Gemini 25° (June 14)

Surely one of the darkest of dates given the birth of two creatures who have wreaked havoc on my micro- and macro-cosmic worlds. But never you mind. I am now officially cooking with gas in regard to a certain project that will be my main work for the next calendar year. I am getting my brain around it all, and just doing what I can to make some artistic and intellectual beauty. In the process, it has been decided, I refuse stress its way. Anyway I have some random notes which need typing up in any case so I might as well just put them down here:

We will include: The quincunx, birthstone or crystal, tree, animal totem——who ram, ewe, boar?—Parenting what kinds of offspring did Ares have?

Needing final list of jewelry styles. Aries men needs to be more the Shepherd archetype leading the flock solo endeavour. The hero archetype maybe even work in heracles having to go through self imposed trials. Iron Man. Reading house lists for ideas. Aries is outwardly challenging loves to debate. Jim Parsons? Issa? Kumal? Jessica Williams. Eddie Redmayne. The woman in the Danish girl. John Oliver. How were work with clients .

Aries man is the most self obsessed of the astrological characters. He fascinates at his own experience personal experience that which is right in front of him the metaphorical equivalent of the baby playing with his own body and entertaining only that which is in his immediate via. He wears an open expression like Ewan McGregor, typically pitched forward in conversation talking at others with a challenging glint in his eye. Very rarely someone you’d describe as laid back . Forever proving a point , convincing others of his position. Even if the strong silent type there is a sense of seething beneath the surface. He is never retiring. Learning to be a team player because it does not come naturally. Site Michael imperioli.

Aries man is the most indie of the sign. Vincent Gallo. Diane von Furstenberg. Ares is the God of blood. Research his foreign equivalents. He is most cut and dry.

What sign is Betty Friedan? Where does Pallas come from? What does it say that Athena takes on her name? She is the most irascible. What sign is the actress who plays Wonder Woman? I wish to say more about Lilith. Aries is the type of girl that could survive for 50 years on the tiniest trust fund. Along with psychology look to the sign quadrant also the sign glyph for inspiration. If he is most cut and dry she is most cut and run. Ewe is an animal form of the primordial goddess. sign glyph: we didn’t say it is her brow and wisdom. Nor have we discussed her as goddess of helmsmen. In the Bible Rachel is the holy Ewe.

I feel like she would be the person to raise a single child as a single mother….connect to that myth and the link to Hephaestus.

 

The following blocks of text are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 411-415 . 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. 

Originally posted June 2, 2016:

It would seem that every person I pass on the street is more qualified than Trump. Why are the so few who run for the highest office in the land so wrong for it compared to, well, just about anybody. How did this happen. Is it really just money? Or is it related to sanity. Especially on the Republican side. Is having a screw loose a prerequisite for candidacy? Or, okay, people that are already in politics. Why isn’t Al Franken the next president. I mean we got lucky with Obama but I still think he’s a certain kind of crazy in that, if he didn’t have an outsized ego, he wouldn’t have grabbed for that brass ring. He is the unruffled king (Leo) far more than the teflon Bill Clinton (Leo) was. Obama, it seems, plans to pride himself on having lasted all eight years with out going ballistic over anything. Trump can’t last eight seconds without doing so. Surely there is something in between. Obama’s stealthy and above-censure moves, after all, have seen him quietly launch over 500 drone strikes. I’m not arguing the validity of having done so; but it is very much in keeping with his persona, characterized as it is, by having a cool remove.

Drone strikes, as opposed to conventional military strikes involving people in pilot seats or behind tanks or on the ground, are arguablly less humane because the human conscience isn’t that directly involved. Nowadays we train thousands more remote drone pilots than actual ones. If we’re not seeing the collateral damage and the thousands of innocent people, women and children included, being killed, it doesn’t emotionally register, we don’t feel it. And if we are emotionally responsible for the killings than we are that much more densitized not only to war but to human life in general. Surely that will seap further into mass consciousness. Drone pilots, in effect, are not very different from children playing video games, only what they see on the screen isn’t the be all end all, it is an abstract of a grim reality. We detach, we detach and yet, what? We want more attention. We want the greatest number of hits and clicks and followers in an on-screen world that is a representation of our lives, not the one we’re actually living. This two-dimensional reality is more than just concept fodder for science fiction novels, we are becoming less dimensional, not more so, as human beings.

