Scorpio 11° (November 2-3)

Yeah so, the last couple of days were pretty major. Awoke at the crack to do part two of prep for colonoscopy. It was wearing on me that I had to drive an hour to get to the place, as, while in the throes of pissing clear from your rectum, you can’t imagine being able to sit in a car that long without exploding. And we just got a new car. Not my first colonoscopy rodeo. Had one about six years ago. I don’t have a picture perfect system but I think it will hold together for the duration. It was a very busy place in Hyannis, six doctors seeing fourteen patients each, and its Cape Cod so a lot of old people. It’s actually a very impressive operation (why do I weirdly enjoy things like this?) that works like a Swiss clock and the doctors and nurses and everyone are so nice. My anesthesiologist (omg I spelled that correctly on the first go) was Eugene Eldridge, an olde Cape Cod surname, in his early 70s maybe, telling stories about being stuck in St. John’s during hurricane Irma…and let’s face it, it’s all about the anesthesia. Best twenty minutes of sleep I’ve had in the six years since my last visit. While in the waiting room, before being called to go in, a man came out and his wife was waiting for him. He was probably Eugene’s age and he didn’t say hi to his wife but went to the window and asked if he could have two envelopes because he wanted to write notes to two of the nurses who just took care of him. (Yes this seems weird to me.) Then he asks if their their names were Jill and Fran. Yes they were. Okay, and he’s writing his little love notes while the wife, still having not said a word, gets up and just leaves, one imagines heading for their car. And I’m thinking okay it’s sort of sweet but mainly it’s creepy. The nurses are seeing a hundred patients today and, even with your love notes, they are not really going to remember who you are, sir. To them you are literally just some asshole. 

Had a lovely rest with pizza and blueberry pies to follow, and we rented Anonymous, one of my favorite films of all time. Watched a bit Monday night and the rest Tuesday morning. Election day. All but ignored it until six o’clock in the evening, only pausing to get a sense. I decided to do very physical things today only to keep myself occupied. I brought all the plants inside and set up a little area. I have the worst bruise in my forearm from the intravenous. Actually hurts quite a bit too. Cleaned the entire house top to bottom and prepped a whole bunch of food. Steak for the first time in probably six months, with roasted potatoes and side salad. Yum. I little fun time fireside and a singalong at the piano, and then the passing out in front of scant election returns.

The following blocks of text are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 1081-1085. 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.

Michael Cohen got raided. We went shopping in Orleans and found out the owners of the local wine shop have sold, this on the heels of our cool produce shop closing. Why is it that in any village in any town in Europe or the UK it seems, there is a fishmonger, a butcher, a cheese shop, a gourmet shop, several cafes where you can get anything from coffee to a soup or wine and just sit undisturbed for hours, and in small town America you have some Thai restaurants that are closed during the day, a dry cleaners and a Christmastree shop. We are a bankcrupt culture even in the smallest of ways. But I’m going to continue on my journey. I have no idea what that last sentence meant. Oh yes I do.

Being on the brink of something amazing feels, well, amazing. You know when you know when you know what I mean? It’s different from having a manic episode. Not that I would know. Although there have been times when my office has looked like a set piece off the film A Beautiful Mind. Remember Russel Crowe? He’s over, right? We saw Gladiator (me, again) on the boat in keeping with the bacchanale spirit of the party on Mustique. I will likely never go to that particular party again, but it was quite fun to be sure. I think I will make “to be sure” my new catch phrase; Stella will get into it because it’s after Miss MacKay from Marcia Blaine fame. If you don’t know what that means we can’t be friends. I’m so sorry.

I am not the cat’s meow in my own estimation. I think I might just get over myself and get up at the crack tomorrow and finish all this jazz; then off to get the old hair cut; just how to tell this particular barber to just give me a trim did not prove successful in the past. I’m surrounded by old man energy suddenly, my dear acting teacher taking a wee dive back into my life. The father in my French family who was just ten years my senior died last year by suffocating in a hole dug for some technical purpose in his small yard which was in pride and joy. I know he wanted me to see it when I visited, but I didn’t. Now I have a hard time beaming in to speak with his wife and family, you see, because I hadn’t for decades, really, before arranging a reunion, just month’s before his death, back in Grenoble. All tragic. My acting teacher is 93 and other people aren’t.

I’m most comfortable with the above size paragraph. It turns me on, I will not lie. Catching up on Blague-ing is for the birds. I’ll bet my hair cut Monday that’s my decision. We can go for fish together. And I shall clean the house. It will be Friday and a day of little things. I love the little things. I am not not here. I need to leave in a minute. I also must decide what to do with the multiplicity of my thoughts which really is about filling notebooks. I don’t want confrontation. I want an end to it all. I won’t get upended a word I hope doesn’t need a hyphen. Time passes by and it does make me sad. I am who I am and sometimes that person might work a little something something in the privacy of their own unread paragraphs. You only need know what I’m feeling, am revealing. The words are just architecture stacked one atop another like the inverted layers of Rome.

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Okay so nearly three years ago we went to this dentist on steroids (figuratively, and probably, literally) about whom many people either rave or say nothing staring blankly. Being neither one of those types of people, I just wanted a good dentist. And this fellow had supported some of my artistic causes over the years, so there was that factor.

I was surprised to learn, as we booked two appointments, that it would cost $1K, in advance for examination and cleaning, and that the payment was to be non-refundable. It was a lot. It was a lot a lot; but we figured it was a good investment. Though I should tell you I’ve never had a cavity in my life; my gums can get a bit dodgy from time to time, but, look Mom, no cavities.

The first odd thing was that the visit began with a tour, mainly, of a shrine of diplomas and other tribunalia, and the female army of dental assists contributed to the cultish feeling around this doctor, who, again, was always very nice. But I would soon learn I hadn’t so much gone to the dentist as been taken to the cleaners. With an ironic twist Because, you see, I never did get a cleaning.

I got a poke around by one hygeinist, I presume, you sort of pre-diagnosed me, pointing to things the doctor would say about my mouth (which he ended up doing, imagine that!). Then a second hygeinist came in and, mind you, the place has a TV screen on the ceiling and the room is super modish and spacious, like getting your teeth done on the Death Star.

I don’t quite recall if, but I’m sure, they took conventional xrays of my teeth; I’ll check my notes; otherwise it’s possible I had had xrays recently at that point and waived it off.

I do know the two started this tag-team dialogue and deep ultra sounded or something my teeth, one by one—perhaps it was sonar—finding what I presumed weaknesses deep inside the bones of my teeth or some other. And every time the machine beeped one or both of them would make a uhh or yup, or a combined uhyup sound, together. This fantastic voyage went on for a long time; and I was told the doctor was coming in and that there was no time to do the actual cleaning —they would do it “soon next time”. Fine.

Doctor comes in and the rest becomes a bit of a blur so I’ll keep this paragraph brief. When he uttered the words you have eighteen cavities I was taken over by a Mars-ruled blush of pure anger; thankfully, being in the chair, not having to look herr doctor in the face. As I couldn’t have disguised the cartoon train whistle foghorn expression I was wearing. Aaa-ooh-ga! cast in red-orange.

Tune in tomorrow for the continuation of Minority Report Al Dente (Part 1)

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Our experiences had been different but similar. Let’s just say it was all about total reconstruction and being ushered into a room to talk about loans from a company, here you go, we just happen to have information about this company on hand; plus the mention of and a request to take a biopsy—denied—of what turned out to be a burn from a jalapeño. So $1K lighter, with dirty teeth, and a document with a diagram of a mouth with notes indicated where my eighteen cavities were lodged, I left. I needed time to settle and regain objectivity. And I’d be going back and could have questions answered.

I called to schedule the follow up visit and the cleaning I hadn’t had, and set the time, and the assitant’s soothing voice on the other end of the phone quoted me yet another astronomical, not to mention just plain shocking, price for the appointment. Um. I already paid $500 for my visit alone and I didn’t get a cleaning and anyway I was going to come back and talk to the doctor about what seemed to me to be an impossiblity: eighteen cavities. when I’ve never been diagnosed with a cavity in my life. Sorry that’s the doctor’s policy.

Well I said I’m not coming back. Days later I see a charge on my card for another $TK amount from this doctor’s office. Now I’m pissed. I call. Oh it was for something or other and then it wasn’t; ultimately it was a mistake; another sorry; it gets taken off my bill. I write the whole thing off because I’m busy and fuck it. I don’t always have the bandwidth to fight battles. You understand. Sometimes you have free time and you’re like: Okay, I have time for this. But, mainly, not.

Over the near three years since, when I’ve seen other dentists who still say I have no cavities. And during which time I’ve asked around—do you go to doctor so and so? and do you? and what’s you’re experience; uh, huh, and yours? Okay. Seems people are pretty well split. There are those who have had or heard of friends who’ve had similar experience to us. But, I’d say equally, a great many people have the near opposite story to tell, where the doctor shoots the works on them and charges them precious little. And some folks shrug their mouths into frowns at the mention of my eighteen phantom needed fillings.

So I sent a polite note asking the doctor, again someone with whom I’m cordial, to offer some kind of explanation. Instead one of his hygeinebots got back to me to say the doctor doesn’t feel comfortable emailing me answers (I bet he doesn’t) but that I was welcome to come in for a consultation. Or no you don’t. I said I wasn’t interested in that just some kind of understanding as to why our experience had been diametrically opposed to other patients. My question was answered with a question from the receptionist: What prompted you to write now? To which I responded: Well in the last nearly three years I’ve seen three dentists none of whom say I have a single cavity and in that same nearly three years I have heard such wildly conflicting accounts regarding the office experience chez le docteur, with whom I reached an impasse. I then said, then, in lieu of an explantion I would appreciate a full refund for my office visit for which I received nothing but a bogus diagnosis and no cleaning. We shall see what comes of it.

Somewhere at some time the future me might commit the crime of eighteen cavities, but at this point and likely for decades to come my mouth should be presumed innocent.

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We received the first incoming sponsorship donation of the new season yesterday. In our meeting the subject was publishing and it got me thinking: All about foreign editions and ebooks and being more entrepreneurial on this score. I need to mogulize. I need to charm a scion of a stationery empire. From my Paris pulpit perhaps.

I also downloaded my Facebook information today. Put it on a thumb drive and whatever now I can quit if I want to. I’m thinking I maybe want to sell some stuff. too.

I’ve never really sold anything before, but I feel like I need a kind of close commercial experience from whence I also make a little dough; then again, nobody needs my crap I suppose. What I really need do is to start going through all my own shit and making room in the one file cabinet we own. Bliss would truly be….it will come back to me. First, I feel I need to spread out and bring back most things that are locked.

Then on the subject home improvement, or what is better known as the Dale List includes fixing the African ladder that we pass off as art back onto its mounting; fashioning something that can replicate one of the metal rod “corseted” fasteners under one of our Perriand Courbousier pony chairs, and to secure them all in any case; creating sliding mirror doors on the bookshelf; work: Rewiring lamps, painting the whole upstairs. All of this might happen and then again it might not. I don’t know how long I’ll be staying where I am. Do you wonder why I say that well it’s like this: We have a lot out there and spinning and if I’m just going to show up back here on Cape for a few months a year, I don’t mind the place staying on the dodgy side until I leave I really don’t.

This weekend really is busy enough. For starters I have to write two more versions of the following letter to Sponsors to get them to pony up and help with my non-profit. This English journalist I know is writing a piece on sidehustles and I reached out to say that producing live performance is mine. Anyway here is that letter to be reworked for both the returning Sponsor crowd, the Missionary Sponsor crowd and the new Sponsor crowd. Let’s do the Missionary version first here, shall we…

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So the plan was to wake up and directly do a full session of Bikram upstairs in what might be becoming a new gym of sorts. I need to work on strength and get this carcass moving once again. Though, I dare say, I’ve been rather fond of the long winter as it has served as a wonderful excuse all these long weeks. Anyway it didn’t happen. It’s now 10:41 in the morning and I’ve yet to launch this new yogic effort. I will try to do so around 3PM today instead.

It was rather warm overnight and now the temperature is plummeting a bit. Such a weird spring. Oh and we bombed Syria last night so there was that. I don’t know my fellow earth travelers—things are getting even weirder. And you never hear about the Parkland kids or gun control at all. This country is an amnesiac of the first order.

So today will be a salad of experience: I will finishing creating the various letters I need for outreach to sponsors and venues. I will create a social media diagram for our meeting. I will get a draft of a letter ready for speaking engagements, seminars and workshops, that type of thing. I will go through stacks of magazines and newspapers and start cutting out stories to scan for press etc; and find TV clips in the process. I also need to jot down some notes about Cancer people and Leo people, off the top of my head. I also need to put a note out there…well regarding something…I’m sure I’ll remember what. (You see I walked away for a little while certain I would hold that thought; let it be a lesson to you.)

I also need to write this into some form of decent, friendly copy.

Hello. Stella Starsky and Quinn Cox here. So and So was kind enough to give me your email address. Collectively, we are Starsky + Cox leading astrologers and authors of the book Sextrology (HarperCollins 2004). We run a private consultancy of international clients, the majority of whom hail from the arts, entertainment, fashion and design industries.

We have written columns and features for the world’s top publications and websites including Vogue, Glamour, Elle, Allure, Cosmopolitan and The Daily Beast; and we have ourselves been globally featured by publications like The New York Times, Vanity Fair, Time, InStyle, Vogue, Vogue Italia, The Boston Globe, British Vogue. Sextrology has been translated into sixteen foreign editions; and the book was followed by Cosmic Coupling (Crown, 2010) and our self-published yearly series of Haute Astrology ebooks.

We have appeared on numerous satellite and terrestrial radio and television news and entertainment programs and were recurring guests on “Chelsea Lately”. Chelsea Handler, Charlize Theron, Kelly Ripa, Kim Cattrall, Scarlett Johannson, Isaac Mizrahi, Mario Testino, Kate Moss, Sharon Stone, Karl Lagerfeld and Rufus Wainwright have all been outspoken fans. Starsky + Cox have collaborated on events with Marc Jacobs, Barneys New York, Colette Paris, Selfridges and Harvey Nichols in London, Edinburgh and Dublin, and have created content for MAC Cosmetics, Chandelier and Kylie Minogue.

Starsky + Cox have offered their Cosmic Clincs®—working with top PR and event planners—offering on-the-spot astrological readings at private and charitable events. We have also guest-lectured at company events with our “Unlocking the Zodiac Code”, a presentational talk and workshop on the power of the Zodiac, with its twelve signs and houses, as an ancient system for self-realization—”the original twelve-step program” as we say. On top of our private and charitable appearances and lectures, we perform a thought-provoking musical comedy show still on the astrological theme. In New York City we have appeared at Dixon Place, Ars Nova, The Zipper Factory and at Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater, where we perform regularly. As we live part-time in Massachusetts, we have also performed at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge and at numerous venues, most frequently, in Provincetown.

Anway it obviously needs a little work. Which I’ll get to, tomorrow. Meanwhile, here are things to Google: trouble making a muscle; how to best archive all your old CDS.

And oh the increasing waves of longing I’ve been feeling this week; like I’m meant to be strolling some dusty village street, somewhere in southern Europe, France, maybe, near Spain, or in the Aquitaine. And then I decided it might be best to give said longing a specific place (for starters) where it might send the right messages and perhaps effect some realization. So I’ve decided to focus on the little corner of the 5e arrondissement à Paris that I love so much.

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.

Scorpio 10° (November 1)

Rabbit, rabbit. A weird night’s sleep but enjoyed the extra hour, post Full Moon on All Hallow’s Eve. Now Happy Samhain. I’m on a clear liquid diet today. Hoorah. Just coffee and tea and water thus far. There is talk of going for a walk but I’m going to pass, actually. I feel a bit coldy and I can’t be when I go for my procedure tomorrow. The fitting beginning to a week promising to be a true shite show. So let’s see. I washed dishes and rejigged my schedule and did some UI due diligence and updated the menu and returned emails and got my brain around today’s diet (made jello) sent S. a copy of the note to fuckface; and what I have left to do is prepare ye these Blagues for the week plus plan the new set of menus, plus get finances totally up to date. Otherwise I’m going to lay very low today and feel the transition happen. My nerves are a bit on edge and the ongoing pinched one was causing a bit of involuntary movement and I’m not in the mood for that. We have a list going of things we need to order. I’m going to leave the screens in for another week but I will be sending that note preemptively. Also, I have my ablutions to perform prior to tomorrow’s appointment. Yuck. I used to toy with starting a magazine called Yuk. I still think it might be a viable idea, digitally. Nobody reads this so I don’t think I’m giving anything away. Or am I.

The following blocks of text are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 1076-1080. 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.

Breakfast at Tatte where some newbie at ART was dishing the staff—oh uh. Drove back to OCC (Olde Cape Cod) and just got some bear necessities. It’s still so wintery and I can feel it in my bones. I sound like an old person. Oh yeah. Super excited to be seeing the Cursed Child in a couple of weeks. Watched Jessica Williams and Phoebe Robinson’s show on HBO—John Early was a guest and he knocked it out of the park. He really did.

I really do want to stick around here the next two years and get some fun kitchen witch stuff going; like I really have a feeling about essential oils (done in a non cliché way) and other wise digging into the whole apothecary vein. I think I might start by adding some books online. I’d like to make some shrugs and tinctures; but also in terms of the more apothecary ideas we’ve been talking about. And when I say we’ve of course I’m referring to myselves.

I have that all too familiar sense of longing. It really is quite a good thing really. As I say is by our longing, via our need that the Universe can find us. Aries is want, Cancer is need. Both Cardinal signs i.e. putting it out there. And yet, paradoxically, that feeling is often/always/also a sign to dig in right where you are, to center oneself, and to give oneself more breadth of small experience, the things just close by with which we can occupy our time, the small ambitions that are usually muscled out be TV or masturbation.

