Virgo 28° (September 19)

Libra is soon to be here and I have to say I’m pretty happy about it. I have a lot on my plate and still some notes on my desk that I ened to sort through en route to making this week count and my work stick. The weather is really dark and going to get stormier as Teddy rages out at sea. To be honest I believe that it will hit New England in a sudden turn but that is my spidey sense. I slept until nine thirty yesterday which is pretty much unheard of. I know my body is trying to recalibrate after the long summer. I say long but was it? I really loved My Brilliant Friend and I will always associate it with this summer’s end. I actually miss the characters which is strange. 

Architects, entrepreneurs. Comes at you like a puppy. Rugged individualism. Skanda, Stark. Jupiter Zeus and Indra for Sagittarius. 33 Gods in the Hindu pantheon. Rudra personifies terror “to howl” war cry. Rude, i.e. unnamed nature. Individualism over collectivism. What did I say today oh yes: The Narrowing. How (the rise of) Narcissism and Social Divisiveness Has Led to Niche Individualism. Something like that. It was better originally but isn’t everything. There is so much to say and yet I have been spread as thin as margarine on melba toast. It is so impossible with this administration to ever feel hopeful. And we have got to get back to that hope place. I just don’t know what we will do with ourselves if bozo the psychopath gets reelected and we still can’t leave the country. I mean this is some dark shit I never expected to encounter in a million years. I’m going to pop a bottle of organic prosecco and make myself a spritz and postpone coping for a day or so.

The following blocks of text are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 866-870. 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.

When I think about letting myself stay some place for a good long time, traveling around Italy let us say over the course of a month or six weeks, I get anxious, which is a new sensation associated with this sort of thing. And so all the more reason to get over it. I think it will be fantastic to spend the time this autumn in Europe as planned, come home and do a whole lot of early spring cleaning in January and, come February, hightail it back to Europe and stay until earliest April, when I have another show in Cambridge.

Why not really get to know Italy. And then every six months or every year, if need be, pick another country. A country a year for the next thirty years? Why not? That to me sounds incredibly life affirming. And something for which I’d like to be relaxed and thin (so I can wear anything and feel in my skin). Like the Zodiac says, with it’s first house of the physical Self, I need to work on my own cult of the body. Which is fun and actually the antidote to any kind of sag in confidence; or rather put it this way, if we took the Spartan ideal of focusing on the physique, first, an attempt at physical perfection, that would surely foster whatever natural confidence, read swagger, one might have. And, again to look at the Zodiac’s twelfth house which precedes it, we have to dissolve away all impediments first, to gain that spiritual sense of floating, drifting, being at one with the mists and foams and fogs so that we can emerge from them in the most surrendered of fashion. All of this (and more, probably) to illustrate a feeling I’m chasing, a halcyon spirit.

It is something we have taken for granted, that calm we thought would always be there. And it wasn’t a surplus of good hard work which sought to undermine it. It was the indulgence of relaxation and ignorance of the body, that temple of flesh and blood that must be exercised and shaped. But we needn’t beat ourselves up about not re-starting some physically challenging regimen (first house), instead we might focus on the energetic (the immaterial twelfth house) aspect of self, where we are pure energy as all matter is. When we imagine ourselves as such, the space between our atoms can release all that is gathered there, whether we see it as tension or something denser. That’s where I’m trying to live these next two weeks—in the purely mutable waters of my truest being.

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I know it isn’t easy to be uplifted these days. All the more reason to get out there and offer people home. We must get beyond the petty antics of others, a challenge when those we put in power embody the worst of humanity. But never mind. Speak truth to power and keep fighting the good fight, waving your sword of righteousness and powering through.

What trips up most people is the feeling they should have more. As if the people we see on television conspicuously consuming have it all sewn up on some level. They don’t. Most people who are glutted by materialism struggle for happiness. Those of us who have aced that particular test, slayed that very dragon, need nothing from the material world. We know where our true riches lie.

One must feel themselves going in a direction and not feel stuck. Momentum is the natural state. I think of my friends with fame and fortune. I see them mainly taking to social media to shove it down others’ throats. Why they need that I can only wonder. To want nothing is true bliss. To count ones blessings and enjoy the here and now is our birthright. To do good works is the only job you have.

I harken to the days of peaceful surrender. I want all of life to be that. And I feel very strongly that it can. I wish to tend my own garden peacefully and if I can’t do it thus then it is not my plot—double entendre intended. I have all that I need and I wish for nothing. I will move seamlessly from this place to that but my home shall be immutable. The news of the world will not enter here. Not until the last bomb drops or the last slave is free. I cannot hold any truth to be self evident but for the right of freedom.

The leaf falls, the crow splashes in what’s left of the birdbath. The white rose turns pink as it passes away. I dreamed of swimming in the ocean, riding waves, popping up to see I was very near a large slick black seal. I saw shadows in the water presumed to be sharks and I awoke. I was unafraid in my own shallow waters.

I can pass through. I will arrive and I will stay and I will leave. Nobody will be affected by me and that is for the best. I cannot manufacture feeling and I can not solicit love. I can only move from moment place, one room, one road at a time. I will snake through the cobbled streets of Paris slick with rain, my heels clacking. I will have walked this path before. I won’t see anything new. I will sip wine and dissolve into the cool surrounding stone. I will be now like the spirit I will become.

I will leave the world behind. This world. This godforsaken place devoid of spirit. I will find myself a corner, like the Cathars, in some land made holy by my sole belief. I will sit in the golden glare of grand cafés longing for the return of cultures that killed themselves with smoke and ask: What is the equivalent of future longing in my present lifetime? For now I cannot see it. My postmodern mind purchased the test answers from a sketchy character. I will slip behind buildings and find that door, that secret entrance where, in a gold lamé gown, one breast exposed, she bids me welcome with ominous laughter while her partner counts the heads with prices attached.

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But back to the world of ideas—that Geminian bastion of genius. What if we had an open house and everything in every room was for sale, because we will have made displays and even #’d the items and it would be something like by appointment meets an open house. We would give a bag to each visitor and put their name on it and let them go to town shopping. And we would advertise it on my festival thrift shop page and we would make some kind of fun Afterglow event about it. And we can do it next September. Just an idea for clearing out everything non-essential to my life. “When things aren’t adding up, substract.”

This was just one of the many ideas discussed yesterday on an incredible beach stroll, from Newcomb Hollow to Cahoon Hollow before the rains came. I am full up with plans and yet I see my primary job as being able to just shut up and work instead of being torn in so many directions.

But the truth is I have a festival in less than a week that I’m producing, promoting and for which I’m fundraising. Then the series at Harvard starts with John Kelly the following week. Then Stella performs her show in New York first week October before we go to Europe, business plan in hand; returning for another show at Harvard then planning NYC rehearsals for our Starsky + Cox holiday show at Joe’s Pub.

Meanwhile we will have discussed the book proposal I wrote with a new agent. I will have written all my year-ahead horoscope books for release in November. I will written a feature for Glamour (if all goes well) serviced our many clients, written that new holiday show and have shopped around that business plan in London, Paris, New York, Boston and beyond.

And I write a Blague everyday.

Now, with that enormity often comes daily dearth brought on by said enormity: I also have to wash, eat, clean, cook, shop, eat, run errands, return emails and attempt to exercise. Funny how other people have time for yoga, massage, oil pulling, pedicures, facials, hair appointments and so forth. No wonder I’m still wearing the same clothes I wore ten years ago. I don’t have time to cultivate a wardrobe. I do, but you know what I mean. Anyway sometimes I have to do all of the above, and even if I don’t, I might just stare at an empty page on this screen.

Today was one of those days where everything seemed scrambled and nobody seemed to be speaking the same language. My many texts and emails were all miscommunication and confusion. It seems that we are culturally holding our breath and none of us are perhaps making the moves we might otherwise make. There’s little release, no great delieveries. It’s like our collective social atmosphere is constipated.

There is a certain pointlessness, perhaps. Because you think, no matter what you do, you’re going to remember there’s an orange dolt in the White House whose latest antic is to act something like a democrat, while still doing diabolical things like trying to dismantle DACA. So why bother, right? It’s all a bit waah-waah as you’re washing up before bed, some with their glasses off, Rachel Maddow a blackish blur on TV in the next room. And it’s September and very Virgo-y. Gooey. Sticky. Like toffee or taffy, Virgo (mutable-earth) is malleable but just barely.

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On top of it all, we have costumes to put together for a fancy dress party in Scotland. I didn’t use “fancy dress” to be sound affected but rather to find a synonym for costumes, as I don’t love repeating myself.

Hopefully nobody’s reading this but we’re going to go as a post-apocalyptic Melania and Barron sort of zombies but with some Mary-Jesus overtones (did you notice that Melania worke della robbia blue to the corona-…I mean the inauguration?

I don’t know dear reader me thinks I might be barking up the totally wrong tree here. Or let’s make that trees plural. I am in a period of things ending me-thinks and I really need to look at my solar return chart even though I don’t really know my birth time just vicinity surrounding.

I try not to sound too reactive to things. It’s one of my whatever you call its in twelve-step programs meaning fatal flaws. I’ll think of it. Anyway, I feel myself in a mental-nervous spin down and I’m want to catch myself. I think that this is what this time is for: The joy that can be had from purposefully keeping your head above water, exercising your will to maintain integrity.

Some part of my brain likes to write.

It’s ironic, paradoxical that this is the most dire year yet in regard to fundraising for my festival, and lots of other things are unraveling (one of our artist’s shows is called Unraveling btw). We are coming to another crossroads where things that have been traditionally in place are no longer available. The kicker is that I’m finding myself getting a feeling of elation from things falling apart. I get a visual flash in my mind of a modern northern city. That’s the celtic witch “visual feelings” thing I get.

The truth is I need to build my non-profit work as a business and I’m down for doing that. I will certainly get to the lemniscate year; and I will surely try out the touring bit, but I can no longer get locked into personal weirdnesses with people. This was an off year, what with the oaf and all.

What is becoming clear: I want to perform and I almost feel urged, as a form of survival, to give it the greatest go. Performing as a duo or solo almost feels now like a life raft I’m clinging to. Things fall apart and we need let them. Things are the universe, the grand other with which you are having a relationship—that is a searing aspect of Aquarius, ruled by Uranus, personification of the universe. Uni (one) verse? Well, in French, I know, Aquarius is verseau, meaning vessel (grail, cup) of the Water Bearer, so the universe is one big vessel pouring, what?, itself?

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 27° (September 18)

I have many trans friends and I’m also good friends with a high-profile figure who has become their enemy as of late which isn’t right. I defend my friend though I don’t think her position has always been made as clear as it could be. I think she is saying what I would say which is: all women, cis (for lack of a better pre-fix) or trans are women. But not all women were born or grew up as biological females and cis women and trans women share some experience but they have also had very different experiences, especially growing up. They may share a gender but they do not share a biological sex from birth. These are facts. Why is it so difficult a thing for anyone to understand. I do think the trans community has to respect the differences of their biologically female sisters, just as much as cis women have to accept that trans women are women. That’s kind of that.

On the subject of the farmer, too, I will note that when his daughter got married and he offered to pay for us to stay in a hotel—he obviously didn’t want us on the property—we said we would stay down the road but he didn’t have to pay us. When I saw a fox had got into the henhouse, even though I had the flu, I sat vigil outside in a chair, for hours until he returned. When just this summer we noticed a chick outside the now one of two henhouses, we called and said we found it and there wasn’t so much of a thank you. The farmer has been a ticking time bomb (Capricorn) the whole time and he has blown before but never at this magnitude. I suspect there is a reason for suddenly turning hostile. I think he wants to provoke some kind of rupture. 

The following blocks of text are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 861-865. 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.

We have this expression around here called “collection time” which is a reference to our days in our twenties and early thirties when we worked in fashion. The two weeks leading up to collection time and typically some kind of runway show entailed waking up going to work for sixteen-to-twenty hours, passing out and doing it again, during a solid fortnight. It was a drag but there was no way around it. Many things in our lives have had this dynamic and we still say collection time.

Two weeks from tonight is the first night of performances for the Afterglow Festival, followed the next week by the kick off of the Glowberon series in Cambridge. I know myself and I will kick myself if I leave any stone uncovered in my fundraising efforts. So that becomes the priority now, getting in as much money as possible to ensure I at least break even. I have worked fairly steadily over the last six months, as I do every year leading up to festival, to bring this series of productions to light. Typically I get a terrible head cold just after festival ends. But my cold has come early this year. If I were to listen to my body as I should I would lie down and get some rest. Unfortunately there has been no slow down in the Starsky + Cox work—if anything this is our busiest week in months—and people who have taken all summer to socialize suddenly have to be seen—how I wish I could just not show up for social plans right now but then, you see, I’m not “cultivating my friendships.” Not my words by the way. And anyway, I’m of the mind that I do much of the cultivation in any case in many instances. To be honest, I’m feeling very hell-is-others right about now and don’t really give a shit about socializing. So there.

