Month: November 2020 (page 2 of 4)

Thor’s Daze

Sagittarius 4° (November 26)

Either yesterday or today is Henry’s birthday—to be honest I always forget which. Pascale’s is October 26 so I can come up with a mnemonic device, once and for all, for getting that particular bit of shit together. Okay I have writing to do. Anyway today is Hen’s B’day so it is the same number as P only a day later which is good to know. Last night was a bit of a blow out. I had a pretty psychic-y time with a client and am pretty much “caught up” if there is such a thing. We are having a bit of wine for the holiday and then resuming our teetotalling until Christmas, which is good for brain clarity, right now when I need it most. There is no more wiggle room really and that is as it should be. I’ll have a bit of blueberries then spend the day making dinner: homemade cranberry sauce, quinoa that is meant to taste like the stuffing of yore, sweet potatoes, rutabaga, roasted potatoes, green beens with shallot and toasted almonds and a chicken, no turkey, as it’s too big and neither of us really like it. I watched a bit of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang out of nostalgia. Sally Ann Howes is an underated and underappreciated talent. She was just thirteen when she began movies and I think she was only seventeen when she did Anna Karenina (or was it Mme Bovary?) I forget. Was chatting on FB with that guy Kyle who takes all the crazy pictures and putting finishing touches on dinner. S. and I were talking about how you work all day on a meal like this then sit down and basically it’s done within minutes. I think we both might be feeling more lonely than usual at this juncture. We watched Room with a View for the four hundredth time. I actually surprised myself that I knew the dialogue by heart. Anyway, I will have to get right back to it tomorrow which is actually fine. I want to at least draft an introduction which I should be able to do pretty easily. The trick with it is to pretend I’m explaining it to somebody else. 

The following blocks of text are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 1196-1200 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.

Day 16

It’s weird waking up in a hotel in the airport, especially in Vancouver, where you are basically at check in. I went to the pool but it was a drag due to father and little daughter taking up a lot of space. Never mind. Sauna would have taken too long to get hot. I got dressed and we grabbed coffees fro Starbucks, heard of it?; then finished up and headed out; I hate a smoked salmon sandwich from that chic plane, yesterday.

We were able to fly through inspection and plop into the lounge where lunch was just setting up. I started with soup because these places always put the soup out first. Thai Chicken. And they do the bar last. Bloody Mary’s have been spoiled for me since the boat, but….Check in was a breeze. I had the beef. I watched the Shape of Water? We arrived in Toronto and it was a bit rocky, both coming and going. It killed the mood. That and the Canada Air lady who looked like the character Stevie on Schitt’s Creek which is a Canadian show. Oh I give up. She was a crueller de ville. We cleared customs and it was off to Boston. Pretty quick through baggage and finding driver.

It isn’t a so happy a thing when you get home but it’s not your home, it can be an uncomfortable limbo. Am I making excuses. No. So what I was cranky. Sue me. I’m already thinking about the press release which I hope to have complete by, say, next Thursday. It’s a guilt thing on some level. I will drive S. to NH tomorrow and somehow it might be fun.

A frosty morning of eighty some odd degrees. But we get a smooth start, heading up 95 to veer off, just before Portsmouth to head to what is referred to as camp, sort of. N. has rented the house on the site of what was her and S.’s aunt’s lakeside property. Their aunt is no longer with us; in fact neither is her original house; because not long after she died lightning struck it and it burned to a crisp. Her sons had a new house built and then sold it and that is the house S.’s family has rented. It is ideally situated on Great East Lake, to be sure, but, when I go there, I was so glad I had already arranged not to stay. It was small and stuffy with plaid and leather and I get a panic attack just typing about it let alone living in it with one, two, three, four, five, six, and one eight-year old, inlaws. I, who got not much done on the boat, need to head back to Reading to tackle some things.

I drove back down listening to Yacht Rock and upon hearing Cool Change by the Little River Band I knew the songwriter was a Cancer with his looking “at the full moon like a lover.” I stopped in Lynnefield at Whole Foods and got provisions. At this point I’m feeling exhaustion but soldier through. I get some wine. I stop in town for a CVS run and make it back to the house, feeling a bit like entering the batcave, given the garage scenario. Anyway, I’m not a suburban fellow in case you cannot tell. The guacamole I thought I bought turned out to be tomatillo something (with a little avocado but it’s not the same).

I caught up with Brad, West of the Rockies. He said he’d be dressed a certain way and then someone else was dressed exactly the same, walking in front of him, with white sox in sandals. The recognition came slowly. And to this day my instincts about this being some extra are correct, though I can never fully remember the exact why; all I know is that the dream never lasts long.

I never want to have a colostomy, needless to say. And I never want to be odorous on purpose. Sometimes a dinner of chips and tomatillo dip is enough if not more. I keep turning the temperature down and I think it just automatically keeps going up, which turns out not to be the case; as B. is controlling it from his phone or something. Whatever.

I will begin on booking the artists travel and get some laundry done in the meantime.


After the strange synchronicity of yesterday, I am in an expansive mood. I am happy there is cold brew and I keep turning down the thermostat. This morning might be the last even luke-warm bath I’ll draw. I don’t need anything in particular and I’m getting into the solitude. What’s that Madonna song about San Pedro? That gets stuck in my head and other places and I’m on a jelly roll. And lo and behold here we go again. This reminds me of the Lance situation. Delibery. Really not since Ghana. These are the fragments in my head. And it’s impossible. There has never been anything even remotely like it; but somehow it always happens. I cannot explain how as it seems to defy every law of nature. And then briefly you find a way to make what shouldn’t be interesting and it’s kinda cool.

That was the threefold dream I remember of today.

Somewhere I am happy for Young Jean Lee and a lot of other people. But it is becoming not only increasingly clear but urgent that I must focus on my own creativity. Seriously. I’ll get to lie in the sun a little and I really should make some fresh pasta with sour cream and smoked salmon; I don’t see why I wouldn’t. And I don’t much see why I wouldn’t eat it for the next three meals, if I chose to. Tonight for me will end in some kind of heap watching tele. And it’ll be a somewhat slow realization that I have gained a ton of weight now, being away a solid three weeks. Oh well. I might be a bit over my head. But when has that ever truly stopped me. Besides I feel there is more fun to be had.


There was something about Thom Lussier. He had a brother who had a wife who had a sister. Anyway, there was a Pisces man and he of course looked like a combination of Matthew Broderick and Don Knotts, as they all do.

What dreams may come. I need to make the focus of these book intros and the outline for the new Xmas show more, respectively, a love letter and a survey of superpowers. That really is the answer.

I did eat more of the pasta, sour cream and smoked salmon and then went to the store, this time myself, to get what I needed. I’m working through the day and trying to scrape something together but the words won’t come.

I haven’t bathed in hot water and its hot in here and I’m just going to try and make some shit happen and I fall asleep. And I wake up and I’m starving but I am not cooking, so I look up local restaurants, find a place and call an Uber. It’s time to catch up on the David Sedaris book in any case. And three hours pass and I’m closing the joint having steadily drunk a bottle of red.

My dreams were about this apartment that was sort of nowhere, kind of like Reading, no color houses; and some dark skinned guy with a kind of newsy cap and it might have been about Jersey City and Edna, our housekeeper, whose son started Kool & The Gang.

Very fitfull sleep, in and out. I’ve now seen not all but the same parts of Murder on the Orient Express three times. I watch the show about the Browns, Hard Knocks. The weather is really good but you can tell it’s switching it’s all switching.

Being on the boat is not even anything I’m thinking about. This always happens. It switches so abruptly that it will take a week or so before I begin musing about the boat again. I really could use a hot bath. What’s with this place.

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.

Wellies

Sagittarius 3° (November 25)

After all I’ve had my fun. And there are no external hits to be had right now. Including from the wine cellar or social media. So I am letting it all go. I want to say I gave the work at hand my absolute all while it is happening. The rest is uncluttering, unfriending, merchandising, packing, organizing, casting spells, playing piano, giving to charity, researching, playing ukulele, dancing and singing, sleeping and reading and cooking and cleaning and shopping and dreaming and scheming while keeping the barbarians at bay. They have no power here after all. The age of the bullies is over. I will no longer be gaslit or available to the abuse. This has all made me stronger, especially mentally. This is the thing about being a Libra. When we are mentally fit, the power of our mind is muscular and mighty indeed. You do not want to fuck with me, because I am too nice, and when crossed I will cut you. It has been nice to connect virtually with more people but it is a very pale substitute for being surrounded by friends and family, a word representing a concept that has eluded me in this lifetime. But like this isolation I must accept it and channel it and let it deepen my self-understanding and my resolve. A sentence like that makes me think that it is that same brand of insight I must offer those in my chapitres. What then should we come up with. I know that I am in it for the long haul. I am not just writing one book. I want to write a book a year for the next twenty odd years. That is the way to do it. To always be writing and always searching the interior. All the more reason to live more remotely and have nature at one’s disposal. There are many roads and the all unfortunately lead to the same place, if you catch my drift. So what’s the use of worrying. Everything always takes longer than it should but at least, for now we are protected. I have just a few more minutes before I dive back into work and I guess I just wanted to say that, well, a couple of things: First, it does feel good to feel which so much of so-called normal life dulled us to doing. Second, that I’m pleasantly surprise how quickly my psyche adjusts to changes in lifestyle and I think back on the fact that I was probably at my worst when I was at my healthiest. Thin and doing a ton a yoga in a given week let me off the hook to indulge in winey dinners out and the like which really didn’t feed my spirit in any kind of significant way. The humility of our larger situation and being forced into doing for, and right by, myself feel like an around unto itself. Even as I have friends, the couple variety, specifically, I get marginalized be heteronormality because so long as “the gals” keep in touch with each other it ticks a box for being in touch with me as well. Which it really totally fucking does not. So my form of isolation, already magnified by not having any family to speak of, is made all the more profound. But you know what? Good. Because I am letting the darkness and isolation move in and me and allowing it impact my psyche, to pressurize it, like so much deeply embedded rock and stone, churning in the heat, close to the magna core, where diamonds are being wrought. And when I rise with them in hand they will be mine, all mine.

The following blocks of text are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 1191-1195 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.

Day Eleven

Well, again we woke up earlier than everybody, except Neil who had to be up at dawn today as we are getting a new pilot on board and Al will take us from Alaska into B.C.. We spoke to Neil about his Uncle Dave, the hairy potter, and he asked me about Afterglow and I mentioned the whole 333 synchronicity. And we deconstructed The Godfather. Had an ask from Ben and Rizo about booking something in Boston, which was a great excuse to reach out to City Winery in response. Not to mention the venue they are playing in Portland. All this sort of thing is coming together. And I had a breakfast parfait of fruit and yoghurt for breakfast.

I put out a ton of feelers regarding next week; and City Winery got right back in touch with me which is also great. Only thing is I had to stop the works because J. needed wifi again allow the newest version of the movie to come in, which is right. And anyway we’ve been sort of stuck in customs for the last several hours. It’s just that weird kind of day where nothing is really moving. We had cous cous and halibut and steak for lunch with a cauliflower salad which really was quite delightful. Apparently A. had something of an upset in that her tenants didn’t pay her, which is too bad. Jill and Flo left just yesterday and they are probably already back home now in Zurich. How fortunate we are that we live in a time of air travel. It’s weird to think that just one hundred years ago the miracles of our lives would be impossible.

Anyway, in the spirit of stalled momentum I thought I would insert something I wrote in my green journal by hand some days before we set out on this excursion:

I have been four miles on the beach every day on average, which is challening; and I haven’t been drinking or eating sweets; and yet I’m not losing weight. Still as I build lower body muscle my upper body is beginning to slim down. I am, though, shaped like a frog and there is nothing much I can do about that. I will continue to eat light during this next few weeks on the boat. I need to stay clear haded and abstemious for a number of reasons, all under the heading of confidence. Look, I know I’m a mental case, and that I probably have o.c.d.—all the more reason to give myself positive messaging. I won’t be able to spend the day on the beach today and just to act up my look a bit.

I am aware of the irony of having written that paragraph a couple weeks ago; and the nonsense of the last sentence is due to my inability to read my own handwriting; and there is more:

Today id d start with an annoyance frrom a new arist; psychologically I need to get ahead of all the projects. I have been spinning simultaneously it all comes back again to units of time. And this trip has got to be a mga reset for me. What if I think starting today that I will bring in 2K per day. I don’t see why I can’t affect that. I will be writing people in my downtime for contributions in the coming weeks.

This was followed up with:

I can’t get over the lack of support from the new crop a gazillinaires who have washed up on our shores. I need to start vibrating on a much higher level. And the intros for next year’s books should be a “general year ahead for the sign, drawing from old magazine features we have done. It will go on the list to outreach to magazines.

Anyway, I’m glad I got that bit of old diary entry unstuck as we wait here for some kind of go ahead to sail further south. The cloud cover is so thick and so low it isn’t even worth photographing anything outside. We shan’t even sit at the table tonight; instead it will be movie night, where we eat whilst watching, which is also great. Some folks are having a dry night. I myself am not.

Day Twelve

Last night was a bit of a blow out. I think because of feeling stalled, as I said yesterday, we might have gone a bit to far. We weren’t really supposed to. After a late night last night after canapés of beatroot and cream, and salami and truffle, and a dinner of squid ink linguine with shrimps, and some kind of berry pie, ate in front of the tele watching Godfather 2, puntuated with crunches of popcorn (I gave our cheesey variety we picked up in Ketchikan to the crew). Anyway when I got up to pee everyone but Aine was gone; so we finished watching G2 and drank more red wine and then we watched half of Bridesmaids with some brandy. She didn’t really watch the TV; instead she was texting her boyfriend I suppose. I kept redirecting her to the screen until I just gave up. Anyway it was nice to hang out with her alone; I was feeling a bit like she was angry at me since we got on board. Maybe because I suggested she not feed the dog while at the table lest Bronte not leave her alone for the rest of the trip. Anyway I know nothing could be further from the truth and that, if she was irked, she was irked in a way that friends can be with one another. I have true affection for her and I believe it’s mutual.

Anyway, I still got up early today, which was another foggy semi stuck day. They were peddling English muffins but I stuck to fruit. It seems the only time I have any wiillpower at all is at breakfast; actually that’s not really true. I seem to be doing okay. The whole John Derian thing has been bubbling up in me again. I feel so hurt at what happened. And I wish I hadn’t retaliated with such force as I had. The fact is he was an abuser all the years we were friends; and a gaslighter, which he continues to be. I’ve noticed a marked change in what might be labelled our mutual friends. But my challenge is to transcend it. I can’t be stuck in that sort of crap. I have such good friends and such a good consultancy and even the festival, though it is like pulling teeth this year, provides some sense of pleasure and purpose. I just want more of it. And who would have seen what was to come this day. Wow.

So lunch was a delicious chicken cacciatore with white asparagus salad and roasted potatoes and some kind of sorbet i don’t remember what exactly. I did a lot of outreach in advance of my work-time in Reading and that felt right to a point. It is easy for me to overdue this type of work. It’s where I get a bit addicty. Anyway this was the day I stayed in room mainly; and I sort of waited for my head to clear which it ultimately did. And then suddenly, with the time change I guess, it was dinner time and boy oh boy. We had canapés of crab circled in cucumber sheets—delicious and light—and then very lean lamb loin with veal sweetbreads, which I normally don’t eat, but did (also ate S.’s) and what seemed like drugged Rioja. The dinner theme was sort of creature-like, we all had masks, and we were supposed to come up with a name for our character and also a mythos. I got as far as naming myself (a leopard) Silenzio; and S. who was a deer/stag called herself Batchel. The conversation centered on what kind of man men are. We had the story about “dégage” and Mr. Big Voice which, thankfully, I didn’t have to employ; and J. told story about her creepy uncle. We were planning on playing charades but instead the crew had set up a game for us the name of which escapes me; but it was good fun and took hours to play as Rioja fueled conversation welted and weaved through our foggy, cabin fevered brains.

The next thing I knew it was nearly 5am and I had fallen asleep—and snored!—on the sofa whilst Aine and J. and S girl-talked for hours. The latest night of all and it ended with me munching down on a thousand pistachios as I made my way to bed to sleep for four hours.

Day Thirteen

The thing I have to remind myself is that I have gotten up quite early most days. True I have yet to get into a kayak or to go fishing, but it’s not something that necessarily motivates me. Perhaps in the next day or two before leaving I’ll ask for some kind of lesson on that score and see where it takes me. Ah, the perils of a city boy in the wilderness of Alaska and British Columbia. Today started off a bit on the slow side and on the late side. I did not rise until 10am; and S. stayed in bed. I was rather shocked to see J. at the breakfast table but she did go right back to sleep after. My arm has really been bothering me and today I noticed a giant bruise. I’m trying not to be Movie-of-the-Week about it but it doesn’t feel great. I can’t really exercise it as it seems to make it worse so the most activity I’ve done is slip in and out of a hot tub. I suppose I could request a massage but I hate to push my luck about these things. There were vegan blueberry muffins but I didn’t eat them.

Up on the top deck this morning trying to catch up a bit on writing while also just wantintg to sit in the sun and read magazines. The fog cleared readily and we headed to put the bow into a waterfall which is always nice. And as N. says maybe more about the captain than it is about us at this point. There were threats of seeing spirit bears (white black bears?) but it didn’t happen. There was also mention of a ghost town which apparently came and went. It is absolutely beautiful here but very, very remote. Still one wonders what opportunities the area has to offer—or one would if one were twenty not nearly fifty five. Good lord how did I get to be this old. No wonder I have some kind of ache and pain. Otherwise I feel as if I’m twenty five. Actually better probably.

I did manage to draft some letters to sponsors and sparklers for the festival and to put together a document whereby setting up travel for the artists will be simplified. I don’t think I’ll try to do any of that on the boat however and will instead wait until Tuesday at the earliest to make that happen. I will try to make that all work in just a matter of two hours; the only potential stress at this point is fundraising and the book intros. But you know what. It will be what it will be. And I will have a month when I get back to the Cape during which time I will amil to make $30K in 30 days. All the while taking our beach walks and otherwise trying to enjoy ourselves.

My nerves felt a bit shot and my arm was really acting up at lunch. I could tell because even holding fork in left hand felt challenging. Lunch was delcious take on fish and chips with homemade tartar sauce. And I employed liberal amounts of malt vinegar. There was (again I think black cherry) sorbet. S. tried to sleep during the day, several times, here and there, but to no avail. K. had a big breakfast of bacon and eggs. I could almost bring myself to have that tomorrow. Dinner was to be an astrology theme and Cat asked if we would deliver some kind of presentation, so I put my mind to it. Why not.

We had a lovely salmon jerky again and a warm goat cheese with bread sticks. J and I had bloody marys which were so smokey and spicey and dinner with red wine was venison Wellington and the pudding was something I can’t quite remember. Oh well, there has to be one thing that slips through the cracks, eh? The astrology bit went over a little like a lead balloon but that’s okay. Oh I know the dessert was a sort of semi-fredo with strawberries and a kind of icing. K. wanted to play charades but people were tired so I suggested we watch Romy and Michelle. Actually I wanted to watch K. watch it which she said “wasn’t too creepy.” Wow it is really dated as a film but still people enjoyed it I think. We went to bed relatively early and I slept weirdly knowing that Sunday would be my last full day.

Day Fourteen

The last full day of anything is tough, never mind saying goodbye to dear friends and the incredible holiday they provide by having us on a luxury yacht. I mean come on. It is such a gift and I pinch myself every time we come on this boat. I feel strangely used to it which might be a bit dicey for a close friendship. But there are few people I trust more in the world than these wonderful folk; and I cannot say how beside myself with joy I am at having had the oopportunity to do this.

S. was given some magesium last night designed to help her sleep and I think it worked; so I tip-toe’d out by around six o’clock this morning and got a little bit of writing done. Let’s face it: I’m not hitting required marks they way I need to be hitting them but what the hell. There is nothing I can really do about that. I needed this holiday more than I realized. And I have to say I’ll need a few days to recover from the fun of it all.

We travelled quite a few (six) hours down to the bay we are in now. I had fruit and eggs and turkey bacon for breakie; and I tried to get a bit of work done in the morning. Lunch seemed to be minutes after. It was light however in that we had lobster tails, king crab and scallops with a bean and greens salad with lychee sorbet for pudding. Then we had a few minutes to change clothes and throw bathing suits into a bag and head out in the tender for this tiny cover where there was a 1.2 km path up to a fresh water lake. A big lake it was, called Scaget or something, and the water was filled with pyrite so it was literrally gold. And there were others there, Canadians of mixed white and native blood.

We noticed some of the locals were actually floating atop logs, as if they were rafts or rustic boogie boards designed for no wave water. I was wheezing a bit on the way up which I think troubled N. whom I had to reassure that my lungs need to acclimate to woodsy environments, my brain deciding what is really an allergen or not. It settled pretty quickly. Still I could do with a bit of cardio make no mistake. I’m going to take the month leading up to Afterglow to go completely carb free. And after this trip, alcohol free as well me thinks. I could definitely need a break and so could my liver.

There wasn’t much time between tea and dinner which was actually a buffet and party for “crew night”. We all submitted stories about ourselves and divided into teams, N. on one and J. on the other. We won. Stories included being almost abducted as a child, peeing in the woods when a plane crashed just hundreds of feet away, sending a sexty pic to a coworker accidentally, and other less interesting things. Some of the food was pulled pork ban-mi, fresh summer roles, terayaki beef, bbq’d chicken, pizza which i didn’t get to eat, followed by all sorts of cupcakes. The galley staff were the real stars tonight.

