Virgo 27° (September 18)

I have many trans friends and I’m also good friends with a high-profile figure who has become their enemy as of late which isn’t right. I defend my friend though I don’t think her position has always been made as clear as it could be. I think she is saying what I would say which is: all women, cis (for lack of a better pre-fix) or trans are women. But not all women were born or grew up as biological females and cis women and trans women share some experience but they have also had very different experiences, especially growing up. They may share a gender but they do not share a biological sex from birth. These are facts. Why is it so difficult a thing for anyone to understand. I do think the trans community has to respect the differences of their biologically female sisters, just as much as cis women have to accept that trans women are women. That’s kind of that.

On the subject of the farmer, too, I will note that when his daughter got married and he offered to pay for us to stay in a hotel—he obviously didn’t want us on the property—we said we would stay down the road but he didn’t have to pay us. When I saw a fox had got into the henhouse, even though I had the flu, I sat vigil outside in a chair, for hours until he returned. When just this summer we noticed a chick outside the now one of two henhouses, we called and said we found it and there wasn’t so much of a thank you. The farmer has been a ticking time bomb (Capricorn) the whole time and he has blown before but never at this magnitude. I suspect there is a reason for suddenly turning hostile. I think he wants to provoke some kind of rupture. 

The following blocks of text are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 861-865. 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.

We have this expression around here called “collection time” which is a reference to our days in our twenties and early thirties when we worked in fashion. The two weeks leading up to collection time and typically some kind of runway show entailed waking up going to work for sixteen-to-twenty hours, passing out and doing it again, during a solid fortnight. It was a drag but there was no way around it. Many things in our lives have had this dynamic and we still say collection time.

Two weeks from tonight is the first night of performances for the Afterglow Festival, followed the next week by the kick off of the Glowberon series in Cambridge. I know myself and I will kick myself if I leave any stone uncovered in my fundraising efforts. So that becomes the priority now, getting in as much money as possible to ensure I at least break even. I have worked fairly steadily over the last six months, as I do every year leading up to festival, to bring this series of productions to light. Typically I get a terrible head cold just after festival ends. But my cold has come early this year. If I were to listen to my body as I should I would lie down and get some rest. Unfortunately there has been no slow down in the Starsky + Cox work—if anything this is our busiest week in months—and people who have taken all summer to socialize suddenly have to be seen—how I wish I could just not show up for social plans right now but then, you see, I’m not “cultivating my friendships.” Not my words by the way. And anyway, I’m of the mind that I do much of the cultivation in any case in many instances. To be honest, I’m feeling very hell-is-others right about now and don’t really give a shit about socializing. So there.

Case in point: Someone I know well and whom I write often during the course of the year to check in and chat and so forth (who mostly doesn’t reply to emails or goes into some kind of monologue, as people do, about “how busy I am”—we’re all fucking busy, meanwhile) wrote a note that they’re having a little something tomorrow night and could we come. Well from the sound of what this little something is it’s a biggish something and certainly the planning has been going on for ages. I’m all for spontaneity but I hate feeling like an afterthought or worse: Like someone who might see that this event happened and wasn’t invited so I better be invited just as a precautionary measure against censure. Paranoid of me? Probably. But the way I feel these days I’m going to trust my gut, even if my gut is acting gutted.

Now I’m perfectly aware that I run a risk here of spewing negativity—who wants to read that. But sometimes even those of us who work as professional cheerleaders (especially we in this position) need to get all the yuckies out somehow somewhere. So that’s what I’m doing today. I’m venting. I’m releasing. I’m saying I’m fucking tired and pissed off and all I want to do is watch TCM for the next twelve hours. I don’t want to be on. I don’t want to be professional. I don’t want to be wise or in any way all knowing. I don’t want to channel psychic power. I’m effing exhausted (I’m writing this post the same day as the previous one if you’re catching that theme) and I need a major time out.

Why do I always have to be so Johnny on the spot? Why do I always have to have perfect follow through. Don’t other people who haven’t returned professional emails in the last two months feel even the slightest guilt about it? Even if they’re British? Are friends not aware that it’s always me reaching out and that they rarely initiate. Even if they have kids (and I don’t), I feel like that excuse has worn pretty thin. Anyway people my age are no longer young parents. They are becoming grandparents for Chrissake. Anyway, I’m definitely down a hole and I’m not coming out until I feel better and I’m not going to mask my feelings for this fucking Blague today. Today I need to be a fucking whining complaining douchebag.

