Aquarius 23° (February 11)
Took the very dry tree down last night, needles everywhere. New Moon today and yet we don’t really start a new Blent. Looks like we are waiting until Sunday which is fine by me. Going to make some lovely dinners, thus, over next three days. And we will experiment a bit with some new reds to go with and then nada, which is a-okay. I be ready. I am completely glued to the impeachment trial, which is probably not going to end well, oh well.
At risk of typecasting Gemini as a perennial philanderer, we maintain it is the are Twins bird who remains completely faithful in long-term love relationships. And though it isn’t the only marker of an evolved native of this sign, an ability to eschew the kick that kicking it with other lovers might provide does generally signal a Gemini personality that isn’t reliant on what is for him, a rather regressive means of providing himself stimulation, which, in time, isn’t a great look on him. The reason being is that it is a symptom, not the cause, of Gemini’s proclivity to suffer from a Peter Pan complex, a way to signal to himself that he is still the same schoolyard Romeo he has always been, that he still possesses the same boyish charm and slick courtship moves to score a romantic goal. In this way, he is typically honest in saying that the someone with whom he is taking up “means nothing,” which is obviously dehumanizing toward that individual, but it is likewise debilitating for himself. There is so much positive power in being born under this sign and its many archetypes of ageless adolescence, but it isn’t meant to be manifest literally, but fuel the Gemini individual energetically, and indeed spiritually. And it isn’t just a compulsion for romantic conquests as would occupy the thoughts of a real, hormonally raging teen that characterize this faulty channeling of this archetypal power—we see this, too, in other Gemini tendencies to spend a surplus of time with other males, playing games and even sports with obsessive regularity, shirking other adult responsibilities such that their spouses or steady mates overly perform a role of housekeeper, cook, nanny to children, while Gemini comes and goes from the homestead like an errant teen whose recently received his driver’s license, hiding his habits as an adolescent would from his parents. It is no secret that Gemini is the premier dealmaker of the zodiac, but it comes down to the setting in which this proclivity is being channeled. There is a danger in Gemini getting a fix from the excitement of employing this native skill on petty levels, gambling or getting involved in schemes that promise a short cut to hitting some kind of jackpot. We tell our Gemini friends that short cuts only end up cutting you. And we point out here, that, the combined stimulation of all of the above—secret trysts, deals, plans, bets, schemes, and the like—is not a recipe for growth but for stasis or, worse, a series of setbacks. Back to that if-he-only-used-his-powers-for-good cliché, it is important to understand that these types of activities and preoccupations, all of which might come under that larger heading of letting off steam to Gemini’s mind, does exactly that. We ask you, Gemini, don’t you want that steam in reserve? Do you not want to operate, as only you can, under the power of your own steam? Can you not see the detriment in thus constantly letting it out, depleting your power out of a serial need for instant gratification? Peter Pan lives in Neverland and in emulating and perpetuating the negative juvenile aspects of that figure, determined to keep thinking and behaving like an eternal teen, there is every possibility, Gemini, that you will never land the kind of big deals for yourself and your loved ones that you were designed to do in this lifetime.
Gemini’s duality may extend to engaging in some shady secret shenanigans, while he presents a squeaky clean, grown-up altar-boy public and social profile. He will play the proverbial family man, determining that his entire brood project a goody-goody image, keeping up appearances and some of his operations under wraps. In the lauded streaming television series Ozark, created by Bill Dubuque (who also penned a Nightwing film), it isn’t just the surname of the main character Martin Byrde that carries an avian meaning, but his first name as well, a martin being a type of swallow and the main target of the introduced, invasive European starling species, the culprit of the martin’s near extinction in North America, a fact which obsesses “Marty” Byrde’s son Jonah in the series. Marty’s secret life as a money-launderer becomes a tangled web as he negotiates an increasingly expanding underground den of thieves, involving him in crime upon crime, including multiple murders, all against a dark comedic backdrop of trying to lead a normal home and family life, clinging to the American dream, offering fatherly directives to do homework, brush teeth, observe bedtimes and refrain from swearing. Gemini man is likewise a do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do type, unlike Byrde, keeping his underground dealings hidden from his kids, and he can be very strict and controlling, one might say, overcompensating for his own questionable antics by forcing his offspring to toe a moral line. Gemini’s signature urge to game the system is an expression of his scrappy personality, being someone who is not content with accepting the scraps society largely hands us, but it also points to his infamous fear of his own mortality. Greed, and other forms of grabbiness is a signature Gemini vice that drives him to take those aforementioned shortcuts, while running counter to the glaringly factual phrase, you can’t take it with you. And, as if we needed a connection to the Martin Byrde archetype and that of Peter Pan, his enabler wife is called, you guessed it, Wendy.