We act differently in the two-dimensional world. We are more black or white. We make blanket statements that inspire pointed reactions. We get into online battles with people over politics or social concerns. We say more than we should, perhaps, behind the safety of our black and white screens. If we later were to bump into the individual we met earlier on the laptop battlefield, we might hem and haw, retract and reposition, because there is more nuance to human interaction in the flesh. There is chemical reaction that might inspire more empathy or other forms of kindred spiritedness that might prevent you from attacking or blocking as you do electronically. Even though, a generation ago, the notion was floated that”we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden,” we have done the opposite. We are creating a wilderness of wires and fibers and satellites and other muscle and sinew of isolation. And yet, what do we most want from this virtual non-dimensional world—every possible shred of fandom we can amass; and why is that? Money. We want more money. We want all the money. It isn’t enough to have the accolades alone unless they monetize. And that is all fear. Fear, fear, fear.

Not to say I blame you for being afraid. It’s what is expected of you. It’s what makes you malleable. It’s what militarizes you. But you should be most afraid of what you’re putting in place to protect you. And get off the fucking computer.

————

The sign of Taurus rules the ages 7-14 when we can be at our most vulnerable. I would venture to guess that most molestations occur to people during this span of their life. My “experience” surely did, pretty much right smack dab in the middle. As relates to my personal experience, I don’t embrace the word molestation. Although the other individual was older than me it wasn’t by all that much. It’s similar but different, I think, from having been abused by someone undeniably adult. Though any kind of sexual experience that is imposed upon a person who is as yet not of sexual age, therefore lacking the mental ability, never mind the physical equipment, to cope with it is not to be excused; I have always considered myself relatively lucky in the scheme of premature seduction in that the so-called perp was still, relatively, a peer; such that “our little secret” still managed to smack of something between friends that we are simply not choosing to tell our parents who were off somewhere doing something fueled by alcohol no doubt—at the beach with a cooler, at the track, out to a fancy boozy lunch, on the golf course—leaving, as you unfortunately did, kids home alone to fend form themselves. Besides, and I’ll get flack for admitting this, I actually found it fun at the time; blissfully unaware of how this might be sending me down a path of self-loathing, fear and making me prone to any number of floaters up and out from Pandora’s box.

The fixed sign of Taurus, as I’ve said, is associated with the garden and the dichotomy of innocence and temptation. We know the biblical line; but the Greek mythological landscape in which these archetypes live is that of Arcadia, wherein the nubile nymphs and flower gods provide temptation to even the highest ranking of gods—divine noblesse is no match for a lecherous mind and constitution. My own Arcadia happened to be the Jersey Shore where I was forever left to my own newly deviant devices at the very same moment that I was becoming obsessed with mythology and magic. I had more crushes on divine beings than I did on any real people my or any age. I fancied myself emerging from silken pools filled with immortalizing liquids and expending my natural energy running nearly naked along untrodden paths; when in fact I was simply awaking before anyone else in my jam-packed beach town to swim in the calmer waters, close to the jetty, the ocean pink from the gumdrop Sun emerging from it on the horizon, running along the water’s edge wiped clean of footprints, fueling my fantasy of total privacy and blissful isolation. I would recite incantations in my head to Apollo and Dionysus, to whom I would also make invocations dressed in robes I made out of old curtains. Not sure if I learned this trick either from The Sound of Music or Gone With The Window. Either way, I was watching way too much TV. But not in the summer!

