Page 1. Snapshot.

Twist on opening words from S’ology. Her usual traits are set ups for evolving them. Her typical challenges are evolved through. “She realizes” negative patterns have a “shelf life”. Everything, even negatives spun as a positive “part of her evolution.”

Her sign’s energy is all about “potential” “alchemical change” “developing clarity” “uncertainty drives her deeper”

She appears one way to others (forever mulling) but they are symptoms of something else: her inherent process of personal evolution. To others “she’s stuck”. 

Wherever we find (her) on her evolutionary path she always (cartoon bubble above her head). 

Page 2-5 Sign + Significance

(2)

 Of all signs most…has a “default sense” of (lack)…We all struggle with (loss) but for her it’s X…pointing to universals but digging into her specifics.

Aries most something to prove. It might put people off, but itisn’t bad it is really about X although he could be less Robnoxious about it. Needing to impress if not impose. Is he needy? He would never think so.

“Astrology 101 says” Virgos will organize others…. “certain genius” in this, which comes easy

But “What is hard” is (applying to herself)….  Taking sign motto(s) and turning them into the positive side of paradox.

Aries is the “indie” on solo trip, perhaps must truly embrace that and therefore not have to impress or also to fit in. not needing others to be on his trip as well.

“VW has strongest”…(emotional intelligence) “what might be mistaken for X (being on autopilot) is actually Y (feeling her way, honing her e.i.)… “even when (servile) is really (serving self)” putting “puzzle pieces together at techtonic pace” thus….

(3)

 “she is collage of influences p, p + props, happenstance 6^th house, habits, rituals behavior

Segue into “borrower” archetype of Pandora…but it’s more than that she is molding them into something greater than sum of parts “to be actively impressionable is one of VW’s greatest superpowers” and with it comes responsibility…must avoid this or that.

Is Z’s original “mama’s girl” encoded into astro DNA. Myth bit. (So, if you wonder Virgo, why your relationship with mother is so loaded) Reference “Sharp Objects”

“There is paradoxical power to be mined and pitfalls to negotiate” It is her (another) superpower to diagnose and set things right”

(4)

That super power comes “from the arduous work she does around maternal bond” as does (arrested development) another negative. She is all mythological characters (Pandora, Demeter, Kore) negotiating virtue and vice, meting them out, process of “all too human” conscience.

Here’s a snapshot of VW: “facilitator of first order”. Cite quality-element. Power to mold situations to her specifications in subtle steady fashion. Shaped new reality without notice. She considers all angles (consults everyone) but never second guesses

Prone to victim mentality, slighted put upon (by sibling) drill down mutable-earth “power” a “volcano of self-insight”

“The cosmic energy of mutable-earth, the combination of elements (f,e,a,w) and quality (c,f,m) unique to Virgo, fits on many levels”. Vulcanalia (8/23) Hephaestus (tinker potter etc) more accurately alchemist. Lame, divine power stemming from disability. Her character portrayed by primordial female Pandora, speaking volumes on her ability to conform, mold, be bolded and on “shadow side” to outsource her own development/grooming to others. Be Svengali’d/develop Wendy complex…filling in gaps in others’ lives victim (ultimately victor) elements.

(5)

Myth rape Kore/Core one of victimization/adoration model for Beauty/Beast

“loss” of maidenhood + devestation/disenfranchisement of mother “Black Demeter” void of divinity. “So next time you ghost someone, Virgo, “ IS MYTH TOO REPETITIVE S’OLOGY? We will add in some disclaimers “we have long established in our previous books that the archetypes we associate with Virgo are…” “and we work with these archetypes in private practice with clients of this sign”

Aries?

Previous sign Leo pride V’s S.P. is humility. Planet in dispute—Mercury, Chiron Vulcan) All healer/alchemists (is this in Sextrology’s V.W. chapter?). Also question mark hanging over this whole issue. ***Is another S.P. that of inquiry? Asking the right questions if not having answer? Is her constant pondering the S.P? Scrutiny? Dissecting? Or is dissecting a V.M. thing?

Mercury magic 1.Gemini slight of hand 2.Virgo transmutation, “characterizes her experience and evolution” getting lead out metaphorical/metaphysical Caduceus, med pro , Hermes = hermits work in secrecy hermetic (occult of alchemy astrology theosophy….ADD hermetically sealed? We are thinking that in fleshing out more “our work with clients”

(6)

Mother Self SB/TB comes off narrative that was set up (we do these later, take notes now)

Sense + Psyche

VW to mind-body connection no brainer. Sign Symbol hinged (like all earth signs) on theme.

For VW vivid: holds spica posied to insert body rule of digestion ate pomegranate food of underworld 

(7)

Seals her fate, personifies cycle of life. Digestion literal meting out nutrient from waste (fertility/Demeter). Digestion metaphor human conscience, seat of increasing divine nature of being chewing on right and wrong for self, community, environment. Gut choices mind/belief with body/behavior with mind. What sits well both real and metaphor. Stomach second brain

Hardpressed to run digestive system; tinkering only makes on sicker. VW must leave body alone The turning in M at best means tuning into still small voice, shadow side: caving in on oneself. Demeter in hiding leads to core, kiln, crucible, purified in fire of own being. VW can glean 2 truths: trials fuel fire that reforge her stronger AND purity is renewable resource need never be lost. Fire removes impurities. Is VW an avoidist?

Singular challenge move through troubles not broken record seeking outside counce fixes.

Target specific issue. Always looking for next guru. As yourself where you play injured party.

People places things can fill empty spaces.

(8)

Whether lame Heph., broken jar/box or raped Kore, trauma of loss (of ability, freedom, innocence, etc) designed to put VW on road toward healing. Accepting life on life’s terms. This is the path of surrender. White lied. She must let experience move through her. To be Virgo: to burn with deire to contribute. Only comes from cosmic breeding to sniff out defects and deficit. But slow to decision. Must come to realize Virgo experience means letting light of personal revelation in through cracks. For disability to fuel sympathy, functionality, divinity. Lemon to lemonade. Beyonce. So where do we find you, Virgo, in this process?

Spica gestation/digestion is letting experience move through.

(9)

Pregnant with possibility. Juiciest, oomphy appearance, bursting with plans ideas, projects information as she might be with gossip gripes grousing. We use her body as metaphor.

Lemons should give rise to humor (comedians new category we didn’t mention in the past) we describe personality: “unapologetic, full bodied spirit, devoid of preciousness. Childlike nature, goofiness, sardonic laughter …self-deprecating at once eternal teen and lifelong midlife crisis.

Mercury. crossroads. Metaphor for crisis and conscience. Kid sister of Zodiac, guileless exuberance, tag a long, fly on wall, blank page, lump of clay, slowly digest without pressure. Also keeps her young. Half the story. Seemingly unassuming, affable childlike, but serious side, tender vulnerable. A cameo, an old fashioned human. Not to be forgotten, sentimental value.

(10)

How she appeals and protects. Laughing through tears. Transmutes life’s sorrows, humiliations into satiric send ups. Sending up (surrending! To the gods). Fire of purification now searing humor…being human…humility too. Citric analogy Liz Lemon mod Virgo archetype, kid-sister, wendy complexed, lost boys and burned by the ridiculous, finding the funny. 

Mercury on earth plane flightless birds. Not a disability but a sign of evolution. Having found a niche to flourish. We always called her beauty storky and her demeanor dorky. Playing the sign guessing game as we do if a gangly long lashed beaky unwieldly yet unhurried, measured, we would peg her as Virgo….Lauren Bacall to Sophia to Chrissie to Amy Man to Noamie Harris to Misty Copeland to Suranne Jones….to be continued but maybe it is enough!! Or just add a sentence or two

(11) Solo Silo based on Color

Sexuality + Spirit

Love relationships pose particular challenge. Intimate relationships are where…we see sharpest outline of her spiritual relationship toward life. Sally Brown blind affection for Linus. Doesn’t notice his dispassion. Great romance can be all in her head. Just enjoys being in love or lust or both without pesky relationship itself. Almost enough to have feelings awakened as they contribute to her feeling in love with life. Gives everyone in earshot blow by blow of her daily grind. 6^th House focuses on happenstance which she spices up in retelling. Despite fears/doubts, Sally Brown of Zodiac is optimistic, yet practical and loses patience with the high-expecting Linusus.

