Month: March 2020 (page 1 of 4)

Streaming Garbage

Aries 10° (March 30)

 

We weren’t even due to fly home until tomorrow. S. is so fierce—she got a voucher for the amount equal to all the charges Eurostar hit us with for changing our train schedule, over seven hundred clams; and next she will shake down Virgin and I put my faith in her to do that successfully. Today is going to be a busy, creative day. Hard to get the juices flowing on this branding project I’ve been dancing around while trying to get ourselves home and then acclimate to the terrible state of affairs that is America’s handling of this pandemic. When this is over, even for the time being, hopefully, as the weather warms: We better take to the streets against this horrible miscreant in charge. How did we ever let this happen. Of course we New Yorkers knew what we were in for. You just wonder why other people in other parts of the country weren’t like, hmmm, I wonder why his home state is so dead against him? Because we had dealt with this evil. He is evil. Don’t let him off the hook. Don’t say he’s stupid or a puppet or just venal. No! This guy is pure evil. He actually enjoys the fact that he’s killing people, just like his sons like killing big-game. There is no remorse in this mutant DNA. They are bad to the core. And so is Maleficent the wife. They are all the worst (can’t even call them people) entities currently roaming the planet. We need to be so much more outraged than we are. Revolution is soon to follow, one can only hope. It should in any case. I took my temperature this morning and I’m fine on that score, although I have a terrible headache. I took some ibuprofen which rumor has it you’re not suppose to do if you have the virus; assuming I do not, I need to bring down the inflammation I feel in my sinuses. These are all random thoughts I realize, and they shall continue to be.

We watched Goodbye Columbus last night and Ali MacGraw is pretty great in it. And who doesn’t love Richard Benjamin. After a supper of chicken stew we started watching After Hours but I fell asleep about fifteen minutes into it. That was probably around seven thirty. I have not been able to stay awake that much at night. I have this branding project to do and I’m a little stumped by it. I do want to write up a storm with it, but right now I’m just sort of digesting it all. I want very much to make it all sing and will do but I have to let it percolate first I guess. It is always part of the process. In the meantime I think I’ll go through some receipts and get a handle on all that. I will need to start booking artists in earnest for the festival upcoming. At least I think I will. I am trying so hard not to get ahead of myself nor fall behind. There is much to be accomplished and I need to figure out what that might mean. I have not felt this crappy in weeks. I wonder why it is all crashing down on me suddenly. I mean there is the larger thing that is happening about which I must be more shaken up than I consciously realized. I’m typically okay with being isolated but this really is doing a number on me suddenly. There is no escaping it. Today I saw that awful Billy person stole probably Stella’s most famous jokes. He is such a sick, insidious person. He thinks he has me blocked from seeing his shenanigans. Last week I saw that he was wearing a shirt I lent (or maybe gave) to him for a performance. This guy is one of the worst people I have ever encountered in my life and what makes it worse is that he amasses more and more friends, many of which he first came to know through me. We all have these awful creatures in our lives, right? I mean I’m not the only one to suffer this kind of shallow miscreant? I know it only makes me sound bitter to write this sort of thing but he truly is the worst person you could ever meet. I think because he is quite smart, unlike other vacant characters who don’t things unwiggingly, this monster really is a danger to others. For starters he is a total pusher and wants to get other people hooked on heroin, which he will casually bring to a dinner party and put in front of people. He is so jealous of other people’s talent he consciously seeks to topple those he knows are more gifted than himself, which are most people. I’ve seen friend after friend become fooled by this joker and, well, they probably deserve what they get.

The following blocks of texs are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 51-55.  I am reading through all my Blagues, five per day, and posting some samples here. Now, in my sixth year of writing this Blague, but the time I get to my seventh, I will have through all the daily Blagues of my first five years. If that’s confusing I apologize:

I know I’m a narcissist, but I hope I’m a benign one. Still I must bring this back to me (and you should do the same) in thinking where am I the warrior bent on protecting the natural state of things from the destructive tide of civilization. Maybe you’re an environmentalist. Perhaps you are seeking to preserve native cultures.We do not have to reach back to find examples of actual genocide happening in the world. And metaphorically, there are those of us who fight to save forgotten, institutionalized children, or fight for civil rights, or senior citizens or for the disabled or for LGBTQ causes or for women’s rights or maybe for education or against disease or any form of discrimination. I am humbled by those who do. Yet my cause is native in effect. As a warrior brave from the Provincetown tribe of thespians I’m trying to save my village from pillage of a different sort: the destruction of its historical theatrical heritage. And so the concept of what is native is that which is germane to my own being, culture and history.

In the Hindu pantheon, Hephaestus’ equivalent would be Ganesh whose own festival is celebrated at the start of Virgo. Ganesh is the remover of obstacles. And that is exactly what the Indian brave is doing. He didn’t start this fight. He is trying to remove the obstacles, the human ones, to his own divine right to freedom, happiness and way of life. We know he is fighting a losing battle but that is neither here nor there. He must fight. This is a spiritual war, a holy war. This day reminds us that we are always engaged in spiritual warfare, seeking to remove the obstacles, those people and situations, that seem so bent on our spiritual death. If Provincetown loses its theatrical heritage to greed and gentrification, that is a spiritual death. It might not be one you will mourn, but I would. Modern American theater was born in Provincetown, just as America was (those crazy pilgrims landed their first not at Plymouth). Weird that the seeds of the Indian’s destruction can be linked so readily to my own cause of Provincetown’s theatrical birthright and legacy but there you have it. Oh right, I was talking about Dane Rudhyar, who labels the theme of today as Violence for Survival. I don’t quite subscribe to that. I don’t think our defenses need be violent, just as our attitude needn’t be victimization.

To view the original Sabian Symbol themed 2015 Cosmic Blague corresponding to this day: Flashback! The degree pointof 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

 

 

Pantry In A Twist

Aries 9° (March 29)

 

Fell asleep in front of the fire last night. Woke up at five and already have done a thousand things. It is now ten in the morning. I was thinking of how productive I can be as a means of dealing with stress. Part of me wants to completely escape by whatever means necessary. But the better portion of myself is determined to work through all these feelings and to stay strong as can be. I sent a bunch of notes out to people wishing them well. I got precious few back which is fine. My car had been taking on water, a phenom I couldn’t figure; and now, as inexplicably it isn’t. I chalked it up, originally, to the replacement of my windshield, and went back and forth, for months with the company that did the switcheroo, and they maintain it has nothing to do with them; and yet they came while I was in Europe and the feedback they gave me was that yes it was totally soaked inside; but I’m guessing they did something they aren’t owning up to, because the problem has disappeared. Anyway, I went to the dump in this, my thirty five year old Mercedes Benz, with its broken hood hinges, and broken headlights, and it still drives like a dream. I love my car in an unnatural way. I keep getting traumatic flashes of the last several weeks, escaping from Paris to London and then back to America fleeing this deadly virus. Of course I don’t want it, and I intend not to get it. I suppose in the end I’m glad to be on Cape Cod where the people are few and far between and, as I say, I’m used to isolation anyway, being the social pariah that I am. I wish I was joking about that. It doesn’t take much to be social pariah.

You just have to live in a place that echoes eighth grade, as Provincetown does, and be the victim of gaslighting and cancel culture, which I am. I very much related to some fourteen year old girl whose social life has been fucked with by mean girls. I had a best friend, this semi famous gay fellow I’d be friends with at least as long as my Mercedes has been in existence; and he did a number on me. And it snowballed from there. It doesn’t quite matter much to me because I don’t really make my life there anymore and most of my friendships are based in Europe and the UK, really. Not so much New York anymore. Meanwhile, as it is, if I needed to take stock of the Provincetown existence, I could still list hundreds of friends there. It’s just a matter of being more aware of places that are closed to one as opposed to those who remain open. And I have long learned my lesson: There are folks I should have never been friends with in the first place because they largely fall under the larger heading of malignant narcissists. And still, during this crisis, I sent out words of love and encouragement even to those who character-assassinated me. I do believe in that Jesus m.o. of turning the other cheek. It’s different from letting yourself be slapped around; rather it’s about taking one’s full power and illustrating that your side of the street remains clean. All told, Provincetown does attract people who need that junior-high dynamic. It’s all about having been ostracized as children, marginalized, and so, as adults they are compensating and often overshoot the mark and become the people who used to torment them. It’s a pretty banal pattern, actually.

I spent some quality time in the kitchen today already—I have today’s food prepped (Greek salad for lunch and chicken stew for din din); but I also made a roasted pepper soup and a fresh pea and mint soup to have later in the week, which is going to be a very busy one with a number of clients and a branding project that will occupy ninety percent of my creativity. We are going to tithe by making this year’s Haute Astrology books 99¢ instead of $9.99, and I have already done all the prep work for the 2021 books so that is an accomplishment of which I can feel proud. We all have to do what we can within reason. Mainly, I do feel quite happy with the solitude. And I’m glad to be connecting with the usual penpals.

The following blocks of texs are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 46-50.  I am reading through all my Blagues, five per day, and posting some samples here. Now, in my sixth year of writing this Blague, but the time I get to my seventh, I will have through all the daily Blagues of my first five years. If that’s confusing I apologize:

When the going gets tough…etc. And some of us know this dynamic well. I’m this man. I come from financially poor beginnings, and my father, who had countless shortcomings, was also this man, and he took us as far into the storm as he could, typically sporting a dapper hat, with a feather, a symbol of higher-mind aspirations. He had the benefit of being middle class when there was one, but still he worked for the man who tried and mostly succeeded to fuck him over in the end. The storm for him was that of social strata and prejudice. He died with nothing except for an uncompromising nature that never let him quit. I seemed to have inherited that. For me the storm is not working for the man. So braving it isn’t a just a necessity it’s a privilege. I welcome the wind and rain on my face.

Then again I had a weird and wonderfully wacky Pisces mother who, again, when in her cups when I was small, insisted I accompany her outside for strolls during hurricanes.

There is something a bit cringy about the costume of the man with the hat. He seems to wear his station in life. He’s a big garish, perhaps, bordering on nouveau. That always makes me uncomfortable. Like Stella Dallas at a fancy estate; or the penchant some men have these days of adopting a sort of neo Oceans Eleven style when asked to dress up for weddings. Barf. I feel some pity for this man in the oracle just as I genuflect to his pluck. He is telegraphing his desire for upward mobility via trappings that might prevent him from it. Again I think of Frank Sinatra who, despite his success, being labelled a wop, as my father surely was, snubbed in the end by those Kennedys who, let’s face it, weren’t exactly bluebloods themselves. But I find prejudice is more prevalent the closer the social proximity between classes. It explains why Italian Americans can be the most prejudice of African Americans. It’s because they were the last immigrant wave before the Civil Rights Movement.

————

When we were writing Sextrology back in the day I went through a “metaphysical visitation” period whereby I was awakened every morning at 3:33 AM. And before this surfaced as a theme in the Nicholas Cage film vehicle Adaptation, being awoken at this time was an experience I owned. I came to realize that 3+3+3 signaled the nine Muses, the triple goddess in triplicate. I automatically see an upward spiral.

Of course the three is also the trident on it’s side, so little wonder that this Sabian symbol is ruled by the sign of PIsces whose ruler Neptune’s symbol is that trident. 48 reduces to 12 which reduces to 3. So it get’s better.

When I started the Afterglow Festival I did so under the name 333; but not automatically. There already was a 333 business on the South Shore of Massachusetts. Some kind of management company. They were not easy to reach—I had to put on my Corleone thinking cap—I have always loved the fact that Lynne’s name is Corbett and mine is Leone so together we are Corleone—lion heart—although the Cor in Corbett is actually Gaelic for raven which is the sigil of their house. Mine of course is Bert Lahr.

So I finally tracked these people down and convinced them, can you imagine, to write me a letter “letting” me also be 333, Inc in Massachusetts. Afterglow is a d/b/a/ off of that. I figured I’d need to court these Muses in the making of the festival and surely I need invoke them moving forward with new artistic goals.

The first year of the festival we put it on at The Provincetown Theater which was lovely in its way. We comped a great many people. But when I tallied the total of actual tickets sold over the four days it came to, yes you guessed it, folks, 333.

You have to believe we are magic. LIfe is all just one big upward stroll through the Guggenheim.

————–

To view the original Sabian Symbol themed 2015 Cosmic Blague corresponding to this day: Flashback! The degree pointof 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

 

 

Anthology

Aries 8° (March 28)

 Bernice-1572547003-726x388

Woke up to find out my old theater colleague Danny Burstein has been struggling with the virus for the past two weeks and is now, thankfully, on the mend. I rediscovered the anthology series, American Short Story, that played on PBS in the seventies. Watched an adaptation of Bernice Bobs Her Hair, the first Fitzgerald short story he published, with Shelley Duvall and Veronica Cartwright and Bud Cort. Was so good and I must now find other episodes. My first male crush, Mark LaMura is in it as is Dennis Christopher from Breaking Away. Mark played Mark Dalton on All My Children. I wanted to be him. I wonder if what I’m writing is a printed-esque form of procrastination. I don’t want to alarm anybody, but I’m not feeling all that swift today. I’m going to keep a positive attitude and keep pounding liquids; but my brain feels pretty scrambled as well and I haven’t been able to be linear and finish all but completed tasks piling up on my desk. I did manage to vacuum the house already today; and I did make some wonderful food over the past couple of days. Today for lunch we will have caviar omelets and for dinner a sirloin steak sliced with a salad of arugula, palm hearts, tomato and parmesan. I already made a chicken stew for tomorrow’s supper, and will rustle up a Greek salad for lunch. The following is a little Garde Manger for the coming weeks, in no certain order.

Caesar Salad, Roasted Pepper Soup, Cauliflower steaks with Brussel Sprouts and turkey bacon, Pea Soup with mint, Mushroom Barley Stew, Roated Beets and Goat Cheese with Salad, Miso Soup with Cabbage, Avocado Toast, BLT Salad, Clam Chowder, Tuna/Sardine Melts, Omelets with turkey bacon and homemade ketchup, Smoked Salmon on Rice Cakes, Chicken Sausage with Rutabaga and Cabbage Stir Fry, Spaghetti Faux-lonese, Hot Dogs with Homemade Baked Beans, Sweet Potato Soup, Black Bean Soup, Re-run of Tuna/Sardine Melts, Rerun of Smoked Salmon on Rick Cakes, Burgers with Blue Cheese, Pizzas, Linguine Clam Sauce, Rice and Beans with (frozen) vegetables. So that’s at least twenty-four meals not including the fact that some of these will entail leftovers. That’s fourteen days of food in the house including the meals today and tomorrow, without having to go to a single shop, which we inevitably will.