In the summer, I entered into a fantasy bubble, much the way I would have done at two years old, entering into fairy worlds by crawling inside empty duvet covers or other wrinkles in quotidian reality. But at the age of ten or eleven, I would be ripped away, in June, from summers spent with the kids I went to school with, never having the kind of summer-bonding experiences others did when they returned in September with matching tans and inside jokes. I went to the beach each June where I didn’t really know anyone but a casual acquaintance or two I’d meet on the beach. Mostly I lived inside my own head with no parental guidance at all. One day I walked to a movie theater and sat and watched the same film four times in a row. It was hot. The theater was air conditioned. They had soda and popcorn and nobody missed me. There was a certain beauty to those anonymous days; nothing really costing more than a quarter or maybe a dollar or two for the movie, easily affordable entertainment on a weekly allowance of two to five dollars; and of course there was always change looking within the tobacco flakes at the bottom of my mothers’ myriad handbags.

So with summer arriving I feel nauseous. It might be the fact that the whole of my childhood existence was ripped away, not a single shred of it remaining. Relations all dead or estranged, the towns and houses of my youth left in the dissipating fog of memory dating back some thirty, forty years, now. I don’t have Proustian remembrances, I have waves of nausea. Is it the same nausea I felt in the first moments of being urged to do things beyond my ken? Is it trauma of these having been terrible times resurfacing in my viscera. Or is it a result of being flung so far out, as if on the tilt-a-whirl or spidey rides of my summer youth on rides in Asbury Park to which I would ride my bike, increasingly, ten or twelve or fifteen miles from where I lived or worked in Belmar, Spring Lake or Sea Girt as a young teen, still alone, nobody knowing if I return directly home from my evening restaurant shift or if I drive further toward Asbury to enter a seedy landscape of bars and clubs where nobody checked your age upon entering to drink endless Cape Codders, mostly for free, because the feather-haired bartender with the turquoise rings would give them to you and any child brave enough to enter into such a place at the age of fourteen or fifteen. I had such an education. Most folks I encounter have no idea. The lives I lived before I even had a drivers’ license. Thankfully, that life was led mainly if not primarily as an observer. And the bubble in which I kept myself was pretty secure. Trying to see myself through the eyes of….what was turquoise bartender’s name?…he went on to open the Raspberry Cafe in Ocean Grove? Oh, well, it will come to me…trying to see myself, say, through his eyes, I must have seemed like some kind of sexually confused autistic Holden Caulfield. Better known as, well, Holden Caulfield, only small and without the patch of grey hair.

—————-

Two Taurus keywords are Value and Belonging. It’s funny how seemingly disparate things find a connection in the astrological houses associated with any given sign. I was just sitting here meditating on how these go together and I’m not certain I’ve come up with anything earth-shattering but I do have random thoughts I could share.

I was never a joiner. There might have been a time that I wanted to be one. Back where I grew up I was a pariah for much of grade school and surely the lowest level of hell aka junior high where I was only popular for a week at school-year’s end when I would be cast in a starring role in the school musical. Otherwise, I was severely mocked—as a matter of fact, in Wyckoff, New Jersey, the local insult was “a mock”; one would say, “Oh, Billy, you’re such a mock.” Seriously I’m not making this shite up. All this to say that I didn’t even try, though I longed, to fit in, until well after going to high school at the age of 13. If anything, I defied the whole concept of fitting in—careful not to join any band of underground newspaper editors or the a/v club or anything even mildly subversive.

If you’ve read this Blague before and no anything about me I led a sort of adult life from a very early age, specifically in summers where I drank at bars and smoked pot and even had (a form of) sex on the beach from the time my age reached double digits. So that when I returned back to “normal” suburban life I felt that I was in cognito, a sort of Clark Kent, without the bone structure or muscle tone, pretending to live as a child going through rights of passage that I had already been speeded through arguably prematurely. So I hung out with people two or three years older than myself. Not like pot-heads did. Remember pot-heads. They were their own counter culture. And a girl or boy would enter high school as a freshman but he or she might have been one of those kids that lived a pot-head lifestyle with absentee parents and older siblings whose houses always seemed a bordel with sticky floors and broken screened backdoors and mutliple siblings all taking care of themselves like they do on Shameless; such that said “child” would enter high school and already be hanging with pot-head seniors in a designated location—in our high school it was “the wall”—although there were two walls: one wall where the popular mainly senior population plopped themselves like gods of a pantheon on a concrete dais; and the other wall which separated our outdoor courtyard from our playing fields which were a good six feet below the courtyard such that crouching and smoking bowls somehow went unnoticed? Well, in the late 1970s early 1980s they did. I’m off track. I’ll get back…oh right…Value and Belonging.

