Aquarius 21° (February 9)

I need to go back into one of the previous chapters today and tomorrow into another just to get those a bit more fleshed out during this initial draft phase.

We don’t speak lightly of the term responsibility when exploring the Taurus human condition. In literal terms it means the ability to respond—which may be a conscious reaction or a purely reflexive, subconscious one—of course the word came to carry weightier definitions of reliability, obligation, duty, accountability, onus; and even blame, fault and liability—all of which could trigger conversations on a Bull theme. But there is one word under which all the rest fall, and that is the very punny term: Charge! That which, or whom, is under Taurus’s charge, is what most concerns, if not consumes, women of the sign especially. JFK, paraphrasing Luke 12:48 said, “for of those to whom much is given, much is required,” and you Taurus are gifted more than most, and you should feel that onus on you to pinpoint what it is you do best and do the best with it. We mentioned earlier that the tandem Io and Europa myths are like a call and response across time-space. Well, that sort of dynamic goes on inside you, too, characterizing your inner dialogue, whereby the increasingly worldy and mature you guides and reassures that eternal nymph that resides at your core,; while she, in turn, keeps your progressively more sophisticated and seasoned self, real. Incidentally, this call-and-response dynamic is at play in your external experience as well—being still and present-minded, as we said up front, to properly “field” what life throws your way. Life calls, you answer. You plot out your bit of territory (that garden) and you play your position. You step up and into whatever balls in the air serve your larger, soulful—creative, romantic, humanitarian, familial, et al—ambitions; otherwise you should let them fly by, understanding it’s just as important to know what not to hustle and reach for—what is meant for other players—as it is to scoop up chances, opportunities you’re sure fall comfortably, right in your pocket. You mustn’t ever be a moving target if it’s a bullseye you’re seeking to score. But let’s get back to that internal dynamic and the enduring, dangling conversation between those bi-directional voices blabbing on deep down inside. 

You’ve heard the term “old soul” bandied about, but what about a young one? That’s what you are, Taurus, a young soul, so-called, which is not to say you’re new on the eternal celestial scene (if that could be a thing) but, rather, in our estimation, someone who, it has been determined, is and/or should be learning life’s lesson, and earning its just rewards, from a most archetypally fresh perspective. It’s easiest enough to do in your youth, Taurus, despite being distracted by all those aforementioned curve balls and monkey wrenches; which makes you wonder, as you get older, if you were as available as you could have been to all the good (and goods) life was throwing at you. Regrets, you’ll have a few, but it really is best not to mention, let alone dwell on, them. You wonder if you could have done more, sooner, such that you could have enjoyed a proverbial cocktail of youth and success. But don’t we all. Mostly, it hinges on that performative aspect of being a Taurus player on this stage called life. Could you have performed, and can you keep performing, your part even more to the hilt to dispel any self-doubt that you’ve done all you can to provide yourself every happiness—or did you overplay, and are you still, chewing the scenery, obsessing over your role to the exclusion of other joys you might have afforded yourself if you weren’t so charged with making your mark? Good questions, and ones central to the Taurus female experience wherever we find her along her present timeline. 

The following blocks of text are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 1566-1570. 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.

The last of the baby boomers, I was born a city kid in Jersey City to be exact. We lived in an apartment building complex called College Towers near what was then called State Teacher’s hospital. This was before the white witch exodus to the suburbs of the 1970s. My mother, a celtic Pisces with red hair and freckles and eyes that looked inward and she was born Margaret Anna Mary McDonough, but everyone knew her as Peggy—and she was a good witch. And she had a sister, Muriel, whom everyone called Mickey, and she wasn’t. She was a mean girl. And was what you would called fast back in the days before slut shaming and had a child out of wedlock, living with my mother and her parents in their cold water walk up flat, and, as my mother put it, news traveled fast and guys were “coming out of the woodwork” assuming she was cut from the same sexual cloth as Mickey, which she wasn’t. My mother was a good girl who worked from the age of fourteen (as I later did) scrimping and saving to buy herself clothes, suits and dresses, that she could wear on interviews and to secretarial school and for church and socials and for other good girl reasons. These suits and dresses would consistently go missing; of course my mother knew Mickey was stealing them but she never saw her wear them. Anyway it was that type of dynamic, growing up with a bad seed (as I later did); and by the time my mother was pregnant with me at the age of 32, late in the game, and nearly six years since her first child, Peggy and Mickey had been estranged, already, for nearly a decade.