I have no Twitter game. None to speak of. Which is weird because I am pretty verbal. I will eyeball the podcast info this week. Putting it on my list. I may be too hard on myself. I think I need to bolster my immune system even more than usual and I definitely need to set up my home hot yoga (Bikram) studio, which has worked fine in the past. We have a bunch of clients this coming week and I really must pace myself. I want to get back into bed as soon as possible today though I think. I am scared that I am feeling under the weather. I must remind myself that there are other ailments besides this deadly virus and anyway I’m not giving into fear. I’m going to put on my headphones and play some favorite songs and get myself in gear. Knocking things off the list as I go. I have pretty bad body aches but no respiratory symptoms. Maybe a bit feverish, or it could be my imagination. I don’t want to take my temperature unless I really start feeling poorly. I’m going to keep breathing deeply and suck back a ton of hot beverages. The trick is to send whatever virus you encounter to your stomach instead of your lungs, or so I’ve heard. There is so much disinformation (or no information, really) out there. We have learned that in America we are all potential sheep being led to slaughter. When this is all over, those of us still standing will have to take to the streets in protest of all of this. We will never be the same. That seventeen minute song Bob Dylan released the other day? That is pretty amazing I must say.

 

The following blocks of texs are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 41-45.  I am reading through all my Blagues, five per day, and posting some samples here. Now, in my sixth year of writing this Blague, but the time I get to my seventh, I will have through all the daily Blagues of my first five years. If that’s confusing I apologize:

 

  I am engaged in several creative and heady work projects all at once, and my schedule for the next several weeks is packed with marks to hit and stolen moments when I’m meant to move so-called mountains. But what if I were to approach all my scheduled activity as play, letting a good half of my mind float around in the tide of creativity, ebbing and flowing and washing up ideas, here and there, as needed. If the most functional or professional or together I need be is akin to some kid frolicking along a beach who, when out of imaginative notions, might need only run down to the water’s edge to see what life might be floating there, to consider, poke at or capture? Well then that might surely make the month ahead less fraught and more fun and, possibly, just possibly, yield more successful products than a default type-A personality ticking items off myriad to-do lists might achieve. Frankly, I’ve had it up to here with that guy; and I would so very much enjoy just one May without him huffing and puffing and bemoaning the fact “there isn’t enough time.” For what? To be some self-profesying stress case?

I have been very fortunate to spend all but the first six years of my life with a house a stone’s throw from a beach. (And the first six were spent at the Skyline Cabana Club, now on the site of Liberty State Park, in Jersey City and that was a total gas.) But from the age of seven, I spent every summer growing up “down the shore” in Belmar, N.J. where my parents bought a big house with a wrap around porch just a block from the ocean. It was city-ish compared to the beach experience we had out in Wainscott, where Stella and I rented our first beach house, or on Cape Cod where we bought a house in the days before we rented in Provincetown and Wellfleet. The point is I’ve never been able to be very far from the ocean. I don’t think I’d be happy without at least knowing it’s nearby.

As a child, my mother, sister and I spent the entire summer in Belmar and my father visited on weekends. It wasn’t that far away from our permanent home or his work; and now in retrospect I’m sure he was up to a little bit of no good. And my Pisces mother was happiest in her cups without any overlording by him in those days. My sister was hostile and never spoke to me. So really summer meant that I was completely untethered. It was the seventies and eighties and I too got up to a little bit of no good. Tales of my nighttime teenage revelries that included long and winding bike rides to and from Asbury Park in the wee hours would curl your hair, so I’ll skip that bit—I have to leave something shocking for the memoirs—but my collection of daytimes was one long idyll. Even when old enough to legally drink and work as a waiter in restaurants, partying with a pack of preppy, nut-brown, sparkling tooth faces framed with dry, thick surfer, salt-stiff, sun-bleached hair, I might skip going to bed, but doze on the porch in a blanket in a hammock for a couple of hours until the first old man or woman walking a dog at dawn would wake me; at which point I’d grab a towel, zombie-like, and stroll the block to the empty beach to greet the rising Sun which would paint the entire ocean pink as it poked its way above the horizon; and I would slip into the silky rose brine and swim out as far as I dared indulging in the rare private moments one might have in this environment which would, within hours, be blanket to blanket, boombox to boombox, a battle of Coppertone and Hawaiian Tropics and orange Bain de Soleil played out in the breeze.

I would emerge after an hour at least, imagining myself a young Apollo or Dionysus dripping from my rejuvenating bath, and fall to my towel to finish the sleep I started hours before, often awaking to find myself completely surrounded by the throng. And I would tip toe home to no recrimination, pulpy orange juice and Munster cheese lovingly melted by mother on a plain toasted bagel. Even writing this is chilling me.

Whenever asked to imagine my most relaxing experience or directed to go to my happy place, or attempt to get a lower blood pressure reading than I typically do, I always recall the sense-memory of my morning swims in that pink water, the crystalline pre-dawn sky still twinkling with stars. My favorite spot to slip in was along a jetty that created a tiny cove and pool that was spared the large rolling effect of the breakers, even at low tide, if you hugged the line of jagged rock and conglomerate as you pushed out to sea. There would be tiny minnows and starfish and crabs and whatever those barnacley things are called attached to the rocks—barnacles maybe. The unreal colors led me to imagine I was swimming in an ocean on another planet, or in some Yes album landscape come to life.

The summer before going to college I decided not to work a job; I demurred, really, much to my parents “chagrin”, apparently—at least this is what my friend Dick Badenhausen’s mother Margo said my mother told her though she never uttered anything to me. I spent everyday, all day, on the beach, from 8am until 7pm, with quick runs home for food, bathroom breaks and, quite probably, the occasional puff off of something soothing. And I read. I just read. Starting with children’s books. I know this will sound odd or sad but I never read children’s books as a child. My parents never read to me and I didn’t read. Even in grade school I would skim any reading assignment or just not do it at all. Nobody checked my homework. We were not a conscientious family. I remember the first book I read, besides D’Aulaires Greek Mythology and Edith Hamilton’s Mythology, was The Once and Future King which was kind of a doorstop and supposedly too advanced for my ten year old brain. It wasn’t. Though I loved this book it didn’t trigger readership in me and,, by that time, it was too late to go back and read kids books. I had never even heard of The Chronicles of Narnia until my best friend senior year of high school gave me his set to read over the summer after graduation. Which I did all at once, followed by the The Lord of The Rings trilogy and then Salinger’s Nine Stories, Franny and Zooey, and Raise High The Roofbeam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction, plus my university catalog. I was the most tranquil I’d ever been in my life, at seventeen, no longer a child, already possessing dark secrets, while not yet an adult in spite of them.

Even though I’ve been at the beach most of my life, there is nothing like, and no way to recapture, the experience of ones salad days, which for me were very specifically, July and August of that summer. I am so grateful that I had the unwitting forsight not to work that summer. I have something so potent, more than memory, to draw upon, now as a result. And while it’s still early May, today’s oracle reminds me that: no matter what my calendar looks like, I am going to do my absolute damnest to not create unnecessary work or stress for myself, and to channel the feeling of moving through that pink water, as I consciously would, with the smoothest, longest strokes and nary a splash. I’m going to let the Sabian symbol of Taurus, 14° set the tone for the entire summer. In a twelve-fold sequence this forty-forth symbol would fall under the rule of Scorpio which, in contrast to the preceding sign of Libra, eschews the outer world of order and appearances and embraces an inner world, that, of the subconscious. It is the fixed-water sign, concentrated, distilled and crystalized emotion that isn’t expressed but kept guarded and used to power one’s desire, like a dragon protecting its treasure deep in the recesses of the earth. There is no f.o.m.o here or whining or complaining. Scorpio, ruled by Pluto, named for the god of the underworld (subterra and the subconscious), employs the power of elimination, pruning, to inspire growth at the unseen root level of experience. Thus Scorpio and the astrological eighth house are associated with regeneration, sleep, sex and even death, which is only a dreadful name for rebirth.

As a child we are naturally inward focussed; and at seventeen or ability to be so is still rather automatic. As most of us age we lose our capacity for this and have to intercede with meditative practices to reintroduce this element back into our lives. Even in meditation, I employ that pink dawn ocean; so I’m going to return to that source now, in light of all the tap dancing I’m meant to do as fast as I can, and find that fixed-watery place inside myself, the vibrational crystal of my inner being, the insouciant Mona Lisa smile of my salad days and demure, once again, when it comes to work, taking on only that which I can execute as play. I have Mars conjunct Neptune in Scorpio. In simple terms that spells an active imagination, not to mention the ability to cast some pointed spells. Mars is the active self, fighting the good fight; and Neptune is that vast primordial sea of imagination and possibility. And, really, today’s oracle is about working on both levels simultaneously, finding the parrallel between them, returning to simpler joys for revitalization. Running around, like yesterday’s porter, subject to the needs and dictates of others is anathema to the experience of the child taking his cues from his inner life; not to mention remaining connecting to the natural world and its energies.

The message of this oracle is sychronistically the same as the Tarot card I pulled from the deck, as I’m wont to do daily, yesterday and then, curiously, again today, the Page of Pentacles: Connecting with life’s simple pleasures. As Stella and I tell our clients, this may be simple, but it isn’t always easy. We mustn’t attempt at once more than we can achieve via our conscious minds and ego drives. We must keep a toe in that water and skip along the shore. A not so nice voice in my head is saying: Who are you kidding? And the truth is I have already failed to take this oracle on board in the hours spent putting this blog entry together. Living life on life’s terms can be a challenge. But we must live and let live and allow that which isn’t working to fall away, as no amount of struggle or speeding your way through a schedule like a pin ball bouncing off walls and obstacles will serve you in the end. I’ve never said it before but today it seems highly appropriate: Peace Out.

 

To view the original Sabian Symbol themed 2015 Cosmic Blague corresponding to this day: Flashback! The degree pointof 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

 

 

As Folk

Aries 7° (March 27)

 

I started getting squirrely yesterday. I was up so early—3:33. By the time nine o’clock rolled around I was already obsessing over social media and I could feel that edgy, old, procrastinative behavior begin to creep in. Happily, today, I will get out of the house and do some shopping after our conference call with the TV folk. Looking forward to all of it, actually. Got a cute card in the mail from a friend, just a heart that read Love More on one side and More Love on the other. I put on one of my favorite records of all time by Brian Eno and David Byrne and just soldiered on, ignoring the old urges to cushion my brain against all that’s happening lest I spend the day needing to be hospitalized for panic—no ER working in the world wants to see someone thinking they’re dying when they have simply given themselves an extreme anxiety attack. None of this is a joke. I have a friend who is a famous cartoonist for a conservative publication and I cringe every day I see his latest offering, which are posted on Instagram. I actually commented on one of them last week and thought, crap, I hope this doesn’t in any way cramp our friendship, which I would never want to happen. Still, I’ve never been one to hold my tongue, virtual or otherwise. And I just don’t think there is any room for levity in any of this. The first thing one learns in comedy school is that diseases aren’t funny…ever. I’ve seen comedians go there and it never works, except with the mean-spirited people of the world. Those who would have filled stadiums to see Andrew Dice Clay back in the late eighties. Enough said. Even the present Andrew Dice Clay, I believe, wouldn’t go to one of the past Andrew Dice Clay’s show. And yet, I see so many of our mutual friends (of mine and my cartoonist friend) posting heart-likes. I do not get it. At all. I know that this friend is rather indebted to the publication where he has been working for the past thirty years, but we are beyond just living in polarized times. We are in a place where the evil rich like those who own things like his newspaper would rather see people die than any slippage to their bottom lines, let alone their yearly bonuses. It’s all dirty money. Everywhere. That is what is being exposed. That and the fact that Mother Nature if fucking pissed. As well she should be. We are killing her indiscriminately so who are we to wonder why she is picking us off in the same manner. The world you get you deserve.

More than wanting to be spared, myself—because let’s face it, I’m not all that young anymore and I don’t have kids nor any real family to speak of and not that many people will be that upset—I just want to live in a world where this sort of thing cannot happen because we are already unified, as a humanity, against common enemies like viruses, natural disasters and hurtling asteroids (because you know that’s next). I will wake up today feeling a bit worse for wear but will steel myself and go shopping once again. This time I don’t believe I need to go out again for the next two weeks. I feel iffy but I’m ignoring it. We have a big meeting today for the TV project and it turns out we are quite sympatico with the show writer which is very good news indeed. She has a queer bent and that is right up my so-called alley. I continue to reach out to friends. S. is in constant touch with J and N. I don’t know what to do about my feelings regarding P. and her unabashed needs. The posturing is beginning to wear on me but I’m sure I’ll get over it. The good thing about having self-absorbed friends is that there is no worry of their reading your Blague. And hopefully they will get over themselves in due time. I was surprised that some of the nutsy boltsy stuff needed immediate attention but that’s fine. Not much has really been done up until this point so I’m not terribly worried about the outcome. Would be great if this came to fruition and I for one want to do everything in my power to insure that it does. I have made some good strides today so I’m not going to worry about the rest of it. Tomorrow is another day and I plan on ruling the school so long as I am well enough to do so.

 

The following blocks of texs are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 36-40.  I am reading through all my Blagues, five per day, and posting some samples here. Now, in my sixth year of writing this Blague, but the time I get to my seventh, I will have through all the daily Blagues of my first five years. If that’s confusing I apologize:

 

Looking at my schedule today, it is the day that I must begin contracting all the seventeen artists I have slated to perform this year’s Afterglow Festival in Provincetown. And I must also reach out to sponsors and donors to fund this yearly project. I’ve been trying to build other bridges with other venues, as well, to produce the great artists with whom I’ve the privilege to work, but it has been a total slog. Not returning emails. How do people get away with this? It’s part of a larger question which is: why do people who operate so shoddily in the world, with no regard to formality or the social fabric, succeed at all? We seem all to often to reward those who are self-serving, ineffective and second-rate; while individuals of quality and character have to spend their time bumping up against these, let us call them, void-ers. I’ve resolved, at various times in my career (which has entailed the wearing of many hats) to be more cutthroat and other c-words, but I only ever end up being compassionate, even for these void-ers, which partly pisses me off, but, for which, I am largely grateful. I’m not after that pot of gold after all. I’m interested in experience. But, man oh man, you would not believe the people who have reached out to contact us this year, friends at ad agencies that want to help us spread our word, even so-called good friends with production studios and branding companies wanting to help realize our vision. And then (what is it like to live in these people’s heads) they completely disappear. You called us, remember? This is not true connection. This isn’t building a cantilever bridge. This is the opposite. Honestly I think some people must wake and bake and think they’re having an epiphany about us and what we’re doing and gain the momentary bravado to phone and promise the moon. But again, it’s just fairy favors. That pot of gold.

