Scorpio 21° (November 13)

I was pretty much useless today. Couldn’t even be asked to cook anything. Thank goodness for tinned sardines.

The following blocks of text are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 1131-1135 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.

Our daily walks are the saving grace; and I need to embrace them all the more. I have over three weeks until my high school friends come to visit and the vanity in me is determined to get a little edge in the rest and exercise department. I’m weird I know. It’s been such a dark time in our country and I can’t help but feel really strung out by the bad baby sitter. People seem a bit crazy to me, which I know puts my own sanity in question. But I think when you have a bully running the show it gives license to other bullies. I want to get out in front of all these feelings, but it is terribly challenging. Two words: Nova Scotia.

Seriously the smartest thing to do might very well to figure out a way to get a house in our neighborly land to the north. I can’t believe we would go so far as to alienate that country of all countries. I’m not saying anything earth shattering here today I know. And I worry that I’ve lost my sense of humor. Everything feels like its happening in a dream, or rather a nightmare. This must be the last time I do certain things the way I’ve been doing them. I need to drum up more easeful support for my efforts or simply stop doing them.

I’m in a place where I am trusting very few people; and in regard to my visiting friends I think these two thought forms go together. I think I need to be around people who knew me when after spending far too long being around transient narcissists. There is that one narcissist nemesis who I despise with most fibers of my being. The one who infiltrated my world to meet and ultimately befriend my more influential cronies in the world of art and entertainment. And he’s done very well for himself, convincing them of his worth, showing only the bright colors (although he also offers them heroin, the fools) all the while playing (St)Eve Harrington. Someone should do a campy remake called All About Steve. There is a film of that name but it’s not the same story. Anyway…

There is something about the Taurus narcissist, especially. The sign ruled by Venus, rubs me, a Libra, also ruled by Venus the wrong way. Mine is masculine sign and rather objective and Taurus is subjective—look at me! I want to be looked at to, but more appreciated, and not so much for my talents as my ideals, I suppose. I can’t stand injustice I can tell you that much. And I can’t stand the feeling I’ve been or am being used. In the end I feel disdain for a character like Steve. But really I become so disappointed in my friends who fall for that sort of thing. Anyway, this phase of my life is ending as I embark on all new things. It’s like I tell clients: You really do have to let go of the vine you’re swing on sometimes in order to grab at a new one.

All I really want to do today is listen to full CDs. What is the best way to do that I wonder. I should ask Tony Grimaldi, he will know. I actually still can’t believe that my high school friends are coming to visit. What I realize we share is that we are all super savvy—we’re plain old smart that’s for sure, and we all have a ton of references, but we’re also kind of slick. Maybe it’s because we grew up on old movies with fast dialogue and all had parents that were determined, to varying degrees that we would make something of ourselves. I do hope Tony arrives a day early as, of all the fellows, he is the one I really know the least and could use some alone time with. We shall see.

I am at once really looking forward to getting back into the hot room and also dreading the hell out it. The dread is pretty real. Meaning, I’m actually scared I’ll keel over. I’m going to have to be so, so gentle in this process of reentry. And meanwhile, I have been walking about two-to-three miles in the sand which is great. But these are all just words. The fact is I feel as if I’ve lost a part of my spirituality. That might sound strange. But once upon a time, in my early twenties, I was the guy reading the Vedas and the Upanishads. I think my doorway into spirituality was ironically J.D. Salinger as I wanted to be one of the Glass family; and they were all spouting Buddhist and Hindu and Christian and other forms of mysticism.

I associate these early glimpses of burgeoning mysticism with alone time on the beach at the Jersey shore where I would take my beach chair and my slim Salinger novel and a course catalogue from B.U. for, even, the first year of school, and all the Chronicles of Narnia I borrowed from my friend Ken, as I had never read them. And that was my literary stash and my comfort, taking me through the day, wiggling my chair with my ass to face the sun all day long, until there was a sort of click in of said heat, light and sea spray, and the world all faded to a blue wash, blood pressure probably dipping below normal. I would just space out and not smoke cigarettes, which, unfortunately I had been doing since I’d been eleven (god help me). And I just felt a sort of peace in waves of spare sentence structure and childlike imagination and eastern religion all mingles together with the smells of Hawaiian Tropic oil and greasy hamburger smoke wafting from the nearby boardwalk grill.

There was a very bearable lightness of being at that age in any case. And I suppose I was naturally manorexic—that is to say I liked to go long hours without eating because it gave me a bit of a high, airy sensation. But it was just the sense of not having to be anywhere. I began working my first job at fourteen, but at seventeen, the year before college, I made the conscious decision that I wasn’t going to work that summer. I was going to walk the one block to the beach. I was going to space out in the sand and read. Sometimes I would wake at dawn and creep out of th house and swim in the bit of water that was like a cover, next to the jetty, all pink with the rising sun. Just me and the gulls and the occasional imaginary shark—Spielberg was truly a buzz kill. Then I would emerge, no towel, and tip-toe run back to the house, drop my wet things, wrap myself in a towel and eat fresh cut cantaloupe my mother would have in a bowl covered with foil in the side-by-side fridge.

I didn’t know then that so much of what I considered to be hopelessly middle class would be looked upon, in hindsight, as luxury. I doubt my parents ever made as much money as I do, by my wits, in a given year. But I can barely make ends meet, without kids, while they would have had plenty to spare, there, for awhile; that is before economics began trickling down. But more than that I had freedom and autonomy. And I don’t think it’s age but culture that has whittled those things down to a nub. Cellphones were the start. We can’t be anywhere where nobody knows where we are. Sometimes after the summer crowds leave I can walk out onto the beach in Provincetown and just stay there, no satellite to find me, for hours on end. But I don’t have whole summers to do that as lucky as I am, not having a job where I work for anyone or punch a clock. If I had to punch a clock I would surely punch a more than a few people out cold. I know myself. I don’t like to be told what to do and/or when to do it.

