Scorpio 6° (October 28)

Day started early with client who we have been working with for years. And it is always exciting to take people to new levels. We get to see such progress in people which is encouraging. Got a bill from the lawyer which was a bit of a shock but I suppose not too, too surprising. It is worth it for the peace of mind. We had a lovely note from the TV folks who wanted some follow up info from us, which I was happy to provide. It’s good to keep taking our space. Heard back from JES which was also nice. I am really playing chicken with my appointment on Monday. I am giving myself just four days to prep for that procedure. And I’m also constantly tweaking my schedule which I find understandable. I must have compassion for myself and trust myself as well.

The following blocks of text are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 1056-1060. 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.

I’m sad Stephen Hawking has left us; but I do need to admit something: He did end up making me feel paranoid much of the time. It’s one thing that he was an atheist who believed this was it—but he also said robots would take over the world. I don’t know about robots but I will say that tehcnology in the form of cyber warfare is of the same il. And with all the WH chaos—I dunno it’s all a bit too doomsday for me.

I used to be really good with a sort of energy work in my younger days.

My heart aches when I think about certain characters in books or films. For some reason the family of siblings in Howard’s End does that to me. It’s what’s not being spoken about their past, really, before the current circumstance presents. They have no parents and are far apart in age. Such a story there. Anyway, à propos of nothing. But, I dare say, at this point in my writing this Blague, having done major catch-up, it feels natural to coast and allow thoughts to flow. I might have said this already but, I was telling Stella last night: One goes into the endeavor of producing more than a fair amount of copy, the notion being that it must begin in the brain and make it down to typing fingers, which, of course is true; however, what one comes to discover is that the writing, the actual doing of the thing, is what pulls the thoughts down, and not just in one simple way; no, the content can be created (now that I’ve passed the extent of a retelling here) where, let’s say now we enter territories we’ve not entered before in musing upon the notion of this, that or anything; and I only got here but sitting down and starting to type. So there’s that way. Then, one may find themselves writing the next word being drawn by the rhythm of the words on (we can’t say paper anymore, unless paper itself becomes a metaphorical term) a white field on a computer screen; but it’s typically not just purely rhythm. No, the rhythm is nine times out of ten the result of some sort of poetry at work, a way to catch our metaphorical eye, our metaphysical fancy. The phone flashes: “On way back now”. I struggle to keep the thought or wonder if I’ve finished it. I suppose it falls under the heading of metaliterature or stream of consciousness or both, I dunno. But I can tell you this, that there are fewer sensations so relaxing as writing in this “mode” just as nothing can be more tension making or near seizure inducing as a bottled up process of writing whereby one feels the blocked energy from brain, back of the head, down neck and shoulders, down and out arms, hands and fingertips.

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I used to be really good with a sort of energy work in my younger days. That was a sentence that appeared in yesterday’s Blague and, instead of following that tangent, feeling it might be big, I left it as a single paragraph….

St. Patrick’s Day was fun when I was a kid, in New Jersey, because, having parents who were the opposite of the helicopter sort, what would you call them?, more like zeppelins drifting off in their own directions, unawares, and I would skip school and take a bus, maybe, or a train, though that doesn’t sound right, to NYC, to get drunk. That was pretty much the extent of it. Nobody watching, nobody cared. Me in a lined windbreaker, prematurely garbed for spring, ordering beer after beer, day drinking at fifteen, sixteen; in those days they never “proofed” you in NYC; we didn’t say carded, or as we say in New England, cahded, we said “proofed.” I can still picture one bartender like from a movie wearing his white shirt, sleeves rolled up, black pants and suspenders, grey hair, pouring beer after beer in his bar that began with Mc, making bank as fast he could, not stopping to asking who was underage. In 1980 in NYC there was no under age. I suppose I would have told my parents, ahd they ventured to ask, that I went to see the parade. But I’m sure they didn’t know I wasn’t in school the whole day. They might be curious why I’m home from school at nine o’clock, shit faced at that time. I remember making a phone call to someone from, yes, my private phoneline in my bedroom—what, you think I was raised by wolves? (I was in many ways which is why they compensated with perks like my own private number—unlisted, thank you.)