The only way you build a bridge together, whether professionally or personally, is to start building it. Before we ever charged clients or even called what we did a consultancy we offered our services up for free. We don’t get paid to do the Afterglow Festival, we just do it to fill a void and prevent a further chasm in Provincetown’s birthright as the birthplace of the modern American stage. I do this by holding out my beggar’s bowl and asking those whom I believe have a stake in Provincetown’s stage heritage remaining intact to give what they can, whether it be ten dollars or ten thousand. I can ask for money because it goes solely toward building that cantilever bridge. It has nothing to do with me personally, but for the pleasure and satisfaction I derive from pulling this project off each year. As it’s become increasingly successful, mercenary minds want something from it. Those who gave to us now see us as a way for them to profit and it makes me queasy. In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve taken the gloves off this week with the blog. I’m on a bit of a Norma Rae soap box; but I am a Libra after all, and any form of injustice makes me break out in a rash of righteous swords.

Today’s symbol really is about making one’s individual life better by recognizing a chasm that needs to be bridged and working with others toward doing just that. Certain things cannot be done on our own. And those of us who recognize where there is lack or have understood deprivation in any sense of the word (like that widow yesterday) are more equipped than others to make some positive changes, buidling bridges in this world. This gives the individual life substance and purpose. I’ve quoted her before but as Uta Hagen would say: Obstacles only make your objectives stronger. So if the hotel that usually gives our artists discount rooms during the Afterglow Festival suddenly wants to profit on us this might inspire me to reach out to a bunch of hotels and inns and ask them to house our artists individually, and gratis to boot. It’s way more work for me, but it’s good work. As I write this I realize that Greed is one of the biggest voids that exists in this world. Look at the polarization of the haves and have nots. The gulf between them has become vast because the greedy find a way to buy politicians and otherwise find loopholes around paying taxes while raising prices on everything their corporations manufacture, including food that makes people sick so that they have to spend their hard earned money on drugs created to cure illnesses these same corporations, in effect, created. I wish this was exaggeration but it isn’t.

It is indeed more difficult for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle; which is why I’m most in awe of my richest friends who spend their money in truly philanthropic ways. There are those who have given to my non-profit since year one whom I know strive to give as much as they can. Wealth and fame do not make people happy, that is a fact. And there is something about the making of a lot of money that corrupts people and causes them to horde it. I think this can happen to most folks. So I find it so rare and refreshing when I encounter those of means who give so much without thought to it just being a good write off or buying some kind of recognition. One of our most faithful patrons insists on being anonymous and is truly caring. And there of course is Ms. Rowling who singlehandedly pays for the entire operation of her Lumos foundation, so that if I person makes a donation to it, that whole amount goes toward the cause, never toward expenses. People of means do have a great power to do good in this world and so few of them do, ironically. It’s so inspiring when they dedicate their life to building bridges over gaping voids they see in our human society. I know many rich people give money to causes, but so few care about them.

Okay hopping off my soapbox. What I am realizing from this oracle is that I can’t do something that can be metaphorically expressed as bridge-building alone. True progress is a collective endeavor and must include the ideas and skills of more than one person. A cantilever bridge is only fixed at one end. That is to say we don’t know where the other end might lead; we must be flexible in regard to where our efforts might “land.” This is why those hit and run contacts from people pretending (to themselves) that they want to “help” doesn’t work—because the fact is they are leading with their agenda, they know exactly where they want the so-called collaborative effort to land: in their own pocket books or with an individual feather in their cap. This is why they cannot follow through. Because they were never prepared to devote to the process of filling a void, that was a pretense for their own reward. So, if you’re one of those people who reach out to others under the guise of collectively wanting to make some corner of the world a better place, when really you are only fishing for projects via which you might profit, you should take this oracle to heart today. Because you not only don’t gain a foothold with that future aim, you lose any ground you’ve gained in the relationship you sought to parlay into your half-wake-and-baked vision.

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Surrounded as I am by golden calves who are endlessly being worshipped, invited, raised high, painted, photographed, and otherwise blown, many of whom worship, invite, name drop, paint, photograph, us-y and otherwise rim all the other golden calves in one big gilt bovine cluster fuck, year after year, amassing a deep well of mutual, group ancestral sychophancy, I (have decided to) emerge as an avatar of a new order. Yep, that’s right folks, I’m busting out as the new messiah and I’m really only most interested in revealing my truth, disclosing my true nature, to other people like myself who don’t give a shit about where everyone is going, what they’re wearing, whom their with and how many shows of validation they are receiving on Facebook for whatever gumball of an opinion or a snark remark has fallen from their overindulged, egocentric noggins. While most fatuous folks we know are lost in their orgy of pseudofame and delusions of power and influence, pretending to some pedigree and treating everyone like they’re some lucky servant whose role it is to dote on them, I’ll be at the well, if not the bar, hanging with a new tribe of goils who are not above fetching their own refreshment, thank you very much.

Like both the Samarian doll and my main man JC, I tend not to fit in with the prevailing tribe. Once upon a time, that might have bothered me; but now I’m so effing grateful. There really isn’t much in it, spiritually that is. Sure, you might have some fragile sense of belonging, but it takes up a lot of time and energy, all that worshiping and being worshipped. It’s truly dullsville. While being on the fringe has a sharpening effect on your psyche, such that one day you can wake up and enjoy the revelation and declaration that you are in fact gods’ gift to humanity, but you were just too humble all this time to go around advertising the fact. Except when you meet someone who is as unimpressed as you are by the heirarchies of worship in your midst, and all the middle men, so many middle men. And so many yes men. Meh, who needs it. Not me. I have nobody to impress. Who has time? What with all the money lenders needing ridding from the temples and all those in pain in need of healing, seriously I’m lucky I have time to stop and share three simple words with my lady pal over a ladle of some cool fresh H20.

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 In the 1973 season the character of Georgina is introduced, shades of Sybil for you “Downright Abject” fans. Georgina is played by the lovely Lesley-Anne Down and during the Great War she is swept up by compassion and becomes a Red Cross nurse, despite the fact that she comes from Upstairs. For, really, it’s far more difficult for the Upstairs set to leave their drawing-room fear-based lives of losing what they have than it is for those who’ve nothing material to squander and whose lives are already all about service. But off Georgina goes even though she is the most celebrated bright young thing of her generation, the century-old version of a dreaded Kardashian only with an I.Q. and taste. I think of the people I know sometimes and ask myself are they Up or Down. Those who were Up in modern America are often so because they were born into Down circumstances. Many of those who are Down are vehemently so, having contempt for anything Up. I think of our summer place Provincetown where the great culture war is increasingly being played out. I like to think of myself as somewhere on the staircase employing my wit. I am an equal opportunity shade magnet. The Downs can find me uppity and suspect I have some kind of trust fund. Wrong. I’m a quasi-well-traveled autodidact whose busted my ass so to work for myself. The Ups seem to worry about me and tend not to visit but rather invite me, considering their surroundings so much nicer. Meanwhile the smokey tattooed former set is typically Bennington educated and more well-heeled and cared for by parents affording their stylish love of poverty, whilst the lockjaw latter crowd with their chihuahua accessories and editorial mudrooms were my busboy a New York minute ago and have zero references beyond Lulu Guinness and “Glee”.

But let’s get metaphysical. Cancer, the sole cardinal-water sign, is associated with The Flood; just as Gemini, mutable-air is associated, in its shadow aspect, with overthinking, duality, consciousness of opposites that characterizes The Fall. In Gemini, we are subject to dualistic thinking—its ruler Mercury is named for the god of tricksters, liars, merchants, jugglers, thieves, basically a whole bunch of carnies—and so we see how yesterday’s symbol might leave one torn. Do we stay cozied up against the harsh outside world in our glittering world of gifts, or do we go beyond our immediate surrounds to help wash others’ cares away. In the Greek flood myth, it is the goddess Themis who saves humanity after the destruction of Zeus. She is the mother source of repair. And we take on her mantle, as did UpDown’s Georgina, when we leave the comfy world of personal attachemnt with its trumped up petty dramas, and selflessly and impersonally participate in the care of all. We become the light to the hurt and despondent and the reparation of humanity.

I do things for social and creative causes; but I have never expressed volunteerism on this most consecrated of levels. Seemingly, neither has anyone famous born on this day. So much for that theory being born out. Seriously, go look at a list of famous people born this Taurus day. There are some lovely people, but mainly its those who’ve cultivated a specific talent with nary a saint or nurse or would-be savior among them. Oh well. And anyway, for the occultists in my midst, the Red Cross mightn’t be all it’s cracked up to be. And there have been more than just conspiracy theory crackpots (who me?) who have drawn the connection between the Red Cross and the Rosy Cross or Rosicrucians, many of whom have a very sinister take on the organization, from its very origins, especially when it comes to things like blood-banking. My arms go weak just typing that. Ugh. Anyway, everything has it’s shadow side and so I offer up this wild and crazy  read by Dr. Len Horovitz which might put a spooky and cynical spin on Upstairs’ Georgina’s role in those field hospitals. “She done already done had herses.”

 

To view the original Sabian Symbol themed 2015 Cosmic Blague corresponding to this day: Flashback! The degree pointof 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

 

Crystal Blue Persuasion

Aries 6° (March 26)

 

The deaths just yesterday in America were 223 putting us at 1001 total, meaning yesterday made up nearly a quarter of the total. Louisiana is in trouble, Florida is in trouble, we are all in trouble. The virus has invaded Southern Italy in a big way and nobody can figure out why since travel there from the North has been halted. This thing may be way more airborne and invincible than we imagine. The best thing to do is to stay ultra healthy so that when we do get it, and the majority of us will, we get mild symptoms and build up the requisite antibodies to this thing. I wouldn’t want to be a germ phobe at this time in history. How those poor people are suffering.

A FB “friend” performer who did a virtual show into which many, many people tuned, woke up the next day (yesterday) whining about how he feels ostricized by the so-called “downtown network” of performing artists. Now this is someone who has had successful shows, TV gigs, plays, books and tons of praise from everyone actually in the performance community. He went on this diabribe which was like a Sally Field speech in reverse. When I first started my festival he wanted to do a show which would have required dozens of people which we couldn’t afford, so I asked him to do a one-person show instead. He stopped talking to me because I said no. He was insulted. I ignored this and would reach out year on year to invite him to do things, and he always turned me down with a dismissive air; and as he became more successful he would say he couldn’t do it because of (fill in blank on project he was bragging about). So yesterday, in response to his poor-pity-me routine I actually offered encouraging words in the form of a comment. I told him he was fierce and fabulous and he should be proud of his accomplishments and focus on himself. And that all performers feel left out sometimes and unappreciated. I said that we had talked about this sort of thing in the past—which we ultimately did—feeling hurt and acting from that place. Well he blocked me of course. And friends have told me that the post doesn’t even appear on his page anymore anyway. So in the midst of a health crisis where people (we know) are actually dying this baby gets on social media, after a successful streamed show with a large audience, to talk about how nobody loves him in the community. I and others reach out to buck him up and lovingly tell him to get over himself. And he blocks people (I’m sure I’m not the only one) and removes the post anyway. Such bad form. Talk about your inferiority/superiority complexes. And in a time like this? You know, people, if you decided to be a so-called “downtown” performer which used to mean someone who didn’t care about commercial success or anything other than just making art, then shut the fuck up about the fact that the worship you receive ins’t ubiquitous enough. And while you’re at it, shut the fuck up about your bank account and the fact that other people have stolen your material, or (this is the big kicker) that you are not recognized by the mainstream. You decided you didn’t care about that to begin with, right? The world is totally upside down and you’re still acting from the emotional place of someone who got picked last for kickball? Grow a pair and the fuck up!

Anyway, I’m missing Paris in the worst way today. It truly was a trauma to have already decided to stay another month, filling the apartment with food and supplies, only, days after that decision, having to leave within a span of twelve hours. There I was in Springtime and now I’m back in Winter on Cape Cod. Not complaining because it is a nice refuge, but it is cold and grey and gloomy and, unlike the shelves in stores in Paris, here they are picked bare of all the essentials because we live in this awful competitive society, dog eat dog, every fuckhead for himself. It’s awful. And whereas the situation was bringing out the best in the community where we were, here it seems to be bringing out the ugly aspects, the narcissism, the greed and the need for attention and validation. It’s so dumb. Anyway, I cannot wait for the machinery of our consultancy to start cranking up again next week. We have a ton of clients scheduled and it always makes me feel better to help others. Meanwhile, tomorrow, we have the first brainstorming session for the TV project for which we’ve been brought on. There was a New Moon two days ago and I’m feeling it. As for the negative observations they are just that: observations of negativity, not my own. I eschew all that. In fact I want to remain dissatisfied because I wish to avoid normalizing my feelings about this culture, which has not been aligned with my framework or sensibility, probably since the 1980s. There might be a bit of the 1970s down-and-out-ness that needs to be reclaimed, and I’m all for it. I am someone who owns practically nothing. And all I can think about is further weeding out and getting down to the most essential items and putting the rest into safe storage somewhere. The only props I want to buy are archive boxes and other such containers that look beautiful upon a shelf.

