Aries 24° (April 13)

 

Ok so yesterday was a boring odyssey and I awake today at ten minutes to four. There is no point trying to fall back to sleep. I’m in a kind of crisis mode and I have a huge day ahead of me the schedule of which I immediately plan to reconstruct. I’m trying to fall back, still, when the alarm goes off at six. I have been watching repeats of the weekend news. It is not going to be a good look this day. I think of what I can achieve that requires little brain activity. I will have breakfast and watch a funny show on Netflix and then I will cook and plan the meals for the coming week. I will go to the dump and dump what I can, since they are not really accepting recyclables. I will go to the bank and get a handle on my personal finances. I will clean the house and do the laundry and get my hygiene where it needs to be. I will do some correspondence. I will plow through many papers stacking up on my desk. I will think about what I want to achieve creatively and when. I will drink to much coffee to stay awake. I will watch Governor Cuomo talk with other governors and create a united front meant to preempt the menace in the casa blanca. I will suddenly want to watch Casablanca, along with Dinner at Eight which I’ve never seen. I will hear from the lawyer whose correspondence implies that the other parties would like to try and settle if possible. That will make me happy but, as I’ve waited five years thus far already, I don’t really care about giving them very much lee-way. I made a roasted red pepper soup for dinner tonight and I will prepare an arugula salad with palm hearts and tomato and parmesan and serve it with slicked chicken breast, glazed with some de-fatted drippings. I will get my brain around the enormity of all that needs doing and feel in some ways relieved to be inside as a huge storm heads our way. The power company will text and warn us that we will lose power which I don’t doubt we will. I need to now charge my devices.

S. reminds me that we have a freezer filled with food which is our back up supply so if we lose power we will have to eat things as they thaw but, no, because our stove is electric. Today there is this thing going around on FB which is post your senior picture in solidarity of seniors. I couldn’t be asked to find my yearbook and yet one of the more popular girls in school offered to find mine for me, after I posted that I wouldn’t be posting one. Now I will have to post one? This is an inane edition of this Blague I realize. I actually wrote yesterday’s today as well…and now it’s tomorrow as pick up where I left off. There is quite a bit of copy waiting for me, from the previous years, for me to post over. And still I feel compelled to say so much more. Why this frustration and constant angst. Why this gnawing at my soul. Why this feeling I want to cry somewhere in the back of my chest. They say that allergy sufferers could be harder hit and that breathing exercises are key. This is why smoking is so bad, besides being carcinogenic, it does the opposite of exercising your lungs. I need to make sure that beginning in the next few days I resume my daily practice of deep breathing and meditation. I will put together some lunch and some dinner as always. I will shower and wash my clothes. I will get myself upstairs and at least map everything out for this next project without overthinking. My only goal today is to be bad. I wish I had more friendship in my life; something I’m realizing now, at a time when it is near impossible to initiate, but I suppose I could foster it and polish the connections I do have. I should be writing some kind of newsletter. Then again, no. I hate receiving newsletters from people because they are phony. Especially now when they offer help to people. That’s a sham. I see through that b.s.. They still just want me to download their music or watch their at-home performance, or some such fuckery.

Perhaps it will be warm enough today to go for a walk. That might be the one thing we can and should do. I will ask and see if this is something we can affect. I want to hurt. I want to feel the pain of my past bad decisions. I want to be plunged deeper to the roots, to root around in my conscience. I want to make a clean break, like going off to college, to be suffused with the prospect of not knowing, unafraid to leave the past, with all its good intact, behind. I want to feel the exhilaration of being separated from loved ones, no longer here, but in dreams before I realize they are not still alive and I awake crying out the fact. I don’t need to have a structure, to follow a form. I want to be cast out into the wilderness with all my psychological patterns that will insure I repeat the same mistakes over and over again. I want to be reviled, to be treated like a pariah and to finally not care about fitting in, footing the emotional bill. If you reject me I want to thank you. Thank you very much for not allowing me to conform to your criteria. Thank you for not using me as a crutch to keep yourself from falling into challenges that might be a sign of personal evolution. I want a new catalogue. I want to feel alone again, naked, on the beach, exposed. I want to be more skin and bone and live off the accumulated fat of my bloated need. I don’t want to give to you, and I don’t need your applause. I’ve had it and it was never enough and it never will be. There are a select few of you, here and there, who get me. And you are not the ones, typically, occupying the space of labels—the best or oldest or closest. Some of you have never seen but you look right through me. And I no longer take it personally because I’ve seen how you have, over the decades, had that same perspective on your own children. Nobody, not even those you were meant to love without condition, are free from your vague withholding. You offer anecdotes and aphorisms to your own flesh and blood so what should I expect.

The following blocks of texs are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 116-120.  I am reading through all my Blagues, five per day, and posting some samples here. Now, in my sixth year of writing this Blague, but the time I get to my seventh, I will have through all the daily Blagues of my first five years. If that’s confusing I apologize:

We recently watched an old Greer Garson film, Mrs. Parkington, which is amazing on many levels. The writing is fantastic. And the theme hits you right in that yankee spot in the center of your being–even if you’re not an American you probably know what I’m talking about. In it the self-made individual is to be celebrated, while the lazy inheritor is a lout. In my experience, of the big silver screen, I find this largely to be true.

