Scorpio 16° (November 8)

It’s 333 in the morning and I cannot sleep. (Time passes). It is now almost 10 and I finally fell asleep around 5, I suppose. There was a whack job on social media I was debating with before I blocked their crazy ass:

You fail to realize that anybody who voted for the melted pile of circus peanuts this time (as opposed to last time) knows what kind of criminal he is on so many counts, how many dead, how many children separated, how many institutions gutted so it is more than a difference of opinions that divides the two voting blocks and it is the racism and the xenophobia and the misogyny and the ableism and all the other ills of American society that have to be addressed. But we don’t have to hand-hold those who are on the wrong side of history. If they want to live under a dictatorship we can give them a list of nations where they can go.

Yeah. beginning with your original post. like for instance who is gloating exactl;y? i’m looking around and i don’t see people gloating. I see people relieved and hopeful and recognizing a win for sanity, and end to daily barrage of lies and gasligting. it’s bad enough we have to take it from the right, but it upsets me even more when this sort of thing comes from the left because i actually am a progressive. Biden wasn’t my first choice in the primary but he won the bid for the Democratic ticket and so he got my vote. I happen to think he’s an empathetic man who works hard for the American people. That is my opinion. I do not think he is corrupt or that he exacerbates ills (that is your opinion). You don’t provide supporting evidence for that opinion you just make it. Just like you made accusations against me and others in this thread. That is a menacing thing to do ergo you are a menace.

The following blocks of text are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 1106-1110. 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.

Today has been a productive day but I am feeling my oats. That is to say that I don’t think I’m too old, afterall, to have spring fever in a big way. Speaking of oats: Must remember to make overnight version tonight as I am “off bread” and, for the next six days, especially, will be living on soup and sunlight. Thank you daily constitutionals by the raging atlantic sea which has actually only been fairly calm as of late. That will change. To live near the open ocean continues to be the goal. It has been a constant happiness.

The glory of this day is that I shall have a goodly amount of time to get things done; and will be fun to have a last Lambrusco night, before rest on Sunday and then a sobering week. My dreams are getting dark. And time will have a tendency to speed up. One must therefore do all in his power to stay on the side of light and health. Those dreams have a labyrinthian underbelly aspect, as if being perpetually in some kind of basement, deepest darkest subconcious where Mick Jagger in a hospital gown with a giant dick protruding and disembodied parapalygics, guts spilling out into their wheelchairs, are just some of the elements of this landscape, the colors of which are stereotypically black and darkest red. Dreams so horrific that they can’t help but spook you in waking life, making it feel like something sinister may be around the corner.

Caught the Hall of Fame inductions. Lauren Hill. I know but still. Lauren Hill. So glad I tuned in for the Nina Simone segment. Wow. All in all I am trying to see the progress and divine some clear paths, all of which should lead to sharing what we know about what we do and our gifts as performers and personalities for a greater good. Entertaining Enlightment™must remain one of our watchwords. I must challenge myself with this show this year or else I don’t know how I’ll feel particularly. I do need a new kind of sense of accomplishment, and although I know this may be had by upping my game across the board, in all I do, I feel the specific need to excel, singularly, in this one arena.

One must be one’s best friend to the fullest in exercising ones ability to be a friend from both angles. I know what I mean by that: As the giver and the receiver. Okay time to go.

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We didn’t quite make the right decision perhaps to walk barefoot with no jackets on yesterday but such is life: we were given a choice, when the wind suddenly changed to a light arctic, to turn back or brave it, happy to be able to walk on the flats and cross rivulets but at the same time courting Renads. We were sort of flagged down by a ranger who wanted to show us a plover egg. After straining with and without binoculars I just while lied that I saw it lying in sime kind of indent in the sand. Sorry but not sure I did.

I can feel the town of Wellfleet changing. I will reach out and connect to Harbor Stage folks and also the Preservational Hall here in town as I am curious about their programming and such. In all I just want to be connected to earth and sky this season, taking full advantage of time spent in nature, where, along with within, all the answers lie. Feeling a need to connect in similar way with community here; and as a rule my usual point of entry is through the stage door. That will be part of the m.o. beginning May 14 which marks our official return.