The following blocks of texs are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 31-35.  I am reading through all my Blagues, five per day, and posting some samples here. Now, in my sixth year of writing this Blague, but the time I get to my seventh, I will have through all the daily Blagues of my first five years. If that’s confusing I apologize:

I’m reminded of when I first graduated university in Boston. I decided to spend the summer in town before heading off to Paris in the Fall. I had already taken a job at the end of my senior year at the Cafe Florian on Newbury Street. Being back in Boston the space now holds the Thinking Cup where I do enjoy morning coffee, post yoga. It’s funny to be in there. Back in the day it was owned by an older Hungarian couple and the menu consisted of caviar omelettes, vichyssoise, goulash and an assortment of pastries includie sacher tortes. They served wine and beer and in summer the other waiters and I would drink Pilsner with lemon. Our manager was called Ed who had the affectation of starting many a sentence with a drawn out “uhhh;” after our shift we would sit in the restaurant and play a drinking game where everytime we heard Ed say “uhhh” we’d have to take a sip. Oh the simple ways we used to amuse ourselves.

One day I was meant to work the outdoor cafe, arriving at 4PM for my evening shift, but I had a social opportunity I didn’t want to pass up. The weather looked and felt a little like it does today. I was sharing a huge apartment in Allston with mostly absentee roommates. I decided to do an experiment. I stood, arms akimbo, in the living rooms giant bay window and I attempted to “gather” the energy of the atmosphere into something of a rain storm. Now of course this could be coincidence; although witnesses to the fact seem to feel this actually happened: I poured every fiber of my intention into becoming one with the air and I found myself do all sorts of automatic movements and the wind did begin not just to blow but create mini tornadoes on the street just below the window and the sky suddenly blackened and it began to pour. A friend phoned a store next to the Florian and asked if it was raining there. It wasn’t. Then he phoned The Magic Pan which used also to be on Newbury Street, up the block. They said it was just starting to drizzle. Sweat was beading off my brow as I continued my new wave rain dance; and I gave it one more powerful thrust of intention and movement for power and called the Florian myself. Hi I’m supposed to work the cafe but it’s absolutely pouring here, how about there? It was torrential and I was let off work for the night. I hung up and within minutes the sun came out and there was a rainbow and I slapped on some Kouros (probably), threw on some Matinique outfit and set off for my sanctioned evening of social activity. Ah the days of no cellphones and minimal accountability and blessed anonymity.

So, witches, though today is about a release and intervention from the heavens, you might just be able to participate in its formation and its purpose. But mind you don’t do so too selfishly, as I believe I might have done that day. I do think someone who needed the money too my shift so I don’t think there was any karmic retribution. Still, if I were you, I’d focus straight on the rainbow!

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Let’s discuss death metaphorically though for a minute, separate from the fact that we are all literally dying from the moment we are born—an ultimate paradox. We experience death of situations and relationships all the time. We don’t know when it’s coming, typically, just like the real deal. There’ll be a call (or my favorite: an email at 5 o’clock on a Friday) that a job or gig that you’ve had, and upon which you probably counted, for ages has suddenly bit the dust. Or somebody will get a bee in their bonnet about something and snuff out your bond with them. Well the subject of this oracle isn’t the grave, really, but the widow; and that suggests to me that we are meant to meditate on what becomes of her. We are all widowed by experiences like the examples above. Things end all the time. The question is, what do we do next? Whenever there is a real or metaphoric death we start over, in a sense; and we typically try not to repeat the mistakes of the past—when taken metaphorically—just as we might understand we can’t replicate a relationship with a loved one who leaves us. We can have new relationships, but we’ll never have that one; perhaps because we’re still having it and we’ll always have it. In the case of a real death of a true intimate, I think it’s very rare that we would want to bond again so deeply; instead I think human nature dictates that we involve ourselves more detachedly should we find love again.

Surely, this is true when we stay in metaphoric land. We will not repeat the mistakes we made in a job, say, if we find ourselves suddenly fired from one. In simple terms we might say we won’t let ourselves be hurt that way again. But really, we are inspired to transcend and to invest less personally, next time, in like situations. The pain of losing a job or opportunity is invariably felt by the ego. But herein we learn the lesson of letting go lightly. All that we experience with our senses is impermanent, which is why eastern philosophies often characterize so-called reality as the illusion. What if anything is permanent one wonders. Eternity is the self-evident response, but what is that? Is it something that we can participate in. I would say yes. But you shouldn’t listen to me. You would have to experience such a connection for yourself to know. I suddenly hear a parody of a pharmaceutical company in my head: As your metaphysician if Eternity is right for you. Side effects may include transmuation into pure love and light, transcendence of time and space, expression of your full divine nature, and Oneness.

 In astrology the eighth house rules death, sleep and sex, among other key attributes. Why these three elements hang together is because they fall under the larger concept of regeneration. The diviners of our ancient Zodiac believed death to be a means via which the spirit achieved rebirth, just as sleep rejuvenates the body and sex reproduces life. It does reflect that scientific view of indestructable energy. So I’m going with that. Still we feel the pain of the loss of personal attachment and I don’t believe we’re meant to transcend those feelings completely, especially when we leave the realm of metaphor in considering the message of this symbol. And yet, we must continually make our peace with saying goodbye to the past. And really, who among us is really that good with goodbyes?

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To view the original Sabian Symbol themed 2015 Cosmic Blague corresponding to this day: Flashback! The degree pointof 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

 

Tolkien, Marshmallows and Veronica Lake

Aries 5° (March 25)

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It doesn’t help that it is super dreary here on Cape Cod. We briefly ventured out to deposit some money and to get some things from the pharmacy. Quick, with two pairs of gloves and one mask. Terrence McNally died yesterday. Prince Charles has the virus. I don’t know how this happened so quickly but it is not going to resolve quickly that I can tell you. I will venture out again in a couple of days to get some more supplies in—I am keeping a list. We have to just keep moving the needle under duress. J. seems to feel she had it and that Jess did as well. But there is no way to know because there is no testing. As of yesterday there were thirty cases on Cape Cod, today forty. I just added that new tidbit. I am having trouble focusing that much I know. There is work at hand to do, and I will do it. But I also have a need to massively under-achieve right now. We have our first TV meeting on Friday and I’m very much looking forward to that. I jumped through another major hoop in the book-selling process, yesterday, and I’m hoping it will yield. We spent yesterday late afternoon watching some new episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David being one television character to whom I relate (and Quinn Cox haters—and, oh, there are some—would certainly agree, from their perspective). I had made this giant soup, only, for dinner, so we thought let’s have some cheese and crackers and a little Italian wine we have on hand. Well that became dinner and we fell asleep at around seven in the evening and, though I was up for a little bit around the one o’clock hour, we managed to sleep until four. As horrific as that sounds, we are getting closer to normal schedule. It’s just about ten now and I feel I’m already ready for bed. It will not be another long day I can tell you that. I may have to stock up on some more wine though is the only thing. I decided (after getting to day twenty-three of my thirty day Bikram (Paris) yoga challenge before they shut the studio, and seeing how good it has already done my body, I am going to restart my own thrity-day practice, again for April.

I have so many thoughts swirling around my head. I will write to check in with Jesse. And also to the grant people in Provincetown, just to take their temperature. Bad choice of wording in the circumstance I realize. Anyway I was realizing how this health crisis even changes the way I procrastinate. Or the manner in which I check out. I’m so concerned with keeping my immune system as pumped as possible, I’m only letting myself indulge in the off glass of wine with dinner, before bedtime, which has been before nine o’clock now since I returned back stateside. I am scared like everyone else is; but being a default optimist, I’m not as freaked out as others I know who are darker, generally, even in the best of times. I’m also quite the loner so isolating isn’t that hard for me. I knew there would be an upside to alienating people for most of my adult life! I am (only wishing I were) kidding. Well I feel that might be enough to go on, today. The great thing is that I know the whole world is at a standstill so for the first time in my life I don’t feel like I’m behind the eight ball or in the weeds meeting deadlines. The point is I never am. I need to cut and paste that lesson. I owe it to S. for getting us back home that’s for sure. I wouldn’t have asked for the favors (which were on offer, to be fair she did to bring this about. (Probably stupidly, I would have stayed in Paris.) But I am much more adapted to change, especially on a dime. I came home, unpacked completely, shopped and cleaned, sorted out all the homey stuff, like firewood, dump runs and car maintenance. I haven’t missed a beat with my work, either, really. And so here I am. I even had time to look some things up on Wikipedia today, which form the title of today’s entry.

 The following blocks of texs are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 26-30. I am reading through all my Blagues, five per day, and posting some samples here. Now, in my sixth year of writing this Blague, but the time I get to my seventh, I will have through all the daily Blagues of my first five years. If that’s confusing I apologize:

Just blocks from where I now find myself in Boston is the Hotel Eliot where we had always stayed, for over a decade, whenever we would come to town. In fact the suites there remain the model in my mind for the perfect pied à terre (plus a small separate kitchen), something for which I’m always on the lookout in any of the several cities of the world I fancy living. I think it was the winter of 2004-5, we were staying in town overnight and I had a dream that was seemingly banal but very vivid and thankfully I verbalized it in the morning to Stella or else I would have been stuck in my own head with this happening. I told her upon waking that I had a dream of being in this underground parking lot and there was a small dark indigenous looking man washing a wall with a fire house and that he tried to speak to me but then I woke up. I might have even brought the dream up in context of an ongoing most-boring-dream contest we had with each other and some close English friends, one of whom had a dream she was vacuuming; I had once had a most boring dream that I was sleeping and not dreaming. Think about it.

Anyway, we decided we’d take in a movie after checking out. I believe it was Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, which was playing in Kendall Square which is a very open, unpopulated part of Cambridge, especially in winter, characterized by renovated old warehouse buildings and sparkling new hotels and office buildings. It sort of reminds me of some of downtown Los Angeles. When we got to the theater, which was part of a sort of building complex, it became clear that we didn’t have to find street parking it was provided and we followed the blue P sign. This started leading us down an incline and I got a flash. And then we went over a pretty remarkable bump for which there was no warning, and I turned round to look at what we had run over and it was a meaty fire hose. I immediately broke out in a cold sweat and my heart started racing and I desperately blurted out in rapid-fire machine-gun style: this is the dream; when we get to where we’re parking we will see a small, dark man hosing down a wall and he’s going to want to talk to me and I can’t, I just can’t. “Calm down,” came the response; but I was already in full on panic-attack mode as we circled, down and down, going over another bump. As we turned the corner we saw the doors marked elevator to theater and to our right, for some inexplicable reason, in the middle of winter, the temperatures well below freezing, there was the tiny dark native of somewhere looking man blasting a wall with a  fire hose. As we passed I heard the water turn off. And I repeated: he’s going to want to talk to me we have to get out and just walk really, really fast to the elevator. We parked, and slammed the doors and bee-lined and, of course, after us came the compelling voice in broken English: “Hello, excuse me, please, excuse me, sir, please, hello.”

No effing way. That’s all I could think. Whatever he has to say (for some reason) I do not want to hear it. Move, move, move. I can still see him coming towards us as the elevator doors shut. Now, needless to say I was shaken. First of all, I had never had so vivid or so ridiculously immediate a manifestation of a prophetic dream of this nature. I laughed the dream off as being a contestant for most boring but the moment I knew, upon entering that parking lot, that the dream was being born out in reality it did not exhilarate me, it freaked me the ef out. And yet, I have to say, that this trip to Boston, and we talk about this, ushered in a spate of pretty bad misfortune that lasted more than a few years. As these things go, this period was character building but I still say: we didn’t need it. Regarding the little man so desperately needing to tell me something: I’ve had to live with the fact that I didn’t let him. Sure, at first, it was a very great relief because my instinct was Run. So I felt as if I had dodged a bullet; for awhile. Then it slowly crept in: What if he was trying to tell me something helpful, useful—what if he was trying to warn me about some horrible things on the horizon; and would it have helped to know about them?

I have a mystic friend called Margaret. She douses. That is to say she has a special talisman on a chain that she swings over you via which she reads your energies and removes any unwanted, shall we say, entities. The first thing she told me was that…hmm, I hesitate to write this for some reason…how to say: I have a positive entity that watches out for me and helps clear my path, energetically. She said he was an Indian man with a certain weapon which made me think American Indian for some reason. I never asked which. But then I wondered, sometime later, after the dream cum parking lot incident if she didn’t mean a man from India; because, though I refused to really take a good look at him, it is very possible that the man with the big hose (ha, ha) was Indian and therefore most directly analogous to my description of the dream man being indigenous. I’ll never know. And as the decade marched forward I came to actually regret not stopping and heeding what this creature had to say. I probably would welcome the experience now. But I’m not the same person I was then. And that’s the point. So yes maybe he was going to issue a warning and that’s why today’s oracle seems apt, but I suddenly have another theory.

I wasn’t equipped to handle whatever knowledge or power was going to be imparted—I was not equipped to have my dream of prophesy fully born out. I couldn’t have handled that. It would have been too much. So for the first time in nearly a decade I don’t regret not stopping to listen. I believe I did the exact correct thing. It would have blown my own cosmic circuits perhaps. I didn’t want to know that I possessed such a power. I was scared. And fear can be a great guide. I recognize that over the last decade I’ve slowly accepted that I have certain gifts and I’ve explored them gradually and in a way that has, with a few exceptions, been comfortable and not crazy making. Remember, I had that experience with the superhuman strength and the Sherlock Holmes-like blueprints appearing in my mind, mathematically outlining every physics possibility to every action, back in 1987. That was too much a break with reality as we know it (though it opened me up to other realities) for my tender mind and body at that time. There is a monstrous manifestation of unseen power that can threaten to undo us lest we learn to harness said power in such a way that folds it into our present reality, gently, like whipped egg-whites into batter.

Needless to say I wasn’t in a state of “calm watchfulness” that winter day in question. I mean WTF? who hoses down a wall in freezing weather and why did that man want to talk to me, specifically, so urgently. At that point I had major limits and restrictions and today’s oracle has helped me understand that this was probably a good thing. I don’t think it was safe (for me at that time) to hear what the little man had to say. I’ve encountered little men before, I might add. One of whom spoke in tongues, but that’s another story for another day. Meanwhile, I can’t help think of the little man in the top hat in J.D. Salinger’s Raise High The Roof Beam, Carpenters, as he does suggest a mystical presence which wouldn’t have been lost on Buddy or any of the “Wise Child” Glass children. I know it’s not unusual or a even un-pompous to relate, as I did as a young teen, to members of Salinger’s fictitious family. In my youth I fancied myself something of a Zooey who, despite being one of the brood, embodied a certain skepticism which I now realize was his assured way of hanging onto present reality in a world, and in a family, in which those around him were forever shifting the “limits and restrictions” thereupon. I’ve become less the Zooey as I’ve gotten older and am more the Buddy now, a character, I feel, who operates from that vantage point of “calm watchfulness.” Let us all take a page from Buddy’s book today. Let us be the observer. Let us not leap at opportunities to bite off more power than our fragile psyches can handle,

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I remember some years ago, we accompanied our friend JK Rowling to Harvard where she was giving the commencement speech, which of course was brilliant, and entitled “The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination.” In it she speaks of how what she considered her own epic fail stripped away the inessentials to focusing on the one thing she wanted to do most, write novels. It’s an inspiring read. And it’s most fitting given today’s oracle which asks us to allow loss to inspire our creative imagination. If you’re like me, more than one opportunity pops to mind but, perhaps, also like me, they may be of a piece, falling under a larger umbrella.