Everyone got to elaborate on their stories and the crew learned much about their proprietors, I’d say. The kids were cute and funny and I really feel a stronger connection with them. We then watched the first Monsters Inc which I had never seen. It was totally cute. To bed….

And up too early

Day Fifteen

And up too early…for what needs happen today, but such is life. We drank naught but champagne last night which means I feel good if not a bit nervy. Woke at 5 o’clock and it’s seven now and I’ve just been sort of faffing about. I want to leave here with total optimism and I hope that will be achievable. I think Zak and Aine will and we will head to the airport together today. We will fly out of Bella Bella to which we are sailing now. I’m going to throw on some clothes and go grab some coffee now…..I just want to get my packing done and take a nap. It’s challenging being on different schedules sharing the same space because one person typically ends up having to drag themselves around in the wake of the other person’s habits, which I find tiring at best.

It was just me and A. at the breakfast table, N. came through to take the doggie ashore. I did not have the banana bread. Funny how people write a daily blog; but it isn’t always just me talking about what I’m doing on any given day; however, these past weeks, I have enjoyed just recounting, pretty vaguely, what’s been happening. Because it’s important to me: this time. I have never so thoroughly enjoyed myself (in both meanings of the word) as I have these past weeks. I am concerned about money and my shoulder but really that’s about it.

We did some packing and took a hot tub for a super short time; and then dried our swimsuits in the sun while I finally took a few minutes to read a magazine. Everybody has decided to go into the town on the island off which we are floating, but I don’t like doing things before I leave. I like to do nothing before I leave anywhere. I like to Zen my packing and my eating and my thinking and just let things fall into place. I will look at the pictures today. And I will be happy to go to lunch totally packed and just relax into this day. I felt like I was drugged almost, I was so relaxed. And I was curious about lunch which turned out to be jerk chicken and, uh-oh can’t remember. I know I had some kind of sald and roti which was a repeat and very delicious .We had the Haut Pecblah, blah bla rosé which was a return to the beginning of the trip. And after an espresso we got a tour of the galley and the engine room which was really quite something. We watched some Pixar shorts and then waited for S.’s white shirt to reappear and then the grand goodbyes which I really love/hate.

Zak, Aine, S and I were tendered to Campbell Island where we got a taxi to the airport. I had spent all morning online looking at the airline that flew out of Bella Bella, only to find that we were not on that airline but were on a special charter which itself must have cost a pretty penny. I’m always surprised and I hope I’m never not in a sense. We had to hang out for a bit in the “airport” and then Chris and…forget the other guy’s name, Karl maybe, (he was probably the pilot) walked us over the tarmac to the plane and we took some photos whilst boarding. It was luxe. Almost like nothing is luxe. It was surely the combination of this tiny plane from nowhere going to Vancouver and that pretty penny. We had wine on board and fruit and Zak being eighteen gobbled up the available food. It was my favorite flight of all my lifetime, seriously; just the four of us on board seated family style across from one another. S. stared out the window and didn’t speak which I’m used to, but I don’t think they were. But A. totally got it. She’s such a good person.

We landed in Vancouver and were taxi’d to our terminals which were adjacent but we had to part company pretty much straight away. Aine and Zak were in the international departure area and we were in domestic so we kissed and hugged and rolled our bags onward to the next connected terminal only to find our flight was delayed due to weather in Toronto. As it was we were going to arrive Toronto in the middle of the night; and have a three-hour layover. Now it just seemed disgusting. So we rebooked ourselves for tomorrow and rolled our way back through the terminal to the Fairmont hotel. They gave us a room for their supposed half a price. We had a weird but kind of good snacky dinner of crab cakes and chicken wings and Caesar salad and local wine and went to bed. Banal? Perhaps.

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.

Trouble Shooters

Sagittarius 2° (November 24)

I do think that the alchemy is changing already and, after a short spate of panic, I’m ready to devote every waking hour to the project at hand. It will be my industry, my creative outlet, my obsession, my vacation, my dedication, my magic formula, my protective fortress, my ambition, my transcendence, my spirituality, my deep dive, my magic spell, my indulgence, my porn, my psychologist, my hobby, my art, my religion, and my partner in crime. I don’t know what I dreamt exactly but I do know that Gary C. featured in it and it revolved around having to get to a movie theater in time. It also centered on Paris in some sense, some magical apartment in a building with a series of them, my mother perhaps also living in one of them. There were wood beams in the ceiling. It was very fifteenth century meets flimsy 1980s drafty. The thing I learned already today, having been awake for only an hour is that: If you just stay inside a project then the ideas are available to you. I don’t necessarily feel like getting a tree this year. I mean, I do, but I don’t want the hassle to be honest. I am going to spend an hour a day throwing things out. And a half hour shopping online because daddy needs some stuff. I am forgoing all other things. All other needs. All other everything. An hour equals a page whenever it occurs and there are thousands of hours still available to me. Come July, when all will be in boxes, we will slip away, and make it clear that we are under a vast protection of terrestrial and spiritual forces. We will inform the legal team that we are dehors. So for the next four hours this day I will read three chapitres and draft the front-of-book material. Okay now my love project beckons.

The following blocks of text are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 1186-1190 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.

Day Six

Oh the dream I had—I had to wake myself up from at 5:15 this morning: I was yelling at Peter Belsky. I had two desks in his establishment which looked like a sort of chic lounge with modular red furniture. It was an entire store front with a downstairs where I also had a desk with more stuff. I almost have to jump to the end to describe the beginning. He knew I was there to talk. I kept waiting for him to finish with other people. In the meantime I made my way to the kitchen area where there were other people—it was sort of a party. (This all might flash me back to a dream I had about him many, many moons ago.) There were creepy, crappy people at the party, specific ones with whom I was doing mental and verbal sparring. All I wanted was a clean plate for lasagna while I waited for Peter to be done. Lynne had left me (she was driving a yellow taxi) outside and was to return in an hour. I had a real face to face confrontation with some hardbody guy who could have taken me a part but still I remained in his face ready to fight until we both backed off a little—I could feel that he was physically ready to do battle by way of his tensing the muscles of his core and inner thighs (I felt it as if it were my muscles that were doing so, which doesn’t make real, only dream sense). Peter wanted to get Nora Burn to be editor he had told my earlier and I went quietly ballistic saying she’s a no talent and I’ve been working there since 1987, the premise being I was meant to be editor in chief of this magazine that was always threatening to get off the ground. It was a dream of being undervalued, overlooked, being the one right there the whole time doing all the work and yet not the one desired for the reward of the big job whatever that means or meant. There was a woman, whom the hardbody was presumably protecting, who was real trouble and it was as if I was alerted to her being an anti-us by Laurie who, even in the dream, I believe, was no longer with us. Again I flash back to a dream dating to the early nineties perhaps, when we were losing Laurie, where this type of tightly packed and populated dream was set in claustrophobic quarters (the setting was the upstairs three bedrooms of the house I grew up in which must have doubled for the claustrophobic tenament interior of Laurie’s apartment on west 43rd of 44th to which I had a key back in the late eighties such that I could edit on the one computer DV8 owned. Anyway, I finished my lasagna….Lynne showed up in the dream in time to eat it with me/us…but this did not supercede the fact that I would still be waiting for Lynne to pick me up in a yellow taxi which was part of the original premise of the dream. Her arrival to the kitchen was through another (back) door in the space, while Peter at his desk, working with hipsters, was in the (store)front on the front side of the store, if that makes sense, where he sat at just one of the modular desks others were also sitting at, workers for him. Then I saw his desk was empty and learned that he was gone. And I went super ballistic. I went outside looking, I went all around. It was still to early for front of building Lynne to pick me up in her yellow taxi. I was fuming. Then I saw Peter coming down the road, after leaving me high and dry for over an hour, because now Lynne, too, was late, and he was driving a brown Deux Cheveux, contently oblivious as you please (stopping at a dumpster?) then we are at his desk. I’m aware of some of the women who sit around him at their desks because I think I already vented some about him in their presence; and then there was this hipster in front of me, perhaps the same hipster I walked in on as he was readying a shower for himself, half naked, when I looked for Peter in the bathroom before going outside and finally spotting him in his French car. I yelled at him for never following through on his promise! (That must be the psychological key to why this dream now.) That I had worked for DV8 since 1987…that I had worked on Seen (conflating him with Jonathan whatever his name was) winning the magazine a Graphis award…that I had been waiting around (apparently all these years) to finally function, paid, as editor in chief of what this next enterprise would be, my desk here (which I was clearing as I ranted) and especially the one downstairs filled with work already completed or semi completed. Now, awake, it might be seen as all the work I have ever done, designed for this sort of enterprise—all the work at The New York Social Calendar, all the lists of pitches for The Face and other publications, all that stuff I dragged (and still drag?) around all those/these years. And how he never paid me or anyone. I appealed to all the people in the room at their own desks, asking them, am I right that you’re all here working for free? And then I gave him the biggest dressing down in dream form I have ever delivered since reading my sister—when that happened it became talking/yelling in my sleep in that way where you’re talking through the veils between the sub- and conscious worlds. I referenced his family (wife and daughter) living in Wichita, Kansas and the expense of going back and forth, and the Deux Cheveux which he presumably had to ship from France, and on and on and on, citing his selfhisness and so forth. The Deux Cheveux could be Eric Delancy or Ryan Landry or neither. Anyway I railed on Peter and his expression was cryptic, a combination of really feeling the truth of what I was saying and not really caring and just waiting for it to end. Anyway…The lesson here is that I must be paid. And I must be valued.

Morning was crumpets—I didn’t have any. We travelled to Wrangell. We had a Turkish lunch of halibut (caught by K.) and beef kabobs, elbow macaroni and grilled aparagus with parsley, kale and sweet balsamic. We went into Wrangell. I bought a back pack and a tee-shirt. I am still in need of getting some work done!

Day Seven

Last night’s dinner was delicious Spring Rolls and Pho Noodles and Iced Coffee Cake. Ginger martinis, sake and white wine all in one go. And then it was the “Geese” night of Cards Against Humanity.

I did manage to finish the Norse Mythology book by Neil Gaiman, so that’s something. But otherwise I am really behind on just about everything. I don’t know what to do about it. Also I was feeling pretty rested and now I’m feeling rather shattered again which isn’t all that fun.

The morning was fantastic however. After a brekkie of banana bread: We went to see the Bears of Anan which is something I shan’t soon forget. It was a bit scary walking through the woods where we saw a bear climbing a tree; but the actual outlook where you could watch the bears catching and killing and eating salmon wasn’t at all frightening. There was even a bear hanging out under the wooden shack of a ranger station. But make no mistake—these animals are in no way acclimated to humans—they are definitely wild.

After watching them eat salmon we got to have Alaskan salmon ourselves. I left the skin on because it was perfectly done. And it was served with a salad of tun and canneloni and celery and squash roasted with basic and almonds. Gr-yum. Sak and Aine arrived in the late afternoon by seaplane and we had tea and flapjacks and then I tried to get a little something done before dinner which began with lovely cocktails—I had a dry martini—and oysters which were a bit cramy and delicious. Dinner was fantastic. Homemade parsely garanelli with a ragout of beef which was sweet, likely, with balsamic and almost bordered on bbq, with delious bread twists with olive and parmesan. After dinner there was an olfactory game planned with prizes of gorgeous colognes. Delicious Napa Valley wine and brandy into the late. Aine told us all about her new squeeze long afer others had gone to bed.

Flo and Jill have decided to leave early—Wednesday instead of Thursday, so I’m a bit bummed about that I must say. I really love them both and they will be so missed.

Day Eight

I have kept a rather low profile today, trying to get some work done and otherwise transcend the epic fatigue I feel. We are going up in a plane tomorrow to the Misty Fjords (a fantastic dragname) for J’s birthday and that should be a lot of fun.

I unfortunately realized that our graphic/web designer has as yet not gotten our site up and running; and he tends to disappear at crucial times, just as he did when we needed him last winter for a project. I feel I am too forgiving of shoddy work, but it’s selfish on my part, because I don’t want to have to go through the slog of finding someone new.

After breakfast yesterday I disappeared to tackle some of this work. I didn’t get very far unfortunately and the fundraising especially is uncharacteristically not forthcoming. I need to find a different tack. And it starts with a mental picture in my mind. So I’m going to try and re-write the headline. I don’t know why I got into a negative head. I am very sensitive to energy and I really try not to judge, lest I be….I get triggered easily working/interacting with people who remind me of my sister for sure. Next year I will avoid hiring certain figures. It was frustrating punching my way out of paper bags; I know I must have made some progress but it’s so hard to tell.

Breakfast featured waffles with black-cherry ricotta—I had none of it. Then lunch was Tandoori chicken, saffron rice, pureéd egglpant, burgies? (I don’t know Indian food the way the Brits do) and mango chutney, yoghurt sauce, naan, and pampadun. White wine. Then the kids and Aine went fishing. I went back to work. Went online and saw that my friend Ruben had done a FB Live from Ketchikan which is basically where we are! How cosmic is that? He is performing on the Norwegian Bliss.

More work. And my stomach was really hard and swollen and I knew this would put me into a bad mood unless I pre-picked out my clothes for dinner which was a Winter Wonderland theme, for summer in Alaska, which does make sense. I went haute lumberjack. Nibblies were amazing: a salmon jerky and chicken remoulade—like little chicken and mushroom stews inside fried balls. Martini. Then delicious white wine again.

We spoke about Lumos something to which I really want to find a way to contribute. I will bring it up again and maybe speak to Billy about it. Dinner was halibut with tomatoes four ways and baked Alaska for dessert. Movie night on the top deck: Passengers. I fell asleep about forty minutes in.

Day Nine

Not only is it the last day of the month and exactly six weeks to festival time but it is Jo (and Harry’s lol) birthday. And we have been talking about Caddy Shack since we got on the boat and I just say today is also the 38th anniversary of its release. These things keep happening. As if Ruben starring in a musical on the Norwegian Bliss we keep passing int the night wasn’t enough.

We had prezzies for Jo over brekkie. And everyone is sort of doing their own thing now. I am still trying to get work done but it isn’t easy. Anyway I am not here to work so it’s fine. I need to get my brain around how it is I can bring in all the money I need in the last month. I will go down the list and make a huge plea to all the big sponsors. But for now I need to focus on having fun and just keeping up enough as not to get ridiculously behind.

Lunch was a birthday party with balloons and hats and noisemakers. Fun. We had cous cous with vegetable and steamed cod with herbs and chicken kabobs also with herbs and a salad of lettuce tomato cukes and onion; dessert was a cocoa sorbet; champagne and Whispering Angel.

Then the sea plane arrived and we tendered to it and wow it was way beyond what I expected, thankfully, because I might not have gone if I knew how we would be flying over mountains that we sometimes seemed to barely skirt. We went through Salmon Glacier to No Name Lake where we landed and hung around a bit, the pilot immediately putting out his fishing line. We had listened to John Williams music and Enya and so forth on the first bit of the flight. Then on the second bit it was all kind of rocking out music. I only found out later you could turn the music off in your headphones. I actually got the feeling that the pilot might have had more than coffee in his mug. I took a ton of video. After taking tea upon return, we prepared for the Norse God murder mystery night. Jo was Hel and seemed very much in character, characteristically, as was David, as Odin, who never dropped the ball. It was revealed last night, as I suspected, that he will go into the acting profession. I imagine what it would have been like for me to have parents of such enormous means actually supporting a child’s desire to become an actor. I have to take that primal pain and turn it all around.

I can’t get over how much I am reminded of my sister. The triggers are harshly real. And that is enough said about that. Other than I must not be dragged into any fight that someone else might be itching for. I must go even deeper into compassion. Dinner was something of a blur because of the game. For canapés we had salmon jerky again maybe? And some kind of creamy soup as a shooter? It was a ball of confusion with all the “gods” sussing each other out; and the crew making very graphic appearances. Cleo who organized the evening stressed the feminist aspect of the stewards as Valkyries which was fantastic—the male guests were prohibited from making eye contact with them while the female guests were required to do so. I was Loki (exactly who I hoped to be) and I was of course the murderer, which nobody guessed, stressing the point: don’t avoid the obvious. Afterword we played a bit of Cards Against Humanity but it fell flat because I think we’re all now too acquainted with the several, now, entire whole decks of cards.

Day Ten

Woke up early and really would have chosen to fall back; however, today was the first day there was mist and a mystical feeling in the air, which is how I imagined the weather would be for most of the trip. We are heading to Ketchikan today and I’m looking forward to being in a larger town for a few hours. And then Jill and Florian and Graeme and Matt will leave, after Alistair arrives. So the day will be characterized by a natural human shift which might shake some things out energetically speaking. I need to do some timed writings which I’ll do right now, having already had a breakfast of smoked salmon (which was caught by the kids and A. the other day) on rye bread.

I’m a bit coldy today, which I hope will pass. I might hit the hot tub which might help….time passes…and it did! We went into Ketchikan and S. and I decided to avoid the commercial bit, so we headed up a hill into area people seemed to live. The town seemed a bit poor on the one hand with giant cruiseships (and the blocks of tourist traps the cruise companies own) on the other. We came upon a bridge and a waterfall with a wooden walk way so we took it. As it turned out it wove back into town, all along this walkway on stilts, to a more charming, but still commercial bit. There were some nice jewelry shops and a great book store and a cannabis shop and a cabaret venue, if you could believe it. We didn’t have much time as we had a rendezvous time back at the tender; but we ended up waiting another forty-five minutes in any case because J. got rockignized. But I had bought some cheesy popcorn so we snacked on that until the fam arrived and headed back to the boat.

Lunch was a bit sad knowing Jill and Flo were leaving. Pizza and arugula/beet salad and roasted vegetables. I know the Brits aren’t always super effusive, I don’t know about the Welsh, but I love Jill. And Flo gave me another kiss, and he’s Swiss! And we also said goodbye to Matt and Graeme, wecloming Al aka Cap’n Bumpyon board earlier. We then hopped back into the tender and went back into Ketchikan and tooled around for an hour and hit the highlights—cannibis shop, cabaret, bookstore. Then tea with chocoloate chip pumpkin cookies. Oh boy. Canapés were sushi and dinner was black cod and rice and a bun with bean paste for dessert. Conversation was all about trans versus gay. The kids, I thought, had the most interesting perspectives. And then we watched The (first) Godfather. I went back to our cabin to pee and never made it out again, face-planting into bed where I spent a good part of the night, apparently, snoring.

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.

Monkey’s Uncle

Sagittarius 1° (November 23)

One of thirty, as well, before I get some tests done and, look at me, I ate bad food (old sauerkraut and maybe even older smoked salmon) which means I have been running back and forth to the loo so yay on jumpstarting the weight loss as well. My dreams were fucked. They were a combination of trauma surrounding my parents’ friendship with the Vermes (and by extension my own with “brother” David) and being on the boat which I know, given what’s been going on around here, must be a subconscious stresser because, hello, I’m afraid of leaving all my stuff here. I have a nice contact for Belfast which I will use. We had a fruitful client appointment. I have all that “manifesto” stuff under my belt. The officer from town did call me back. I created the entire menu and I did manage to get through one of the chapters. Well, nearly. I know I can be done with all of that by noon tomorrow and then I’m in and staying in and the next stop will be to put all this stuff in place for round two. I have to do two things. I have to write finished copy as best I can on the first go, like any professional writer would; and I also have to let it be light and lively and make room for more room. It will come back to me in August and September and then I will have November and December to make a physical move (using August and September as the springboard for doing that. July is going to be packing and vacation and getting pretty much everything out of the basement so that it can be easily taken with. This is going to be quite a challenging year to say the least, and I do well to make the most of every waking moment, and also to have it be that I don’t get weighted down by the usual stuff in the meantime. 

The following blocks of text are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 1181-1185 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.

Day One – Boston To Juneau

What a relatively easy day considering all the traveling. Grabbed a taxi from the Eliot around 7am and made our way, no traffic to Logan. Alaska air is in a small terminal; there was no wait to get through security which was remarkably thorough. We were in first class—one of the perks of being flown by a wealthy friend—and it was a smooth six hour flight, with pretty lovely food, for the airplane variety, to Seattle. We had less than a half-hour to board the next plane which was just steps away from where we were let off. Amid hopes our luggage was on board with us, we then flew to Juneau just two plus hours. The airport was quite tiny but it didn’t have that third world feel. It had more a dystopian vibe and there were pro-life posters in the actual baggage claim area.

We were collected by Graeme, the boat’s captain, and taken down to the harbor where Calypso was moored. There were bald eagles in the treetops, casually, like crows; and it felt quite red-statey overall but not uncharming, despite the obvious queues of tourists off of Alaskan cruise liners. My weak airline bloodieshad made little impact other than to make me feel abdominally distended; we had a nice chat and then went ashore to see the Mendenhall glacier and waterfall, which was a stroll more than a hike. Got to speak with Dayne, the first mate, who is a special character among special characters on the boat.

We weren’t going to await dinner for Florian and Jill to arrive, but managed to in the end, which was great. (We were meant to meet them a the Seattle airport and take the flight to Juneau together. But their flight from Frankfurt, to which they got late last night from Zurich, was delayed; and they were stuck in immigration. We boarded and I asked the flight attendant if she could inquire after them—there was a ground crew member on board who chimed in: “What are their names?” We told her and she said “yeah, no” they were not going to make it and in fact their seats had already been given away.)We lifted anchor and set off up to Tracey Arm to see what would be far more major a glacier. Drinks and smoked salmon before a bowl of light tortellini with peas and vegetables followed by what seemed to be a fancy version of donut holes. We chatted a bit but everyone was bushed. I don’t really remember falling asleep. My arm really hurts and I’ll have to get to the doctor sooner than later.