Case in point: Someone I know well and whom I write often during the course of the year to check in and chat and so forth (who mostly doesn’t reply to emails or goes into some kind of monologue, as people do, about “how busy I am”—we’re all fucking busy, meanwhile) wrote a note that they’re having a little something tomorrow night and could we come. Well from the sound of what this little something is it’s a biggish something and certainly the planning has been going on for ages. I’m all for spontaneity but I hate feeling like an afterthought or worse: Like someone who might see that this event happened and wasn’t invited so I better be invited just as a precautionary measure against censure. Paranoid of me? Probably. But the way I feel these days I’m going to trust my gut, even if my gut is acting gutted.

Now I’m perfectly aware that I run a risk here of spewing negativity—who wants to read that. But sometimes even those of us who work as professional cheerleaders (especially we in this position) need to get all the yuckies out somehow somewhere. So that’s what I’m doing today. I’m venting. I’m releasing. I’m saying I’m fucking tired and pissed off and all I want to do is watch TCM for the next twelve hours. I don’t want to be on. I don’t want to be professional. I don’t want to be wise or in any way all knowing. I don’t want to channel psychic power. I’m effing exhausted (I’m writing this post the same day as the previous one if you’re catching that theme) and I need a major time out.

Why do I always have to be so Johnny on the spot? Why do I always have to have perfect follow through. Don’t other people who haven’t returned professional emails in the last two months feel even the slightest guilt about it? Even if they’re British? Are friends not aware that it’s always me reaching out and that they rarely initiate. Even if they have kids (and I don’t), I feel like that excuse has worn pretty thin. Anyway people my age are no longer young parents. They are becoming grandparents for Chrissake. Anyway, I’m definitely down a hole and I’m not coming out until I feel better and I’m not going to mask my feelings for this fucking Blague today. Today I need to be a fucking whining complaining douchebag.

I’m tired of the uphill battle. I’m tired of doing the same thing everyday, including this stupid thing. I’m tired of other people. I’m tired of rolling this stupid boulder up the mountain with a stick. Mainly I’m just tired of myself.

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Spent the day yesterday at friends of ours from England who bought a house on the Cape in an area we never got to “the other Cape” in Osterville. It was such a fun day. I forget how much fun seeing true friends can be; and how much it reminds me that I’m surrounded by crazy people for the most part where I live, a place where I have some good aquaintances which I think can be friendships given proper nurturing; though mainly people around here are super problematic.

It was exotic to be in such a heteronormative environment, I must say. Lunch with three generations of a family en plein air. A little boat trip with doggies down to the beach. Tea. Then the appearance of neighbors and cocktails (not for me thanks) and then just a lovely dinner with talking and laughter. I’m completely shagged out today because I stayed up past my usual 9PM bed time but it was really good fun. I think because we don’t have kids we don’t have that experience of, now, being friends with kids as many of our friends are. It makes me sad on one level. I think that’s why I have probably avoided it and stuck with the other groovy ghoulies where I live. But I must say I felt the loss of that lifestyle. Though I try not to compare myself to other people, it’s hard sometime.

I brought this up and the opinion was that it’s good I am verbalizing feeling the loss of would-be parenthood and the “normalcy” of family life. I suppose I’m glad too. Funny how you don’t know how deep something has cut you until you’re faced with it. And I mean it when I say that I might have subconsciously been avoiding environments like that. But now I feel the opposite. I feel like being around more of that sort of thing. I feel like I/we do actually play a part. I think the whole “assistant parent” thing comes into play because we are also a deviation from the normal structure of family and yet we do drop right in. Kids like to see close friends of parents and parents love having the pressure off a bit. Anyway, this year coming up, we are going to be surrounded by many friends with kids and, frankly, I’m so happy about that.

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“Autumn darkness falls so soon and steals my soul” was the first line of a poem I wrote once. I don’t know the rest of the poem because it was stolen with bags full of my writing. One day, in the heat of summer, in the very early 1990s, when we lived in Hoboken, I drove to Florent and sat all day going through tons of notebooks, annotating my writing, deciding what would become what—novel, poem, comedy piece, etc—I must have been there four hours at least. Then I drove and parked the car on Mercer or Green street to meet Lynne to go see a film at the Angelika. I had put all my bags, including my favorite Millet backpack I’d bought in Grenoble, in the trunk. When we came out of the film we found the trunk had been broken into and all my bags were gone.

I don’t know if someone told us to, or if we just knew to, but we drove to the East Village where people sold stuff on the street. We didn’t see any trace of what was taken. I think about the thieves, just grabbing all the bags and running, only to find they are filled with someone’s writing which is of no value to them but of great value to only one person. I’m sure the karmic payback for that swindle was great.

The most sad loss was a green French graph paper notebook Lynne had given me when we lived in Grenoble into which she put a poem I wrote her—she rewrote it onto the first page. And then wrote: “Now write”. The poem was called Run With Me and it was a sort of invitation to her to spend the rest of her life with me. I’m most sad about that.

I think I got writing on this subject because I was trying to pinpoint the feeling I feel now. And I suppose it is just very close to that feeling I felt at the loss of my bags. But instead of bags it’s now this free floating sense of loss over what I once had, now gone, and what I never had. You can definitely feel loss for something that you never owned or experienced. Isn’t that some kind of strange twist on empathy. Being empathetic for some version of yourself you never were.

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I cannot tell a lie, I’m happy summer is drawing to a close. It’s nearly Labor Day and I have just nine days until the start of our festival. And then John Kelly at Oberon and then off to NYC where we will produce Stella’s Birth of the American Baroness. I’m speaking to one of our sponsors that owns a hotel in Asbury Park about possibly producing some shows there. I would actually love to go down and check out the place. As I said in a recent post I haven’t been back to that area in ages. For the first half of those ages I was rebelling against all the unhappiness associated with the place, for the second half I’ve been having some pangs which combined the feelings of wanting to make the past the past but also being curious about what’s going on down there. Still, it’s New Jersey.

There were so many regular things we did then. Someone recently told me they were born in Neptune New Jersey. I think it was my friend Will? Anyway, that area keeps coming up. We used to go to this place called Mom’s Kitchen where we knew all the waitresses who treated us like family. We at there a lot. My mother always had veal chops with vinegar peppers. I googled it and it comes up but there is a new place in its location with the same interior just new booths called Il Posto. It looks eh.

I want to move around a lot this year and yet still hit my marks. I want to be super smart about projects and not be lead down any garden paths. When it comes to the charitable work it will have to be very much easier this coming year. I should really like to realize some of my personal goals in all of this. I know I can do it if I really set my mind to it. And I have a sort of roll-out list sketched out in my imagination. It can all come together beautifully if I set my mind to it. Anyway, I might be ready to re-visit some of these old haunts. And yet I have trepidation. I’m better off sticking to a European plan me thinks, spending as much time over there as possible. I really must get to Venice this year I feel it is an absolute necessity. This will be the year of greatest hits travel wise. We won’t go anywhere new looks like.

I’m not sure how to feel about the festival this year. When I look over my list of sponsors from last year so many of them haven’t returned. By hook or by crook I will somehow make ends meet with the festival but it really has been pulling teeth I must say. I don’t know why so many people tell me it’s their favorite thing and then seem to expect it’s going to happen for them just by magic. The only magic is me. I look forward to doing a little bit more research for Boston to see if we can get that project moving as it ultimately has more potential for success.

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Waking up to Facebook is depressing. It’s not because of any one thing like people being narcissistic, posting things that are meant to feel “greater than”, or people mourning their dead pets or parents, or making sour-grape statements about other people’s “greater than” posts, or the politics, or the anonymous infighting. It’s all of it. I have used Facebook because I promote things and create events and send invites to them; but this too has become a bit of law of diminishing returns as a medium. The site now limits how many invites you can send to events you’ve created and I don’t feel that many people are actually seeing my posts. I will be making my Facebook page a marquee and switching all my focus over to the business of Starsky + Cox, including the inclusion of this Blague which, let’s face it, has got to change back to what it originally was meant to be: Daily postings that were funny and cosmic-synchronistic i.e. Cosmic Jokey. It’s also time for me to stop playing all the instruments and to be the orchestra leader full stop. By the same token I want my own solo work to take precedent. I should look at my solar return chart for the coming year. The irony being that I don’t really know my own birth time.

Lucille Ball has a very simple and, one would think,obvious quote about loving yourself, which is always easier said than done: “Love yourself first and everything else falls into line. You really have to love yourself to get anything done in this world.” It really is truth. And I find that the first step in loving yourself, or the first symptom let’s say, is letting go of those who don’t celebrate (but only tolerate) you. You know who they are because you feel it. Feeling is knowing. You know in your gut. That’s the Canerian- (I feel) Aquarian (I know) connection. Aquarius is an air sign. It is the water bearer, not the water itself. It contains feeling and therefore has a hopefully healthily detached relationship to them. Personal evolution is hinged on not taking anything personally, even when affronts in life come from those closest to us. When they do, say, in childhood, we then replicate those relationships in adulthood, trying to get blood from stones.

What I love about Lucy’s quote is the focus on getting things done. It is true the only way to get things done is to love yourself, that’s kind of an unexpected practical twist. I would imagine that, though she might have loved Desi, that continuing to be in a relationship with him rang as not loving herself. But what do I know. I saw her admit to Dick Cavett and her daughter Lucie for the first time that she tried to kill herself at age sixteen by walking into traffic, because she had a lousy audition for something. To feel that hopeless so young and to be that affected by rejection and then to become the person she did which entailed enduring another twenty five years of a so-so career, one bordering on loserville at times, until she found her place in the Sun. Of course she’s a Leo, the fifth house ruling “the love you give” with the parenthetical addition of (yourself).

I was watching part one of the American Experience on PBS about Walt Disney. Never mind that they used words like extravert, exploration, experience, generosity, big-boy, paternalism and other such terms associated with the Sagittarius that he is, it really was quite inspirational interms of giving your all to get all you want which may never be enough. So we see all sides of it. He was a super heterosexual for sure; and yet there is something strangely homoerotic about being so into the care and needs of other men while treating women more like vessels or second-hand citizens. All the guys who made up the bulk of the Disney studio upper echelon seemed, in many ways, to be carbon copies of himself. They were macho. They were tall and thin and athletic. And Walt built an executive gym, with an Olympic trainer, along with VIP dining halls for this population in his employ. They had all the perks and huge salaries and the women, mostly paint and ink artists, were in lowlier digs in separate buildings and paid peanuts. There is something so gay about being so straight.

Still, on the theme, he never gave up and he certainly loved himself. So much so that he was surrounded by doppelgangers.

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 26° (September 17)

I have a cold. Let’s hope that’s all it is. I have very little energy which is worrying but…what can you do. I am slowly getting myself out of the writer’s block while also putting other wheels in motion. I have to make this fun for myself. It isn’t easy but I really do want to have some fun in the process. It has been six years since I suffered quite a large emotional blow and I can scarcely believe it still lingers, and I’m cross with myself for not fully healing by now, but I suppose these things cannot be rushed. I feel a great deal better when not on this rock. I’m hoping to hear back from counsel I reached out to because I don’t want to face yet another uphill battle on my own. I am working as well as can be expected and I know I need to make certain sacrifices for the greater good. It’s difficult when you feel huge chunks of your life are missing and need compensating for. I suppose that is also my problem and responsibility, but the clock just keeps ticking and the wind blows the pages off the calendar and sometimes I feel my output pales in comparison to others’. This is going to be the lasts for many things this year. Which hopefully means the beginning for a great deal. I am writing a lot so I don’t want to say anymore here. That’s why I’m going through all past Blagues. Reruns if you will.

I meant to say that I had very strange obsessive dreams. The one hinged on the fact that I couldn’t remember the word “for a cadaver of someone who died of drowning” and I kept going around asking people including my high school A.P. English teacher who had it on the tip of his tongue but went into this giant library to look it up. I realize that library has factored into my dreams before. The other similarly obsessive dream hinged on my having to pinch hit as a hair cutter in this salon, which has also factored into past dreams I think, and then I popped out for a minute and bought some objets as Christmas presents, one being a pen and inkwell set up which I thought was three bucks but turned out to be two-seventy-five. I went to pay and all my credit cards were missing from my wallet, so I had to do search of my entire bag. In both cases it was this kind of dream where you try and try to “find” what is lost or some resolution but it just goes on and on, compulsively, with no wrap up. It was exhausting. I am definitely fighting some kind of terrible.

The following blocks of text are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 856-860. 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.