I started writing a paragraph about the history of specific failures but deleted it. Seems the wrong tack. But let me cite a few examples: For years we wrote horoscopes for magazines and their websites. It was quite lucrative and was our bread and butter. We had really high-profile gigs like Paris Vogue and The Daily Beast, which never had a horoscope before and not since. But as publishing changed and print magazines began to shrink in size or fold, horoscope pages were the first to go. So the column idea “failed” as a means of income. We thought screw this. We will write a horoscope for free every week and just offer it up as a tithing to people. As a result our weekly Haute Astrology column is very popular and though it doesn’t pay financially I know that it benefits us in other ways; if nothing else it keeps us connected to people interested in our unique perspective on astrology and planet moves.

The failure of our column business—at one point we were writing upwards of six to eight different daily, monthly, weekly horoscopes at one time—also freed us to explore our talents as personal consultants. And now, a decade on, this is the most thriving aspect of our professional lives; and nothing gives us greater joy than helping people in their journey of self-realization. It has also cultivated those extra-sensory gifts of ours to which I’ve alluded in this blog. So that’s a big win-win.

And, speaking about that umbrella under which seeming disparate things might fall: I realized that our nighttime pursuits of performing in clubs and theaters, and even the founding of the Afterglow Festival, which we did in collaboration with John Cameron Mitchell and others, and our quite serious private consultancy with clients all fell under the larger heading of “lifting people’s spirits.” And whenever I feel that I’m wearing too many hats or stretched too thin or teetering into Libran dilletantism I check myself with that phrase. Is what you’re doing lifting spirits? If the answer is yes than I’m on the right track.

We had a decent success in publishing Sextrology and I’m most encouraged by the fact that it still hasn’t achieved its “tipping point”; it’s a boon to know someone hasn’t heard of the book because that is a potential new reader. That book is a success story against all odds. People say publishing has always been a nightmare industry; I entered it with the whole fantasy of getting a great advance and writing out at the beach, which we managed to do. We like to say we got the last real advance in publishing before the polarization occured whereby only celebrities (in whatever field) were given money and others peanuts or worse. But this celebrity obsession is true across the board. And when they are famous for nothing? Why do we care if some junior Kardashian got her lips plumped up amid denials of plastic surgery. It’s like we always want superficial people to complain about. Shouldn’t this sort of thing have ended with guillotine-ing Marie Antoinette? Did I mention Stella is related to she who lost her head?

I’m rambling today. But I don’t care. This subject inspires rambling. Rambling is the form my creative imagination takes. Back to books. We were hardpressed to write a second book. Or as our agent said: “you need a second widget.” I should have known right there that this was a bad idea and ran far, far away. The world had changed. There were no more good advances for the non-famous. What was meant to be a sidebar to Sextrology was then poured into our second book Cosmic Coupling but it was chopped to bits and we weren’t “allowed” to give gay relationship chapters equal length. “The book can’t be too long.” Don’t get me wrong, people love this book, but there is a worlds better version of this concept waiting to be published. But how to do it? Despite the fact that Sextrology is an industry success story, you’re only as good as your last book and our highly abridged sophmore effort (which maybe would have been a huge seller had it contained all the content we intended it to) pales in comparison to Sextrology. Well maybe we should take a page from Amanda Palmer’s (actual) book, The Art of Asking which was her Ted Talk and an art she has perfected, admittedly, amid some rumblings. The point is one might say we have at this junctured “failed” at book publishing or have “missed opportunities” in that field but I don’t think so. I think the way that industry treats non-celebrity writers is criminal and it should inspire my creative imagination to find a way to get our work out there in spite of traditional publishing that takes the lion share of profits. Oh, to be sure, HarperCollins has made millions off of Sextrology and though our royalties are stellare compared to most, we assuredly have not. One silver lining was our “prediction” that ebooks would be a thing and a decade ago we had those rights reverted and recently published the Sextrology ebook under our own steam. #pleasebuythisone

I know we will, via use of creative imagination, find a way to publish the (at least) dozen other books we have on our virtual drawing board. And, in so doing, I have a feeling, we will trailblaze uncharted territory, paving the way for other writers to do likewise. This is a gut instinct. We know where we’re going and so we needn’t be in a a rush to get there.

Television has been another “epic fail” for us. We have been approached by innumerable producers and networks and even Oscar-winning movie stars with their own production companies to develop a show. We also have a menu of ideas for the making of a great one. But oy. Publishing is like a neighborhood playground compared to the snake pit that is the television industry. You’ve seen the program Episodes, right? I wish I could say that the most exaggerated characters on that show were caricatures. They are not. If it’s challenging to retain the integrity of ones work in publishing, it’s near impossible to do so in television where every promising conversation and agreement devolves. It is truly comical. Just this past year, after several years of saying no to offers, after several years before that of “going out”, both in the US and UK, with sure-fire (not) show ideas: we were working with this one production company that swore they were only interested in a classy, elevated, artful concept that we could pitch to some high-class networks only to package the “sizzle” they shot of us to appeal, seemingly, to one TV exec who wanted us to host a late night sex show where we basically critiqued people fucking. Yeah no.

Yet we know that our effort isn’t for naught, just as we know energy can neither be created nor destroyed. It will find an outlet. That will be up to us. Not that either one of us have any burning desire to be on TV—we so don’t. But should the failure of these past approaches creatively inspire another way to represent ourselves, in our best light, in that or a similar medium. Well then yes bring it. I think what we are meant to glean from all of this, actually, is that failure is for winners, only regret is for losers. Dane Rudhyar gives a nod, with this oracle, to the relationship between guru and student whereby the guru sets tasks for the initiate that are designed to fail so that the novice finds a unique inroad born in his or her imagination. I would say that the guru is mimicking the action and purpose of Life and the Universe. If we achieved everything we set our mind to, we would never be inspired and we would never grow. We would never divert from the norm.

Remember how evolution works. There must be a mutation, an offshoot from the norm, via which new life thrives. When we hit a wall, we find a new way around, not just for ourselves but for others too. No is Yes. So next time someone slaps you with the former, hear the latter and find a new way. Yes is the word of creation. When others succeed where you have failed be inspired by them not resentful. When your greatest hopes are dashed realize you’re probably being saved from distress. Other’s success isn’t your success. You can’t have what other people have. You can only have what you have and you can only want what you have. That includes success. You are already successful. Don’t look at the successes you haven’t achieved. Look to the ones you have achieved.

Anything denied you isn’t yours. If it was meant to be it wouldn’t be denied you. You won’t regain that loss. You’ll gain something else. That loss was only meant to inspire your imagination—so-called loss is indeed the most powerful fuel for your imagination. In this way we not only weather, we welcome, it. A closed door of opportunity speeds your path further down that great hall toward rightful success and fulfillment. But that’s the byproduct really. What is being cultivated all the while, during this process, is your unshakable Faith, not only in yourself, but in the workings of the Universe. If you feel you could achieve a) success or opportunity, but find it denied you, why wouldn’t you move to b) or c) all the way to z) and around again to aa)? You had faith in achieving a). Is that all you could achieve? Just a)? No. We don’t keep going back, beating our head against a wall trying to succeed under hardship or duress. Success should be worlds easier than that; so we thank the “loss” of opportunity for saving us the struggle and speeding us toward more natural fits of opportunity where success comes naturally and readily. I don’t know who said this originally but Stella utters this phrase quite a lot: There Is No Loss In Divine Mind.

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…;this is the nightmare of anyone who performs on a stage. Typically it doesn’t include being confronted by the audience, good gods. But the not being prepared part, please. Surely you’ve had some version of this dream. In a way it would almost be a relief to be confronted by the audience. Then you could sort of dialogue about it. But to disappoint an audience and have them sort of politely slink away—”the lighting was nice”—is just the worst. Or is it? My pal Justin Vivian Bond used to advise, and probably still does: “Dare to Suck.” And I gotta tell you those words have buoyed me on a number of occasions when I wasn’t quite sure if my idea of what I could do matched my ability, on stage, or in other settings requiring a leap of faith in myself. Of course it has to be a large audience, as if this wouldn’t be intimidating enough. Some performers I know would just call it an interactive workshop and own the censure as part of the experience. I’m not that clever and I’m way too sensitive. I like to be prepared. And the times that I haven’t been my best on an actual stage or a metaphoric one aren’t my favortie memories. But even they were learning experiences. My most favorite acting teacher of all time (it wasn’t Uta), Edward Morehouse used to warn against trying to wing it. It never works. There is a difference between daring to suck and winging it although, to the untrained audience eye they might be indistinguishable. If I’ve been over tired or over served and didn’t give my best performance on a stage that’s my bad because it was my responsibility to be prepared. If I was indeed prepared and stunk up the joint, well then, my side of the street is clean and I can just shrug that shite off.

Speaking of joints: I used to love to smoke marijuana. It relaxed me. I could do anything while high. Everything except act. I would never in a million years touch the stuff if I were acting in a play. And, in those couple of times I was lucky enough to be on Broadway I saw actors who would be high for rehearsals, if not performances, and it would give me panic attacks; and this was years before smoking pot myself resulted in my own actual panic attacks. Yes, there came a day, one exact moment, when it all turned on a dime and smoking weed switched from encasing me in a giant white comfy cotton ball air-conditioned parka in which I could walk to setting off bright electri red-orange lighted alarms of seizing terror. Just like that. But wait where am I going with this? I think I’m circling back. Am I? Let’s see.

Acting was a craft. It was always sacred to me. And though hardly anybody I now know has ever seen me at my craft, it really was something that I once lived and breathed. And I prided myself on being a good actor because I was always prepared. Always. I employed every fiber of my being with every amount of technique I honed, and that allowed me to fully inhabit characters in a safe, real, open, honest, accessible way. Performing was a different story. And I always made the distinction between when I was acting on a stage and when I was performing on a stage. Doing sketch comedy or improv or singing a song, even, back in the day was performing. Acting was something else. Though I don’t act really anymore—I mostly perform—when I sing now I don’t perform, I act. I wouldn’t be able to stand up and sing any other way, really, because I’m not a singer per se. I absolutely love to sing; but in order for me to sing in front of people I have to prepare the song the way I would take on a role in full-length play. Then what comes out will always be right. Even if it’s wrong it’s right. If I don’t approach a song like it’s a juicy monologue my character is compelled to communicate it falls short. Trust me, I’ve tried. I can’t put a song across on musical chops alone. I’m not an instrument that way.

However, if you know me, or if you’ve been reading this Blague, you might have come to realize that certain forces have been known to move through me. But if that’s ever happened in my work as an actor it would have taken the form of the thinnest membrane because even if I’m playing an out-of-control character, as the actor, the real me, William—not Quinn really—is in full control of what’s happening. But I have had other performance experiences where I’ve been a total instrument for those sometime friends of mine, the unseen forces.

Back in the early 1990s I worked as a waiter at the Bell Caffe on Spring Street, in New York City, while so many of my friends, now, would have been at Don Hills, literally spitting distance away. If you were around there then and remember the Bell, but didn’t realize I worked there, you are probably revising your whole concept of me. And well you should. Because on any given night as your waiter I might have been wearing a vintage micro-mini real Hawaiian print woven cotton bathing suit with oversized workboots, a hooded zip windreaker and some kind of beany as my uniform, and there would have likely been a joint hanging out of my mouth while I was taking your order. I loved waiting tables. Most waiters have nightmares that they can’t keep up with a slew of tables—see, another performance anxiety dream just when you need it—while I would dream that I had to wait on the entire restaurant by myself, which would be a very good dream indeed. Actually I could handle an entire restaurant by myself back in those days. I would love when people wouldn’t show for work. That just meant a bigger challenge to keep the entire restaurant happy and buzzing without missing a beat; and of course more cash for Billy. It is my name don’t wear it out.

So the Bell Caffe would be packed to the rafters with hipsters before there were hipsters. It was a perfect melange of punky, hip-hopping, hippy, biker, fashionista grungesters. You know, the 90s. So of course we had a live middle eastern jazz trance band on Friday nights that would come in and set themselves up in a circle right in the middle of the restaurant through which you already couldn’t walk with any semblance of ease, unless of course you were me, coursing through the place serving up a storm. Against the wall, right near where they circled up, was an old out-of-tune upright piano that looked like it was from, oh I dunno, 1910. I good quarter of the keys didn’t work at all and nobody ever played it. But one night, as the band began to play, people packed in like sardines, a thick cloud of smoke infused with garlic and pot and patchouli and incense and steamed vegetables and sweat and love and coffee and indifference hanging in the air, all my tables happy, nobody wanting for anything: I opened the piano.

I can see the keyboard now, its white keys were, wait, colored?, in my imagination—pink, blue and yellow—the black keys still black; and the music, this exotic form of jazz, was swirling and quickening into an improvisational froth, and the color-coded keys, like the sometime blueprints in my mind, urged my fingers to them in certain combinations. And I began to play. Now, as I child I took piano lessons, but it was all by rote, the Fur Elise, the Sonata in C or whatever—pieces I tried to learn and through which I only ever stumbled. But now I was in it. I was part of the band. And the piano was telling me what to play like a spool in a player piano in reverse. And I just kept forming chords and running up and down the ivories and trilling here and well, to be honest, I’m not really sure what I was doing. I was gone. Gone, daddy, gone. And the song went on forever. And I remember the hangnail I had began to bleed and I could feel the keys missing ivory scraping my fingers with raw wood edges, and on I went and it was wild and spectacular and I came as close to being possessed, and happily so, as I have ever been in my born days. And it got faster. Crescendo. Lightning speed. To beat the band. Like dancing the Alley Cat as a kid. Me and this band behind me, whom I never saw during any of this, together in a fever pitch, faster and faster and faster and then, stop, all together on a single note, done.