Day Two – Tracey Arm

I woke at four but didn’t dare budge from the room that early, even though it was already full daylight. We are having just about four hours of darkness per night seems like. It would turn out to be quite an eventful day which began with me on the upper deck, wrapped in a cashmere blacket, at five a.m. It was really too cold so I came down and started writing and doing a bit of fundraising and awaited breakfast, buffeted by an Americano, once Cleo, the morning stewardess, emerged. As determined as I was to just have fruit I had to go for the fresh waffles on offer with what I believe was orange-infused ricotta. Two more Americanos and a bit more work as we made our way up to the glacier.

By 9 o’clock, I believe, we had smoothed our way through the calm silky water to where we wanted to be: faced with a giant wall of ice straight out of “Game of Thrones”. There were loud moaning sounds coming from the glacier at first but no visual accompaniment. And so Neil in one and Jill and Flow in another set out in kayaks to skirt the glacier closer up; and inspired by Jo who arrived on deck in a terrycloth bathrobe, we ducked below decks to become similarly attired, all stripping off to our swimsuits and slipping into the hottub. Before S. and I did that, newly arrived back on the upper deck, Jo was in a bit of a flurry because a huge chunk of glacier had broken off and made a giant splash and the subsequent waves that rocked the big boat and therefore most certainly the kayaks which were microscopic in comparison and way closer to the setpiece of G.O.T..

While still in what was an aptly named hot tub, the temperature of which did ultimately send me out first, resulting from strange sensations from it in my arms, one of which is already comprimised from some kind of pinched nerve, Neil returned from his marine adventure really shooken up, heart pounding. I don’t really know and forgot to ask if indeed they were wearing life vests, the three of them, but anyway, the sheets of ice falling off the glacier, an occurance which had now become regular, created mini tsunamis and they really struggled, phyisically and psychologically, not to tip over. I have still never tried kayaking and I’m very happy that I rethought my original impetus to make a virgin voyage in one this morning.

Lunch was a Mexican fiesta of pork tacos and fish tacos and quinoa salad and another one which was a medley of sweet corn, black beans and cherry tomatoes followed by a sort of team of coconut mexican cookies in a yoghurt sorbet. And there were tiny bottles of Patron tequila placed at our plates with a side of salt and limes. I think only one of us had their entire nip, I had about half and thus took an afternoon nap; but not before playing MarioKart, my first lousy but comical attempt at a video game, and a competitive one at that. The appeal for me was choosing my character and my vehicle both of which were very cute; but I do not know how to work the tiny joystick device with multiple ancillary buttons they provide you. And David, a cheeky fifteen, followed up each game with “highlights” of my (not everyone’s, mind you) race, sometimes in slow motion, showing my cute character veering all over the road in a manic manner.

The nap lasted about an hour with Streetcar Named Desire playing low behind the veil of slumber. Then it was time for afternoon tea—we are eating again already?—featuring a rhubarb cake. And it was off in one of the tenders to try and find some whales with an axe to chip off some ice from a berg for cocktails. This would prove a very bad idea indeed. We didn’t see any whales on our rather long journey out of site of the boat. (I learned later that a few of us—we were only six in our party plus the crew member driving—were thinking this seems a bit dicey, being so far out of site of the boat, without any life vests, given the fact we might sneak up on whales; this was an instinct that would be justified, however not in light of the whales but in respect to the unsuspecting iceberg we were seeking to hack with an axe.

We came along side a rather big blue one which was beautiful but it didn’t allow one to reach it with outstretched axe-wielding arm which specifically belonged to the fifteen-year-old David. So we set our sites on a “tiny one” which was roughly the size of a large refridgerator; or at least the proverbial tip was, emerging from the grey-green sea. David was poised on the bow like a cartoon masthead; but before he could even graze it the bow of the boat struck the submerged majority of the berg which resulted in the following scene: Suddenly the managable fridge-sized block of ice rose up to a great height before us, like some Norsegod come to life, or as if the iceberg was on some kind of underwater elevator, growing to a height four, five times its height—what was actually happening was that the boat’s bump into it had caused the iceberg to flip back from us, the refridgerator submerging and giving way to what had been the enormous submerged side increasingly towering, in the kind of slow-motion reserved for near or perhaps full-on catastrophes, bumping in the boat back in seeming retaliation, crunching into the bow and bending the metal ladder attached to it. In that eternity of a moment we were all silent, expectant, frozen and utterly and helplessly awaiting our fate which we have thought would be a proper capsizing into the freezing drink. We came through it muttering things like “oh my god” and “holy shit” and “that was close” and “wow, wow, wow.” And then we set off to see if we could find some whales, which we did.

There seemed to be a humpback whale on its own, or maybe it was calving, or something of that nature; because a small distance from said whale was at least one, maybe two, orcas or killer whales which are quite a different animal. And it was like dualing marine mammals where the humback would creat a flurry of activity, slapping the water with her flukes, and then the orca(s) would bubble up and spout and make some separate kind of commotion. It was very strange and we didn’t quite now what was what. We later learned that orcas are predators with proper teeth who will hunt other marine mammals, seals, mainly, but also newborn calves of other “real” whales which aren’t predators but gentle krill-eating giants with giant brushes instead of teeth that filter in mass quantitie of smaller aquatic life as sustenance. And as we watched this random, avant-garde whale choreagraphy I know that the bulk of our brains were still processing the David versus Goliath iceberg that had moments before played out.

We did have cocktails that night with an hors d’oeuvres of a fresh tuna paté spread on cucumbers, which was followed by a delicious dinner of seabass and garlic potatoes and a good deal of delicious Pouilly Fumé. People were drinking a bit more than usual and we played Cards Against Humanity conversationally puncutated by details of the ice incident, thoughts and impressions and admonitions of true terror. All of which resulted in “new rules” that entail: always wearing life vests when out on the tender and always being within sight of the boat itself when out and about on the smaller vessels. This is a good thing.

Day Three

I woke up to the following email from a first cousin on my father’s side—of which I originally had seven and now just four, two of whom I’ve only seen, like twice in my life, but not for decades, and probably will never see again…actually that is probably true about all my remaining cousins on my father’s side. This from the one, of all of them, with whom I once was closest and whom, even so, haven’t seen in over thirty years…the subject line of the email was “Branding” and I represent the body of the text in full:

Funny how much money is spent on branding and how some simple brand memories last decades

Today, I had a thoroughly crap day that Monica had an inkling about.

After dinner and sitting on the couch to relax she walked up to me and said.  “ I know you had a bad day and when I went to the store earlier I thought I would get you a special treat to brighten the day.”

She was holding a box of Haagen Das Ice Creme Cookie Bars.

Special treat. Being the recipient to   Numerous fat genes need to minimize carbs so it was a nice unexpected  surprise.

When I looked up first thing that registered was how much your mom liked Haagen Das.

I looked around since not everything from shopping and asked her “ what else did you get?”

It was then I saw Band de soleil.  Over the weekend we talked about how I get a red bronze tan and Monica gets a yellow tan. I asked her to get a bronzing tanner.

Bingo just like the Haagen Das can’t think of band  de soleil without thinking Aunt Peggy

Probably because she also made her rice with noodles, butter and College Inn Chicken broth

Ok I’ll get of the reminiscing diatribe and seems like people sometimes are better branding advertisements than any commercial ever made.  

Have fun and enjoy 55

To deconstruct, in my opinion, he “sounds” drunk. And you can see that he “edited” it as certain words mid sentence are in upper case, still, supposed remnants of previous versions of lines nad phrases. It’s very odd overall that he would write me and begin with “Funny that…” as if we are somehow always mid conversation, which we are not. He also has some facts quite wrong. And though I appreciate (which has proved to be) an ongoing obsession with my mother, his romanticism of her is wholly narcisisstic and rather intrusive. I don’t appreciate being taken, as I sometimes am by him by email, perhaps once a year, down some memory lane in a park whose theme is my mother not his, especially when it’s revisionist, if unconciously so.

First off, my mother didn’t eat Haagen Das, the spelling of which, I trust, might be correct in his email and which I thus replicate here. She either bought and relished Breyers “vanilla bean” which came in a square box or, more often and later in her middle age, she would buy pints of different flavors, though typically also still a supplementary pint of vanilla as well, from one or other of our local seaside homemade purveyors of the stuff. I will concede that she might have at one point purchased a box of “cookie bars” but it wasn’t a signature move that would have defined her, but perhaps something she tried, drawn by the promised convenience of being able to unwrap one and not have to struggle with scooping. That is entirely possible. But I doubt my cousin ever spent multiple nights, let alone one, at my parents house during whatever time he cites from his faulty mists of memory, whereby “cookie bars” (did he misspell creme or was it intended and perhaps Googled for clarification?) would be some kind of ritual of hers in which he partook, parenthesis: I didn’t.

Next, she didn’t wear the misspelled Band de soleil. She did wear Bain de Soleil. However she did not, being fair skinned and freckled, red-haired, 100% Irishwoman, wear the greasy orange variety (that might have created a bronze effect, even, in part, from that orange being something of a dye) which was basically hard oil; but instead she opted for the white somewhat more protective—although this was before SPF percentages—white cream, which I chose to spell thus—accented by zinc oxide on her nose and lips, which would nonetheless have been shaded by a cap. My mother did “tan” in a sense, but it was really more of a result of her ubiquitous freckles being brought out by the sun and banding together in solidarity into some kind of overall semblance of color, which was my mother’s actually word for it. She never said “you’ve got a tan”, or “you’re very brown”, she would say, “ooh, you got color today” and it wasn’t spelled colour.

As I’m in a snark I will add that I don’t believe I ever met “Monica”, my cousin’s wife, just as I have never met the two daughters I believe he has with her. The only child I know that he has is a son called Daniel who was born in the late seventies and whose conception precipitated Joe marrying Cheryl which was his girlfriend dating from the Saturday Night Fever era and who would have, by the late eighties, been a model for some friend character that the main character in “Working Girl” would have left behind in Staten Island while the Carly Simon song played to sweeping scenes of a crossing ferry. Daniel had big blue eyes. Joe did not. And in order for Daniel to be his biological son, Joe’s father, “uncle Joe”, my father’s sister’s husband, would have had to have blue eyes or else no dice. I do not remember if he did or he didn’t. I think that is perhaps a grace.

And in case you’re wondering about the final kicker to that email: Yes I will be 55 this year and, yes, my cousin wants me to know he knows that. But there is an edge to ending the email that way, too, don’t you think? To me it says: Even you, little Billy, whom I envy for having the mother you did (and whatever better life he imagines I had over him) will shrivel up and die, and you are well, now, on your way. So enjoy that….

I must also tell you and remind myself that breakfast today was fruit and a delicious egg and spinach filo pastry tart which I tried and failed not to eat. (There is always tomorrow—yeah right, who am I kidding?) The boat continued to make its way south and we happened upon an island of noisy sealions we could also smell from a distance. Then we went seeking whales in earnest and found them in abundance. We spent the morning, all of us, watching a feeding frenzy that entailed groups of humpback whales “bubbling.” This is what they do. They all dive down deep below and release air from their blowholes which bubbles krill and other yummies up to the surface….then, they all head to the surface straight up, like rockets, with their mouths open, such that, all of a sudden, a group of giant whales emerge together, straight up, into the air which is terribly exciting. Then they dive down to do it again, and again and again. As they’re below seagulls on the surface bob and wait; then the seagulls all take to the sky, calling out to one and other, and hover over the spot where they giant black heads, mouth agape, will again appear, giving all of us with fingers perched on the red buttons on our phones to start a new video some semblance of a heads up, no pun intended, but there it is. That went on for hours and we watched some of it from the bridge, where we also got to see some naviation maps detailing where we were and where we were going.

Then lunch of a rich mushroom risootto with morels and black truffles with both breaded veal cutlets and breaded cod cheeks and a delicious minerally rosé from the Languedoc. Nary a vegetable in sight but who cared. While we ate the boat made its way into a little cove where there were apparent hot springs. Post lunch and very full and even a bit swollen from the gluten I was now consuming at every meal—I didn’t mention there were giant breadsticks laced with anise seeds of which I gobbled two—I needed the kind of lie-down that I got: one where I sweat out, mainy around my upper chest and neck, whatever my digestion couldn’t filter on its own, feeling slightly nauseous slash fluish. So I made my excuses and didn’t go ashore; neither, I learned, did anybody but Jill and Flo and Kenzie.

It was apparently a more treacherous climb than anticipated, and there were some “old geezers” (Florian’s words) already there when they reached the spot. The water was scalding in spots and resulted in actual burns; but they did find a place to wade in without being boiled alive. We have surmised there is a literal hot spring which derives from far above and cascades down to these “baths” which are really man-made soaking ponds. But it gets better or worse depending on your perspective: Neil, who didn’t join the trio, later went ashore to walk the dog, the cutest white Westie in the world. There he saw a house on stilts which turned out to have three, let’s call them, cubicles, each of which was outfitted with a “domestic bathtub” not porcelain but probably plastic, that was also continually filling with the steaming hot water, but simulataneously emptying as well, through it’s unstopped drain. I have to say I’m a bit intrigued and might have to check that out on the morrow.

Day Four

Last night cocktails was delicious Beluga on blini with champers—yum. Then two lobster tails that were in a delicate thin pool of broth. Followed by a delish banana chocolate (flourless I assume) pie. Incredible. [I think I wore a blue shirt…jeans again?] We played another quick round of C.A.H., this time writing some of my own. I did not win. I felt a bit cranky going to sleep, as I have every night—not cranky in the sense that my mood is bad, but in the manner in which I seem to fall, and really not stay, asleep. It’s all very episodic. And once again I was fully awake this morning at four o’clock and went upstairs at five.

I tried sitting on the upper deck, wrapped in some blankets. It wasn’t even cold but there were hundreds of no-see-ums and mosquitoes the size of 1970s-era Buick Electras. So I came down stairs and did some writing there and requisite catching up and that’s pretty much where I am right now. For the next several days I need to marry my Blague writing with other needs of characters strung together, for the festival, and for the books-in-progress. Having had a taste of fun I’m a bit preoccupied and on that score feel as if life is happening somewhat elsewhere. But I’ll work through it. There is some vague interest in our projects but I’m not going to bank on any of that having made such a mistake before.

I sat in the Sun after breakfast which was crabcake benedict, wrongly named. It was tiny crabcakes with hollandaise sauce, so I ordered some poached eggs to go with. And I had my fruit and coffee and politics dominated the breakfast conversation, which might have been foreshadowing as some real shit has gone down today apparently. Namely, Michael Cohen says that Trump was in the Trump tower meeting and other things are unraveling. I really hope so. I started reading Neil Gaiman’s Norse Mythology and it put me in something of a bad mood. I shouldn’t compare myself because “comparison [truly] is violence”, as our friend Taylor Mac says—he might have gotten it from somewhere else—and it really is up to me to be as big or small as I want to be. We don’t even have a Wikipedia page which makes no sense. Everyone I know seems to be getting theirs and I’m going to let that inspire, not discourage, me. We all have our sadness and we all have our own timing.

I had a nice donation today from a friend. A client who was a youngster a decade ago when she first come to see us is experiencing some major successs and credits us in that coming to bear. Alaska is ridiculously beautiful and I truly cannot get over the daily views off the decks and through our portholes, if that’s still a word in operation. Lunch was scallops and lamb, surf and turf being a Chef Leo theme. And we are in the sign of Leo and there are many Leos on board, including one of the most famous in the world whose birthday we shall soon celebrate.

We have a Murder Mystery tonight based on the game Clue, or as the Brits call it: Cluedo. Attached is a picture of the menu.

Day Five

Okay so last night was really a lot of fun. I realize these murder mysteries in the end are less about what the plot is and more about the characters, and specifically, how they draw out the people and lend license. J. and I always seem to be at odds, funnily enough. One time, during a Greek gods mystery, she was Athena and I was Dionysus, so right there we were archetypally disposed to humorously clash. Last night was the bit of the same and it really is fun to exchange barbs with friends in the course of the created dramedy. A total hoot. D. totally emerges from his otherwise normal teenage-boy sulk and really hams it up—he is so funny—while M. really takes her signture ingenue roles so serious. Jill and Flo were totes fantastic; Flo was the perfect Colonel Mustard and he really seemed very much in his skin, again, a byproduct of having a character to both veil you and access elements of personality one often keeps under wraps, for reasons of politesse.

The crew girls did such an amazing job, with the game and the food pairings with wines, choreographing their service into a serveuse ballet. We sat outside for a bit afterward and had a wee bit more wine and then some brandy. Post that, Flo and I stayed up for another hour talking which was a rare moment of male bonding and our burgeoning bromance. Complete with innocent peck good night. Adorable. Overall such a perfect night.

This morning my nerves were slightly frayed but not really for only having slept about five hourse. There were banana pancakes for breakfast which was short and sweet as we went to a salmon hatchery which was fascinating. It is called Armstrong-Keta Inc and I’m telling all my friends to visit their website an learn more about it. The owner? Ben gave us a tour that lasted about fifty minutes which was perfect, and now, as I write this, we are headed to El Capitain (where the operating system got its name?) to explore the largest cave system in Alaska, and one of the largest in the country. Cannot wait. I will top the Blague off with a recap of the day. Meanwhile I have to get my brain around the work I have at hand today…..(which turned out not to be today).

The boat was pretty lurchy as we hit a bit of open ocean and it was too nauseating to work. I did manage to ready a hundred easy pages of the Norse Gods book by Neil Gaiman. (More feelings of undervaluling to fight.) Lunch was cous-cous and cod fritters and veal balls and salads of actual lettuce. Rosé. The sorbet seemed to be mandarin orange. The boat ride to the caves took about half an hour. We were the new life “vests”. We hiked up many many steps with two guides Brooke (who I swear knew who Jo was) and Jessica, whose second day it was and who had obvious native—Klinkit?—blood. S. got through it. The steps down made ones legs shakey. Jill brought tip money, something I wouldn’t have thought of doing. I’m sure I’ll be able to take everyone out for a meal or some such when we hit a town. I don’t know when that is but I suspect in the next day or so. In two days we will have been here a week and Jill and Florian will be gone forthwith. I would like to see them in Europe this year, hopefully soon.

It turned out to be a Hawaiian themed night and luckily they provided flower shirts and leies (sp?). Speaking of which my clothes are beginning to not fit and I will have to start slimming down. Anyway I really want to get back to yoga in the coming weeks. We had poke in spoons for our drinks appy, and I had the best blood mary of all time. Then crisp white wine for dinner of rockfish with rice and endives and steamed bun of gingery chicken filling. Dessert was a sort of souffle cake with almonds (I think) anyway I ate everything. Then we watched Anchorman 2.

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.

Sullied

Scorpio 30° – Sagittarius 0° (November 22)

Last night was another doozy. Woke at two with the mind racing and bracing. This time the prevailing thought was all about taking a solid stand. I ran the notion by S. and wrote it up. We had a delish cassava linguine clam sauce last night and I’m super excited knowing there are leftovers to finish with a salad of butter lettuces. My dreams were so freaking bizarre. I pulled off a piece of my foot. Yeah not good. I am really happy to be launching this new live-it this week, and I feel much better being in Sagittarius. At least that’s what I’m telling myself: It’s a lesson in expansion. This is why writing some of the front-of-book matter might feel quite good. Otherwise it is a perfect time to power through. To go deeper into the yoga (and Yoda). It’s been such a long time, now, since I was in true farmer’s hours mode, falling early, sleeping through and up by 4:30, working with breakfast from 5-11, doing my exercise having lunch and then letting the rest of the day unfold with some winter cleaning, errands and the like. All this worry has caused me to live completely upside down. 

The following blocks of text are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 1176-1180 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 didn’t get the beach today. I did manage to get a haircut from my ancient barber, Raphael, who told me the texture of my hair had changed. He recommended buying a huge tube of Nexxus from Amazon because it is only $25. His hours are 7:30 to 11:00 only four days a week. He starts his day at 7AM but sometimes clients are there at 6:30 waiting for him because they’d rather wait that half hour than three hours later in the morning; the place gets packed, mainly with elderly men, and Raphael takes his time.

I keep rejigging my schedule (which I shall continue to do for several days no doubt) the law of diminishing returns being levied on me, as I realize my idealistic notion of fitting in all the work I need to do before I leave will happen. It won’t. And so I’ll be taking it with me, which might be fine, lest I get too far behind (which I shall!). What I have managed to do is to get the website into some kind of shape. And to get all our graphics under way. I think I am in decent shape, not just with the festival, but with all my works; but I really won’t know until after this trip.

Traveling with work can go either way. You might just drag it with you and spend the whole time torn between the jobs you need doing and the beckoning holiday doings or the off-site-ness of the journey can provide some proper perspective for plowing through and hitting your marks in such a ways as can’t for the time being happen at home base. We hit walls when we look at the same four of them, day in and day out, trying to make professional magic—stepping away for a few weeks might just be the tonic the proverbial doctor ordered, even if you don’t actually do the work at hand (and so long as you make your peace with not doing so). But I have a good feeling this time out. Erin Markey is totes persona non grata and this juncture and another performer is now exhibiting signs of not following through. Given the former situation I have a short fuse with anyone making those kinds of waves; I think I might be on the defensive. Anyway I must have slapped her down enough that the grumblings stopped. And then of course, because I’m me, I felt bad. But I would have felt worse if I had to replace someone so there.