I’m tired of the uphill battle. I’m tired of doing the same thing everyday, including this stupid thing. I’m tired of other people. I’m tired of rolling this stupid boulder up the mountain with a stick. Mainly I’m just tired of myself.

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Spent the day yesterday at friends of ours from England who bought a house on the Cape in an area we never got to “the other Cape” in Osterville. It was such a fun day. I forget how much fun seeing true friends can be; and how much it reminds me that I’m surrounded by crazy people for the most part where I live, a place where I have some good aquaintances which I think can be friendships given proper nurturing; though mainly people around here are super problematic.

It was exotic to be in such a heteronormative environment, I must say. Lunch with three generations of a family en plein air. A little boat trip with doggies down to the beach. Tea. Then the appearance of neighbors and cocktails (not for me thanks) and then just a lovely dinner with talking and laughter. I’m completely shagged out today because I stayed up past my usual 9PM bed time but it was really good fun. I think because we don’t have kids we don’t have that experience of, now, being friends with kids as many of our friends are. It makes me sad on one level. I think that’s why I have probably avoided it and stuck with the other groovy ghoulies where I live. But I must say I felt the loss of that lifestyle. Though I try not to compare myself to other people, it’s hard sometime.

I brought this up and the opinion was that it’s good I am verbalizing feeling the loss of would-be parenthood and the “normalcy” of family life. I suppose I’m glad too. Funny how you don’t know how deep something has cut you until you’re faced with it. And I mean it when I say that I might have subconsciously been avoiding environments like that. But now I feel the opposite. I feel like being around more of that sort of thing. I feel like I/we do actually play a part. I think the whole “assistant parent” thing comes into play because we are also a deviation from the normal structure of family and yet we do drop right in. Kids like to see close friends of parents and parents love having the pressure off a bit. Anyway, this year coming up, we are going to be surrounded by many friends with kids and, frankly, I’m so happy about that.

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“Autumn darkness falls so soon and steals my soul” was the first line of a poem I wrote once. I don’t know the rest of the poem because it was stolen with bags full of my writing. One day, in the heat of summer, in the very early 1990s, when we lived in Hoboken, I drove to Florent and sat all day going through tons of notebooks, annotating my writing, deciding what would become what—novel, poem, comedy piece, etc—I must have been there four hours at least. Then I drove and parked the car on Mercer or Green street to meet Lynne to go see a film at the Angelika. I had put all my bags, including my favorite Millet backpack I’d bought in Grenoble, in the trunk. When we came out of the film we found the trunk had been broken into and all my bags were gone.

I don’t know if someone told us to, or if we just knew to, but we drove to the East Village where people sold stuff on the street. We didn’t see any trace of what was taken. I think about the thieves, just grabbing all the bags and running, only to find they are filled with someone’s writing which is of no value to them but of great value to only one person. I’m sure the karmic payback for that swindle was great.

The most sad loss was a green French graph paper notebook Lynne had given me when we lived in Grenoble into which she put a poem I wrote her—she rewrote it onto the first page. And then wrote: “Now write”. The poem was called Run With Me and it was a sort of invitation to her to spend the rest of her life with me. I’m most sad about that.

I think I got writing on this subject because I was trying to pinpoint the feeling I feel now. And I suppose it is just very close to that feeling I felt at the loss of my bags. But instead of bags it’s now this free floating sense of loss over what I once had, now gone, and what I never had. You can definitely feel loss for something that you never owned or experienced. Isn’t that some kind of strange twist on empathy. Being empathetic for some version of yourself you never were.

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I cannot tell a lie, I’m happy summer is drawing to a close. It’s nearly Labor Day and I have just nine days until the start of our festival. And then John Kelly at Oberon and then off to NYC where we will produce Stella’s Birth of the American Baroness. I’m speaking to one of our sponsors that owns a hotel in Asbury Park about possibly producing some shows there. I would actually love to go down and check out the place. As I said in a recent post I haven’t been back to that area in ages. For the first half of those ages I was rebelling against all the unhappiness associated with the place, for the second half I’ve been having some pangs which combined the feelings of wanting to make the past the past but also being curious about what’s going on down there. Still, it’s New Jersey.

There were so many regular things we did then. Someone recently told me they were born in Neptune New Jersey. I think it was my friend Will? Anyway, that area keeps coming up. We used to go to this place called Mom’s Kitchen where we knew all the waitresses who treated us like family. We at there a lot. My mother always had veal chops with vinegar peppers. I googled it and it comes up but there is a new place in its location with the same interior just new booths called Il Posto. It looks eh.