Yeah I said it. (Sorry, that was my Chris Rock impersonation) I’ve watched his Netflix special a few times. He really is the best and this new piece Tamborine is quite expert. Wow. Still, Netflix has more quantity over quality of stand-up shows in their service. The rare one is great. The funniest thing on Netflix isn’t meant to be: Tulip Fever is an inexplicable film that is up there with the great good-bads like Staying Alive (The Saturday Night Fever sequel). What a yucky time in mainstream American culture that was. I was already feeling Elvis Costello and Talking Heads in ’77 and I was 13 for most of it.

Things are really heating up. I just don’t know why it is we have such a high tolerance for this bullshit. I mean it would be bad enough if he had frauded people out of their university money and experience; or that we haven’t seen tax returns; or that he makes fun of the disabled; or that he fights with the FBi; or that he is using the stage of world politics making threats to other nations as his personal means of expression; or that he paid off women including playmates and porn stars; or that he had shady business dealings; or that he is trying to fire everyone who is involved in the investigation. But there is so much more. Imagine if this were Barack or Hillary.

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Waking up on this morning is like happening into a work-in-progress, which also characterizes those individuals born on this day. There is an element of happy surprise now in realizing how far along plans and projects actually are; just as we sense a cozy security in knowing that achievement is had slowly, thoroughly, without the anxiety of haste. Today, we feel all shall end well, on a self-satisfied note, spent either in jovial company or in more desired solitude, inwardly gazing as events dissolve into night. Rhea Cronos, Old Mother Time, rules this day, stretching her sense of everlast over its frame. There will be obstacles, if only to illustrate how readily they can be removed. Those born this day may feel thwarted from, even robbed of, nay spared, a conventional course of life experience; they are, in sacrifice of so-called normalcy, being shepherded in an extraordinary direction. This Capricorn day is equal parts careful and capricious. We seek to engage in productive activity, without over achieving; indeed we have the confidence of imperfection, an aristocratic ease and the guilelessness of those whom others only erroneously presume possess airs. The tactile is paramount on this day, a need to commune with the nobility of nature and show it deference. We sense and acknowledge the present, momentous power of what lies beyond the loose protection of our conscious minds. The day invites nourishing intrusion, mostly in the form of serendipitous happenstance. The steady assurance of low light and distant cloud blankets the soul like a swaddled babe. We deliciously strain against the confines of our own perceptions, safe in their sane protection. The limit of our consciousness feels a blissful thing onto itself, a mixed membrane of the familiar and the vastly unknown, this two-part blend of ingredients making each the more delectable. We feel the texture of this day beckoning as do the long contoured ridges of fresh pale cut applewood. Reaching out to touch it, even its coarseness provides reassurance. We will not waste the graces of this day. We will utilize them in full appreciation, counting our blessings, without compulsion for saving, only savoring, our every boon and bounty. People born on this day embrace quality over quantity—they are abundance conscious, highly aspirational, choosey and sparing. A default sense of sacrifice making the most meager indulgence all the sweeter characterizes the spirit of this point in our journey around the Sun. Bright quince ripening in a cold blue-grey bowl. Today we are asked to see the exotic beauty inherent in the presumed bland. Our powers of discernment, natives of this day realize, are key to achieving desired goals. We can see obstacles before us, or the building blocks for assembling our dreams. People born today are expert at visualizing the entire path of their long journey to fulfilling their destiny. We are all this day suffused with the understanding that there is an art to living, the technique of which lies in disciplining the mind to see the upside, the solutions, in every situation. Natives of this day show us, by example, that the act of living is the purest of all creative processes. Today’s native comports herself regally, using the obstacles in her path for fuel to reach ever further than even she originally anticipated. This day reminds us that life might be allowed to exceed our expectations. People born on this day are rarely disappointed, for they project realistic expectations, living frugally on the surprises that the universe (heeding their humble mindset) blissfully springs on them. They are subtle creatures, never showy, typically cloaked in elegant greys, browns, maroon and black, the color of renunciation. They seek to absorb, negate negativity itself, picking up real as well as karmic and energetic slack, clearing the decks, preparing the way for goodness to find them, while never taking on too much so they might be needy of extra help. They tend to take up a surplus of responsibility so that their loved ones might have a lighter, breezier aspect. This can see them being taken advantage of by those who don’t recognize the quiet, constant spiritual sacrifice that this Capricorn soul devotionally makes—this can result in their being scapegoated or overlooked by the obtuse who mistake their humble nature for a self-effacing one. On the other hand, the person born this day can have their surpassing self-esteem taken for a snobbish, haughty nature. Wrong on both counts. Just as this day stretches out forever, time seeming to move more slowly than usual, so too, is its native the proverbial tortoise who paces himself for the long haul, ultimately winning the day, yes, but having a thorough experience of life. This day is to be lived on its own terms—one shouldn’t seek to alter ones experience of it, neither through substances that warp perception nor via the imposition of drama or dysfunctional behavior. People born this day are preoccupied with the notion of being clean livers, regardless of where they fall on that spectrum; they are sober by nature, and unlikely to manufacture drama or manipulate others in any fashion. They thrive without crutches or artificial stimulation. This day’s native goes beyond living in the moment; she glimpses eternity within it. There is no rush today. We don’t wish to sidestep any feeling being evoked; even melancholy is sweet now as it accesses even deeper emotions that can be excavated most readily this date. Those born today are dark and wintry nights. They may be foreboding but inspire a need for warmth and joviality, for close companionship, cheer, upliftment and illumination. On this day, we take a page from its natives’ book, and build a fire in which we, virtually, through visualization, ritually burn all vestiges of a past in so-called ruin that no longer serve, but rather bind, us. As the third and final earth sign, Capricorn represents Mother Nature in her crone (from Rhea Cronus) or dying aspect. The Capricorn motto, “I use” is best applied, here, to what we characterize as dead wood in our experience, which may be used to fuel the fire of our being in which we are purified—our trials and tribulations forge us into more whole and perfect stuff. In this fire we burn our own defects, the only real impediments to our happiness, and thus become a burning beacon to attract future hopes and wishes. This is an ongoing process reignited on this day which reminds us: We have both all the time in the world and not a moment to lose. Today provides us desired pause to process all that has led us to this point on our journey around the cosmic wheel, so that each of us may go forth as our more essential Self, carrying no excess but for increased light and wisdom.

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Monday felt a little rough, but again this year’s New England weather has been diabolical. This was a good meeting day otherwise. We let the conversation emerge pretty seamlessly and found ourselves alighting on the consutancy and foreign book deals—we’ve been approached (we’re always approached) by some people to partner a bit and so it sent us in the direction of exploring notions about exotic markets and how to best remerchandize that which we’ve already written. There might be some fun entrepreneurial notions up some sleeves on this score.

And with the consultancy too: We’ve started going back through the annals of all the clients we’ve seen to date—thousands and thousands—reacquainting ourselves to their stars and stories. The process feels like touching fabric. It’s as if revisiting the clients one by one is continuing to energize a connection if not with each individual then with the consultancy as a collective. We have been so fortunate and we fascinate to work with such incredible people.

We also went over the finishing touches of our gorgeous new business plan for our design enterprise. The plan itself looks like a work of art, honestly; I can hardly believe it. It becomes more and more real everyday; and I have to say that I need some place to put my aesthetic feeling and power. With such a platform, one can throw onto it; but it also draws one out, asking one to give to it. I know I want things to be really quite tiny. It might be good to check out some Providence graduations; spending money in such a way, now, is a very good idea as we are putting into research. So much good design coming out of Providence, actually. And only three hours from New York City. Oh, dear. I don’t want to live in Providence please don’t make me. I feel that investment in this area, from outside sources, is personal, that it is an investment in me. And that is something for which I truly long and by which I would do so very right. I want to let myself be invested in. In this case I want things to be as personal as possible.

And straightaway, this weekend, I must get onto the yearlies (books of weekly horoscopes per sign). I think they are a lovely idea and the perfect platform for approaching a cool stationers. Stationers are the thing. I think, too, if you can replicate old world sorts of things like having a writing tablet and sending hand written notes. I’ve been struggling a bit with the whole notion of handmade and electronic. I’m over this electronic world; in fact I think we are going to see a giant backlash.

Fiesta forever is indeed much better than Siesta forever. Then again?

We walked down the rue Commerce in the 15e a couple of times back while in Paris. It was rather depressing that road. And our previous positioning, which we found again, this last trip, in the 17e, was even worse. However it was very close that section of the arrondissement as it nears Batignolles that was so fancy. But I dare say, still, creepy somehow. We passed a Scientology center this last trip even. It makes me wonder if we didn’t shoot high enough even then. I think we are naturally demure when it comes to giving ourselves material things in life. It seems almost embarrassing. I actually wouldn’t want to have so much money as some of my friends have—and I mean that most sincerely. I just want to have a rich bohemian life. In Howards End vernacular I’m a Schlegel not a Wilcox by any stretch. I’ve been a Bast and I don’t want to go back there.

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.

Scorpio 9° (October 31)

Watching a cooking show set in San Sebastian. Today will be the final day of summer enjoyment, in effect. Evenings sitting outside may arise should we hit another spate of Indian summer, but for the most part, with the full Moon today on All Hallow’s Eve, and the turning back of the clocks, and two months of increasing darkness, we will make a necessarily fitting psychological shift. It all feels quite right now. I keep tweaking the letter to farmer fuckhead. I am feeling more not less confident about it. Looking forward to my daily Bikram practice restart on Tuesday. I think it will be the most therapeutic thing I can do for myself, mid mornings. And on days we have clients I simply don’t do it. The next two months should prove to be very powerful indeed, then after a few days break, only, the following two brings me to having something drafted at the end of February, which will be a great milestone. And then we get to May, which is all tweaking and would thus allow for some afternoon house hunting here and/or there. That is a worthwhile way to spend the long winter. I will deposit four months into farmer fuckhead account in December, which will bring us to May, at which point we will drop another four in, which brings us through September if we include the original last-month. At that point we will ask for a reckoning for the electricity and so forth, and I will have made my move with the injury situation. 

The following blocks of text are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 1071-1075. 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 day of March 2018 and the last Blue Moon until 2020; and Easter tomorrow, quite a confluence, the Moon also opposing Mercury all T-squared by Mars and Saturn in Capricorn. Mars is exalted, and Saturn dignified, in the sign. So there is much amplification in the way of power. I think this weekend is posing a challenge: To get to know our real selves a little better and to trust our own sovereignty in situations. There is no reason to go far afield knowing it takes so long to come back. It is on that score I say to you: Know Thyself today.

This sort of speak, I feel, comes under the “weather within” idea I want to work on with S. in our weekly social media offerings. Something short and sweet and astrological—an interstitial—which we might nonetheless have a little comic fun with. Cosmic Comics® Productions. I would like to make a tiny LLC off the biz with that moniker. I think that might be wise. We talked a while back about being content creators, double entendre intended for sure. Contentment creators. That’s another way of putting it. Getting a number of memos out into the either. The montage portion of the programming. What is the film that makes fun with the montage section? Is it Team America? Something like that. God that was a great piece of funny, funny work. I love those guys. Thinking back to the turn of the millennium, just some eighteen years ago, I feel I’m living in a very changed world.

I spoke about The Weather Within (brought to you by As Above So Below, you’re cure for metaphysical irregularity). It can be fun and funny and require us to be up and at ’em; as we say. I must also check in with the Boston Globe and make sure they have all they need to run a piece this way. I will also put sponsor letters into emails this week and link to the press item as well. I need to go through the weekly minutes tomorrow morning in time for Monday meeting. And I will break down the dealio on social media plan. It’s all part of the program of underachieving borderin on laziness. I know that this is the way to approach the year ahead.

I was thinking about certain times I’ve been with people and how I’ve behaved. For instance, at our dearest friends I might show up for some two week period and I might have been smoking, which I would do, no apologies, outside never thinking a thing about it. Or I might have had a boatload of wine at dinner and send everyone off to bed only to then tidy and “finish drinking” making everything camera ready. I would never do these sorts of things now—if I did I would have to commit myself. And yet my attitude doesn’t get any better as I age, though my behavior might. Still I sense evolution.

Next year, we will be in Europe and UK often. We must base the consultancy in Paris; it is actually the most practical thing to do. So many of our clients are in Europe or Asia and since we see folks mainly by Skype in any case, and so many in-person yearly clients work in fashion and design, they can see us there. Also, most friends how are at the grandparent age—that happened quickly—and I’m ready to be a god/grand/parent for sure.

Monday must also be about settling accounts—we have a number of people and causes to give to in our tithing spirit. I mentioned tithing last week in terms of this young fellow whom I found needs our help. That’s part of the reckoning. Post the Libra Full Moon, I’m feeling pretty balanced overall. And having physically cleaned and organized my offices, je suis tres content.

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Easter Sunday. And it was not a good night. I barely slept as is the typical case when alone. But when I first woke up in the middle of the night I had a glob of yuckos that I coughed up from my chest and discharged, flushed. Seriously, given that entrance into awakedness I assumed I had a really bad cold. My sinuses hurt anyway, but they basically always do; and I felt generally lousy, so I naturally assumed I was coming down with something. And most of the morning was spent in the head that I’m sick. And yet slowly as the day unfolded, I began to feel fine. Like all of it was allergies or something.

It is also April 1. Now, I had a friend with whom I shared April 1 fun. He lost his way and now we are no longer friends. But today is our sort of shared holiday, as it was for years, and I’m a bit wistful not for that relationship, per se, but for a close bond with another guy on whom I can play practical jokes and have a fairly unconditional bond. It seems that male friendships lose their emotionality over time and they wholesale dissolve on the main. I used to have so many close male best friends. At least a dozen. I miss that. Mostly Virgos, but that’s another story.People forget that, when you don’t procreate, that you’re not occupied as most are by family life. And they assume you are equally predisposed…indisposed…disposed? Anyway, when left alone, even for short periods, I feel that particular dearth.

All told I’ve gone a bit fetal today I suppose.

Krt who owned the Bell Caffe where I worked in the early nineties—today is his birthday. I love/d Krt….Funny I just came back to write this after several hours and I had a nice tete-a-tete with Krt. I’m sorry I’m not using accents properly, someone can edit me. I had left him a birthday message and he wrote me immediately. We will catch up when next I’m in London. I’m just realizing, given the earlier bit of this post, that maybe I got a reminder from the universe

I watched All The President’s Men last night and it’s fine. It ends weirdly.

Now everyone knows that I have an erotic attachment to Luke and Leia from Star Wars, thus Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher, both Libras; and maybe you also know that we assign these characters as archetypes of the sign of Libra—they would be assigned regardless of the fact that Libra actors portrayed them; but typecasting by sign being what it is this comes as no suprise to we in the biz—which means just the two of us as our biz is something unique to us. I have a current allergy to parenthesis.

Mark Hamill seems troubled to me in a way that I take as a cautionary tale. I think he struggles with some kind of substance abuse, most likely alcohol addiction. I don’t know this to be true but: He looks and acts the way I imagine I would if I were to myself slip into some kind of downward alcoholic spiral. And to think about what he looked like younger; we’ve all changed I realize, but he was a slip of a pretty Apollonian boy; and now he’s bordering on playing Steve Bannon’s stunt double. I don’t mean to be glib or point fingers; I feel for him; but: Empathy is always at least half self-preservational. You may quote (and credit) me on that one.

I don’t know how good I friend I really am; and where I am lacking in that department I would attribute to the fact that I am not the best friend I could be to myself. The irony of the Libra man, associated with the seventh house of relationships, is that he will not have a very good one with himself. He is other-orientated, especially in one-on-one relationships, a series of which make up the Libran friendship landscape—he is not a group person. He will give the larger-half portion of everything to his mate, in both senses of that word, but will ignore himself, which means he has less of himself to ultimately share.

I see Mark Hamill on a talk show, say with Ellen. And I can tell he’s drunk or something. I call also feel his pain in trying to appear normal—I know first hand that can be work. When in the past I was consciously drinking too much or too early, I wouldn’t ever admit it. Now I would. But that’s because the light got in to all the broken places. It’s Leonard Cohen who said that’s where the light gets in—he’s a Virgo, and Virgo is all about the break, the crack, followed by that light of Libra. There’s also a fine Roches song called Broken Places.

I believe I shall stop here.

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o you’re like why is this post Aries 13° but the Sabian Symbol you attach at the end of th post is Aries 14°. Well that’s because my post is about the day as it unfolds from the degree point (here 13°) but that same time frame encompasses the 14° Sabian Symbol, as the degree point signals the completion of that symbol. I hope that made sense to you.

I didn’t forget to watch Jesus Christ Superstar live. I just didn’t want to. And anyway, too many commercials, as Stella would say. I’m sure I can see it On Demand; though I doubt I’ll be able to fast forward through the commercials, so I’ll probably never see it. Awoke at 5:30 and I knew immediately what kind of day it would be—and that I was mind-melding with Stella who also woke pre-dawn to drive back to the Cape. We would have our own Easter—I made pea soup with mint, roasted chicken with new potatoes in the drippings and ginger carrots. And, in a passive embracing of innocence, we watched the original Paddington and it was adorable, followed by stand-up acts on NetFlix. All in all we will file this under a mental-health day. And physical health too as, I’ve been feeling old “conditions” more accutely.

