Virgo 23° (September 14)

The bulk of below past Blagues are still from a trip to Islesboro some years ago. I’m saddened in the present about the way the world is treating my friend across the pond. The cancel culture is so sweeping and so malinformed. People want others to fulfill their negative vision and so they don’t listen to what is actually being said. I don’t have time to care about it. People need others to vilify and they just jump on others without giving any thought to the reality of the situation. I am going to do my damnest to get myself together. I need to face facts.

The following blocks of text are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 841-845. 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 am truly happy we stayed an extra day; we hadn’t planned on it. We awoke first thing Monday morning all packed and ready to go and by the time we finished our coffee we were slightly unpacking having moved rooms. We went to Belfast for the morning have missed a ferry and waiting ninety minutes. It wasn’t a fun trip into town but it was enough to hit home the fact that we love it in Belfast for sure. And it is definitely an affordable reality. I so need a change. I so need to say goodbye to the past in a significant way. I will always love Provincetown and the Cape but I think perhaps I’ve had my fill of both for awhile. And I can always visit for festivals; anyway I am there for another year at least. I really want this to be a fruitful time.

Here at Kirstie’s I’ve learned one thing and that is that it is good to have specific taste. I don’t necessarily love her taste but I love the strength and potency of it. I am at a place where I need to make choices. I feel like I used to have an aesthetic and now I’m not terribly sure. It’s been so long since I’ve exercised it and I’ve always had to comprise for money. I’m not doing that this time around. I’d rather have no furniture or belongings than have things that don’t match me.

Last night in Islesboro. Trying not to lose this feeling. Must keep it with me henceforth. I really know I love it up here; I just have to find the perfect place on the water like this and I will explore and explore until I find it.

[then a week went by whereby I returned “home” only to be made sick to my stomach by the usual dealings. I am indeed keeping that trip to Maine alive in my mind and spirit. I know I need to find some corner of that wonderful cool-aired world. I’m so saddened and sickened by what is happening in Provincetown. The gentrification is out of control.]

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

I think when I get through this year of Blagues I’ll go back to year one and really dig back into those Sabian Symbols. I need to be quiet and write even if it kills me. I say that because the isolation of writing is not the healthiest thing for me. The fact is that if one writes fiction, good or bad, there are no rules to follow really. But if one writes non-fiction there are cases and arguments to be built, predetermined payoffs to achieve. It’s quite daunting. I have never figured out how to take the easy way in life. And I have never had lightning strike the way others have. I was not born into a family with a grandfather who gave me a house when I was twenty. I worked a thousand jobs and did what I could to get this far. I’m proud of myself but now I want more and less. I want more of the kind of payoff I’ve seen my friends enjoy and I want it to happen more easefully. I’m sick to death of being an adjunct professor in the school of hard knocks.

Any form of poverty will wear you down. We are all impoverished on some level. But I realize that doing what I do non-profit puts me in the position of walking around with a begging bowl which casts me in the light as beggar and I’m not. I make a decent living and dedicate half my year and time and energy to working on this non-profit. I get very little help in this I must say. Actually I get none. I’m tired of struggling to make things happen here. Provincetown has proved time and again that it cares more about realtors than it does about artists.

We’ve tried to save Provincetown from itself but it doesn’t want to be saved. It wants to have crappy remakes of Broadway plays which only speak to the vanity of it’s producer/performers. It wants rich boys in shorts of many colors with dogs of myriad tiny scale clutched into their chests. That’s what this place wants. In some way that’s what every place wants. Where are the true bohemian enclaves? Where have they gone? Where is art being created as a genuine experience. Fascist regimes used to attack the artists and intellectuals first but this current politcal and social culture doesn’t need to attack the artists and intellectuals because there aren’t any. There are brands that make TV shows and movies and music and clothing lines for the home shopping network.

People think that the problem is in the White House, which is only partly true. But it’s also in your house. You know that place that isn’t good or big enough for you. The one that makes you say you deserve more. The one from whence you sit watching doggy videos. The artists I knew back in the day, the 80s and early 90s, most of them made it. And then they lost their artistry. Now they are logos on the back of other people’s jackets. There is no art. There is no poetry. There are just would-be screenplays. Even the live shows that happen in downtown NYC are exploitation. There is that one performer, the worst ever to play Afterglow, who exploits her friend (who didn’t even like her toward the end of their relationship) who died of AIDS just so she can have a solo show at Dixon Place.

Say what you want about Penny Arcade—and I have—but at least she hasn’t made it. And because she hasn’t made it she can still rant and rave her sourgrape symphony that actually constitutes art. Jack Pierson’s work is now as faded and discardable as the giant letters of signage he salvaged to make it. John Derian’s style is as faded and decayed as the moldering pieces of furniture and objets he’s collected. There was only one Boo Radley and he existed fictionally. It all belongs on the trash heap. But not until enough stupid rich people who’ve paid through the nose to acquire it have had their fill.