I want to move around a lot this year and yet still hit my marks. I want to be super smart about projects and not be lead down any garden paths. When it comes to the charitable work it will have to be very much easier this coming year. I should really like to realize some of my personal goals in all of this. I know I can do it if I really set my mind to it. And I have a sort of roll-out list sketched out in my imagination. It can all come together beautifully if I set my mind to it. Anyway, I might be ready to re-visit some of these old haunts. And yet I have trepidation. I’m better off sticking to a European plan me thinks, spending as much time over there as possible. I really must get to Venice this year I feel it is an absolute necessity. This will be the year of greatest hits travel wise. We won’t go anywhere new looks like.

I’m not sure how to feel about the festival this year. When I look over my list of sponsors from last year so many of them haven’t returned. By hook or by crook I will somehow make ends meet with the festival but it really has been pulling teeth I must say. I don’t know why so many people tell me it’s their favorite thing and then seem to expect it’s going to happen for them just by magic. The only magic is me. I look forward to doing a little bit more research for Boston to see if we can get that project moving as it ultimately has more potential for success.

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Waking up to Facebook is depressing. It’s not because of any one thing like people being narcissistic, posting things that are meant to feel “greater than”, or people mourning their dead pets or parents, or making sour-grape statements about other people’s “greater than” posts, or the politics, or the anonymous infighting. It’s all of it. I have used Facebook because I promote things and create events and send invites to them; but this too has become a bit of law of diminishing returns as a medium. The site now limits how many invites you can send to events you’ve created and I don’t feel that many people are actually seeing my posts. I will be making my Facebook page a marquee and switching all my focus over to the business of Starsky + Cox, including the inclusion of this Blague which, let’s face it, has got to change back to what it originally was meant to be: Daily postings that were funny and cosmic-synchronistic i.e. Cosmic Jokey. It’s also time for me to stop playing all the instruments and to be the orchestra leader full stop. By the same token I want my own solo work to take precedent. I should look at my solar return chart for the coming year. The irony being that I don’t really know my own birth time.

Lucille Ball has a very simple and, one would think,obvious quote about loving yourself, which is always easier said than done: “Love yourself first and everything else falls into line. You really have to love yourself to get anything done in this world.” It really is truth. And I find that the first step in loving yourself, or the first symptom let’s say, is letting go of those who don’t celebrate (but only tolerate) you. You know who they are because you feel it. Feeling is knowing. You know in your gut. That’s the Canerian- (I feel) Aquarian (I know) connection. Aquarius is an air sign. It is the water bearer, not the water itself. It contains feeling and therefore has a hopefully healthily detached relationship to them. Personal evolution is hinged on not taking anything personally, even when affronts in life come from those closest to us. When they do, say, in childhood, we then replicate those relationships in adulthood, trying to get blood from stones.

What I love about Lucy’s quote is the focus on getting things done. It is true the only way to get things done is to love yourself, that’s kind of an unexpected practical twist. I would imagine that, though she might have loved Desi, that continuing to be in a relationship with him rang as not loving herself. But what do I know. I saw her admit to Dick Cavett and her daughter Lucie for the first time that she tried to kill herself at age sixteen by walking into traffic, because she had a lousy audition for something. To feel that hopeless so young and to be that affected by rejection and then to become the person she did which entailed enduring another twenty five years of a so-so career, one bordering on loserville at times, until she found her place in the Sun. Of course she’s a Leo, the fifth house ruling “the love you give” with the parenthetical addition of (yourself).

I was watching part one of the American Experience on PBS about Walt Disney. Never mind that they used words like extravert, exploration, experience, generosity, big-boy, paternalism and other such terms associated with the Sagittarius that he is, it really was quite inspirational interms of giving your all to get all you want which may never be enough. So we see all sides of it. He was a super heterosexual for sure; and yet there is something strangely homoerotic about being so into the care and needs of other men while treating women more like vessels or second-hand citizens. All the guys who made up the bulk of the Disney studio upper echelon seemed, in many ways, to be carbon copies of himself. They were macho. They were tall and thin and athletic. And Walt built an executive gym, with an Olympic trainer, along with VIP dining halls for this population in his employ. They had all the perks and huge salaries and the women, mostly paint and ink artists, were in lowlier digs in separate buildings and paid peanuts. There is something so gay about being so straight.

Still, on the theme, he never gave up and he certainly loved himself. So much so that he was surrounded by doppelgangers.

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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