So I was telling you the other day that I found out recently, well, a long time ago, but I only recently starting researching the fact that, I am INFJ in Myers-Briggs speak. This is characterized as Introverted, Intuition, Feeling, Judging. Okay fine. One of the characteristics of being INFJ is seeing patterns in things, which speaks to my interest in all things metaphysical, astrology in particular, which is this perfect mandala for existence on so many levels—that is to say that every nook and crannie of experience seems to folow the twelve fold logic of the astrological signs and houses, one through twelve, as they give way to one another, ad infinitum, on what isn’t a static circle of the zodiac but a never ending upward spiraling staircase, something, in its patterning recalls DNA, the base and railing of this imagined stairwel, forming a sort of double helix—Jacob’s ladder also comes to mind as does the song Stairway to Heaven.

I was musing on this in the car yesterday. Driving my 85 Mercedes into Provincetown with the top open and the windows down feels fantastic in any sense. And I was already enjoying the previous day’s revelation about rushing, which I’m really fighting against doing even as I can justifiably consider my life to be a never ending series of deadlines. It starts with perishing thoughts along that perception and realizing what the hell are we rushing towards? I think rushing is a symptom of not really doing what you want to do or at least including bits or seeds of that truest dream into your day to day. So I myself need to work on that I realize. I might be best off doing it on a local level for awhile. At least I might as well give it a whirl. And so fresh from that realization I had another one:

The old adage “we really are just passing through” can be taken quite literally. I should contextualize this by saying that I am not one to get very attached to very much—my Aquarian moon (which als makes me something of a cult leader lol) perhaps contributing to my often nuts-and-berries existence of non-material attachment and the fact that, as compared with most people, I could probably pack up my entire house in a matter of days and be on my way somewhere else. At the very least I could lock my front door and walk away with the entire contents of my home left as it is and neither miss or nor need anything from it that isn’t in my suitcase. I travel often. In fact I get very antsy unless I’m in a city, even though I presently have no home in a city—each year we sort of pick a place and just go there, but these last three years Stella has been doing a masters degree so we’ve stayed by, in Boston, which I liked more than I thought I would. Anyway, I’ve always felt “stuck” on the Cape in winter dating back to 1998 when we first bought a house.

But back to my revelation. I got this sense that my time in any home, including the planet, is so terribly fleeting that I’m passing through any place I live, including the one I call home, which for me, is an experience so acute to the degree that I’ve managed to turn it around and gain this new perspective of choosing to visit the Cape when I’m here, as one of my favorite places that I visit frequently year on year. Right now I’m in this house. Next year I will be too. After that who knows. But I’ll still include this in my mix. It’s still up to me. I don’t need to retreat somewhere and be stuck there I have infinite options because I keep giving myself infinite opportunity. Already I feel the adjustment is working; I feel terribly less anxious and as if I’m on a sort of permanent vacation, punctuated with business appointments and meetings. But the truth be told. Stella has finished school; I’ve completed one festival and am about to execute a second; I wrote a book proposal which is now in the hands of a reputable agent; and we have a business plan all but finished and ready to be seen by investing eyes. All this will what is already a creative and rewarding private consultancy, which is the backbone of our work, and the soul of our business.

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The working out of some bits that I will perform in front of the curtain at Afterglow is now on my to-do list. I have flirted with a few ideas in the past but now I must actually get some thoughts on paper that I can work up into five-minute bits. This first one I’m going to work on we’ve been having so much fun with lately. It all started with this line of comedy that popped into my head which was: We moved to Wellfleet for the Jewish eye candy. And I’ve been working on that a bit—not just the jokes but the notion of doing Jewish jokes at all which can really fall flat.

 So it starts with: We were talking about Provincetown, probably coming off gentrification, but we recently moved to Wellfleet. For the Jewish eye candy. What? Wellfleet? Oh yeah, It’s super intelligentsia, academic, many psychologists, thinkers, which is so sexy. And chic, yes. Gorgeous people, thin, lanky, beautiful JD Salinger Jews, you know. (Am I wrong? No) Eye candy. Of both sexes. Many, many gorgeous couples, walking the beach, gorgeous couples, mostly mothers and sons but gorgeous. On the beach walking. All lean and kibbutzy. Long lanky legs, kicking out in front of them, like this, you know, walking, zero body fat, because they’re weekend eaters, otherwise just a little melon in the morning a little avocado something for lunch and maybe some sushi from Mac’s shack, so to rock a skimpy their little late 1970s looking gymshorts or bikini with an unironic No Nukes tee-shirt. Gorgeous, eye-candy.

I eroticize the Jews. I’m an honorary Jew so I’m allowed. I grew up in a mostly Jewish apartment complex. I went to pre-school at Jewish Community Center in Jersey City. All the boys there, my earliest friends, Jewish—Richard Rosen, Steven Cantor, Jeffrey Finkel—I don’t know where I”m going with this so I think I’ll have to stop…..I think most of the humor is in the above bit anyway. And it’s meant to be sure and I’ll just be fleshing it out.

One of the other bits I was thinking of doing I actually did write about here before. It was on the theme of No Vacancy at B&B’s and so forth. I actually think I can combine them. I think I’ll do a lot of Provincetown style jokes. I don’t think I’m thinking all that clearly today, not sure enough that I can make a compelling comedy attempt today. I think we’ll just let this one go by undetecte, whadya say? You’ll let me slide, right? Anyway, I better quite while I”m ahead lest I really insult someone.

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It’s 5:55 on a Saturday, late August. I have the creeps, I don’t know why. I’m not anxious. I just have the creeps. It’s sort of ridiculous to. I suppose I feel a bit like something from the past is going to come back to haunt me in some way. Is’t that odd? I don’t know that I’ve felt that way ever in my waking life. I know I have experienced that feeling in dreams, particularly, with one recurring dream in which I may have killed someone and buried their body in the back yard of (it’s always) my house (in Harwichport). I suppose I have to ask myself do I really miss my life in Harwichport. In so many ways I did. But I don’t think I really liked it much. I need a walking town. This is becoming extremely clear to me. It’s why I like Belfast but there really isn’t all that much going on there. But that’s okay too. It could be Portland. I don’t know. I wish I knew. I wish I knew why I was so convinced of things and then I’m not. It makes me wonder if I’m not a bit kooky.

I think of other people of modest to moderate means and what they do. Not all, although many, of my friends are gazillionaires. I have friends who work in New York, maybe they own their apartment there or they rent and own a house elsewhere, something small, on the Island or something. It’s not for me. I am luck in that if nothing truly could-be spectacular on the horizon pans out, I can do what I do from anywhere. I really can. I can get a small house in Sicily or Sardinia or in Gascony or, sure, in Maine somewhere, too, and still have an apartment in Paris or in Boston or both. I like going to New York but I don’t feel I want to have to live there at this time, or probably ever. Anyway, I’m trying to verbalize any thoughts I have about this creepy feeling to try to get to the core of it; though I suspect it isn’t any one thing, but a number of factors contributing to this compounded sensation.

It’s very possible that the creeps are the release of something that is no longer serving me, therefore the increasing absence of a feeling rather than one creeping in or up on me. I have always been someone who has heaped a lot on his own plate and perhaps, as a result, I haven’t driven far enough into any one direction. I characterize this as a Libra thing, being prismatic in one’s approach to creativity and manfestation. The whole renaissance man thing. And it might serve me well to be more laser as I move forward. I also think I need to accelerate this release of the creeps, as I’m experience them, by forgiving myself for my part in any past disappointments or disassociations. I imagine that would be quite beneficial. I also think that I could be more clever and executive and also throw out a bunch of old possessions I’ve been hanging onto out of fear for survival, or the preservation of some identity or sense of belonging, that have become visual reminders, now, of a past I’ve been long passed out of.

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Sometimes feelings are overwhelming, especially the wistful sort from the past. I was just writing a fellow who, with his partner, owns a hotel in Asbury Park, along with hotels in Provincetown, where they support my non-profit work. I have not been down the shore in New Jersey since just after my father died and about three years before my mother died. The whole of my childhood and entropy which came to characterize its progression had to be put in a box, behind me, for the sake of my own survival. I got into a giant mess in the wake of this big ball of tragic fiasco. And I don’t think I’ve stepped foot in New Jersey at all, actually, now in nearly fifteen years. Wow. I’m just realizing this as I type here. Truth be told, though, when I saw that these aquaintances of mine had bought and renovated a hotel in Asbury, my first thought was: I do need to go back and come to terms with the magical tragical times for which the shore was a backdrop in my early life. From the time I was seven until the time my parents sold the what was once just our summer house in Belmar prior to their deaths, the length of the shore, from Asbury Park to Sea Girt, was my personal playground and the site of many firsts, and not all of them wholeseom. I’m sure I will write all about this one day. In the meantime I still have very mixed feelings about the whole of my past.

I think I’m too used to things being ripped away from me. My parents increasingly isolated and disassociated from the many, many friends, couples with families, who made up the social fabric of my early life. We were always in groups. We lived in an apartment building with best friend neighbors who were constantly around. In summer we belonged to a “cabana club” with an even wider array of families and bbq’s and group dinners out in summer, late night, en masse, where the plastic booths or chair upholstery would stick to the sunburned backs of ones legs, and where you would fall asleep at the table, being carried to the car, slightly waking, and then back into the apartment. Then when I was eight years old we moved to the suburbs where our world already started to shrink. But still, weekends would entail perfumed couples dressed to the nines showing up in Cadillacs and Lincolns, for drinks before heading out with my parents to some fancy restaurants—or they would have parties that would go into the wee hours; and I would fall asleep to the reassuring sound of adult laughter from far off rooms. And there was always the shore. Our house had seven bedrooms and was always filled with visitors, our wrap around porch, crowded with close revelers, giving the impression our house was some sort of Inn, attracting strangers up to inquire about Vacancy, which opened these poor strangers to some harmless though certainly semi-drunken practical jokes by my Dad and his bravado filled pals.

My parents belonged to a culture. They were New Jersey. My father was from the largest Italian family in Hudson County and my mother from an equally giant Irish clan of cops, chiefs of police and local politicians. My parents were tiny, just over five foot, but they were enormously popular. But slowly, slowly this peopled word became ever vacant, until my parents world shrunk to living in a two-room apartment, smaller even than the one in which they started, filled only with plastic picture frames and encroaching demential.

I’m glad these things are coming up; not that I haven’t written about them before probably. It’s times like these one really appreciates the fact they took Typing in high school Do you remember wondering whether or not you should take a typing class? We didn’t know then that the whole of our adult lives would be spent in front of keyboard. Which it shouldn’t be. But, hey, for better or worse I did end up a writer. That’s how most people know me, anyway. Anyway, I think the creeps feeling I was talking about in the previous post is all about me. I think I give myself the creeps. I think I’ve become aware, and acutely so, of my own shortcomings and incidents in the past where I have contributed to the demise of good relationships or situations that didn’t need to be destoyed. And I think I destroy things because, like so many elements of my childhood, past and even my adulthood, I’ve felt that feeling of things being ripped away. So I think I tear them I knew one before they can be thus ripped. I’m a highly sensitive sort and am easily hurt and really really struggle with (not) taking things personally. I work a lot with clients on this subject, secrety working on myself in the process.

Anyway: Asbury Park. It would be fun to pursue something there. I think I’m ready to see that part of the world again. See what’s still miraculously standing and what is now the property of Lady Mnemosyne.

I am a son of Earth and starry sky. I am parched with thirst and am dying; but quickly grant me cold water from the Lake of Memory to drink.—“instructions for the dead” written on a gold Orphic tablet

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I guess it’s pretty Virgo to feel disillusioned with the world and with oneself. I am not feeling good today and I don’t know where to place the blame. On myself, yes, I know. But I’m also tired of blaming me. Other people work hard and get breaks. Why have I yet to figure out how to take a break. Even when I’m on a holiday I am playing some kind of catch up or otherwise working between times. It really sucks. I’ve been on my own for so long and I feel like I’m in high-alert mode for survival all the time. I’m not talking about material things although right now I don’t feel much like being around people who have the proverbial all. And I certainly don’t need to watch them perform their own prosperity shows. The only thing I can say fairly definitively is that I still tend to be the smartest person in the room; but I’m tired of also being the most sensitive on so many levels. Hey this is really helping to get this shit out. Because I just got a glimpse of what I might like to do…

I remember in the late eighties I was on a real spiritual trip. I was reading the Vedas and Upanishads and all that jazz (for fun). I really wanted enlightenment. It was a goal. Everything was ahead of me. I might have had that brilliant acting career—for me the chance to express myself via that craft which I loved so much (to be clear I never thought about “making it” in terms of fame or money); perhaps that’s why I never did. It was tough knocking on agents doors and dealing with the constant rejection. I think I buffered myself through all that by reading. I didn’t have a career. I had jobs. I went to them and I left them. I smoked a lot of pot probably. I didn’t drink in those days out of choice–the first, not the last, time I took a break from alcohol for clarity. I didn’t feel I needed to do it as much as I wanted to. All this to say that I feel a bit full circle. Not on the alcohol front although that might be part of it. I’ve been super abstemious as of late, after a year of enjoying some good wines. I take natural breaks. I suppose I always have. And it feels good to clear out. Just as it feels good sometimes to indulge. To everything there is a season.