I was a bit out of it. Transported. My fellow waitrons were like what the fuck, why didn’t you tell us these past two years working here that you played piano? I don’t. And the band on their feet hugging me and slapping me on the back; and customers, some I knew some I didn’t, asking me when and where I would next be performing; did I have a band? did I play solo? “How can we see you?” You can’t. I don’t exist—this I.

I remember that night flashing back to another night long ago when I was a freshman in high school inappropriately attending a party of seniors where there was a band made up of bad-ass graduates who were never going to college. I was some version of drunk I’m sure; but very lucid, I recall. Still I had the pluck to join the band’s open invitation to anybody, anybody who would like to come up a sing Sweet Home Alabama. Yes that’s right. I started too high. I was in that weird strained part of my voice the whole time. However, I was working it. Showmanship up the wazoo. The full on Mick Jagger cum Bowie, with maybe some Tina thrown in, experience as applied to a Southern rock song. Sure, why not. Except that people were absolutely appalled. I would go so far as to say livid actually. When you’re fourteen giving raw androgyne glam to a room full of long-haired nineteen year olds who spent all four years of high school in auto shop, and their girlfriends for whom feathered roach clips are the de rigeur hair accessory in 1977, it’s a bit awkward to say the least. People may have thrown things. If not bottles then at least they flung the liquid contents at me. I was a shaking outcast as I left the “stage” any liquid bravado that had gotten me up there having evaporated in my spine. And then this girl grabbed me. I forget her name. But she was one of those sort of earth-shoe stoner girls, hair too thick and kinky to work a feathered roach clip. “You were great” she said, and it was clear she meant it. I began to mumble some kind of disclaimer but she interrupted me. “I know, I know”, referring to the popular opinion of my performance, banishing that pervasive thought-form with a dismissive wave of her hand and a modified Bronx cheer. “These people don’t know anything; that was great, that was truly great.”

So what have we got? We have me being possessed by the spirit of some piano jazz great; and me being universally reviled but for one individual dissenting from the Large Audience Confronting The Performer. In neither case was I prepared. When I took over one of the three roles I was understudying in a Broadway production of The Seagull back in the early 90s for a few weeks, I was on stage a good amount but basically had one key line. I was universally praised for what was considered my compelling albeit silent physical life on stage; and yet Jon Voight, who was in the cast, would come to my dressing room after the show to give me a line reading or make comment on my tone, projection or modulation (on my one line!). It was so embarrassing and so infuriating. And being a sensitive young soul I thought well he must be “representing” everyone in the production and he’s been elected to come and correct me. I am ruining the entire three act play with my two dozen syllables. I wasn’t. He was just a blowhard. And apparently he is notorious for giving other actors line readings. He’s like Cloris Leachman with a overlarge dinner plate for a face and a penis that creates incestuous offspring. Gosh that felt good to say. But I am aware that I am being self indulgent in this reading of today and storytelling without much exploration of how this oracle applies to all of us. Or am I performing for a Large Audience and have I Disappointed Its Expectations. You decide.

The Bell Caffe had let me take a hiatus while I did The Seagull. And when I first went on as The Cook for the great actor and artist John Beale, Stella was attending the wedding of our closest friends, in France. The wonderful Maryann Plunkett who was in the cast made a very sweet announcement wishing me luck over the loudspeaker that piped into the dressing rooms—something I shall never forget—and after the curtain I was so keyed up with nobody to celebrate with or vent on. So I called the owner of the Bell, Krt Williams, from the backstage payphone! to see if he and other staff were still hanging out and could I come down for a drink and unwind because I was so shot through with adrenalin I could have scaled the Empire State Building. He said they were. Great. I cabbed it down to Spring Street. Meanwhile Krt had gone around to every table in the still packed restaurant telling all the customers—eek gads I’m getting teary—that I’d just gone on in this role. So when I walked into the Bell the entire room shot to their feet and applauded my entrance. I can’t tell you how amazing that felt. It was like being in an old 1930s movie. But I’m still on about me, aren’t I?

The oracle, the oracle: Preparation. That’s the key element. We can’t just be hopeful. We can’t leave it to chance. We can’t expect to be possessed of a spirit. And we can’t hang our hopes on the exceptions to the rule—we have to consider the Large Audience, which symbolizes everybody, really, all of humanity. All the world is a stage. We are all players. Everybody else is the Audience. We all have a part to play and we better know that shite cold. We have Responsibility, literally: ability to respond. To what? Our purpose and our calling, so many of the themes we’ve been touching on thus far as we cycle through these Sabian Symbols. Great expectatons and Hope are not enough. So we are Confronted with the fact that we have promised more than we’ve delivered. Hope, Promise, Deliverance—these are all themes of the sign of Cancer which, in my estimation, governs this oracle. After the Fall of Gemini (duality) as befitted yesterday’s oracle on failure, we have the Flood of Cancer, the cardinal-water sign, with its’ ark (promise) to carry us to a new shore (deliverance); but it isn’t automatic, we have to prepare the vehicle for our own deliverance. Everybody, all of mankind and all life depends on our putting in that work. And, really, if it’s going to rain for forty days and forty nights you might as well stay in, put your head down, power through, and prepare! So here, as this oracle says, we haven’t done so, and we are going to be read hard by a critical mob. Good. At least the mob has the courtesy to read us instead of flinging rotten tomatoes or complimenting us on our costume with a forced smile. I think that Large Audience, as daunting as they are, are doing us a big favor. If they’re taking the time to critique us we are probably being given another chance to deliver. If they care enough to tough love us in this way then they must have seen a glimmer of hope that we do possess the right stuff to deliver. Dane Rudhyar says it comes down to “how to handle this situation.” Indeed. I think slapping on the notion of “It” being a workshop is a good one. Yes we are performing and though we mightn’t be prepared, we are preparing. And guess what, Large Scary Audience, you’re all a part of it. Maybe Jon Voight was right, maybe my tone was off, maybe he was trying to help me, maybe he’s not a face-plate after all, maybe I really learned something via his criticism, and maybe I did appreciate the fact he cared enough to come to me and try to help me. It could just as easily be that as it could be he’s a blowhard. The perception is better for me. Forget about him or any audience. What reparations are we willing to make in the process? None? Okay, then, good luck with that. But don’t expect an Audience to care enough next time to Confront you. Meanwhile it’s your responsibility to deliver; to get the job done. It’s your sacred duty to be the best most prepared You you can be. We are recovering, repairing and being delivered all the time. Every day some Audience has something critical to say; and the truth is we can always benefit from said criticism. There is always something we can learn from it. Even if the lesson in patience in enduring the criticism and still looking at that critic as a teacher, a guru. You have high expectations of others to deliver. Why shouldn’t they have high expectations of you. Maybe they think you are capable of meeting them. Isn’t even their disappointment a compliment when you think about it? Think about it. And once you have: come back more prepared and show us what you got!

 

 

To view the original Sabian Symbol themed 2015 Cosmic Blague corresponding to this day: Flashback! The degree pointof 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

As Best I Can

Aries 4° (March 24)

 

Celeriac. It's What's For Dinner

Celeriac. It’s What’s For Dinner

Another weird night of sleep with blocks of hours staring at the ceiling. We are ticking off the days in this fortnight from the last moments when we could have been infected. I made a menu which I hope will last for the next ten days. This way we can avoid interaction as much as possible with the outside world. In the meantime I will wash my latex gloves (not a sentence I ever expected to write). I heard back on the branding project and will invoice that today. I will get to the bank and mechanics today after I assess the state of my ancient vehicle. I will make a celeriac soup for dinner tonight, after some caviar omelets with avocado vinaigrette for lunch. I need to order more wood which means contacting the farmer to move stones he has in the way of vehicle pulling in. I will make hot drinks. I will binge watch Curb Your Enthusiasm and read my book. I will gather all the materials for the branding project. I will isolate and hope for outcomes of positive introspection. I will do my best to understand. I wrote to DD. I will not get a response. I am lucky that I am in a sparsely populated place. I will still need to get some answers and to pose some questions. I am realizing that I have a great deal of material for another project I can propose and I may do exactly that. I reached out for times to speak to the television writer and have some templates regarding podcast pitches to take a look at. I will read the worldometer.

 The following blocks of texs are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 21-25. I am reading through all my Blagues, five per day, and posting some samples here. Now, in my sixth year of writing this Blague, but the time I get to my seventh, I will have through all the daily Blagues of my first five years. If that’s confusing I apologize:

Upon arriving in America for the first time and asked by journalists what she thought the most important thing in life was, Madame De Gaulle said “Happiness”. Now remember, she was French, with a very thick accent, and she would have pronounced the word with a silent H.; so, you can imagine what those journalists thought she was actually answering…

The motto “I believe” belongs to the sign of Pisces, the womb-tomb of the zodiacal twelfth house of non-material “spiritual” existence. From that womb we emerge again into Aries, whose motto is “I am.” So too does manifestation, existence ascend from the vaporous mists rising off Pisces’ primordial soup. Belief and Imagination are as interwoven as that of the sign’s Fish. Belief is the knowledge than anything you imagine can be made manifest, no matter how impossible it might seem. We never lose our ability to experience life at the pure energetic, non-material or “spiritual” level, but our facility in doing so is immediately bred out of us at birth. So to fire on both cylinders, living a terrestrial and spiritual life at once, we must acknowledge and claim this dormant ability in us. Sometimes we are called to do so. Perhaps yesterday’s cornucopia shaped curtains were something of a calling.

I’m not talking about religious life here. I’m speaking of experiencing life on the level of pure belief, imagination and magic. To understand the world as both a physical place set like a gem in time, and also as wholly energetic experience that is beyond time and space. So many great scientists, let alone mystics—although I’m always most interested in those in whom the twain shall meet—have meditated or stared into space or at a dirty wall to “come up” with their greatest ideas, theories or breakthroughs. Come up from where? Exactly. To gain experience at two levels of being: That phrase alone implies a sort of internship or apprenticeship. We are not being asked to walk on water or turn it into wine. We might just imagine what it would take to do such things. We might only be asked to believe that such things are possible. Or to take a less Christ-y tack, we might explore how science fiction of the past becomes science fact in the present. So what might we imagine, here and now, in our non-material fiction that might some day manifest as fact?

I think of the X-Men because, well, we know that we are indeed evolving and that evolution actually happens via mutation. The freak, the quirk, the deviation is what spearheads a new pathway for life to survive. The avant garde becomes the old guard. The freaky voice in the wilderness, John the Baptist, the Waterbearer (Aquarius) paves the way for the new messiah, the Jesus Fish (Pisces), who told the doubting Thomas that you have it backwards if you need to see to believe. JC was all about believing to see! And look, since we are all evolving, I’d like to believe that my personal evolution is characterized by the endowment of certain abilities in which I must believe in order to embrace, access and utilize them. If I didn’t believe in what might be deemed my own psychic abilities I sure as hell wouldn’t be able to employ them. If I didn’t believe in synchronicity as a certain synching up of these two levels of being I wouldn’t recognize and experience their astounding reassurance and, as the Cosmic Blague suggests: humor.

I have a funny story: We had written Sextrology and was promised, even shown a marketing plan that included a multi-city tour of book signings. Well just after the book came out the head of marketing quit at Harper Collins and she had fabricated this entire tour—none of the bookstores at which we had scheduled appearances had even been contacted. Being a corporation run by the devil (Rupert Murdoch) our publishers and editors made up all kinds of excuses for this and tried to sweep the whole thing under the rug. But, if you’ve met us, you’d know that doesn’t fly. After tearing the glib, smug PR and other people involved in the fictious promotional tour of our book new ones, I petitioned the publisher for a budget, which we received (it wasn’t a lot) and we launched our own mini tour that included Book Soup in LA and Booksmith in San Francisco. At Book Soup a coven of witches came to our event and bought a book for their “friend Tori” who turned out to be Tori Amos who then wrote (in her book Piece by Piece) how our book inspired the writing of her song “Goodbye Pisces” which Stella has been known to perform. But it gets weirder, which we love right?

In San Francisco we were interviewed by the Chronicle by a fantastic journalist who really understood what we were on about and wrote about us in a very respectful manner that really set the tone for other newspapers and magazines to take us and our subject seriously. Then, at Booksmith, we didn’t realize that this venerable bookseller has the tradition of making “author trading cards”; so there we were, a stack of Starsky + Cox cards, each with our picture on one side and vital statistics about us on the other. Having never been the type of boy who collected baseball cards my closest point of reference was Partridge Family cards which I did obsessively collect, as I did Wacky Packs, to whom I submitted a number of suggestions (I was already branding) some of which they actually used, though I can’t remember what they are anymore. Oh, wait, Poopsie instead of Pepsi was one!

So morning after the Booksmith event it was time to head to the airport to fly back east. And we were staying at a sister hotel to the Triton, the name of which escapes me, and they had piped in music in the rooms which you could turn down of course. We were running a bit late and Stella was downstairs dealing with checkout while I finished packing and I turned up the music for some added pace and motivation when suddenly I Woke Up in Love This Morning by The Partridge Family came blaring through the speakers. I couldn’t wait to tell Stella this had happened thinking that was the end of the synchronicity. It wasn’t. For, at the airport, through check-in and, now, at the gate I needed to hit the mensroom and who should be walking in at the same time also heading to the urinals? Well Brian Forster who played (the second) Chris on The Partridge Family of course. So as we’re peeing, I am thinking how do I say all this and not seem like a crazy person. Somehow I managed to let out two streams simultaneously, the obvious one, and one made up of short, succinct sentences that managed to hit the important points: author, Booksmith, trading cards, Partridge Family, I Woke Up in Love This Morning, now him. (Did you know that Brian Forster is Charles Dicken’s great-great-great grandson?) As we zipped he said those three magical words: “That’s So Weird”. I know!

I remembered, hey, I have my trading cards on me. Of course after washing and drying my hands and hearing how Brian lived in the Bay Area and was a race car driver and something of a techie, I handed him a Starsky + Cox trading card and said, here, as someone who collected your trading cards it would be a hoot if you take one of ours.

