Virgo 12° (September 4)

My particular spritual father isn’t Hemingway, it’s Fitzgerald, a superior writer, though obscured, in large part by his own reputation and (thus) a fellow Libra. I love everything about the myth and the man, whom I know less than the myth. But I have always thought that we would have made great friends. I can feel his pain if not his genious. And just imagine the two of us, traipsing around Paris, on a lark and on a bender, young, tan and full of the dickens. We would try to impress and outwit one another. We might buy each other ties as presents. We would meet our wives for dinner with inside jokes. Where had we been together all day they might ask? The answer may include the words bars, hammams, parks and haberdasheries. He may have bought me this hat on a whim. We are more than friends Fitzgerald and me; just this short of lovers probably. In a couple days time we might disappear without a trace to the Riviera for nearly three weeks sending one funny but not so amusing (to some) telegram. There would be rumours which we scoff and in which we each, secretly, revel. We can’t decide between the two of us who is the most good looking. From the inevitable sizing up that happens when you share a hotel room, I know mine is bigger.

Scott really is an amazing person. That one night, downstairs, when I ordered les grenouilles, he was absolutely on fire. A little manic I’d say. I think he wasn’t being square when he said he didn’t drink in the day. It really seemed he had; and I have a pretty good radar for that kind of thing. We had had a perfectly normal breakfast, although now, come to think of it, he was rather quiet and monosyllabical and yeah, cagey, I suppose. After my little walk to get cigarettes and postcards he was already gone from the room, which felt a little loaded with unncecessary deceit. Anyway I was headed to the beach and got one of the last lounge chairs. It would prove to be the hottest day of the week and I had to run to the water lest I scorch my feet. The families were gone by midday and didn’t return in the afternoon. I had my lunch en place. By the afternoon only half the chaises were filled and there wasn’t a kid in sight. La Rentrée happend within the span of an hour, this extinction burst of families crowding the beach were all, apparently, just taking in a little bit more on their last morning before checking out. I made eye contact with several of the adults and probably made it obvious on my exiting the plage that I was staying juste en face. In my perverted mind I imagined some of those beachgoers being so enamored that they followed me or planned to show up in my hotel bar in the next two hours. About which, it turned out, I was right.

I had smoked half a pack on the beach in my frustration and my lungs were literally hurting—I could feel it in the shower—like when you get waterlogged, as a kid, from staying in the ocean all day. So I was rather lost in self-recrimination as I descended the hotel’s sweeping stairwell, muscle memory walking me across the lobby’s marble floors, around giant potted palms, to the moulding-mirrored doors, still closed, leading into what at first seems a tiny hotel bar until you see it is a long, narrow bistro, to the right, leading through blue light, cooly reflecting off checkboard floors, ceiling fans blowing the high chalk walls rolled the hotel’s long narrow bistrot, spilling through its sidewalk café. So long it was that the square of light that marked its entrance, still at the bar where I stood, would appear to fit within the circumference of my watch face…

To view the original Sabian Symbol themed 2015 Blague corresponding to this day: Flashback! The degree of the Sabian Symbol may be higher than the one listed here  as the symbols cluminate in the next degree. There are 360  degrees spread over 365 days.

 Typos happen—I don’t have time or an intern to edit.*
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