What better way to celebrate your wealth than in the exercise and development of your mind. I suppose, if ever I was jealous of peers who grew up with a trust fund, it was because of the grace of time and space it could afford to focus, with fewer obstacles, on what was most important in life. Surely, I would have stayed in school as long as possible instead of slinging hash to make ends meet; and I would have used all that free time, as a younger person certainly, to devote to my first and greatest love: the Theatre. I am very fortunate that I’ve managed, coming from very humble beginnings, to carve out a life where I work for myself, living by my wits, and, well, as you can see I, or in case you didn’t know, I do spend a lot of time exploring ideas and notions that expand my conscious mind—not to mention underaking certain endeavors that give other parts of my brain a bit of a psychic workout; and I’m never very far from at least producing for some stage or other.

I am perfectly aware of the paradox: because I’ve had to make my own way—Major and Mrs. Parkington would have liked that—I can say that I would have used my time to devote to my callings would I have been bankrolled; but really, if funded as such, I might have been the biggest slacker on the planet, going, as Joni put it, from cafe to cabaret. Ah but that was a song about freedom. And David Geffen. I’d like to meet David Geffen. I’m friends with him on Facebook and I think he’d dig what I am trying to do in the arts, but I’ve gotten off the subject. If you see David just tell him to call me. He seems to be someone who might have sunk a bunch of dough into creating a fabulous personal library where his guests could hang out and just read. I read two chapters of two different books last week. That’s the last time I had a moment to read. Well, I suppose I could make time, but this time of year is so much about doing the next most pressing thing. In precisely eight weeks, my labor of love, the Afterglow Festival, will take to the stage in Provincetown. It’s a lot of work, which I don’t mind doing. So long as people like and support it, which can be an uphill battle. I often wonder why it is that, I of the no trust fund and minimal material trapping, spend so much time not making money. I think the answer is that it seemed like an if-then equation. If I have money, then I’ll do what I want. If I have money, I’ll live by the sea. If I have money, I’ll travel. If I have money, I’ll buy art. Well, I think I’m the sort who goes directly for the then. I would build the library first. I do have a butt load of books. I just need to read more of them.

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Funny that the sons and daughters of any revolution always want the buck to stop there; they don’t want any more upheaval coming up behind them; they want to be the last stop, the new and final crème de la crème. But we needn’t speak of descendants of Mayflower voyagers vis a vis immigrant waves to understand the resonance of this.

I was just encountering something similar this morning while casting my cynical gaze upon the social landscape near at hand. Here I am, downtown New York; and when I first moved here the scene below 14th street had a sort of benign contempt for the paparazzi-driven society centered around Park Avenue. And now, our own sons and daughters of these downtown revolutionaries seem to emulate the likes of Nan Kempner and C.Z. Guest, never mind Pat and Bill Buckley. Of course the selfie-ish amongst us are now their own paparazzi for the most part. Look I’m all for self invention, but just as that daughter of the revolution might remember that her ancestor rallied against an oppressive monarchy, the artist barely surviving in their rent unstablized walk-up might recall that s/he descends from a long line of dissidents who actually created the world in which they’ve managed to thrive. We aren’t supposed to turn into some artistic aristocracy; we aren’t meant to art direct our personas to appear to belong to some sort of elite, and especially not for public consumption.

But look, this is the pattern of things. And people do tend toward the creamy and want to forget their own humble orgins, breathing more rarified air standing on the shoulders of those who came before. I suppose I’m still rather unsinkable Molly Brown about it all, preferring to preserve my own personality and allow it to change society via any power or influence gained over the course of my journey from my scrappy origins, instead of adopting the attitude and characteristics of some fabulous existing society which might now, at this point in my illustrious (as if) career, accept me. The ancestor of that daughter rebelled against the fox hunters and polo players while she and her brood would have become them. I don’t believe we need to lose our revolutionary spirit no matter how high we might rise, worldly wise. In this battle between retreating into the past and forging ahead into the future, it would seem that the past wins out.

Pisces, which rules this oracle in a twelve-fold sequence, is ruled by Neptune, the power of dissolution. So we see the dissolve of all our forward moving efforts and we thus reveal the importance of the past. However, in the dissolve, some residue remains, and this film cannot be removed. Pisces, mutable-water, is likened to mist, foam, vapor, film and any such slime, the primordial kind especially, that from which we emerged and to which we will ultimately return, each subsequent generation, whether of people or of thought or ideology (indeed everything), adding its layer of influence to that which came before. So try as you might to completely blend in, you can’t help but change the mix even ever so slightly. Some strive to leave as think and creamy a layer, distinguished from the past fossilized layers, as they possibly can.

 

To view the original Sabian Symbol themed 2015 Cosmic Blague corresponding to this day: Flashback! The degree pointof 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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