Scorpio 5° (October 27)

We did have a lovely chat with the English office and, though S. thought otherwise, I was actually really cheered by what the producers had to say, and I feel the project is very much alive indeed. Took the car to get inspected which was quick and easy. Ate some scallion oatcakes and had a lovely dinner of clam chowder with some nice Chinon. And now we are taking a full two months off which is a good thing. Everything is in works and there isn’t a whole helluva lot to say on top of it all. There is just me redoing my schedule in a delusional state of writing block.

The following blocks of text are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 1051-1055. 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.

There has to be a real switcheroo right now. Things will be coming to a head. And if John Bolton gets anywhere near decision making things will really go pear-shaped or, perish the thought (and everything else) mushroom shaped. I feel that we are nationally hitting a rock bottom. The country is a sick addict and it must enter recover. Of course we must first stage an intervention. This is what I think we should call what used to be known as a protest. We need to tell our fellow citizens that the country is powerless over its addiction to sex and greed and rage and bullying as personified by the circus peanut in chief. I’ll come back to this later I don’t want it to color my whole Blague entry.

I was speaking the other day about learning later in life how much my father prejudged and hated me for not being all boy. And doing it so, so early in my life. It actually made me wonder (as I saw a documentary on this recently) whether there might have been some kind of question as to my gender, or something, at birth. I remember my earliest Halloween costume was “football players” which now seems like an overprotestation, speaking of protests. I see a lot of my father in the circus peanut; and of course my evil, estranged sibling is born on the same day as it.

I loved dolls as a very small child. Five years her senior, the fact my sister had an array of Barbies and Liddle Kiddles, I remember getting into them when I was home all day. That is to say pre-school. And I started pre-school actually at the age of three, so we are talking very early memories of me. There was some kind of hair dye thing for her blond Barbies. Now let’s not get started on the fact that this must have been a toxic substance with which I was left alone, age three, in my room. But I do remember dipping her dolls hair in different dye mixtures; moreover I remember her violent reaction to my doing so upon my return from school. I totally got where she was coming from. But get over it. I’m three and I’m left alone for hours by an extremely checked out Pisces mother whose credits include falling asleep with the gas burner on, starting a kitchen fire; and leaving both my sister and me in a car, at the supermarket, in neutral instead of park, so we rolled backward into a concrete block in which a street light was lodged. Ah memories.

Anyway I remember being made to feel a great deal of shame about the doll thing from my father which gave license to my sister to create whole rallies around making me feel like I was a freak by the time I was four. But, I suppose this is a testament to my resilience—and this is something that only occured to me for the first time in my entire life—I channeled my doll envy into something creative. First of all I don’t think the doll thing for me was about loving girly things per se. It was the fact that they only dolls we had were female. Really it was just about playing with something that was a human replicant. This was far more interesting to me than playing with objects. The only other toy, up to this point, I obsessed on were toy soldiers—I had this amazing United Nations forces set up of soldiers, in varying positions, some shooting rifles while kneeling of course (that’s a classic) that came in a package with this great U.N. white army truck. And there was cool military paraphenalia like plastic army bags and utlitiy belts you could put on the soldiers before loading them into the white metal truck that had a canvas U.N. blue canopy on the top. That was rad….but I digress…..

Where I really channeled my love of figurines, shall we say, was in drawing; and specifically in my rendering of the Flintstones.

This is becoming a two parter. So tune into the next Blague on the subject which will be March 13ths entry. You see I already have some words written into the one following this one because, well, let’s just say I’m floating between days here. (I did mention that I tend to write a few paragraphs at a time within entries….well I also sometimes write a few entries at once and I didn’t expect this to be a two-parter, anway)…

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Today didn’t include my most shining moments. In anticipation of the blizzard that came to be I was a bit lax in my understanding of self-care. And to be fair it had been another lonely night without sleep, staying up, as I often do when Stella is away, all the night long watching movies. The only positive thing I can say about that is: they play way better movies overnight when supposedly everyone is asleep. Which doesn’t quite make sense. Maybe the better movies are on overnight because so many people like me don’t sleep but instead lie awake anesthetizing their pain injecting the flickering light into their eyeballs held open in some kind of Clockwork Orange type fashion. I do like that film. Though I’m not a big fan of the director, a Leo man like so many. We saw a wonderful exhibit on Kubrick a few years back at Los Angeles museum…LACA? Anyway, the Leo (a sign that has many a dictator associated with it) director had made a film about the Leo tyrrant emporer Napoleon which never saw the light of day but which generated so much art work and writing in the creation that it filled rooms at a museum. It was wonderful.

Except that I almost burned the house down.