(12)

Pandora primordial female brought virtue and vice into world cognate Mary Mag anointing oil in jar. Demeter/Kore silos ceramic jars underground grain/corn. Jars metaphor for Virgo vessel Mother Earth container of life, female species as well, Virgo spotlighting matrilineage.

What to do with spica? Question for VW regardless of sexual or gender identity. Entering bond w/VW not to be taken lightly. Many VW marry young or playhouse with older someone serving as mentor only to divorce ere long. Raise your hand Virgo? Leaping before looking only needs to learn that lesson once. 

13

Eyeballing spica symbol of consideration, mindfulness giving rise to healthy beheavior, breaking bad habits reversal of victim to victor. Madonna/whore invention of patriarchy sacred harlot Mary Mag was no puta but a high priestess, sex magick is VW Superpower, if they were getting it on then Jesus was as high priest their union being sacred right. 6^thhouse of divinely endowed rituals not just habits. Needs to go to higher power place with sex. This will come as no surprise to her. (Talking directly to and also about her in chatty way.) Eleusinian Mysteries dedicated to Demeter-Kore form of apotheosis divinity on initiates September event three phases dissent, search , return. Heiros Gamos Alchemical marriage conception of divine child. And you wonder why she can’t take sex lightly? Never casual but most causal: meaning sex is magic for VW utter surrender to the act with devotional surrendering up . Mysterious and transportive two ecstatic state. Not to mention Essential for life creation 

14 

Virgo’s desired sexual groove also applies to other areas of life. Her archetypal DNA seize her self sacred in Den mother role even. Middle Eastern hippie boy band Mary magdeleine most Wendy complexed . She wasn’t servile but exalted. Not what but how she was doing and saw herself in the process likewise VW is invincible clear bold declarations to herself only by descending into active introspection , loss, searching her feelings can she ultimately ascend to new emotional intellectual and spiritual Heights does her self service to look on others as initiates newbies with whom she can be a patient and on whom it’s her power to bestow the bounty of her company and reassurance healing and appreciation (anointing). We say bit others welcome without being a doormat something she has to work on. VW potentially most caring of anyone on planet. Withholding is her greatest weapon . It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature. VW can hold a grudge. Typically grows up in household sometimes parents will compensate for her feeling like an afterthought by helping financially she doesn’t really get the validation she needs she gets the message that others see her as someone in need operating as adept at a deficit the girl was something missing short a few marbles maybe. So we see the emergence of another Virgo theme that of love and pity being intertwined also feeling indebted perhaps indentured emotionally held hostage and as mentioned this charge is typically led by virgo’s mother 

15

all VW wants is love and confidence others confidence in her not their projected fear. Not all VW encounter this exact dynamic still themes weave their way into experience making it difficult for VW to read signals friends and lovers or sending will not clearly giving off their own. Dig down search around come up with something declaratives statements especially when it comes to love are VW’s best friend in the end. Prospect of making declaration just someone she likes is terrifying in extreme, it removes the obstacle that looming cartoon? To knowing. She may have to admit she doesn’t always want to know the answer. She enjoys the possibility of the fantasy of her imagined potential scenarios sometimes better than solid outcomes. Not only would rejection pain her but if she were to release kauer her feelings she might admit she doesn’t truly desire some happily ever after with this crush she keeps going on about. In the elusive knee and mysteries of blissful afterlife isn’t had that easily . And initiate must earn it through years of repeated participation In devotion to the goddesses. Even then it is her power to withhold . But again This all falls under larger heading of would be Virgo mindfulness . By all means Virgo indulge your fantasies about this mate or that steady friend with benefits even if the other party hasn’t a clue you’re lusting for them. So long as you know it’s fantasy no harm done. By the same token What you’re feeling is real you must make that clear and move through the experience removing the obstacle of guesswork and the endlessly ensuing dialogue around it. 

The following blocks of text are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 766-770. I am reading through all of my Blagues, five per day, and posting some samples here. Now, in my sixth year of writing this Blague, by the time I get to my seventh, I will have journeyed through all the daily Blagues of my first five years. If that’s confusing I apologize. Year seven, I’ll only have to read through year six, once a day. 

Nothing today!

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

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

Virgo 7° (August 29)

In the intro we must make a case for working with archetype, and I want to schedule in that intro writing after I hit my marks today. Athena “armed wisdom.” If gods are disunited there is return to chaos, they are proud susceptible and vain, cunning and intelligent. Along comes an energy more rational, capable of unity, constructing peace, on the side of reason not passion. From the first wife Metis prudence and cunning. Gaia and Uranus warn Zeus that after she gives birth to a daughter she will bear a son that will dethrone him. He does his trick of swallowing her, playing a game of metamorphese, on the verge of giving bith to her: Armed and helmeted letting out a war cry, striking fear. Prudence and wisdom of mother, intelligence of father. His fave forgiving everything. Given to Triton the river god raised with his daughter Pallas. During combat training Athena kills her involuntarily, Pallas distracted by Zeus’s appearing, fearing Athena’s safety. Lost sister, places her name before her own, homage to her. Dazzling beauty but determined to stay virgin. Hephaestus relentlessly pursues her. She orders weapons which he says he’ll do for love of her. Poseidon, her rival, tells Hephaestus that she wants him so when she comes to collect her weapons he pounces on her. She gets away he catches up and tears her garment exposes her body and basically shoots his wad which lands on her leg and, in disgust, she wipes off with a scrap of wool, throwing it on the ground, unknowingly impregnating Gaia, her great grandmother who gives birth to Erichthonius, half human half snake baby boy, whose name derives from the Greek word for wool, the Ram’s sheepish association duly noted. Gaia rejects him in horror so Athena adopts him and loves him so fiercely the gods all believe it’s really her child. Relate to snake goddesses in notes. Three daughers of Cecrops, king of Attica, her priestesses, were put in charge of his care when Athena was otherwise engaged but they were told not to look inside the basket; curiosity got the better of two of them and they opened the box and went insane from fright and threw themselves from the Acropolis.

Zeus puts forth a decree that all the gods must claim a patron city. Attica is fought over by Poseidon and Athena, rivals from the get go. It is the most civilized place in Greece with no human sacrifice, law courts, and mandates for marriage and monogamy. It is not only a democracy but women have the right to vote. Poseidon offers and creates a lake of saltwater for leisure and water sports and a warhorse, a black stallion for the king, entertainment and war. Athena offers the useful gift of the olive whose leaves never fall and whose fruit will feed and fuel the people, a symbol of peace (still is) and fertility. She wins, carried along by the women’s vote. Poseidon is bitter and hateful (a side of Pisces we will explore), but Athena offered peace and agriculture. Erichthonius becomes the first king. Athena becomes the patron of heroes, Perseus gifting her with the Medusa’s head for her help, which she wears on her breastplate. The Trojan horse is her idea, she helps Odysseus, Telemachus and allows Prometheus entry to steal the proverbial fire. She inspires audacity and clearheadedness in humans, a new form of bravery guided by reflection and cunning, not disorganized, blind fury, associated with Ares, her opposite. 

Intelligence in the service of war for peace instead of the extermination of the enemy. She is guide of heros. Protectress of the state, the first palacial god, laws and their correct application. w/out prosperity laws alone are not enough She gives men the plough and yoke. Also teaches numbers and women the culinary arts with weaving and spinning. Oversees shipbuilding, how to work wood (he he) as she is goddess of the helm. She oversees the construction of the Argo which sets out for the golden fleece, from the Ram who is the constellation of Aries. She is often in contest, that is a hint of her mythology. Arachne hangs herself in remorse for boasting after Athena, in a rare mood, breaks the place up in a rage. Athena puts a balm on her corpse and turns here into a spider, an arachnid, forever hanging as was the girls choice and forever weaving which is Athena’s decree.