Got up at the crack of dawn and finished packing. And we were en route to Boston by 8ish. We checked our luggage in a day early to the Eliot; and I dropped La S. off at the bottom of Newbury Street and set off for my doctor’s appointment. My blood pressure was in the okay range which is better than it’s been—and I haven’t exactly been super careful. Gave some blood. Got a wee lecture on my weight and then headed back in to meet S. for lunch—a little pho—before meeting with the dean of the Museum School. I didn’t know much what to expect, but it surely turned out unexpectedly, and not in the greatest sense.

Some months ago I had Joseph Keckler to Harvard/ART/Oberon as part of our series. We brought him up a day early, I thought, so he could tech. Then I started seeing promotion on social media for an event he was doing, the day before his show, at the Museum School. The person posting it created a poster listing all the places he had performed but no mention of Afterglow or Oberon/ART on whose dime Keckler was in town. Nope. They just piggy-backed off our dime. Such a sleaze-oid move. And I definitely took issue with it. Well the dean, Nancy, who started the conversation about how she had a cancer scare and how her mentor had died actually had the nerve to bring the subject up and to tell me that Danielle had told her not to work with me.

So here I was, having to go on the defense for myself? Which, given the momentary shock of the situation, I sort of did. Which later missed me off even more. Then the Dean, Nancy, offered up as an excuse for Danielle that she was “mixed race” and gay or whatever word she used to describe her sexual identity—was this supposed to be an excuse for her being a total sleazeoid? I guess so. I guess she is so much the victim due to her race and her sexual proclivity that me, the supposedly straight white guy, is supposed to be like, “oh, okay, I get it, it’s fine—I understand why she’s a fucking asshole….no problem.”

You’ve got to be kidding me. What kind of narcissistic bullshit is this? All excuses and accusations. I left with a very bad taste in my mouth I have to say. But I’m not surprised. So many people are acting like this these days. Forget seeking forgiveness instead of permission—they don’t even seek said forgiveness. They just throw it in your face and act like you’re the culprit for taking issue. And I would bet my bottom dollar that if I weren’t white and male (and they I suppose presume straight?) this wouldn’t happen. Meanwhile during the meeting this Dean, Nancy, spouted off about her book writing and being a Simone de Beauvoir scholar, and about her husband and her son, Max, who was working for “Funny or Die” and was “really smart and funny and a real character”…and…yet…she was fawning over Brian, calling him a weirdo and a queer and all that sort of thing. I thought it was insulting as did S., but he didn’t seem to think so, so who am I to be offended form him?

Anyway we headed Nahth and had dinner with the Corbett family. We had stopped for some organic red and cheese and Nancoise had put out a picnic of cheeses and hummus and raw veggies and we had a nice ravioli, of which I regretted not having more. I fell into conversation about the visit from my high school friends, some short weeks ago. I can’t quite muster the energy right now to elaborate on that. But I will insert it here later, maybe, after cocktail hour:


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.

Sad

Scorpio 29° (November 21)

Really have to get this sleeping under control. I should feel better today but bit blue. I will put my thoughts on list for Roman, who is helping quite a lot. Googled him and he’s a Capricorn. I was going to ask him if he was yesterday based on the shape of his eyes, but restrained myself. It seems he also is a registered chess player. Capricorns play the long game. I will set up another week’s worth of Blagues and read what I’ve written so far. I have to go slow and go deep and just let myself be. Thirty-one days of massive recovery time. There was no news good news about a medical procedure I had done. It is a use it or lose it time. FF is an abuser and he will not be allowed to get away with it again. I must remember that. I’m so conditioned to wonder why it is that people treat us this way or that. It’s a self-punishing thing. The truth is he is a menace and he cannot be allowed to cause us any more pain.

The following blocks of text are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 1171-1175 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.

Dear Quinn,

First off I wanted to say I think you’re doing great. You reallly are more ahead of the game than you think (despite the obvious setback you wrote about yesterday). Within a short period of days, you will have drafted all of the introductions, and well, really, all of next year’s books, still nearly six months ahead of the game. So good for you for being so staalwart in face of the shifting sands of a schedule. You always pretty much weather life well.

The loss of your parents didn’t really hit you hard. At least you haven’t manifested it as such. I think the loss of other people in your life, however, might be devesating, and you might want to think about that, just as you push yourself to think about your own demise. That was always the beauty of the reading you did in your youth. Starting at quite a young age you read about seers and magi and the like; you read your Vedas and Upanishads and about various pantheons and symbol systems; and that has certainly served in your work as a writer and counselor; and it shall serve you in the course of creating tangible designs, now, as well. You must think of it all holistically and authentically. Just as you have to power to create a powerful herb conconction so do you have the power to create beautiful talismans.

So keep that in mind and know that the busy work is almost over for the year. On the boat you will write your Blague (exploring pas Blagues by reading through, going back to the beginning, marking the dates where certain stories arise, cutting and pasting in those stories, and reworking them a bit, if only smoothing them for storytelling gigs or fully realized performance pieces. That will be an hour of your morning on the boat. And then you will work on smoothing the intros, that will be another hour to two hours of stolen moments—you can likely get through the first six signs in about two days, right? Then you have the whole rest of the time to devote to fleshing out the others. It will be fun and it will keep you focussed. So that by the time you hit New Hampshire, on August 8, you are already editing and drawing out the books, per day, finished on your end, surely, by the 20th—and then you’ll have ten full days of working on your Christmas show while finishing your fundraising. Sounds fairly doable. And, again, I think a simple schedule of work as such will keep you grounded while on holiday without at all interfering with it.

When I first thought to write you this, which was only a few days ago, I was going to see that: “on a deeper note, you’ve gotten really far away from yourself and you need to get it together”; however in just a few short days you have proved you can still rely (albeit decreasingly) on your bounce-back ability. So bravo for continuing to watch your diet and for exercising and getting out and enjoying nature in the process. More than in any summer I can remember, you have gone to the beach more often than I can even count, going back to spring. This is another reason I’m so proud of you. I know it’s painful to fully open like a prismatic, cosmic flower without anesthetizing yourself against the angst and fear, nay panic, in doing so, but it really is better that you operate from this particular station at this point. I don’t often say I love you but I want you to know I really do. You’re a very good person and the irony of being (and no it’s not just your imagination) treated as less-than or discarded by others is not lost on us. You might say it’s proof positive of how powerfully wonderful you can be. So keep up the good work of being yourself! XX


Ah Bastille Day. I have memories of almost winning a boule tournament one Bastille Day, playing in partnership with chef Alan Harding against dozens of teams from all the top French restaurants in New York. If I remember correctly we came in third or fourth.

I am having terrible writer’s block in attempting to meet some important project deadlines. I think it’s because there are so many different things going on at once; I always think I can stick to set “units of time” but, alas, I never have. Still everything gets done; and I must remember what I told myself yesterday. Meanwhile I am front-loading health and exercise. The day has been starting with low tide so it’s up and out to the beach for the next few days, which really helps keep my head on straight.

This time next week I’ll be setting off to Boston for the weekend and meeting with the Dean of the MFA. I look forward to just being able to focus on all things Glow-y for awhile and to get cracking on the fundraising which is seriously lacking this year. Provincetown has never felt more changed, filled with day trippers while Ryan Murphy and his ilk continue to buy up houses they don’t live in. It’s become such a status symbol for rich gays. But the arts outlook is becoming rather dim in the process.

Ooh, I haven’t in so long a time felt such a spirit of excitement and élan as I am currently experiencing. Even in the mindst of the mountain of work I’m facing, somehow it all seems manageable, due to how much effort I’ve already put in. I’m quite proud of myself and my accomplishments thus far this year, and I can say so here, publically, because it’s only you and me reading this. Ha! And who cares. I had an artist bag out on me, or rather never even have the courtesy and decency to tell me: you know what thank you for your offer but I can’t do it. Just threats and recrimination and then a big silent fuck you. Well, I’m not going to dignify these actions with any kind of retaliation (except for venting here). Still, this morning, I was asking why me? Why do people feel comfortable. They definitely shouldn’t. Anyway, I can only keep my side of the street clean…

Today is my friend Matt’s birthday. I wrote Happy Birthday Matt to him in a text. I went to see if he got it, and when I checked, in the box wherein you would type a text to send, were the words: I am not coming home. Isn’t that kind of spooky. I think it is—it flashes me back to the kind of freaky feelings I’d get, always in summer, reading books like The Amityville Horror or Suffer the Children, which I mainly did, in the summer of 76.


You have to include everything—you can’t be so black and white. You are not good nor are you evil if you indulge in certain behaviors. Whether or not they are good or not for you, they needn’t have resonance beyond the scope of the action itself. It is its own thing. It doesn’t mean anything more about you. It surely isn’t a sign you’re spinning down in any way. Especially when coincidence or synchronicity brings such things to you. You must accept them. They have no moral assignation.

You don’t have parents looking over your shoulder; and you’re not in trouble. And though it is comforting that friends might play that knowing, authoritative part from time to time, you have an off-switch. You understand how to monitor yourself. Like now: You can ritualize your experience, not only including it but empowering it to empower you, instead of rationalizing it, embarrassed by expressions of your true nature. You can do this. It is all a choice. All choices are a choice. Imagine guilt not playing a part.

I will read the Bhagavad Gita (again?) while on this trip and read nothing else. It will mark the beginning of new spiritual sustenance. I have often read great books on boats. This is the essential book and I will not not read it. Alaska should be something of a spiritual journey. It should absolutely not be anything that resembles a debauch, by any stretch of the imagination. I am looking forward to seeing my friend Florian most of all (to be honest).

I have not had the best taste in friends over the years. It really is an area where I am really terrible. I didn’t much enjoy the weekend having all my high school friends to visit, I must be honest. It was way too full on. People are so selfish and narciissistic. I don’t think I am, but maybe people say that about me. Who knows.


It just takes a moment for things to go completely off. I was doing fine enough. But one false move and then everything goes kaput. I have to learn my lesson this time. I can’t keep making the same mistake over and over. It’s not a good look, and it puts me in deeper danger than I can rationalize. When I’m not in the correct state of mind I am simply too uninhibited to know what’s what. I feel for me I really do. There is a huge part of me that is, for lack of a better word, missing. And so I take scraps, but I realize that I might really be living out some trauma, or retraumatizing myself, to use modern vernacular.

I need to treat this vacation as a vacation. I think I need to really rest and recuperate and let myself be taken care of a little. Maybe something has finally switched in me for the better where I realize that I know longer process the same input as I did in the past. I am beginning to know what is detritus and not to repeat patterns on the them of that definition of insanity. I am not going to make things better this way. I have to keep my head screwed on straight if I’m to navigate my personal and professional life and this increasingly crazy world. Otherwise the proverbial they win. They are trying to wear us down. And we can’t let them.

All this while we watch our illegitimate president suck Putin’s cock on international TV.

I won’t get into it. I can’t get into it. Our leaders now have to step up and prove that we are stronger than this one man. Meanwhile, I have my own goals to achieve, my own battles to fight, only I’m not fighting. I am tired of speaking about myself and giving a daily account. Something has switched in me and I need to speak on more metaphorical and metaphysical a level. I must begin to achieve what I need to achieve and to sleep when I’m tired. I cannot keep coming up against the same obstacles—it’s not doing anybody any good. Especially me. I’m the one who truly suffers and I’m kind of sick of it.

And so I go to the beach and I walk three miles in sinking sand. I eat healthfully and sleep nine hours. I sit back at my computer and resolve to do better. I make my plans for the future with more than hope, but resolve The general atmosphere these past two years has trickled down, even to members of our so-called community. I see an uptick in selfish, venal, mercenary, self-aggrandizing behavior across the board to which most people have not been immune. There is the overt and there is the insidious. The result of feeling universally persecuted unfortunately results in fearful dog-eat-dogging. You are only a victim if you choose to be; and if you do, you are likely going to victimize others in the process. I choose kindness, increased compassion, community and, most of all, I choose forgiveness and Love.


I’m going to focus on the positive. I’m going to clean slate myself and stop living in fear. I have plenty of time and I have done all the heavy lifting already. Everything else now can just be icing. And downtime, even a wee trip down the rabbit hole, is a necessary part of the process. I actually feel renewed and thus ready to keep up the good fight. I must find a way to activate S+C against what is happening politically. I must find a way to give counsel to people, more widely, as I do for our individual clients. I feel it must now be a calling and I have to get that mechanism moving. I ask for guidance on this score.

Next year will be the crystal anniversary of Sextrology and I’m thinking up a bunch of fun ways to promote what will definitely be a new ebook edition, and hopefully a new print one; it requires getting a wee bit more respect from that powers that be at HarperCollins. They’re owned by Murdoch that fascist reptile so, really, if they don’t pony up, they can go fuck themselves. It dawned on me today how many people I know who are powered by phony fucking money. I have been so naive whe friends have mine have had houses bought for them, school tuitions paid for them—and I’ve seen them elated and celebratory. How to remain friends with people you know are succored by what would be blood money. To be honest, if I think it through I’m not really surprised. Some of my best friends for decades I fear might really be quite, how do you say, elitist (in the true sense not in the insdide-out GOP-spin sense). Of course they are the same people who give to Christian charities, which, unbeknownst to them, are likely human trafficking outfits. You think I’m kidding and I’m not. I need to get more involved in Lumos and other organizations.

This week is not turning out to be what I expected and I keep rejigging my daily planner. But you know what—fuck it. Time has to work for me not the other way around. I will get through everything and all will be done, so why stress. Why stress anything really. It’s all made up. The important things now I find are exercise and eating right. That’s the simple first stepness of the Zodiac as well, it starts with Aries which rules the first house of, among other things, the physical body. The physical body, according to the Zodiac is spirt made manifest. Anyway, I’m not going to go on about astrology right now; I’m more interested in remaining terrestrial, here, today.

I’m going to miss our daily walks here these next three weeks. Wow that is a lot of missed walks. I won’t be getting much exercise on the yacht I can tell you. I suppose I shall have to learn how to walk on a treadmill—perish the thought. I miss the sand and sea and seals and so forth.

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.

Farm Monster

Scorpio 28° (November 20)

Was very anxious this morning to a level I haven’t been in a while. I think the problems on the farm are really weighing on me more than I imagined. The lawyer will pay a visit today and that will prove fruitful. I will unlikely get any actual work done as I want the place looking sparkly and I need to move my body around in any case. Going to make delicious flounder filets with spicy bok choy and white turnip mash. Finished Queen’s Gambit which was truly excellent in the end. We are managing to have fun through it all. It is really stressful though, to be sure. Anyway, let the healing begin. Went down a very deep English Beat rabbit hole, which felt fantastic.

The following blocks of text are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 1166-1170 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.

Capricorn Man

Capricorn man is a throwback. He is cosmically steeped in tradition, born with an old-world sensibility, a practical penchant for tried -and-trued methods, and reverance and romanticism for former grandeur in any number of forms. This is archetypally ordained, it would seem, as the sign is ruled by Saturn, the deposed king of the god’s and ruler of the mythological golden age, that of the Titans, before being overthrown by the classical Olympian gods. Though more primitive a time, the reign of the Titans was something of a paradise, as there was no vice in the world, everybody did the right thing; there wasjust peace and harmony and prosperity; nobody worked to survive, the earth providing in abundance, and people lived to a very old age while retaining their youthful appearance, dying peacfully, though living on as ancestor spirits. Nothing wrong with that; unless you forever long for a world while living in this one, something Capricorn men do in a variety of ways.

Capricorn might live by a solemn moral code—rules and regulations, long-held traditions being attributes of the tenth astrological house associated with his sign—while indulging in certain decadences—decay being a hallmark of his own artistry and aesthetic. There is an inherent wistfulness to his character, fittingly, if not a sorrowful melancholy that is suprising motivating. For, Capricorn is not a defeatist; rather he won’t easily venture that which he’s not pretty much guaranteed to achieve; as such he is highly realistic about what talents he does or does not possess; he never strives to be something that doesn’t come easily. That which does will be given his total all—he’s never one to put eggs in multiple baskets. And being so narrowly focused, he doesn’t entertain. the notion of competition, that is except for the self-kind of beating his own personal bests.

In contrast to Jupiter whose energy is expansive (ruling over the previous sign of Sagittarius), Saturn’s energy is restrictive, containing and retiring. It is about preservation. And Capricorn surely paces himself, like an elder getting through a long day’s events. His tastes tend to the elegantly leisurely—no man perhaps possessses as many pairs of loafers. He is not out to prove…anything. Still, his own self-imposed goals will be as high as the standards of personal conduct he sets for himself. Like the metaphoricaly deposed royal that he is, no matter his worldly origins, Capricorn comports himself with what can only be described as good breeding, which, biologically speaking, is a most vivid example of tradition. Carrying on, in fact, is something Capricorn is wont to do, in every sense of the term. That is to say he can succomb to wailing bouts of melancholia so abyssmal that he must fight to climb out of them. In some ways Capricorn man seems not so much a scapegoat as an escape valve through which not just his own but a sort of collective grief is expressed. Like he’s mourning for all of us. That sense of hurt lends him a serious air, pulling on heart strings and contributing to his overall appeal and profile as a seasoned, experienced, mature and sophisticated a man.

Even at a tender age, this, the Zodiac’s Holden Caulfield, has a wizened lens on the world, which motivates him to gather his rosebuds as he may; which manifests in something of a paradoxical manner: Capricorn, whose sign motto is I use, will waste not a moment in pursuing his dreams, working every wrinkle in time for accomplishment; while, at the same time, he sows more wild oats and samples more earthly delights than any man in the Zodiac. Of course, if doing so conflicts with that notoriously strict moral code, he may wrestle self-loathing on that score. For the most part, though, Capricorn doesn’t find his lofty aspirations and licentious affectations to be mutually exclusive. Like the goat god Pan living in Arcadia, even the most urbanite Capricorn has a pastoral view of existence—simple and quiet but for the rutting of satyrs and nymphs. He is, in fact attracted to rustic types with whom intimate relations will smack of certain corruption. He likes to have the upper hand in relationships, as a rule, often partnering with people who in no way threaten to get up in his goatish grill. Let’s bring the catcher Caulfield back in to illustrate the Capricorn male paradox: He wants to at once save and slaughter the innocence of life, to preserve it so to savor the spoils thereof.

Like his mythic ruler, Saturn, Capricorn is all about divine decadence. Saturn is god of seed sowing, and yet, with his signature scythe, he is the prototype of the grim reaper. Also of Father Time, which seems to be on Capricorn’s side. He is an enduring character who moves, albeit sometimes at a tortoise’s pace, from strength to strength. Even when suffering a personal fall, he rarely slips so far that he can’t pick himself up to continue his ascent toward his next milestone. Capricorn David Bowie even rose from the dead, Lazurus-like. And we may find that young Holden recovered from his own breakdown—depending on what Capricorn J.D. Salinger may’ve published posthumously.


The most monumental of women, even pint-sized Capricorns pack an iconic punch. She is at once a staunch and capricious character, depending on the stimuli. Most people will experience her as the former, only a handful of intimates getting glimpses of the latter. Much of the ongoing Capricorn condition is hinged on affecting a certain flow between the more rigid and more carefree sides of her personality—to find the freedom inside her infamous self-rules and -regulation and to employ them as solid scaffolding from which her boundless spirit may safely soar. Ruled by Saturn, the planet of structure and containment, she is born with healthy boundaries. Whereas Capricorn man draws on the archetype of the mythic Saturn, Capricorn woman derives power and meaning from his female counterpart, Rhea, whose name means “ease.” This might be music to Capricorn ears as, from youth, she is used to hearing and feeling that life must be hard. In truth, the mountaineering Goat is drawn to great heights of achievement, tough roads to hoe, but this is Capricorn’s happy paradox: As she matures she increasingly finds success in her professional and personal callings the more she eases into their processes. In our book Sextrology we call Capricorn woman The Sleeper. She is, by would-be cosmic decree, something of a late bloomer, all the hard work of her youth contributing to what might appear, to outsiders, as latebreaking overnight success. And they’d never seen her sweat.

In mythology, Rhea is goddess of motherhood; she the “grand mother” and “goddess of generations”, plural. Her husband ate her first five children; she managed to save her sixth, Zeus, who overthrew his father and freed his siblings. She embodies the passing on to others—she even mentored and gave her grandson, Zeus’ inheritor, Dionysus, her full “estate”, that is to say her brand of power, making him a male nature god, plus perks like her leopard-drawn chariot. She is the embodiment of traditions, endowments being passed down. She comes to us in fairy tales as the fairy godmother, a kindly all-powerful being. All of this goes a long way to illustrate Capricorn woman’s character: Whether or not she herself ever gives birth, the grandness in the she-goat’s character dictates that she play universal mother to a great many, nurturing, mentoring and administering to so-called children on a vast scale, in the abstract or both. Even if she is a literal mother, she is somewhat eccentric and detached. Though thoroughly loving, she imposes a healthy formality, on guard against codepency, you might say, taking a more grandmotherly approach, with one cool remove, to motherhood.