The following blocks of text are exceprts from my first year of Blagues, nos. 1576-1580. 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.
And not only that but I am stalled too because I’ve found myself with just six days to write this show that it became four days as I was triggering myself and suddenly writing to Midge Hurst things like I did The delivery of which is just so cringey and embarrassing but I hope so devoid of guile that it will be received in the spirit it was sent. I seem this year to be in confessional mode telling all my friends with whom I grew up in high school that this thing happened to me and also it is why to this day I hold up the B. And why it is that my best friend all through junior high and high school was also well, you get the idea. His name I will not name but somehow, some way, this kid with whom I became close friends in sixth grade and who was thus my best friend during this summer of 1975, did I tell him? I didn’t tell him? somehow he knew? These mysteries of life at these innocent, lost times in our life where, you know what?, everything was magic, they become the occult, the personal occult we explore. Occult simply means hidden. And at a time when life is accelerating so fast and all the first adult things happen too soon we hide them. We crush them down into our subconscious. They become the occult, hidden. Exploring our own occult is one and the same with exploring the occult, it is shot through with the same intrigue and latent power. I have no idea where I’m going with this. I was meant to speed the plow, in my premier autobiographical show, from eleven to adulthood, at this point of the show but I can’t seem to get out of neutral; and at the same time being this hurricane stalled over the Bahamas, I am raining down, I am broken, I am exposed and seriously stalled and I think I am forever in this place.
I don’t think that’s the way to go
Actually it’s fine that I got stuck in the summer of my eleventh year because I’m going to very quickly employ another device here, a sort of equivalent of the movie montage—let’s call it the Encapsulation technicque—and I’m going to use it to speed us from seventh grade to college, ready? We begin with me being a social outcast as I start junior high, low man on the totem pole, the usual name-calling of the faggot sort suddenly cutting me deeply now. I kept to myself. I continued my mythological and metaphysical studies. I dove into chorus and theater which I didn’t know at that time shared an origin with ritual magic and earliest religious rites but it does all fit together. I had a bright singing voice before puberty hit and I always had the solos. I was Randolf in Bye Bye Birdie so the first words I ever sang in a musical were Ed Sullivan, Ed Sullivan, which is kind of cool since we share the same birthday and are both impressarios. I played all the lead roles in eighth grade. And all through high school I was being groomed for a theater career, taken under the wing of older students, and for brief shining moments when plays were running I experienced brief waves of, well I won’t say popularity, but a reprieve from the tormentors who continued to attack me, and yes the stranger things. I would get flashes, future glimpses of these individuals, as if the fear, or adrenalin I suppose, that they triggered in me would surge and manifest in these images in my mind; I’d see these bullies driving away staring out of the rear car window or falling down a flight of stairs or being, themselves ridiculed and red-faced crying, things like that. Then these images would bear out. Bullies who would threaten to beat me up after school would that day break a limb or one psycho kid who pledged to kill me before the start of a new year moved away. Once, and really only once, a redhead kid Peter Reynolds, who looked like that pugnose puppet on Pee Wee Herman, Randy, remember him? Well this kid jumped me and pinned me and started pummeling me and all I could do was warn him which made him laugh. I don’t know why I knew to warn him, but he just kept it up, and then he spit in my face and then I don’t really remember much except a full body adrenalin sweep and springing to my feet flinging him off me as if he was blown back by an explosion then jumping on to him and pinning him down so hard his wrists were disappearing into the grassy soil. And though I never punched him or spit on him or anything he was screaming and crying and yelling get him off me get him off me with this wild trapped animal look in his eye. And people pulled me off and I continued home where I puked my guts out.