The following blocks of text are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 761-765. I am reading through all of my Blagues, five per day, and posting some samples here. Now, in my sixth year of writing this Blague, by the time I get to my seventh, I will have journeyed through all the daily Blagues of my first five years. If that’s confusing I apologize. Year seven, I’ll only have to read through year six, once a day. 

Let’s talk biz too. The nutshell on my journalistic career is this.My real name is Wm. Leone for starters and I was a journalist and editor in my youth while trying to launch an acting career. Most people wait tables. I ultimately did that too, at the Bell Caffee on Spring Street. But that’s a long story, being a gender bendy 90s neo hippy hangout near Don Kings. Waiters wouldn’t show up and sometimes i ran the whole restuarant—easy a 100 customers by myself wearing shorty Hawaiian print bathing trunks, with work boots and a slicker throwing parties with Penny Arcade and Chris Tanner and Quentin Crisp and so many others back in the day. I was intermittently on Broadwy while working there three years. Before going deep into freelance mode.Before all that, my first magazine job was at Passion in Paris (run by Robert Sarner) in 1985 1986 I wrote things about micobiological farm markets and singers at Le Palace but mainly, speaking friench, I answered phones and used our trade with clubs to party with my friends who in Paris then included Jo Rowling and jackie and laurence llewelyn bowen and susan tide frater all still closest friends.Then I moved to NYC in 1987 and worked for Judy Price at Avenue magazine on their side more style magazine called On The Avenue. That world include Joan Krone and Andrew Willis (is that his name) and great photogrphers Joseph Carne, Steven Klein with baby Kristy models. It was culture shock there so I left to work at two magazines simultaneously. I founded DV8 which was fabulous and all the club kids worked for us circulating the magazine at Tunnel and The World and the like. I was editor there and also Managing Editor working for Howard Jacoby with Lisa Kenndy, Lynn Geller, Jim Mullen,  Donald Shruggs, Peter McQuaid, Glenn O’Brien. Mainly people did a lot of coke while I put the magazine together.I wrote for Paper and Detour and then my acting work took off a bit in between the Bell Cafee, two shows on Broadway, then back to journalism this time Working as a reporter for Instyle, also producing FAshion TV segments for City TV Toronto which also did Ohh La La with Laurie PIke. I wrote for slew of magazines then like Paper, Glue, Stop, The Face, Cosmopolitan and runway reports that took me to Paris and Milan for Madmoiselle, Glamour, YM eventually TimeOut, The New York Obersver, and The New York Times but something was lurkingLynne cum Stella and I were already deep into astrology. She was working for designers in Paris and Milan which is really why I sought writing gigs there.That and the fact the runways were riddled with Supermodels and I was consious of being in the right place at the right time. Anyway after her and my work in Paris or Milan folks would come over and get a reading from us. Big people in magazines like Sally Singer and Brana Wolf and a slew of executive editors, one at Teen People who asked us to create a his/her horoscope column. We did. it was a huge hit everybody was reading it. Adults I mean. One was Rob Weisbach who offered us a book deal which eventually become a Harper Collins book SEXTROLOGY , followed years later by Cosmic Coupling.While writing books I because an A NIght Out With columnist in the STyles section of Times and also wrote for the ART section of the Boston Globe. Then Tyler Brule left Wallpaper and Lynne and I were brought over together by Time Inc to act as executive editors —this was 2003, before the books were published and, once they were, we went through a long period being written about though now came out of the closet as astrologers and wrote features and horoscope columns under our new pseudonyms for British Vogue, Paris Vogue, Glamour, German Glamour, Bolero, Style.Co./Vogue/ Vanity Fair, Cosmo, Elle, on and on and on. We even thought we could make a go with a horoscope in Star but couldn’t work with Bonnie Fuller and Joe Dolce just couldn’t make that work…..

So then Starsky + Cox took over. We were performing an act as such; We had two books and columns culminating in being the Astrologers for the Daily Beast, something Newseek readers were freaked out about. But we had many firsts. They way we skewed the subject of astrology was in a sophiscticated sometime glam direction. Our book launches were at Barneys where Simon did Sextrology windows which was so sweet……..

============================================

Typos happen—I don’t have time or an intern to edit.*

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

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

Virgo 6° (August 28)

Sometimes you have to trick yourself into getting words down on paper. Something about being on a fast track, as a strategist, maybe let’s others take care of her in some way or other. She isn’t the type to readily send a thank you note. You have no idea whom I’m talking about, but I do. And that’s the point. I need to speak around the subject of this person. No bones about it, very clear, not taking no for an answer. I wrote one page. I was meant to write four more. It’s okay, I’m writing this. And tomorrow I have that much more to do. Eight pages in all. It’s not impossible I dare say. Sometimes the hardest thing to do is start. And I’ve started. Something weird: My keys on my keyboard feel harder to press than usual. Is that a thing? I dunno. Maybe I’m just that tired? It is possible. I have some notes I need to put together let’s see: something to the effect of, okay that thing I just said…if, coming off what we should said about free-spiritedness being encoded in Aries DNA, you’re scratching your head wondering then why it is that the Aries woman in your life calls you for advice more often than anyone you know. Or if you, Aries, reading this is likewise curious why it is you call your mother daily for advice on every tiny career move we have some answers for you. First of all when clients come to see us we explain…. That is to say you’re not there yet. Also one of the markers for personal evolution in Aries world is just how much you do rely on others for, what is typically, a specific brand of guidance. The more self-realized Aries will not only solicit such advice infrequently, she will also find herself playing the role of wise woman, with friends in within her family. But there is a distinction we want to make here. You’re not so much needy as you are needful. That is to say you’re not approaching people as a victim like say another sign whose name begins with the same letter and who tends to tells their tales of woe, rather you ask for others opinions with your mind on winning, enlisting others’ advice as any intended victor would do in her warroom. Well that was a good start.

I think if I can keep up a fairly steady pace, I will have a nice draft by winter. It’s a good goal in any case. I’m surely not going anywhere—they will have to pry me out with a stick. It will be an interesting time one way or another. And though I wish I didn’t have a single negative feeling hanging over my head I didn’t create it and I can’t cure it. You can’t go from telling people month in and month out how amazing they are as, shall we say, residents; only to then one day turn around and become this drastically abusive entity. It will not work that way and, if anything, this will be a galvanizing catalyst and I pity the poor fool who takes us on. I always try to tell people: don’t do it. Because I’ve seen some really awful karmic things come down as a result. I have to chalk this past week up to coincidence. I refuse to believe our juju had anything to do with the terrible events of the week. But holy moly it is really tough when people who have just treated you like garbage suddenly meet with tragedy. I can’t exactly reach out with any kind of comfort, if anything I feel how acutely that instinct has already been bred out of me which is strange in and of itself. Enough of new writing, let’s bring on the old….

The following blocks of text are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 756-760. I am reading through all of my Blagues, five per day, and posting some samples here. Now, in my sixth year of writing this Blague, by the time I get to my seventh, I will have journeyed through all the daily Blagues of my first five years. If that’s confusing I apologize. Year seven, I’ll only have to read through year six, once a day.  