The problem with staying up all night is that you can easily fall alseep without warning. And you might fall asleep after putting a chicken in the oven on 500° for what’s meant to be forty-five minutes, not an hour, which will result in a house full of smoke and yet, strange, the smoke alarms didn’t go off; and they always normally do, much to ones chagrin, every single time I cook chicken in that manner. Anyway, I shot up and the house was full of smoke and of course, right at that moment, Stella returned from Boston, earlier than I had expected, and I seemed, and rightly so, in an instant to be the kind of person you just can’t leave alone without some kind of mini-disaster happening. In this case it could have been a lot more than mini and now it becomes a serious cautionary tale. I feel like the cosmos only gives us so many free passes in life; it gives us plenty, but these are finite, I sense.

I can feel myself really trying to change the paradigm. The breakthroughs come but they always leave us hard work to do in their wake. Which is an apt term since we are more woke about (fill in the blank) after a major breakthrough which not only presents more work as I say, that’s the head down power through part of it all, but also a portal into the achieving of the concept this is comprised by the hard work and vice versa. It’s like you have to have a hook, on which to hang everything involved in any particular venture; and you surely have to kiss a lot of frogs. But you can’t just sell any idea, you have to also find a way to start achieving it and to have it ever the more flesh out as to be able to sell it. People like to buy very fleshed out ideas. We provide an experience, this has to be front-loaded not just as a philosophy but as a practice. As they say, no manure, no magic.

Anyway, let’s just say it ended weirdly, this day.

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As I was writing, two Blagues ago, I got the feeling it had to be a two parter. And the last sentence I said on the subject was: Where I really channeled my love of figurines, shall we say, was in drawing; and specifically in my rendering of the Flintstones.

Since playing with actual dolls caused so much shame and guilt and shame you see, compounded by general statements made by my father aloud about me even as I’m, hello right there—comments like “he’s really round-shouldered isn’t he”. This particular one stands out because I remember feeling its effects almost physical. Certainly felt it emotionally. In recent years I’ve linked posture issues and even shoulder problems with manifesting this malignancy heaped upon me by manipulating my own body, subconsciously, never feeling in my skin, but that I had to compensate through, yeah some kind of Marcel Marceau manipulation of myself to “appear” differently than I am. Appearing is a very Libran word, and I’m a classic conceptual sort of kook.

Anyway I digress…

Plopped in front of the electronic baby sitter I saw the same TV shows day in and day out from the moment I arrived home from school through to, and ultimately mostly through, dinner, into primetime, every night from the time I’ve been alive until, I’m gonna say, the upper reaches of high-school where I did manage to bust out a social life. I was fun! But back into those tender years, and I mean really tender, like four years old: I started to draw the Flintsones characters and ultimately took things, if not completely three dimensional, then two-plus, by then cutting all the characters out, which I would draw next to each other, to get the sizing right, and I would thicken a bit the outside lines, for ease—a clever trick that came too late—and then cut them all out. And then draw their backs, which was one of the funner parts because it required thinking. I made houses and chairs, with tabs, that I could fold down and fasten with tape so they’d stand up, onto scenic surfaces better known as paper plates or interestingly shaped cartons, that provided a field which provided me literal platforms for creative expression.

My Flintstones were really good, too. They were kind of perfect. And I became a connoisseur of the evolving styles, from the oldest episodes to the newer ones, during the show’s run, in the articulation of the characters and I tended to go for the most recent looks, though I suspect, now, I might have patterned my little figures on the older ones. But if I were to draw you a Flintstone today it would recall the latter years of the original primetime run of the series. Anway, they were my first dolls of my own. I also made a sort of cartoon Lost and Space series, another afterschool series that ran for eons in syndication. But my dollish lust was ultimately more satisfied by Major Matt Mason. Oh my god I loved Major Matt Mason. He was an astraunaut and his rides and props were amazing. I had both the red space rover and the clear blue bubble on wheels that it could two, the bubble itself being what rolled, wherein a seat for Matt, as the result of amazing technology (lol) would stay upright within the rolling bubble. The door the the bubble was a panel that slid up so that Matt could slide in. Major Matt Mason was rubber with wires inside which would lose their pluck, resulting in flopping limbs.

Later I collected mostly all of the Johnny West series which I gave someone to sell……how strange, this never happens, but I hear a call up to my lair from a voice not Stellas and up the stairs comes our friend and associate Brad. Hi Brad….twenty two hours pass, and I’m back, wondering did I finish this Blague or is there more to say…on Ebay, which they did. It fetched something, but not a lot. I could have waited. But I had carted the collection around from house to house over the decades and it was time to let go. When the letting go of things you think will hurt you doesn’t so much, it makes it easier to let other things go. Anyway, once I finished playing with dolls, I took up playing with personages. Illustrated, first, with my obsession with pantheons and mythology because, really, I took to drawing the various gods and goddesses whom I loved. Then the Justine League or theater groups or “schools” of artists, or movements, to some degree, royal families, or literary families or any kind of extended family.And I’m really into pantheons in my own life, too, whether it was feeling part of a movement myself or in the “characters” that I write about (even the astrological ones) or the “family of performers” I present and avec whom I commune.