I feel pretty exhausted lately. Not sure what that’s about. Not fatigues, but exhausted. Like I can barely hold my head up at times. I should probably get my blood pressure checked. It might actually be too low. And, to add to the mix, I woke up with a horrible head cold so there is that. But no rest for the weary as I have a day full of clients and promotion work for the festival. And I should be working on some creative bits on that score but I just can’t find the funny in me right now. It’s all I can do to maintain a positive attitude which is typically quite a cinch. I will admit I’m bummed that not all my expected fundraising came through this year. People love to say they love what I do but when it comes time for even small shows of monetary support these same folks do tend to take a powder. It is particularly irksome in Ptown where people will say they’re strapped but then walk around from bar to restaurant to bar spending loads of dough on crap food and pricey drinks. But what can you do. You can’t berate them for it or even give it much of a second thought. I suppose my only goal today is to take a deep metaphoric inhale that might constitute a second wind, because for the most part I feel as if it’s been knocked out of me.

Also I lost my signature Persol sunglasses as I do every year and it has put me in a mood. I had put them together in a little hug with my cheapo No. 1 readers and left them at a friends house where I was for a dinner party. The readers were still there but the sunglasses had somehow uncoupled from them. I dunno, people. I just don’t know.

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 25° (September 16)

Thanks for getting back to us so quickly and for letting us know about Karen. We suppose it’s not unusual for players to change in this process, especially when going back to the drawing board on concept. That said we not only remain super excited about this project, we are increasingly creatively inspired. Remember that we are writers first. We have never written for film or television, but in addition to our books we have written live shows that we have performed solo and as a team and performed at places like Ars Nova and Joe’s Pub at the Public in NYC, and at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, MA, etc. We are not saying that you should think about having us write the show, but we do think that we should brainstorm with you for starters, as we have some solid ideas about what would make a good show in regard to the world in which we inhabit in real life and how that world would translate into a successful television show. At the very least we have a great many ideas you might want to chew on, if not take up or shoot down.

Our feeling is that we can really help you shape the concept and even bring some characters to life. We won’t go into great detail here for reasons of space and time, but why don’t we try to get on a Zoom call in the coming weeks. Our own backstory and journey toward becoming Starsky + Cox includes working as writers and fashion designers and actors and magazine editors and performance artists and authors, and of course astrologers, wearing so many other hats as we have, has a number of benefits: First, we have a great many stories to relate and we have writing expertise to do so. Second, when we “became” Starsky + Cox, we not only had a great network of friends and colleagues in the fields of entertainment, publishing, fashion, art and advertising and media where early adopters and influencers hold sway, who helped us make our brand known, these folks also became our clients, many of whom we have been consulting for over a decade. As metaphysicians we have helped people reach their goals and potential in their personal and professional lives, while, in the process adding a bit of magic to their lives. In practical terms, Stella being a psychologist especially, we are effective therapists; but there is also a psychic element that comes into it which is “extra sensory” for which there is no explanation though it happens with frequency. This special sauce inspires clients on a different level, amplifying their faith in some divine/cosmic forces at play, as inexplicable as they may be.

So, even though the show could be sliced and diced any which way you as producers fancy. We feel strongly that you might consider basing the show on the reality of our lives and work. Starsky + Cox exist in the real world and there are many spokes to their professional wheel. They also have complicated lives in their own right—I realize I’ve switched to third person here LOL—which could be an area of story to mine. Or not. Or sometimes not always. We have used the example of “The Guy” character in High Maintenance who is sometimes just the catalyst for a story line that focusses on folks he brushes up against, and sometimes he is the main character in an episode, and sometimes in between. If the core of the world of Starsky + Cox is their consultancy and their clients include actors and directors and academics and fashion designers and tech hotshots and studio heads and famous painters and photographers and top editors and sports or music stars BUT ALSO “regular folk” from all over the world who find their way to us and who, more often than not, are as if not more interesting than our more high-powered clients—if all of this is real life for us—wouldn’t it make for fertile creative soil for the made-for-TV version of our world and experience?

I’ll reel this in and we can talk more when we see you, but we wanted to take this opportunity to say that we feel we can be more of a resource in this project than consulting on the personality traits of characters of a certain sign; we think we can actually help you shape what this show is about and offer ideas for making it compelling story-wise, overall, for the life of the show, and of course, episode to episode. We can draw inspiration from the thousands of people with whom our work has brought us in contact and come up with a great many story lines (loosely based on reality and disguised enough of course not to mess with our client confidentiality, especially, when drawing from that part of our professional experience. At some point perhaps Stella and I would take a crack at writing actual episodes—again we’ve never done it but we feel it is something at which we can excel at some point. Meanwhile, we can craft the concept with you and provide character ideas and plotlines and all of that. I will add as a footnote, that the book we are currently working on is heavily themed on the “personal development” angle of the astrological characters which we have over time delineated in our larger body of work. That is to say, the thinking caps we are currently wearing would only contribute to the work of fully realizing this show, getting it sold, and making it a smash.

The following blocks of text are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 851-855. 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 want to stay very close to the bone today and rather close to home. My day entails driving into Provincetown and putting up posters and circulating postcards with the wrong information on it. But never mind. I will do this in the afternoon, now as I have other things that have invaded my morning plans. Like talking to the “manager” (I think he’s an accountant) of the first ever individual to break a contract.

That conversation was okay. I sort of knew the guy. Anyway didn’t feel like going to Provincetown, the weather is too iffy. Went into town for the daily pound of fish and fresh vegetable. Really nothing as grand as this place in summer. Well there are other things but this is pretty good. I do love the open ocean and I do love the beaches on Cape Cod. There’s nothing like them anywhere really. So I’ll have to come up with a formula for keeping a strong foothold here. I might just look around for another year-round rental when the time comes. I’m in such a groove here I really am. And in just a matter of hours Stella will be finished with school and we’ll really be on the same page, working together, other than with clients, for the first time in a long time.

We’re going to take a trip. First we’ll go to Boston for a couple nights. Then we’ll hang out in Provincetown for my birthday. Then we head to New York later that week to stay at the Marleton while Stella does her show at Dixon Place. Then back to Wellfleet for Oyster Fest and then off we go to London, with a side trip to Suffolk, Edinburgh and Paris. We’re going to stay at the Portobello Hotel in our old Notting Hill hood. The Cow is still in operation. I wonder if it’s still good. But anyway, that whole area is such a treat to walk around in. We’re going to have such fun there after spending a long weekend in the countryside with close friends, we can see clients and meet on our creative business projects at the Portobello. I definitely need a whole new wardbrobe, but not before I shed a little weight.

On that score I have put us on a diet after our calories debaucle in Maine. So we are eating salad and salmon for lunch everyday, pretty much, and different variations on a celery-soup theme at night. My body is currently playing chicken with me, refusing to show weight loss on the scale, but my clothes are already fitting better and my face is no longer a fully inflated red rubber ball, though still only slightly deflated. It’s all of a piece: This sense of gearing up for something—for preparing for ones good. I’m readying myself for the rentrée, and I do have quite a lot of city hopping to do. For this I must go shoe shopping, which I will, in New York, in October. That’s going to be a bit of indulge. I deserve it that’s for sure. That and weekly massages. But it’s all coming I can feel it.

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I feel that I’m once again getting down to the nitty gritty and that everything else is gravy. How to explain? Life has never felt less dramatic. I’m not sure exactly from what that is resulting. I guess I feel secure emotionally and financially and that I am, for the most part, representing myself in such a way that I feel proud. I feel detached, autonomous and not under any scrutiny. I don’t feel particularly creative perhaps, another reason why forcing me to write these Blagues every day can be a boon. I don’t feel like venturing to far forth. I want to stick with the same territory. Which is why I’m so happy with the trips coming up. I don’t need to go back to Maine as yet. I’m happy to explore the Cape this Fall, but that will be so fast and fleeting. And then away for three weeks. Not only are we staying in our old familar London neighborhood but also in our old familiar Paris one as well, near the Pantheon, in walking distance to Bikram Yoga Rive Gauche and the Luxembourg Gardens and our favorite, and I mean favorite, cafe, probably, of all time, where I plan to eat two meals a day, at the least, every day I’m there. You think I’m kidding but I’m not.

Meanwhile, however, and I’m glad it happens in this order, we have a costume party to attend in Edinburgh on a dystopian theme. I’m confused too. Besides going as a Zombie or some character in 1984, I suppose we could come up with something original. But it’s hard to think costumes while traveling with a medium sized suitcase. One must be clever. I suppose I could just find some proletariat workers jumpsuits or some cast-off costuming from a Janet Jackson video, or do something vagule Mad Max ish. I don’t know. I have a few joke ideas up my sleeve that involve minimal baggage, real or emotional. Anyway that happens in the highlands of Scotland which will be bookended by nights at the Edinburgh Residences. There is quite a good pubby restaurant right in that area, a kind of basement grotto witchy pagan Scottish kind of place with a soupçon of Presbyterianism.

I do plan on being rather thinnish by the time the party rolls around; and then I plan on letting myself completely go. I jest (not really). But, from Edinburgh we will take train to London then Eurostar to Paris all in one day to arrive at our tiny flat in the fifth. Je cannot wait. Well I can. I have to be clear about what I’m taking with me and what I’m not taking with me. I have to have all of my 2018 Haute Astrology Books finished and designed and ready to go. I must also have any Christmas show we’re planning to do at Joe’s Pub all mapped out. We will return mid November to Boston to see Bridget Barkan, whom I’m producing perform at Oberon/American Repertory Theater—I first produce John Kelly in September—as party of an expanded series, now in its third year, that I do there. Which is quite fun, I must say. So we return mid November meaning I should probably have the new Christmas show mapped out if not before, than while, I’m away. If we have a magazine feature to write, as well, I will write that before I go away, between end September to end October.

I know I have to start working on my own solo show this year. And my musicianship and improvisational talent. I think about that time I wrote about here, year one, of the Cosmic Blague, about playing the piano at The Bell Caffe. I have quite a bit of story now, here, under my belt. Several thousand screenplays probably. We will one day unpack it all. But for now I have some entrepreneurial plans to hatch and hatch them I will.

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We didn’t “watch” the eclipse in the way people with type-A personalities might do. I don’t have a type-A personality per se. I am an INFJ in Myers-Briggs terms, as is Stella. As are some close friends like JK Rowling and Justin Vivian Bond. We are the rarest personality type making up less thatn 1% of the population. We are dreamers, but not idle ones. We do in fact have quite a power of manifestation. So watch out.

Anyway I was talking about the eclipse. Although I have a feeling I’m going to veer into INFJ territory. Who can know. I know I’m going to Paris and London soon and I’m pretty happy about that I must say. So this is so us: We didn’t really know the exact time of the eclipse because we didn’t really care I guess. Also we are not the ones to make lenses or glasses or camera obscura. In fact we were having lunch and spontaneously decided to have a meeting about finances, business plans and dreams. This is something we haven’t done in months due to heavey separate schedules—she finishing school, me legistating the law of diminishing returns in trying to stage yet another festival. Pin in that.

Anyway we thought we’d put on the news—CNN—as a backdrop while we talked just to see what was up with the eclipse. As it turned out we were just about to see the first totality occur on the West Coast and move its way across. We went outside for a brief five minutes when we “felt” things were at getting dark. We could see the reflection of the sun bouncing against our car and could see the reflection grow dim. And the chickens shut their noisy beaks for five minutes. And the birds took to the trees thinking, hmm, should we roost? And then it started getting lighter.

We went inside finished our meeting and just as we did the last totality was being seen off the east coast. It was pretty cool, in the sense that, for us, this was one big new moon ceremony and it felt pretty fun and great to have had a meeting about our plans and dreams during this powerful new moon. It was also super fun to note that in our plans and dreams involve a few trips to old favorite places like Paris and London. In the coming years we hope to visit more environs more exotic to us.

As INFJs we come across as subtle extraverts but the fact is that we suddenly withdraw. I can get stuck in withdrawal mode that’s for sure. My hero Jimmy Carter is a Libra and an INFJ. It strikes me that he is still seen as ineffectual. He was the total opposite. He was preventative and nobody likes Chicken Little, who (weirdly) I now realize as I’m writing this was one of my favorite literary characters growing up.