Fifth memory: Taking a bath in an aluminum tub with my first cousin Karen outside at my Aunty Margies house. My father, the oldest, had three siblings: Marge, Junior and Donny (surely not their actual names—I told you all my life my father’s name was James, right, until he told me in my thirties that his name was really Vicenzo?). Marge lived in Lyndhurst, New Jersey. And like I tried to tell Georgeann Walken (Christopher’s wife) who was the casting director of The Sopranos (on which a slew of friends and acquaintances like Michael Imperioli and Aida Turturro appeared): I knew the entire landscape of that show from growing up and going to Auntie Margie’s, passing, like the Soprano’s opening credits, all they pictured there plus the endless cemetaries and cemetary themed shops—yes I think they were cemetary shops where you could by tombstones and fake flower decorations because, in that part of New Jersey, death-themed outlets and fledgling fast food restaurants—the first ever McDonald’s I ever saw—was in Lyndhurst and Kearny, where New Jersey children of immigrants went to die. You could entered Auntie Margie’s house without ever going into the house at all. They had the first electric garage door opener I ever saw. It was just a doorbell near the garage door that you pushed, meaning anyone could at any time but didn’t because people didn’t assume such a thing existed then. The door opened and before it was fully raised, as soon as you could, you ducked into the garage and then immediately into the “basement” which was all tile and lineoleum (easily wiped down with cleaner on a cloth) and there was a kitchen and a cheap outdoor/indoor table, glass and iron, and other smaller, mainly card, tables, that doubled as “kids tables” and places where poker would happen. Karen was uncle Donny’s daughter. I never saw her growing up past the age when we were three. But for that time we were inseparably bathed, bedded and put to play together.

=====================================

So I came upon a Facebook message this awful person sent me before immediately blocking me. He is a notorious criminal and an even more notorious asshole called Duncan. I think he was on a celebrity rehab show. Anyway, he was in Provincetown for the first Afterglow, sharing a house with one of the performers. I managed not to meet him the entire festival because I wasn’t one to party with the performers which is a good policy to maintain. On the final night John Cameron Mitchell had a show and it was surely going to sell out. I told the hangers-around the theater including close friends that they should buy tickets before they were gone. My friends did. Not only did we sell out but JCM arrived at showtime with an entourage that we also had to somehow “fit” into the room. I had limitations—fire codes imposed by the venue. We got everybody in except this asshole Duncan who threw a fit. I said: “I told you hours ago to buy tickets before we were sold out.” He went around in a heightened state of Don’t You Know Who I Am? No, I don’t; and I don’t care. He was miserably rude to me. I ignored it. But then he went around bullying young people I had volunteering as ushers. That was it. I told him to get out. He called me a “Fat AIDS Dwarf” among other thing. Then he flung a water in my face and stormed out but not before being hit with two (closed) bottles of water my hands had found and flung at him before my brain even had a chance to process. JCM was meant to introduce me onstage. I was soaking wet. He came into the lobby asking what had happened. I went on stage soaking wet. Meanwhile Stella was seated next to Taylor Mac whom she told I had had an issue with Duncan, not knowing the upshot. Oh that guy, said Taylor. He had a bunch of performers come to the West Coast for a performance and then didn’t pay anybody. (I’m paraphrasing). Apparently en route leaving the theater he bent and broke the radio antennae on my antique Mercedes. He’s a bad egg. He has been in trouble with the law I learned since. Three years ago, when I was in Paris, I awoke to this note on FB….at least he didn’t call me “fat” this time.

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So inspired by the last spoke whereby a guy named Duncan sent me a note he never should. I was glancing at my email “drafts and noticed I have an even 240 said drafts. I suspect they are mainly made up of emails I wrote in some state of emotion than thought the better of. I’m twenty-eight Blagues behind, spanning the signs of Taurus and Gemini. So what better way to bridge that gap then by publishing narcissistic emails that, in so doing, might take on a comic rather than tragic purpose.

I’m going to start with a letter I wrote recently that I knew, when writing it, I couldn’t send—it was meant for two individuals:

If a certain friend of ours whom we adore ever knew the way you spoke of her it would break her heart. Your hypocrisy and disingenuousness know no bounds. You’ll turn on a dime if something appeals to your vanity.Just how many farewell shows and articles have you done solely for the attention?In life we all encounter people who are users (in multiple senses of the word) masquerading as kind and caring individuals. For me you have been a cautionary tale. That said, when asked about you I only say the kind things I can think of or nothing at all.I have even tried to get beyond animosity with you, year on year, and broker some kind of detente.I realize now that is impossible because you know I see through what others swallow about you hook, line and sinker. You live inside a desperate bubble of narcissistic self-aggrandizement, which, I imagine, must be exhausting to sustain.I really hope for your own sake that you do achieve some semblance of fame in your golden years. I know how important it is to you.Whether or not that does come to pass I will make a non-astrological prediction:Someday one of you will turn a blind eye, one last time, to the fact that the other one of you is a pusher and an assassin. I can only hope that nobody I love and cherish will suffer as a result; and that the pain and guilt will be something you can endure.See you around town as is inevitable.

Typos happen—I don’t have time or an intern to edit.*

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

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

Virgo 5° (August 27)

I’m still reeling from the events with the farmer which will come round to two weeks this Sunday. I fell asleep late and woke early from a dream wherein I was with a bunch of people and we were attending an outdoor football game. JD was there and there was this sense that we were repairing. We all started running down this grass path inside the outdoor stadium if you will, such that the path was like the main circular hallway tier of an indoor stadium. I was running faster and faster and I was thinking I’m fitter than I thought I was—that I could run like this for a long time. And then the grassiness turned to asphalt with these kind of thin speed bump type things and I was leaping and it became a nearly flying dream and I was so far ahead of everyone that I stopped to see where others were behind me, especially S.. She was nowhere in sight and I asked JD where she was and he said solitary confinement. And I woke up. It was too early and I’d only slept a few hours. I watched some news then began to fall asleep again when S. woke up so I stayed up and I’m still up. And I’m taking inventory this morning before sitting down to write my five pages a day which is pretty much plan from here on in.

To that end I am relaxing into a little cooking right now, roasting potatoes to serve for Thursday brunch with leftover ratatouille and eggs and maybe some first fresh tomatoes from the garden. I’m saddened by the fact I have to feel the way I do now about living here after the abusive treatment by the farmer, but it has clarified things and I’m tired of walking on eggshells. For that matter his chickens sadden me. Every time I walk to the compost outpost they follow me and whine for company. He is really a sick man and we will no longer tolerate the treatment at his bullying hands. Anyway, getting my brain around the day. Im going to start putting drafts into a large loose-leaf and I’m going to muse about archetype and other ideas for the next chapter and then take those notes and try to mold them into something. I realize that I don’t necessarily need to print out all the deconstructed chapters in S’ology, but really only really read what notes I have and make a bullet point list of ideas I haven’t incorporated and notes, too, on what might be repeats. I will do that at some point today or this evening. Meanwhile I want to keep all the notes in one place which I will do with the help of a little paperclip action.

I don’t want to say that today feels hard, although I did pull the Knight of Pentacles (following the Page of Swords which signaled more ease these past few days). As I write this I’m getting a weird wave of sisterliness—I wonder if it is a tremor in the force. Nothing to do about that I’m afraid. Anyway I just need to make a little bit of a word jumble for the new chapter today at least. That just might end up being enough. I will probably accomplish more than that. I need to include some finger painting in the process today, that much is for sure. I have organized my office once again down to a nub, and there is no more “productinating” to be done (my word for when you procrastinate on the thing you are meant to do whilst still being quite productive. I’m happy to have a clear head even though I’m tired. I’ve balanced all my books and booked all my appointments, and now I’m getting down to the nitty gritty but before that I shall have lunch!

The following blocks of text are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 751-755. I am reading through all of my Blagues, five per day, and posting some samples here. Now, in my sixth year of writing this Blague, by the time I get to my seventh, I will have journeyed through all the daily Blagues of my first five years. If that’s confusing I apologize. Year seven, I’ll only have to read through year six, once a day.  

First memory: My sister leaning over my crib. Also Barrel of Monkeys holding hands and tails from the sealing to just over my face. I think there was something about them I didn’t like, the Monkeys—something to do with the sharp thin plastic from which they were made. I think perhaps one fell and poked me in the eye. I can see different colors—red, brown, yellow, blue—and I can see their expression. Of course the second after I write this I’m going Google Barrel of Monkeys and I know I’ll recognize their simean grins.

