Virgo 10° (September 1)

I do love Aries people. I was going to say I do love my Aries friends but I don’t have any. Okay that’s not true but I find I have very “important” Aries relationships but I can’t say I have contant Aries companions. I have dear, close Aries friends. Aries people occupy key spots in my heart. I just don’t hang around with Aries people much or rather they don’t hang around with me. All my Aries bonds have been fast and furious for the most part. That is to say that they were established quickly, in a few days and, though I might consider a great many Aries folk loving fixtures in my life, I mainly experience them from afar. Proximity seems to be counterproductive to our getting along. I seem to be very quickly turned into audience and I’m not all that good at nodding or screwing up my face into a scrunch of affectionate validation.

Seriously, I suggest to anyone reading this to use this next month ahead to align with the energetic estate of the sign of the Ram. The Golden Fleece was stolen by Jason from a grove sacred to the god Ares (Mars). The whole metaphor of that quest is one of self-propulsion (if not fulfillment). Aries energy is headstrong, initiatory, ignitive, adrenal, muscular. It isn’t necessarily about follow-through. It’s about intention, which should be pure. Who are you? What is your purpose? For what should you quest? These are Aries questions. If the answers are dunno, dunno and bagel with a schmear, you have some work to do. The work mightn’t be easy but it is basic. That is to say, you just have to get your head screwed on properly and try not to deviate from what you see as your prime objective.

Aries people are the best at this. Which is why they don’t seem to much take into account what you’re doing. They approach life (and love, too) like a battering Ram. But I love that about them, the little lambs. Mary had a little one. You do realize that nursery rhyme is all about Jesus right? The lamb.  Easter. It falls into the sign of Aries. Pass the mint jelly.

An aside from a 2017 entrée entitled Lonely Planet
Cheery subject I know but I find this very much to be in keeping with the sign of Aries which hits home the fact that, when it comes to it, we fly solo. What has made this realization more poignant in recent years was the necessary loss of certain bonds which didn’t serve me and the conscious decision, regarding other friendships, to stop doing all the work—always being the one to reach out—to see just who would or wouldn’t make the effort to nurture a relationship.  Sadly, more often than not, I heard crickets.

An aside from a 2017 entrée entitled Lonely Planet
Maybe you too have a bunch of new things you’re putting into works. Great. Don’t think about completion only focus on the start. Aries loves the beginning of things. This is your time to frame and outline all the myriad things you’d like to do, rather than to go to deep into any one thing. Surely there are existing projects you’re already deep into. But don’t try to rush the works on something newly started.

As I write this I’ve taken a quick break from sorting through all the myriad to-do lists on paper and saved on my computer, pasting what I can onto my four walls like a detective piecing together envidence on how to solve a crime. It’s kind of fun to move slightly beyond the process of those myraid to-dos, but not quite yet into the doing. It creates a multiplicity of bite size tasks that an overactive mind like myself can be overwhelmed by when the flood  my mind en masse. When that happens I typically take my drug of choice—Netflix—and try to clear my crowded noggin.

I find printing out all the electronic lists, making them physical, is in keeping with Aries love of the actual. Those daffodils outside aren’t rushing through their process of blooming. Typically waiting for Taurus, the estate of the nymphs and flower gods, to enjoy that full expression. We’re not at that stage. It’s no easy task for any shoot to work it’s way through frozen soil and stones to pop out head first. Success of this sort (is there any other?) is achieved by degrees. And we’re only seven degrees into the first sign of Aries. So slow it down! Being throrough is the accumlation of baby steps.

Anywig, I tend not to ask for help (which can be it’s own “issue). And I will admit that I have waxed martyry in my day, but mostly not. I just find it so much easier to d.i.y.. Also desired positive results tend to taste all the sweeter. The man who wrote philosophically on this subject, most notably, is a Gemini not an Aries (I’ll let you guess who that is). But energetically speaking the notion is Arien. Self-reliance is most selfless. Just imagine if we embodied this principle. Nobody would have to pick up after your tweets.

So what is self-reliance at this particular instant in history? It’s hard to say. I suppose it’s not letting the government oppress you or the news of the oppression of the government depress you. But self-reliance isn’t escapism either (not even the good Pisces brand of seeking soul-asylum). Self-reliance is being a warrior in keeping with Aries’ martial archetypes. Self-reliance is health and fitness and personal well-being. Self-reliance is taking just what you need and no more as to create a deficit for others. Self-reliance is, in fact, taking a stand for those who can’t do so for themselves. Never do we have so strong a sense of self as when we are warriors for the freedom and happiness of all sentient beings.

The first sign of Aries is all about form (Taurus, which follows Aries, is about content). You can’t have the latter without the former. Form, former. Oh never mind.

The following blocks of text are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 776-780. 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. 

The first gay bay I ever went to was the Odyssey in Asbury Park. There was a sort of gay beach in Belmar where I lived with my parents, or, rather, my mother, summers. And being a bicurious fourteen year old who had already had some, mostly unwanted experience, I would let myself stroll to the north end of town where that beach was, close to the bridge to Avon-By-The-Sea. While I was strolling the length of Belmar, by the water, as I did pretty much daily, I lingered a little longer at the so-called gay beach and sat on the “cliff” that was made by the recent high tide.

It didn’t take long for someone to swoop down on this fourteen-year-old in the form of someone called Simon who was, yes you guessed it, a seminary student. He was eighteen or nineteen so of drinking age in New Jersey at the time. He invited me back to his “blanket”. I went, we chatted. Two other guys, Todd and Sean, joined us. I was so young that eighteen year olds looked like grown men to me.

Simon’s parents (and he), it turned out, lived two blocks from me. I have spoken before about the fact that my father was pretty much absent in summer, staying in our house up north in Wyckoff. My mother was a Pisces so she had no clue what I was up to; and besides, she drank and watched a lot of tv, eating pretzels or Snickers bars or Breyers vanilla ice cream, while stroking her twenty-five pound cat, Kerry, who, apparently, was also Irish.

Simon took me to play racketball once. I think it was an attempt at some semblance of heteronormative male frienship. Then he took me to a gay bar, The Odyssey, which was not just any kind of gay bar I realize now in retrospect. I would go the the Odyssey again and again, mostly ironically, with my fellow new-wavey straight and probably not so straight friends for years after. But at this time, in the late seventies, the new wave hadn’t quite hit. It was deep disco still and this place freaked me out. I remember seeing men kiss for the first time ever when I was at the Odyssey. I was suffused with excitement and revulsion. Howard, the famous eighteen year old bartender wore tons of turquoise. He looked like he should be on Eight is Enough. He wore v-neck three tone cotton short sleeve shirts with big collars. Just like Grant Goodeve and Willy Ames.

Todd and Sean showed up that first night. Nothing untoward happened. I was very clear that I liked girls (too?) and I approached being there, a place that came to be something of a home, as an anthropological study. But the truth was I was intrigued and I belonged there as much as anybody. As much as the seriously butch men (and women) dressed in leather playing pool in the part of the club when you first walked in. As much as any man occupying a stool and drinking their Cape Codders or Budweisers or Seabreezes making a ritual experience out of drinking and hopefully hooking up. As much as the drag queens—the best I ever saw was called Michael and she set up an entire dressing room table and did a Dreamgirls lipsynch to And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going that still gives me chills to think about—she would swipe all her paraphenalia off the fake dressing room vanity. As much as much as much.

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.
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