Early in the pregnancy, the phone rang and my mother picked up and it was Mickey who said, no more no less, you’re going to have a child, it will be a boy, and he will be born on my birthday, September 28, which I was. Now these sorts of predictions, apparently, weren’t strange in their small world, but it was typically my mother who had the psychic flashes, which she largely kept to herself, she later told me, as they happened so often and so early in her young life that she tried tried to train her mind to fight them off becaue they frightened her. Apparently she never could fight them off completely. And it was at those times when I would see her standing looking out a window or seated in a chair, trancelike, with those eyes pointed inward that I knew she was in some sort of stat of revelation. All my life I never had to pick up a phone to call my mother, I would simply send her a message to call me. Or,the other way around: I would get a flash the phone would ring and seconds later it would. The phone also had a special ring when she called.

By the time I was born, which was some thirteen or fourteen years after Mickey’s first child, she had married her baby daddy and had a total six children. Fertile Murtile my mother called her with a slightly abhorrent tone. Anyway, my mother decided, due to the psychic flash and because, as a good witch, she was hoping for some repair with her only sister, perhaps for her own mother’s sake, as her father, my gradfather died, during her pregnancy with me.

The day of my christening came and Mickey was holding me as the priest did his whole water thing, dripping in on my forehead or whatever, and well, even to this day, I’m sure this is true for most of you, but just the sound of dripping water, let alone the feel, can inspire, well as my mother put it. And as if on cue, your little thing rose up and you let loose and peed right in Mickey’s face. That was a sign I guess, or an excuse, or something, for which my mother was blamed, as if she was working her powers through my little, as my father would call it cummasicuam, an Italian dialect version of come si chiamo which means “how do you say” in this case a watchamacallit because, the Italian side of my family, not mafia per se, but maybe a bit bookyish, not bookish, decidedly not bookish, but bookyish, never talked about sex or body parts or anything of that nature. They didn’t even call it a peepee. Cummasicuam. Watchamacallit. I we getting a picture of my formative influences? Anyway, it was another eight or so years until we moved to the suburbs, originally an old Dutch settlement called Wyckoff, a name which you can imagine every young boy growing up there had fun with, and not knowing that her sister had moved to the next town over, Peggy and Mickey literally bashed their shopping carts together at Stop n’ Shop; but still I didn’t meet my aunt until I was thirteen. Of course on my birthday every year I would get gifts from her address to Master William Leone, that’s my real name, William Leone, and they would be weird gifts princely gifts like velvet waistcoats or a chain for a pocket watch or a monagrammed tie clip. I had met two or three of my first cousins once or twice—they were weird, wild animals for the most part, and overly sexed, now that I think of it, as a young age, the youngest Anne Marie or Am A-M, who was just three years older than me, I remember, once, we were doing mad libs, I was 11 and I would say Noun and she would say Masturbation; I would say Verb and she would say Fucking. She was fourteen.

Anyway, I was finally going over during Christmas, at age thirteen, to meet Aunt Mickey who looked like a severe version of my own mother who was forever being mistaken for Rue Maclanahan, a fellow Pisces, all of five one, with her tiny hook button nose, aristocratic airs (despite being raised with no hot water) all Estee Lauder youth due, her soft, sage, siren sense of drawing everybody in. When she drank, she caved in on herself. Not Mickey, who was taller and tough with a long, sharp pointy nose; she stood like this; her hair was a dyed version of my mother’s natural sandy red, a little to bright, her fingers covered in huge rocks, diamonds, emeralds, rubies, all gigantic, and she carrid a giant key chain which you knew was mainly a weapon. The first inappropriate thing she did—she was surely drunk and unlike my mother, came out of herself, emboldened—the first thing she did was I need to introduce my two favorite people (I’m just meeting her remember) to each other and we have to be friends. She dragged my tiny thirteen year old self over to meet her best friends son, Paulie, who looked like Andrew Stevens and Rex Smith had a love child and, who I realize now, of course, was gay, and Mickey was trying to put us together. The second inappropriate thing she did, before it was time for me to go (which I knew because my mother was sending me mental signals which were confirmed by my father’s beigy pink champagne Cadillac Coupe de Ville outside, back to pick me up where he left me, probably, just forty minutes before), was to usher me upstairs where she said she had something to give me. I was terrified. On the way I caught my first ever and only glimpse of Mickey’s son Tommy who by then was already a heroin addict who would die of AIDS. She led me up the shag covered, fairly dramatic stairs, of her colonial style home and to her impossibly large bedroom where she opened a closet-dressing stuffed with hanging clothes and stacked clothes and boxes and racks of shoes. She got up on a low round foot stool, like the ones you still see in libraries, and reached up so high her arm disappeared from view and pulled down these folded items, fabric it was, and said they were a present to me. M’ok. They were tied with string or ribbon or some combination thereof. She put them in a bag. When I got home my mother asked to see what Mickey gave me. And as she loosened the string or ribbon I could see the light of realization being cast across her face. “Son of a bitch, she said, these are all my suits and dresses—she’s taken them apart at the seems, stitch by stich.

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.