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Second memory: The painters are painting the apartment. I’m young—I don’t go to school yet (and I started school, “play school” at three); yes, my mother wanted someone else taking care of me until I could take care of myself, completely, by the age of 5. I remember my mother’s friend Joan coming down to check on the apartment. Later, I remember seeing photos of her visiting and I really was still a baby. Like a baby baby. And if this is my second memory than that crib one goes way back. I remember everything was one color. The walls, the painter himself, his clothes, the drop clothes. I don’t know why I look back on the painter as someone very kind and who I wish would have kidnapped me. He was a Norman Rockwell painter, a television sitcom painter, a kindly American fellow. I remember that much.

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Third memory: Driving my Fisher Price car around the apartment. We lived in a small flat in Jersey City; two bedrooms, a bathroom a hallway a kitchen and a combined dining living room. I would drive my little wagon—it really wasn’t a car—around it and when I say drive I mean sit in it and move my feet. I remember the horn the most. It was in the middle of the “steering wheel” slash wagon pull and it beeped for a while. Soon it sort of was permanently caved in and out of air to create a beep. This was around the time when I would go into completely other worlds via duvet covers but I think I spoke about that in a previous Blague.

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Fourth memory: Going to see Mary Poppins which was made a year after I was born so I suppose I would have saw it at age two. My mother’s mother’s sister, who looked like my grandmother but excactly, only taller, took me and maybe my sister. Although I do feel that my sister was already becoming my sworn enemy, through the warped machinations of her own mind; in fact I remember some drama that day but can’t put my finger on it. My sense is that it involved jealousy and the giving of presents. Me thinks she might have been judging love and loyalty via the quality of a present and perhaps I got a better one that day than she did from aunt Kate. I wasn’t alive when Darby O’Gill and the Little People first came out in 1959, but I know for some reason that it was in theaters in the sixties because I saw it around the same time as I saw Mary Poppins. I think I had lots of Mary Poppins paraphenalia—and I’m also sure that I couldn’t sit through the whole film, especially the cartoon parts, because, quite simply, they sucked. I might have napped or spent some time in the lobby with an adult feeding me candy. It was the same some years later with Bedknobs and Broomsticks when they merged with cartoon characters and backgrounds. I hated that. Give me real live flesh. Darboy O’Gill spoke to me. I had already been to those places where the little people live. And because it was probably at Radio City or something and we saw it at Christmas (we probably saw all the above mentioned movies at Radio City during Christmas—Bedknobs for sure, along with Oliver and other such films like Charlie Brown movies, although, they might have been at Easter not Christmas)—I was saying: because it was probably at Radio City and there was merch I had Darby O’Gill “rub ons” which were sort of decals on wax-y paper that you placed against things—in my case my shared (with my sister) bureau—and you rubbed, typically with a nickle against the wax-y paper that held the decal on the other side until it transferred to, in this case, the furniture. I don’t know what they put in those things but they never came off.

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

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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

Virgo 4° (August 26)

The dream I had last night is difficult to put into words. I know it was inspired by watching My Brilliant Friend, which is superb. I know that it hinged on a close friendship with a solid guy. I know that I was filming along the coast of New Jersey. I even spoke to the fact that I was filming. Ellen was there looking for her lost adopted child, walking around with a picture of him as one might do with a pet whose run off. We hugged. We talked about when she was filming in the area. There is always this town, this village in my dreams, that runs along the water. All the buildings are made of a grey stone. I need to find that village somewhere in the world. It could be some place in France that isn’t super on everybody’s radar. I was wearing costuming from the set. I think that the Meisner, no the Drabkin family it was involved. Also there was a gathering at this house and people were interrelated like the families in the TV series, and there were hostile elements that brought me back to Oysterfest, perhaps, when I felt a little uneasy in a crowd of twenty something white people who seemed to know the words to every song from the early seventieis that might smake of racist Southern Rock. But this friendship and the feelings suffounding it were so warm and welcoming and I felt seen for the first time in a long time. I was enjoying a truly close family-like brotherly bond. Perhaps he was a cousin. He was Italian after all, but again I chalk that up to the series I’m watching. My own cousins on both sides are pretty terrible narcissists, the alive ones anyway That’s all I need to write today.

The following blocks of text are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 746-750. I am reading through all of my Blagues, five per day, and posting some samples here. Now, in my sixth year of writing this Blague, by the time I get to my seventh, I will have journeyed through all the daily Blagues of my first five years. If that’s confusing I apologize. Year seven, I’ll only have to read through year six, once a day.  

Why do I do what it is I do in regard to the half of each year, I spend, putting together performing arts festivals and series. Well, the simple answer is that Ed Sullivan and I share more than a birthday. Like Ed, I was a journalist from the age of 22 to about 40. IN fact the main reason I thought to adopt the pseudonym of Quinn Cox was because I wanted to keep my journalistic world—editors and publishers and the subjects I wrote about—separate from what might or not be a success as an astrological duo which has affectionately come to be known as Starsky + Cox. But you see paradoxes began to spring up. Like my Libran brother Oscar Wilde said, and I paraphrase because I’m too lazy to look this shit up: Give a man a mask and he’ll reveal his truths to you. Okay I’m going to look it up and see how close I got. What he actually said was: “Give him a mask and he will tell you the truth.” Which is much simpler and better but I was close.

People do not know me and that’s been okay. I think I’m getting ready to reveal myself in teaspoonfuls. The fact is that back around 2005 I thought Stella and I needed to take to a stage, something we had only done together, rarely, in acting classes where, at HB Studios, we were labelled “the Lunts” which, I won’t lie, I loved. I had a sort of rock-bottom epiphany where I thought, hang on, our book Sextrology came out last year and it has been a success, so we should take to the stage and somehow combine comedy and astrology with some music thrown in. At a place called (under) Elmo in Chelsea, which one tried to convince oneself was a boutique version of Fez under Time Cafe which had recently closed down, we launched our first “Cosmic Cabaret” to a full house of wonderful people we knew personally and periferally. Lots of fashion people—Zaldy and Ruben and Isabel Toledo and John Bartlett—as opposed to performer folks. And, I have to say, after another decade or so “being” with performer folk, I much prefer the people in the fashion and design world, despite the fact I was so utterly convinced, in 2005, that I wanted to stop hanging around with fashion folks whom I did at the time find fatuous and enter the “real” world of performing artists who were down, dirty, honest and true.

Performing artists, who had been down, dirty, honesty and true for the whole time I dipped in and out of their circles, for the past 20 years since I made my way to NYC, but when, in 2006, I began to seek their company, they were on their last gasp of genuine experience. Now, first, let me say, there is no downtown. And I say this as both a journalist and a downtown denizen who more dabbles in performance. I have said this for a decade now: Round about 2007, “downtown artists” began emulating some hybrid breed of Upper East Side Socialite and opera, indie-movie and/or rock star. Quite a leap, I know; but one felt, downtown, that one should speak in a mid-Atlantic accent previously reserved for Rosiland Russell and garb oneself from head to toe in outfits that were spontaneously ready to pass, if pressured, at a Met or Whitney Event.

Suddenly the creme de la creme of the downtown scene used words like creme de la creme. Though they might still live in apartments where the bath tub was recently or still, in the kitchen, they thought they should no longer have to pay for meals or makeup or plastic surgery because they were iconic, and they were. Some still are although that particular brand of enchantment is wearing off and, dare I say, thin.

And I started to miss my friends that worked at magazines that no longer existed. I started to miss the art directors and fellow writers, like myself, who live such solitary lives that it takes a proper poking or, at the very least, a more gregarious partner to stap you into interaction. But what I missed most about living life as a more anonymous character was the ability to move on a dime, to travel, undetected, without needing to be any one place on any certain date….