In the social heirarchy of my highschool there were various levels of popularity, and as I said I was the lowest of the low, among the pariahs. At the very top were the beyond crowd, a small, elite, sophisticated crew including a soccer player who made varsity his freshman year whose French father was the chef at LeCirque, and the cheerleading captain whose family owned a cycle shop and lived with a single mother in a mid-century modern house like in that film the Ice Storm. At the core, there were three girls, all of whom had straight blond hair, and three boys who were swarthy, brooding and intense. And then a half a dozen characters, mainly loners or type-A academics, who floated in and out. And then there were the four hundred and fifty everybody in between on various scales of popularity. It’s those people you have to watch out for. That’s where the bullies and tormentors lay. Somewhere in that samey samey sea of docksiders, Lacoste shirts, grosgrain, teabury pink and kelly green, red-faced, sweaty Bruce Springsteen fans, which, if you actually grew up in New Jersey, made you very ordinary indeed.
So one morning I got one of my flashes only this time it was of me; and I decided to act on it. This was my flash and this is what I did. I was in the cafeteria, sitting by myself as usual, and I crossed the entire room, walking through that preppy snarling sea, and up to the table where these creme de la creme kids were sitting and I said hi and sat right down and, as if I had been there every day since, they said hi and started chatting and asking questions about classes we had in common and what I thought of this or that and, like in my flash, I remained cool and unflustered and just answered and quipped and I never sat alone again. And what I realized with, just like when you’re at the very bottom of the social food chain it’s basically the same as being at the very top. At the bottom you’re not included and at the top you aren’t either. Only here the choice is yours. It’s not up to the hundreds of insecure middledwellers jockeying for position. This whole notion of this circle of friends being elites was an invention of those in betweeners just as they invented the category of pariah I had previously been relegated to.
The alchemy had changed in an instant. I had changed it. Or these psychic flashes did. But that was me anyway, right? Okay maybe it was some kind of outside source or higher power intervening but as I’ve come to learn that is also me. I don’t believe in A higher power necessarily I believe in MY higher power. Anyway it literally worked like a charm. And those Mr. InBetweens who had previously attacked and tormented me were suddenly silenced. I could almost see them biting their tongues as they passed me in the halls now because they couldn’t bring themselves to insult one of the elite crowd since it was their own invention. Meanwhile, I had known these new friends for years I just never spoke with them before, a fact of which they were blissfully unaware.
We had dinner parties and listened to vintage music, the Doors, Buffalo Springfield, Jefferson Starship and CSNY, not typically together, but on lesser known solo and duet records. We took the train to New York to see matinees of Equus, Deathtrap and Bent. Everyone was kind and had a moral compass. There was light sexual experimentation of varying kinds. And the boys smoked pot and went camping and took mushrooms or mescaline and laughed till our faces ached. But I was in with some classy people and it wasn’t determined by money or membership at the country club. It was based on books and food and culture and travel, even though these people were athletes they weren’t jocks. Everyone went off to a good college and stayed loosely in touch and I had a model for the kind of tribe I would seek to find as an adult. I wanted to be around kind people. The word kind has that double meaning. And what I’ve learned is that people who are reallly at the top of their game tend to be the kindest people and they use their influence to help other people. Those with trumped up ideas of themselves are forever those middling insecure types, the bully cowards, who hoard and lie and cheat and steal, things that only entail their lower reptilian minds.
What you might not have noticed was that I employed yet another device I guess you can call it in that last bit. Something called poetic license which is absolutely another element, the fifth element I think now, maybe in the constructing of a one-person show. This one anyway. So I didn’t study theater in college; the high school mentor acting teacher and drama department head moved away after my sophomore year and took all inspiration with him. But as fate has it I ended up on the Performing Arts floor of my dorm at Boston University and to this day are close friends with people I met there, many of whom went on to do great things. I was an English major and by year two I was bored and wanted out. While sitting with the same stoned faces on Buswell Street where I lived, now, at the Earth House next door to Marc Maron, and, as I say we both ate at “Veg”,
I felt myself falling into a rut. Freshman year I did okay academically but I partied too much. Sophomore year I got super academic for the first time in my life and got straight As proving true what every teacher since Kindergarten had told my parents: He could be the top student if only he applied himself. I did so now because it was an individualist pursuit. I was sick of my surroundings, and as I say I was sitting with the same stoned faces of so-called friends I have to admit I didn’t like and I got one of my flashes. Call the Study Abroad office. I picked up the dorm phone, hit Zero and asked the operator to connect me. Got anything going to France? Funny you asked: We have a final meeting for a first ever year abroad in Grenoble but all the other students are already signed up. You would have to get us parental permission and a letter from one of your French professors stating you are proficient enough to matriculate directly into a french university. I went to call my mother when the phone rang her ring. Parental approval check—she would call the Study Abroad Office. The only problem was my French was terrible. But I asked my professor who, it turned out was predatory, called Adrienne who had invited me over to her apartment once and terrified I didn’t go and she felt slighted. I need you to give a proficiency test
You never came over. Small stand off then she gave me the test which I didn’t pass. She changed a few answers for me so it looked like I did and I went to the meeting at the Study Abroad office. You might say my life started then I could have started the show here. Every single good thing in my life can be traced to my deciding to go to France, literally, in a flash.