The mythical Saturn, with his scythe, is the symbol of the grim reaper, but Rhea’s brand of “passing on” is in the form of a baton. Likewise, Capricorn’ ambition always includes others. She learns things she can impart; she gains wealth to share it. The Capricorn motto is I use, and she does so for great purpose(s). Born under the cardinal-earth sign, symbolized by a mountain, Capricorn is sure-footed, enduring, in it for the long haul. Rhea’s home is the mountain, also called a horn—Matterhorn means mother mountain. Capricorn is the cornucopia, the goat horn of plenty. The previous sign of Sagittarius, ruled by Jupiter, is about abundance—Capricorn, ruled by Saturn, denotes containment, seeking to preserve the bounties of the world lest they overflow and spoil. To be exact, Capricorn is the Sea-Goat, mountain and lake, a reservoir, a container of all that is abundant and pure. Capricorn woman is reserved and conservative in the truest sense, a cosmic holder of that worth preserving. She is a keeper of postive traditions, generation upon generation, be it knowledge, customs, codes, mores, all such things that will serve the future. She is a human time capsule, a classic, a golden girl from the get go.

Being likened to some kind of grandma, even in her youth, is common for Capricorn. She leads with her serious self, intending to be respected and never trifled with. (If you catch her in a rare moment when you get an opposite impression she’s taken off her granny glasses and down her bun to let off a little steam.) She grooms herself into a person of importance, learned and refined, with ethos to impart. She is culture incarnate, the best of the past, present and future, three points drawing the circle of time (eternity). The cornucopeia, the reservoir; the Petri dish, in which select new growth is cultured . (Never mind that Capricorn Mary Tyler Moore played Laura Petrie on TV in the 1960s, evolving the culture, panicking the patriarchy, by insisting on wearing Capri pants.) The word panic comes from the goat-god Pan, whose wailing melancholy speaks archetypal volumes on Capricorn man. But Capricorn woman is so on guard against would-be gloominess, constantly climbing out of sinking feelings, this becomes the main motor of her self-empowerment. She will overcome. She’s not only been to the mountain, she is it, monumental. As a biproduct of her own edification, she Sherpas others and elevates the ethos overall. She personifies all that is enduring, meaning: lasting and worth suffering.



If the previous sign of Capricorn is all about a past worth preserving, Aquarius is the unwritten future, a time-space from where Aquarian man seems to have been sent. He will be regarded in his youth, distinguished in his family, as being different from the rest. His is a unique brand of signature high intelligence which mightn’t conform to conventional standards; and he tends to latch on to specific areas of interest, typically new, groundbreaking ones, where he can play a part in pioneering a field. In this way he is unpredictable; otherwise, he is a creature of routine, though one which might be considered unusual, working odd hours or otherwise marching to the beat of his own drummer. He will have many aquaintances, or what is more accurately termed followers, but very few close friendships. He may be something of an outlier, and buck whatever system he was brought up in. Whether on a hippy, spiritual or techie type of trip, he finds comfort in the company of other fringe or niche dwellers. Frequently suffering from ugly-duckling syndrome, this awkward geek, more often than not, matures into an alluring and rather imposing figure. Appearances being deceiving, he will always possess a deep sensitivity, a gooey center of vulnerability. More often than not, though, he will adopt a countenance of detachment or even a cliqueish disdain toward others, on high alert for getting hurt in relationships, which tended to be a source of even mild trauma in his youth.

The sign of Aquarius is ruled by Uranus, named for the primordial sky god, that of the univere (space). Uranus means to rain or to urinate which shares the same etymology. It’s assignation to the sign of the Water Bearer is thus thematically in line. Uranus was castrated by his son Cronus (Saturn), and from the severed bits sprang to life several beings, including the goddess of love. In biblial myth John the Baptist is the Water Bearer who also, through baptism, causes others to be reborn, paving the way for his cousin JC , who also is love. What, you wonder, has this to do with the Aquarian male? Well, seemingly from outer space, they are frontrunners, lone voices in the wilderness, bringing what might register as radical news, sticking their necks out, often losing their heads, for their convictions. The only fixed-air sign in the Zodiac, symbolized by a star—the Star card in the Tarot depicts the Water Bearer—Aquarius espouses fixed ideas, facts, truth and convictions; the paradox being that these truths aren’t necessarily evident, but of the as-yet-unproven variety. Cue that saying: Science fiction of today becomes science fact of tomorrow.

It’s like the advent of evolution itself. In the present will surface certain mutations, which, now, are the quirks, the ugly-ducking bits; however it will be along these mutations that evolution, and the survival of any species, will rely. Aquarius man is mutation made manifest—he is the oddity now but his uqnique visions will be the mainstay of the future. He is a walking-talking aha! moment, pouring out new life and understanding to anyone who’ll take a sip. The shadow side of the sign—we all have them—can see him become something of a guru with his own flavor of Kool-Aid. He requires a kind of vague adoration, while he finds one-on-one bonds to be challenging, for a variety of reaons. Sometimes it’s the notion of variety itself—all the romantic and other type possibilities out there—that prevents him from entering into constructs like marriage or monagamy. He might always keep his options open, even when in a commited bond, and bid a partner do likewise. More often than not, though, this laissez faire attitude toward emotional connections stems from having fallen hard in love and lost. Loss is not an emotion Aquarius will care to repeat if he can help it.

I know is Aquarius’ sign motto. It points to his emphatic conviction, while it also speaks to his encyclopedic knowledge about thinks of interest. He really seems to have a computer for a brain, and once he locks in information it is loaded for life. It is difficult to alter his first impressions of anything as he is quick to assign hard and fast labels for people and situations, refusing to waste time on second glances or guessing. This mainly serves him well but it can limit his experience, which, again, isn’t so bad a thing for him. Aquarius, the Star, as compared to his opposite sign of Leo, the Sun, is most comfortable at a distance, but he likewie expects everything to revolve around him. He is patient and will bide his time, happy for a cult following for his ideas, art, invention, activism, creation or even his friendship. He knows instinctively that he is ahead of his time and that others will always need to play catch up. Instead of making this a source of frustration, Aquarius also stays ahead of his game, even enjoying a certain obscurity in which he can further his craft or evolve his art or otherwise devise plans that will, even in some small degree, define our collective future.

In our book Sextrology, we call Aquarius man The Visitor, for oh so many reasons.


Aquarius Woman

She is a contradiction in terms: at once conventional to the point of unironic nerdiness, and yet the freest, unfettered freak on the astrologial block. From childhood, she is folksy, a homebody who revels in the company of close family, finding synergy with certain members, productive and creative ways to spend time bonding. For instance, if she plays the violin and a parent the oboe, she will form, and musically direct, a burgeoning duo. And this will become a theme in her adult realtionships—she likes to do things, perform activities, and otherwise share in the happenstance of life, with others. She makes her friends, meets her mates, in settings where she and like-minds gather, whether at work or play. Many Aquarian women partner with people who perform the same job, role or function as she does. It might be a symptom of wanting to share deeply with an object of affection on as many levels as possible. Some people can find her choice in other people to be questionable. It can seem that she isn’t aspirational enough in relationships. She is, after all, like The Star card in the Tarot, which pictures the Water Bearer, a naturally exalted, twinkling figure, an elevated fixture in her loved ones’ lives. Aquarius is ruled by Uranus, named for the god of the starry universe, and it’s fixed-air status, translating to a point of light, is indeed symbolized by the star; it is the axis- or so-called-opposite sign of Leo which, ruled by the Sun, our home star. Aquarius, with her far away eyes, is forever coming from a different place, and yet she is looked upon as a beacon, a north star, who helps others navigate their own human condition.

Stella (meaning: star) in A Streetcar Named Desire seems, on the surface, to be slumming it with Stanley. But this literary dynamic has mythic roots. The classic Water Bearer is Hebe, goddess of youth, and “daughter”, the maiden form, of the goddess Hera (Roman: Juno). Hebe is indeed divine but falls for the mortal Heracles (Hercules) which means “beloved of Hera.” Hebe is a “descending goddess” deigning to love a mortal who, by that love, is made divine. We see this, too, in the myth of Iris, another “descending goddess” who fell in love with a mortal. Iris is Hera’ messenger, goddess of the rainbow, her path for bringing good news to mortals, and thus elevating them. The seven colors of the rainbow correspond to the seven colored veils of Salome, the female counterpart to John the Baptist, the biblical waterbearer. So? So, archetypally speaking, Aquarius is designed to share her awesome inspiring rainbow unicorn-ness with those who mightn’t realize such magic exists in this world. Also, by raising up, enlightening, even one significant other she has removed from the world, and potentially saved it from, just another brute. To the untrained eye, it seems that she is casting her pearls. Both things can be true. And this is Aquarius woman’s most poignant paradox. For all her starry notions she is bound to play on the ground so raise up those who might feel low. Her sign’s motto is I know and we all look to the Aquarius woman (Oprah, Ellen) for answer.

What the Water Bearer pours out is a balm, a salve, certain salvation, saving grace. This is Aquarius woman’s superpower: She does honor and credit to others by her very presence. She personifies the principle of free and unmerited favor of a kindly cosmos and divine intelligence. Whereas Aquarius man draws on the primordial archetype of the mythic sky god Uranus, Aquarius woman’s metaphysics derive from his female counterpart, the goddess Gaia who is both his mother and his mate. Gaia is the most primeval of classic deities. She is the Earth incarnate, while her name more literally means “life”, “world” or “the totality of all creation,” which perhaps sheds some light on Mia Farrow’s mania for adoption. In ancient art she is depicted as reclining on the earth surrounded by countless Carpi, winged Cupid-like infant gods of earth’s bounty. In the present neopagan view she is the divine spirit of the Earth, which would seem like another paradox, being that, she’s also likened to a distant Star. But was not all of life, all of us, here on Earth, indeed made out of stardust, long ago and far away?

As essentially life-giving as Gaia, (and Aquarius woman) is, she is so sweepingly so as to be impersonal. Yet another paradox of the sign: the Water Bearer feels strongly for the world and for people in general, but she is comparatively cavalier in one-on-one bonds. Like Gaia, who has countless lovers beyond Uranus, Aquarius woman is probably the most free-wheeling amongst women—did you know Uranus is the only planet to roll through its orbit while all others spin on their axis? Stella probably didn’t stay with Stanley, but enjoyed the earthy engagement while it lasted. We joke that Aquarius woman always has a packed bag stashed under he bed. When she goes she’s gone. She personifies Uranus’ brand of energy which is sudden and deviating. It is not only that of evolution, via sudden mutation, but of revolution by way of awakening and revolt. Being such a giver, she won’t waste her grace on the unappreciative—she’ll go where the love is.


Pisces Man floats in and out of your life at will, but he’s always totally present when with you. Years will go by with seeing him, but it feels like no time has passed. The most knowing and yet unknowable of the signs, Pisces functions best unanchored, allowed to materialize, or fade into the ether, as it suits him. However, if he wants in to a certain milieu, just try to keep him out. He has a way of permeating situations, getting through the cracks, like a gas, appealing as a shameless but selfless creature, at once obsequious while taking up a lot of space—he can be very on—often being whomever you want him to be (if not your own personal savior). Pisces is the sole mutable-water sign, which is symbolized by the salt sea, foam, mist, fog and vapor. In our book Sextrology his chapter is called The Drifter for numerous reasons. Besides being unbeholden by nature, he is like a lucid dreamer, holding some overall vision in mind, nothing specific, otherwise giving himself over to experience and letting it take him where it will. The sign is ruled by Neptune, the planetary energy of dissolution; and Pisces man does tend to dissolve into life, giving himself over utterly to experience, letting go and letting…belief carry him. The sign’s motto is I believe, and Pisces embodies it, believing in himself, generally, and in his broad skills and talents to find their ultimate expression. He is impressionistic, nonlinear, taking a big-picture perspective, letting opportunities emerge from the field of his experience. More than most, he lets life dictate his journey, walking the path of least resistance. If he wants to be a fine artist but receives an opportunity to, say, design sets, he will go where that love is, unlike the more singular minded folks among us.

Pisces seems to absorb knowledge as if by osmosis, boasting an encyclopedic understanding of anything and everything. He is typically a visual person drawn to vocations that fall under Neptune’s rule—art, design, film, photography, media, all which deal in certain imagery—given to some fantasy, illusion, enchantment and imagination, as it relates, not just etymologically, to making a little magic. In life and career, Pisces is who he imagines himself to be, typically characterized as a departure from his origins. He is a revisionist in the purest sense of the word, reframing his life to suit his soul instead of trying to fit in or make peace with the circumstances of his upbringing. From the moment he can walk, he is set upon a unique journey, constantly morphing as a result of his many influences and references, erasing from his memory-banks life circumstance that doesn’t support his ever unfolding story line. He sacrifices for his art or other callings but he doesn’t subscribe to a down-and-out lifestyle per se. Pisces tends to put on lofty airs, a signature manifestation of his self-art-direction, adopting a yah style of speech to match his seeming omniscience. He is drawn to rarified enclaves and aspects of culture that might smack of an upper crustiness—at the same time he may frequent certain “underground” realms into which most of us would never care to set foot, but he usually keeps that to himself. Pisces man has seen it all, or at least he’s trying to. And nothing surprises him. Again, like a gas, he seeps in everywhere, achieving a certain omnipresence (to match his omniscience), which is right up his archetypal alley. The Pisces fish are the mythic animal totems of the Aphrodite, also called Mari, and her son Eros, at once the oldest (father) god and yet the eternal babe (son)—see where we are going with this?—yeah, when Pisces Lou Reed said he felt like Jesus’s son, he wasn’t kidding. The itinerant messiah figure fits Pisces to a tee; as does his ability to fall into the arms of the world and let the universe decide his cosmic plan, without struggle but not without sacrifice. And, though he may be god-complexed, he identifies with the marginalized, often surrounded by disenfranchised souls whom he inspires, even at cocktail parties. The twelfth astrological house of Pisces is the poubelle, the trash bin of the Zodiac, and it rules outcasts, pariahs, the forgotten, the exiled, castaways, and misfits.

There’s something magnetic about a person who lives life like he has nothing to lose and everything to gain. By the same token, this can rub people the wrong way. He seems to get life and, well, everything better than the rest of us—and he’ll have us know it. He can’t resist letting the steam out of stuffy situations, with clever and cutting remarks, even when doing so with signature lockjaw-aw affectation. He may feign a jadedness, mastering the eye roll, but, in paradoxical Pisces fashion, it will be false people or faulty situations that become the target of his censure—something that will always have a comedic bite to it, as if to say there is nothing that need be taken too seriously. Pisces may be the one human most naturally programmed with an understanding of his own mortality. He is the wise and powerful Oz of the Zodiac, working his world of illusion for all it’s worth, ultimately revealing certain truths in service of helping the small and meek. Because, maybe, he’s the most accepting of the fact that all roads lead to the same place.


Pisces woman is a delicate creature who in time learns she is tougher than she ever imagined. Naturally soft-spoken, if not a silent figure in her youth, she is an old soul with eyes that seemingly gaze inward. She is the most introspective of the signs and, let’s say, in tune with the more subtle vibrations of existence. Many a Pisces experiences psychic flashes in childhood, which can scare her, ironically causing her to try to shut down that part of herself. In more practical terms, Pisces is the most empathetic of creatures, which can cause her to isolate or otherwise lose herself in social activity or substances or all of the above, at various points in her life. Pisces is the only mutable-water sign, which has various interpretations. First, it speaks to the primordial soup from which all creation comes, whether in terms of the evolution of all life, or the embryotic state in which we are gestated. Pisces’ symbol opposite-facing fish signify the womb-tomb, the alpha-omega, the great beyond from whence we come and to we which will return.

Pisces’ mutable-water is also the salt sea, from which all earthly life crawled, and the foam and the mist and also the fog. Pisces’ female archetype is that of Aphrodite (Roman: Venus) who emerged from the foam of the sea—the Pisces fish are the mythical totems of Aphrodite, goddess of love, and her son Eros (Roman: Cupid), also a god of love, the eternal babe who is also the oldest of the gods, just one of the sign’s many paradoxes, which Pisces often beautifully personifies. In our book Sextrology, the Pisces woman chapter is called The Dream, pointing to the intangible, misty stuff of our soulful reveries, at once elusive and signifying a certain oblivion, while also being the state via which we most probably connect with the proverbial All. And Pisces woman is likewise dreamy, hard to get a hold of, indefinable, and yet so palpably powerful on a level one can’t quite pin down. We become lost in our dreams and yet they save us; and Pisces, the Siren of the Zodiac, has a way of making others lose their footing while being the most inspiring and muse-like of creatures. The word Siren means cord, rope, to join and to bind—those Pisces fish are bound by a central umbilical chord, how Aphrodite and Eros stayed connected—and we sense from Pisces woman a soulful need to connect, not just one-on-one in relationships, but with humanity as a whole as well as on a spiritual level. Many Pisces women become spokeswomen of causes aimed at helping those who are most marginalized or forgotten by society, the gravely ill and other so-called untouchables. Pisces’ compassion for others is rivaled only by her proclivity for leading a dramatic life—no woman has more soap operatic an experience than she.

Like her Pisces male counterpart, Pisces woman tends to be something of an anomaly in her family of origin, cut from a finer cloth than other members of her clan. She is an autodidact and takes pains to better herself, presenting herself as mannered, tasteful, cultured and refined. Often an artistic ability, as a dancer, artist or musician, exposes her to people and prospects not afforded others in her family, where she is groomed for “better things.” She is often unfortunately susceptible and subjected to dominant figures on whom she comes to rely, the transcending of these dynamics and relationships, though difficult, building the kind of emotional muscle that comes to define Pisces’s signature survivor status. She may prematurely run with a fast crowd, swept away by promises of glamour, pleasure, ease and luxury. In time she will learn to provide herself the right amount of all of these elements as fringe benefits to a meaningful life; spent making a difference, typically, in the lives of those challenged to help themselves. She feels and thus takes personally other people’s pain and suffering. And others generally make a great impression on her—she all too easily adopts the personality, cadence and rhythm of those with whom she spends long stretches of time—which is why she oft opts to be reclusive, limiting how much of other’s energy she absorbs.

Ruled by Neptune, planet of dissolution, the mutable-water sign of Pisces speaks to non-material existence, that of the purely spiritual or energetic. (Scientifically, we now know that all matter is energy, anyway.) She is like a spirit in the material world. And she can often seem a blithe one, that is to say casual and indifferent; this being a demeanor she adopts as protection against the extremes to which she can go, whether dragged down by an undertow of despair or riding giant waves of exaggerated, exhilarating emotion. Meditative practices (or even being an avid reader) are ways she can keep, or rather not lose herself in a sea of world problems or, closer to home, in an ocean of emotion. Her love life tends to be tempestuous, but that is, typically in part, by choice. Even a little drama is in this department goes a long way to keep Pisces and her partners on their respective toes. She can’t abide a status quo romantic life. So she may inflate issues so to inspire deeper connection on them, only to then surface and float more blissfully resolved.



I want to once again fall into the arms of the universe, which for me means letting go of all attachment and moving around the world at will. I feel I have to look on the next ten days before heading off to Alaska as a work-holiday of sorts. I must continue to rest and diet and allow my organs some respite, while I get the entire mechanism of the festival totally up and running. Challenge for the Actor, to be sure. Anyway, I know all is doable if I just do what’s right in front of me and take it from there.

TK dropped out of performing at Afterglow; rather she didn’t sign on, spending months finding excuses not to. I would say to her:

Let us agree that you found excuses and unuttered reasons not to send your contract citing that you had no printer. Still when I asked if you were “for sure signed on” so that I could get posters with your name on it designed and printed you said: “YES.” Despite having patiently waited monthys amid many a number of attmpts to get that plus show information and photos you simply never did. In the process, you kept saying “next week” or “after the show opens” and I tried as best as I could to work around you.

Then suddenly most recently you tried to blame the festival for putting some kind of financial pressure on you, saying you were “broke” and “busted” from doing shows back to back this spring and summer and “don’t you [me] know what you’re asking me [you] to do?” as if I was somehow the cause of what you seem to consider your own financial planning.

All I did, months ago, was offer you a slot in the festival, which you accepted; we settled on a date and you confirmed that both you and TK, your accompanist, could do that date. And I sent you a contract. That was April.

You know as the months ticked by that I need you contract and meterials; you knew I was spending donated money on designing and printing. You kept having me wait and to meanwhile bill the show generically. I suggested wording to you on that score and you told me it was wrong and I changed it. Then suddenly last week you say you’re having second thoughts but that you will “update me after” your show opens. It opened four days ago. I emailed and texted you and you didn’t respond. You try to make this seem like my fault—perhaps I’m seeing your process of your trying to convince yourself, yourself.

I, who have championed you for the last seven years, most notably to ART/Oberon, having you several times at festival and in my series at ART/Oberon, which resulted in a subsequent run of your show and a bucolic workshop. I have built audiences for you in Provincetown and Boston, and this is how you treat me. I may have been gaslighted and ghosted in the past, but not at the same time by the same person; and not by someone whom I trusted to be kind and fair to a friend and colleague.

I will add that I now have to redesign, reprint and redistribute materials with your name on it. And I will refrain from sending you the bill. You will pay without my lifting a finger. I feel bad for you. Anyone who does any combination of Starsky + Cox wrong always gets what they give one-hundred-fold. I apologize in advance for what the universe might deliver.

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.

Thoroughly Mod

Scorpio 27° (November 19)

Moving around today sending an artist some money and also doing some shopping in the big city of Orleans. Relatively quiet as compared with the last couple of days and our client cancelled so the afternoon is free. It ended up being something of a mental health day. I will let the marks go by and hit them tomorrow. Sitting in the living room in the afternoon, after a lunch of pasta lefties. Dinner twill be salmon with tomato, thyme rice and avocado. It was bloody delish watching Sophia as Madame Rosa. Will look for my copy of La Vie Devant Soi by Romain Gary in this little corner of a book shelf where all my books are stored but I will not find it. 