So, I never cared about belonging. I had no natural belonging in my family, my one sibling being a hostile nightmare that tried to make me feel that I didn’t belong and then again I didn’t want to belong to my family, really, because my father struck me as a Neanderthaal for the most part, despite his good qualities, and my mother, though genius, was too weak to leave and take me with her which would have been my fantasy. To me: belonging would have been she and I playing out some Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore fantasy which would have made for a much better reality than liviing with my mostly horrible father and my only ever horrible sister. But you know, my mother never had to work. She had summers alone. She had house cleaners and frozen food you popped in the oven and a new Buick every other year so she wasn’t going anywhere. Again with the digression.

Okay I had no self esteem as a child. And nobody really telling me how great I was on the homefront. My mother would tell me I was smart but she eyed me with a desire to perform plastic surgery. I think she was happy my junior year of high school when my neighbor friend drove me to school in his open topped Jeep with the “roll bar” the concept of which was put to the test when, Jeff yelled “I think we can make it” gunning the Jeep from the side street leading to the entrance/exit of the school with school busses, full and empty, coming either way only to find he didn’t (make it) and we got hit by a school bus and the Jeep did indeed roll over and when we were upside down for that split moment I (thankfully?) banged my head and face into the roll bar—people said the roll bar saved me that if i hadn’t hit it i would have been crushed underneath the rolling car because, remember the dates, nobody is wearing seat belts—such that I emerged with a gashed head, amnesia and a broken nose that needed immediate repair…once I remembered who I was.

I imagine the glee my mother would have secretly felt. She had the excuse to bring me to a plastic surgeon (an at least locally famous one with twelve children a half dozen of whom I knew by sight and a few I was friendly with) and “repair” the damage. But she had other things up her sleeve. That will have to wait for another Blague, perhaps the next one, because I’m talking about Value and Belonging. Am I talking about it here? Am I saying that my mother would have a stronger sense of belonging toward me her son if she could alter my face a bit surgically. I might be saying that. But it isn’t what’s driving me. Must keep on theme

Value and Belonging. So imagine you’re me. You’ve already been through something of a ringer by the time you enter high school. You have secrets. A sort of secret life maybe. You’ve been mocked by the preppies in pink and green, LL Bean duck boots and you could give a shit. You have two art classes back to back first and second period. Typically you wake and bake so you’re super chill and detached. Yes, you’ve continued to at least be “featured” in every musical and experienced waves of recognition. And still the “middle management” of your school is married to you’re being not only “a mock” or or worse sling you’re already bullet proofed against, knowing full well, if push came to shove, and somebody called you out to physically fight, you’d be more afraid you’d kill said person with the strength of your pent up secret than if they gave you a fat lip or bloody nose. Meanwhile you’re just the weirdo trying to keep his head down, not a pot-head, but smoking a lot of pot, hanging out with adults in your spare time, going into New York, to clubs, getting drunk on champagne poured into bathtubs, having Chinese food in the village, seeing Broadway plays in matinee, and not giving a shit. Until one day…somewhere during the last few weeks of your junior year in high school…you’re like..

