Leo 28° (August 17)

I could not get to sleep last night for the life of me. I felt very Sunday bluesy, which is only being compounded by this first day of a determined dry spell. I pulled a card for the first time in a year and of course it was The Devil, an accurate and fitting reveal given the turning point from fleshy pleasures to more long term eudemonic intent. The dearth of family and the facing of math and mortality amid this, the darkest time in history, with its omnipresent gaslighting, all at once hit me. So I did what I needed to do to survive: I watched seven episodes in a row of the Mary Tyler Moore show. I didn’t get to bed until nearly two and I awoke at six, so today will be focused on just one thing: Fully appreciating every nook and cranny of the sample material already written for this book as a framework for what I will do in each and every chapter. And that’s it. That’s all I need make happen today and it should not be too tall an order to accomplish.

The following blocks of text are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 716-720. 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.  

It’s so important to get away with friends who remind you who you are. I don’t really have the benefit of being around folks who “knew me when”; most of the people who know me in my current life only do so superficially. Even (or especially) those I see most often these days. In the mirror of many people’s eyes we can’t help but become colored by what we feel is their perception aka misperception aka underestimation. We realize how we’ve allowed ourselves to be slowly whittled away. And then we reconnect with loved ones who see us as our best selves, not just our old selves, but also as people who are still realizing their full potential.

I once had a past-life regression session. It totally blew my mind. I flashed back to lives where I felt a sense of great status and authority. In my present life I was young and waiting tables. Having felt/remembered what it was like to feel a great sense of personal value, I quit my job waiting tables and started to expect more from my life, experience, and relationships.

I can’t say I outright envy people who are, and always have been, surrounded by large families or those who live in societies where they’ve had the same friends for long periods of time, but I do feel these characters are constantly reminded of their best selves, buoyed by loving expectation. In this sense, others support a strong sense of self when a rotating cast of characters can erode it.

I often feel like some deposed royal who had this formal life of grandeur, a fact that is lost on the characters peopling my new life where I don’t speak much to them of my past. And then, metaphorically speaking, there comes a time to pull the trunk out of the attic or haul it up from the basement, to start rummaging through the contents of ones previous existence, trying on garments of old glory, polishing the finery, outfitting oneself in ones true, original adornment.

It’s not healthy to feel unrecognized or undervalued; and its up to we, as individuals, to make sure said elements don’t ooze in. We must remember ourselves. And pinpoint where our giving has morphed into being taken advantage of and where allowed ourselves to depreciate. That is our fault. And we are reminded to outfit ourselves in our own true glittering glamour and to rise to our full height and not stand for others thoughts or behavior that don’t truly reflect our own true power and worth.

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I had a waffle today. And yet I feel less you-are-what-you-eat than I ever have. It is a total cosmic blague that I always seem to be at my chubbiest when I have to be wearing the least amout of clothing in front of the most amount of people. My weight has constantly fluctuated these last twenty-five years of my life but it really is true that, as you get older, you really have to limit your calorie intake. Especially when you’re five foot some-lie-of-inches. It’s easy to be confident when you’re in some kind of fit shape. That’s a cinch. What’s really a show of confidence is being on display when you’re more a blob. Now that takes strength of being and character.

Sean Bean was once nearly as fit as his name—that was my little bit of Gertrude Stein for you— and Thelma Ritter—she looks exactly like her name.

It seems that no matter how many days, weeks, I eat just soup for dinner I no longer lose the ten pounds standing between me and my ideal weight. Actually my ideal weight is ten pounds less than that but I’ve already jettisoned that lunacy capsule of hope to return to the poundage of my early twenties and am now settling for that of my early thirties.

So right now I’m on a boat off the coast of Belize and it is really hot and so I’m in my air conditioned cabin catching up on these poor belabored blagues, attempting to get through this particular one because I have two more already hand written waiting on deck. Not to belittle this one but it is something of filler I won’t lie. But I did figure I would just keep typing until something of seeming thematic importance were to arise from the black characters on white page.

Last night we had a Full Moon party on board and it was certainly was the most fun and weird and vivid of the nights. I didn’t wake up once and dreamed of ancient houses with cracked tile and giant wardrobes and vine covered walls. There were visitors all in red robes as if part of a commencement and we were having a bit of fun with them pretending the wardrobe was a secret elevator. None of this will make any sense to you.

Went to the Hemingway house in Key West on Sunday which it didn’t feel like. Failed to see much of the town but what I didn’t see I didn’t love. And forget it weather wise: I could never stand this level of humidity. I’m a dry heat queen for sure. Anyway, I can at least say I’ve been there. We are going to see some Mayan ruins and go swim with whale sharks. Yes sharks. But apparently they eat plankton (sp?) not people. I have to get my snorkel on. I dread trying to squeeze my pudge into a wet suit. Oh well.

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In astrology the first sign of Aries’ motto is “I am”. If I had any motivation to add to a sentence beginning “I am” the predicate would be “a poet.” Now that might sound hifalutin but I think you can be any kind of artist, creative, not only a writer, and be a poet. I happen to be a writer, for better or for worse, but even in that: my motivation to be poetic would be save space; that is to pack in as much information (if not meaning) in the use of as few words as possible. Poetry would be a shear expression of laziness for me.