Even my closest friends don’t realize that I “suffer” day in and day out with a nagging physical problem. I put that word in quotation marks because, dealing it with so many decades now, it’s just part of my nature. My own private Chiron, you might say. I don’t want to get too into it but I’m going to say the first leg of the larger problem started in like 1990 I believe. I was at a friend’s place in Brooklyn just hanging out and jamming and I felt this kind of pop in/on the left side of my jaw, ear, throat, face, neck, mouth, tongue, sinus, windpipe, palate, eustacian tube, head, brain. To this day I don’t know where the “things” is located; but it has never been the same; and when i say that I mean that henceforth there has been a block or misalignment. I could go on on this subject and create an entire new blog based just on it.

Instead, I’ll just say that I have been constantly, both mentally and physically, negotiating this thing that happened; and I’ll say that it forced a certain ongoing meditation in me, if not an incessant prayer, which I believe helped “grow” my psychic sense(s) over the years. I remember soon after the incident…oh wait, I have to say first, that I told my mother about it—anything metaphyscial that I might encounter in life was best and easily shared with her because she always got it, nodding, eyes closed, telepathically saying I know, I got it, I understand, been there. This time he reaction was that much more glib. Oh, you popped a gland. I never thought to ask if this was a thing. Actually I just realized I never Googled it. (time lapse) Oh my god don’t Google that, what you get is people, vets, popping their dogs anal glands. Nothing on the subject as what my mother dismissed as a popped gland. Did she make that up?

Anyway, this ongoing nearly thirty-year-old affliction is my little cross to bear. And as I said: I believe helped “grow” my psychic sense(s). I remember soon after the incident I would go into a sort of shavasana, first, trying to “find” the place inside that was afflicted or damaged; and I would imagine this etherically thin golden thread “sewing” up the damages, like I was giving myself psychic stitches. As I did this, breathing deeply, the affliction would move or, rather, I would get a sense that it wasn’t any one place, per se, but along some kind of real pathway, nerve, lymph or circulatory, and/or along some invisible meridian. Anyway, the practice of this sort of meditation, which began pointedly, in time, just took over and became a part of my consciousness, whereby I am forever creatively visualizing the relief of this injury or blockage. I think it is part of my being now. I favor it doing exercise, careful to protect whatever it is. I fall asleep on some theme of this mediation. I never need to count sheep.

When I was young I had a Teddy that played Brahms. That was very relaxing. This two score and eight year mediation since affliction became my adult bedtime go to. If you look close me in my waking hours you might notice sudden movement or intakes of breath through my nose all designed to clear said block. I don’t do these things consciously, now, on the main.

I just realized that I forgot what we watched before Paddington and stand-up comedy: Rosemary’s Baby. How’s that for an Easter movie? I might make an argument for it year on year. So what do you do on Easter? Oh we have a tradition of watching Rosemary’s Baby. Happy Easter. Anyway, as happens with these mental health days, in so many ways designed to crank up the old synchronic machinery, many of the themes in Rosemary’s Baby were repeated in the other innocent entertainments we watched afterward. Hail Adrian. The film itself is shot through with so many inexplicable, coded, mystical things I find. Roman Castevet is the name of the main warlock (though Maurice Evans is in it as his would be foil—Evans being most famous for portraying the warlock father of Samanta on “Bewitched” at the time. Roman Polanski and John Cassavetes direct and star. But Roman Castevet is an anagram for Steven Marcato. The film was released in June of 1968 and in August of 1969 Sharon Tate was murdered in the most diabolical manner. John Lennon of course was shot outside the Dakota, which in the film was called the Bramford, which Evans says was the site of witches, cannibalism and murder in the early days of the century.

I might admit I believe that the film “unlocked” something; and I think the author, Ira Levin must have, on some level, tapped into Aleister Crowley’s story in the writing of that book. He actually is on the record as saying that the wave that he started with this book and then the film, which were followed by a slew of literature in the genre, most notably the novels of Stephen King, and films like The Exorcist and The Omen, created such a sense of Satan in the world that it likely fueled the Christian fundemental movement, by relief.

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We all have sadness and have experiened lost, but some people are better at grieving than others. I am not one of those people. Dating back, I always felt kind of ripped away. We moved to the suburbs from Jersey City in 1972; and then I was happy to ripped away. Though we weren’t your typical suburban family, I assimilated best of all—my father and sibling had the hardest time—my mother, the Pisces, dissolving in anywhere. But we were ripped away each summer to the Jersey Shore. I didn’t complain about this, but having summer friends and year-round friends made it difficult to bond really full with people and get any sort of consistency or momentum going. And as I was graduating high school my parents sold the house in Wyckoff, so I never returned there during college (except for once, in the first weeks of school, when I and a band of friends from B.U. stayed there and went to see Simon & Garfunkel in Central Park, on a whim, driving overnight and landing, near Wyckoff’s border, where the car literally broke—it’s frame cracked—anyway that’s a story in itself.

Instead I returned “home” to our summer house which was now our year-round house, trying to keep Wyckoff friendships alive but to no real avail. So I committed to a social life I could come home to on the Jersey Shore. I worked at the Parker House in Sea Girt and tried to cobble together a cool social circle. It worked but briefly; and not too many years later that house was pulled out from under me. And I suppose I repeated this trauma in my adulthood, moving from places I loved just like I gave away designer furniture I loved—George Nelson and Eames and other great pieces at least to great charities like Housing Works.

But I think I’m ready for a new era of ownership and stability as I get to this juncture in life. By the same token I could run away and join the circus (which is code for move to Los Angeles to become a character actor). The thing is, curse of the Libra, I am always intrigued by new possibilities and am never so sure as others seem to be about places of habitation and career directions. I can do what I do from anywhere, pretty much; which is a wonderful thing. And the word retire was never in my vocabulary, even dating back to when I was younger: I always knew I’d do something for a living that allowed me ultimate decision power. Ironic isn’t it that someone with difficultly making decisions has at least decided that he wouldn’t outsource decision making power. Maybe it’s enough to embrace this power, and forget about how I wield it. I wield it. That might be more than enough.

The moon transits Jupiter in Scorpio today so emotions can be intense for sure; but as they trine Neptune in Pisces the intensity should be allowed to dissipate just as readily. Today is a pivot, this much I feel. And though there is a ton on my plate I must flow with all of it. Producing a show this week at the Americn Repertory in Cambridge, continuing to write new introductions for next year’s Haute Astrology books, sign-off on a final draft of a business plan (and get my brain around what comes next on that score); I do need to start work on the new books themselves; I must finishing casting next year’s series ad A.R.T. and also this year’s Afterglow, not to mention beginning the outreach to fund it. There is more; but these are the major balls in the air.

The other elephant in the room is, well me. I was going to write the diet I must now began in increasing earnest and intensity, but I could resist. It’s spring and i need to drop at least ten lbs., which, to be honest, I end up doing pretty much anyway starting this time or year through summer, even without trying. My reasons for a little crash aspect in the diet is strictly practical and also financial. I need to fit comfortably into clothes I already own for upcoming events this month and next in NYC. And so I’ll be frontloading diet and exercise above all other things these next few weeks, and then just let it become part of the new order. I have been making my very spicy drinks and broths and getting early to bed and early to rise plus not drinking any wine at all. I know longer plan these sorts of clear-outs really. As I say, they are an annual unspoken event of sorts.

Lunch today will be a glorious leftover black bean soup. When you wake up at 5:30 as we do, you tend to be ravenous by 11:30. Then again I always ate lunch early. I remember back in the day, specifically, when I worked for the Book-of-the-Month Club in the early 1990s, I would hop the number two train from, practically, underneath my building on 12th Street and zip up to 50th Street to the Time Life Building, in under ten minutes. If I packed a lunch I would inevitably eat it at my desk by 10:30 or 11AM and have to go out and get a second one around 1 or 2 PM. I know that they referred to this in The Lord of the Rings but I thought it was something made up by Tolkien.

Does it ever freak you out that you will die without reading all the books you want to? Now these are the thoughts that could keep my up at night. Ha. Who am I kidding? Nothing keeps me up at night.

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I feel blatantly negative and unhappy and angry and upset and I want to be able vent the fuck out today. I am sick to death of just about everything and nothing is going to change that right now. Every gods damned thing I say or do seems to result in boring, bad nothingness. This is the way I feel. I wish everyone would just fuck the fuck off. The world is just filled with liars and users and assholes. That’s a fact. On this day I want to empty my bank account fill a bag and just fucking move to the desert, which, by the way, is becoming unaffordable. I just don’t feel I can live in this sick-o-phantic world anymore. cue Google search Quebec. I don’t know where I have to go, or what I have to do, to find kind people who aren’t fucking hypocrites and to experience some kind of genuine, well, experience, I truly do not. This world is one big diseased narcissistic ball of fuck hurtling through the space; and I really don’t see any healing in sight. And I don’t know why I bother trying to make any bit of it any better for anybody. It (largely) goes unappreciated.

I feel maybe I have it wrong. That if you can’t beat ’em join ’em is the only way to navigate this world. Nobody espouses true kindness, compassion or humanity. Nobody. Everybody is out for their own gain, plain and simple. And those of us who aren’t are just fucking patsys. Remember this is just the way I feel today. I’m hoping that indulging it might get me to the other side. There has always been a battle between good and evil raging out there and in here. But now I think the playing field has become terribly uneven. Greed has never ceased to be the problem, it only gets worser and worser. Our parents’ generation was a blip, and anomaly; and we are seeing the result of that, particularly as Americans where we are not only not given health care and education by rights, but they purposefully don’t want people healthy or educated because then they won’t vote for disgusting monsters like the melting circus peanut.

And honestly I feel like a waste of space myself, which is probably where all this is coming from. It seems I can’t do enough to fight the good fight—that which is raging inside me. So many of us in the country are so busy trying to survive, and help on the small levels that we can, that we have so little steam to take it to the streets where it belongs. It seems futile, resistance, it truly does. Why can’t the people we put into power be championing the bigger issues and causes. They will have privatized everything by the time I finish this post. Speaking of posts—the post office will be next. I don’t know where to go to finish out this life in happiness. Again this is me just talking today.

Pence tie-breaking against Planned Parenthood is sort of the last straw, and what broke the camel’s back on what was already a fairly lousy morning. I felt fine. But the world got up on the wrong side of the Sun. This might be working. I may coming out of it as I express what needs expressing. Still I’ve more to spew. So: Keep moving around your objets d’art/Photographing skinny young boys/Millions selling the Emp’s New Clothes/Hose down your vintage Pontiac/Keep vigil over the fridge/Find what you need in aisle five/Don’t forget your pills.

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.

Scorpio 8° (October 30)

Well one more day’s reprieve. And then that’s really it. I have to get on the horse and stay on the horse. That’s the long and short of it. I feel capable of doing so. And today starts this weird preparation diet so even if I wanted to have some fun wine-wise, I’m prevented from doing so, which is fine. It will make for a nice jumpstart. I’m thinking it will be good for me to be forced into a spate of sobriety in any case. It has been my only solace in these troubling times. I have certain goals lofty goals that now need to be achieved and singularity of mind is what will be required, pretty much, for the next eight months. It’s not too much to ask of myself. Also, in light of the emotional environment around here, given farmer fuckhead’s behavior, I need to be made of steel to thwart whatever might come our way. No sooner do I write all the following that someone says she wants to hit the wagon November 1. I’m such a pushover I’m like sure works for me. Friend wrote from Paris on the day that she is meant to be chatting with S. later, at 3:33 the number of the triple goddess in triplicate, the muses, pointing to the bifurcated personality of the Pisces, which she is. Any old wig, tomorrow really does begin the ultimate in sneaking in. It has to happen and happen it will. We had a client today and I was pretty psychically on fire I have to say. Names, dates, even types of fruit (pomegranate). 

Oh my god I love Rosie Perez more than probably anybody. A slight case of psychedelia. Nothing to write home about. Had really delish salmon with roasted garlic mash and greenbeans was blandly but bloody good. Started watching The Queen’s Gambit and I cannot believe how old and terrible B.C. looks. I think he is younger than I am. I just checked and he has two different ages listed on Wikipedia. He left acting to become a cook and a mechanic in 2002 and then returned only to then get really great roles in things. Amazing what a Julliard degree will do even when you are a messed up ne’er do well, you can then return from self-imposed exile to Broadway and television. If I sound jealous I am. He was always good but I was always better. But it’s like he never really had to work. Just like his wife. 

The following blocks of text are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 1066-1070. 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.

Feeling frustrated today on a few levels—not exactly sure why. Socially, nothing seems to change, there is no grand revelation, the criminals continue to get away with the proverbial It. Personally, and I’m sure it’s exacerbated by this weather, it feels like Groundhog Day, and that things show no sign of altering, but for the weather. Stella stresses the weather within a lot; and I’m all about it now. I can feel my body screaming for a change. For sunshine, for fish oil, for something, gods know what; and I wish they’d tell me.

My fingers have been hurting of late and I already have that weird pull thing in my palms along my ring finger line; I think I know what it’s called but I hate saying the words, but it ends in “contracture” and it’s a thing that people from North European descent often get, especially men. Also I had a terrible car accident fourteen years ago and gripped my steering wheel so tightly in the midst of it that I bent it down flat nearly. I would actually prefer it was that then the contracture thing that only gets worse. Every paragraph can end with the sentence. So I should go back to yoga.

I am determined to have my most successful “busy season” ever. And that entails in joying working more around the clock; spending time in my office in the evenings, writing and organizing and corresponding and all that. I’m having a late Lent so the boost in my healthful practices should have some kind of positive impact. I will likely cut my hair—I haven’t since October, if you can believe it. That’s six months ago nearly, holy merde. My 1985 Mercedes passed inspection this day without a glitch. Which made me feel hopeful. I thought if Old Yeller could do it so can I. Pass inspection that is.

Most often, I will share, it isn’t the what but the how. We trip ourselves up a lot on the what. But some days you just have to do what’s right in front of you. Or you get thrown a curve ball, money wrench, fireball to put out. So what if you looked at life as all of that. In other words what if there were no such things as distractions but just priorities and you fielded what was necessary in the order the Universe prescribed. The macro and micro cosmic universes that is, because most often, yes, the call is coming from within side the house. But there is this little invisible traffic cop at an intersection under construction and he can only let traffic go one way at a time. You have to say STOP to the inner mandates, often, to let the outer ones have right of way.

We walked out of Stop n Shop leaving a half full cart of food. It was ridiculous shopping at this local nightmare; they were making nonsensical phsical changes so everything wasn’t where it has been for a thousand years; but when asked a question, the staff was so surly, dismissive and generally unhelpful, we were like, you know what we outta here. So we drove another twenty minutes to Whole Foods, which, I’m sorry, is still shopping Nirvana. Everyone is so nice and friendly and everything is so fresh and organic (everything at the other placed looked green unless it was suppose to). We filled up for the week and then had a super early lunch at my favorite spot around Orleans, Sunbird. I always get a smoked mozzarella and kimchee sandwich on sour dough, with a hot turmeric, ginger, cinammon, honey and coconut milk. Again more Nirvana. Honoring thyself. Nothing bad ever came from that

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I was thinking on the subject of performance yesterday: In a way we already have a great show in our bag in the “Christmas” show; in that we set it up that the “Christmas Story” follows the same pattern as the Zodiac, and vice a versa; but this becomes a stretch (but a forgiven one) in the Christmas show which is so “uplifting”. While the truth is the “Jesus Story” is what really follows the same pattern as the Zodiac, so we can easily remove anything Christmasy and go more for the parable aspect of being your own personal JC.Starsky + Cox • Cosmic Geezus is what I have in mind. This idea is COPYRIGHTED so don’t get any funny ideas.

I slept very well last evening but I’m more useless today than usual. I’m going with it. Everything will get done in time. I just need more of it. Which means not being in a rush. I have been on such high alert in some ways now for years; it’s been nearly four years since I was dealt a pretty devestating blow in my personal life; and only about six months since being clobbered on the professional side of things in the most extaordinary and ironical of ironical of ways. I have never looked for help and had even backed off utterly in certain areas of my career, only to be offered, without asking, an incredible leg up, or so it seems, as it was all fairy favors going poof.

I remember the summer of 1998 we were putting finishing touches on a book deal and we had friends looking for a winter rental in Wainscott for us while we had set off to Ireland for a few weeks alone followed by a journey back through London to Paris where we got a car and drove to Umbria and then to countryside of the Charente. It was bliss feeling that everything was ahead; and yet, in hindsight, my thinking was flabby, and my spiritual core not so strong. I feel, now, in comparison that I am much better off on those scores. And I’m suprised to discover that feeling to be honest. Where I feel now that I’m lacking is in laughter. I haven’t laughed all that much of late. I know many of us haven’t. And as much as I want to resist laughing off anything serious going on, I wish there was a separate laughter that could happen. There has to be the kind of laughter that doesn’t just let the steam out of the valve so that we “get through” all this. There has to be the kind of laughter, like a Mel Brooks laughter, of laughing at those who think have so much import.

I would totally accept the criticism that this Blague is navel-gazing. However I think, in so doing, staring at the sucker, you can still find universals, even, perhaps, quite readily. So what else about that trip back in the gay nineties? I think I would tell myself not to be in such a hurry. I think I would tell myself to live frugally and bank more cash. I know I would say not to be too tunnel-visioned with things, but to continue to pursue a variety of interests and activities. I have no regrets because they are an illusion. I only have now; and I could easily thread through some of the things I started and stopped over the years (know what I mean? you have those?); but it means getting off the rollercoaster of merry-go-round or whatever metaphorical amusement park ride you now find yourself on. There is nothing like a late cold March to make you feel stretched so very thin, spiritually. I guess, in that regard, Easter comes at a great time for those who put all their spiritual eggs in that particular basket.