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I was talking about being a journalist. I started at Passion magazine in Paris in 1986 than moved to New York in 1987 where I worked at an Avenue magazine offshoot called On The Avenue; at the same time I became managing editor then editor of DV8* which was a downtown music, fashion and art magazine that club kids like James St. James and Michael Alig would circulate for us at clubs like the Tunnel, Limelight, Palladium and The World. I then became managing editor of The New York Social Calendar which was a hip rag that was put in the new breed of luxury hotels like the Royalton and the Paramount where Where magazine wouldn’t fit. I freelanced for a number of magazines and newspapers including Paper, The New York Observer, Stop, In-Style, where I was a party reporter and Detour, where I wrote big celebrity features, The New York Times and the Boston Globe. I also was a field producer of a television show called Ooh La La made in Canada by the people who produced Fashion Television with Jeannie Becker. I did fashion pieces for youthy magazines like YM, Mademoiselle and Teen People. Soon, though, people got wind of Starsky + Cox and we/they began writing horoscope columns and features for seemingly every publication from Paris Vogue, Allure, Cosmopolitan, Elle and Teen People, Star, Glamour and ultimately the Daily Beast (if you can believe we had a short-lived column there which ultimately became our own brand of Haute Astrology). Meanwhile under my real name and also under Stella’s real name I wrote for Neimann Marcus “The Book” which was pretty prestigious and allowed for more creativity than journalistic outlets, even though it was considered advertorial.

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The word nemisis is literally from the goddess Nem-Isis, who was the shadow twin of Isis. An archeytpal Debby Downer if you will.

In my life, I believe, that I have had one nemisis, which is different from an enemy. A nemesis might be closer to a frenemy but one of the two people in the equation might be bordering on restraining order. My nemesis has actually tried to kill me, oh so subtly, but I don’t take it personally as he tries to kill everyone he “loves”, oh so subtly, because he has this weird worship/destroy attitude toward people he suspects are smarter, more fortunate or talented than s/he. This nemesis is no longer a nemesis in that I am in no way any longer emotionally involved with this character. Someone close to me probably warned me by saying something like: Anyone that wants to get that close to you so fast is probably not someone you want to know (or probably will know in the longr un because they are going to assert some narcissistic agenda). True dat. Funny thing about narcissists: They stage things like farewell tours and then they don’t go away.

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

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

Virgo 3° (August 25)

There are no words.

The following blocks of text are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 740-745. I am reading through all of my Blagues, five per day, and posting some samples here. Now, in my sixth year of writing this Blague, by the time I get to my seventh, I will have journeyed through all the daily Blagues of my first five years. If that’s confusing I apologize. Year seven, I’ll only have to read through year six, once a day.  

I love Julia Child. Who doesn’t, I know, but she has always held a special fascination for me. When I was a waiter in 1986 at the Harvest in Harvard Square, she and her husband Paul would come in for lunch. You would here “Bonjour Roger” in that booming unmistakeable tenor as she greeted the tiny alcoholic nicotine sodden maitre d’ whose name she properly prounced in French, ro-jay. Paul, a curled shrimp of a man who had already suffered his series of small strokes, followed hist towering wife into the dining room where she would always order the same thing: a burger, rare, no bun. She is a Leo and I’ve often remarked on the similarity between her choice of lunch and the bloody meat one would throw into a lion cage.

Before the book and movies about her during the last decades, I always thought she would make a great subject for a work of art. I won’t go any further into that thought lest I actually end up pursuing this instinct myself. At the very least I think she and her husband would make great costumes for Stella and me, come Halloween. But, obviously, there’s more to it. Here was a couple who worked together (even though you didn’t know he was behind the scenes), who had no kids and were rather late bloomers. They were also obsessed with France and had an affinity for Cambridge, Massachusetts and Maine. All of this I can relate to.

She described herself “as the cat looking at the king” when she was a student of Le Cordon Bleu—what can be more Leo an expression than that. And what person from any other sign could turn what was for her a personal passion into an entire movement, changing the way Americans cooked, forever. What other sign could see a chef superstar embodied in the form of a fifties something woman. I’m happy I had the few opportunities I did to wait on Mrs. Child whose name couldn’t be more fitting for someone who lived life with a childlike exuberance and who gave so much to the world.

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As we often are, we were approached by an event planner to do readings for guest at a private party. But there was something mysterious about this whole affair as the planner didn’t seem to be someone who threw a lot of parties, and we came to learn she worked for just a few clients helping them with their private and corporate events which kept her busy. This event was to be at a private home in Rhode Island and we took it as an opportunity to see a new part of New England. Only was there did we realize the island was where much of Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom was filmed. So we drove around to visit location spots, most notably, the “cove” of the place that serves as the film’s title.

The party itself only had about forty people in attendance but it was pretty elaborate and the grounds on which it was held, a private home on the water with multiple acres and buildings, was something the likes of which I’ve never seen; and I’ve spent a lot of time around rich people. We were set up in a sort of tower structure from which we could look down on the partygoers whom one couldn’t help imagine lived very privileged lives. One never knows exactly on which side of the political equation people might be in this position but, we were in short order led to assume that these people here assembled were on the right side of politics and history. How did we know this? Because they were all incredibly nice and unassuming people. In a world where the biblical adage that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of the needle than it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven often rings so true, this party of people was to prove twrong that saying.

We had no idea the name of the hosts all the while we were at the party. Only by doing a bit of Google detective work the next day were our assumtions corrobarated. The host of the party was indeed a well-known, celebrated, very wealthy man of the Warren Buffet school of philanthropy where he was determined to give a great deal of his wealth away and to put it in service of others. We’ve always said that when it comes to private clients the best people in the world seem to find us and to be genuintely interested in raising their consciousness, making it a joy to help them in that aim. What we realize is that the same holds true for those who come to hire us for events. In either case we have never solicited interest but allow word of mouth and, I’d like to say, some good karma, make the referrals for us.

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

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

Virgo 2° (August 24)

After the way you behaved in our home a week ago today it is shocking that you have as yet not apologized. Since our first meeting where you said you were determined not to rent to a hot head, it has become clear that the hot head you fear so much is you. We already had a run in early in our residency here when, on a Memorial Day weekend, when a pipe burst in the basement, you had a complete meltdown, shouting at me and and storming off leaving us without water, only to return the next day not just apologizing but literally begging for our forgiveness. That contrite attitude and behavior didn’t last long. You have been subtly and increasingly rude and bullying since then, hinting that we are at times hard to reach or that our asking simple questions put you off. But last Monday your bullying went over the top into full-stop verbal abuse, false accusation, shaming, hostile threatening, even to the point of shouting/spitting at us not wearing a mask, while we asked you time and again to only where a mask in our home. This may be a house that you own, but it is our home, and the behavior that you exhibited is not only inexcusable it is unforgivable.

Last year, due to your negligence, I had an accident in this house, falling through the back porch which you admitted after the fact was rotted, and seriously injurying my leg. In hindsight, now I realize that you had no concern for my well-being before or in the wake of this incident; all you cared about was whether or not I was going to take legal action. Surely, had I been hurt in a way that required surgery or longterm doctor care, we would have had to address that; otherwise, I let the incident go. And yet, last Monday you (weirdly, as if you were having a break with reality) accused me of threatening legal action which never happened. If you can show me any evidence of that in my correspondence to you please do—you can’t. You also accused me of slamming the back door of our house “in your face” and when we once again addressed this—you wrote me on the day you heard the door slam and we already told you it was surely the wind and you offered to bring over a doorstop which we said we didn’t need—you alternately called us liars then said it happened when “Lynne was traveling.” Well Lynne was here the day you texted about the door slamming, and I immediately shared your text with her asking if the door had slammed—she was under headphones and said she hadn’t heard anything. And yet you brought it up again in your rage of last Monday.