Now, I have one more trope, device call it what you will. I’ve not seen it used before so I think I invented it. It should speed us along and will serve as some scaffling for some future stories. I’m calling this a quasi-epic poem, without rhymes, to which I will add stanzas over time. It is titled: Well I Never.
Well I Never met a girl at Logan Airport at whom I made funny faces, then started dating, married and am still with 36 years later
Well I Never Flew to Paris and, jet-lag dreamed, I was French currency, in coins, being poured through a sorting machine.
I never climbed an alp with my girlfriend to stay in a ruin left over from the 1968 Olympics and nearly together froze to death
Well I Never staged a sit in when I discovered our school in France cost BU $1K that year but our parents were paying $16K
I never organized an educational field trip for a dozen of us to go to Rome and had the whole thing paid for by Study Abroad office
Well I never met, my girlfriend and I, an elderly man after midnight, in a bar who spoke in tongues but we understood him and my girlfriend never never remembered him being young not elderly
I was never given the nickname Credit Leone for swiping taxi receipts from French cabs and giving them to students to get reimbursed by the program
I never went to Paris every weekend but one because it was eight francs to a dollar and hotels cost nothing in those days
Well I Never flunked most of my classes including Cubism because I didn’t speak French until that year was nearly over
I Never returned to BU for senior year and got straight A plusses but still didn’t graduate with honors. Then moved back to Paris.
I was Never swept up by an Italian futball team and taken to a Club on the C. E. where naked women danced around giant plastic phalluses
A man in a car with a driver never picked me up off the street to take me to an ceremony on the C.E. for a French futball team celebrating a win and was lobster on gold plates as the players sat on a multi tier dais pouring champage over each other’s heads
Well I Never danced at Le Castel with my girlfriend next to a woman was it Jerry Hall? whose gold lame dress only covered on breast
I never worked at a magazine called Passion that was this big because it was the 80s by day and at a restaurant in the Marais before it was the Marais called Dizzy Place not Dizzy’s Place or The Dizzy Place.
I never met my tribe of people that year, still my dearest friends, and one of them didn’t one day write the Harry Potter books
Well I never lived in Harvard Square for a year and wore a Marrimeko uniform working at the Harvest restaurant dancing away nights at Man Ray
I never crashed a party in Allston where someone put pcp in the pot or dosed my drink and then ended up being arrested at the 7-11 for eating Vienna Sausages out of the can and was thrown into a cell with scary people who were soon screaming to get out because I was scarier. I didn’t sing Sweet Chariot substituting words that suggested I was a Mafia prince and when my girlfriend and a friend picked me up I didn’t dive roll out of the car going 40 miles an hour on soldiers field road and absorb the impact with multiple forward rolls, seeing the math and blueprint in my head, then spring to my feet and run back to the 7-11 because my bike was there and I didn’t crouch down and propel myself into the air and clear the eight foot fence without touching and get my bike and smash my way out and back to my house where another chain link gate enclosed the shared driveway between my house with my landlords house and I didn’t see the math in my head again that told me where to ram the fence with my bike so that it came out of its cement pilings and then ride over the fence with my feet never having left the pedals and run into kitchen back door and take off all my clothes and start breaking all the dishes in the house and back into the backyard and the landlord’s golden retrievor wasn’t going crazy and crash through it’s screen door to jump around with me and I didn’t wake up naked in the back yard spooning the dog which comforted me all night long and I didn’t stumble into the house and look in the mirror and every muscle in my body wasn’t supersized so I looked the the Hulk and I wasn’t so sensitive to light that I couldn’t go out of the house in the daytime for a week
I never moved to Hoboken to work at Avenue Magazine on 57th Street while my girlfriend also worked on 57th at Bergdorf Goodman
Well I never studied acting with Uta Hagen who didn’t hate me because a class applauded an exercise I did and she didn’t have this thing called the Hagen Wagen where a student had to bring in lunch for everyone and I made a Full Mediterranean meal, including humus in a bread bowl and she never said “what is this shit?