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So we bid adieu to Leo and say howdy Virgo. Entering Virgo typically makes my heart race, not for any other reason than it means that the Afterglow Festival is drawing nigh. Indeed in just three weeks from tonight plus ninety minutes Phoebe Legere will take to the stage. I love Phoebe she is unique talented and I truly want her to have a good show. I think I’m usually most nervous this time of year because I too must write half an hour of show and have two songs to sing. I’m not doing that this year. No performance from us. Well, not from me. Stella is going to reprise her Birth of the American Baroness show, which will be great, I’m sure; and a good rehearsal for her leading up to doing it at Dixon Place in October. So that’s pretty great. These will be the fourth and fifth venues where she has presented (and I’ve produced) the show.

I’m sad about not performing of course. But I’m looking forward to taking some inventory of my own stage stuff. I need to work on my solo play which will have music. Gosh I hope it’s recorded somewhere. I’m sure it is.* And that I’ll stumble upon it again the moment I most need to. It’s probably sitting in that pile over there on my desk. In the meantime. I do need to inventory songs as well. That’s always fun in any case. I asked myself today if I”m jealous of someone like, oh I dunno, name a person who has a shop, Josh Patner and at his lovely shop, Loveland. Not at all really. I couldn’t stand in a shop all day touching things. But I do like the idea of having ones own world and being surrounded by ones own creations. Being more conceptual rather than tactile a person, I lack the physical representation of taste, order, beauty, grace—but I’m nigh on getting into it. I’m nigh on getting into it all. I just need to stick to a schedule now that I (again) have the chance to be one and the same with words and pictures.

[a day passes]

*So first thing this morning I started puttering and, sure enough, I stumbled on that document I created outlining my solo show. I’m not saying it’s a sign but I’m going to start scripting it sooner than later. I’m sure you’ll see a lot of it. In fact his Blague got a bump back in April when I started writing every day on the boat in Belize. A lot of that material was meant to become the show. I don’t even know if it’s worth mining through all that—what I wrote then was meant to be show material—now I remember: I was going to try and see if I could write the entire show on the boat and if I could I was going to perform it this year Afterglow—how could I have blocked that out? Anyway, the writing didn’t go in that direction and I am not one to keep any writing, particularly my own, go in whatever the fuck direction it wants to. All to say that this Blague was really powered this year by personal story I thought would be show, which may still be show, but in any case has brought me to this spot where, at least, I realize the coming-full-circleness of my performance writing, if not immediately embark upon its execution.

On today’s list to do are putting together folders with visuals of some things I find inspiring. At least I’ll get that ball rolling. And also taking stock of many different projects whereby knowing exactly at what point I stopped and what the steps are moving forward. That’s kind of fun. I’m also up-to-date with this Blague. And am about to embark. Will explain 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! Copyright 2020 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Get your HAUTE ASTROLOGY 2020 Weekly Horoscope ebooks by Starsky + Cox.

Virgo 24° (September 15)

Another wall has been hit and this has to be the last. I am so tired of feeling sad and hurt. It still feels as unbelievable as it did six years ago. The thought that someone has derived pleasure from other’s pain is the most baffling bit of all. We were enjoying each other’s company in life, sharing so much, and then poof. It has so much to do with the love interests involved. One in particular was always going to be trouble and it turned out that was true. I have to snap out of this and stay snapped out. 

The following blocks of text are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 846-850. 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.

Watched Glory Daze last eve on Netflix. Brought back many uneasy memories of those crazy club-kid days. DV8 Magazine, which was probably the first magazine ever designed on a Mac, was central to the scene (before Project X came along). Peter Belsky and Jonathan Bee were the teen-aged publishers. Dearly departed Laurie Litchford and I were editors. Editorial meetings with Michael Alig, James St. James, Keoki, Larry Tee, RuPaul and the whole tribe in attendance never went super smoothly. We were trying to publish a serious Arts and Fashion magazine which the kids would then take to Tunnel and other places to sell. I suspect we never got our full share of the profits.

Michael Musto, who is in the documentary, has made mention to me of the inconsistencies in the chronology of events put forth by the film. I’m curious to know if Fenton Baily has anything to add. I may never know. Anyway it was an era in which I felt vacant much of the time, and I feel that way now, looking back. I had just moved to New York City from Cambridge where I was for just a year after returning from Paris, in 1986, which I never wanted to do. I had moved there after college, returning to France, in a way, since I spent my junior there, when I would take the train from Grenoble, most weekends, to stay at some fabulous cheap hotel, namely the Hotel St. Domenico on the rue St. Dominque in the seventh.

My “in” into New York was through a hairdresser friend, Nancy Cohen, who lived in Paris when we did. She was part of our larger tribe. Nancy had a friend called Rondi Cooler who worked at Avenue magazie. As I had spent my year in Paris working at Passion magazine, a giant-sized (1980s) bi monthly glossy in English, all about doings in the city of lights, owned and run by Canadian, Robert Sarner. Rondi got me a job at Avenue—actually I was an editorial assistant at On The Avenue, their glossy tabloid publication, which came out weekly and was super fun and cheeky, taking the piss out of the 10022 crowd, while catering to them all at once. I wrote stories on themes like are Ed Koch and Cardinal O’Connor compatible, employing an astrologer, a hand-writing analyst and a numerologist, or something, to bring the “facts” to light. I also covered parties with great photographers like Mary Hilliard or Eric Weiss in tow (or rather they were towing me).

I was supposed to cover the young uptown set, the junior leage, if you will. Meanwhile I was far more downtown in my character, my wardrobe getting me into trouble on occasion, and with a longing, still, for Le Palace and Castel and Le Flashback in Paris, I was drawn to what was still a vibrant though changing club world in New York. A flyer came across my desk for a party for a new magazine starting up downtown called DV8* (with an asterisk as Wallpaper* would later adopt—I worked there later too, lol). Nobody at the magazine, including its editor and utlmately our dearest of friends who left us too early, could edit. I stepped in to do the actual work of turning stories handed to me, I’m not kidding, on toilet paper scribbled on in the middle of the night in a stall of some club, no doubt; gibberish from which I had to make complete sentences, paragraphs, pieces onto which I would impose some made up point of view. You didn’t email with the writer.

Only Laurie and Peter and Jonathan had computers. I would go to Laurie’s Hell’s Kitchen apartment during the day while she was at work, and race against time before my allergies to her cats sent me running from the old tenement, working as fast as I could on her tiny Mac SE30, to bascially shape scratchings on crumbled bits of paper into something sensical. And there were a handful of writers, like Musto, who handed in ready made copy. It was an incubator for talent though we didn’t know it at the time, really. Nobody thought in those terms. But, for instance, David LaChapelle’s first magazine cover was DV8*.

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So this is what I found out: Boston had the first public school, the first subway and the first public park in America. It’s very livable and health is a big deal for people in Boston. I feel very healthy there I must say.

The city is considered to be a world leader in innovation and entrepreneurship, with nearly 2 thousand start-ups. says:

Innovation that Matters 2016 (Report). US Chamber of Commerce. 2016.

What gives: Households in the city claim the highest average rate of philanthropy in the United States; The city has one of the highest costs of living in the United States as it has undergone gentrification—though it remains high on world livability rankings.

Global City: Boston is placed among the top 30 most economically powerful cities in the world. Encompassing $363 billion, the Greater Boston metropolitan area has the sixth-largest economy in the country and 12th-largest in the world.

Youth and Vigor: Boston’s colleges and universities exert a significant impact on the regional economy. Boston attracts more than 350,000 college students from around the world, who contribute more than US$4.8 billion annually to the city’s economy.

Tourism: also composes a large part of Boston’s economy, with 21.2 million domestic and international visitors spending $8.3 billion in 2011; excluding visitors from Canada and Mexico, over 1.4 million international tourists visited Boston in 2014.

Wellness: Boston receives the highest absolute amount of annual funding from the National Institutes of Health. Of all cities in the United States. businesses and institutions rank among the top in the country for environmental sustainability and investment.

Progressive: The city is considered highly innovative due to the presence of academia, access to venture capital, and the presence of many high-tech companies. It is a hub of design education with MassArt, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, the School of Design Studies at The Boston Architectual College, New England School of Art & Design, The Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and, even, the Rhode Island School of Design within close promximity

Thought Leaders: Boston has been called the “Athens of America” “the intellectual capital of the United States. The Transcendentalists— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, James Russell Lowell, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow—were Boston based.

In a Word: Brahmin has come to mean a socially or culturally superior person, especially a member of the upper classes from New England. But it was adopted from the Hindu term for priests and spiritual leaders, which happened to be from the highest caste.

Hungry: In 2016, Zagat named Boston the No. 4 Foodiest city in the Country. New York was No. 21 and San Francisco, No 22.

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As a producer I really feel that I can expand to other venues around New England. Based on my experience and association with Harvard, I could conceivably replicate what I’m doing in Providence and in Portland and in the Berkshires, for sure. There is the MoCa and there is that corridor of colleges moving up to Vermont. There is Bennington. There is Worcestor, even. Newport. Then there is Bangor and Montreal and Toronto. And then all the way down to the Hudson Valley. Not to mention monied New England colleges dotted all over the map, which is what I need to make. Short of just jumping onto the web I want to get a clearer understanding of what I’m doing here and think about this logically. Hartford? New Haven for sure. There are definitely towns where this sort of thing can happen. And it would be fun to work with a roster of talent and have places into which I could book them. The other side of the coin here is finding a Boston base all my own, ultimately, like in a hotel somewhere (which really is a dream), where I could run a nightclub, like a little Joe’s Pub, and really put on the Ritz.

I will be speaking with and schmoozing with people who might help in this. I just have a feeling it’s part of my personality, maybe. Like being Rick in Casablanca. Ohh, that would be a fantasy. I’ll have to revist that soon. I’ll add to this item once I have some more information. Then again I might not and just keep these thoughts to myself. I have to say though I have always dreamed of owning a club or a small hotel or both. There used to be places like that in the world, small hotels with clubs. What a grand thing to be able to do. I should speak with my hotelier friends. Don’t you think?

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 23° (September 14)

The bulk of below past Blagues are still from a trip to Islesboro some years ago. I’m saddened in the present about the way the world is treating my friend across the pond. The cancel culture is so sweeping and so malinformed. People want others to fulfill their negative vision and so they don’t listen to what is actually being said. I don’t have time to care about it. People need others to vilify and they just jump on others without giving any thought to the reality of the situation. I am going to do my damnest to get myself together. I need to face facts.

The following blocks of text are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 841-845. 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 am truly happy we stayed an extra day; we hadn’t planned on it. We awoke first thing Monday morning all packed and ready to go and by the time we finished our coffee we were slightly unpacking having moved rooms. We went to Belfast for the morning have missed a ferry and waiting ninety minutes. It wasn’t a fun trip into town but it was enough to hit home the fact that we love it in Belfast for sure. And it is definitely an affordable reality. I so need a change. I so need to say goodbye to the past in a significant way. I will always love Provincetown and the Cape but I think perhaps I’ve had my fill of both for awhile. And I can always visit for festivals; anyway I am there for another year at least. I really want this to be a fruitful time.

Here at Kirstie’s I’ve learned one thing and that is that it is good to have specific taste. I don’t necessarily love her taste but I love the strength and potency of it. I am at a place where I need to make choices. I feel like I used to have an aesthetic and now I’m not terribly sure. It’s been so long since I’ve exercised it and I’ve always had to comprise for money. I’m not doing that this time around. I’d rather have no furniture or belongings than have things that don’t match me.

Last night in Islesboro. Trying not to lose this feeling. Must keep it with me henceforth. I really know I love it up here; I just have to find the perfect place on the water like this and I will explore and explore until I find it.

[then a week went by whereby I returned “home” only to be made sick to my stomach by the usual dealings. I am indeed keeping that trip to Maine alive in my mind and spirit. I know I need to find some corner of that wonderful cool-aired world. I’m so saddened and sickened by what is happening in Provincetown. The gentrification is out of control.]

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I think when I get through this year of Blagues I’ll go back to year one and really dig back into those Sabian Symbols. I need to be quiet and write even if it kills me. I say that because the isolation of writing is not the healthiest thing for me. The fact is that if one writes fiction, good or bad, there are no rules to follow really. But if one writes non-fiction there are cases and arguments to be built, predetermined payoffs to achieve. It’s quite daunting. I have never figured out how to take the easy way in life. And I have never had lightning strike the way others have. I was not born into a family with a grandfather who gave me a house when I was twenty. I worked a thousand jobs and did what I could to get this far. I’m proud of myself but now I want more and less. I want more of the kind of payoff I’ve seen my friends enjoy and I want it to happen more easefully. I’m sick to death of being an adjunct professor in the school of hard knocks.