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Yesterday ’twas a dark day weith a nor’Easter blowing knocking out the power most of the day. Was a first time experiencing outage in this house which meant everything was out. No water, let alone heat. Based on yesterday’s experience, I wouldn’t have made a great pioneer. The blizzard really hit in the morning and stayed that way. Now, it wasn’t my computer or devices I missed, leaving them to power back up—by the way as I’m writing this the power is out again and I am racing against battery power (but I’m feeling a bit more pioneering)—the first thing I realized is that I suffer from a very serious television addiction. Not to say that I am inclined to watch television during the day, typically, unless in some kind of funk; but without the so-called mod cons (or an unantiquated power grid not to mentionan overall infrastructure) my natural inclination is to crawl under multi-layers of “covers” and zone out in front of the box for comfort and, well, really as a distraction to pass the time. Everything gets shut off here when the power goes out, not just the heat, but any running water as well. I was in complete denial just staring at the shallow black box in quiet desperation. In the evening the power came back on and I was elated. We had heat that night. And the next day, bam, it was out again. I wonder if they force shutdowns to work on the problem but can turn on again when night falls. Probably not. But that was my suspicion.

The next day I was completely adjusted to the notion of melting snow for flushing toilets and I had a fire going around the clock, inspiring me to wonder if I had the capability (or cookware) to rustle up some vittles over it. We had a fire ranging all day. I was almost sad when the power came back on although I was glad not to have to flush with melted snow water.

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Note to Self: Begin by Finding that list of things that would take up your whole day. (You see I have a word doc somewhere where I’ve listed all the self-helpy things you’re supposed to do each day, like drink eight glasses of water) There may be things to add to them like deleting Spam. This could constitute today’s Blague if nothing else. That was the now slightly edited note I made for myself for this day a few days ago—remember I do write more than one of these at a time, because some ideas don’t belong together so I assign them to another day, or rather suggest them to myself, or one of my many selves, who may or may not want to write about what was suggested. In this way, it’s more of a collage endeavor than a linear one. Some days I’m more collagist than others. Some, needing to following one long flowing line. Sometimes a combination of both.

This was actually another note to myself (I didn’t say there wasn’t more!): Imagine all day that you are in the new astrological year and pinpoint what needs to be done, daily, at what time. Oh I see what’s happening here. In the enormity of details much of my new routine, this coming astrological year, starting in less than a week, I need to have a clear understanding of the daily chores that now constitute each day; and I must figure out the “units of time” to borrow an idea from About a Boy, that I must lend to each of the chores that must be executed, some every day, some on certain days, in order to hit all (self-imposed) marks in this new, improved, efficient, self-actualized (likely heading for a nervous breakdown—I’m just kidding) new turn around the astrological wheel beginning on Tuesday.You will next go back to the Calypso stories and play editor and document what might or might now work for the OPS. You will be objective in doing this. Some things won’t work for the show but will string into something written perhaps. You will be in charge of knowing the difference. You will then go back to October 6 of this year and read through all those ideas for the same purpose. I think it will inspire you to write more Blagues. You will continue to do this even after March 21. Yes sir, will do. And thanks for the gentle way you are presenting this to me. I seem to recall you sitting around a fire with the power out during a blizzard when you “suggested” this all to me.

Oh, wait, what? There’s more? (I go on to say): It will be an interesting week this week. I want to remind you as well that besides clients and putting together a schedule for preparing next year’s Haute Astrology books that you have to schedule outreach for Starsky + Cox and outreach for Afterglow at the same time. These are on both the big To-Do list and the Afterglow to-do list which you so wisely put together a few years ago. This list this year requires social media, too, in the process. What also needs to go into the schedule is a plan for going through all the stuff in the basement and attic to sell, give or throw. Going through stuff up top or down below will also provide you with some visuals for social media. This is why we should start in the offices.

I wonder if writing can be considered “meta” if you keep slicing into it at various, not just one present, time. Multi meta? Did I just invent a new newthing. I thing I did just then invent a new word, at least: newthing? It’s somewhere between nothing and something.

This day is my mother’s birthday. She was deeply flawed and yet still the best. Anyone who met would tell you the same. She could change your way of thinking for life in just the first moments of meeting her. She was every friend, love, kid or colleague I have introduced her to’s favorite Everything. And this is by no means an exaggeration. She was instantly loved by All.

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.