I am trying to keep poetic economy in mind as I am currently writing a show. It’s a sort of warts-and-all affair. It’s the opposite of a Palimpsest the definition of which is: a manuscript or piece of writing material on which the original writing has been effaced to make room for later writing but of which traces remain; something reused or altered but still bearing visible traces of its earlier form. The main them of what I’m writing is hinges, instead, on the knowledge that what I’m putting down is actually wrong and left intact despite the fact.

Picking up from what I was saying in the previous blague I’ve come to a point in my life where I realize that most of the people who populate my experience have no idea who “I am” or whom I’ve been for that matter. And, for the record, I’ve done next to nothing to alter that fact.

I’m not terribly comfortable one-on-one with people—it makes me awfully self-conscious. I’m much better in a group (or on a stage or addressing an audience, like here, in writing). I’d venture to say that I’m ironically much more at ease being intimate in a forum of some kind. On stage, especially, is where I can reveal myself most intimately and thus provide a bunch of people truest insight into who “I am” all in one fell swoop. And have them pay me for it, which is a perk only in that I always donate all monies made by any theatrical venture back into my non-profit endeavors, which (as this sentence runs on) are designed primarily to help other artists find a stage, a live platform, from whence to create, perform, express themselves. So it pains me, I’d be a liar to say anything to the contrary, when people forget or don’t appreciate this fact.

But this is part and parcel of my current illumination on the subject of personal value: I have to up my worth game. But I digress.

I was talking about people not really knowing me or not stopping to wonder how I got here here. Who am I, anyway? Where did I come from? What were my past lives in this life, which have put me in this place where I help others so seemingly unassumingly?*

*In recent years when I’ve “acted out” or “up” it was typically because I felt overlooked, not recognized, such that causing scenes, playing scenarios, became the shadow side of taking stage, which I wasn’t doing enough.

But that’s my own fault. When we don’t take license we tend to “lose it.” But no regrets. Especially when it comes to people: I’ve never lost a true friend, though I have had a hand in pushing away people were placeholders thereof.

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So, okay, who am I…what are the selves I’ve kept cached…who have I been…where do I come from… Well, I shall tell you. Let me first say that it might be a Ligra male thing to seem “abstract” or “conceptual” to others—the Scales representing those forms in life, being the only inanimate symbol in the Zodiac—that is to say “unsubstantial”; but, all things being paradoxical, the opposite is also true: I for one have been so many selves, some by chance, some by accident, all as a necessary means of survival. I’ve inhabited so many characters in life it’s little wonder that, as an actor, I ended up playing relatively few roles.

It will take me days, weeks, months maybe to illustrate them all; but I think the doing of this might be the crux of this Cosmic Blague Mach III, as I am now in the third year of this venture (the second ending rather abruptly somewhere last June or November, can’t remember.)

The first character I played was indeed an abstract one, as if my earliest life were an allegorial play in which my character would surely have been called, quite simply, Light. This, too, befits the sign of Libra, the cardinal-air sign (translates to light) with its abstract archetypal god being Apollo, god of light and all symbolic abstractions thereof—goodness, reason, order, art, truth and prophesy, to name just several.

As Light my role was to personify goodness. And being strawberry blond with pale brown-yellow or golden eyes, I looked the part. I remember pre-language, knowing I was puregoodness—my favorite color was white like the apparel of angels, cherubs or classic infant immortals. I could have lived on all white food and often did: vanilla ice cream, shakes, malts, Maypo, white chocolate Easter bunnies, Jiffy Pop…Vichyssoise, Fettucine Alfredo…I was sent not to combat but to counteract and -balance the dark bitter chocolate forces of vice embodied most readily by my father (and his whole Italian family with their low thinking and their plastic slip covers, swarthy olive complexions, petty thievery, heavy thighs, excess body hair, bookie joints, poker chips, pungent antipasti, tripe and drama, deceit and constant deaths) and my wicked sister who blammed me for ruining our wall-to-wall carpet by letting the cap off a black magic marker, which seaped into a circular spread in all directions like her jealousy and her deception and her cruelty and her lies, knowing full well that I, pre language, didn’t yet have the words with which to defend or advocate for myself, and sickly relishing the fact that I, Light, would be abusefully punished, hit, an earth-struck angel in a pit of corporal punishment.

Light thus escaped out of his body, casting himself elsewhere, slipping out of this cruel worled ruled by sister darkness, through duvet covers and pillow cases and, yes, through wardrobes and sometimes walls, into timeless prismatic worlds of color for whole eternities, long enough, surely, to find respite and reappear with a plan to out-reason and out-fox and out-shine with whole inherent gleam, glamour, goodness, as a force thereof, biding terrestrial time until Light obtained the oracular power that was his birthright. Light’s terrible weaakness was his want to be loved by his tormentors, one of whom inhabited the twin bed on the other side of the room from his crib, the other pushed together with mother’s own twin bed in the next room. She, golden haired with alternately blue and green eyes, and fair, near blue with translucence, might have been Light’s only hope but she isn’t strong. She isn’t Light but Water, dissolution. She’ll stay, an almost willing captive, her phosphoresence but dim in the prevailing darkness so very like a jellyfish, and sometime medusa.

I had to wait, keep myself under a bushel, play dead, not shine yet…

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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