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

The best thing about writing this Blague at this particular juncture, besides the pure venting, is not wanting anybody to read it. Not advertising it. Just doing it. And saying whatever the fuck I want to say. Condescension. Condescension. It’s something that can seep into relationships and experiences unless you nip that shit in the bud. I have gone on record many times by saying that people either celebrate you or tolerate you and you do the same to them. Celebration is the only way forward. First you must celebrate yourself. Then you can celebrate others, fairly easily.

I have felt the weigh of others condescension. I have. So have you. And I realize I have had a much a part in inspiring acts or shows thereof as those who are acting or showing. It’s just the way it goes. I have often allowed others to feel superior because it has served a purpose but it has exacted a price. And I’m absolutely done with it. One of my truest friends in the world is one of the richest and most famous. I don’t need anything from her. I just want to be free to be friends with her. But there are creatures among us who think they’re famous or wealthy or more talented (and somewhow this makes them better—a phenomenon we’ve all fed into) and when they use words like “aw” or “hon” or “doll” you know you’re stumbled upon them.

I’m feeling that for my next birthday, in little over a month, I’m going to pull a Bilbo Baggins and disappear. I won’t even have a party. I’ll just disappear. If we need to be the change we want to see in the world then I want genuine experience to characterize my change. I want to be free of the aw and the hon and the doll. I want to be free of the unreturned text, phone call or dinner invitation. I want to be free of the fabricated social heirarchies designed for revenge against feeling marginalized in middle school. I want to break free of the tyranny of the innuendo and the masked insult or sideways compliment.

I know there are no geographical cures but still I find geography helps. Certain places make us feel away just as others are triggers and push our buttons. I’m not gay and I’m not straight so my very presence in Provincetown is like a square peg in a round hole because, especially and ironically in Ptown you better know on which side your sexual bread is buttered. Why? Because the place is built on gay people having needed a place to feel safe. And the straight people there are distinguished by their small size in number and their scruffy embracing of diversity, that isn’t really all that diverse. The transexual community has had the most recent glaring spotlight—to varying degrees they are a population who are allowed to be both or neither. But bisexuals aren’t cut the same slack. The irony being that bisexuals are probably the purest expression of human sexual realness. I think, in the world of LGBTQ, being bisexual is the bravest thing to be. Because we have no community inside the community.

I didn’t mean to veer in this direction but I guess it’s where I’m going. Just because I don’t need to send all my friends a list of what pronouns to call me doesn’t mean I don’t have distinctions. I am all distinctions. I am not about anything that moves. I am about being open to loving people of all genders. Naturally. Well, I think, naturally. Who knows? When you grew up in the seventies when parents didn’t watch their kids and you were laid bare to sexual advances or, yes, attacks and those attacks become the norm who is one to ever know the difference between nature or nurture on that score. But who the fuck cares. We don’t care if it’s David Bowie or Joe Dallassandro because, why?, they were talented or beautiful enough that we could suspend our prejudices against bisexuality just in case they might decide to like us? Fuck you. Fuck all of you. (Isn’t that what you think I want to do?)

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

I’m a writer. So I naturally attempt to create an arc. It’s not thought out though it is an unconscious expectation. So even in writing these Blagues I suppose I feel a responsibility to make them complete nuggets. For them to have a beginning, middle and end. But screw that. At least I try to.

Sometimes I think of life in terms of what I would call my autobiography or my one man show or my pithy epitath, expressing a need to sum myself up in a clever capsule phrase. But I try to break through of these pre-sets in my brain, especially here where I should just be letting the words flow any which way. I wish myself luck with that.

I have thought about going back to school. Stella just finished year three of a masters degree. And (I wonder if) I feel the need to have some kind of like credentials. The fact is I hated school. I loved learning but I hated school. I loathed the way I had to fasten my assymentry into stiff new jeans and acceptable check or stripe shirts and footwear. Even new sneakers are uncomfortable. I hated the greasy patina of myself after a day at school where you had to hold in your bowel movments because there were no doors on the toilets in the boys room. Why were there no doors on the toilets in the boys rooms? I don’t recall ever seeing another boy use one of those stalls. At least where I grew up, we bred entire generations of constipated, divurticular males. Why? What was the reasoning? Boys don’t need to not be looked at by a room full of othe boys while they take a shit? I don’t get it…

But, hey, look good for me. I didn’t care about the arc, the titlte, the beginning, middle and end; I just wrote in any ol’ direction. But you see what I did there? I had to bring it back. Why did I have to bring it back. Why must a have a theme or a title. Such are the grooves in my brain I suppose. Though I do want to get to the poetry. Oh, that’s what I was saying, picking up another thematic thread: I thought I should get some kind of masters degree. In my fantasy these past years I thought I’d get a masters in some concentration of my own creation like: Sacred Spaces: Theater and Spirituality, since it combines much of my collective interest and industry. But I keep being drawn (back) to poetry. I make that parenthetical nod because I do think that poetry underlies everything. I do think it is a sort of primal cosmic language. I think that because when I strip away all the external and internal noise it’s what I hear. Yes the Libra hears the lyrical music of the spheres in words that float or breeze or unfurl in the everlasting air.

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.