My neighbor Tony Goldwyn never offered to give me a list of agents and he never called to invite me over greeting me wearing nothing but those tiny striped nylon Richard Simmons shorts and I never made a lame excuse and went running from his brownstone and never kicked myself later.
Well I never had Julianna Margulies over with her then boyfriend to play charades and she was never really good at it
Well I never studied comedy improv and came up with a sketch where I was Tony Randall doing a commercial which went like this: “Hi I’m Tony Randall and I want to talk to you about Oscar Wilde Camp for Sensitive Boys. At Oscar Wilde you don’t learn the usual ruff and tumble fistacuffs and other sports and skills. No. At Oscar Wilde Camp you learn proper ascot tie, quipping, inuendo, Maugm. That’s right Oscar Wilde it’s truly camp.
Well I never the, two weeks later, met Tony Randall, who made me a member of his theater company where I appeared in two Broadway plays
The rehearsals weren’t in the building across the street from the Time Life Building where I worked at the Book of the Month Club as the person who writes all the tiny captions and I didn’t come in early and mess up my desk and come back and lunchtime to make sure I was seen and rehearsed for a month without anyone at work knowing I wasn’t there.
While reading with starlets coming in to audition for the role of Nina in The Seagull, none of them knowing Laura Linney, who wasn’t going to be blood awful, already had the part, Elizabeth Shue never came in to read and we never did the final scene where Nina and Treplov see each other one last time and something incredible didn’t happen where we barely looked at our scripts and both somehow knew the lines and we WERE the characters and we had this out of body experience and then like Nina she fled the room only she didn’t come back and I wasn’t told to go after her and she wasn’t sobbing uncontrollably in the hallway with her manager and then she didn’t run at me and fling herself into my arms hug and kiss me with her wet face and whisper in my ear I will never for get you and then go running out of the building at which time I didn’t fall to the ground having what I told was an actor’s breakthrough where my muscles were siezing and the assitant director didn’t jump on top of me and kneed out all the trapped tension while saying soothingly good for you, good for you
Well I never had just one line in The Seagull that I delivered to Tyne Daly and Jon Voight never came to my dressing room every night after to give me notes on it.
I never lived in the West Village for twenty years during the best time to live in the West Village.
I never wrote for the New York Times Styles Section, nor wrote celebrity features for Glossy Magazines, interviewing Jean Reno in Paris on the set of Ronin or Peter Greenaway at his studio in Hampstead. Or Helena Bonham Carter at the Lenox Hotel during which she kept her hands down her pants taking them out to sniff them at intervals.
I never went to Paris, doing runway reports for magazines, and field producing for Fashion Telelveion, to be there when my wife was working there with designers, and I never saw Kate, Cindy, Naomi, Christy, Tatiana, or any of the supermodels walk in countless shows.
I wasn’t an on-the-spot reporter for Instyle where I would ask people like Roman Polanski and Catherine Deneueve what the first record was they ever bought or what is your favorite article of clothing.
While reporting on a party for InStyle, Darren Starr didn’t come up to me and ask if I could act and say I was exactly the person he needed to play a reporter role on his new tv show Central Park West and made an appointment for me to come in and read and Central Park West wasn’t cancelled the next day.
Well I never with my wife did astrological readings for friends in Milan and Paris late night, after a day in the fashion trenches, and this didn’t lead to our writing horoscopes for magazines under pseudonyms.
Well I never got a call from a publisher who was secretly reading our column in Teen People to offer us a deal to write a book for adults based on our premise that the signs were broken down by gender.
We never launched our book at Barneys and Parker Posey who was playing the manager of Barneys on Will and Grace didn’t come to the launch and confuse the hell out of everybody
Well I never met Princess Caroline twice, once when she didn’t come to our book launch in Paris at Colette and say slash lie probably that she heard so much about us
I was never with my wife on Chelsea Handler’s show several times and she never called me a funny little nugget.
We never bought a house on Cape Cod in the late 90s but ultimately settled in Provincetown where I started a festival
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.
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