I am so ready for another journey like that one, back in 1998, before I knew so much. We did a show a few years back as the opening to the Afterglow Festival and we were speaking of the god Ganesh and how one sings the word Hu and how Dr. Seuss must have based his Horton Hears a Who, upon it. And so we ask ourselves, are we listening out for that, and are we also shouting, hoping someone will hear. I don’t have time to mine all the content I’ve created over the years especially as I spend most of my time creating anew. What to do. What to do.

========

You remember the Brady Bunch episode where Marcia helps out this nebbishy girl (she wears glasses and her hair up) helping to make her popular and then the girl gets all uppity hanging around with some in-crowd and starts treating Marcial like a pleb? Why this theme is recurrent in my own life I can’t tell you; but if I had a dime for every character who came into my life seeking help and a certain solace, if not asking for endless favors, only to leapfrog over me to target the more (fill in the blank) of my friends or associates, I’d be a rich bitch today. But Marcia and me, we’re better than that, so we don’t dignify such situations. I just put it into my Blague while she takes it out on Jan. Poor Jan. I always dug her side-part though. Weirdo that I am, my crush was always on her, not Marcia. “Sorry Marcia but I’m going to have to let you go. You’re a good worker, Marcia, but Jan here is just a little bit better.” Waaah-waaah. The upshot being, of course Jan was the better worker—she had to be.

Whereas this used to really get under my skin I now just kick into observer mode when it happens, realizing that a good part of this sort of thing is normal (although not for me); also, as I get older, sad but true, I tend to stick close to an intimate circle(s) of friends I’ve had for decades and really don’t make new ones. It might be a guy thing. Women seem much more capable of forging meaningful platonic bonds, regardless of their age; I on the other hand, quite simply, don’t. To be honest, I wouldn’t even know what the forging of a new friendship would look like; I think it’s different for people who work in a team or group setting; everything I do, but for consultancy with S., I do alone. The only reason this isn’t terribly scary is the sheer number of people I do interact with via the consultancy, keeps me from losing my faculties for language or social interaction. Still, I have always felt like that Reses monkey (spelling? I don’t have time to check—see below tag).

The invitation to see Cursed Child on Broadway arrived today and I’m so psyched to see it with the original cast. As it turns out we are in NYC in any event meeting with clients old and new. Ah, April in New York City. I love the blossoms along the river on the walk to Battery Park, that stark pink against the periwinkle sky. Can’t wait. I want to take a long, long walk—not off a short pier. And I’m already tasting my dinner at Indochine. Sorry but these are the things that excite me about New York. I’m feeling generally excited anyway, though not too-too. It’s enough right now just to keep it real and hit some marks; but I’m trying to go on instinct these next several weeks and just know “generally” what needs to get done, whilst not being all schedulely. Things are often simpler than we make them. It is always about letting not making, anyway. The great unfolding (not to be confused with the dreaded unraveling).

Watched two things on the screen last evening. Part One of the Garry Shandling doc bu Judd Apatow and (no she didn’t) I did end up watching Roseann for sentimental reasons. It wasn’t good. I saw what they were trying to do—pitting the political debate between Roseann and Jackie but the “democratic” Jackie was the jester-buffoon in the pussy hat. Anyway, I did love the Garry Shandling and, as neurotic as he might have been, his journaling made me feel more normal. Although he was laser focussed in his notes-to-self on stand-up and making it, more, more, more…and I’ll write about pretty much anything, there was a similarity in the way that we outline what we need to do to achieve x, y or z. He really only talked to himself. I have you to talk to. But (who am I kidding?) I’m the only one both reading and writing this. Ha!

 ,,,

Postscript: Duh, I am writing comedy, here, thus the “Blague” double entendre. I literally forget. Literally literally. I’m a fourteen year old girl, but who isn’t nowadays?

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

A lot has happened since we were last here. I dreamed I had sex with a devil, that was fun. We never did quite have the sex I don’t think but still; and I remember I was prepared perhaps to pull out some kind of “the power of Christ compells” you incantation to ward off any juju; but I either woke up or the dream melted into another one. I Googled it of course and it’s about a bunch of things like being in conflict, characterized by a direction your taking leading you astray; or that you’re being seduced or tempted into doing something you don’t want to do. It can signal urges or emotions we are not in control of. So it’s the externalization in devilish personification of influences that are undoing us. I accept any and all of those interpretations.

Today feels like the time of year, each year, as a kid, you’d watch The Wizard of Oz; I don’t know how to explain it other than to say I think it was always on TV lat March, around Easter, when the clouds outside often looked like the clouds of the opening credits, creating a seemless transition, over the rainbow, from the reality of (typically Sunday night) suburbia to the Technicolor world of munchkins and monkeys. There was always a mystery, one felt, to be found in the shadows of the scenery or in the characterizations of the Witch’s army, much the way, as a child, you might get lost inside a duvet cover, finding a secret portal to the other side.

There really is no rush for anything. And, with Mercury retrograde, anyway, today, I planned to make black bean soup with the one single jalapeno I bought at WF this week, the one the check out lady even commented on, being this tiny object inside a flimsy green produce bag; but it must have been thrown away accidentally upon unpacking the groceries; so I got in the car to go get another one at the local market and the car (my old Mercedes) wouldn’t start; only slightly turning over. Ironically, taking it out on a rare drive to get an inspection this week, which it passed with flying colors, it must have lost battery from the driver door not quite closing, which it often doesn’t, leaving the inside light to wear its charge down to nothing. So that was a fun haiku of harumpf this morning.

But here I am. And I don’t mind working a bit late to explore all I must explore today. I enjoy few things more than writing, as it turns out; had you asked me that a year ago, I would have said the complete opposite—so this is new.

I remember when we first got the deal for Sextrology, I think I was telling you: We took a trip to Ireland which I’ll delve into sometime; then to Italy and France; and while we were away for a solid month, friends of ours found us a winter rental in Wainscott, for October 1, that we moved to, in a Jeep my father found for me (and I paid for)—now here’s how cynical I am: I will guarantee my father made some money off of me—and it was really rather sublime to be out in the Hamptons but we only made it to the New Year because I had the bright idea to buy a house on Cape Cod, which we did, it will be, twenty years ago, this autumn. The house was called Shine Cottage, as it belonged to Muriel Shine, a woman well into her eighties at the time. It was a tiny ranch, but could have been a dormered two stories; happily though it was exposed wood ceiling and rafters and beams all painted white. It was a five minute walk to the beach down the road; and it really was rather idyllic, except that it was filled with flies, situated near a horse farm. Driving to the house from the main road you passed pastures and pumpkin patches. It was quite near Georgica and very beautiful and now a dream. It wasn’t expensive. Just a thousand a month for a three bedroom can you imagine; nothing like that, not eve winter rentals, can be had for those who could be in the Hamptons in the winter; now everybody can.

I get a sinking feeling when I think of those days, in Wainscott. We made a friend called Tom whose brother Hamilton was friends with Caroline Bisset and rather known in and among the young, shiny faces of New York in the nineties. Tom worked at the wine shop attached to the Red Pony food shop. We became instant friends and he came over for dinner and so forth. We lost touch and then Facebook came around and I didn’t see him so I reached out to Hamilton who I didn’t know. Tom had died, I never found out how. He was a floppy haired Libra like myself, I dare say, still. Nostalgia is a killer and I’m on a heavy dose it seems today. Started yesterday, I was thinking about “tithing” as we typically choose some pointed way to give something to somebody each year; and then yesterday the young man from whom we leased a car, three years ago, came over (and again today with the car) to fill out paperwork; and he broke down in tears launching into the story of his life since we met him, admitting that he took the opportunity to come out to us because, he had sensed three years ago, that we were “different” and actually said “hello” and meant it, being present, I guess. His story is private and multi-layered and sad and, I will say, one feature of was the loss of his older brother. This was the major theme. too, of the Garry Shandling documentary I watched, in two parts, over the last two days.

Something powerfully emoting, emotive, emotional? in the air. And then that devil dream.

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A new client today who brought out the psychic in me a number of times; that’s always fun. Spent the morning sprucing up the Blague site a bit. Turning a corner. I hope. The light at the end of the tunnel always looks different than you imagined. It’s a crunchy transition, but I know it will happen; I can see how the last two months’ worth of punching my way out of a paper bag yielded a plethora of glorious half-baked plots and quasidrafted memos and letters and directives. It’s kind of great. As if I tossed myself a bunch of heaps of half-shapen clay, into the future, for me to now pick up and finish off. Again, it’s kind of fun. I can’t tell whether of under or over achieving—neither I think. Productivity can go at a pacific pace; and I’m feeling confident about less being more.

I am keeping a vague eye on my tummy, which after a certain amout of time must be referred to as my gut or surely just my stomach. My father used to refer to his as what sounded like la banze; I believe this would have derived from la panchia or paunch. My father had more than a paunch, he had la banze, a big round mass worn rather high. I have the gene to some degree and can easily go there if I don’t watch it. So I watch it, ish.

We have a Full Blue Libra Moon tomorrow at 12:36 PM tomorrow. The Full Sap Moon (which is what we’re calling the second of March’s full moons). We won’t see another Blue Moon until Halloween 2020, and we won’t experience two blue moons in a year until 2037. I don’t know where I’ll be. The Libra Full Moon, Moon opposing Sun (and Mercury) in Aries, forms a T-square with Mars and Saturn in Capricorn. A certain personal mastery is required now to balance your will with your want; and the selfish aspects of self with those that require tandem effort. Other people write about astrology in this manner way better than I do. I’m better at the vibey not the nitty gritty stuff.

I will skip out on the Easter rituals this year looks like—to be honest it is the one holiday that I do skip out on most. I love the renewal energy of this time of year and I’m already feeling it for sure. I will take the Libra Full Moon to reflect on my ambition and personal development. Being a Libra, it impacts my own native Sun placement, my chart being somewhat nebulous as my parents didn’t recall my exact birth time; thanks. But if we say I was born around 6AM then Mercury would likely be on the ascendent from the twelfth house which makes sense given the psychic messages. This also puts Sun and Libra squrely conjunct in the first house where it makes me something of a aesthete, artist, effete perhaps, if not fey.

My Venus opposes Jupiter in the seventh, suggesting one-one-one relationships loom large just as an amplification in my own personal development might counter any soft, if not week, aspects associated with my sense of self. I do feel torn, perhaps, a little bit, this time, during this Libran Blue Moon, not spending it with my one true loved one; but I’ve been doing so much to’ing and fro’ing and I was just in Boston and I go again this week and the transience can negatively impact my mojo which is very again to motivation.

I can say this: that I’m happy to let certain chips fall where they may, while still fearful of what others may do so. I must learn to trust myself more to be self-caring and responsible. We are all like children asking for increased responsibility. Having felt abandoned one all too easily becomes ever more abandoned in their attitude and behavior. I wish to avoid any such lifestyle choices, because, at this point in my life, that’s what they would be. Comes a time when you can’t rationalize away behavior based on your conditioning. And people that continue to do so must also fall by the wayside.

Thus I feel that the Blue Moon in Libra, which some are calling the Full Sap Moon, is about rendering, coming to terms, deciding, even weighing out and valuing—all Libra actions. It’s not just about taking stock, it’s about paying up, thus karmic paybacks too. We are deciding who’s who and who does what and what worth things carry in our lives, whether they be interests, relationships, job, causes, art, pursuits, and so on. It is also time to put up or shut up, and to pick a dream and commit to realizing it, or let it go.

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.

Scorpio 7° (October 29)

The quincunxed planet will act as a conduit of energy, or as a profound and deeply felt block. This aspect can produce a heightened direction of energy in the chart which may also oscillate between bifurcated states or situated personalities. A planetary opposition to the quincunxed planet of the Yod can be malefic, or can produce situations of dramatic reversal.

Midpoint the sextile is a very sensitive point in the chart, as transiting planets, when conjunct with this midpoint, will then be in opposition to the quincunxed planet. This situation is said to trigger major events, thus revealing the true power of the Yod. Multiple sextiles and trines involving Yod planets can be extremely beneficial and thus spread the energy of this aspect in one side of the chart or produce a focal point for intense energies on the other side of the chart. Hence, the yod is the most difficult natal chart aspect to interpret and requires a great aptitude in astrological interpretation to divine accurately.

The conflict arises between the worldly, sociable character of Leo and Libra, which tend to seek inspiration in the world, versus the introverted, unworldly character of Pisces, which is too sensitive to be able to cope with worldly life and aims to work in the background serving others. These energies do not interact and hence this hypothetical native would possess great difficulty making the choice between serving others and seeking inspiration on the social stage.^[1]

Jupiter is in a feminine sign, while the Sun and Mars are both in masculine signs. Jupiter is also in a mutable water sign, while the Sun is in a cardinal air sign and Mars in a fixed fire sign. Jupiter shares neither duality, element, nor mode with the two planets that aspect it in quincunx. This complete lack of commonality of Jupiter with the two sextile planets illustrates how the yod triggers an irritating situation that can be overcome only through adaptation and discovering new paths. If there is no other aspect outlet for Jupiter (as would be reflected in a trine or sextile angle to another planet), a transiting planet in opposition to Jupiter and conjunct the midpoint of the sextile planets can trigger major life events which are difficult to handle and take great creativity to overcome. This is why the yod is often called the “Finger of God”,^[ for it takes great initiative and fortitude to overcome the limitations created by the yod, but great rewards can result if the native does the necessary work.

The following blocks of text are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 1061-1065. I am reading through all of my Blagues, five per day, and posting some samples here. Now, in my sixth year of writing this Blague, by the time I get to my seventh, I will have journeyed through all the daily Blagues of my first five years. If that’s confusing I apologize. Year seven, I’ll only have to read through year six, once a day.

I’ve really debated, back and forth, about sharing a certain creative idea with you; and, though even now, when I felt the impetus to introduce this Blague I had already determined that I would. Then the second I started typing, well, I feel that maybe I should shelve the idea. You see it has a great title; and I’m not sure weather revealing it, in a copyrighted…so I think I’ll muse on the stars of the month—the Aries people of the planet.

Aries males are the butchest. And it’s always the Aries man show. He is great at putting it out there but it’s difficult for him to take things in. This buster can filibuster, like the fire sign he is, sucking all the air out of a room. He is the most honest of the gender signs, for shiz, and fairly brutally so. He is boss, and he’s good at it, so long as his delegates buy wholesale into his vision. Voted most likely to achieve singular goals, Aries man is shot through with adrenalin, just one of many A-words associated with Aries, along with ardour, assertion, aggression, ambition, actualization, achievement—even his biblical and mythological archetypes, Adam and Ares (Roman: Mars) do likewise.

I’ve always found much treasure in the typecasting of actors as they often get pigeon holed by virtue of the archetypes and attributes associated with their star signs. Aries women play unapologetic and unabashed. They can be at war with the world and the men what made it. They hold themselves apart, at once aloof and armored, thus, one feels, also readied for attack. They are objectifying of that which they want, which they want when they want it. What she fancies is hers by rights, it seems. She is selective after all and thus singular in her ambitions and would be conquests. She can be most selfish for love, if not in it. To connect the aliterative dots she is alert, attentive, aware, audacious, avid and avaricious. She assimilates and seeks to do so, most simply. She is strategic and employs an economy of moves, suffering no fools. She isn’t by nature sentimental, and she will people, places and things from her life, without regret. When she goes, she’s gone, to coin a phrase.

A little musing never hurt any astrology writer after all. And I suppose I am getting the cobwebs out of my creative machinery specifically designed to churn out starry notions.

Shopped Provincetown, to Perry’s, for a final hoorah of wine as tomorrow will mark day one of thirty specified alcohol-free days; so we got a bunch of cheeses and paté, and smooth arichoke, and we had Formaggio’s grill toasts, arugula and Badoit; so we watched news and had a picnic which isn’t something we normally do, but it was so much fun. We put off our big shop and just pieced together what we could. I actually love creating meals from the fewest of ingredients; to be honest I think you get the best meals that way, so I’m already eyeballing what we’ll have on the weekend, including the leftover picnic will never eat in its entirety, but…close enough.

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I do think it wonderful to witness the March For Our Lives (even though the tiny skeptic in me can’t help but feel that this too, like most things, will peter out). However, the thing I do feel is different about it as an event was that it provided a marquee underwhich these kids can find unity and live according to more democratic dicates and also, vote in more global a block. They know hot to be connected to a great many people at once, a hallmark of both technology and of the Aquarian age. The archetypes of Aquarius, too are the cupbearers (which contain not just eternal life, but eternal youth). And, look, my skepticism isn’t about me—I am all in, and I cried throughout the entire thing, for love of the kids and for pure joy—I just think that by the time the society at large takes on what these kids truly have to say, that they will already have kids of their own. We have to know that and they really have to know that. They are the youth, but they must sacrifice that youth in the achievement of their mission, which is, by any account, truly spiritual in nature.

The rally was so visceral—cue young Samantha throwing up on stage; and rightly dramatic—the six plus minutes of silence, Emma standing staalwart. That was not easy to do. I tried to look up her sign on line but I couldn’t find it. What I hope also gets stressed is the connection from the Parkland kids to all other kids everywhere—that was rightly represented and I not only hope they keep it strong, I hope that form an impenetrable web that goes beyond the gun issue (which it already house) to the unity of the races, social stratas and every other bogus category that divides us. They want us divided and these kids have the opportunity to stand up to what has been an endless inevitability of division which may be starting to gasp it’s last entropic breaths.

It’s important too that, at a time when we may have to take to the streets for other issues involving politics and, particularly this White House, as we projectile toward impeachment, this has contextualized that probability, setting a positive example whereby we can all participate in a poised and peaceable manner. In the face of deepest trajedy, the protest looked not only poignant and powerful, but also uplifting. We need to remember moments from that rally moving forward.