I was going to dive into new work today but my spidey sense says I should stick with the larger project at hand and not go off on too drastic a tangent. I had thought that certain deadlines were looming, but realized, as with most things, that they were invented. So I am instead just touching base these various projects to ensure they are on the right track; and then I can go back to the business at hand, which is writing next years twelve weekly horoscope books. It’s a time consuming project which has really taken hold with readers as of yet, but something urges me to write them as beautifully as I might; and to have them at the ready eariler than usual.

We head to New York first thing Friday morning and it will be a very long day of travel and night of socializing; and then a business-design meeting on Saturday morning, before a long drive back. It will be exhausting but it will be worth it to celebrate our friends’ nuptials. I managed to set up a meeting with the Harper Collins speaker’s bureau and have hopefully piqued the interest of a VP at a reputable radio outfit. Little by little we ascend. No climbing just elevation, if not levitation.

Did you ever see the Blake Edward’s film S.O.B.. It’s one of those films I’ve seen snippets of and always sensed, despite a sixty percentile Rotten Tomatoes ratings, would be good. Well, it’s kind of genius actually. There are a good many great moving parts. That sentence was intentional, and something you’ll just have to live with. Speaking of living, I am in the mind of living rather frugally (for reals but also) “on surprise”. And I do think this weekend will provide a bit of a reset, on many levels. I just want to show up and see what I find and be open to whatever comes. I also want to leave some time for shopping because Daddy needs some new threads.

Sometimes the realities, and even the so-called banalities of life provide some semblance of transcendence. I am self-denying in so many ways as to border on self-deprivation; this I know about myself. I am willing and able to allow my environment to become pared-down, and to accelerate this, as a process, by changing my clingy ways. The fact is I have hung on to physical things, that have have no purpose in my life, for ways too long; and it’s time to let go of such things and start to free myself from the consequences of the ties that bind of which I am not full cognizant.

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Baby seal on the beach today. Yes I admit privately I was worried it was sick or dying, but I had to go with “blissed out and sunning himself” so as not to alarm S. who was sick herself worrying about it—and anyway it was preening and yawning and didn’t seem stressed out or in distress, although it’s heart or breathing was making pretty rapid moves in its chest. Such is nature in any sense. And since I’ll never know I choose that it be happy and thriving and just in need of some sunshine. It was facing into it, like any determined sun bather.

One of my default “issues” I suppose we can call them is that: I never feel quite caught up, which is a terrible feeling. If I could afford to go and write everyday I would—and, again, I do because I do (at least) this Blague; not to mention delegate all the myriad tasks it takes just to be alive. Anyway, that is a theme that might need to be explored. I never really knew how to write a paper; senior year of high school I determined that I would be in honors-level english even though the year before I was in standard-level (the school had done away with the enriched-level I was in my first two years, and I’d been shuffled down to honors. My mother and I muscled my way into Mr. Mazza’s desirable honors english but I was so behind the eightball, as all these students had been in honors all four years. I didn’t know how to write a paper, while they had all been taught to do so; I got very average grades; however I did very well indeed on the AP test for college and thus got skipped out of freshman, college now, level where I would have again had a chance to learn composition. I never did and I spent four years dreading deadlines and falling short. It was only in the final semester of senior year that someone, a close friend of mine coincidentally, was called on to read their paper in class aloud as “exemplary” that I learned what teachers and professors had been looking for. She should regurgitated what all we learned in class. Oh lord, I had no idea that’s all we had to do. I thought we had to always find “something else” apart and beyond what we were being taught; to discover our own new slice of literary criticism. So I did not so great in college, mainly because I was constantly overachieving.

I’m ready to get beyond the thinking constantly that I’ve done something wrong. It really has become quite debilitating. Admittedly I do do a lot wrong. And who doesn’t? But I do quite a good deal correctly too. I just need to give myself a break and come down off all of it. That sense of dread and deadlines is so deadening. Right, that’s what I was going to say: I still live as if I have some paper due, on high alert, dreading and expecting to fail, even though there aren’t really circumstances instigating that feeling. I’m still dealing with symptoms of a cause that no longer exists. Well not utterly in that I am still a writer despite every attempt I have ever made not to be one.