Okay, holy crap. I just went to Wikipedia to check to see how many great-great’s Brian is from grandfather Charles Dickens….and get this people…..TODAY is his birthday. The synchronicity continues!!!

 

To view the original Sabian Symbol themed 2015 Cosmic Blague corresponding to this day: Flashback! The degree pointof 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

Reckoning Ball

Aries 3° (March 23)

 

Book of the Week

Book of the Week

The Monday to beat all Mondays: Typically it when we crank up the old machinery, and this week it is that times a million. This is the first Monday back in the States since we flew out on Christmas. Last night was a little different in terms of sleep. I did again wake at two in the morning but only stayed up until four and then slept another ninety minutes; but I had taken a nap in the day for a couple of hours and so the whole of yesterday—the third day of just a few hours per night sleeps—was mainly spent in bed, when not cooking or eating. And from the state of reverie and what is meant to be a healthful and preventative retreat, I awake today with more resolve then I’ve felt in a very long time. And with kindness I need to assert my agenda. This might be boring for you but I’m going to use today’s Blague intro, here, as a sort of real and metaphorical to-do list, in no certain order:

Stop trying to get blood from stony-faced people who don’t reciprocate and value me/you in the manner you (have) value(d) them (and also stop valuing them so much, maybe?). Get on the phone to get your car windshield fixed this week, without exception. Finish putting together the planet moves for next year’s books. Check on current book sales. Send S. thoughts on what we might offer or not in regard to books. Circle back and let Meg know we have returned. Get on the phone to the car mechanic. Finish plotting the planet moves for 2021. Set up a time to talk to TV writer in Dublin. Get info on podcasts. Try not to murder windshield replacement people when they text you that they can’t help after they caused your car to leak. Have a good follow up conversation with them and get more facts. Write to invoice on a branding project. Look up testing for Covid-19 on Cape Cod. Hear from the mechanic that he will info gather on the subject of fixing the car. Find out that all body shops and mechanics are closing in any case until further notice. Hear back from two interested publishers with questions, one of which we understand and will answer, one of which we do not and will not in all likelihood. Call the transfer station to find out how to use it without the car with the sticker—they are not even checking anybody coming in at this point. Reactivate my chart account at the hospital. Make a whole bunch of food for the week. Read the next group of Blagues.

 The following blocks of texs are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 16-20. I am reading through all my Blagues, five per day, and posting some samples here. Now, in my sixth year of writing this Blague, but the time I get to my seventh, I will have through all the daily Blagues of my first five years. If that’s confusing I apologize:

So it’s not just me seeing them. Phew. Actually, I saw them as a child (as did a tall Baroness I know), an experience that peaked at the turn into adolescence, and, yes, it was typically around sunset, in Spring or Autumn, when they’d come to light, peeking out from their habitats, usually below exposed roots at the bottom of hillsides, along a creek. That’s where I sensed them most. I kind of love this supernatural oracle happening on Easter because, really, I don’t know what’s wilder, a savior rising from the dead, or hmm-hmms (as we call them in our house) going about their biz. Today’s symbol points to our ability to attune with nature and the power of unseen forces. Way ahead of you.

I know Stella will think of Ireland. We got lost in the West one day, where the road signs were suddenly all in Gaelic. We kept going in circles and we knew we were being toyed with by the hmm-hmms (we dare not use their real names); so we employed a trick we learned from the film Hear My Song, ever seen it? You should: We pulled the car over and turned our shirts inside out and started on the road again, and around the very first curve, we were stopped in our tracks. I kid you not: Standing along the road, some holding hands, were what appeared to be seven children, the “oldest” of whom was, I’d say, ten years old, tops. And they were all in order according to height, the littlest one appearing to be about two. And get this: in their non-clutched hands they were holding tiny metal tools. That’s right. A little spade, a tiny axe, wee mallets, all very antique looking. These “children” were positively diminutive, as if ancient Pictish blood ran strong in their veins, the oldest tallest boy, one would imagine, being an Owen Meany of sorts, compared with those his age. And how to describe their faces. Like slices of strawberry shortcake. Big round white poreless faces with cheeks shot through with ruddy flushes, not chubby but wide with strong broad cheekbones, their some dark and some sandy hair swooping across their brows, stuck, sweaty, to their skin. Because apparently they were working. And they seemed to be waiting for us, because they flagged us down, not we them.

We cautiously rolled down the car window and a collage of curious heads came into frame. “Are you lost?” Asked the boy whose button-down shirt was tucked taut into his trousers hitched by a thick leather belt, the skin of his lower calf exposed where his socks had fallen down and his pants had grown too short—as if that were possible. All their shoes and socks were muddy and they smelled of grass and peat. None of the others uttered a sound, as if they were one collective organism, clinging here and there to itself, with one workable mouthpiece, the others appearing to be purposefully shut tight. We explained that yes we were lost and told them where we were trying to head. And the boy wiped his Dondi swoop of hair from out his crystal blue eyes, a trait the collective shared, and said “Now…” launching into a series of directives pinioned with Gaelic names of this cnoc or that beleach. Glazing over at the musical guidance, we didn’t jot anything down, but just took it in, until the medusa of dirty, sweet, sweaty, and some snotted, faces all began to smile gappily, and nod their noggins, only one of which, apparently, was capable of thinking in English, we were sent on our way, the wee ones waving, again draped in a line across the road, holding hands and tools, in our rearview mirror.

We flipped our shirts inside out and we summoned a whole gaggle of children, like seven dwarves or rather hmm-hmms hi-ho’ing off to work. Later in our journey we ended up at an old estate that had been turned into a beautiful inn, on a cool blue lake over which we glided in antique rowboat, and with a delicious restaurant on the premises that served world class cuisine. Our waitress, we will never forget, was called Bridget; and she was almost as tiny as the leader of that merry band we earlier encountered on the road. She had minute hands and that white-light clairvoyant far-away look simple, special peoplepossess. We have ever since thought of her as Saint Bridget, an ancient Pict of a little person over whose head our sophisticated jokes might fly, as she innocently and benignly smiled at us and served us over the course a few days with her contemplative mien. She might have been a young auntie to those children along that lush country road, they were so similar in look, with the same flushed cheeks and damp brow; and one could easily expect that at some point during her visits to our table she wouldn’t be bringing a smoked fish appetizer or a cheese course but matter-of-factly displaying a freshly materialized stigmata.

The name of the inn was Ard Na Sidhe which translates, but exactly, to Hill of the Fairies.

———

Our dearest friends bought us a hammock as a house-warming present when we first moved to Cape Cod. And we did indeed stretch it between two trees. And, though bitter sweet to think of it now, that image is never truly far from my mind. I would put the hammock out in the morning and go about my busy day, knowing, at any point, I could stop and just stare up through the trees. It’s an image of savasana, the “dead body pose” where one gets most benefit from lying completely still, letting the body absorb the action performed in other active postures. We have to know when to let the body’s intelligence take over, and mindfully release all our tension, which can be an obstacle to natural recuperation. In Bikram, one does savasana pretty much after every set of every posture. There is a natural rhythm to it, where you exert effort and then receive the benefit of it. The hammock reminds us, in the midst of our busy life, that it is unnatural not to include repose in the process of our industry.

We need to feel the magic of life today, so the slings, arrows and rotten tomatoes you might be ducking can be viewed as inspiration to take a flight of fancy. When we’re feeling down or persecuted we can overcompensate, in a good way, reaching heights we never would have achieved if all was going swimmingly. “No Manure No Magic” was the theme of that great film I Heart Huckabees by that awful human being David O. Russell—and I say awful from first-hand experience. Being pushed to new heights by negative experience, even abuse, was the theme, too, of the recent film Whiplash, but sometimes abuse is just abuse, like Russell in the below clip with Lily Tomlin during the filming of Huckabees. You’ve probably seen this? He’s such an asshole.

But there are a lot of assholes out there. In fact, sometimes, you can see nothing but them. It’s always about money and status. That’s what’s usually driving the mean-spirited of the world. And living in a culture where social and financial competition are so prevalent can really wear on a kind person who isn’t designed to approach life as if it’s some kind of fight for fame or money. Not to say that success isn’t a goal for kind, compassionate people who might be more type B. It’s just that in a world filled with so many grabby sharks running rough shod over others, those who are quietly and selflessly getting their life are obscured by those who are more cut-throat Machiavellian in nature. But you can comfort yourself with the knowledge that those people rarely experience any magic at all. How can they? Their vision of life is too myopic, fixed on their own narrow need to succeed. And it’s a disease. Enough is rarely enough for people for whom life is a competition on every seeming level.

Up until recently I maintained a (one-sided) friendship with a fellow who had become fairly successful in business. We knew each other when we worked at restaurants in the late 1980s in Boston, when I was fresh out of college; and circumstance threw us together once again and it seemed that Fate had more in store for us to work through together. Well, what struck me about this person was his compulsive need to play games, actual ones, nearly incessantly, and his sinister desire to win at them, which he would cheat to do at the drop of a hat. He approached life and human interaction the same way. If he differed with you on a matter of opinion, he would go to great lengths to try to discredit your position, subjective though the challenge may be, because he had to win every argument. He had to be right about everything. This tenacity in competition masked a serious lack of confidence, of course; and resulted, too, in overt social climbing and an increasingly superficial character. Gaining the reputation for being condescending and cruel, he systematically alienated friend after friend over the years, the only people remaining in his life being those in his employ or ones who feel that somehow his worldly success will rub off on them; so they suffer his abuses for that sake. It is a losing battle.

There is a difference between those who may be your enemy and those who are your nemesis. The goddess Nemesis, was that of divine retribution. And in life we may view others as nemesis when they represent the non-you; when we might silently whisper to ourselves “there but for the grace of god(s) go I.” People and circumstance that we deem negative, or blatantly negating, are our cue to go higher, despite the pleasing worldly trappings they represent, or indeed due to them. The “Magic Carpet” of Oriental Imagery, is that of our own mind’s ability to imaginatively transcend the world of appearances and its dualistic dynamics of illusory hierarchies and terrestrial competition. We give over to the knowledge that there is more to life than that, and we leave it to the unimaginative minds to fight for scraps on the ground as we go rise up. The Oriental Imagery points to geometric patterning as figurative portrayals do not factor into Arabian art. And so we know that the carpet is woven with our own abstract designs for living, our thought forms making up the fabric on which we may soar. We’ve been dealing with a great deal of weaving metaphors these past several days and it all seems to add up to taking flight now on what we’ve fabricated for ourselves. We must detach (with love) from static situations and allow our dreams to manifest more fully in our waking life, letting those choosing to play on the ground amass and hoard all their earthly riches and rewards like dragons bound up by avarice and self-loathing, ever fearful that their treasures will be taken away. Those who live in constant fear of being cheated or taken advantage of are always those who cheat and take advantage of others.

But we have the ability to transcend notions of competition and contention; there is nothing holding us down but attachment itself. We don’t need anything. And once we feel we do we risk being incarcerated by that need. Today we are reminded that there is no strife if we don’t struggle. We can’t hang on to anything in the end, so why would one seek to do so in the process of life. We must let go loosely, all the time, not only of material things but of our limiting thoughts. King Solomon had a flying carpet with which he could transport his entire retinue; and yet, if he exhibited excess hubris, the carpet would give a shake and scores of his people would fall to their demise. Pride is forever threatening to bring about our falls. Dragons get slain, the greedy miser loses all he loves. The flight of the Magic Carpet is a selfless one. I liken this image to a lucid dream. When we awake into a dream, knowing we are dreaming, we are tempted to make something we want happen, but expressions of selfish want dissolve the dream. If we are aware we are lucidly dreaming, the way to keep the dream alive is to relinquish any need to impose our wants on it and to, simply, go along for the ride. This is challenging of course but worth the non-effort.

Life is truly but a dream so it’s more than mere metaphor to extend the notion into life. Magic is belief in the unfolding. How can we participate in life’s unfolding if we are viewing life as a competition we must manipulate and “win”—that is anti-life. So step off and hop on the magic carpet of your own soaring participation in life as a dream. Be swept away on the winds of your total faith and belief in the power of your own imagination and design as it is one and the same as that of the divine plan unfolding its patterns. Let go of your wants and so-called needs that keep you in static status quo. And by all means take a road trip of sorts if you can, even if it’s a short hop and a skip to stare at something scenic, or an inner voyage, closing your eyes, allowing your mind to wander, perhaps, through an inky landscape of twinkling stars, feeling yourself fly through outer space to the farthest reaches of the cosmos. Let yourself go.

 

To view the original Sabian Symbol themed 2015 Cosmic Blague corresponding to this day: Flashback! The degree pointof 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

Strike A Repose

Aries 2° (March 22)

 

Well another night where we awoke at two thirty in the morning and then stayed up. The jet lag will cease and in the meantime it matters little as there is no place to go. I did my best garde manger of the pantry, fridge and freezer, and we have enough in house to stretch out over the next ten days probably. That’s all I’m going to say about that as I don’t feel that the constant narrative is helping anybody right now. So: Of all the people I know I am the fastest to reacclimate post travel. I have fully unpacked and am prepared to start my work day tomorrow; by the same token I have shopped and cleaned and will spend the afternoon setting up meals (soups and stews, mainly) for the week ahead. I am concerned about creative projects and there is surely no way to begin fundraising while we are in this situation. I actually had an artist whom I was planning on presenting reach out to me to try to pin me down on dates and their demands. I found it rather unbelievable. People are literally dying and this individual wants firm assurances. It is mind boggling. Anyway here I am still talking about it. Hard to turn the corner when the corner hasn’t been turned. And when you live in a country where the leadership no longer cares about the well-being of its people? That was my argument for staying put in France; the only thing is we are not their people. So, despite the fact this government has abandoned the safety and welfare of its populations, at least I live in Massachusetts where, despite there being a Republican governor, the state institution itself does value the health of its people. I will be the corner and the turn I suppose. I just want to help other people, now that I’m settled (and safe? I dunno) here at home. Stepping up the contributions as best we can being there for the other folks. Making sure the people reach out and ask any questions they might want or need. Maybe set up a day a week where people can send chart info or some such. Whatever we can help with. Doing a little Cosmic Clinic of sorts. We will be talking about pod casts in any case as the days unfold.