Meanwhile back in the cosmic kitchen I made three soups today, one from leftover spinach, mushroom and potato I brought with me to Boston—and onion, celery, carrot and stock and zhush: cups of soup for lunch with leftover cheeses. The second soup, we’ll have for dinner is a roasted red, yellow, orange pepper one; and I’ve prepped a celeriac soup to have for tomorrow, Sunday’s, dinner, when, I hope, a porn star helps to bring down a circus peanut.

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My dreamscape last night was crazy. I had this male lover or something, with whom I hadn’t been intimate (so I don’t really know what to call him) but he was young and sort of trade-ish and we either met at some resort or he was writing me, oh yes, that’s it: I received a letter from this fellow who had more than a friendly attachment to me, the premise being that he and I had already spent time together, though it wasn’t sexual by nature (it never is in my dreams); however I had the distinct feeling from that letter—I believe he mentioned coming to see me, or I was somehow going to be seeing him, coincidentally where he worked, at this resort from which he was writing me. I remember looking at the map and seeing he wasn’t that far from St. Tropez—I have a very dear friend who lives not far from St. Tropez either; and as I type this I do feel a longing to return to that part of the world. There was nothing incriminating in the letter—I passed it to Stella to read; and I think I said to her, at least with my eyes, that I thought the letter was infused with anticipation. I felt she agreed. We were going to keep a watchful eye.

The dream was so bizarre and included some recurring elements like: Stell and I were walking on Twelfth Street, from Seventh Avenue, toward Greenwich. There was a song one had to sing, a little ditty, that was like the opposite of an open sesame, upon leaving the subway station, as if to ritualize the passage. Anyway, I found I still had my key to the front door; and Stella ran a bit of interference keeping lookout while I put the key in. It was thin, like a pin (hey no cracks) and yet eventually went in and turned and we were in our old lobby. We pushed for the elevator, and more people came in, and we were waiting all together; keeping an eye to make sure the super John or Kevin (as he was called in the dream) would show his face. I think I confused this so-called Kevin, based on the real life, last super we had there whose name tramautically escapes me, with short-lived super called Frances whom I really liked. Anyway, we got up stairs and down the hall and, I believe, into the apartment. But, truly, as this is a so-often-recurring dream, I’m not sure if the rest of it is a remembrance of last night or a previous night in the past. But I think because I fell asleep watching the film of The Odd Couple, with that eight room Upper West Side apartment, with the moldings, so exactly like those in our two room West Village apartment, the hair-trigger I’m on for being launched back into this dream landscape was pulled and so there I was. It was in more disarray than usual which makes me suspect I did dream about it last night, triggered by Oscar Madison’s messiness.

I am a Felix, after all. I have the same afflictions: the clogged Eustatian tubes, the bursitis in the shoulder, the rampant need to clean, cook, shop, tidy, time and measure everything.

The dream went from the inner landscape of my old West Village apartment to this place, I’ll say Europe, where this resort spot on the map from whence this younger ardent fellow wrote me was a short hop skip and a jump. I was already on the beach and then on the water. Swimming, in small boats and so forth. A friend was swimming along the coastline and he was too far out beyond the breakers. Seals as big as sealions were riding waves, smaller ones, babies, “sitting” on their parents who were stretched out like surfboards. It was cartoon comical, but there was something lurking; and then large sharks, or at least one, panels of slick grey and white running the length of its body, and it was munching on boats and I tried to signal my friend but he seemed to be okay and then I don’t have much that readily comes back to me.

Still, I always feel that the quality of the dream is as telling as the content. It was so very vivid.

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.

Scorpio 6° (October 28)

Day started early with client who we have been working with for years. And it is always exciting to take people to new levels. We get to see such progress in people which is encouraging. Got a bill from the lawyer which was a bit of a shock but I suppose not too, too surprising. It is worth it for the peace of mind. We had a lovely note from the TV folks who wanted some follow up info from us, which I was happy to provide. It’s good to keep taking our space. Heard back from JES which was also nice. I am really playing chicken with my appointment on Monday. I am giving myself just four days to prep for that procedure. And I’m also constantly tweaking my schedule which I find understandable. I must have compassion for myself and trust myself as well.

The following blocks of text are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 1056-1060. I am reading through all of my Blagues, five per day, and posting some samples here. Now, in my sixth year of writing this Blague, by the time I get to my seventh, I will have journeyed through all the daily Blagues of my first five years. If that’s confusing I apologize. Year seven, I’ll only have to read through year six, once a day.

I’m sad Stephen Hawking has left us; but I do need to admit something: He did end up making me feel paranoid much of the time. It’s one thing that he was an atheist who believed this was it—but he also said robots would take over the world. I don’t know about robots but I will say that tehcnology in the form of cyber warfare is of the same il. And with all the WH chaos—I dunno it’s all a bit too doomsday for me.

I used to be really good with a sort of energy work in my younger days.

My heart aches when I think about certain characters in books or films. For some reason the family of siblings in Howard’s End does that to me. It’s what’s not being spoken about their past, really, before the current circumstance presents. They have no parents and are far apart in age. Such a story there. Anyway, à propos of nothing. But, I dare say, at this point in my writing this Blague, having done major catch-up, it feels natural to coast and allow thoughts to flow. I might have said this already but, I was telling Stella last night: One goes into the endeavor of producing more than a fair amount of copy, the notion being that it must begin in the brain and make it down to typing fingers, which, of course is true; however, what one comes to discover is that the writing, the actual doing of the thing, is what pulls the thoughts down, and not just in one simple way; no, the content can be created (now that I’ve passed the extent of a retelling here) where, let’s say now we enter territories we’ve not entered before in musing upon the notion of this, that or anything; and I only got here but sitting down and starting to type. So there’s that way. Then, one may find themselves writing the next word being drawn by the rhythm of the words on (we can’t say paper anymore, unless paper itself becomes a metaphorical term) a white field on a computer screen; but it’s typically not just purely rhythm. No, the rhythm is nine times out of ten the result of some sort of poetry at work, a way to catch our metaphorical eye, our metaphysical fancy. The phone flashes: “On way back now”. I struggle to keep the thought or wonder if I’ve finished it. I suppose it falls under the heading of metaliterature or stream of consciousness or both, I dunno. But I can tell you this, that there are fewer sensations so relaxing as writing in this “mode” just as nothing can be more tension making or near seizure inducing as a bottled up process of writing whereby one feels the blocked energy from brain, back of the head, down neck and shoulders, down and out arms, hands and fingertips.

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I used to be really good with a sort of energy work in my younger days. That was a sentence that appeared in yesterday’s Blague and, instead of following that tangent, feeling it might be big, I left it as a single paragraph….

St. Patrick’s Day was fun when I was a kid, in New Jersey, because, having parents who were the opposite of the helicopter sort, what would you call them?, more like zeppelins drifting off in their own directions, unawares, and I would skip school and take a bus, maybe, or a train, though that doesn’t sound right, to NYC, to get drunk. That was pretty much the extent of it. Nobody watching, nobody cared. Me in a lined windbreaker, prematurely garbed for spring, ordering beer after beer, day drinking at fifteen, sixteen; in those days they never “proofed” you in NYC; we didn’t say carded, or as we say in New England, cahded, we said “proofed.” I can still picture one bartender like from a movie wearing his white shirt, sleeves rolled up, black pants and suspenders, grey hair, pouring beer after beer in his bar that began with Mc, making bank as fast he could, not stopping to asking who was underage. In 1980 in NYC there was no under age. I suppose I would have told my parents, ahd they ventured to ask, that I went to see the parade. But I’m sure they didn’t know I wasn’t in school the whole day. They might be curious why I’m home from school at nine o’clock, shit faced at that time. I remember making a phone call to someone from, yes, my private phoneline in my bedroom—what, you think I was raised by wolves? (I was in many ways which is why they compensated with perks like my own private number—unlisted, thank you.)

…. I used to be really good with a sort of energy work in my younger days. Before we talked about such things, or I knew of something called Reiki or whatever, when I was still a teenager, or maybe twenty, I became aware of a certain ability I had with my hands. No I know why I wanted to write about this: I sort of forgot the fact—that this was part of “my thing”. I keep stepping away from writing about this I’m not sure why. The visual that comes up when I alight on the topic is of being in Stella’s studio apartment on Beacon Street, our senior year, back from our study abroad in France, and “doing stuff” with my hands. Now, I’m not talking about sexually, only, but that was an interesting part of it: to discover that I could, how shall we say, affect an outcome without actually touching, but rather “touching the energy” surrounding the body. It sounds hokey I know but I didn’t know that “energy work” was a thing so I thought it was only me who had this particular talent. Anyway I do remember doing this to people if they had a bad back or they injured themselves or just felt a little stressed or nutsy, I would just sort of …I dunno…work their aura? Or something like that. Meanwhile I’m not the one who sees auras in the family. Oh no she didn’t. I hate myself for that last sentence. Okay now I understand why I didn’t write about this—it was because of its boudoir elements; and I am, despite heaping evidence to the contrary, quite the prude.

I chalk up everything woo-woo about me to being a Celt. Without proof, I know that it’s that blood line which has given me any power of this kind. And I’m at the place in my life now where I really want to cultivate it. At first I dismissed it, then I accepted it rather dispassionately, not wanting to “bill” myself as some kind of psychic or intuitve of any kind; and now suddenly I find myself wanting to nurture this side of myself and really find so many creative and intellectual ways to explore this pretty wide range of, lets just call it esotericism, in its myraid forms, and to let my interest in astrology and counseling and theater and art and design and study and discourse and body and mind and spirit all come together more cohesively now. Just like all the once-considered scattered bits of myself, what might have been labelled dilletanteish (by others and even myself) pursuits that seemed to split me—well those are now each of them pretty much risen enough on their own accord to come together, like building blocks of my being, moving forward.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day. I bought this book in Ireland twenty years ago. It gets one star, which unstuck itself and fell from the ceiling.

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Let me put it down. While it occurs to me. A jumble of thoughts and typings up on remaining bits on paper on my desk and on the walls would be a fitting form for this entry today. Tomorrow I will set forth a new intention and the day after that will begin the fourth year of my writing this Blague and I already wish not to narrate, today. I will tweet on QC account my aphorisms and commentary on things occuring. How my father told me late in life, when I was well into my thirties, that his name wasn’t really James but Vincenzo. I said what about your social security—he said I have two. My uncle my godfather was a godfather who got presidential-pardoned by Ford. I wish we had a strong enough mafia to take out the circus peanut. I’m excited and a little challenged being out, now, in society. None of the clothes I really want to wear fit—one must resist the urge to shop-spree as a reward for losing weight—and I’m not at my thinnest. Oh well. I don’t really care which is unlike me. It has also not been like me to let my hair grow this long but it feels good to be older and free. Boston for a few days, interaction with others day one, then a solo day day two to just space out and walk around—though it’s still meant to be cold, or I should say: it’s meant to still be cold.

I do want to read O Lost or whatever Look Homeward, Angel was before the editing. Good movie about Thomas Wolfe and Max Perkins that didn’t see the light of day is on one of the premium movie channels. Genius. I feel longing. And as I tell clients that’s a good thing. It’s very Cancerian. Little wonder Penny Arcade titled her show Longing Lasts Longer, she’s a Moonchild. Longing is cardinal-water (directed emotion) and it is the thing by which we reach out to that which we desire—cue Cinderella singing whatever—it’s a bit of a paradoxical thing. Not the cardinal-fire of Aries, the previous cardinal sign, with it’s point spear. Cardinal-water longing reaches out like a spear but it has a receptor at the end. Sceptre. Have to look up the word and check it’s etymology. Notes from my wall on what sorts of things might be of interest, social-media-wise. I can incorporate my Afterglow shout-outs because it would give the Blague location. I am also supposed to write a form letter to other universities and colleges. I like also to talk about what astrology book I might be reading. And some aphorisms from our work and others.

Remember this isn’t supposed to make that much sense to you. As I wing my way through anything that might be relevant to my ritualizing making one of the yearly breaks. I have to say the equinoxes are much more powerful for me than the solstices, but each, in their way signals a shift. Ironicially the solstices seem more of a point between experience, even though they are the polarity of dark and light and the equinoxes are more lin in-door and out-door side by side. For me the equinoxes tend to mark a time when I clean slate and start again. The start of the zodiac begins with the equinox. And we just had a new Pisces Moon to boot. That really signals deep change. Because we are at the end of the zodiacal cycle, the hope is that we all spiral up a notch. That is to say that we don’t repeat the patterns of last year but learn our lesson and ease on up the cosmic slinky personifying progress whatever that means for you. Pisces is non-material existence which I will put into a word Love. It’s about trying a new paradigm and leading with love…and with sacrifice. You must be willing to let go—via Neptune, dissolution is the Piscean process—in order to ascend.

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Stockholm Syndrome Okay so here’s where I really need to tell the people what’s happening tomorrow. And in so doing articulate it to myself I suppose, which makes me feel dizzy just thinking about. But, let’s face it, I’ve been increasingly dizzy for years. Tis true. Which is the old way of saying True dat and no more efficient a one. What I didn’t expect to happen is that I feel most comfortable now sitting down and writing into this Blague than I feel doing anything else or nothing at all. At first this Blague held me hostage and now…well…

So, I have been writing my daily Cosmic Blague now for three years. I began in 2015 on the spring equinox, beginning at 0° Aries, the first sign of the zodiac, ushering in the astrological new year. Blague is the french word for joke; and, the original idea was to muse on the ways in which this is a funny universe, both ha-ha and not always, where we all feel the joke is rather on us; and I also wanted to bring in a mystical element citing things that are logically unexplainable about experience, primarily, my personal own. I have surely had my fair share of run-ins with the cosmos on that score. And, whether writing books or material to perform as Starsky + Cox on stage, I’ve always strived to mix the comic with the cosmic, since the world of metaphysics and esotericsm was my ironical ballywick. I say ironical because writing and performing comedy was what I worked at magazines or waited tables through my twenties to afford. Writing ultimately paid the bills; while what began emerging in me was something else, something different if not deeper. I was like an underage new ager. I was a myth head, which is better than the alternative. Like most adolescent witches, I scoured the local libraries for anything on the subject and for spells. I did incantations to Dionysus in the attic of a summer house wearing a toga-type thing I made out of old curtains; at seventeen I began reading some fairly esoteric materials. I studed the myth of the magi. I frequented good-vibe arcane bookshops (how I miss those) and knew which darker spots to eschew. I had met some sages and received transmissions and had “transformational experiences” whereby I experienced superhuman strength and capabilities; something opened up in me that, I realize, had opened up in my immediate ancestors, and so on, the Celtic side of my family being, well, what I used to call spooky in the extreme, but what I have grown to welcome as a gift. And when you have a gift, you see, you must give it away; that is one of the great paradoxes of life; and paradoxes, akin to irony, which is a cousin to the comedic, is an expression, I believe of the inherent humor in the universe and so it’s why I wanted to make this the subject of a Cosmic Blague. But I was saying…

Year one of my Blague. Should I then reiterate the above….?

So the Cosmic Blague is back.  So I set out three years ago to mine and muse upon the workings of this, our funny universe, it’s inexplicable, mystical, metaphysical workings that so often hurl metaphorical pies in our faces, the comic and the cosmic inextricably linked. It wasn’t always easy, and year one I used training wheels—I mooned on the “Sabian Symbols” that mark each degree of the zodiac and day of the year, using that as a spring board to find the funny truth outside and in. Years two and three the training wheels were off, and it became more and more personal, and I realized I had this platform for exploring ideas, which might make their way into books or conversations or consultations with clients; and it also severed as an incubator for creative concepts and would-be projects, 99% of which will never see the light of day. Still you can’t steal them because they are my IP. Some days I wrote shopping lists but the important thing was to show up. The practice of dedicated writing of this nature has its own alchemy that takes over, asserting its necessity. Anyway, I thought to mark this milestone as I embark on year four; and I wanted also to say that I’ll be more mindful of sharing thoughts and feels, comic and cosmic, with you all more consistently. Our disillusionment with social media, its algorithms, and the world socieity now, in general, can lead us to detach, but I think that just might be an insidious plot. So I’ve decided to be more connected than ever….

I’m fucking crap at being “live”.

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Here we go! I’m in Boston where I went to school. At B.U. I lived in Warren Towers, very on the nose, on Commonwealth Avenue the first year and somehow ended up on the 18th (top) floor of the A tower (there are A, B, and C) which is the most easterly tower…and because boys got preferential treatment, on the east side of that tower, which meant I had a view looking into the City. The sunrises were brutal but the rest was okay. I was on the “performing arts” floor for some reason (spooky) as I didn’t request it having already veered away from my drama-club high-school self, but there I was. Karen Kohlhaas, still a friend, who became a great teacher and director, was on my floor and we had fun then, and more fun in more recent years, togther. She left for NYU after freshman year.

I moved, for sophomore year to South Campus and lived in the Earth House which was filled with a combination of geology students, environmentalists, pseudo-activists (playing out a college fantasy that no longer existed in the eighties) and stoners, basically, Dead Heads, specifically. I was on my own trip. I had a single which I painted a sort of cocoa with brown trim. It was maybe seven by eleven feet in dimension. I tried to make it look cozy, first semester; then I deconstructed in second semester, hanging my box spring on the wall, sleeping low, just on the mattress, hanging all sorts of objects, and making stacked file cabinets out of milkcrates onto wich I fashioned “doors” with masses of duct tape, from cafeteria trays, which also served to hold families of objects—a toiletries tray, a stationers tray, a weed tray for rolling joints. I wore sailor pants and sweaters onto which i fashioned pins—my favorite sweater had been inherited from an older child of my parents older friends, Bobby, who was in the FBI or CIA, even, by then, some fifteen years my senior maybe, and the claim to fame of the sweater, beyond the fact that it was a rather fitted 1960s black sweater with thin gold stripes, like that of a subtly modish bumble bee, with ribbed mock turtleneck, was that it had gone to the Filmore East on Bobby to see The Doors. It had magic in it. As did everything I wore, owned or touched which was getting more and more minimal in this deconstructive process of mine. I still have this sort of minimalist morphing that that happens in my life, from time to time, being very much the opposite of a materialist (and an air sign) I need a well appointed space of few objects. It’s what we now refer to around here as “feeling atonal.” Ha!