I worked as an editor and a writer, I suppose, to keep retraumatizing myself with deadlines I suppose. I have always been immersed in words, it’s been one of my worlds. As a youngster, I didn’t much like science or math, especially, (now I’m, mainly philosophically, intrigued by them) because no teacher could ever why…why are we talking about x and y to begin with. What logic is this whole thing based on?Because they didn’t know. And history and language, English et al, were way more my speed. Especially English. I could diagram the biggest sentence you could throw at me with alarming ease. I loved language and had an erotic attachment to the semi-colon in particular. I loved myth and literature, where I felt history and language arts met. I loved all the symbology and metaphor and analagy and simile and I was also intrigued by literary signifiers, the i.e.s, the e.g.s, the sics and so forth. I thought of myself as a person of letters. When I went into magazines within a year of graduating university I became obsessed with the editors marks and the holy grail of that world, the blue pencil.

Being into books was part of the identity of being an ex-pat upon leaving school, and living in Paris one felt the need to emulate those who flanned the streets and sat in the same cafés a scant sixty years before we did in the mid-eighties. Technology was a thin line of light on the horizon; meanwhile we held tight to pencils, pens and notebooks we carried in leather briefcases that might also have a shoulder strap, which gave way at regular intervals as one clipped down wet cobblestone streets with sidewalks to narrow for two way pedestrial traffic.

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The zodiac is among the ancient systems in which we see a lot of wisdom and power. We have always had a fascination for such systems, as with panteons and the breadth of myth systmes including those of modern religions and the comparative dynamic therein; we also both grew up with psychics and astrologers in our lives; and astrology for us is a symbol system that is particularly alluring in that it is at once efficiently ordered and very confident as a system and also it’s rich symbology and imagery links directly to the myths we love so much, not only in the planets being named for the gods, but the symbolic estate of each sign being endless with imagery, totems, story, parrable. All of it our jam.

Starsky + Cox really are always all about the big questions.

Today was mean to be quite busy. It is a client call in day so we stay open. And we did have an appointment with clients (twin brothers) who aborted last minute. I did manage to make a foray into puttin next year’s horoscopes together and things are pretty much falling into place as best they can. I am a little backlogged on chores. And I have a pile up of notes and such needing sorting through.

I had this thought: What if we have it all backwards in terms of evolution and the species and we are actually at the bottom of the scale. I mean we are the only animal that can’t not live in captivity. We can’t survive in the elements. We eat anything not just what is in the “regular diet” of our species. We have addictions and create polution and are pretty much the reason for a great many diseases. Look at the other end of the spectrum, like the insects, for instance; imagine having a shiny green ectoskeleton and some fierce antennae that sensed things and the ability to fly. To me that sounds far more evolved.

I can’t tell if I’m the most or the least organized person on the planet. It has to be one of the two extremes. I do know that I have friends who seem to write a couple of novels a year; now that is rare I realize but they’re really good novels too; and I don’t seem to have whatever it takes to be that prolific. I try to hit all my marks but sometimes I feel I have too many, that I’m not focused, but scattered, rather; then again I think maybe I’m just someone who doesn’t put all his eggs in one basket.

I know it probably sounds paranoid but I can almost hear my liberties being narrowed; it makes me furious that the cheato in charge speaks for us when I feel completely opposite from him on all issues. I need this to be over soon-ish; it is a ruination. I jump to this because it relates to what I was saying earlier (yesterday?) about living on deadlines and the dread associated therewith. How come I didn’t feel unambitious when I spent my days watching videos and walking through the West Village or over to the Hudson to sun myself. How is it that I felt I then had all the time in the world. Wouldn’t that have been the time to hustle? In my late twenties, early thirties? Why do I feel I must do all my hustling now. Is the very reason because I didn’t do it then. I’m talking about the Clinton years, now. They were as unhurried as can be. I know I went for things. I created, I auditioned. I went to class. I wrote for magazines. I worked for fashion designers. I did PR. I started magazines. I worked as a field producer in television. It wasn’t like I was just sitting around. But I remember some summers being so slow and sleepy all day long.