The truth is you were in a rage of your own making. You showed up to replace our broken refridgerator in a huff. Your stormed around telegraphing how angry you were, trying to switch out the refridgerator on your own, which seemed a foolish thing to do. You were angry at yourself we can only guess because you didn’t measure doors before taking them off their hinges, trying to get the refridgerator in the house. You had texted me from the road to say to move my car, which I did, but then you didn’t pull into the driveway where you indicated so I simply asked, didn’t you want to use the driveway, referring to your text to move the car. You said you wrote after that which, if you had, you didn’t send. I simply said oh I didn’t receive another text from you at which time you completely flew off the handle berating me for texting you that weekend to say our fridge was broken, screaming at me that I shouldn’t be texting you—that I should physically try to find you outside as I “knew” you were out there. I said I did not. I woke up late that morning to find Lynne sitting on the porch, already, for a couple of hours reading. The first thing she told me was that the fridge was broken. I texted you then went about my business filling the car and going to the dump and shopping. I waited a few hours and you hadn’t texted back so I texted you a heads up to my earlier email and you said you’d come over. What you didn’t say was that you had received that earlier text and had chosen not to answer it. That you were already angry for some reason. And all of this, too, came out in our faces in our home where you verbally assaulted us. You threatened, also, to kick us out of our home. I said you were going to feel bad about the way you were treating us and that you would regret treating us in this manner and that only angered you all the more. You didn’t replace the front door but instead boarded it up. It will be a week since we are living without a front door.

 

The following blocks of text are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 736-740. I am reading through all of my Blagues, five per day, and posting some samples here. Now, in my sixth year of writing this Blague, by the time I get to my seventh, I will have journeyed through all the daily Blagues of my first five years. If that’s confusing I apologize. Year seven, I’ll only have to read through year six, once a day.  

In my endeavor to catch up on these Blague entries (I have another month to go before I can get to the desired one a day) it’s nice to hit the milestone of Taurus while we are actually still in the sign of Taurus.

Here today on the East Coast it is really hot hot hot outside. One of the bummers of our climate is we tend to go from Winter to Summer with very little Spring in between. Meanwhile the less extreme seasons of Spring and Autumn are my favorite, Autumn probably my absolute. I always considered my preference for Autumn to be akin to my favorite color being green, or my love of auburn hair (my own having long lost the reddish bit, leaving me with just a silver reminder of what used to be there).

As a small child in Jersey City we used to have soot showers. That’s right. There was a nearby factory or something and sometimes soot would fall from the sky like black snow flakes, wafting down. It was very odd and frankly something I hadn’t thought about probably since the last time I witnessed one—sometimes sitting down to write a Blague without any exact idea about what that Blague might be can trigger memories of this sort. These soot showers used to happen, I recall, most, in Spring, which seemed longer when I was a kid, in no small part due to the manmade changes in our weather patterns.

There was something magical that happened to kids in Spring, which I can’t quite explain. In the city, there would come that day where bubbles and water balloons and kites and kids trying to ride bikes for the first time without training wheels, bats-and-balls, those paddles with the ball attached with a rubber band, and hopscotch, water pistols, and hulahoops, and those small pink balls one used, in cities, to play handball against a brick wall, and the two dangerous early-seventies toys called Clackers—two balls on a string you would try to make hit above and below your quick-flicking grip, only to hit yourself in the head or face—and that other gadget, a loop with a string and ball attached, where you strapped the loop around one ankle and you would try to jump over the ball as you swung it in a circular motion with said ankle, only to trip yourself and fall face first onto the pavement—all would all start to surface. Girls played elaborate patty cake and jumped rope and everyone played Red Rover and May I.

Later in the more bucolic suburbs, in addition to paper airplaines, boys would fold up paper footballs and shoot the between a buddy’s goal post—index fingers connected at the tips with both thumbs up, while girls made what I was told later in life by someone were called Cooty Cathers, little magical folded and numbered creases of paper with numbers that you manipulated with your fingers and to which you posed questions about love, for the most part. I didn’t describe this at all well. Under flaps of paper were “answers” to the questions girls would ask. Suburban girls played less patty cake it seemed and gymanstical feats seemed to replace jumping rope, but that might be Nadia Comenici’s fault. And of course little league and new gloves and mitts and such played a major part in the childhood estate of Spring. And for some reason candy seemed to be more a Spring occupation than it was in other seasons. I think that had something to do with marketing and the knowledge that kids could sneak away to candy stores more readily in the clement weather.

All this innocence and youth of Spring is very much in keeping with the blissed out pre-fall Edenic experience of the fixed-earth sign of gardeny Taurus.

====================

Living in seaside towns you see your fare share of inns and B&Bs and so forth. And there is something about the signage that can tell you something right off the bat, I find, about the personalities of the owners. If full and they hang a little NO to the left of VACANCY I take it as a polite, time-saving gesture for all involved. It’s polite enough without being cute. I hate cute. The only exception perhaps is when a shop says OPEN and then scrambles the words to read NOPE when they’re not. I can sort of deal with that. But when an inn or B&B is full and they hang the world NO to the right of the VACANCY sign, I feel we’re in for a bit of a problem. I mean there won’t be a problem because obviously I’m not entering to inquire about a room—I wouldn’t anyway; but I might subliminally steer visiting friends or strangers, even, away from some a place. Somehow that particular combination of the two words is the equivalent of the kind of 1980s joke, like, “I’m so interested in this—NOT.” It’s something Roseanne used to say as the character Roseanne on Roseanne. It’s a little dangle-y, as if there is a silent question mark after the work VACANCY? and then boom: NO, loser. It’s just a bit passive aggressive.

And then there is the more cloying passive aggresive version of the no vacancy sign which is SORRY. Really? Sorry? Are you. Why. Who asked you to be. Who says I’m disappointed? How did we jump to disappointment. It’s assuming a lot: To think you have the power to disappoint me. It’s so condescending. It might be worse than VACANCY NO now that I think about it. Like it’s so fucking great to stay at your crappy B&B. SORRY. That’s like breaking up with someone because you know they are just about to break up with you. Like I have to be shut out from staying at your crappy place and also be noble enough to let you down easy that I didn’t want to fucking stay there in the first place. God. It’s such a victimy projection. Like don’t fucking worry about it. I’m fine. I don’t need your fucking pity that I can’t stay in your lousy room with the squeaky double bed and eat your mini muffins with bad coffee in the morning. Trust me we are good.

Whatever happened to FULL. I love FULL. It’s so simple and direct. It’s the opposite of VACANCY, that would be EMPTY which wouldn’t be accurate because a place isn’t empty then full it’s filling up and then full. FILLING UP would be a cute way of saying VACANCY but, yeah, we don’t like cute so never mind. And so what—damn the parallel structure—FULL works just fine. It’s succinct and yet it feels a little friendly. It’s not assuming anything about me or asking me to feel away. It’s not like the other codependent nightmare signs. It’s just like FULL. That’s it. We’re cool. No need to discuss. I have boundaries. I wish you well. I’m not going to waste your time. Just keep looking and I wish you well. God Speed.

While on the subject of signs: I have this idea to market a two sided Provincetown Paddle whereupon, on one side it says COME HERE and on the other GO AWAY. Because after living and working in this town for quite some time what I’ve noticed is that it’s a petrie dish for polarization. And ultimately people fall into two categories—those you want or actually need to see for one reason or another on any given day OR those you are definitely trying to avoid seeing or being seen by. So I thought I would market an auction paddle. I could call it the “Provincetown People Polarization Paddle”™ I think it would sell like hotcakes.

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I couple of days back I posted the monologue I wrote for Stella for the opening night of the Afterglow Festival last year. So I thought I would post my bit too although you’ll have to use your imagination a bit here because my bit relies a lot on pantomime; anyway, coming off the “polarization” theme of yesterday’s post I thought I would throw this out there because, as along with Stella’s bit, both monologues are really about how our little town at the end of Cape Cod is a microcosm of our deeply divided culture on a grand scale. Also, as we’ve changed venues this coming year and won’t be performing our own opening-night show in which we feature festival artists performing that week, I thought it a bit of an homage to the past. I am now cranking up the machinery on all aspects of the Provincetown festival, and working on a new festival for Cambridge so you might expect that much of my Blague-ing will be about the cosmic jokes I encounter in so doing. Because I always do! 