I also took to running everywhere. I didn’t walk to class, I ran. When friends took the T to Allston or into Back Bay, I would run along the sidewalk and try to keep pace, grateful for its frequent stops, though, I remember. Now I’m writing this first day of the new astrological year from one of my favorite places on the map, a hotel that has become home away from home, and the vib here is ever so so good. I typically listen to KCRW Eclectic 24 online and throw it to my bluetooth speaker I travel with. There is something to be said about living in the modern age. Except the news today is about an automatic car killing a woman. Is this the first robot murder? Will it one day be traced back to this?

Had a wonderful meeting with a writer for the Boston Globe who, it turns out, grew up in the next town over from where I spent summers all my life. If you’re a reader of this Blague then you’ll know that I have often mused on the town of Spring Lake, New Jersey and what it meant to me…yeah, spiritually. It was the place to which I was infinitely drawn growing up, the giant gilded-age mansions that were made of wood. My new friend, the journalist, spoke of climbing up the outdoor stairs of a mansion to smoke a cigarette and look at the ocean when she was fifteen. I got it. In those empty, badland days of seventies anonymity, with these vacant monuments to the past, many of them, looming over you every day, you could, yes, just walk, not sneak (nobody watching) up some escalier to do just that. These places were inhabitied ofen, only, by Irish lace curtains and musty, dusty, a lot of velvet, furniture.

This new year is going to be pretty wild, I predict, for all of us. I will try to keep my sense of humor and it is my belief that the universe, said, cosmos, has the ultimate one.

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.

Scorpio 5° (October 27)

We did have a lovely chat with the English office and, though S. thought otherwise, I was actually really cheered by what the producers had to say, and I feel the project is very much alive indeed. Took the car to get inspected which was quick and easy. Ate some scallion oatcakes and had a lovely dinner of clam chowder with some nice Chinon. And now we are taking a full two months off which is a good thing. Everything is in works and there isn’t a whole helluva lot to say on top of it all. There is just me redoing my schedule in a delusional state of writing block.

The following blocks of text are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 1051-1055. I am reading through all of my Blagues, five per day, and posting some samples here. Now, in my sixth year of writing this Blague, by the time I get to my seventh, I will have journeyed through all the daily Blagues of my first five years. If that’s confusing I apologize. Year seven, I’ll only have to read through year six, once a day.

There has to be a real switcheroo right now. Things will be coming to a head. And if John Bolton gets anywhere near decision making things will really go pear-shaped or, perish the thought (and everything else) mushroom shaped. I feel that we are nationally hitting a rock bottom. The country is a sick addict and it must enter recover. Of course we must first stage an intervention. This is what I think we should call what used to be known as a protest. We need to tell our fellow citizens that the country is powerless over its addiction to sex and greed and rage and bullying as personified by the circus peanut in chief. I’ll come back to this later I don’t want it to color my whole Blague entry.

I was speaking the other day about learning later in life how much my father prejudged and hated me for not being all boy. And doing it so, so early in my life. It actually made me wonder (as I saw a documentary on this recently) whether there might have been some kind of question as to my gender, or something, at birth. I remember my earliest Halloween costume was “football players” which now seems like an overprotestation, speaking of protests. I see a lot of my father in the circus peanut; and of course my evil, estranged sibling is born on the same day as it.

I loved dolls as a very small child. Five years her senior, the fact my sister had an array of Barbies and Liddle Kiddles, I remember getting into them when I was home all day. That is to say pre-school. And I started pre-school actually at the age of three, so we are talking very early memories of me. There was some kind of hair dye thing for her blond Barbies. Now let’s not get started on the fact that this must have been a toxic substance with which I was left alone, age three, in my room. But I do remember dipping her dolls hair in different dye mixtures; moreover I remember her violent reaction to my doing so upon my return from school. I totally got where she was coming from. But get over it. I’m three and I’m left alone for hours by an extremely checked out Pisces mother whose credits include falling asleep with the gas burner on, starting a kitchen fire; and leaving both my sister and me in a car, at the supermarket, in neutral instead of park, so we rolled backward into a concrete block in which a street light was lodged. Ah memories.

Anyway I remember being made to feel a great deal of shame about the doll thing from my father which gave license to my sister to create whole rallies around making me feel like I was a freak by the time I was four. But, I suppose this is a testament to my resilience—and this is something that only occured to me for the first time in my entire life—I channeled my doll envy into something creative. First of all I don’t think the doll thing for me was about loving girly things per se. It was the fact that they only dolls we had were female. Really it was just about playing with something that was a human replicant. This was far more interesting to me than playing with objects. The only other toy, up to this point, I obsessed on were toy soldiers—I had this amazing United Nations forces set up of soldiers, in varying positions, some shooting rifles while kneeling of course (that’s a classic) that came in a package with this great U.N. white army truck. And there was cool military paraphenalia like plastic army bags and utlitiy belts you could put on the soldiers before loading them into the white metal truck that had a canvas U.N. blue canopy on the top. That was rad….but I digress…..

Where I really channeled my love of figurines, shall we say, was in drawing; and specifically in my rendering of the Flintstones.

This is becoming a two parter. So tune into the next Blague on the subject which will be March 13ths entry. You see I already have some words written into the one following this one because, well, let’s just say I’m floating between days here. (I did mention that I tend to write a few paragraphs at a time within entries….well I also sometimes write a few entries at once and I didn’t expect this to be a two-parter, anway)…

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Today didn’t include my most shining moments. In anticipation of the blizzard that came to be I was a bit lax in my understanding of self-care. And to be fair it had been another lonely night without sleep, staying up, as I often do when Stella is away, all the night long watching movies. The only positive thing I can say about that is: they play way better movies overnight when supposedly everyone is asleep. Which doesn’t quite make sense. Maybe the better movies are on overnight because so many people like me don’t sleep but instead lie awake anesthetizing their pain injecting the flickering light into their eyeballs held open in some kind of Clockwork Orange type fashion. I do like that film. Though I’m not a big fan of the director, a Leo man like so many. We saw a wonderful exhibit on Kubrick a few years back at Los Angeles museum…LACA? Anyway, the Leo (a sign that has many a dictator associated with it) director had made a film about the Leo tyrrant emporer Napoleon which never saw the light of day but which generated so much art work and writing in the creation that it filled rooms at a museum. It was wonderful.

Except that I almost burned the house down.

The problem with staying up all night is that you can easily fall alseep without warning. And you might fall asleep after putting a chicken in the oven on 500° for what’s meant to be forty-five minutes, not an hour, which will result in a house full of smoke and yet, strange, the smoke alarms didn’t go off; and they always normally do, much to ones chagrin, every single time I cook chicken in that manner. Anyway, I shot up and the house was full of smoke and of course, right at that moment, Stella returned from Boston, earlier than I had expected, and I seemed, and rightly so, in an instant to be the kind of person you just can’t leave alone without some kind of mini-disaster happening. In this case it could have been a lot more than mini and now it becomes a serious cautionary tale. I feel like the cosmos only gives us so many free passes in life; it gives us plenty, but these are finite, I sense.

I can feel myself really trying to change the paradigm. The breakthroughs come but they always leave us hard work to do in their wake. Which is an apt term since we are more woke about (fill in the blank) after a major breakthrough which not only presents more work as I say, that’s the head down power through part of it all, but also a portal into the achieving of the concept this is comprised by the hard work and vice versa. It’s like you have to have a hook, on which to hang everything involved in any particular venture; and you surely have to kiss a lot of frogs. But you can’t just sell any idea, you have to also find a way to start achieving it and to have it ever the more flesh out as to be able to sell it. People like to buy very fleshed out ideas. We provide an experience, this has to be front-loaded not just as a philosophy but as a practice. As they say, no manure, no magic.

Anyway, let’s just say it ended weirdly, this day.

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As I was writing, two Blagues ago, I got the feeling it had to be a two parter. And the last sentence I said on the subject was: Where I really channeled my love of figurines, shall we say, was in drawing; and specifically in my rendering of the Flintstones.

Since playing with actual dolls caused so much shame and guilt and shame you see, compounded by general statements made by my father aloud about me even as I’m, hello right there—comments like “he’s really round-shouldered isn’t he”. This particular one stands out because I remember feeling its effects almost physical. Certainly felt it emotionally. In recent years I’ve linked posture issues and even shoulder problems with manifesting this malignancy heaped upon me by manipulating my own body, subconsciously, never feeling in my skin, but that I had to compensate through, yeah some kind of Marcel Marceau manipulation of myself to “appear” differently than I am. Appearing is a very Libran word, and I’m a classic conceptual sort of kook.

Anyway I digress…

Plopped in front of the electronic baby sitter I saw the same TV shows day in and day out from the moment I arrived home from school through to, and ultimately mostly through, dinner, into primetime, every night from the time I’ve been alive until, I’m gonna say, the upper reaches of high-school where I did manage to bust out a social life. I was fun! But back into those tender years, and I mean really tender, like four years old: I started to draw the Flintsones characters and ultimately took things, if not completely three dimensional, then two-plus, by then cutting all the characters out, which I would draw next to each other, to get the sizing right, and I would thicken a bit the outside lines, for ease—a clever trick that came too late—and then cut them all out. And then draw their backs, which was one of the funner parts because it required thinking. I made houses and chairs, with tabs, that I could fold down and fasten with tape so they’d stand up, onto scenic surfaces better known as paper plates or interestingly shaped cartons, that provided a field which provided me literal platforms for creative expression.

My Flintstones were really good, too. They were kind of perfect. And I became a connoisseur of the evolving styles, from the oldest episodes to the newer ones, during the show’s run, in the articulation of the characters and I tended to go for the most recent looks, though I suspect, now, I might have patterned my little figures on the older ones. But if I were to draw you a Flintstone today it would recall the latter years of the original primetime run of the series. Anway, they were my first dolls of my own. I also made a sort of cartoon Lost and Space series, another afterschool series that ran for eons in syndication. But my dollish lust was ultimately more satisfied by Major Matt Mason. Oh my god I loved Major Matt Mason. He was an astraunaut and his rides and props were amazing. I had both the red space rover and the clear blue bubble on wheels that it could two, the bubble itself being what rolled, wherein a seat for Matt, as the result of amazing technology (lol) would stay upright within the rolling bubble. The door the the bubble was a panel that slid up so that Matt could slide in. Major Matt Mason was rubber with wires inside which would lose their pluck, resulting in flopping limbs.

Later I collected mostly all of the Johnny West series which I gave someone to sell……how strange, this never happens, but I hear a call up to my lair from a voice not Stellas and up the stairs comes our friend and associate Brad. Hi Brad….twenty two hours pass, and I’m back, wondering did I finish this Blague or is there more to say…on Ebay, which they did. It fetched something, but not a lot. I could have waited. But I had carted the collection around from house to house over the decades and it was time to let go. When the letting go of things you think will hurt you doesn’t so much, it makes it easier to let other things go. Anyway, once I finished playing with dolls, I took up playing with personages. Illustrated, first, with my obsession with pantheons and mythology because, really, I took to drawing the various gods and goddesses whom I loved. Then the Justine League or theater groups or “schools” of artists, or movements, to some degree, royal families, or literary families or any kind of extended family.And I’m really into pantheons in my own life, too, whether it was feeling part of a movement myself or in the “characters” that I write about (even the astrological ones) or the “family of performers” I present and avec whom I commune.

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Yesterday ’twas a dark day weith a nor’Easter blowing knocking out the power most of the day. Was a first time experiencing outage in this house which meant everything was out. No water, let alone heat. Based on yesterday’s experience, I wouldn’t have made a great pioneer. The blizzard really hit in the morning and stayed that way. Now, it wasn’t my computer or devices I missed, leaving them to power back up—by the way as I’m writing this the power is out again and I am racing against battery power (but I’m feeling a bit more pioneering)—the first thing I realized is that I suffer from a very serious television addiction. Not to say that I am inclined to watch television during the day, typically, unless in some kind of funk; but without the so-called mod cons (or an unantiquated power grid not to mentionan overall infrastructure) my natural inclination is to crawl under multi-layers of “covers” and zone out in front of the box for comfort and, well, really as a distraction to pass the time. Everything gets shut off here when the power goes out, not just the heat, but any running water as well. I was in complete denial just staring at the shallow black box in quiet desperation. In the evening the power came back on and I was elated. We had heat that night. And the next day, bam, it was out again. I wonder if they force shutdowns to work on the problem but can turn on again when night falls. Probably not. But that was my suspicion.

The next day I was completely adjusted to the notion of melting snow for flushing toilets and I had a fire going around the clock, inspiring me to wonder if I had the capability (or cookware) to rustle up some vittles over it. We had a fire ranging all day. I was almost sad when the power came back on although I was glad not to have to flush with melted snow water.

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Note to Self: Begin by Finding that list of things that would take up your whole day. (You see I have a word doc somewhere where I’ve listed all the self-helpy things you’re supposed to do each day, like drink eight glasses of water) There may be things to add to them like deleting Spam. This could constitute today’s Blague if nothing else. That was the now slightly edited note I made for myself for this day a few days ago—remember I do write more than one of these at a time, because some ideas don’t belong together so I assign them to another day, or rather suggest them to myself, or one of my many selves, who may or may not want to write about what was suggested. In this way, it’s more of a collage endeavor than a linear one. Some days I’m more collagist than others. Some, needing to following one long flowing line. Sometimes a combination of both.

This was actually another note to myself (I didn’t say there wasn’t more!): Imagine all day that you are in the new astrological year and pinpoint what needs to be done, daily, at what time. Oh I see what’s happening here. In the enormity of details much of my new routine, this coming astrological year, starting in less than a week, I need to have a clear understanding of the daily chores that now constitute each day; and I must figure out the “units of time” to borrow an idea from About a Boy, that I must lend to each of the chores that must be executed, some every day, some on certain days, in order to hit all (self-imposed) marks in this new, improved, efficient, self-actualized (likely heading for a nervous breakdown—I’m just kidding) new turn around the astrological wheel beginning on Tuesday.You will next go back to the Calypso stories and play editor and document what might or might now work for the OPS. You will be objective in doing this. Some things won’t work for the show but will string into something written perhaps. You will be in charge of knowing the difference. You will then go back to October 6 of this year and read through all those ideas for the same purpose. I think it will inspire you to write more Blagues. You will continue to do this even after March 21. Yes sir, will do. And thanks for the gentle way you are presenting this to me. I seem to recall you sitting around a fire with the power out during a blizzard when you “suggested” this all to me.

Oh, wait, what? There’s more? (I go on to say): It will be an interesting week this week. I want to remind you as well that besides clients and putting together a schedule for preparing next year’s Haute Astrology books that you have to schedule outreach for Starsky + Cox and outreach for Afterglow at the same time. These are on both the big To-Do list and the Afterglow to-do list which you so wisely put together a few years ago. This list this year requires social media, too, in the process. What also needs to go into the schedule is a plan for going through all the stuff in the basement and attic to sell, give or throw. Going through stuff up top or down below will also provide you with some visuals for social media. This is why we should start in the offices.

I wonder if writing can be considered “meta” if you keep slicing into it at various, not just one present, time. Multi meta? Did I just invent a new newthing. I thing I did just then invent a new word, at least: newthing? It’s somewhere between nothing and something.

This day is my mother’s birthday. She was deeply flawed and yet still the best. Anyone who met would tell you the same. She could change your way of thinking for life in just the first moments of meeting her. She was every friend, love, kid or colleague I have introduced her to’s favorite Everything. And this is by no means an exaggeration. She was instantly loved by All.

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.

Scorpio 4° (October 26)

Over the weekend S. picked out a new car and we are going to pick it up today, the first day of the absolute restart of the book work, with so much preparation now under my belt. I’ve forgotten about humor and I need to take stock of the chapters and work those mad libs harder. I am looking forward to optimism. I finally own a muscle car. It feels weird. An entire family of friends has Covid and some members, knowing they had it, got on a train and traveled through other countries. It really freaks me out how differently people handle the big things in life that come our way. I am super happy to know that we will just get away from our desks today. We “accidentally” drove up to 6A in Barnstable and drove home that way. We haven’t been on that road in so long. Quite beautiful. I really see myself in a small perfect place the door of which I can lock and travel to parts known and un. I realized today that I need to have more fun with what I’m doing. We need to be witty with all that we are doing. I am looking forward to our TV talk tomorrow. Happy Birthday Hillary.

The following blocks of text are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 1046-1050. I am reading through all of my Blagues, five per day, and posting some samples here. Now, in my sixth year of writing this Blague, by the time I get to my seventh, I will have journeyed through all the daily Blagues of my first five years. If that’s confusing I apologize. Year seven, I’ll only have to read through year six, once a day.

I can’t say I loved my father, and I was unable to trust my mother. I now know that I was right in the first place. I found out about six years ago, nearly ten years after his death, that it was quite obvious from birth that he didn’t like me. For the first eight years of my life I lived in a small apartment in Jersey City and shared a tiny room with my sister who is over five years older than myself. Twin beds tucked into corners with just a small space between them. Oh how I hate her too. She had a best friend, who was more a sister to me, who lived upstairs in the building and who moved away when I was six or seven. And yet, rekindling my relationship with her via social media six years ago, she revealed much to me. That my father didn’t like me. That he was extremely upset by my existence because I wasn’t a butch child; not the alpha-male that he considered himself to be. He was truly wrong about that too.

