form does your experience take. How is your experience constructed. Do you have room for what you want—literally and figuratively?

Every so often (and I know I’m not alone in this) I get the urge to create a curriculum for myself. As children we didn’t have much say in how our experience was structured. In grade school we were ushered through different subjects with no say; in high school we were herded from room to room with practically no say. After school sports or piano lessons we didn’t know we wanted or not, for the most part.

In college we had choice but learned that if we didn’t now self-impose these types of structuring we would likely fail. I pretty much got all straight As in college but my one year study abroad—a first year program that wasn’t set up properly coupled with the fact I never went to class but instead traveled around the whole time—I failed Cubism, okay?—completely tanked my four-year average to the point, now, that I feel applying to grad schools would be a rough road to hoe. All these years later!

Form. Structure. The simplest ones work best. First comes the hard wood of the tree then the blossoms then the fruits. I think of Aries as the hard wood. Also as the hardware on which all the other signs run as software. This is why the sign rules the physical body. Your body must be fit and healthy to be an instrument for all the other aspects of self that the ensuing signs express. So it’s the same with circumstance. The physical body of our experience must be fit, sound and simple. The form of our life must be akin to the well-toned body of a warrior. We can not lead a flabby l ife and expect to be happy.

Look at the Aries people around you. (People of a sign are the best “living” examples we have of any sign’s energy.) Those born under the sign of the Ram are ascetic by nature. They don’t have a lot of aptly named stuff. Even if they have every material want, they try to keep it real. Many an Aries person, especially those with a big bank roll, tend to espouse Eastern philosophies or disciplines that stress the fact that materiality is fleeting. Unlike other signs, Aries people tend to struggle with too much fat in their diet, metaphorically speaking of lifestyle.

To view the original Sabian Symbol themed 2015 Cosmic Blague corresponding to this day: Flashback! The degree point of the Sabian Symbol may at times be one degree higher than the one listed here. The Blague portrays the starting degree of for this day ( 0°,  for instance), as I typically post in the morning, while the Sabian number corresponds to the end point (1°) of that same 0°-1° period. There are 360  degrees spread over 365/6 days per year—so they nearly, but not exactly, correlate.

Typos happen. I don’t have a proofreader. And I like to just write, post and go!
Copyright 2020 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Get your HAUTE ASTROLOGY 2020 Weekly Horoscope ebooks by Starsky + Cox

Leo 22° (August 11)

The following blocks of text are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 691-695. I am reading through all of my Blagues, five per day, and posting some samples here. Now, in my sixth year of writing this Blague, by the time I get to my seventh, I will have journeyed through all the daily Blagues of my first five years. If that’s confusing I apologize. Year seven, I’ll only have to read through year six, once a day.  (For thirty days this paragraph will include this parentheses to say: I realized that in the summer of 2016 I actually didn’t post for some time, such that for the expanse of two months, I will continue to number the past Blagues, as above, five at a time, but there will be nothing to post from that period.)

Something else I stumbled upon from 2017:
I’m a big believer in self-reliance. Believe me I have tried to not be but for some reason it doesn’t tend to work out all that great. Which is strange because people are constantly asking favors of me. When others do, I tend to comply, feeling it an opportunity to help pave the way or speed the trip of people in want. But I’ve got to say, I don’t typically get the same all-in reaction in return. Don’t get me wrong—it doesn’t make me bitter nor have a come to change my ways and withhold my help when asked. It’s just that, objectively speaking, I don’t meet many people like myself. That sounds egotistical in some twisted way but so be it.

Anywig, I tend not to ask for help (which can be it’s own “issue). And I will admit that I have waxed martyry in my day, but mostly not. I just find it so much easier to d.i.y.. Also desired positive results tend to taste all the sweeter. The man who wrote philosophically on this subject, most notably, is a Gemini not an Aries (I’ll let you guess who that is). But energetically speaking the notion is Arien. Self-reliance is most selfless. Just imagine if we embodied this principle. Nobody would have to pick up after your tweets.

If you want something done right…I’m tempted to finish that sentence with….hire a millenial. They seem to know how to do things quickly and easily, and now they do it with stickers, but I’m not sure they do it right. Am I self-reliant or am I a control freak. Am I hardworking or am I carrying some cross around. Uh-oh. I do know I tend to take on more than my fair share. Back in the days I waited tables I used to hope no other servers would show up so I could work the whole restaurant myself. I had recurring dreams of waiting tables as many servers do. But for me they were good dreams. How many Quinn Cox’s does it take to screw in a light bulb? One. No joke there.

Being self-reliant is a nightmare under this particular government administration. People with whom I have zero in common elected this baboon-bafoon to disempower the individual and create oppression on a scale we haven’t ever seen in this country. The marches and protests seem to have died down. Everyone is back to their distractions? Every day I spin the globe in my mind to alight on some place in the world I can feel as free as possible. I don’t think it’s here anymore. At least not for awhile. And I am self-reliant enough that I haven’t worked for anybody else for the last few decades unless it was as a freelancer who could walk at will.

So what is self-reliance at this particular instant in history? It’s hard to say. I suppose it’s not letting the government oppress you or the news of the oppression of the government depress you. But self-reliance isn’t escapism either (not even the good Pisces brand of seeking soul-asylum). Self-reliance is being a warrior in keeping with Aries’ martial archetypes. Self-reliance is health and fitness and personal well-being. Self-reliance is taking just what you need and no more as to create a deficit for others. Self-reliance is, in fact, taking a stand for those who can’t do so for themselves. Never do we have so strong a sense of self as when we are warriors for the freedom and happiness of all sentient beings.

To view the original Sabian Symbol themed 2015 Cosmic Blague corresponding to this day: Flashback! The degree point of the Sabian Symbol may at times be one degree higher than the one listed here. The Blague portrays the starting degree of for this day ( 0°,  for instance), as I typically post in the morning, while the Sabian number corresponds to the end point (1°) of that same 0°-1° period. There are 360  degrees spread over 365/6 days per year—so they nearly, but not exactly, correlate.

Typos happen. I don’t have a proofreader. And I like to just write, post and go!
Copyright 2020 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Get your HAUTE ASTROLOGY 2020 Weekly Horoscope ebooks by Starsky + Cox