…. I used to be really good with a sort of energy work in my younger days. Before we talked about such things, or I knew of something called Reiki or whatever, when I was still a teenager, or maybe twenty, I became aware of a certain ability I had with my hands. No I know why I wanted to write about this: I sort of forgot the fact—that this was part of “my thing”. I keep stepping away from writing about this I’m not sure why. The visual that comes up when I alight on the topic is of being in Stella’s studio apartment on Beacon Street, our senior year, back from our study abroad in France, and “doing stuff” with my hands. Now, I’m not talking about sexually, only, but that was an interesting part of it: to discover that I could, how shall we say, affect an outcome without actually touching, but rather “touching the energy” surrounding the body. It sounds hokey I know but I didn’t know that “energy work” was a thing so I thought it was only me who had this particular talent. Anyway I do remember doing this to people if they had a bad back or they injured themselves or just felt a little stressed or nutsy, I would just sort of …I dunno…work their aura? Or something like that. Meanwhile I’m not the one who sees auras in the family. Oh no she didn’t. I hate myself for that last sentence. Okay now I understand why I didn’t write about this—it was because of its boudoir elements; and I am, despite heaping evidence to the contrary, quite the prude.

I chalk up everything woo-woo about me to being a Celt. Without proof, I know that it’s that blood line which has given me any power of this kind. And I’m at the place in my life now where I really want to cultivate it. At first I dismissed it, then I accepted it rather dispassionately, not wanting to “bill” myself as some kind of psychic or intuitve of any kind; and now suddenly I find myself wanting to nurture this side of myself and really find so many creative and intellectual ways to explore this pretty wide range of, lets just call it esotericism, in its myraid forms, and to let my interest in astrology and counseling and theater and art and design and study and discourse and body and mind and spirit all come together more cohesively now. Just like all the once-considered scattered bits of myself, what might have been labelled dilletanteish (by others and even myself) pursuits that seemed to split me—well those are now each of them pretty much risen enough on their own accord to come together, like building blocks of my being, moving forward.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day. I bought this book in Ireland twenty years ago. It gets one star, which unstuck itself and fell from the ceiling.

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Let me put it down. While it occurs to me. A jumble of thoughts and typings up on remaining bits on paper on my desk and on the walls would be a fitting form for this entry today. Tomorrow I will set forth a new intention and the day after that will begin the fourth year of my writing this Blague and I already wish not to narrate, today. I will tweet on QC account my aphorisms and commentary on things occuring. How my father told me late in life, when I was well into my thirties, that his name wasn’t really James but Vincenzo. I said what about your social security—he said I have two. My uncle my godfather was a godfather who got presidential-pardoned by Ford. I wish we had a strong enough mafia to take out the circus peanut. I’m excited and a little challenged being out, now, in society. None of the clothes I really want to wear fit—one must resist the urge to shop-spree as a reward for losing weight—and I’m not at my thinnest. Oh well. I don’t really care which is unlike me. It has also not been like me to let my hair grow this long but it feels good to be older and free. Boston for a few days, interaction with others day one, then a solo day day two to just space out and walk around—though it’s still meant to be cold, or I should say: it’s meant to still be cold.

I do want to read O Lost or whatever Look Homeward, Angel was before the editing. Good movie about Thomas Wolfe and Max Perkins that didn’t see the light of day is on one of the premium movie channels. Genius. I feel longing. And as I tell clients that’s a good thing. It’s very Cancerian. Little wonder Penny Arcade titled her show Longing Lasts Longer, she’s a Moonchild. Longing is cardinal-water (directed emotion) and it is the thing by which we reach out to that which we desire—cue Cinderella singing whatever—it’s a bit of a paradoxical thing. Not the cardinal-fire of Aries, the previous cardinal sign, with it’s point spear. Cardinal-water longing reaches out like a spear but it has a receptor at the end. Sceptre. Have to look up the word and check it’s etymology. Notes from my wall on what sorts of things might be of interest, social-media-wise. I can incorporate my Afterglow shout-outs because it would give the Blague location. I am also supposed to write a form letter to other universities and colleges. I like also to talk about what astrology book I might be reading. And some aphorisms from our work and others.