I was right in the second place too. My mother, whom I loved, was not to be trusted. And I knew this early in life. They say you don’t realize when trauma is happening, but that something triggers in later in life. For me later in life meant like ten years old. When shipped off to a rental summer house for the summer, my mother, sister and I; my father staying up north “to work,” I remember one night, my mother had a bunch of her friends over, all of whom lived in the same apartement building in Jersey City, from which we fled to a tony suburb two years before—she said “let’s show them what we do” and we proceeded to make-out to the verbal horror of her friends that shocked me into realization that, though I can’t remember a single incident as to the “what we do” prior to that, I have a shameful, sharp remembrance of performing it for her friends. A completed cycle of trauma before I turned eleven. I always wonder if this made me vulnerable to all that happened, starting at age eleven, which would only support my father’s presuppositions.

Am I, one eternally wonders, a self-fulfilled prophesy in the flesh? Sure why not. It’s so easy to be poetic about the things that happen to us and to reveal them, thusly, suggesting it makes one interesting, that we all have extraordinary stories. But really, though this and other traumas may have cycled through me before teenage, the tragedy of them continue in me all my life. In my self-indulgence, in my isolation, in my alienation of anyone who might be a friend, something I have never successfully been able to pick. I am a split person or a dual person or a person or all of the above.

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This has been a tough couple of days. Any kind of things involving people’s health is always a bit of a pickle, emotionally. Growing up the male Katharine Hepburn I always thought I’d face physical challenges with a yankee resolve; then again, I thought I would swim every day off a dock all year long. Neither of these things seem to have become my eventual reality; so I know I have a long way to go in this area, and in others. I know this. But then I return to the Kate Hepburn thing or anything stiff-upper-lippy. What is the alternative, I ask you. It has to be thus. We must be strident in the face of adversity. There is no other way. I hate medications, I will either endure the damage or make changes where changes might mean something. Otherwise I’m pretty fine, floating; and I will face whatever may come. Doing so is an expression of the dignity of being alive.

Our friend Taylor said that “Comparison is violence” and I not only agree; but I would suggest it is a self-inflicted sort. I may have written this very sentence a few Blagues back but, to be honest, writing so much in so short a spate of time, really is a blur. And yet I’m proud of the quantity, if not the quality. And I feel there might be some gems of wisdom to be found in the silt of the past six weeks playing so-called catch-up which I realize was more than that. Yes, I got derailed in October receiving news that, whether you label it “devestating” or not devestated me. I was feeling so happy and so optimistic about the representation we were being offered. “Let’s have some fun,” said the top agent who was “interested in representing” us back in May—and then the slow silent descent of six months ending with an abrupt…”Unfortunately…” Oh how I loathe that word. And I’m sad to have discovered how easily it was to derail me. In my defense, I swore off all agents, lawyers, managers as best I could, dating back at least six years; because I never again wanted to find myself in a position where someone could take me off my game with just that one word, ususally uttered after 5PM on a Friday.

So many cowards. And so many rich cowards to boot.

I don’t want to compare, as I say, because of the violence factor but, really, most of the people I know that are very wealthy (but for a few poignant exceptions with whom I have close bonds) are really just venal and vapid in equal measure. I surely do not want to be like them. Ever. I want to be one of the good eggs that gets his. And I have. And I’m not greedy. And it’s not that I want more for more sake. I actually want it for security and peace of mind. And so I must again take up my warrior spear and set upon making a difference, for myself, and for my loved one, in this world. I do just have the one—that wasn’t a typo, despite what the daily sign-off (below) of this Blague might suggest.

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With a heady Pisces man encounter and the watching of the Mr. Rogers special on PBS I am awash in masculine-fish understanding. Well, I should preface by saying that Pisces man is probably the most truly unknowable character in the human zodiacal Pantheon. Typing that triggered a dream. Something about not using upper case in something that called for it. Not a very impactful dream. We once had a contest amongst friends whereby we recounted our most boring dream ever. One friend had what seemed like an epic dream in which she was just vaccuming. She might have wond the contest or I did. My contribution: I once dreamed that I was asleep and not dreaming.

I love the fact that Mr. Rogers (whom I really didn’t watch much as a kid) had Margaret Hamilton the Wicked Witch on. I actually do remember that episode. I think she was also already Cora who sold coffee. I suppose she was so universally frightening to children that it warranted an episode on demystifying the witch thing. But he didn’t have to go and write a song about it called, or deliver the message that, “Witches are Never Real”, because, hello, here I am. And look I know that many of my downtown East Village friends and performers and defacto social crowd consider themselves witches and talk about it and say blessed be and all that…but they don’t have my abilities. Nor do they even know (or actually care to know) that I possess the actual thing of which they wrap themselves in a cartoon-cloak version.

It’s just one of the many reveals about me which have yet to happen. I am and have done more things than most who get praised, obsessively, by those who love to worship. I hope that made sense. Not all talent is gods-given. There are acutely cultivated people out there (many of whom just happen to be born under the sign of Taurus) who have worked so hard on their persona and on little bits of ability, blowing them out to extreme proportion, that it disguises the fact they might not really be very singers or writers or actors or comedians. And yet they succeed via their decades long cultivation and I think that is as important if not more important than natural talent. Those who have both the natural sort and the genius for self-cultivation really make true stars. But they aren’t necessarily also witches. It’s just a little fairy dust thrown on top, an affectation, like a love for Stevie Nicks. Don’t get me wrong—Stevie is fabulous—but we really shouldn’t label her a genius.

As often happens, as I’m writing this, a dream I had last night bubbles to the surface. I think I was in a van or a bus as would travel a band or performance troupe and the conversation swung to what a true genius Christine McVie is; (in the dream) how she was a unique composer who innovatively pieced together compositions. In reality her songs are very simple but surely among the most best-selling ones in Fleetwood Mac. They were catchy. And she’s a bigger Mac than her husband in the equation of the musical group. But she’s an Ethel, a Bea Benadaret, the beta female in the mix, by virtue of Stevie’s love of the limelight, surely, but also her recklessness. I remember friends seeing the band during the Tusk tour while I was still in high school and reporting back that Stevie just sat on the edge of the stage staring into space all during the show. It was when they were on the wane, for sure, seeming corny and tired compared to Squeeze and Elvis Costello and other pop entities coming onto the scene. But I do believe that Stevie just might be a witch. Grace Slick called her a white witch. I’m going to say gray, brown, tan beige or putty.

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Oh my goodness I was looking at my collective To-Do list and in a world where I thought I was ahead of the game of 2018 I suddenly feel ever so slightly behind the eight ball, though I am aware, that both perspectives are illusions. I am interested in getting more out of every day, naturally, as spring approached. I am often derailed with regret for the things I didn’t continue to pursue—guitar, tennis, et al. But self-recrimination is not only a trap in itself, it’s also kind of narcisisstic at its core. Look I don’t live in a hut and have to walk six miles every day for water to feed my family of nine. I have the luxury of my problems and wistful thinking. However, and you might relate to this, it is often difficult know if I’m being hard on myself or not hard enough. When I look around I feel nobody works harder than I do. Then again, others might feel I live the life of Riley. Neither or both may be true.

There is much heavy lifting to do this year and I really want to do it. I have learned my lesson about disappointment and it’s almost better to expect to feel it than to toppled by a position of high optimism. The trick is to be optimistic and not get taken off your game, despite the doings of others. I do think I’ll feel better, next week, when I can go through to-do lists and brand books and planning strategies and all that occurs in the course of a day in the life of a person that has a dozen would-be giant projects going at once. This sort of grand re-visioning is for the birds; and I truly never want to have to do it again. The spoon must be moved. And I must reserve this time for more purely creative pursuits.

Starting on the Ides of March, a happy-sad day on a number of accounts, I will be working my way through some creative ideas in what will be a week-long slamming together of a project. Yes, that’s right, I’m giving myself another goal to achieve. This time in the short-term. It might prove to be something of incredible importance, not just in its own creation, but in the manner it will be created. It’s an experiement in actualization which, if it works, I can share with clients and friends. It’s hard to put into words the theory of the method as of yet but, bear with me, it has something to do with creating objects and putting them down onto a desk in front of you. I know that sounds rather basic but it may require cut-outs and cartoons and the like with little snippets of words here and there to get the out of the abstract realm and into the real in a matter of one week.

Yet another reason to beware the Ides of March.

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I miss blue books, you know, those exam books we used to write into at university. It’s the same reason I miss stationers, especially the French kind. I think it would be so hot to have a stationers and collectibles as part of the retail model for the design stores. If such items were both a draw and an accent for customers. But, like so many ideas, somebody else would have to actually work there.

The so-called “downtown performance scene”, once literally associated with NYC and no more conceptual a reference, has changed more drastically, probably in its history, in the years I’ve been working in it, and for a number of reasons. Many of the popular artists who had been performing on the fringes have seen that fringe become mainstream. Meanwhile there is simply more appetite in other cities, now, besides NYC for this genre (which isn’t really any one genre at all); and many artists themselves comprise a social circle, if not a circuit, while living. in Austin, Seattle, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland(s), Boston, Philadelphia, New Orleans. I believe our work with Afterglow, preserving Provincetown as an incubator, working with artists from various American places, and some foreign ones as well, champion artists that have been on the fringe, has helped cultivate this cultural shift, along with other festivals, arts centers, theaters, museums and universities, many of which are in loose contact with each other. Then there are those, the younger ones, who were on the cusp of this cultural shift and immediately spring-boarded into zeitgeist via television and film and commercial “festivals” which really should be termed something else.

I remember, when I was learning to write semi-professionally I think my biggest challenge was to take each thought in turn, to separate them out, and let thoughts simply build through the blocks of letters, characters. I still see vestiges of my struggle with that when I write. I also write several paragraphs, often, at the same time. I’m sure that wasn’t something you knew, would have guessed, or even thought was a thing. But it is.

I don’t want to rush. Rushing is for losers. The tortoise not the hare is the proverbial winner. It’s all very Saturn-Cronos energy of endurance. Endora, as we’ve oftain said, is the pop culture Ops-Rhea. Cronos and his scythe. Old Father, and Mother, Time. Maurice and Endura, forever clad in tuxedo and gown, like the classic ruling couple of the Golden Age of the Titans; and too, they are Oberon and Titania.

Anyway you never saw them rushing. I’m ready to be a late bloomer. Title for a book: The Baby Bloomer Generation. Don’t steal that title—it’s now officially my IP.

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.

Scorpio 3° (October 25)

I’ve been feeling really spacey lately and I’m not sure to what I attribute this but I’m just focusing on health and feel good and keeping my less favorable habits in check. Yesterday was fun in a sense that I just chilled into the weekend vibe. Found a Steve Coogan film to watch. He really is one of my favorite on screen creatives of all time. The film, called Greed, isn’t great but it felt important. Last night at two a.m. a door slammed waking us both up. That was fun. I really didn’t get much more sleep after that, just watching stupid Brittania (wow it is bad). I made a lovely cassava penne with red onion, anchovy and radicchio for dindin last evening and today I’m roasting a chicken and potatoes (lefty penne for lunch). I do also need to get a jump on making a chowder for the coming week. I have to find someone else from whom to purchase wood because the usual fellow I find rude and I don’t want to suffer fools anymore in this lifetime. As it is I can’t quite believe that I have to live under such a cloud with farmer fuck, but there you have it. To be in a little house in Maine, to lock the door and head back to our apartment in Paris. That is what I would choose for myself at this juncture and I could just go from one book to the next book. Writing is and always has been my ticket out of normal town and I need to get out more now than ever. It is baffling tome that the stupid fuck on the tractor doesn’t have a clue about the laws of this world, the laws that were in place during the pandemic and the unbelievable arrogance of being an ignoramus during times like these. But he shall learn rather the hard way I think. I am harping on this I realize but that is where my brain is today I’m afraid and that’s how I need to filter through and out this situation.

The following blocks of text are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 1041-1045. 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.

Everything is a thing. We used to say that about certain people. You know, with her, everything is a thing. And I remember it being a common trait amongst people, at least in the literally gay nineties when never a minute went by without thinking about AIDS and the people we loved and the people we lost and the people we slept with in the past. With luck I can write three more posts in the next half hour is what my brain is saying. You see, for over the past month I have been catching up on writing this Blague. And one might easily ask one why if one wanted. The truth is that I sense I need this Blague to be complete and to be great. I have been writing it for three full years, nigh on entering four, and I’m fucking proud of the fact I dare say.

Cue exorcism:

So I know you had famous parents and that your siblings parlayed it into even bigger fortune, but we don’t feel bad for you. And we certainly can’t understand it as the root to your problems which may be lodged elsewhere. What we do know is that we don’t care, we’ve never cared, and we just liked you. So you can stop testing us (and everyone?) and no this isn’t an open letter to Angelica Torn cum Angelica Page. Torn, Page, oh Jesus fucking Christ, I’m just now getting that this is a joke. Hominy Grits. Smokey porky smells on the chill. I can do everything, Jesus. You were all about self-belief. I can walk on water you said—must have—somewhere before you did it. That would only seem logical or poetical or a minimalistally beautiful new word to express both things at once.

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Who is Scarponi? It’s a name coming through. Sometimes I even psychic myself. So I just looked it up and it’s Michael Scarponi who died last year. I’m not saying that’s who’s coming through I’m saying that’s who popped up in a search. But he did die recently. And he was born 9/25 while i’m 9/28. It isn’t related. I know that I’m grasping. But it’s all been grasping or last gasping or however you want to look at it. I have spent the last month or more catching up on these Blagues which is all fine and dandy. But I have in many ways ran out of things to say. And so I should say nothing. But that’s not really my style.

Yesterday I reached out to Gary Lennon. It was weird because I was writing a couple a days back about how I auditioned for Hair in the early 1990s, for the writers of the show. I met Gary Lennon when he was the boyfriend of Jerome Ragni who died not long after we met. It was in Hoboken and we met in the bathroom of the restaurant where I worked. We were both younger and cuter and we just kind of took a shine to one another. Gary became a playwright in his own right and is now a television producer and writer. Anyway, at the time I was edtior of a magazine that was for and all about the club kids and nightlife. I just found out yesterday that Gary is the show runner for a new show that Ru Paul and J.J. Abrams are doing focusing on those years in NYC. And another acquaintance from back in the day Fenton Bailey, whose company is World of Wonder, is also involved. So I reached out to both Fenton and Gary to say that I would love to write for the show or whatever. It was a knee-jerk thing but I have been wanting, as Stella has, to do some writing for television. So we shall see what pans out. Could be an interesting direction for us. But, as with so many things right now in life, I feel a little unready if that makes sense. I feel as if I must get down to the nitty gritty again and clear out and just feel a bit more sane and steady on my feet, if you catch my driftola.

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There is something to be said for optimism in all its forms. As I sit here in my cold office in early March I feel myself a hinge that’s turning. I can easily look at this past year as having taken something of a toll, but I also see that my recovery is easy and should be rather speedy, that I haven’t given too much into winter and it’s frosty reduction. I’m also incredibly impressed with the fact that I have moved the spoon pretty readily but now I have to put all the pieces together which, really, shouldn’t be so hard.

In these next eight or nine Blagues I am going to have to express (to myself) what my days are going to be like under the new routine. I know that I will need to Blague daily so to never get into this situation again. But I also have to “man my station” in regard to all the social media and so forth I will need to create. I will need to strip my walls of paper and map out what might be the structure of a show which I really must begin to write by Monday if I’m going to have this enterprise be successful. I so don’t want to disappointment myself this year.

I fear that I will repeat the patterns of others’ abuse of me, self-inflicted, you know. That’s how it happens. I am proud that I stood up for myself in situations that were not sustainable with others; but, as a result, I tend to isolate and that is just self-punishment really. So I have to make an effort to stay in the picture. My confidence isn’t exactly at its peak at present so I need to do some work on the score as well. I’ll get there. It’s not always easy, but I will get there. I really want to prioritize health in the coming months. It really is time for me to go deeper in that realm. If only because I’ve been a tad lax for too long. Amazing that my health can be as good as it is. Although certain things tend to be all over the map. I still harbor the teen-age notion that I can just chill for a week and lose ten pounds. I mean it is amazing that my body still has some semblance of snapping back, but it surely isn’t as reliable as it used to be that’s for sure.

Still, I’m doing okay. And any minute now I’ll be able to take my daily walks and do my daily hot yoga. It will be three years since the accident where we were rearended on the highway, our car totalled, and our bodies put through such a fucking ringer. And the insurance company tries to keep us from any kind of recompense. We will sue that young woman and we will make her an example of the evils of texting and driving. She has messed with Starsky + Cox, after all, and I pity the poor fool who does that.

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I’m not going to lie to you: there are certain things about getting old that are just plain old fucking depressing. And things that were okay or used to be cute aren’t really that much any more. Not everything but certainly somethings. I don’t think the way we live is particularly cute at this point; then again, we make ever place we live beautiful and just have that natural magical vibe about us; but when you don’t prioritize material existence you tend not to have a lot of material trappings. And this is something else I’d like to see change right about now. I try not to be so blatantly honest in writing what should be pretty public material. That said, I don’t have much of a readership and, really, why should I. So like most things it’s all in my head. The fact of the matter is, though, I must say, somehow this time may feel different.