Any form of poverty will wear you down. We are all impoverished on some level. But I realize that doing what I do non-profit puts me in the position of walking around with a begging bowl which casts me in the light as beggar and I’m not. I make a decent living and dedicate half my year and time and energy to working on this non-profit. I get very little help in this I must say. Actually I get none. I’m tired of struggling to make things happen here. Provincetown has proved time and again that it cares more about realtors than it does about artists.

We’ve tried to save Provincetown from itself but it doesn’t want to be saved. It wants to have crappy remakes of Broadway plays which only speak to the vanity of it’s producer/performers. It wants rich boys in shorts of many colors with dogs of myriad tiny scale clutched into their chests. That’s what this place wants. In some way that’s what every place wants. Where are the true bohemian enclaves? Where have they gone? Where is art being created as a genuine experience. Fascist regimes used to attack the artists and intellectuals first but this current politcal and social culture doesn’t need to attack the artists and intellectuals because there aren’t any. There are brands that make TV shows and movies and music and clothing lines for the home shopping network.

People think that the problem is in the White House, which is only partly true. But it’s also in your house. You know that place that isn’t good or big enough for you. The one that makes you say you deserve more. The one from whence you sit watching doggy videos. The artists I knew back in the day, the 80s and early 90s, most of them made it. And then they lost their artistry. Now they are logos on the back of other people’s jackets. There is no art. There is no poetry. There are just would-be screenplays. Even the live shows that happen in downtown NYC are exploitation. There is that one performer, the worst ever to play Afterglow, who exploits her friend (who didn’t even like her toward the end of their relationship) who died of AIDS just so she can have a solo show at Dixon Place.

Say what you want about Penny Arcade—and I have—but at least she hasn’t made it. And because she hasn’t made it she can still rant and rave her sourgrape symphony that actually constitutes art. Jack Pierson’s work is now as faded and discardable as the giant letters of signage he salvaged to make it. John Derian’s style is as faded and decayed as the moldering pieces of furniture and objets he’s collected. There was only one Boo Radley and he existed fictionally. It all belongs on the trash heap. But not until enough stupid rich people who’ve paid through the nose to acquire it have had their fill.

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

The best thing about writing this Blague at this particular juncture, besides the pure venting, is not wanting anybody to read it. Not advertising it. Just doing it. And saying whatever the fuck I want to say. Condescension. Condescension. It’s something that can seep into relationships and experiences unless you nip that shit in the bud. I have gone on record many times by saying that people either celebrate you or tolerate you and you do the same to them. Celebration is the only way forward. First you must celebrate yourself. Then you can celebrate others, fairly easily.

I have felt the weigh of others condescension. I have. So have you. And I realize I have had a much a part in inspiring acts or shows thereof as those who are acting or showing. It’s just the way it goes. I have often allowed others to feel superior because it has served a purpose but it has exacted a price. And I’m absolutely done with it. One of my truest friends in the world is one of the richest and most famous. I don’t need anything from her. I just want to be free to be friends with her. But there are creatures among us who think they’re famous or wealthy or more talented (and somewhow this makes them better—a phenomenon we’ve all fed into) and when they use words like “aw” or “hon” or “doll” you know you’re stumbled upon them.

I’m feeling that for my next birthday, in little over a month, I’m going to pull a Bilbo Baggins and disappear. I won’t even have a party. I’ll just disappear. If we need to be the change we want to see in the world then I want genuine experience to characterize my change. I want to be free of the aw and the hon and the doll. I want to be free of the unreturned text, phone call or dinner invitation. I want to be free of the fabricated social heirarchies designed for revenge against feeling marginalized in middle school. I want to break free of the tyranny of the innuendo and the masked insult or sideways compliment.

I know there are no geographical cures but still I find geography helps. Certain places make us feel away just as others are triggers and push our buttons. I’m not gay and I’m not straight so my very presence in Provincetown is like a square peg in a round hole because, especially and ironically in Ptown you better know on which side your sexual bread is buttered. Why? Because the place is built on gay people having needed a place to feel safe. And the straight people there are distinguished by their small size in number and their scruffy embracing of diversity, that isn’t really all that diverse. The transexual community has had the most recent glaring spotlight—to varying degrees they are a population who are allowed to be both or neither. But bisexuals aren’t cut the same slack. The irony being that bisexuals are probably the purest expression of human sexual realness. I think, in the world of LGBTQ, being bisexual is the bravest thing to be. Because we have no community inside the community.

I didn’t mean to veer in this direction but I guess it’s where I’m going. Just because I don’t need to send all my friends a list of what pronouns to call me doesn’t mean I don’t have distinctions. I am all distinctions. I am not about anything that moves. I am about being open to loving people of all genders. Naturally. Well, I think, naturally. Who knows? When you grew up in the seventies when parents didn’t watch their kids and you were laid bare to sexual advances or, yes, attacks and those attacks become the norm who is one to ever know the difference between nature or nurture on that score. But who the fuck cares. We don’t care if it’s David Bowie or Joe Dallassandro because, why?, they were talented or beautiful enough that we could suspend our prejudices against bisexuality just in case they might decide to like us? Fuck you. Fuck all of you. (Isn’t that what you think I want to do?)

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

I’m a writer. So I naturally attempt to create an arc. It’s not thought out though it is an unconscious expectation. So even in writing these Blagues I suppose I feel a responsibility to make them complete nuggets. For them to have a beginning, middle and end. But screw that. At least I try to.

Sometimes I think of life in terms of what I would call my autobiography or my one man show or my pithy epitath, expressing a need to sum myself up in a clever capsule phrase. But I try to break through of these pre-sets in my brain, especially here where I should just be letting the words flow any which way. I wish myself luck with that.

I have thought about going back to school. Stella just finished year three of a masters degree. And (I wonder if) I feel the need to have some kind of like credentials. The fact is I hated school. I loved learning but I hated school. I loathed the way I had to fasten my assymentry into stiff new jeans and acceptable check or stripe shirts and footwear. Even new sneakers are uncomfortable. I hated the greasy patina of myself after a day at school where you had to hold in your bowel movments because there were no doors on the toilets in the boys room. Why were there no doors on the toilets in the boys rooms? I don’t recall ever seeing another boy use one of those stalls. At least where I grew up, we bred entire generations of constipated, divurticular males. Why? What was the reasoning? Boys don’t need to not be looked at by a room full of othe boys while they take a shit? I don’t get it…

But, hey, look good for me. I didn’t care about the arc, the titlte, the beginning, middle and end; I just wrote in any ol’ direction. But you see what I did there? I had to bring it back. Why did I have to bring it back. Why must a have a theme or a title. Such are the grooves in my brain I suppose. Though I do want to get to the poetry. Oh, that’s what I was saying, picking up another thematic thread: I thought I should get some kind of masters degree. In my fantasy these past years I thought I’d get a masters in some concentration of my own creation like: Sacred Spaces: Theater and Spirituality, since it combines much of my collective interest and industry. But I keep being drawn (back) to poetry. I make that parenthetical nod because I do think that poetry underlies everything. I do think it is a sort of primal cosmic language. I think that because when I strip away all the external and internal noise it’s what I hear. Yes the Libra hears the lyrical music of the spheres in words that float or breeze or unfurl in the everlasting air.

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 22° (September 13)

I’m down to my last window to avoid writer’s block messing with my schedule so no more excuses—I have to get anything down on paper that I can without any excuses on the subject. The posts below date back three years to summer on Islesboro

The following blocks of text are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 836-840. 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.

So this morning we went to the dog show at Apple Bartlett’s house on Islesboro, Maine. It was the seventy-third such show and Apple started it when she was ten. All goes to charity of course, and it happens on her lawn which rolls down gently to the sea in great enough expanse that it comfortably held about one hundred people, a “ring” for showing the dogs, about a 100 foot square area where she or her son(s) have sprinkled love-seat and individual sized plastic cushion on said lawn just down away from the house. The lawn then rolled left down a path to the water; center was a circular garden some 200 feet away with still more lawn beyond it; then the whole right of the lawn is initially taken over by a lean, flanking stable of vegetable garden, before rolling away into forest and more sea. One of the most beautiful spots I’ve ever witnesses. For the visuals, yes, but also for Apple’s classy mellow vibe. Her son called the show and he was funny like a more non-chalant Dave Letterman whose mean side had been all but yacht-rocked away. And the people…

Everyone, of course, has a dog, and though I didn’t think about it at the time I might at some point consider if there was any connection between the human characters and their canines. But I was just trying to survive without being too seen. We sat on a blanket we brought—more of a rug, really. My sister-in-law has been here before and she’s determined that bringing ones own form of Macintosh squares is the cooler thing to do. I suppose most people did throw down some kind of pliable surface. And how to explain: What first struck me, on arrival, was that ninety percent of the people were blond. And one always expects women to be dressed, while here the men were too. There were no jeans, rally. Young boys were in muted solid pastel shorts in an array of careful colors. Most had the same style and/or brand of shirt, most markedly, a horizontal micro-stripe pointy polo job with seemingly very fine fabric, as it drapes. We scanned for a few logos and will look them up later. The men wore hats, sometimes jaunty; some were in yacht-drag. The dog and the sea and the time and the means.

The women were beautiful and/or weathered and saintly matriarchical depending on their age or inclination. It was made clear many were cousins as well as friends. They all belong to the same country club where the kids sail and such all day and adults dine and dip in and out. Chris O’Donnel grew up summers here and a few guys and families who accompanied his own wife and kids (he was here last, not this, year) surely look like him.

Apple’s son soldiered through the pure-breed categories—large sporting dog, small sporting dog, non-sporting small and non-sporting large, however these last two categories had a total of one dog between them to show so s/he won first prize. Then there were the miscellaneous dogs. My wife’s niece showed her dog Lulu, here, last year in this category (but Lulu’s in New York right now alone with a dogsitter); so on arrival this morning Apple asked Genevieve if she would like to show her dog, Billy, which she did and it was very sweet. I’m guessing Billy is a Labradoodle. He had the mind, the whole time, that this was his event, and he spent most of the time policing the other dogs. He seemed distracted when Genevieve showed him, as if someone were taking him away from his duty elsewhere. But he relented and trotting in the most pleasing style. They received fifth place, a category, one imagines, invented solely for Billy. He won first price in this category last year against Lulu. But this year Harry won and we knew Harry from earlier…

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Right so directly to our left was Chris’s wife and their kids, one of which, a boy engaged this older woman about her dog. Is that an English spaniel, he asked. Yes it is came the reply; and before he could quickly interject, because he was determined to do it, the lady said: but it is from England where they don’t bob [cut] the tail, which completely took the wind out of the wee O’Donnel’s sails. He was good but funny looking, while mostly the children looked beautiful in that bred way, not unlike the dogs. There was the twelve-year-old girl who is already six feet tall with model looks; and her brother about whom one could say the same—they may’ve been twins. There were likewise two Turlingtonian young girls, their hair in matching, difficult french braids. We didn’t hear anyone shout out Tookie (which inspired our calling this whole tribe the Tooks); but the children had names like Ware, for a boy. One of Apple’s son’s funniest bits was trying to prounounce some name which might have been spelled Geffwyn since that’s how he prounounced it before saying, I dunno, it’s Welsh.

Stella asked me if I thought they voted for Trump, I said no. It might’ve been because, or in spite of the fact, that we just passed the most beautiful Roman Catholic church which, at 10 AM was packed, on a Saturday. I don’t know if I’m connecting these two thoughts, effectively. But one gets the sense, on Islesboro, no matter how extraordinary the wealth here, that the people would see our present ruler as one step too far. There is a conscientiousness amongst the people. Maybe it’s an island thing. One probably feels it in Mustique and many places where you always wave at your steering wheel. But mostly I think it’s an Apple thing. She seems to set the tone; and if she doesn’t she should. I’ve only been here twice but I suppose I must imagine Apple as the unspoken Queen of Islesboro, ruling by kindness and right living, or so it seems. I have only ever met her briefly, but meetings with enlightened beings tend to be brief from my experience.

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

Lunch today was left over grilled chicken cut into cubelettes. Seriously, you’re not going to believe this. I no sooner finished typing that first sentence before I heard this sudden disturbing buzzing coming at my head; I didn’t know what it was because it was too loud for any one insect I know, or like a tiny drone, had I made that connection at the time. But no, it was a hummingbird. Usually shy, elusive this one was full on. I had heard the intense buzzying behind my head and quickly turned to find her stationery in the air, her invisible wings a sound. In the immediacy, I yelled quite loudly oh my god, which should have frightened her away, but it didn’t. She kept buzzing at me. Then I started cooing you’re so cute, you’re so cute, and she bolted away. Imagine being a hummingbird.

