Capricorn 9° (December 30)

First full day on the boat. We headed from St. Lucia to St. Vincent which was a bit of a rocky trip but I didn’t bother taking any drugs. I spent the morning sunning (or would have if my no. 50 sunscreen hadn’t been so effectual. I did finally start reading Slouching Toward Bethlehem which (I get it) is quite well written. I do love the dry style. It reminds me a bit of Salinger and Hemingway but with a dryer, more journalistic albeit feminine feel. The style is unsentimental and yet one gets the feeling that the writer is purposely checking hers.

Scorpio Man 

In our book Sextrology, the Scorpio Man chapter is titled The Stranger. Like his archetypal god Pluto, namesake of the planet ruler of the sign, Scorpio men choose not to live on some bright, shining Olympus as part of any pantheon of other joiners, but rather inhabit their own dominion—Pluto’s underworld symbolizes ones inner life and the realm of the subconscious. Scorpio man finds fatuous the world of appearances—rose-colored glasses aren’t endemic to his fashion sense. He is a born outsider, an anti-hero, and he delves the depths of experience that are typically hidden from view, whether they be taboo aspects of life or the murmurings of our own repressed psychology. Scorpio is deep. And he can be dark if only to bring the unknown and unexplored to light—just as those alternatively attempting to keep things light tend to cast a long shadow of repression. Scorpio man can get under our skin in an attempt to root out our secrets; he acts on subconscious instinct to cure what ails us as, the saying goes, for individuals or society as a whole: We are only as sick as said secrets. So bid enter the brooding, seemingly pessimistic, subversive miner for meaning and hearts of gold: Albert Camus, Pablo Picasso, Neil Young, Johnny Carson, Dick Cavett, Charles Bronson, Robert Mapplethorpe, Seth MacFarlane, Roberto Benigni, Richard Burton, Christopher Columbus, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Joachim Phoenix, Auguste Rodin, Bram Stoker, Dylan Thomas, Kurt Vonnegut, Jonathan Winters, Leon Trotsky, Gordon Ramsay, Lyle Lovett, John Keats, Neil Gaiman, Matt Drudge, Rodney Dangerfield, Claude Rains, Voltaire.

As each sign is associated with a different set of body parts, Scorpio rules our tender bits and pieces. We’ve had a lot of fun writing about this and in our live shows too, when we’ve gone through the entire zodiac talking about the various personality types per sign vis à vis its anatomical rule. For Scorpio man is, by nature rather rigid—being a fixed sign—with a, shall we say, stiff countenance—he tends to turn his whole upper body, not just his head, to look this way or that. (Think of Johnny Carson.) The sign of Scorpio boasts multiple totems including the lizard, the snake, the serpent, the dragon, the phoenix and, you might say that the male of the sign is, on the whole, fairly reptilian looking. Okay fine—no beating around the bush (ha, ha) he can look like a penis: with his signature sinewy physique, veiny extremities, hooded hairline, if he has hair at all—Scorpio does bald quite readily—never mind his penchant for turtlenecks. And the metaphor extends to his personality which is best described as probing if not intrusive, insistent if not unrelenting and, yes, often, truly deep. Nobody invests more interest and concern in, or is it control over?, those he loves; and nobody can be a bigger prick when crossed. Take a look at this list of Scorpios and you tell us if it’s all phallus-y or not: Adam Driver, David Schwimmer, Damon Wayans, Seth MacFarlane, Owen Wilson, Matthew McConaughey, Dolph Lundgren, Ted Turner, Howard Dean, Dylan McDermott, Dermot Mulroney, Leonardo DiCaprio, Joachim Phoenix, Ryan Gosling, Sam Rockwell, Gerard Butler, Johnny Lee Miller, Ethan Hawke, Mads Mikkelson, Ben Foster, Chris Noth, F. Murray Abraham, Wallace Shawn, Sam Shepherd, Romany Malco, Bob Hoskins, Ed Asner and B.D. Wong.