It’s Sunday and I’m wistful but also, maybe a little at my wit’s end? I truly have news fatigue and so I’m taking a major step back. I’m quite proud of the fact that I’ve put many major wheels in motion and my only wish now is to keep that momentum going because it is so key. I know that in just a matter of days I should be firing on many cylinders again, as is my custom. I don’t want to overdo it today, being Sunday. So I thought I’s put some inspiring words I recently encountered as part of an exhibit at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, a town which is very much on the radar for me…

…but again, I must keep my head where me feet are, and not try to plan some inevitability that is impossible to fully shape…I need to get where I’m going, immediately, and then make the most of where my imagination might take me. This coming year might prove to be the most interesting of all, whereby we travel back and forth as needed. I will need a surrogate in Boston to work some magic. Brian King is actually the perfect character to step in and speak about how Afterglow was created by myself and a group of artist friends including John Cameron Mitchell, Justin Vivian Bond and Taylor Mac, all of whom sit on our Advisory Board. Like: “Hi I’m Brian King and I’m filling in for Quinn Cox who is in Paris…etc. Lay it on thick.

I’m looking forward to closing the loop a bit on the consultancey whilst taking it to the next level Anyway, here, a poem by TC Cannon whose art show was absolutely mind-blowing. More about how Salem can factor in, anon….

Money laundering is on my mind, because everything anybody is saying anywhere is going to amount to that in any case. It’s the disjointed, dysfunction, deconstructed reality that’s infiltrating my real and etheric body, making me feel crunched out to the core.

So I don’t feel like it makes sense to even be speaking in complete sentences as I am now. Instead feel the need to jumble, and so I shall:

This Blague consists of daily horoscopes. Then I insert a bit of writing from the recent past, things I want to bring forth and elucidate and expound upon. This would consist of my analysis, frankly. It is in a way a mechanism for writing.

I could do the same thing, reading Sextrology. Would be fun to do a Sextrology book club and expound upon what was mentioned therein, chapter for chapter. Great way to get new ideas. Also to discuss the fifteenth anniversary edition, which will be fun to do. It’s difficult to force oneself to do it but I think it really, but it would be the easiest thing.

I think we really are naturally good at branding. It’s just a matter of our having been derailed, and rightfully so; we had given it our all for quite a long time, and the spark necessarily went out. In some way, it felt like the last time I cared about looking telegenic; I don’t say that wistfully, only truthfully. It was time to live without that expectation that national exposure was just within reach—to be fair after so many years fielding so many producers and making so many reels and sizzles, it fizzled out.

I’m in my fourth year writing this Blague. I have untold material here. And shall continue to have, I guess. But we’ve been over this and over it. I’m on call tomorrow with two clients. There will be lentil soup and salmon and little else. Heard from Joe’s Pub today and am super excited we’ll be performing our Christmas show there again this year.

The theme is going to be all the ways we slay, all the signs, and what our divine powers for doing so are as per our star-sign

I remembered the transgender concept for Nextrology. Trans people of the sign explore the inner polarity between the male and female as embodiment or enactment of signs energy. Others are more about their opposite male or female character across the Zodiac, an external polarity.

I feel the weight of a thousand broken relationship and the interconnectedness between them, imaginary though it may be, banging some kind of drum, plotting my undoing. Yeah that’s not a real thought. It’s just dread of any kind put into words mayge. I don’t know really. This is the day I do have two clients by phone and spoke to Dave. And nearly turned a corner, but not quite. And then there will be a day to come that will be even more a burst of extinction. I’m gearing up to win some things. And I always win some things. I have a dream and it would be super nifty if it actually came true. When did I buy Priorat, or was this something else? I think it was, actually; and that I had some leftover for during the week. It’s possible that I did. It might even have been the following day.

I do believe I can start marrying this with some thoughts that need generating in any case. I believe I’ll do that tomorrow. Today was a day for meditating and releasing all the pain and tension in my body. I lay on the sofa in the living room for what seemed three or four hours, lost in the psychic surgery I sensed my body needed. I spoke with Dave.

It is soon time to tell the artists: Dear X As the Afterglow Festival in Provincetown celebrates its eighth year, and we enter our fourth year presenting our autumn-to-spring Afterglow-at-Oberon series at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, we are making plans to create a circuit of venues in New England and throught the Northeast.

 Simply called Glow, and tag-lined A Moveable Festival, we hope to create tours for artists through this would be circuit of venues, such that dozens of artists can move through dozens of performances spaces, cultivating audiences in smaller cultural cities and towns, while providing artists with bookings and the ability to connect more widely and more intimately with these audiences. All with Afterglow in Provincetown at the core, continuing to be an incubator of progressive works from emerging and evolving stage artists.

 This year, we received a tour-planning grant to do just that for a New England-based artist—there is a subsequent grant we’ll apply for next year to help with the actual tour; and we will apply for another planning grant for a second New England-based artist, and so forth. This has provided a motor for us to reach out to influential theaters, universities, museums, arts centers throughout New England in establishing these tours and to open up the larger dialogue about touring any and all artists who have performed under our auspices in Provincetown and Cambridge.

 Honestly, I have been pleasantly shocked at how many venues already knew of Afterglow and its work; and what I imagined might be pie-in-the-sky places have enthusastically welcomed the notion of our creating programming for them as we would for other venues, bringing a sensational string of artists through their doors on a steady basis…..

It trailed off there. Oh well.

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.