Anyway, we go to the Took store called Island Market. And we needed to buy some dinner food and figure that all out because we are seeing a Mentalist tonight at the Community Center. Yes, there was a dog show this morning and tonight it’s the Mentalist. The girls thought flatbread pizza would be perfect and they saw that the Tooks had one style of that pizza and I should get that plus arugula and some other things. I drove and waved and entered and found that it was pulled pork and pineapple pizza. Yeah, no. So I bought beer and left and told them we needed a new plan. Let’s have a picnic. They have a certain baguette, get it. Also some paté (if I wanted it which I do) and so forth. They didn’t have baguette but I don’t care. I will eat the paté tonight after the mentalist. So I’ll leave this unpublished until tonight when I can relate our evening…

…okay, last night was a trip. We got to the community having talked through the possibilities of how the room would be set up to a nearly eight-year-old asking us questions we can’t answer about a place we’d never seen. I finally told her that the room will have all white chairs that will be very comfortable. We arrive and Stella’s like white chairs and I’m like see. There’s a fishbowl set up into which we must drop little papers filled out in the center with a “something” like a favorite pet or what not, fold it, and then put your name on the top. The front person was a sort of nervous-happy local who was in ultimate earnest, and then this executive style woman, beautiful in her sixties, maybe, comes walking towards us, and I know that face. I look at Stella who just gives me a quick and intense: you’re on to something. And so I said to her are you Lois? And she said yes. So it was Lois Childs and I said my wife Lynne worked with Sylvia Heisel (they did in fact partner on an item-driven collection which I named called Region) back in the day—Lois actually modelled in one of they’re shows—and then Stella took over and reminisced about visiting Lois’ house in Santa Monica with Sylvia and all going out from there for dinner where Lois ran into Lindsay Buckingham. This made Lynne happy.

So get this, she wasn’t just a guest here. She was running this whole mentalist show. She asked how we came to be here and we said we were visiting at a friend’s of Nancy’s which is true, leaving the rest of it out, because you never know. And then we sat second row to watch this manchild come out on stage. I pegged him as a Pisces right away. A more comely Bieber with coiffed no-color hair and a knit grey blazer that draped and brown shows with red laces, palest skin with pink flushed cheeks. His name is Nat Lawson. And he mightily suggested that he will be a great one day. His confidence was astounding. He is ready to assume any 7:30 PM network game show, now, at the age of eighteen. Without an intermission, which he brazenly told us his shows typically include, we were there a fat hour. He threw a stuffed rabbit into the audience as a means of picking his first participant who then threw the bunny to pick the second, third, fourth and then Stella-Lynne caught the bunny and was tasked with holding the bunny during the first act before being instructed to kick off the second one. The answer to the first trick was that there were exactly four cards and then the cards would repeat in the deck; the deck was from a children’s game with which our host promptly distracted us, relating stories about his fourteen-year-old brother, the photographer in the audience, was way better at predicting math tallies than he, in effect, planting seeds regarding his supposed personality, subliminally impressing upon what was a highly suggestive audience, inserting certain suppositions about him that would sort of bore and dazzle the audience at the same time, bringing down their defenses to a point where they are ready to believe what’s being shown them. They want to believe. Pisces motto is I believe.

But I knew this guy had to be a Pisces—I actually don’t as I’m writing this know what sign he is—when he went into some story cul-de-sac, lullybying the audience into belief, wherein he said he loved strangers. If anybody knows anything about Starsky+Cox’s take on the Pisces persona, one would know we heavily explore to the brink of exploitation the whole “I’ve always depended on the kindess of strangers” notion.

Anyway, let me see if I can find out somehow if this kid is a Pisces—maybe he’s on Facebook—will let you know what I come up with.

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

So it turns out Nat’s a Leo. Well that might suggest the showmanship first and the bit of trickery and the need for the spotlight; we’ll have to wait on the misogyny. I’m kidding the Leos. You treat your womenfolk with utmost kindness. And, as we said, it was mostly ego and confidence running this show. All the five? segments were figure-out-able. But, as I said the largely older and wanting to be amazed audience swallowed it hook, line and sinker. But it was really fun and wholesome and Americana. The Leo Man chapter of Sextrology is called the Natural. Nat Leo, Nat Geo, Nat Lawson.

As far removed as one is here in Islesboro, ME, I have to say I feel completely confronted with my self in the best of ways. I think the remoteness is not a detriment, in any shape or form; in fact it just might be the ticket for moving forward. I really must this year write a letter last week December early January to tell people that, moving forward, we need to work six months in advance, now, getting commitments from would-be supporters. This way, if I don’t manage to raise the requisite moneys I will send back what I do raise. Or better yet, I will do the simplest imagineable festival in Provincetown; all on the strictest budget.

Oy, I think I just bummed myself out. The point I’m making is that, in Maine, one needs a coastal view. Maine makes a lot of sense, if you have a coastal view. If you don’t have a coastal view Maine doesn’t make a whole lot of sense excepting the fact that it is artisinal and you get get farm to table everything including pajamas.

Today nothing happened. We could have been anywhere. It was banal. There is a banality inherent in much of this experience. I am not one to talk as I am not the active sort I would have liked to have been. I didn’t come from an outdoorsy family who did things. I think the most beautiful combination about American life is having a lot of money and being really healthy. I still aspire to both. I would be a liar if I said otherwise. I still feel it possible on some level to find that perfect balance of elan, of equipoise.

I love the beaches in Wellfleet and I will be sad to leave them. I said that about leaving Provincetown for Wellfleet but it’s funny how you don’t look back. Somehow, soon enough, what you’ve done newly becomes better than what you did before. There are elements of life that are not entropic. Especially when you’re predisposed to detachment as a human trait. Sometimes detachment stems from a childhood environment of unreliability. When you can’t invest in much of you’re experience you learn to find happiness without certainty. Funny how that works. I have friends who come from very solid, stable backgrounds, both emotionally and financially, and I find they have been iller equipped to handle, yes, monumental and sometimes devestating things like the death of a parent with a sort of shock and awe at the mortality of those from whom they descend. Well guess what…

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

Again one of those moments where I’ve caught up completely on these Blagues. Not that I want anyone to read any of them anytime soon. I think what I realize is that I will go to any length to achieve a certain feeling. I’m talking about myriad things all at once. The first year of the Blague was so much about writing everyday and using the Sabian Symbols to movitivate me in that process. If you don’t know what the Sabian Symbols are tough luck, bub, look it up. Or just read the first 366 entries of the Cosmic Blague.

I tried the next year to write consistently but didn’t. I didn’t feel compelled to, necessarily; but then something happened year three where I felt compelled, once again, to write as many Blagues as there are degrees in the Zodiac (360), which means I get five days off in a non-leap-year. I think too much and other things that rhyme, of this I am aware. So I must be prudent in the way I approach any given day, project or experience. I do believe I might alienate people as a result of being too on them. And so sensitive when someone suggests I’m doing something wrong. Alarmist. Is that the word? I dunno but I do have a way of losing friends and alienating people. And for making friendships with people who do the same.

So it’s a Full Moon tomorrow…

From a website, edited by me into something else:

Tonight, much of the Eastern Hemisphere will be treated to a partial eclipse of the moon Monday (Aug. 7) — a prelude to the grand spectacle that awaits North Americans exactly two weeks later.

Even if you’re not in the path of the partial lunar eclipse, Monday will bring a summer full moon to the night sky. Traditionally, some Native American fishing tribes were aware that sturgeon — a large fish that inhabited the Great Lakes as well as Lake Champlain — were most readily caught around the time of the August full moon, hence it became known as the Full Sturgeon Moon. A few tribes knew it as the Full Red Moon because, as the moon rises, it appears reddish through any sultry haze. It was also called the Green Corn Moon or the Grain Moon.

…and I was thinking it would be a great day to make pinnacle declarations of appreciation. In August we are at our ripest. We need to reap that which we have sown—very full Moon anyway, one of two, in August, the second will be a near total lunar eclipse, in two weeks.

We did our moon ceremony and I am really ready to reap, let me tell you. This year I want to put $200K toward a house. I’m definitely doing it. If we can come up with $100K, including the $20K I’m saving us on rent. Then I can come up with another $20K; that’s 120K which would be 20% of a 600K house but forty percent of a $300K; and I would plan to pay it off in two years. Writing books and running the jewelry business.

Anyway, it’s a good time to take a step back and to make a change. This whole year ahead will be doing just that. I must cultivate patience, especially with myself. I need to slow down before I’m stopped….anyway, I imagine all elements of life coming together rather seamlessly. Right now I need to make a timeline for the rest of the year. I need to purchase QLab, which is a good expense. I need to make a Sparkler and Sponsor list. I need to send a Save the Date. So August is about festival, learning QLab, finishing the eBooks, chosing new songs, etc. September is about BOTAB and magazine writing and choosing songs. October and/or November are for Europe. We need to buy our tickets.

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 21° (September 12)

I woke up having a sex dream, me and Liza Minelli, both in our thirties. I have never had a gay sex dream to speak of, but I think dreaming you have sex with Liza must mean one is gay, right? Tried to get some work done but it’s not happening so Im gong to back off and just let it all fall away, not pushing anything too much. There is really no point in doing so. 

The following blocks of text are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 831-835. 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 is something about driving North. You’ve heard our Graham Nash story which we just told to Justin Vivian Bond the day after their show at the new Glow Festival. Viv had never heard it and it was timely since their show was all about slut-shaming the women of Laurel Canyon. It’s a week since the show and I’m still singing John Phillips, Young Girls are Coming to the Canyon in my head.

Leaving Portland, we put a pin in it, not sure whether its exactly right, but surely understanding what is exactly right about it. It’s only about two and half hours from Portland to Lincolnville where you get the ferry for Islesboro. We didn’t reserve the ferry because it’s overly cautious and too expensive to do so but just showed up. We had no traffic except for the last half hour where we were stuck behind a white car from FL going thirty five miles an hour across SR90 then up Route 1, through Camden, on to the ferry. Of course the pulled into the drive to take the ferry right in front of us and just stopped; the man behind the wheel was too old to be allowed to drive from FL. Stella jumped out to get ferry tickets and she had no sooner left the car before a woman in an orange and yellow reflector vest starting calling us on. I had to ticket, so I said I’m waiting for my wife to get tickets, only to learn I’m in the reservations only line and there is a hold behind me of many cars that also just showed up, we had jumped the line. I’m getting chewed out by orange and yellow; and Stella, I soon learn, is getting even more chewed out by another lady inside being more than just a little local-eccentric. And anyway, the consequence for being shady with Stella is far more severe than it is for those being shady with me because I’m used to it.

Well the first people to pull behind me/us, the first car I’ve in effect cut in front of, was my sister- and mother-in-law and Stella’s niece—Stella’s father and two brothers had already gotten on the ferry in a separate car. So it was touch and go. I had to pull over and let all the cars I cut off go before us. But there was room for us after all, so all three carloads of our party heading to the home that was given us for a couple weeks by its owner, a popular TV actress from the ninetiees, headed there.

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

So we got to Islesboro in the afternoon, brought in our bags, then went food shopping. We were eight people total and dinner that evening was going to be easy, pasta with meatballs and sausage in red sauce my inlaws brought and we made an arugala salad with tomato and some cheese that was in the fridge about which others were skeptical. I thought it looked fine, perhaps a little wet, but i shaved off outer bits and below that tasted fantastic. We had beer and wine for those who like that sort of thing and it was fun, for sure.

We had seen signs coming in from the ferry—anywhere driving on Islesboro you have to wave at the person driving in the opposite direction along any given road. Typically a little upward unfolding of a few fingers from your hand resting on the steering wheel is enough to register with the other driver.

We sort of created our own polarized expressions for when we’re here. And, for realz, its quite a polarized place, the north part of the island being largely inhabited by locals and then John Travolta’s estate, and on the southside is where you find more blueblood types. There are two food shops, the fancier one of which likely be the least fancy in your town; the other one looks like a museum of dead canned foods. The fancy people we all the Tooks because, at certain events, more than one person would be called Tookie. So it stuck. The other side of the island (read:tracks) folks we can Durks, names for their downscale food market Durkees.

The Fancy gathering we spoke of where the Tookies lie? It is the annual dog show, held on the same day as the Durks favorite annual do—the seafood festival and go-cart race. I wanted to like the later last year when I opted for it over the dog show, to which all the rest of the family went; but on some level I felt the whole time I was taking my life in my hands. First of all the food, or what was left of it, was not something I was going to eat. And then the races are held in the street which, given the location, is already narrow and two passing cars would have to dip to get by each other.

And you have to park your own car first along that road and then walk up to all these doings. But then you realize you’re also on the go-cart race track and about to get mown down by the competitors.