When I was a kid spending summers at the Jersey shore I can’t explain to you how desolate and beautiful Spring Lake was. All the giant mansions from the gilded era were there and yet they were like silent monuments, dormant gods looking on streets, each one a pantheon of architectural splendour. I could ride my bike endlessly through the town and just stare at all the buildings. Later, when I fell in with a year-round crowd there in high school and after I would visit some of these homes which were just unbelievable. But talk about a place in the past I’ve been passed out of. Jeez you’ve no idea. Now houses are five million. It’s so sad and so sick. There are enough boring people making boatloads of money who can afford to live like this. Back then all sorts of people, from various brackets, could still participate on some level, and all still go to the same public Manasquan high school. But no more.

There was an old movie theater in Spring Lake. I saw American Grafitti there when I was in, what?, fifth grade? Is that possible? The film came out in 1973, but maybe I saw it later? Gosh I dunno. It was definitely one of my favorite records. I think I saw it later, in the summer of 1975. Anway there were hardly any people in the cinema. And there were no people walking around Spring Lake. I think there was an ice cream shop near the cinema too. I can see wide slate sidewalks. The seventies were so beautiful and so anonymous. I loved the silent creepiness of it all. Faded grandeur. That’s what these former towns with their mansions were in the early seventies at the Jersey Shore, in Spring Lake, where still faces peeked through their Irish lace curtains as they silently slipped their martinis hiding from a world that would soon have nothing to do with them.

=====

I’m not going to lie to you: there are certain things about getting old that are just plain old fucking depressing. And things that were okay or used to be cute aren’t really that much any more. Not everything but certainly somethings. I don’t think the way we live is particularly cute at this point; then again, we make ever place we live beautiful and just have that natural magical vibe about us; but when you don’t prioritize material existence you tend not to have a lot of material trappings. And this is something else I’d like to see change right about now. I try not to be so blatantly honest in writing what should be pretty public material. That said, I don’t have much of a readership and, really, why should I. So like most things it’s all in my head. The fact of the matter is, though, I must say, somehow this time may feel different.

When I was a kid spending summers at the Jersey shore I can’t explain to you how desolate and beautiful Spring Lake was. All the giant mansions from the gilded era were there and yet they were like silent monuments, dormant gods looking on streets, each one a pantheon of architectural splendour. I could ride my bike endlessly through the town and just stare at all the buildings. Later, when I fell in with a year-round crowd there in high school and after I would visit some of these homes which were just unbelievable. But talk about a place in the past I’ve been passed out of. Jeez you’ve no idea. Now houses are five million. It’s so sad and so sick. There are enough boring people making boatloads of money who can afford to live like this. Back then all sorts of people, from various brackets, could still participate on some level, and all still go to the same public Manasquan high school. But no more.

There was an old movie theater in Spring Lake. I saw American Grafitti there when I was in, what?, fifth grade? Is that possible? The film came out in 1973, but maybe I saw it later? Gosh I dunno. It was definitely one of my favorite records. I think I saw it later, in the summer of 1975. Anway there were hardly any people in the cinema. And there were no people walking around Spring Lake. I think there was an ice cream shop near the cinema too. I can see wide slate sidewalks. The seventies were so beautiful and so anonymous. I loved the silent creepiness of it all. Faded grandeur. That’s what these former towns with their mansions were in the early seventies at the Jersey Shore, in Spring Lake, where still faces peeked through their Irish lace curtains as they silently slipped their martinis hiding from a world that would soon have nothing to do with them.

====

So what to make of Roseanne and Murphy Brown coming back with Will & Grace and perhaps there are other shows, but if my writing days for the Styles section of The New York Times taught me anything it is: you only need three examples to build a story.

I am reminded of the recent-back where I wrote about the need for all to be poetry. It was stated so poetically, and rather through rather than by, that it must have gone directly to my supraconscious to rattle around for a week or so before registering as a thought in my frontal regions. Speaking of frontal regions, sometimes you just want to sit home and sip something relaxing and trim your balls, such as they are. I know I do. Weekend alone stuff to do.

Meanwhile the whole thing is like watching reality television. The president and the porn star. Tacky characters. I’m so bored that I want to change the channel, but that’s what they want us to do. The real Kim Jong-un has now become the South Park characterization of his father. I’m so ronery. Only this isn’t funny or genius it’s boring in the most literal sense of the word. And that’s the desired effect. They want to bore us into submission. Resistance is….I have to look up “opposite of bored,” and you won’t believe the leading thought form!: Entertained. Entertained. So I’m back on my rant about entertainers. But antonyms also include: interest, energy, excitement, liveliness, enjoyment. It’s not enough to laugh, we must laugh, think and act!. Entertainment and activism truly must go together now.

Note to self: What would it look like to set up a gig for yourself and/or Stella at a place like the Preservation Hall. I do get the sense that I need a microphone in my hand—stat. This might also be the rantings of someone who is sitting home on a late Sunday afternoon watching television news (which isn’t great on Sunday) starring down the barrel of bottle of Languedoc. It does feel like something of a luxury. We are supposed to get a storm tomorrow and whether it is the actual ions or something more metaphorical, I do feel something gathering. Which is a nice paradoxical counterpoint to the fact that I am really grasping at straws a bit for something to write that might be of universal interest in addition to ticking the box on self-indulgent mutterings.

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.

Scorpio 2° (October 24)

I crashed so early last night on the couch I was so exhausted and I didn’t really lose any sleep in the process of making it to bed. It’s far less stressful now on the home front with lawyers in place for protection, still I did send a long a little note of inquiry about having a conversation about the awful accident due to negligence that occurred. I did a whole bunch of tidying and otherwise continued to get my brain around a few things. I started separating the herbs in the garden into a few categories and am going to try and bring them inside in the coming week or so. There are many tricky bits to living in this present environment, but I think if it is all faced head on there will be very little to fear. It really is just a matter of embracing new cycles of life, whichh is the most appealing thing. And buying ourselves freedom and stopping giving away all our resources to someone else. I’m struggling to put words into works today for some reason. My e key is still sticking which is part of the annoyance            eeeeeeee  so frustrating I think it’s going great then I realize I have typed a bunch of words with no eeees in them. Anyway, I am keeping my head above water (making a wave when I can). I do feel awfully alone, I must say. I have not cultivated the sort of friendships that sustain me I realize. And I just feel that we are all so disposable to each other now. It saddens me. But what you going to do about it. It’s the thing about being someone that nobody sees as belonging to any kind of community. Last spring after it was clear Biden had the nomination I made a comment about how I hoped the Bernie folks in particular would get on board just like other Dems who wanted Warren or Buttigieg or whomever didn’t get the nomination. I woke up the next day to a vile hateful hurtful message from someone who, ok, wasn’t a close friend, but with whom I was quite friendly and with whom I have mutual good friend. They didn’t care how they attacked me. Recently I wrote to this person to say I was wrong for just letting that go and that I was kicking them off my social media. This seems to have caused yet another piling on of cance culture. I don’t know why it is that others can get away with saying awful shit but when I stand up for myself I get universally ostracized. I’ve noticed that my mutual friend aformentioned has been m.i.a. as well. I can’t look at FB anymore. I think I will take a three month hiatus and see what happens. I have so much to do and so many spells to cast I really can’t afford the distractions any more.

The following blocks of text are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 1036-1040. 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.

It’s nine am and I’ve already had breakfast, and prepped lunch and dinner. I pulled the two of swords, tentatively. Ever notice when you’re kind of hesitant you don’t totally align with the card you flip; however you must accept it to be part of your experience. At least when you do when you’re me which means psychic, witchy or crazy or all of the above. I like the two of swords though in that it favors the psychic mind. The character is blindfolded to increase second sight; the moon and rippling water portray the influence and power of subtle vibrations. We are all of two minds, the tricky rationalizing one and the one that is powered, from the inside out, by our emotions, to which our mind should be a messenger. That is one of the central tenets of Starsky + Cox’s own brand of metaphysics I dare say.

======

Gates is pleading guilty which is so great and it won’t be long now. The grand ironi is: it’s all so obvious and predictable. there really is no dramatic tension searching for evidence or anthing of that nature. it’s probably the easeiest case Mueller has ever had. Imagine that. Just some big, dumb unfolding of the facts involving the most doltish looking characters ever. I mean that shot that clip they keep showing on television of Manforte walking and pushing camera’s out of his way; he is so creepy and so familiar a character, the perpetually nervous bully. And a dolt. There was a new shot of him last night getting into a car to take him back to home/arrest and he hits his head when he gets into the car. It’s just unbelievably doltish. And Trump is exactly the same only blond or whatever that is. It’s been pale copper lately. Remember when it was white and before that piss yellow? Dolt. With that melting Mussolini of a mug on him. Everything about him is downturned. But honestly you could make the same doll and dye one’s hair blond and one’s hair brown and you could market them as Trump and Manafort dolls without doing much else. Maybe give them different color ties.

I cannot wait to watch it all come tumbling down and tumble down it will. We just have to keep him away from the button, that’s the only major caveat I see. But, I think, if proceedings are brought against him there will be people in place to protect us from the get go. I think that he is so universally disliked, even by his appointees, that they will side with the American people. Those in congress who have sided with him this whole time are going to get their come uppance, for sure.

Anyway for some reason I can’t come up with a tagline—and I want one—for this Cosmic Blague. You may not all know that blague means joke in French. (I can’t even type the word France without going off on another tangent about how much I can’t wait to get there. And I want to hit home the idea that the Universe is Funny or It’s a Funny Universe or that Jokes Told By A Funny Universe or maybe The Jokes of a Stand-Up Universe. The Universe Does Stand-Up. Jokes From a Comic Universe. It’s All A Big Joke. From a Funny Universe. Anyway I’m working on it.

It is all about writing stories and then stringing them together. I am definitely a storyteller but I haven’t shared much of my personal life with others except for very few intimates in my life, those I can probably count on one hand. I have a lot of friends but I don’t share the way others do. And I’ve never really shared much on a stage. Perhaps a story or two from my real life, so called. If anything, through the character of Quinn Cox, which used to be far more pretend than he is now since there is now no difference between the two me’s like there was at the start when I thought Quinn Cox would be a mask, a smoke-screen, through which I could engage with the public but the persona instead seeped into me and even what used to be the pretend things about Quinn Cox are now the real things about myself. It is strange.

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

Okay so here is the story of auditioning for a touring company of Hair. I lived in Hoboken in the late 1980s before moving to the West Village in the early 90s. While in Hoboken I worked at a restaurant called Lady Janes some nights and the guys who wrote Hair, Rado and Ragni used to come in for steak. I heard they were planning a tour so I rehearsed a song, Donna, from the score, but who knows what that sounded like. I had listened to the record over and over and over when I was in seventh grade—it was part of my sexual awakening as well as my show-tune obsession—but you know how you think the words are one thing only to find out later they weren’t…..?

Well of course I rehearsed with the correct words but when I got into the room something happened. I was already not very good and everyone else there was super legit. I remember this one African American guy who went before me who had like the voice you know the voice. Anyway I was so nervous that I reverted back to my seventh grade understanding of the words. They visbily winced, the auditioners, who included the show writers. I can’t stress that enough. Anyway there is a high note that is hit in full voice by Ragni on the original Broadway recording which was right in that spot where my voice turns to falsetto. It’s a high note at the top of a crescendo and it is held a really long time. I hit it. I could feel the architecture of my face struggling under the strain, like my cheek bones would conceivably crack from the force. And I hit it full voice much to the visible approval of the team. Rado even made a triumph fist pump upward and shouted something like, “that’s it!” or “there you’ve got it!” and I felt so good and that maybe I might even get called back. I didn’t, which was just as well. By the time I had left the building, auditioners know the kind, in the West 40s, I had completely lost my voice. I couldn’t make a sound. I had blown it out so completely. It didn’t full come back for another two weeks.

====

Do you remember whispering “I’ll never forget you” into my ear before flying out of a rehearsal suite, an entire floor of the Coopers Lybrund building, and my life in 1992, I wonder. You came into audition for Nina in the Seagull, a part that, you had no idea, had already been promised (shhh) to Laura Linney who didn’t have to audition at all. I was the reader, playing Constantin, for all the young actresses who came in. I didn’t read with all of them but I remember that Marisa Tomei and Cynthia Nixon and a slew of others auditioned. But I don’t remember much of anything from those few days except your audition, which I don’t quite recall but for different reasons that, if your reaction was true at the time, you will still remember and understand.

You came in and you were wearing something like a Betsy Johnson floral print dress, in rayon, that buttoned down the front. It might have had sort of a rounded collar. And you had on kind of big sneakers or running shoes. You were far more a tomboy than I would have imagined and you had cropped your hair short in a sort of 1930s retro-depression-era bob that was popular at the time. You could have worked at the Grange Hall in the West Village. Anyway, if you remember as you vowed to do, you will know what happened next despite the fact is was one big half-hour striking of lightning and then the aftermath.

For brevity, now—because I will be elaborating later—this is what happened. You bounced into the room and sat down facing me and Tony Randall and the play’s director Marshall Mason and Marshall Mason’s manservant major domo, Rand. There was some comment about how you seemed frank or forthright or something, and you said you came from a family of boys and that you had balls basically. You were radiating light—a truly beautiful being. Then suddenly—let’s read, came the hand clap, and it was explained to you that I was Bill or Liam or William or who remembers now what they called me then (a tangential story I’ll put in tomorrow’s), were to read with you, on our feet, and we were to do the final scene between the characters, the real killer, at the end. And then, if you do remember, you tell me what happened.

We were off and we were absorbed into the characters and each other and some glorious alchemy and beatificence. I know we scarcely looked at the scripts which seemed to fall out of our hands as we spun, clung, flung and flew around each other as if we were on orbital tracks so precise and safe, and the Chekhov words picked up true emotion as they poured out of our beings at one another. And you know that this scene ends with Nina embracing Constantin before flying out of his life forever; and so you flew from the room, wailing, leaving Tony, Marshall, Rand and me stunned, speechless; whereupon they collective leered at me with the silent words: Go after her. And I flew from the room, all of this happening in an instant, to find you at the end of the hallway with I supposed your handler. And you were weeping uncontrollably and through it I caught your eye, and you came running toward me, in that print dress and plump white sneakers, and you threw your arms around me and you whispered in my ear: I will never forget you. And then you flew again down the hall and out of my life. And then something overwhelmed me.

My body went into some kind of shock or seizure, my body morphing, as it once had (yet another story pin in that), in an Altered States fashion, and I was writhing and stumbling and moaning but not crying because, one realizes later, that the way in which my emotion that had been inspired and elicited was so intense and total and so seismically carthartic that it was getting stuck in my instrument you might say and i went down the hall and I was in complete emotional and phyiscal indeed muscular visceral agony that was surely unprecedented and would not end well or easily when suddenly I was jumped from behind and effeciently thrown onto my stomach to the floor and I felt the full weight of Rand’s body as he crouched on me and sought to roll, as with an invisible rolling pin, this invisible thing which had bubbled up so big as to now be trapped in my emotional, energetic guts. Apparently he had done this before. So I guess it wasn’t that extraordinary, this was a thing that happened to people, to readers, to actors when the reality of the moment that is spiritually bound inside a play invites the beings speaking the words and like high priests and priestesses they can explode all at once. Rand called it “breakthrough.”

I could and probably will go on.

====

I think I shall simply whistle in the graveyard once again and cut and post some sill thing I’ve written elsewhere to fill a space, a void but then, yes, something stirs and I’ve already cut and pasted so what now? I’ll tell you what I’ll tell you what. You will type your way through this measure and you will take your non-metaphorical lumps by way of certain and swift madness, the only way to have it so, and so it goes.

There is that same “project grant” from MCC the timing of which has changed up a bit such that it is for the 13th month period of June 2018 through July 1 2019. I want to spin the Glow fest we did at Oberon into “moveable fest” concept and do it a different place any given year. Or maybe not. We would do the next/first one in Boston anyway (since we technically did Cambridge last time) and can play it by ear.

But it makes me realize: we need an ongoing mechanism IF so and so likes doing the fundraising kind of work, which most people don’t. It would be such an asset to have someone to liaise both with the spaces we are going to be soliciting—including museums and universities—for your piece, but with potential local banks and other business entities that might give shekels to our efforts which will (fingers crossed) already be bearing the NEFA label, helping target the philanthropic set with me!

So I’ll be meeting columnist/writer for the Globe next Monday and also conducting first official meeting.

That happened. And I say so in red.

But I bet that, by the time I cut and paste this into the Blague it won’t be red and you’ll have no idea what I’m talking about. It wont be read and it won’t be red.

=========

Well I dare say, if this is going to happen, whereby I have to write the next nine blogs in forty minutes that gives me about four minutes per. So I’m just going to keep on going and try to instantaeously link thoughts i most wish to express with this experience. Ready steady go. What do I think about Spirituality. Or what is my idea of it. Well I can say that my first sense of spirityality would have been had in two ways; only at the time I wouldn’t have realized this. The obvious form of spirituality is me going to church. Now, and I mean this most sincerely when i say. I have always romanticized my early Catholicism because I associated it with my sister going to the shcool attached to the church through fourth grade she only wnet to public shool for firth grade when i went for kindergarten.

That summer we had a waterballoon fight and Robert Walker tripped my sister who had the last standing waterballoon and she fell, went face down onto the pavement, biting into her lip which needed stitches and was hugely swelled and crusty for quite awhile. I imagine my sister already being trepidatious going to a new school, already the outsider, set up for self destruction.

But I was talking about my brand of Spirituality. Oh I dunno. I think where I was going was the fact that we probably, my sister and I, walked to church together a few times and I went to Sunday school; presumably, my parents went to church either before I can remember or never but likely kept up some kind of pretense. I do recall being in our church in Jersey City, to which we could walk, me in some kind of Patrick Dennis spacesuit, my crazy Irish small redhaired Auntie Mame, how much I loved my mother. So much.

But look I have to write a whole bunch of these so I’m going to move on now….

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.