The following was performed September 12, 2016 in Provincetown:

Good evening. Thanks. Applause. Nice. Applause. I’ll Take it. If only for fitting into this tux. Seriously. Not to self: Don’t buy formal wear after completing a 30-day Bikram yoga challenge. Don’t do it. As it is Provincetonians traditionally fatten up as summer ends, like squirrels, before all the restaurants close for the season. Nice that more are staying open. Still, we are going to move the show along this year because: Oy.

So, as you can imagine, I’ve been busy putting this entire festival together—thank you—and (if they applaud: you’re going to doing a lot of applauding here tonight as nine of the fourteen festival performers are here tonight to give you a sampling of what they have in store for you this week with their individual shows, plus some special guests, right) so I’ve been busy organizing and so I don’t have any brilliant stand up prepared or spoken word or anything like that to perform—really I’ve got nothing—so I’m just going to wing it something my acting teacher—Uta—said never to do so, I don’t know I thought I’d just talk about the weather. Really because I love the weather this time of year.

It’s one of the main reasons we chose this time of year for Afterglow, you know, post summer glare. It’s my favorite time of year. I just love it. September. It’s so beautiful. The navy seas, the white caps, the perwinkle skies the bleached parchment sand and still the sunkissed skin and salty brow and the best part of all….Sweaters. Sweaters. So comfortable. And sweaters on the beach. I’m sorry but it’s so chic. Negligent chic but..and sexy so sexy, I think so sexy. Sweaters. They’re like Yankeen lingerie.

And there are fewer people. Or as Stella Starsky calls them the Ford Taurists—the day trippers—they’re gone. And that’s why this is the perfect time, too, for Afterglow, because it is so reminiscent of a summer in Provincetown, say, oh, sevent years ago when an artist, a performer, anyone could come here and have room to move, room to stretch, room to roam, room to create, room to grow and room..s to rent. Not to mention a stage on which a performer could play. So free and comfortable. September really is so conducive to “Try(ing) to Remember” a simpler, more easeful, twinkly and electric time.

And how about you are you comfortable. Yeah? Oh good. Your comfort means a lot to us especially in these times because even here over the rainbow flag in Provincetown we live in a polarized, fractured us-and-them kind of world. Yes even there are factions—mainly outside these doors, if not concurrently on other stages, but even in here we have a bit of a mix. You’re all mixed together. And we want you to feel comfortable amongst the various groups and sects and xenos—is that a word xenos?—amongst the various xenos you find yourselves.

There are our sponsors here tonight of course; and our sparklers, too; but our sponsors esepcially are easy to recognize. As they are the ones leaning in. No, literally leaning in. You would have spotted them earlier coming in, lurched forward, edging up behind you perhaps stepping on your heels a bit, giving you the old flat tire. Not really seeing you but looking over your head maybe on tip toe. Or not. It’s just that sponsors tend to be taller than other people—really, they’re taller, it’s a thing—and they would have been focused down front making a beeline to find their reserved seats in the second or third row. Not the first, no never the first—God forbid. Which I don’t really understand: when people don’t want to sit “oh no! not in the front row.” Why not? “I’d rather sit in the back.” Really? Why? You do realize that the first row is just that much closer than the second, right? We’re not Gilbert Godfriend. Nobody’s going to sledge hammer a watermelon. We’re not Blue Man Group. You don’t need a bib or a slicker. It’s not a log flume. But hey, sponsors though forard leaning, are discreet—some are even anonymous—so fine they found their seats in the second, third, fourth row and they’re happy still leaning forward on the edge of their seats some still on tiptoe, legs shaking in eager anticipation. Like parents at a children’s recital, having invested in their talent, shelled out a few clams, and they’re smiling up at me now, I see you, with your perma grins—those are going to hurt later—nodding in appreciation like the beaming bobble-headed benefacts that they are. They just want it to be good. It’s good right. It’s good. Is it good? Is it good? Is it good? Yeah. Would make a great Snapchat filter wouldn’t it. The sponsor?

And then of course there are the invited audience of townspeople here, the townsfolk if you will who hopefully left their torches on their porches. The Townies though meh they don’t really love that word, the T-word, especially when uttered by someone who isn’t one. The T-word. T for touchy. And they’re easty to spot too because they’re the ones leaning back, mainly with their legs crossed like so, arms folded, typically looking at you sidelong with just half the face, not wanting to commit, just the one eye, most liekly the left, not commiting the full gaze with the right eye no just the left and not the whole left just the corner, the outside corner, without the tear duct, just the dead corner of the eye. Like impress me. And they are strategically seated on the ends in the back on the side in case they have to make a Brexit, a quick get away without being noticed. Which by the way is rarely achieved. People who try to “slip out” always spill something or knock something over or step on someone or trip on someones handbag or especially the heavy doors here always make noise or cast light. But my favorite Brexit move is when people cross, the were seated on the end but they have to cross, and then the do that barely bent over walk through the spotlight so their giant head shadow is cast across the stage, and you get this perfect bent over cameo, going by and the person thinks somehow this makes them invisible the bending but everybody wants to know where the hunched over giant shadow head is going. But for now the Townspeople will stay, won’t you. They’ll see. Anyway this is something different, it’s something different it’s something different—the Massachusetts mantra—it’s something different and maybe they’ll like something different and spread the word, right? Right? T-people?

And the last major faction we have here tonight are passsers by, the already dinters, the strollers, mainy couples who are working that delicate mix of wine and espresso perhaps with a cognac thrown in for good measure, which is always a recipt for impulse shopping or the impromptu purchasing of show tickets. And maybe they were just passing by the box office and asked if there was a show starting and thought: Should we? Do we want to? You think? I don’t know—it’s up to you, and they just said “Okaaay, let’s do it” and then speeed-walked from the box office to the door just in time and then suddenly they were like whoa and sort of stopped startled and did that kind of deer head caught in the headlights two-dimensional heiroglphy walk, their buzz shifting, shades of buyers remorse setting in, what…is…this…where…should…we…? These all say reserved. Those have weirdly smiling people in them those others have are-they angry people in them. Where do we go. What do we do. Someone is yes that guy is waving he is waving at us is he waving at us. Us? He’s nodding and pointing to tow seats. Two seats? You want us to ok—go quick, go quick before someone else…ok this is fine. And then it begins. “Is my bag, where should I put my bag, is it safe on the back of my no I can put it on the floor is the floor clean is it sticky no it’s okay but what if someone spills a drink I think I’ll just hold it, I’ll hold it, I’m going to hold it. I said I’ll hold it. Is it cold? Are you cold? I can’t tell is it cold? Maybe I’ll put my shall should I oh you’re warm? are you warm? do you want to take that off? I can hold your…or…I can pull your sleeve. I don’t know should I get a wait waiter what what’s happening is he talking to me again is he talking to me are you talking to me? Yes.

Because this is opening night….

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How to speak on the subject of nothingness: The day was devoid of meaning, there was nothing to discuss, the televised news headlines were the same as last night’s, it was toast as usual, today, with almond butter and honey, not miso-tahini sauce. Alas, it was a no-nonsense day, with varied purposes being personfied in beings moving too and fro, like birds, in the morning.

There was beauty; there always is. But today it had a special spark suggesting something significant might happen. Use of simile, unawares. And somewhere via something else a corner of the mind awakes from long sleep not hindered by worry and longing. There was poetry, too. Somehow, inside ones head, verse was heard, sounding like voiced by Laurence Olivier, which inspired Kenneth Branagh. And now, I have nothing to fear.

I asked the door to move if there were spirit here and it didn’t. So I know that it is just me. And before I exercise license I must feel, and that is near impossible. Of inspiration take a sip and swallow. Make of yourself vehicle and vessel. It’s uncomfortable but it gets the lead out. Golden years, gold, whop whop whop

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

Typos happen. I don’t have a proofreader. And I like to just write, post and go!
Copyright 2020 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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Virgo 1° (August 23)

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

____________________________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I need a blowjob Aunt Bessie.”

“What Stevie, Honey?”

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

“That’s nice.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

From April 2017, afloat, as I recall:

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

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

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

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

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

———————

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Typos happen. I don’t have a proofreader. And I like to just write, post and go!
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