Remember this isn’t supposed to make that much sense to you. As I wing my way through anything that might be relevant to my ritualizing making one of the yearly breaks. I have to say the equinoxes are much more powerful for me than the solstices, but each, in their way signals a shift. Ironicially the solstices seem more of a point between experience, even though they are the polarity of dark and light and the equinoxes are more lin in-door and out-door side by side. For me the equinoxes tend to mark a time when I clean slate and start again. The start of the zodiac begins with the equinox. And we just had a new Pisces Moon to boot. That really signals deep change. Because we are at the end of the zodiacal cycle, the hope is that we all spiral up a notch. That is to say that we don’t repeat the patterns of last year but learn our lesson and ease on up the cosmic slinky personifying progress whatever that means for you. Pisces is non-material existence which I will put into a word Love. It’s about trying a new paradigm and leading with love…and with sacrifice. You must be willing to let go—via Neptune, dissolution is the Piscean process—in order to ascend.

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Stockholm Syndrome Okay so here’s where I really need to tell the people what’s happening tomorrow. And in so doing articulate it to myself I suppose, which makes me feel dizzy just thinking about. But, let’s face it, I’ve been increasingly dizzy for years. Tis true. Which is the old way of saying True dat and no more efficient a one. What I didn’t expect to happen is that I feel most comfortable now sitting down and writing into this Blague than I feel doing anything else or nothing at all. At first this Blague held me hostage and now…well…

So, I have been writing my daily Cosmic Blague now for three years. I began in 2015 on the spring equinox, beginning at 0° Aries, the first sign of the zodiac, ushering in the astrological new year. Blague is the french word for joke; and, the original idea was to muse on the ways in which this is a funny universe, both ha-ha and not always, where we all feel the joke is rather on us; and I also wanted to bring in a mystical element citing things that are logically unexplainable about experience, primarily, my personal own. I have surely had my fair share of run-ins with the cosmos on that score. And, whether writing books or material to perform as Starsky + Cox on stage, I’ve always strived to mix the comic with the cosmic, since the world of metaphysics and esotericsm was my ironical ballywick. I say ironical because writing and performing comedy was what I worked at magazines or waited tables through my twenties to afford. Writing ultimately paid the bills; while what began emerging in me was something else, something different if not deeper. I was like an underage new ager. I was a myth head, which is better than the alternative. Like most adolescent witches, I scoured the local libraries for anything on the subject and for spells. I did incantations to Dionysus in the attic of a summer house wearing a toga-type thing I made out of old curtains; at seventeen I began reading some fairly esoteric materials. I studed the myth of the magi. I frequented good-vibe arcane bookshops (how I miss those) and knew which darker spots to eschew. I had met some sages and received transmissions and had “transformational experiences” whereby I experienced superhuman strength and capabilities; something opened up in me that, I realize, had opened up in my immediate ancestors, and so on, the Celtic side of my family being, well, what I used to call spooky in the extreme, but what I have grown to welcome as a gift. And when you have a gift, you see, you must give it away; that is one of the great paradoxes of life; and paradoxes, akin to irony, which is a cousin to the comedic, is an expression, I believe of the inherent humor in the universe and so it’s why I wanted to make this the subject of a Cosmic Blague. But I was saying…

Year one of my Blague. Should I then reiterate the above….?

So the Cosmic Blague is back.  So I set out three years ago to mine and muse upon the workings of this, our funny universe, it’s inexplicable, mystical, metaphysical workings that so often hurl metaphorical pies in our faces, the comic and the cosmic inextricably linked. It wasn’t always easy, and year one I used training wheels—I mooned on the “Sabian Symbols” that mark each degree of the zodiac and day of the year, using that as a spring board to find the funny truth outside and in. Years two and three the training wheels were off, and it became more and more personal, and I realized I had this platform for exploring ideas, which might make their way into books or conversations or consultations with clients; and it also severed as an incubator for creative concepts and would-be projects, 99% of which will never see the light of day. Still you can’t steal them because they are my IP. Some days I wrote shopping lists but the important thing was to show up. The practice of dedicated writing of this nature has its own alchemy that takes over, asserting its necessity. Anyway, I thought to mark this milestone as I embark on year four; and I wanted also to say that I’ll be more mindful of sharing thoughts and feels, comic and cosmic, with you all more consistently. Our disillusionment with social media, its algorithms, and the world socieity now, in general, can lead us to detach, but I think that just might be an insidious plot. So I’ve decided to be more connected than ever….