 

 The following blocks of texs are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 11-15. I am reading through all my Blagues, five per day, and posting some samples here. Now, in my sixth year of writing this Blague, but the time I get to my seventh, I will have through all the daily Blagues of my first five years. If that’s confusing I apologize:

 

Seven years before Graydon Carter and Vanity Fair published the storyon Scientology’s search for a wife for Tom Cruise, the magazine included us in their “L.A. Intelligence Report” in the Vanities section in the front of the book. To be fair, it is a tongue-in-cheek page that mixes fact with fiction. Although, in our case, it was mostly fiction. First of all we don’t live in Los Angeles. Anyway, we were deemed “Psychics to the Stars” and one category in the chart-format piece was “Skeleton in Closet”. They said that ours was “Scientology referral swaps”. This immediately made us uneasy. And then came the questions all on the theme of “is this true?”; and despite putting out a statement that none of it was, our business is built upon a real consultancy with real paying clients, most of whom would not be comfortable if we were actually in bed with that awful cult.

I wrote Graydon Carter a letter pointing out the problem. He refused to print any kind of apology or retraction which, to be honest, I didn’t expect. His editors were vaguely sorry, especially Matt Tyrnauer who actually availed himself of guidance from Starsky + Cox on a regular basis, and yet, as often happens in this situation, we seemed to be personae non grata for speaking up about it. As if we should be so lucky to have any mention at all by Vanity Fair. But I do think the magazine was concerned with the legality of the situation, printing something not only untrue but potentially damaging. I then received a letter from Graydon’s office barely apologizing for any distress this had caused and how they planned to make it up to us with the publishing of our next book, which they would champion. They never did. In fact, they pretty much cut off all communication with us. Scientology calls it: To Disconnect. As a Ruler of a Nation, in this case a sensational magazine which is indispensable on long flights, Graydon Carter is well aware of his power, but perhaps he understimates the abuses thereof. When he raised the ire of Scientology, himself, I thought there was something karmic in it. The cult of celebrity vs. the cult to end all cults. If only.

I was thinking this morning, after seeing a familiar character on social media go off on the notion of celebrity that: My sense is that the down-and-out characters that are always complaining about the famous would leap at the opportunity to be a revolting celebrity themselves given half the chance. Ego is ego. Whether you’re a bubble-headed (booby) booby like pick-a-Kardashian-any-Kardashian or a poverty-loving misanthrope whose always pooh-poohing these people, you’re basically the same thing in my book: not a wild goose. The goose isn’t silly, it’s the emblem of constancy, something I find is pretty rare in people in a larger social context but also in intimate bonds. The upshot being that the true gooses really distinguish themselves. Those are the companions in life whom we should value and emulate.

Venus is the planet of union, its energy being attractive. I like to imagine those geese in the sky giving us a V for that planet of love. When we are unified, in romantic, familial, fraternal, brotherly or sisterly love, in that V-formation, we are equals and in the proverbial It together, whatever obstacles or hardships may come. Indeed we are more able and even willing to accept what comes our way because it would be for no lack of love or protection. It’s only when we feel abandoned that we might act out in an abandoned way. Life is a journey and it sucks thinking you’re always having to be on it alone or worse, in competition with others. Besides a single year in little league, I never played on a team; I went to a huge college and mainly lived off campus; I haven’t worked more than probably a total of two years, my whole life, in an office, on a team; and those who know me will tell you. I have no family to speak of. So this aspect of life is something I really have to work at as it doesn’t come easy. I do tend to isolate and I have a morbid fear of cliques let alone cults. It is nice to have a V-formation of loyal loved ones in your life, but it really isn’t something you can manufacture—it is something which comes naturally, if we are fortunate enough to have found true birds of a feather with which to flock.

Ten years ago when Stella and I would perform shows and describe, with tongue in cheek, how it is we descend from a long line of mystics who were forever antithetical to the Lizard Kings who’ve controlled everything for eons, from the banks, to governments, to all the media, people would laugh in that sort of-you-guys-are-so-wacky type of way. Fast forward to the present and those same jokes aren’t as ha-ha funny because they ring more absolutely true. So, why does the bomb go unexploded? Fear. Fear that a motorcade of shiny black American made cars all being driven by Hugo Weaving with an earpiece is going pull up outside your house and you’ll be gently but firmly escorted away. It’s not going to happen. Probably. But, just a hair’s breadth of possibility of something like that happening is enough to keep most people’s revolutionary spirits in a perpetual state of nondetonation. Thus the metaphor of social protest isn’t just a metaphor at all, but let’s take a closer, personal look at today’s oracle:

Oftentimes, when we want to break out and break down our own old orders, such urges are often accompanied by visions of dancing on the table tops in a Parisian restaurant, well past closing with a bacchanal of wildly imaginative artists and intellectuals and fashion models and a winning football team, and of course Bryan Ferry is there, paying the tab, and hailing us cabs to whisk us off to a club privé for more dancing or to a gleaming all-night Champs Élysées brasserie for tiered platters of lobster, crab, oysters and assorted winkles . Okay maybe that’s just my vision but, when we get itching for a new order, we don’t often experience our desire for change as a safe, slow, barely perceptible shifting of a paradigm; we envision it as explosive and entailing a good blow out to mark our revolutionary change. That is how Dionysus archetypally lives in us. And this is why the detonation is thwarted. Our revolutionary motives are wildly inspiring, and they will inevitably surface in establishing a new order, but it does have to happen slowly over time, in fact. A violent reactionary move against the present order we’ve set up for ourselves would be retaliated upon by the police-state part of our own psyche, and it might actually set back our cause. The explosion is an adolescent bucking of our own inner authority; we don’t need it; we have more mature ways of instituting change, even the radical kind.

Oh and do remind me to tell you the stories, sometime, of when I was whisked off, on separate occasions, by different football teams, one Italian and one French, to some crazy doings at some wild establishments, both of which were on the Champs Élysées!

 

 

To view the original Sabian Symbol themed 2015 Cosmic Blague corresponding to this day: Flashback! The degree pointof 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

And We’re Back

Aries 1° (March 21)

2000xxs

Needless to say I have never flown on a private jet as such. I have been on private jets, arranged by the same angelic friends who arranged our flight yesterday, just to get some short distance. But I think I just experienced a once in a lifetime thing: S. and I flying across the Atlantic on a plane that can seat twelve, with just a pilot, a first officer and a flight attendant. It was the smoothest flight I’ve ever taken and I didn’t have a single moment of anxiety as I have had on tinier jets and, certain, on jumbo ones, packed in like sardines. I cannot fathom the extent of the generosity with which this gift was given except to say that, would the circumstances have been reversed, I/we would have done the same for these very good friends of ours. Still it is gobsmacking to say the least. The terminal at Stanstead was Harrods Aviation. Like Harrods, with items for sale in the lounge from the shop. Even the tickets put on our luggage say Harrods. It was surreal. The captain came into the lounge to apologize. He was American and later said he was an army brat who grew up all over, which is exactly what Kirby, our flight attendant, said. Kirby was a trip. A gay silver fox who seems to be a devout Episcopalian, and we know this because, in discussing the corona virus, which we are trying to escape, he recounted going to church recently and taking the body of Christ. S. thought that made him Catholic but I was like uh-uh, he’s from the deep South, his name is Kirby, he is in no way a Catholic, which proved correct. I was on super light Bloody Mary’s until I was brought one I couldn’t drink as it tasted like Jet Fuel not Greygoose, and switched to a little wine to accompany lunch which for S. was chicken Saltimbocca and for me a Shepherd’s Pie. Kirby made up a bed for her and she went to lie down in back, though apparently didn’t sleep at all, as I watched Rocketman and then Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Both were pretty good, the latter being less enjoyable ironically.

And before you knew it there we were landing in Boston. It was almost hard to say goodbye to these people who personified our return. We were shocked at how hot and crowded the airport was and a bit guilty that we were being ushered by border patrol agents through passport control and then through a CDC checkpoint. They took S.’s temperature which was lowish and didn’t even take mine at all which was totally random. Meanwhile, leaving London, they had swabbed me randomly for traces of explosive. We felt a bit guilty getting special treatment but sometimes in life you just have to take the favors given you. The pilot then revealed that he could have actually flown us all the way to Provincetown if we wanted that—indeed we could hop right back on the plane now that we were cleared and do that. But we had a driver waiting, Jean-Paul who has chauffeured us before and Nançoise had had him stop at her house first to give us some groceries so we wouldn’t be left in a pantry lurch. There was nobody on the road from Boston and it was very strange indeed to arrive back on Cape to our usual reality. Unnerving really. I could only slightly unpack before eating a corn muffin G. had made us and climbing into bed. We forgot we had turned of the cable and were annoyed to find that the company had also turned off our wifi; so after some tetchy waiting on the phone to speak to a human we finally got everything turned on. We awoke at two in the morning and have been up ever since. We had some coffee and decided to do a major food shop as the stores opened in Orleans, opting for a smaller market, not a super one. There was plenty of food and we did a giant shop, not in a panicky way at all, but the kind of shop you do when you return back to the Cape after being away for three months. We then came back and did some more unpacking, of groceries and luggage, then went out again, back to Orleans, to get some fish and other things from shops that weren’t open the first time. We really thought we had to get a jump this morning and were at the shops, originally, at seven, way before anything else opened up. We are going to have one last hoorah of gluten—some linguine and clam sauce—and then get into bed and call it a day. It is already about eight o’clock at night for us.

 I wrote the following blocks of text in Blagues 6-10

Uta used to say: Obstacles should only make your objective stronger. And that is as true in life as it is on the stage, the latter being a metaphor for the former. The more we come up against in life, the more compelled we should be to take to that proscenium, or pulpit or soap box, tearing down that (fourth) wall in an awakening of self, and others, to the Light that needs to be shined into this box or that we find ourselves in. We all feel imprisoned in various ways, by outside influence or inner fears and insecurities. We can hide in the dark corners of society or in the repressed recesses of our minds, or we can run toward that Light and boldly let loose sounds, vibrations, that would shake those walls behind us to their foundations. They will crumble under our jokes, they will melt from the heat of our debate, they will disintegrate and turn to dust, blowing in the wind at the sound of the folk song. There will always be walls, in every epoch. There are walls every day in our individual lives. Feel them, bang your head against them, claw at them and consume what they stand for because they are the confines which to scale; and the containment they are designed to provide should send you over the top in your expression, be it creative, intellectual, spiritual, nurturing, enlightening or all of the above.

Whether we are speaking of the world of our imagination, or some spiritual, energetic realm that we can “psychically” visit if not fully inhabit, we are on about the same thing. Back in the late 1980s, right before I had an extraordinary “event” happened to me whereby I was triggered into an altered state—I will try to write more fully about this for you at a later date, though Stella and I have told this story a number of times, live on stage—I had a dream. The dream centered on this giant black book from which I was privileged to read; the book was titled, in giant silver letters: I Magi Nation. Now of course it spells imagination; but it also points to the notion that perhaps I was a Magi and that I wasn’t alone, but part of a larger body, community, nation of them. Within days after this dream the weird event occurred—it may’ve been triggered by a stranger slipping something into my drink—I will never know—but it resulted in my being endowed for a night with super human thought and strength that involved my “seeing the math in my head in blueprint form” for successfully dive-rolling out of a car going 40 miles an hour, landing on my feet and then sprinting faster than a gazelle as well as my “seeing the math” to launch myself into the air and scale an eight-foot fence without touching it; “seeing the math” as well to “find the sweet-spot” in a chain-link gate, embedded in cement, where I could hit it with my vintage Columbia bicycle so that the fence/gate would be knocked over, out of its cement foundation, allowing me to ride my bike over that fence without so much as taking my feet off the pedals—I remember that was important to me—to stay balanced on my bike without putting a foot down. This and more all actually happened on the eve of the Harmonic Convergence, August 16, 1987. I won’t bore you with the rest of this story now; but the upshot was that I learned the hard way, and in a manner I did not invite, that I was capable of perceiving (an) other realm(s) that had heretofore been closed to me. It was violent and forced upon me, and at the time I did not see any good in this having happened. In time, though, I came to understand that, whether welcomed or not, this event provided a breakthrough.

Funnily enough I’ve owned a crystal ball. And the story surrounding it does touch on the shadow side of gazing into it, for real, or metaphorically speaking. It was given to me by someone who, it just so happens, was a master of subtext and subterfuge, which can characterize the shadow side of a Scorpio personality. The sign’s ruler Pluto is named for the god of the underworld, a metaphor for a deeply profound personality who is miner for meaning and hearts of gold, on the positive side; while expressing an undermining nature on the negative. We see this in fearful, insecure and un-evolved people of the sign. There were always two conversations going on simultaneously with this individual in question. The one he had with people —in person, by phone or by text—and the one he had about them, via, shall we say, subtext. With people of a character such as this, one is naturally leery, and should never get too close until they hopefully develop out of this behavior, which most shadowy Scorpios actually do. Meanwhile, ironically, it is the sense that people don’t want to warm up to them that fuels their detrimental scheming below the surface. Although this person’s put downs of others were barely subliminal, I assumed them to be isolated and petty, and didn’t give them any power. Until I saw the subtextual web this individual was capable of weaving. The scorpion is an arachnid lest we forget; and the kiss-kiss of some spiders, man or woman, as well as their idle surface chatter, can be designed to mask—Pluto wore a helm of invisibility—the stealthy time-released character assassinations they make against those they target.

When I was twenty-one I toyed with calling myself Pan and moving to Paris to be an androgynous cabaret artist. Well I did move to Paris but I have never been that androgynous due to hairy Italian genes; and it took me another twenty years to attempt cabaret. But it didn’t not happen. I had the symbol, the form in my mind, way back when. And as most do, I took on a new name when I began working as a professional astrologer-metaphysician. Granted, we had invented the His & Her Horoscope column for Teen People and I didn’t want my New York Times editors to know that it was me writing it, but still there was a tradition of doing this. Alan Leo. Athena Starwoman. Linda Goodman. Dane Rudhyar. The name happened first and then I sort of grew into it. I think that’s how it works. We change our attitude and we mark it with some word or picture, if only in our mind, and then we grow in that direction. Esso just sounds so mid-twentieth century—but Exxon, now that’s a name that could travel into the new millenium.

To view the original Sabian Symbol themed 2015 Cosmic Blague corresponding to this day: Flashback! The degree pointof 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

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