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

So I had this dream last night, or rather this morning, which was probably the most vivid and magical and surely significant dream I think I’ve ever had. The dreamscape was already fertile and undulating and alive. There were elements of it that were familiar and new bits too; for the most part the default landscape of reveries is some kind of Provincetown through the looking glass. I seem to “live” there in my dreams in a dimension that has more similarities to, say, Provincetown in the nineteen-forties than the Provincetown of now. Everyone has there own house, there are fewer people, nobody is a tourist. The cast of characters stand out. In the Provincetown of my dreams everything is seen for what it is. There, Billy Hough breaks bottles and stabs and kills my friends. It’s a metaphor, but it’s real.

Okay but this dream so we had sort of moved away from the town landscape into more pastoral a setting. And suddenly, in a clearing I saw two large blue birds. Now when i say blue I mean like the perfect pale-medium blue. They were large (as magical birds are) and rather shiny. They looked only slightly dissimilar. I would say that in shape they were most like giant seagulls but they didn’t have giant beaks but more demure bills, at least the calm beautiful one did. The other blue bird had more markings on his head and he was pecking at the head of the other beautiful bird and I thought this was a violence at first and I was going to shoo the aggressive bird away. But then I realized it was a courtship ritual and they were just about to mate which they did although I really didn’t see them do it but you know how fast, and quick, birds are.

Then the birds and the dream began to morph. They and the world began to spin and suddenly out of the head of what I now realized was the female emerged a rainbow colored lotus. Yes you heard that right: a rainbow colored lotus. So at first I thought I was witnessing some kind of unicorn emerging. The beings themselves, you see, were growing such that they were no longer birds, as they spun around or the world did: They were now more like dolphins or large sleek dogs or miniature horses as the female’s rainbow lotus protrusion from her crown chakra continued on in it’s RoyGBiv JackInThePulpit sort of way. And then suddenly the were in human form.

The female, now obviously a queen, was the most beautiful woman, blond, hair parted in the middle and still sprouting that rainbow lotus, dressed in copious satin like a renaissance noble, all folds and facets. Around her neck, where one might imagine one of those elaborate tudor colors with its origami folds, instead was a swarling net of gold filament dotted with red jewels or fruits or some combination of the two; and the king, let’s call him, was equally though less captivatingly turned out, dark hair, mustache and pointy beard, swathed in the same style fashion, only sligtly less copious than his counterpart’s.

They were now in a clearing on the other side of some trees and in between me and them Stella was there; and as if trying to quickly tell her that there was a hummingbird right behind her so look quickly, she said “I need my glasses” which were off to the side and she grabbed them and put them on and the figures were still there and she could see them. Only t they had morphed even more and in a darker direction. They were not headressed in black and I thought in the dream that, now, these chief god/esses were showing us their Chtonian aspect. Stella had missed their more rainbow technicolor incarnation but she was their for their even more intense and powerful (and dare I say right for a Capricorn) incarnation.

Suddenly there was a third person to my right, a young, handsome presumably gay character reminisicent of the gay best friends we’ve had in our lives. And he asked the magical couple: “Are you European” to which the upper-case Lady responded: “Not quite.” I knew would this meant. I took it to mean that they were Merivingian. That is what they wanted me to know.

I woke up and told Stella my dream immediately. She asked if I started Swann’s Way, the Proust book that was sitting on my bedside. I said no, not yet, but I plan on reading this book that I have planned on reading all my life, this day, now, here on holiday on Islesboro in Maine. “Because you know,” she said, “in the very first chapter, which is really trippy and in which scenes morph one in to the other, the narrator speaks of the Merivingians.”

No shit.

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 20° (September 11)

The mental health day continued yesterday with a nap and then some snacky food (guacamole and cheese tacos) and I made S. watch Airplane which she had never seen and she did laugh at the broad silliness, which is just what we needed. Maybe in anticipation of this solemn day, which feels all the sadder, given the fact the orange blob sits on the podium arms crossed and now is speaking. Putting on a music station. I can’t take much more of this war of emotional attrition. And so I won’t. I will be making a lovely lunch of portobello mushroom and gruyere omelets with herbs from the garden. There are no past postings to include today, so I’ll write a bit more than usual. I’m going to give myself the opportunity to draft the next six to eight pages of what needs drafting today and then tomorrow I will craft it into something. I have to find different ways of approaching the work at hand and I do resume my serious yoga practice in the morning as well so that will be a joy. Going to try and get as many seshes of that under my belt before heading to Boston/Cambridge on the seventh of next month. By then we should have some information in regarding what needs doing. It would be a stretch to do what I put out feelers to do today. But it wouldn’t be impossible. Still it might be a very stupid thing indeed. There is much upkeep that would go with a place like that; and we don’t really have all the necessary resources. Then again we wouldn’t have to do anything else really. Can’t hurt to go and see something for fun is what I think, especially something that has only briefly been on the market. We would have to remain pretty much still. The trick would be to keep up the momentum that has begun. And that is something we surely can do, but we couldn’t put any unnecessary stress on ourselves. There is a pro and con list in the making here I am sure of that. I am going to finally put our wiki together today I think after lunch. It mightn’t be a bad way to pass the time. I am willing to put everything I have personally, which isn’t all that much really, into making this happen. I am already imagining the possibilities and all the pros. Not that a leap is really what is called for at this juncture; then again people do do thinks like this all the time. 

I spent the day productinating, cleaning the house as a guilt-free way of avoiding my work. Now it is sparkling and I have no more excuses. That’s okay. Tomorrow’s going to be another day and I’m going to have a lovely time tonight enjoying the last of the Austrian red wine and getting my ducks in a row. I had some interesting thoughts about how to approach the chapters and it comes down to things like: You’re an Aries so part of your evolution is really getting into that energy. Anyway its something of that nature, and right now all I have to do is heal and get into the energy of the thing. I was smart to write out all that transpired with farmer fuckface because now it is on paper; and then I thought I know a good lawyer for this type of thing and it turns out, while he use to work for himself, that he has joined the firm we are already with for our estate planning et al, so that is a boon. Worse comes to worst, we will have him deal with farmer fuck because lord knows I don’t want to. I also reached out to our friend with whom we collaborate on some product and it looks as if we are owed some money which is pretty fantastic. I am laying low and getting what needs doing done. That is all that is required today. I don’t want to tell you stories or come up with any big reveals I just want to be myself and do the work at hand. My keyboard is sticking which is freaking me out just a little. I just bought this laptop and I don’t feel like buying a new one. The real-estate market is going haywire right now so says our friends in the biz. And in the paper today I read that someone from California bought a house in Truro sight unseen (via Facetime) for 2.25 million in cash. People are moving to places like where we are driving up prices. Crazy stuff.

The following blocks of text are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 826-830. 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 nothing worth posting!

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 19° (September 10)

Today was a mental health day for sure. Not only did I nap, but, after doing a month’s worth of shopping and such yesterday, letting ideas bubble up instead of forcing myself into my office, I needed another day of getting my head around what is about to happen over the next three months. I determine this to be a very fruitful time. I made a lovely linguine clam sauce while the evil farmer made noise—saws and hammers—until nearly seven thirty this evening, trying to unnerve us. I put a wee speaker outside and listened to tunes while S. finished a seminar and practiced letting the abuse roll off my shoulders. I am getting my bird brain around what to do on all fronts. I have located a former counsel whom we will call upon if need be. I have my brain around my personal routine and my professional one. I am ready to rock the reentree. We heard from the Parisians who were passing our old corner, willing us back to the neighborhood. Sounds good to me. Little by little I will be turning the lower level into an art space and one from which we will be selling off items. 

The following blocks of text are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 821-825. 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.

We used to live in Cambridge, on Mass Ave, just past Harvard and the Cambridge Common. In the 80s we both worked at the Harvest restaurant which was already so 70s, blond wood and shutters, everything covered in Marrimekko, from the cushions on the banquettes to the curtains to our ties, and then rag-yarn, you know like the mat brought to school and sat on during snacks and reading time (or was that just me?). There were these giant poles, columns in the Bauhaus inspired architecture, indeed the restuarant was owned by a prominent architect called Ben Thompson and it was all Mies or Corbusier in the dining room and rag-yarn covered columns, poles this big at which I used to run and launch myself and jump and grab the rag-yar covered pole and just stick to it, as if I were velcro’d. Just out of nowhere just to freak people out. It likely would have been frowned upon if a manager found out but, maybe they did, who remembers. I was pretty hyper active even through my twenties but I’ve slowed down, if not completely halted all together.

So it’s funny to be back in Cambridge, creating and curating series and festivals at the American Repertory Theater. It’s an ironic trajectory and actually it wouldn’t have happened if I wasn’t producing a festival already in Provincetown, which now enters its seventh year, and then, after the second year festival, we performed, Stella and I, here, with Justin Vivian Bond and Nath Ann Carerra, there, so I truly owe my introduction to Oberon to them. We then had our own S+C show there with Matt Ray, who wasn’t yet playing with Vivian. So it’s cool that Matt and Vivian and Nath Ann (and Claudia Chopek) are all performing the first ever Glow festival on Thursday. Meanwhile I started producing shows here for others like Bridget Everett before we created the Glowberon series, a terrible name, which is entering its third year.

I still get a great feeling being in Cambridge and in Boston in general although it is limited. I’m not yet nostalgic for New York City, I suppose, where I lived for twenty years. Why is that I wonder? For some reason I was always a little skieved out in New York. Actually I still am. Not because it’s dirty which it often is; but because the whole energy of the place just feels like a landfill. I can’t explain it. But Manhattan has always felt to me like a part of New Jersey swamp that chipped off. When I’m near the river I feel like I might as well be in Seacaucus on some level. I’m sure none of that makes sense and I don’t need it to. I’ve always had an affinity for New England. I love California and would live there as a second choice. But living near Boston and the Cape and Maine and Vermont and Montreal even feels like all possibility. I feel the same for France. All of it.

I know I’m in the last third of my life probably (already—they were right when they said it goes fast) and it’s humbling. But I also have to move it. To finally launch a design for living. The good news is that I’m not coming from nowhere. I’m building on a lot of experience and I can honestly say I probably feel happier now than at any other period in my life. Pretty cool, right?

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So I really expected to make quite a splash with fundraising for this new festival I’m launching tomorrow. But, excepting Joanne Chang of Flour and Myers+Chang, not a single other professional connection came through for us. Go Joanne. She’s a good egg. It makes me really wonder about the people in Boston. I don’t know many people but the people I do know mainly work as designers or event planners, or in media or PR; and wow, I’m pretty awstruck at how ungenerous even folks I know can be. It’s one aspect of being conservative I didn’t anticipate. Boston people are cheap and stingy. At least that’s my experience so far. I realize this Blague might run counter to the previous entry wherein I sang the praises of all things Boston-Maine. Well not all things. I didn’t actually write that much. There is a quantity of writing I need to feel comfortable before a Blague is complete, and even if I’m just writing about what I’m writing about I enjoy the pure bulk of black letters on white space.

But back to the Boston people. What’s wrong with them? I think they have a bit of a chip on their shoulder because they’re not even Chicago? I don’t know. I love Boston and Cambridge and the whole damn place; and I do find the people nice, but…I remember back to my early twenties when I lived in Boston. I held New Yorkers in a bit of comtempt for being so obvious while being from Boston made me more of a sleeper, classier, less needful of the material things in life or fame and glory. I was demure. Yeah right. That lasted about a year and then I moved to New York where I really did infiltrate, but not too much. I hit many marks but none too hard. I wrote for the Times, I was on Broadway, I traveled as a fashion journalist sitting in on runway shows at a time when it was Naomi and Kristy and Cindy and Kate and Tatiana and Helena and Claudia and all those true supermodels. I produced segments of a TV show. I took acting classes with Uta. I killed it in Improv. I became a “celebrity” booker for events (I set up a d/b/a/ called Ufficio, which means office in Italian and I “specialized” in Italian actors. This was before The Sopranos by many years. I would get people like Christina Ricci, Lorraine Bracco, Vincent Gallo and Michael Imperioli…and Lauren Hutton who doesn’t fit this framework…to host or attend events either for a big fee (I would take half—yes, that’s right Lauren I took the same amount I paid you LOL). I became a feature writer doing celebrity interviews with folks like Helena Bonham Carter and Jean Reno and Peter Greenaway and others. And then I got a book deal and became Quinn Cox and bought a house on Cape Cod.

Best thing I ever did. I still kept my apartment for ten more years in the West Village and occasionally I would be my old self. As him, I continued to write for the Times and the Globe and Stella and I moved to London to co-executive edit Wallpaper magazine, under our given names. And New York caved in around itself. The West Village became a mall of shops on one hand and a wasteland of closed shops on the other. The Meatpacking District which bordered us was filled with stupid people, loud fratty Hoboen types and self-objectifying girls in too-tight too-short dresses with too-high heels, drinking Champagne on the street, throwing bottles into the street, going to stupid clubs and lounged in stupid hotels. The same happened to the East Village only the death has been slower and more severe.

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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.
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