Fuck this. I’m missing out. I’m in high school. I’m not only my outside cached world. I’m here. I’m here now. And here and now totally sucks. I am not Valued. I don’t Belong. Something needs to be done. And so I did it. I was online in the crap cafeteria chosing some semblance of something I could call food—I was already “this person” when it comes to diet—and exiting the line, instead of finding some remote corner of a table where I could sit alone and read without having anything thrown at me or anything stolen off my tray (yes i was that lowly guy), I beelined for the elite table filled with the uber pantheon residents of the wall. There were no football players. Here, there were soccer stars, all swarthy, and not all cheerleaders but only the select upper echelon of cheerleaders who were raised by hippie single mothers and, though they ran the squad, they weren’t “of” the squad. These were the untouchables. In New Jersey, at this time, when everyone was prepped out and listening to Bruce Springsteen, this bunch, like me, was not. We drove our cars up Skyline Drive to find rare records by Buffalo Springfield and the Doors. Stuff I later found out after: I walked over and plopped my red tray down and wiggled my bony ass into a space between this supposed god and goddess and I just started eating my lunch. And they scarcely noticed. That was the best part, learning about Value and Belonging. It was as if they didn’t notice I hadn’t been there alll along. And I listened to them talk, admittedly self-conscious, and then suddenly one girl, making a point about something that happened in class earlier, punctuated by saying, “Billy knows, Billy was there”. As if somehow I had entered into this scene, yes, seemingly unnoticed, but right on cue.

So I made myself belong? I didn’t know I didn’t belong. Others assumed I did already. When you come from a family of shifting sands it’s very hard to know where you stand in a landscape of people who maybe have been on teams all their lives or they don’t come from dysfunctional families but from familes where twelve siblings all love and respect each other or they don’t feel downtrodden so they have no understanding of those who do and perhaps they don’t even view themselves as some sort of pantheon but that’s something others put on them and they are as easy, as a group, to infiltrate as any, provided you have the confidence. Because it was confidence that plopped me down at that cafeteria table and yet that was the last time that plopping was interesting. I’m still friends with many of those high school characters. Turns out the most loving people live at the top. It’s mister/mistress in between you have to look at for. I write on this subject all day. Must shut myself down.

———————–

Originally posted June 6, 2016:

I think I wanted to go somewhere different on the theme of belonging but found myself stuck in the same sort of head I’ve been in lately regarding my past which is in so many ways unresolved. I think I wanted to talk about a different angle.

It is no secret that, besides my career as an author, advisor, astrologist and sometime alchemist (alliteration not intended but welcomed), I producer theater and performance and run a festival I founded on Cape Cod. I put on a lot of group shows and I often invite artists to participate. People tend to rely on me for that perhaps, but sometimes it would be nice to be asked to participate in other people’s doings. But I’m never asked. Which is fine for the most part—I’m used to it; I suppose people don’t assume I’d like to be the participant and not the producer from time to time.

Still, given the choice of being a leader or a follower slash joiner, I would always pick the former as I’ve always done. It’s part and parcel of being a cardinal sign, perhaps I’m always initiating. I’m always on the front lines. I’m always spearheading, but it often feels like an uphill battle. But I’m not hear to complain. I suppose I make things look easy and that I don’t read as someone who would seek assistance. Mostly true, but I would like to sit back and go along for a ride at some point.

For now I just need a little rest before cranking up the machinery again. Failure or falling short are never an option. I might be just writing anything. Perhaps I don’t always have something to say. I think maybe I should stop here.

———–

After a recent discourse on belonging, I attended an annual party I enjoy so much. Not only are the hosts super gracious but the guests, many of whom I haven’t see but at this party once a year, make for a wonderful mix; and there was an unspoken sense that this group does enjoy some cohesion at this point, based on the serial coming-together year on year.

Many moons ago, in New York City, we could throw a party and it would be pretty packed. Our NYC life, that was something quite throbbing twenty years ago, surely dissolved as so many friends have left the city, either to have kids or to strike out on their own in parts unknown. I still have friends who can send out a tweet for a party and hundreds would show—that’s not me—but it is nice to be able to be a guest in these cases.

It does add up to one’s sense of Value to be included and to made to feel you do Belong. At this point it’s probably that London is the singular location where most close friends reside. But I don’t get there as often as I’d like. I guess it comes down to the fact that we used to do the majority of hosting, something we haven’t done in probably a decade. I miss playing the host but the places where we live are necessarily where we know people.

This time of year does serve a reminder that it’s important not to isolate and to cultivate your garden of friends and relations. It’s partcularly challenging for me.

 

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!
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