The following blocks of text are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 1161-1165 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.

Scorpio Man

If Libra represents light, then Scorpio is that shadow that follows. Men of the sign are creatures of shade (in more ways than one) and their path toward success and happiness is stealthy, biding their time, doing what is necessary, largely unawares, to bring about their desires. In his youth, he is brooding and sarcastic, poking fun at, practically joking, or outright undermining his sunnier, more optimistic or blatantly popular peers; if not to their faces, then behind their backs. He personifies a sort of correction, a keeping in check of unbridled cheer, which he is wired to perceive as a set up for a fall. Ruled by planet Pluto, named for the god of the underworld—and of riches, we’ll get to that—Scorpio is likewise subversive, often gloomy, suspicious and seeking to dig below the surface of people, places and things which he simply cannot accept on face value. Pluto doesn’t live in the full, glorious glare of Olympus, but dwells in the netherworld, subterra symbolizing the world of his own subconscious, from whence he sees everything stems.

Rooted in his own interior landscape, Scorpio is the least likely of men to be swayed by external climates; only the weather within determines his actions, hopes and fears. For all his disdain for bluster and braggarts, he is ironically one of the Zodiac’s great egoists, though he’d be loath to admit it, citing a string of insecurities to prove his point. But he takes up a lot of space and energy in so doing; and his so-called friendships tend to smack of a certain psychic possession and hostage taking. Vehemently not a joiner, he instead drags others down into his underground existence, seeking to amass a band of followers, groovy ghoulies who share his gothic sensibility, mysterious if not morbid. Indeed, Scorpio man is motivated by keeping other people at bay and guessing; while his aesthetic is best described as noirish if not bordering on the downright funerary— all dead dried roses, smokey mirrors, frayed rugs and skeletal furniture. And, to extend the metaphor, Scorpio man operates very much by gaslighting. A creature of subtext, notoriously jealous and psychically possessive, he is most proprietary of those who populate his minute social circle. And should he sense they are slipping from his mind-controlling grip, he will launch cloaked attacks. An expert at subtext, he will invent narratives designed to discredit even his so-called closest cronies and freeze them out if he fears they might be plotting to ditch him first. He is the most paranoid of all the signs.

The infamous Pluto myth is that of his rape of Kore, goddess of springtime, who then transforms, 180°, into Persephone (Roman: Proserpina, from whence we get the word prosperity—still keeping a pin in the subject of “riches”). Like Pluto, in a flash, breaking from the ground to grab the goddess, Scorpio man likewise takes a smash and snatch approach, lying in wait, unseen—Pluto wore the original cloak of invisibilty. There is inferior inner voice in Scorpio that says he will be shot down if he approaches any objective desires openly. While Libra man, working his Apollo archetype, negotiates the enobling themes of rejection by Daphne, Scorpio man will not risk rebuffing, this his own central theme running through all elements of his life. He will not venture that which he is uncertain to gain. And he will not wait in hopes of life or the universe providing. He is a pessimist for whom hope is nothing; so he plots and makes every preparation to pull people and opportunities (synonymous to his mind) his way. In this way, he risks being viewed as a kind raptor-captor from whom others may ultimately seek to escape. And we’re back to the paranoia, the fear of abandonment, and the continued need to possess.

Beauty and the Beast is a retelling of the Pluto myth. The Beast/Pluto offers untold riches to Beauty/Persephone—bribes, really, which point to that Scorpion insecurity that he, alone, is somehow deficient or repugnant, and therefore must sweeten the deal in order to be loved in return. This psychology is typically rooted in Scorpio feeling unloved by his own mother, a symptom we see all too often in men of the sign. In a way, Scorpio subconsciously presents a test to would-be friends and lovers. As many people do flee from the prospect of a close relationship with this most uncompromising of men with whom life is always, in a word, intense, he poses a natural weeding-out process such that anyone who can put up with his beastly, grabby, self-centered approach to life, and love him inspite of it, will actually pass through his fogged looking glass to find that he is someone quite completely different—a benign and caring, profoundly devoted, those still dark-humored, prince among men who would literally die for those he loves. To others he may remain one of the walking dead, but to those who break through what is really a facade made of hurt and dejection, he can be his true eternal-beloved self.

With everyone else, he will continue to personify the old adage, it is better to be feared than loved, continuing probe people to show their hands, revealing their truths, just as he keeps those same souls guessing, if not on guard for his next serpentine strike.


Scorpio Woman

Scorpio woman is an immoveable figure, born, seemingly, with an intact moral code and and fixed sets opinions from which she’ll hardly ever waver. It’s as if she emerged into this life fully encoded with all she’ll ever need, a readymade work of art, incarnate, the circumstnaces of life having comparatively little effect on her. She embodies the notion of nature-over-nurture. And if life is a mystery Scorpio is no less so. The proverbial Sphynx, she appears to have all the answers, while it will she who’ll be asking all the questions. She is a natural born psychologiest—think of Lucy van Pelt of Peanuts fame—and she can be no less caustic, on the surface which, when properly scratched, would reveal a caring character with a heart of gold. Whereas Scorpio man is endless probing, provocative or just plain nudgy, Scorpio woman draws out others, typically with a series of well appointed queries, resulting in rather stream-of-consciousness confessions from those she keys into. And after listening, signature stony faced, she will offer up her conclusions on exactly what you should do, when, and in what order to fix or refocus whatever might be ailing or irking you.

Ruled by planet Pluto, which portrays the power of elimination and transformation—named for the god of death which, in astrology and other esoteric fields, isn’t an end but a regeneration—Scorpio is all about killing off that which drains ones energy. Think of the sign’s season autumn, when we prune back trees, so to stimulate new growth, helping to concentrate energy at root level, through the hardened winter. This is a metaphor for how the Scorpio woman operates in toto. She will not put herself out on limbs, unnecessarily, rather concentrating on the most essential needs of her own design; and putting as much energy as possible into rooting herself ever deeper into what she considers a desired lifestyle. Her personality might best be described as dug in, and all that goes with it: You typically go to her, not vice versa, whether on a social visit or soliciting her guidance as premier agony aunt. She sets the agenda with family and friends, creating a strong center gravity from whence both directives and support will derive. She can be something of black hole, too, to be honest. That is to say you might, upon entering her world, become easily caught up in whatever swirl of activity she is currently conducting, assigned tasks you might as well perform, as you’re there anyway.

Drawing on the mythological archetype of Pluto’s female counterpart, Persephone, the queen of the underworld, whom all souls must meet upon their demise and who shall decide one’s ultimate fate—the o.g. maker you meet—Scorpio does tend to collect lost souls and finds no irony in telling the exactly what needs doing to find new footing. People are just some of her many projects. Well, for starters, life itself is one, hopefully, long one. Scorpio has a fixed idea from the time she could squawk how it All should roll out. And though she will tolerate slight deviations in her game plan, she is determined to hit all her major marks, whatever they might be. Typically, she is hellbent on a combo-platter of success, security and excitement—what she avoids like the plague are surprises. When it comes to a choice in life partner she pretty much has a composite sketch in mind for eons before the would-be suspect makes a close enough match. She will seek to stimulate the growth of the desired qualities she observes and the rest she’ll try to kill off, if not with direct cease-and-desist orders, then with withering looks.

On some level every Scorpio woman considers herself something of a femme fatale. She has a notoriously high opinion of herself (whether masking insecurity remains to be seen), such that you might hear her utter, without irony, that a partner or lover couldn’t do any better than her. She is an alpha of the first order, but unlike other signs that fall into said category, she is not an aggressor, au contraire: Scorpio does everything by seduction—cue spider in parlor—inviting every boon and opportunity. She will have you do for her, unabashedly asking for favors, connections and entrées; and she couldn’t be more sure that, in granting her request, she’ll provide a feather for your cap. Circling back to Ms. van Pelt, even she was convinced she drove ’em wild; forever unaware of Schroeder pulling faces to the contrary from the piano. The Scorpio paradox in a nutshell: bossy as hell, wearing the trousers; and subtly seductive, with who knows what underneath them. Undeniably, it makes for a potent, if not lethal combination.

Scorpio personifies power, which isn’t lost on her, and she’ll have you know it. She brims with skills and talents and wisdom and wiles. And should they not find proper expression, or be met with deepest appreciation, she will become a cauldron of frustration, despair and fury. She does not take her life lightly, and you shouldn’t either. She is all the mysteries of the ages, smiling wryly, Mona Lisa, forever luring others to, and inspiring longing for, her. In Sextrology we call her The Specimen, and she is the perfect one.


Sagittarius Man

He has the most unbridled energy of anyone in the Zodiac, yet he handles himself as one would a prized thoroughbred, minding, harnassing, his signature fury of fabulous ideas and outsized inspirations, as only he can. His particular paradox lies in being at once totally at ease in his skin and jumping out of it. He is his own whisperer bent on simultaneously taming and tapping into his wildfire spirit. Sagittarius is the sole mutable-fire sign in the Zodiac, which most readily translates to lightening, that proverbial wildfire in the sky; and his sign is ruled by Jupiter, named for the omnipotent chief god, incidentally, of thunder and lightning, so that all fits nicely. Lighting speaks to the most immense natural power there is while also metaphorically pointing to certain genius. Although we’ve heard literal accounts of lightning strikes causing brain damage, or providing some kind of second sight, or both. The sign of Sagittarius, whose motto is I See (also I Understand) is very much hinged on the notion of a third-eye perspective of existence, something the Sagittarius male is most readily designed for. The physical seat of the third eye is the pineal gland, so called because it resembles a pine cone. The wildly ecstatic god Dionysus bore a staff topped with a pine cone. He and his father Jupiter share the masculine estate of this sign as, unlike all his hundreds of other sons, Dionysus is heir apparent, inheritor of his supremacy. The largest planet, Jupiter’s brand of power is expansive—and so is the Sagittarian male’s m.o., for better or for worse.

The male population of the sign is replete with figures who’ve gone to great lengths and/or too far. Sagittarian men are born with an ex prefix, driving them to explore, experiment, express, expose, and yes, expand, and explode up any given given seen; but potentially also to excess, expense, exhaustion and early extinction if he’s not mindful. If he is, he will more readily “master” meditative like practices than most other men. He is typically an extrovert and unapologetic in the extreme; but even a so-called Sagittarian introvert will take up a lot of energetic, if not emotional space. No one can be more silently demanding and yet, another paradox, spiritually libertarian than he. Even though Dionysus is the seamless scion, chip off the old block, he is also a rebel nonconformist who shakes, and perhaps breaks, the traditional order. In Sextrology the Sagittarian male chapter is titled The Maverick because he draws on this archetype of being daddy’s boy, a mini-me of sorts, particularly at ease in the patriarchy regardless of sexual or gender identity, and yet he is bound to shatter the mold of his fathers he once so easily fit. Often Sagittarius works in the same line of biz as his pop, but does him one better there, at the very least, still expanding out from an existing formula.

There are a great many ways Sagittarian man breaks on through to the other side of whatever it is he is setting his mind to. As a list of so many satirists and comedians of the sign would suggest, humor is one of the key ways. The madcap comic genius is an obvious figure in our culture, bringing the funny in more expansive and explosive a way, breaking through taboos, the result being torrents of laughter and thunderous applause as a—wait for it—mindbending new take on reality shockingly takes hold, forever altering mass consciousness. We see this same pattern in any professional or personal walk of life the jovial, jocular Sagittarian treads. He will always bring the funny, point out the absurd, if not rattle nerves and cages, particularly in exposing that which has gone unnoticed or unsaid. The Sagittarian experience is stream-of-consciousness, making links between the conscious and the subconscious (or subversive, suppressed or otherwise unspoken); which, yes, can result in a kind of ecstacy or hilarity, though probably as often in censure, arrest, and other oppressive forms of blow back. But whenever that connection is made, either within our own minds—as is a constant for the Sagittarian man—or culturally, it is like a lightning flash, an exposure, of something that can never then be unseen. Mark Twain (an invented name meaning “the point between”—third eye!), a satirist of the first order, nonetheless exposed a many societal ills and, thus, altered our global perception.

If it feels like Sadge’s personal life is being somewhat ignored here, you should see how he deals with it. He is at once uberdemonstrative and ultra-detached, exhibiting affection in sudden and showy ways, with extravagant gestures, which, one wonders, could be overcompensation for lacking emotion, or inability to tap therein. He can be all over the place inrelationonships, whether due to diverse preferences—he’ll try anything trice—or in sheer quantity of experiences, or both. He’s both-minded about most things. Whereas his opposite sign, Gemini, signals duality, Sagittarius is past it, forever looking at life from both sides. Now, that may seem too vast a vista for most would-be mates, but for someone willing to provide ample free rein, life with freewheeling Sadge will prove be a rodeo of daring thrills, mindboggling skills, satiric philosophy and a broad clowning.


Sagittarius Woman

No shrinking violet, she. Sagittarius woman is an arresting character who runs the gamut from quietly charismatic to blowhorn blatant. She is dazzling, easily lighting up a room. Yet there is always something nervy or skittish about her, a bubbly mixture of natural enthusiasm, excess brain activity, and a penchant for pleasing. She is a flatterer, but a sincere one, tending to key into the best qualities in a person, often missing their worst, at first. Like male Sagittarius, she appears larger than life, her ruling planet Jupiter hinging on largesse, optimism, in every sense of the word. Her default view on life is one of celebration. Expansive she enters, but, you know, the bigger the bubble of optimism, the more likely it is to burst. And so we see glimpse a potentially explosive woman, who is vigilantly negotiate a superspontaeous nature, a wildcard element in her makeup, that sees her swing to extremes, from daring to dread, devotion to disdain, delight to despair.

One such point of negotiation is learning how not to get too far of herself. She is the archeress, after all, with her narrowly expansive eye on the target, prize and future. But sometimes she gets ahead of herself—enter nervy skittishness. It’s not easy for her to live in the now, which is why she makes some version of her doing so a top priority in her life. It’s a happy paradox about the Sadge—she is so painfully aware of her shortcomings, the sting of them so severe to her, that she is most compelled to make positive changes. The sole mutable-fire sign, the assignation translates most readily to lightning, the most potent form of natural energy. So much power but where will it strike next is not predictable. And that’s how Sagittarius feels of the thunderous tempests she feels raging inside her.

Planet Jupiter is named for the chief lightning and thunder god; and whereas Sadge male draws on that archetype, Sadge woman draws on that of his wife and queen, Juno, goddess of power, thus goddess of knowledge, and goddess of women, none of the above being mutual exclusive, au contraire. The thing about Juno, who like Sadge woman, is also prone to jealousy, is that when her envy and rage did flare, they literally did so. Talk about being triggered. Juno would come to full power and emit an energy so radiant that all were burned or blinded. Cue next irony: The sign’s motto is I See (and I Understand). Juno blinded Tieresias for siding with Jupiter against her. She is Lady Godiva (goddess-diva) who put out the famed peeper’s peepers. Sagittarius knows she’s likewise volatile, and that she is capable of great, some resplendent, shows of perrsonal power, but that she can also blow everything up. In cartoon mythology she is the X-Men’s Jane. Juno as the penultimate power in the universe presents some pretty big archetypical shoes to fill. An insightful inference, here, thus, might be: That the most accurate way of describing Sadge’s particular brand of lifelong process (née struggle) is as the persistant growing pains of becoming herself.

And, for this lady diva, what an epic journey it is—part canter in the park, part race against time atop a bucking bronco, through an expansive landscape where lightning strikes and wildfires need putting out. The respective metaphorical meaning being that Sadge often receives bolts from the blue of opportunity and big breaks for which she’ll move on a dime, strenghth to strenghth, amid fiery family relations, friendships, and too-familiar professional bonds. Whoa, nervous Nellie, Sadge woman lives by leaps and bounds, progressively sitting calm and tall in the saddle, as her genius aspirations increasingly meld with her more preternatural urges. That’s the symbolism of the centaur: Finding that connection between our animal self and our higher mind, both of which are more infinitely powerful than we realize—Sadge woman having especial lighting glimpses into the fact. There’s no room for second-guessing, typically, in her experience. Jupiter is the planet of abundance and fortune, and it comes like a thundering freight train and leaves the station just as fast. Risk-taking is de rigeur for this ironically reticent creature. And sometimes it’s a love train.

In love, Sadge isn’t impetuous but she is sweeping. She makes big love-connect, drawn to those who live large and promise an active, engaged and worldly lifestyle. Just as projects an exaggerated vision, she has heightened expectations of what a relationship should deliver, and though loath to admit it, she’s wired to want it all—fun, excitiement, means, an ecstatic meeting of the minds, and the mostest carnal know-how she can bone up on. But for the most easily board Auntie Mame at the bouffet, enough is never enough, not even constant, coordinated travel and redecorating. No, she soon learns that externals don’t cut it in the true-happiness game, that she must shine her light for herself, radiating Juno-like with a such knowledge and power she can impart to others. If planet Juipter is generosity than Sagittarius is a generator in whose strength and power we hope to share.


Capricorn man is a throwback. He is cosmically steeped in tradition, born with an old-world sensibility, a practical penchant for tried -and-trued methods, and reverance and romanticism for former grandeur in any number of forms. This is archetypally ordained, it would seem, as the sign is ruled by Saturn, the deposed king of the god’s and ruler of the mythological golden age, that of the Titans, before being overthrown by the classical Olympian gods. Though more primitive a time, the reign of the Titans was something of a paradise, as there was no vice in the world, everybody did the right thing; there wasjust peace and harmony and prosperity; nobody worked to survive, the earth providing in abundance, and people lived to a very old age while retaining their youthful appearance, dying peacfully, though living on as ancestor spirits. Nothing wrong with that; unless you forever long for a world while living in this one, something Capricorn men do in a variety of ways.

Capricorn might live by a solemn moral code—rules and regulations, long-held traditions being attributes of the tenth astrological house associated with his sign—while indulging in certain decadences—decay being a hallmark of his own artistry and aesthetic. There is an inherent wistfulness to his character, fittingly, if not a sorrowful melancholy that is suprising motivating. For, Capricorn is not a defeatist; rather he won’t easily venture that which he’s not pretty much guaranteed to achieve; as such he is highly realistic about what talents he does or does not possess; he never strives to be something that doesn’t come easily. That which does will be given his total all—he’s never one to put eggs in multiple baskets. And being so narrowly focused, he doesn’t entertain. the notion of competition, that is except for the self-kind of beating his own personal bests.

In contrast to Jupiter whose energy is expansive (ruling over the previous sign of Sagittarius), Saturn’s energy is restrictive, containing and retiring. It is about preservation. And Capricorn surely paces himself, like an elder getting through a long day’s events. His tastes tend to the elegantly leisurely—no man perhaps possessses as many pairs of loafers. He is not out to prove…anything. Still, his own self-imposed goals will be as high as the standards of personal conduct he sets for himself. Like the metaphoricaly deposed royal that he is, no matter his worldly origins, Capricorn comports himself with what can only be described as good breeding, which, biologically speaking, is a most vivid example of tradition. Carrying on, in fact, is something Capricorn is wont to do, in every sense of the term. That is to say he can succomb to wailing bouts of melancholia so abyssmal that he must fight to climb out of them. In some ways Capricorn man seems not so much a scapegoat as an escape valve through which not just his own but a sort of collective grief is expressed. Like he’s mourning for all of us. That sense of hurt lends him a serious air, pulling on heart strings and contributing to his overall appeal and profile as a seasoned, experienced, mature and sophisticated a man.

Even at a tender age, this, the Zodiac’s Holden Caulfield, has a wizened lens on the world, which motivates him to gather his rosebuds as he may; which manifests in something of a paradoxical manner: Capricorn, whose sign motto is I use, will waste not a moment in pursuing his dreams, working every wrinkle in time for accomplishment; while, at the same time, he sows more wild oats and samples more earthly delights than any man in the Zodiac. Of course, if doing so conflicts with that notoriously strict moral code, he may wrestle self-loathing on that score. For the most part, though, Capricorn doesn’t find his lofty aspirations and licentious affectations to be mutually exclusive. Like the goat god Pan living in Arcadia, even the most urbanite Capricorn has a pastoral view of existence—simple and quiet but for the rutting of satyrs and nymphs. He is, in fact attracted to rustic types with whom intimate relations will smack of certain corruption. He likes to have the upper hand in relationships, as a rule, often partnering with people who in no way threaten to get up in his goatish grill. Let’s bring the catcher Caulfield back in to illustrate the Capricorn male paradox: He wants to at once save and slaughter the innocence of life, to preserve it so to savor the spoils thereof.