I’m fucking crap at being “live”.

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Here we go! I’m in Boston where I went to school. At B.U. I lived in Warren Towers, very on the nose, on Commonwealth Avenue the first year and somehow ended up on the 18th (top) floor of the A tower (there are A, B, and C) which is the most easterly tower…and because boys got preferential treatment, on the east side of that tower, which meant I had a view looking into the City. The sunrises were brutal but the rest was okay. I was on the “performing arts” floor for some reason (spooky) as I didn’t request it having already veered away from my drama-club high-school self, but there I was. Karen Kohlhaas, still a friend, who became a great teacher and director, was on my floor and we had fun then, and more fun in more recent years, togther. She left for NYU after freshman year.

I moved, for sophomore year to South Campus and lived in the Earth House which was filled with a combination of geology students, environmentalists, pseudo-activists (playing out a college fantasy that no longer existed in the eighties) and stoners, basically, Dead Heads, specifically. I was on my own trip. I had a single which I painted a sort of cocoa with brown trim. It was maybe seven by eleven feet in dimension. I tried to make it look cozy, first semester; then I deconstructed in second semester, hanging my box spring on the wall, sleeping low, just on the mattress, hanging all sorts of objects, and making stacked file cabinets out of milkcrates onto wich I fashioned “doors” with masses of duct tape, from cafeteria trays, which also served to hold families of objects—a toiletries tray, a stationers tray, a weed tray for rolling joints. I wore sailor pants and sweaters onto which i fashioned pins—my favorite sweater had been inherited from an older child of my parents older friends, Bobby, who was in the FBI or CIA, even, by then, some fifteen years my senior maybe, and the claim to fame of the sweater, beyond the fact that it was a rather fitted 1960s black sweater with thin gold stripes, like that of a subtly modish bumble bee, with ribbed mock turtleneck, was that it had gone to the Filmore East on Bobby to see The Doors. It had magic in it. As did everything I wore, owned or touched which was getting more and more minimal in this deconstructive process of mine. I still have this sort of minimalist morphing that that happens in my life, from time to time, being very much the opposite of a materialist (and an air sign) I need a well appointed space of few objects. It’s what we now refer to around here as “feeling atonal.” Ha!

I also took to running everywhere. I didn’t walk to class, I ran. When friends took the T to Allston or into Back Bay, I would run along the sidewalk and try to keep pace, grateful for its frequent stops, though, I remember. Now I’m writing this first day of the new astrological year from one of my favorite places on the map, a hotel that has become home away from home, and the vib here is ever so so good. I typically listen to KCRW Eclectic 24 online and throw it to my bluetooth speaker I travel with. There is something to be said about living in the modern age. Except the news today is about an automatic car killing a woman. Is this the first robot murder? Will it one day be traced back to this?

Had a wonderful meeting with a writer for the Boston Globe who, it turns out, grew up in the next town over from where I spent summers all my life. If you’re a reader of this Blague then you’ll know that I have often mused on the town of Spring Lake, New Jersey and what it meant to me…yeah, spiritually. It was the place to which I was infinitely drawn growing up, the giant gilded-age mansions that were made of wood. My new friend, the journalist, spoke of climbing up the outdoor stairs of a mansion to smoke a cigarette and look at the ocean when she was fifteen. I got it. In those empty, badland days of seventies anonymity, with these vacant monuments to the past, many of them, looming over you every day, you could, yes, just walk, not sneak (nobody watching) up some escalier to do just that. These places were inhabitied ofen, only, by Irish lace curtains and musty, dusty, a lot of velvet, furniture.

This new year is going to be pretty wild, I predict, for all of us. I will try to keep my sense of humor and it is my belief that the universe, said, cosmos, has the ultimate one.

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. Get your HAUTE ASTROLOGY 2020 Weekly Horoscope ebooks by Starsky + Cox.