There was that one particular summer. Maybe 96 or 97 not sure. I think the same year as Buffalo 66 and my writing for Detour and all of that. I remember we really didn’t have a sous; but I had worked out a deal to eat at Nine Jones restaurant in exchange for doing there PR which I did, best I could. I did the same at the Pearl Room. Not only did I never go hungry but I also never didn’t eat super well. But it was a drain, I must say. I mean, I was always having to hawk something. It was exhausting. It still is. Sometimes I feel quite lost. Like today. I look at people’s pictures on social media some days and I think how the hell can people party day in and day out and still have bone structure and be rocking some fashionable clothes. Two answers: hormones and Dr. Colbert.

Who me bitter? Never.

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I know a great many people born this day. It tends to be like that, don’t you find? I’m so grateful for the daily beach walks–omg I sound like a fucking broken record. I mean what the hell am I doing here if I’m only occasionally going to be brilliant. Do you think anybody gives a solid shit about what your day is like and how it includes “constitutionals?” Go fuck yourself, Quinn, really. You can do so much better than that.

To which I reply: What the fuck do you want from me? I’m trying to get at least three big projects off the ground while conducting a private consultancy with utmost clarity and professionalism, at the same time writing (in this case yearly) horoscope books and directing an entire performance festival and, you know, being alive without help for anything; actually I do most of the cooking and a lot of the cleaning and shopping in addition to painting whole rooms or otherwise making things functional and nice, just as my partner does in other ways, equally.

Life is Sisyphusian. I am a big Sisyphus. And though I always read the message of that myth to be just terrible and depressing, I now see it differently. I see it as expressing a very prominent aspect of life, a one step forward two steps back dynamic; which, let’s face it, is part and parcel of even the most productive and prolific of lives.

I’ve decided to paint the walls of my office an Hermes hue of dark orange. Suddenly I’m in love with dark orange again. And because the trim and doors are teal it will lend this real Howard Johnsonsy affect. Joey Arias is sober. Life was really quite sideways this week: The effect of putting things out there, throwing stuff at the proverbial wall; I’d forgotten how to do that. I love the construction I had. I think of Georg in The Sound of Music—”I’d forgotten”, music in the house? I think it was. It’s such a circular notion bringing in three time frames to say I had forgotten, as there was the middle time of forgetting a past but now we are beyond either one of those states of mind, further along the spiral, back to the same point further along the line.

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It was in many ways a typical talk with folks at the publishers. Assistant was enthusiastic and effusive and we seemed in a positive direction, which we still are, but then suddenly we asked a question that the assitant couldn’t answer so suddenly somebody else chimes in “being late to the meeting” all apologies (meanwhile she’s got to know that we know that she’s damn well been there the whole time listening in). It’s rather a compliment, actually, when that happens—always good to ask a question only a SVP can answer. But there is always that one line of dialogue, that particularly publishing comment that either begins with “Unfortunately…” or is tucked half way through, after the comma, “, unfortunately…”. I think they teach a whole course sophomore year called: Unfortuantely 201.

Enough of that in my life actually, thank you. I reached out to our publishers, for whom we have made millions to discuss some possibilities; but they weren’t interested in speaking with us apparently. The world is venal. And it’s not going to get better with that fuckwad in office. It will get a lot worse before it even has a chance to improve. I’m thinking today that the plan D’s might be better plan A’s. I am too easily taken off my game perhaps but there must be a difference between throwing things at a wal hoping they’ll stick and beating your head against it.

Anyway, I know myself, and I will rally. But this time I think I really need to rally quite a lot. My life seems like a runaway train and I can’t stand that feeling. I know it’s up to me to make changes; I am just right now at a loss on how to do that. I hope this is helping someone feeling similarly they are not alone. There is no point of my getting on here every day to say something positive just for positive’s sake. Sometimes things feel weird and scary. My reveries have been nightmarish.

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.