Like his mythic ruler, Saturn, Capricorn is all about divine decadence. Saturn is god of seed sowing, and yet, with his signature scythe, he is the prototype of the grim reaper. Also of Father Time, which seems to be on Capricorn’s side. He is an enduring character who moves, albeit sometimes at a tortoise’s pace, from strength to strength. Even when suffering a personal fall, he rarely slips so far that he can’t pick himself up to continue his ascent toward his next milestone. Capricorn David Bowie even rose from the dead, Lazurus-like. And we may find that young Holden recovered from his own breakdown—depending on what Capricorn J.D. Salinger may’ve published posthumously

The most monumental of women, even pint-sized Capricorns pack an iconic punch. She is at once a staunch and capricious character, depending on the stimuli. Most people will experience her as the former, only a handful of intimates getting glimpses of the latter. Much of the ongoing Capricorn condition is hinged on affecting a certain flow between the more rigid and more carefree sides of her personality—to find the freedom inside her infamous self-rules and -regulation and to employ them as solid scaffolding from which her boundless spirit may safely soar. Ruled by Saturn, the planet of structure and containment, she is born with healthy boundaries. Whereas Capricorn man draws on the archetype of the mythic Saturn, Capricorn woman derives power and meaning from his female counterpart, Rhea, whose name means “ease.” This might be music to Capricorn ears as, from youth, she is used to hearing and feeling that life must be hard. In truth, the mountaineering Goat is drawn to great heights of achievement, tough roads to hoe, but this is Capricorn’s happy paradox: As she matures she increasingly finds success in her professional and personal callings the more she eases into their processes. In our book Sextrology we call Capricorn woman The Sleeper. She is, by would-be cosmic decree, something of a late bloomer, all the hard work of her youth contributing to what might appear, to outsiders, as latebreaking overnight success. And they’d never seen her sweat.

In mythology, Rhea is goddess of motherhood; she the “grand mother” and “goddess of generations”, plural. Her husband ate her first five children; she managed to save her sixth, Zeus, who overthrew his father and freed his siblings. She embodies the passing on to others—she even mentored and gave her grandson, Zeus’ inheritor, Dionysus, her full “estate”, that is to say her brand of power, making him a male nature god, plus perks like her leopard-drawn chariot. She is the embodiment of traditions, endowments being passed down. She comes to us in fairy tales as the fairy godmother, a kindly all-powerful being. All of this goes a long way to illustrate Capricorn woman’s character: Whether or not she herself ever gives birth, the grandness in the she-goat’s character dictates that she play universal mother to a great many, nurturing, mentoring and administering to so-called children on a vast scale, in the abstract or both. Even if she is a literal mother, she is somewhat eccentric and detached. Though thoroughly loving, she imposes a healthy formality, on guard against codepency, you might say, taking a more grandmotherly approach, with one cool remove, to motherhood.

The mythical Saturn, with his scythe, is the symbol of the grim reaper, but Rhea’s brand of “passing on” is in the form of a baton. Likewise, Capricorn’ ambition always includes others. She learns things she can impart; she gains wealth to share it. The Capricorn motto is I use, and she does so for great purpose(s). Born under the cardinal-earth sign, symbolized by a mountain, Capricorn is sure-footed, enduring, in it for the long haul. Rhea’s home is the mountain, also called a horn—Matterhorn means mother mountain. Capricorn is the cornucopia, the goat horn of plenty. The previous sign of Sagittarius, ruled by Jupiter, is about abundance—Capricorn, ruled by Saturn, denotes containment, seeking to preserve the bounties of the world lest they overflow and spoil. To be exact, Capricorn is the Sea-Goat, mountain and lake, a reservoir, a container of all that is abundant and pure. Capricorn woman is reserved and conservative in the truest sense, a cosmic holder of that worth preserving. She is a keeper of postive traditions, generation upon generation, be it knowledge, customs, codes, mores, all such things that will serve the future. She is a human time capsule, a classic, a golden girl from the get go.

Being likened to some kind of grandma, even in her youth, is common for Capricorn. She leads with her serious self, intending to be respected and never trifled with. (If you catch her in a rare moment when you get an opposite impression she’s taken off her granny glasses and down her bun to let off a little steam.) She grooms herself into a person of importance, learned and refined, with ethos to impart. She is culture incarnate, the best of the past, present and future, three points drawing the circle of time (eternity). The cornucopeia, the reservoir; the Petri dish, in which select new growth is cultured . (Never mind that Capricorn Mary Tyler Moore played Laura Petrie on TV in the 1960s, evolving the culture, panicking the patriarchy, by insisting on wearing Capri pants.) The word panic comes from the goat-god Pan, whose wailing melancholy speaks archetypal volumes on Capricorn man. But Capricorn woman is so on guard against would-be gloominess, constantly climbing out of sinking feelings, this becomes the main motor of her self-empowerment. She will overcome. She’s not only been to the mountain, she is it, monumental. As a biproduct of her own edification, she Sherpas others and elevates the ethos overall. She personifies all that is enduring, meaning: lasting and worth suffering.

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.

Whatever Kween

Scorpio 26° (November 18)

That would be today, five weeks until some tests I need having done. Let’s see what results that will bring. In the meantime, it isn’t a perfect situation around here of course but it is, proverbially, what it is. Woke up to a note from row-man to which we immediately responded. Today absolutely must result in results, and, to that end, I will attack the FOB section of the book and get that into some kind of fun draft, with a light touch. I’m trying to get the indoor shower to work better than it has. Lefty chowder for lunch and chicken and boy choy for din. I have an appointment at four and have to rack three hours of work before that. I must read in the wee hours of the morning the four chapters that I already have in works, making notes in the Virgo margins, and then there will be another client in the afternoon. Things will be cooking and that’s all that needs happening at this time. Still no word back today about the domestic dealings but I have to find the strength every day to persevere. We have protection of the terrestrial and spiritual kind on our side; I just need to meet this challenge half way and, as I get cooking, hopefully carve out enough late-afternoon hours to go through things and throw them away. Dump runs are to be my favorite outing it would seem, little by little, getting things up and out. 

The following blocks of text are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 1156-1160 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.

Leo Woman

If, for Leo man, life is a game, for Leo woman it is a hunt. She is the most ferociously ambitious of all the gender-signs of the Zodiac. Wearing her signature predator’s smile, she prowls this life, on the scent of the particular successes for she hungers. If Leo woman is the Zodiac’s legendary king Arthur, Leo woman is the mythological Artemis, whom Homer called “Lioness amongst women,” a feral, untameable shrew (read: aggressively assertive). Typically left to her own devices, to fend for herself, from early childhood, the Leo woman doesn’t have much of one. She grows up sooner than she perhaps should, and yet, fortunately, not being a vulnerable personality, she isn’t as a rule victimized by circumstance in youth. Rather, she aligns herself, making friends, with adults, whether they be teachers or mentors within her family or community. She is an overachiever of the first order; and not so much a sore loser as one metaphysically disinclined to failure, whether it be in the pursuit of her marks, leading roles or positions, or awards. All for her is a contest, and she aims to outshine the competition, though she rarely recognizes others as such. If she should fall short of her high self-expectations she can be as fiercely self-condemning as she is, typically, -aggrandizing. Which explains why she can be so hard on those around her—it’s the same kind of expectant tough-love she bestows on herself.

Leo woman plays god in close company, doing for others as much to help others as to ensnare them, keeping them bound by the favor(s) she bestow(s). In the best light, she gets a charge from being responsible for contributing to the fortunes of those she loves; while surely solidifying bonds with those who owe her a debt of gratitude, giving her the upper hand in relationships. And demonstrating her sway and scope, in this way, is akin to a cat stretching, flexing her muscles and showing her teeth, keeping them sharp and giving playful expression to her natural aggression. What is play in nature but preparation for the battle of life?—or, more specificially, for the lion, the hunt. And so when not occupied with pouncing her larger life goals, she plays cat and mouse with people, drawing them in only to give them a few whacks; love taps, she might call them. She is canny and she is cunning and she will cut a bitch. Think of Artemis, giving chase, flanked by her faithful handmaidens and hounds; on some level, that’s as much status as Leo’s cronies might be afforded. We are all, to some extent, her bitches. From her perspective, you should be so lucky as to call her friend. Though she requires untold loyalty from others, she can be fickle and you can find yourself on the outs at a moments notice…only to be back in again before ere long.

Whereas Leo Man is on high alert for phoniness, Leo woman is know to adopt a persona or two or several, all rather lofty ones, over the course of her lifetime. She isn’t so much a social climber as she is someone who, no matter her origins, feels she belongs to some upper echelon or other. And when she “arrives” she is far more comfortable in her skin, like a deposed royal being reinstated, or one abducted in her infanthood, restored to her proper station. There is no irony in the way that she will assimilate with the so-called upper classes. Many people make bank, but not all of them require all the traditional trappings that go along with it. Think Madonna in full equestrian kit muttering in her ersatz British accent. While cardinal signs are the initiators of the Zodiac, the fixed signs that follow them, like Leo, are imitators, honers, and perfectors. What Leo might lack in originality, she more than makes up for in execution, a word which carries a funny double-entendre, especially in light of one of Leo woman’s archetypes, the Red Queen, whose famous expression is “off with her head.” Most anything you can do she can do better; and if she feels out-matched she might find other ways to eliminate the competition.

Creatively, intellectually working within well-worn genres, there maybe be more Leo women superstars, celebrated queens of whatever her chosen field, creative outlet or her intellectual arena might be. This is due, in large part, to…(we may never know


Virgo Man

Virgo man enters doubting; all having to be proven to him before he can decide whether or not to sanction. More than just a defense, this is a default expectation of a literal dis-appoint-ment. Which symbolically makes perfect sense in that it speaks to the shift from the sign of Leo (divine King) to that of Virgo (the Everyman). The Virgo is beyond some naive notion of innate nobility, which, for the Virgo, smack of delusions of grandeur. Virgo is coming from a different place, metaphysically—that is to say: emotionally, mentally, spiritually (all of which effect his physcal nature and body language). He is of the mind that life is what you make of it; that none of us are singled out for any predestined purpose; rather that you create your own existence, and any import thereof, everyday, block by block, over time. Likewise people, places and the things of circumstance must prove themselves to him over multiple interactons, if not a lifetime.

Virgo is especially dubious of others enthusiasm, and those who take too optimistic a view of life. Healthy skepticism is his superpower, allowing him to critique and diagnose situations, circumstances, environments, and other people. He is the alchemist of the Zodiac, seeking to root out the baser elements he encounters and to transmute that which he encounters to a more purified state. He cannot abide dysfunction (as he perceives it), the irony of course being that he has more than his fair share of flaws. And he will own that. Nothing and nobody is perfect, he will concede; but there must be a concerted effort toward betterment, amelioration. After the roaring pride of the sign of Leo, Virgo operates on humility, at least, as a jumping off point. He isn’t born thinking he’s god’s gift to the universe. Virgo is not shot through with bold-faced confidence or bravado; rather, he supplements any lack he perceives in himself via lifelong processes of honing expertise, in this area or that, which can lend him an erudite air, in the end, and, yes, a certain sophisticated superiority.

Fancying himself a connoisseur of this, that or the other, Virgo can be quite the culture vulture, though a selective one. While some say the sign is ruled by disabled Chiron, once a planet that was pummeled by asterioids, or the as yet undiscovered Vulcan, but the traditional ruler of the sign is Mercury, named for the winged god, which rules Gemini also. In that air sign all manner of breeze born birds and insect have emblematic impact; while in the earth sign of Virgo, we are symbolically grounded in the more terrestrial species, the gangly strutting storks and cranes, and the flightless emus, ostriches and other such big birds. Flightlessness in birds isn’t actually a disability, but a mark of evolution. It signifies filling a niche in an environment where there is no danger from predators. We are telling you this because, metaphorically, this is very telling about the Virgo male. He isn’t one to compete, in fact competition makes him anxious in the extreme. He opts instead to carve out an existence for himself where he isn’t open to comparison or censure. (As a Virgo once said: “comparison is violence”). Virgo isn’t comfortable under others’ authority. He is an isolationist and thrives, most, in that regard, both professionally and privately.

We have bemused the fact that Virgo can perform a disappearance act, suddenly dropping out of touch with friends and family, often for years, and sometimes permanently. As personally as one is wont to take this, it is always about him and not about you. Of all men, Virgo man doesn’t want to be known because he doesn’t feel it truly possible; he believes the human condition is indeed hinged on solitude, being alone and dying alone, and, on some level, that the in between time shouldn’t be any different. In the Tarot, the Hermit card is associated with Virgo. And in astrology, the sign has native rule of the sixth astrological house of habits, work, duty, behavior and the daily experience. If we deepen the routine of mere existence it becomes ritual; and life therefore becomes in itself a devotion. Virgo’s mottos are I work and I serve. To the Virgo mind: You are what you do. And a worthwhile life should be a dedicated life; and others, by and large, can be a distraction from whatever form of consecration Virgo’s life takes on. He is designed to be functional and to contribute to the common good, the paradox being that he can best do this by solitary means.


Virgo Woman

You’re not what you appear to be and in oh, so many ways. You’re seemingly unassuming, presenting as an affable creature, laughing readily, and game to realize fun plans and notions. You exude a childlike aura, and yet one suspects you of possessing serious countenance, a truly complex and layered you beneath any guileless surface gloss. We have likened Virgo to a cameo, you know like the jewelry or the framed kind, a delicately drawn, dimensional profile of a person, old-fashioned, human, and not to be forgotten, and of great value, especially, personally. This is how you appeal and how you self-protect. Because as inviting as you can be, something about you says you’re not to be trifled with. (And sometimes you might want to be, at least just a little.)

You can be something of a people pleaser but that’s just half that story. We come to learn that you’re meanwhile exacting an agenda al you’re own—your sign motto isn’t “I work” for nothing—getting what you require from every situation and relationship. You thereby put together the pieces of your own successes. A lender you may never be, but a borrower you are for certain. Virgo woman is a collage in fact of every influence—people, places and things—she encounters. These three p’s comprise the happenstance of life, which speaks to Virgo as the ruler of the astrologicial 6th house, that of daily experience and quotidien existence. In mythology it is Pandora, made out of clay by the god smithy and potter god, Hephaestus, whose every physical feature is modeled on, borrowed, picked and chosen from the best attributes of all the divine goddesses in total. Pandora means all-given (it also means all-giver—we’ll get to that fact). It is one thing to be an amalgam of all our experiences and influences, it’s quite another to mold it all into something completely unique in personality and style. Which is something you do nine times out of ten.

As the sole mutable-earth sign in the zodiac….

You are the zodiac’s mama’s girl. It is indeed coded into your astrological DNA. The virgin of the Virgo is called Kore, she is the mythical daughter and, really, the maiden form of the mother earth goddess (of the harvest) Demeter, who was legendarily attached to her daughter who was snatched by Pluto and turned into Persephone (archeypes of Scorpio). You’ll notice your sign symbol and Scorpio’s both have an M emblem, yours that folds in, hymen-like on itself, and Scorpio’s which jutts out with an arrow head, that symbolic scorpion sting. M is for Mater, Mother. Demeter and Pluto struck a bargain, ultimately (there were pomegranates involved, it’s a long story), and Persephone became Kore again for half the (springtime, summer) year. Demeter grieved the other, plunging us into fall and winter. So if you wonder why the bond with mom is loaded, it’s cuz it carries the archetypal weight of this mother-daughter myth. There is paradoxical power to be mined and pifalls to negotiate in consideration of what inheritances you share with your own mater. Your superpower to diagnose and set things aright, healing situations, making them functional where they were not in some way stems from this relationship, for better or worse. So too does any arrested development.


Libra Man

Mention the sign of Libra and most people say how much they love it or that it’s their favorite. Mention Libra man and you might hear crickets. Maybe the most misunderstood of all signs, Libra man can read as a lightweight who nonetheless asserts a heavy agenda. The truth is Libra has a great many talents. Typically, though, it is challenging for the Libra man to go deep into any one of them to the exclusion of others. This is one of the factors in the that give rise to Libras being labelled indecisive, which isn’t really an appropriate mark. The Scales man is born to weigh his options; and it is in his nature to want to do a plethora of things creatively. This is part of the reason Libra can feel others don’t take him seriously. Also, the Libra personality tends to the bright side, often to a fault, making light of life; and though this is one of the sign’s sincerest personality traits, others can find it put-on, phony, too good to be true—espcially the more brooding of the signs. The fact is, Libra tries tokeep dark thoughts and moods to himself because they seem to him a private affair that others shouldn’t be bothered with; likewsie he doesn’t wish to be burdened with other people’s problems—Libra’s not the greatest in an emergency—which to him, more times than not, just seem boring and beside the point. Get over it can be a Libra creed; but the fact is that some issues, challenges, facts of life do need sorting through. Libra’s default, rose-colored optimism can be, sometimes inappropriately, too much—unrealistic, avoidist and indicative of a lack in coping skills— just as his expectations of others to likewise rise above and roll with the punches can be too great.

As the cardinal-air sign, Libra energy translates to Light. The male arechetype of the sign is Apollo, the god of light (not to be confused with the Sun god, Helios) who is also god of a slew of abstracts—reason, order, music (harmony), law, poetry, art, prophesy and other such conceptuals—and you will note that the Scales are the only inanimate symbol in the Zodiac, all the rest are human or other animal. In truth Libra man can seem the least animalistic of all men, while he doesn’t subscribe to being all too human either. Apollo isn’t a rough and tumble god. He’s masculine but in a rather ethereal way. We see him cloaked in white, fair haired, walking through ordered, columned halls. Vanilla is likely his favorite flavor. He’s the golden boy. And yet his myths all hinge on rejection, most notably, his love for the nymph Daphne, who fled from his affections—was too much expectation?—as she would rather turn herself into a laurel tree than couple with him. Thus Apollow wears a laurel crown, his godhead symbolized by being shot down. He’s not in with the other male gods. They likely think him a little precious, perfectionistic, a bit too challenging, cerebral, none to chill and laidback. Is any of this sounding familiar?

To others, Libra man can feel like a hard lesson you’re learning. He’s like that teacher you had that was tough and formal and perhaps a bit mean but from whom you learned everything you’ll never forget. The paradox (within paradox) of Libra is that he tends only to realize his full self and potential, in one-on-one relationships; and yet his need to be in so terrific a twosome can feel so loaded to a potential partner that they…just…can’t. The seventh astrological house that falls under Libran rule is that of one-on-one relationships, partnerships and marriage, but as with all things associated with the sign, its primary resonance is an abstract one. Libra likes to marry—ideas into revelatory aha! principles, individuals with connections (other people or situations) that spell success, and, especially conflicting opposities into powerful alliances. And he definitely seeks all of the above for himself. As the opposite sign of Aries, ruled by Mars, named for the god of war—symbolizing the spearheading of individual goals, sole concquest and survival, Libra, alternatively, is ruled by Venus, the power of attraction, union, and shared goals and experience, equality, democratic co-existence, and, thus, peace, specifically of the mind. The sign’s two mottos are I balance and We are.

Embodying the notion that we can’t live in isolation, Libra is often, paradoxically, something of a lone wolf (the animal totem associated with Apollo). He isn’t as naturally embraced by guy peers, especially, as are other male signs. He tends not to be a chip off the old block, embodying an opposing vision of masculinity from his father and other men in his family. And you would never call him earthy. He can live very much in his mind and reality often falls short of his idealized vision. He is anything but laid back, and struggles to live life on life’s terms. His rosey outlook is thus his greatest superpower and fatal flaw. The trick for him is to understand that things can never live up to his pink-bubble expectations but that he should maintain them nonetheless. The world may not be singing in perfect harmony, but that is no reason not to want to keep teaching it to do so.


Libra Woman

Wherever Libra woman is, that’s the place to be. At least that’s her storyline and she’s sticking to it. She is the craftiest of the Zodiacal characters, in every meaning of the word. An individualist of the first order, and someting of an eccentric, she carves out her own space in life, taking a rather d.i.y. approach to living, and keeping her human interest light, lively, and moving. She is one to play by her own rules, which often necessitates working alone or in tandem with a loved one, and more often than not, in an aesthetic field or one hinged on lovely ideals. The air sign of Libra, ruled by Venus, is all about gorgeous notions, whether of the conceptual or knick-knack variety. While Venus’s rule over the earth sign of Taurus emphasizes physical beauty, in Libra, it translates to conceptual splendor and the amelioration of the world, or at least her corner of it, through the living of life on an idealized plane (which, again, is much easier to do in some form of isolation). As a rule, Libra is a liberal if not an activist of her own design, her relationships with others being more sweeping and abstract and less cozy and personal—and, besides, it’s easier to carry around a soapbox designed solely for one.

As Apollo, god of light and prophecy, is the archetype of the Libra man, it follows that his counterpart(s), is the High Priestess, oracle of Delphi through whom Apollo would, ultimately, speak. Originally the oracle belonged to his grandmother Phoebe, meaning “shining” (Apollo bears the prefix Phoebus) and, in later mythology, Pythia, meaning “rotting” whose oracles are inspired by the fumes of the rotting Python, whom Apollo slay (he is also Apollopython). Taken all together: To shine and to rot point to an infinitive, inherent paradox in the Libra woman whose tradmark adult role as an enlightener (of others) stems from signature destructions in her early life, symptomatic of her own recovery therefrom—more often than not Libra women come from broken homes where they are made to feel divided, pulled in opposite directions; having to be the balance, the mediator, here come the judge—the proverbial Lady of the Scales. The High Priestess sits upon a three-legged pedestal. As does Libra woman, by virtue of her own edification, others’ idealized vision of her, or some combination of both. For all Libra’s goodness and light, one senses they derive from times in dark places. The white witch with certain knowledge of the dark.

Where Libra man tries as he might to eschew darkness, remaining in his pink-bubble of optimism, which oft leads to disappointment; Libra woman works that bubble, riding it, like Glinda, to try to shed said light in dark places, to elevate consciousness on a democratic scale, to illumine a world of possibility. Due to upbringing, however, she may try to be too many things to too many people, losing sight of herself and her needs in the process. She is most often so agreeable, that when she does take a strong stand, she can be accused of being contrary for its own sake. It’s just one of the levels on which Libra can be misunderstood. The High Priestess spoke in gibberish, which was up to others to interpret. Likewise, Libra can keep people guessing by offering a plethora of possible answers to any one question and a salad of would-be solutions to any single problem. Glinda, you will note, didn’t just say “click your heels” as an instant remedy; rather she said follow that road which would inevitably split into a spray of would be paths. Though you wouldn’t accuse her of being indecisive, per se, as you might the the Libran male, Libra woman can inspire a kind of vacillation in others. And she does jump around, taking on different paths, herself, on a fairly steady basis. She doesn’t seem a dilletante like Libra man, who wears too many hats at once; rather she reinvents fairly constantly, committing for a time, completely, to the one path she’s set upon; while her loved ones learn not to be surprised if, they next time they speak, she’s on a completely different trip.

The one constant, and the one word that best defines the Libra woman, in a word, is style. Not a follower of fashion or other design trends, Libra exudes a personal aesthetic sensibility that inimitable. If strolling through a crowded fleamarket, say, she has a natural eye for spotting hidden, often quirky treasures, that might otherwise go unnoticed. Likewise, she assembles a wardrobe without breaking any banks but nontheless enables her to dress to kill on a daily basis. Seemingly superficial, these talents add up to something resonant: She is forever in the process of endowing herself and her environment with tangible representation of her surpassing taste, which has a powerful effect on her psyche, her confidence, and her sense of identity and well-being. Her ability to visibly and vividly design herself, her surroundings and indeed her lifestyle is a spiritual expression of auto-validation. She can see her tastes and principles reflected in everything she touches, making very real her concepts for living. It’s a slow motion process of waving a wand, snapping her finger, or wriggling her nose to make manifest that which she desires. TK

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.

Truly Unctious

Scorpio 25° (November 17)

I thought yesterday was bad. Today was much worse. It created a junkyard fortress outside behind his truck and trailer which he parked just next to our car. It blasted music from the garage and banged metal objects together and invited a string of people over to whom he complained about and slandered us one after another. It was all a trap. We had to go to Provincetown and he aggressed us. I won’t go into details but we called the police which we should have done as well back in August. I feel somehow better though I can’t say why. I spent the afternoon writing up the incident. I had some follow up questions for the police. I made my peace with a writing schedule that I will surely keep and I will work solidly on the projects at hand on any given day. We learned that FF has filed something with the court but that should be deemed bogus. We might end up meeting a real-life sheriff this week which is fine. I will ask if we can record him for posterity and also make it clear where we stand in in financial relationship. All the while I made a delicious clam chowder and we decided to crack some vino and watch the final two episodes of The Crown, the storylines of which that involve the Diana character I find boring.

The following blocks of text are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 1151-1155 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.

Gemini is forever striking some kind of bargain or another, internally negotiating opposing forces (along the proverbial right vs. wrong dichotomy), and outwardly navigating his wants against that which he supposes others want of him, exacting his next move, the next deal, to further his direction. His can be a tricky head to be in; and yet there is very little the Gemini doesn’t do mindfully, being less prone than most to unconscious motivations, compulsions, and the like. He likes to keep others guessing for as long as he can, which can make him appear indecisive or confused, when in fact he is sowing confusion, creating distractions, to better move along his own agendas.

Gemini man is self-aware, if to a fault, purposely putting on dazzle and otherwise creating excitement aimed at keeping spirits bright, especially his own—even if knowingly faking it. He is the personification of the adage: Fake it till you make it. For him it’s all about his field of experience, and what buzz he can create within it. Immediacy is his watchword. Ruled by Mercury, the eternally youthful, quicksilver god who can be here or there in an instant, the sign of Twins is hinged on both the instantaneous and the intimate, the immediacy of time and space, respectively. He is focused on the here and now, needing to be engaged by interatction, physical activities or conversation, and surrounded by a close circle of cronies who personify as emanations of his own will. He thus attracts those who tend to lack a will or direction of their own. The fairytale Mercury, Peter Pan, whom we’ve long associated with the sign, amasses his tribe of lost boys seeking solace and guidance. And Gemini runs on the steam of such tribalism, if not mob mentality, like that other fellow in green tights, Robin Hood, operating in secret, employing the element of surprise, being rather thuggish, even, in lofty enterprises.

Gemini may be the least naturally instrospective of characters, and must work harder than most in the understanding of an inner life. Even the work of the great Gemini poet Walt Whitman (his name being something of an aptronym in that Gemini man lives most by his wits) is an exploration of what he sees, feels, senses right in front of him, a celebration of what is right under his feet, the street-level of existence. Likewise, Geminiman is occupied with the most urgent to-dos and shiniest objects currently before his own eyes, cutting a path through life like an arful dodger snaking his way through a crowded avenue, reveling in covert action and certain lendergemain. He is a celebrator or experiential self, an operator and a manipulator. That word has its negative connotations of course, but it also speaks to Gemini’s premier superpower—that of positive thinking—which is the highest form of manipulation in that it suggests that experience itself is malleable and can be directed by the determination of our thoughts.

Gemini is nervy and (he mightn’t admit it) rather fearful of the answers to life’s big questions. He loves the world of the living, gravitating toward social hubs of activities, where a vibrant demonstration of life can distract him from what is a signature underlying loneliness. He doesn’t like to feel things because he might do so too deeply for his delicate nerves. Gemini likes to keep it light and keep it moving, immersed in temporal activity; and yet he is more prone to most to subscribe to an eternal element of self—let’s call it soul. He takes from various religions and philosophies that which they all share, tending not to fully subscribe to any one path (though he may feign to do so). In love he is the most monagamist and philandering of fellows, forgiving what he might label human frailty, particularly in himself. He doesn’t linger on thoughts or doubts that might undo him—there is always something more cheering to alight on. A nod to his airborn archetype, the winged capped and footed Mercury, Gemini likewise wings his way through life, too impatient for most processes of preparation. As a rule he doesn’t aspire to higher achievement or higher thought—rather he seeks to reap fullest benefit for doing what comes easily to him, which tends to fall under the larger heading of processing and proliferating his own personal observances, typically in brief form.

Gemini man is the master of the three-minute pop song, the elevator pitch, snappy patter, killer slogan or pithy pun. He is ephemera incarnate, living life to its fullest, like a mayfly on limited liberty. Truly owning the fact that we live on borrowed time, Gemini doesn’t become mired in guilt, doubt or regret. Each next moment provides a new opportunity to rewrite the proverbial headline. Being mercenary comes with his Mercury rule, such that being money-grubbing is just one of the ways he gets all he can from life. Lucrative deals are just human interaction with material pay off; another form of whistling in the graveyard and challenging the notion that you can’t take it with you.


Gemin Woman

She is the cosmic switchboard operator—like opera, plural of opus, meaning: Work! Gemini woman is plugged in and connected every which way. While also, a nod to the duality inherent in her sign, she is the consumate connector, a role she doesn’t always wish to play. She is all too aware, or should be, that she can be a faciliatator, a conduit, to others’ successes, via her own. The larger part of her superpower includes making amazing matches, partnerhips; let’s call it mutuality—equal, shared effort toward that “work,” a.k.a. the happenstance of a successful life. Gemini doesn’t shy away or try to transcend from very certain desired trappings of living, most unapologetically, a material existence. Neither is she greedy, as a rule; striking the perfect balance, more often than most, of leading a constitently “set up” life, with plenty of perks and passions, without all that pesky, excess avarice.

Enough being enough for Gemini speaks volumes on the fact that, despite being a “mutable” sign”, she doesn’t like change. She is a homebody at heart and would rather play the puppet master, even, on a global scale from the privacy of her fuzzy slippers. She is the original tough cookie, promising such sweetness. Sometimes taking the dubious wrap for being flighty, but only, most people don’t realize, when it suits her. Tinker Bell to Gemini man’s Peter Pan, she is no doubt dual herself. Saccharine when it suits her, like Tink to Pete, but in the turn of a head her devilish nature may emerge. The symbol of Gemini’s ruler Mercury’s might suggest a winged cap or horns, as she, the English Rose of the Zodiac, can indeed be thorny. Drawing on the archetype of Mercury’s counterpart, the winged Eris, goddess of discord, hell hath no fury like a Gemini scorned. You simply, silently, no longer exist. Tink, the cartoon Eris, operates solely on nerves, and is easily rundown, needing utmost care and concern from others. So too does Gemini who gives, gives, gives, till it’s totally gone.

Gemini woman is one person in the Zodiac you’d want to have your back. She’s a tough and protective Tinker Bell, a fixer of ailing or broken utility, aimed at mending flailing situations and relationships and problem-solving in general. She is the proverbial mother hen on whom others come to rely, and behind whom we must all fall in line. She is best in all astrology at covering the basics, and all the bases there in, making sure the mechanics of her daily life function smoothly, if not too repetitively, such that it becomes a grind. She can get lost in so-called causes, if not invented drama, which, when pressed, she may admit she cares little about. The doing of things—that’s why she’s great at busy work—can sometimes divert and dissapate energy that might go toward more long-term thinking, achievement or success. She needs reminding of the fact. There is ease and safety, though, sometimes, in making molehills from minutuae. Not to say she purposefully feigns being overworked ao to cut herself slack in her daily schedule. It’s just that perfecting the daily ops of living affords the Gemini you the expertise and status to do so, increasingly, by remote control. To her mind, that is what success looks like.

For the Gemini connector, reward takes the form of unplugging, doing less while being more. Ultimately it’s the Gemini influencer’s word, her endorsement, her bugs in people’s ears, that become a prized gift in itself. (Her ruler Mercury, the messenger god, personifies the word, Logos.) Touting your name, or lending her name, or face to a project or enterprise—all is currency. In the global world of advertising most of the famous faces you see launching a thousand beauty products or perfumes are Gemini women. (Featured in the same myth as Eris, instigator of the Trogan war, is Helen, who hatched from an egg, yet another fine feathered Gemini archetype.) Meanwhile, all Gemini women possess an infamous power to make or break those around her—the face most often empowered to launch a thousand careers, deals and contracts. Even Tinker Bell is Disney’s brand ambassador. And, likewise, as tiny as it might appear, Gemini woman possesses the power to sprinkle fairy dust over situations or be something of a stinging gladfly chasing away would-be opportunity. All depending on what she’s getting out of the deal. She desires no more than simple reciprocation, no matter the commodity, be it love or money or any means of exchange.


Cancer Man

The Moonchild is the most self-protective of men, which allows him to live life more safely on a purely emotional level. And vice versa: He needs strong defenses because he seeks to leave himself open as such. Despite a seeming insouciance—that Crab shell—he is the most sensitive of fellows and can easily be crushed by chaotic feelings. (Not to kick off on so morbid a note, but some of the most famous “French exits” from this life have been made by Cancerians—notably Ernest Hemingway, Robin Williams, Freddie Prinze, Ian Curtis, Anthony Bourdain, Chris Cornell, Hunter S. Thompson, George Eastman, Tony Scott, and too many others.) On a far cheerier note, the intense level of sensitivty with which Cancer is endowed can make him the most caring of chaps. And it will necessitate his being the most trusting, using his superpower intuition to invest in the right people places and things.

The crab will keep his emotions locked up until he establishes a safe means for their expression—in relationships, environment and chosen vocation. It may come as no surprise that irony is also one of Cancer’s superpowers, the ability to get across his point of view, often a sharp and searing one, in a softened, even satirical way. These little jabs, whether directed in his creative work or conversation (typically both), serve as an escape valve for what might otherwise be a deluge of feelings, despair included, he otherwise purposefully keeps pent up. He will protect himself to the death from pain and suffering, needing to learn that the former is inevitable, and the latter, a choice. Meanwhile he does what he can to mitigate all difficulty in his life for the paradoxical reason that he sees life as inherently difficult enough. The Cancerian life experience is all about passage, recovery, promise and deliverance, and men of the sign are predisposed to believing they are born into a journey aimed at landing them on a more hospitable shore than from whence they orginated. Like many marined creatures, birth is immediately followed by a race not just for survival but certain thrivation.

Cancer man lives in a private word, both real and imaginary, avoiding conflict or often anything more than vague interaction unless he sees promise in it. In the literal sense, he prefers solo work, which he can hopefully perform, set apart, ebbing and flowing to his own rhythm; and, figuratively, too, he must let his mind drift to imaginings of would-be scenarios he might ultimately realize. He will of course allow others to form a team to back his efforts. He appears the personification of hope, promise and ease and this is what attracts others to him both professionally and in his private life. He seems (the operative word) so completely unneedy, in contrast to his female Cancer counterpart; as if requiring nothing more than a little support and cultivation to draw him out. Meanwhile, he accesses others’ sensitivity, appealing to their feelings as well as their funny bones, sensitivity and humor being hallmarks of his charm. One feels safe in the company of the Cancerian, that on this journey through life, he is happy to be a designated driver. Not so unassuming, truth is he is one of the more deliberate and calculated characters on the astrological block, though rarely in any insidious sort of way. He simply believes in the fulfillment of his potential and he will subtly get his hooks into situations and those whom he considers to play a part in the unfolding of his destiny.

En route, Cancer man keeps it simple and his head down, quietly powering through. He is entirely pleasant, as a rule, across the board, to friends and acquaintances alike. In fact there seems little difference, often, between the amount of interest or affection he appears to invest in any case. He is practiced in his social repartée, often retelling stories, year on year, losing track of who may or may not heard his anecdotes before. He isn’t very present minded, something he must work on; a result perhaps of being cosmically engineered to look, with hope, toward the future. This may result in anxiety; and he must work to find comfort in uncertainty. He is surely one of the existentialists of the Zodiac, not given to opiates of religion or set belief systems. He might intellectually perceive an ordered universe, but his gut tells him that the bulk of being is random, chaos.

Cancer Woman

Cancer woman is the embodiment of longing, the true nature of which provides insight into her personality. Try to think of longing as emotional outreach, an active and useful mechanism for scanning and searching life, the universe, all experience, for that which one has true feeling. In this way, Cancer woman is perpetually taking emotional action. She invented the term: putting out feelers. And we feel her, don’t we: Cancer women on the whole are not subtle creatures who hide their needs, indeed, their demands. Think of her symbol crab. She flows with the current, which is to say the present, which does sometimes require being what to others can appear to be clingy. The fact is she must establish fixed experiences—occupations, living environements and relationships—for herself to counterbalance what might otherwise feel like a life of being swept up in said moment. Indeed, certain fixtures allow the Cancer to be fully accessible, circumstantially, and emotionally available. Accessing feeling is indeed a hallmark of the Cancerian female experience, most poignantly expressed by the exceedingly emotive brand of actresses born under the sign.

We cite Cinderella as a Cancerian archetype, a figure characterized by longing. Longing is a Cancer woman superpower. Though it goes unseen, this emotionally loaded action may or may not send signals to a harkening universe—though we would assert it does—but there is a strong argument that, in pinpointing that for which the Cancer might might pine, she delineates certain desire and direction to take in life. And who is to say that, being one with this longing, that the Cancer woman isn’t vibrating with needful intention, attracting desired situations, if not destiny, to her. For us, she seems the personification of the notion that hope, another Cancerian superpower, is only partly something we, as people, feel, but that there is an energetic or divine element to it whereby the universe offers it up. Cancer woman seems to have singular insight into the notion that what she feels (she needs) is one and the same with what the cosmos is prepared to provide her. Providence, promise, deliverance, all being Cancer watchwords. And so her infamous capacity for expression is thereby her part of the bargain in bringing about her own fulfillment. She will let life do the rest. The cardinal-water sign, she is like

a fountain, spring or the source of a mighty river, rolling out her feelings. It can thus be difficult for her to turn off the waterworks, and impossible for anyone to do it for her.

The secret ingredient for Cancer is time. The oyster cannot create a pearl without the ebbing and flowing tides that fall under Cancer’s ruler Moon. That tiny orb made in the Moon’s own image, is a symbol of a certain kind of wisdom of the untuitive kind. Flood myths, hinged on recovery and deliverance, hope and promise (the ark) are associated with this sign; in the classic flood myth it is the Titan goddess Themis who appears to Decaulian (the Greek Noah) and his wife Pyrra who, like two peas in a pod, make it to the proverbial other shore, the sole survivors. Themis means, and is the personification of divine law and order; literally “that which is put in place”; and Cancer woman naturally draws on this archetype letting nature/the universe help put into place that which she longs (and, thus, hopefully, works) for, while using her outsized intuition, another superpower, as a gut-level guide. She subscribes to the inclusion of a mystic element in life; and mysticism, by definition, is wisdom that is inaccessible to the intellect and only gained through intuition. So feeling all her feels, which can be overwhelming to her and others, in time provides her with intuitive insight opening onto a brand of wisdom of the highest emotional faculty. That is to say that Cinderella (who brought that prince and palace to her) ultimately becomes the fairy godmother, the wise Titaness, Themis. She is the goddess of customs, traditions, mores (all attributes of the astrological fourth house of Cancer!), the human, earthly manifestation of said order, and our part of the bargain in maintaining it. As such Cancerian women, unlike their male counterparts, will subscribe more readily to traditional religious and social practices.

Themis can also see the future, which is why she is one of the oracular deities to preside over the oracle at Delphi. Cancer woman too provides herself such insight. Her signature longing morphs, in time, into self-assurance, so long as she maintains a steady course toward the objects of it. Happily, the Cancerian isn’t result orientated, and is thus increasingly self-assured by the order she perceives emerging from the (both internal and trademark external) chaos of her early life.


Leo Man

Leo man is best at playing the game of life, one, he is certain, is not one of chance but fierce self-determination. (Ironically he loves to gamble but that’s another story.) He is authority, license and free will incarnate. That said, and as extremely creative and productive as he can be, Leo takes a leisurely approach to living. Fun, play, for him is front-loaded, and he believes that success and fulfillment can be far more easily and naturally had than the rest of us do. He holds that thought. And, while giving his all, he is never one to overdo it. Excess ambition, or the slightest pushiness in the process, are anathema to him, and he finds it vulgar in others. That goes for at work, in his social life, and even in familial relationships. Of all the men in the Zodiac, Leo feels he has the least to prove. Nor is he super demonstrative in his approval of others achievements either.

His is a world unto his own. Leo sticks to a particularly small circle, even if it be a superpowered social circuit, around which he makes the requisite rounds of dates for sports, meals and leisure activites with friends; he is purposefully guarded and unshowy, allergic to attention getters he deems phony or puffed up—and yes, there is irony here, as he does like all eyes on him, holding court as he does within said close circles. This to him is apples and oranges; and he doesn’t see said irony that his so-called reserve stems from the fact he believes all eyes are on him, as they would be any divinely righteous monarch of a man. He sees himself as spreading ingenuous warmth, perhaps not realizing that it is indeed a part of the game; he will invest this much favor and affection, but he’s on the lookout for signs in others of genuine deference would-be fealty. He will say he is drawn to (what he perceives to be) goodness and guilelessness in others. And, indeed, authenticity is one of his superpowers—and prides himself on being uanabashedly, if not overbearingly real himself; which can be at turns enviable and annoying to we, the people. He values his own opinion most highly, and like some other fixed signs, he experiences them as fact. Entitlement is a paradoxical theme that Leo man embodies.

In Sextrology, the Leo Man chapter is The Natural. Whether individually or culturally, he is drawn to those who seem likewise. Leo, himself, is wont to go native, being astrologically designed, like his totem Lion, to easefully roam life’s great expanses. And, yes, he is drawn to people, places and things with a primal throb. Like its ruler, the central Sun, the heart-center of the body is governed by the sign of Leo. The beating of the heart is the rhythm of life; and besides boasting many drummers among its number, the sign of Leo breeds men who live life at its own pace or, at least, they believe that they do. For, the zodiac’s king might naturally confuse his own will with that of the divine. The fifth astrological house of Leo is that of “co-creation with god;” so back to that pardoxical entitlement theme: Leo mainly finds it his duty to be as good a sun king as he can; to embody the best of what man can be, and thus not exploit is godlike designation, but to be a positive life-force for others, creator as well as creature, a positive life force that, to use the vernacular, gives us life. The shadow side of the king, of course, is the tyrant and anyone acquainted with a Leo man has probably seen it creep in.

Being one so cosmically endowed with nobility, Leo man will take personally every lousy move made by others. Even in circumstances that have naught to do with him, if you cross his well-drawn moral boundaries, you will make a direct insult to his majesty. He is all or nothing on that score. And when you’ve been cast out of the realm of his kinship, you typically remain so. He is one of the Zodiac’s greatest grudge holders. And it will take major recompense to enter back into his good graces, which may never happen. He is the golden boy in his youth, the wholesome Picaresque hero around which everything revolves, a typically athetic class clown who charms others with a disarming Tom Sawyer panache, he can nonetheless be emotionally distant and will be hostile to other males he considers sneaky or conniving. He is Archie and always has a rival Reggie on whom to heap his disapproval. As he matures, his world tends to get smaller, not bigger, his fan base limited to family and a handful of friends. He can be nostalgic, lost in his proverbial glory days; and must take pains to focus on the future, the uncertainty of which he’s not so naturally down with. Many twentysomething wunderkinds fall under the sign of Leo; and they risk equating inevitable aging with the weakening of their powers. Archetypally, this is the sign of young King David and King Arthur whose greatest successes come at an early age. So Leo must fight not to see himself as over the hill at thirty-five; and to consciously and constantly reinvent himself, his greatest challenge.

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.

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