Capricorn 19° (January 9)

I feel myself spiraling down today and I will end up getting too sentimental and making too many phone calls. Sometimes you just have to let some days go by. Also, and this isn’t true of everybody, but we all do have our moments of, I won’t say, insanity. Both macro- and microcosmically I’m feeling squeezed; and yet I know that giving into these feelings is not the answer. I must have Faith, something someone else around here is more hard-wired for than I. That’s just a fact. I will try but I am really starting now at a rather low point. Still no place to go but up I guess, and I’m going to keep that in mind as I move through this. “Be not afraid of life,” someone casually said. But the truth is I am afraid and I fear that people in these United States aren’t afraid enough quite frankly. Anyway, I can and will do better. I think I still got this.

The following blocks of text are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 1416-1420. 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 find myself waking up in Boston on Saint Patrick’s Day, gods help me. The trick is to get out of here before a mob of paradiers make it impossible. The good news is: the parade happens in South Boston (imaginitvely a/k/a “Southie”) so looks like we’ll be okay leaving. I think I have some kind of inflammation thing happening in my ears as my balance feels a bit off—I am chaulking this up to the pendulum swings in temperature; surely it is not do to any lack of sleep as I have been conscious only little more than half the time this weekend. I got an clover emoji from an Italian cousin who was/ is obsessed with my late mother of Irish descent. I love these people from your past who never took a moment to give a hoot about you all the while you were growing up (in this case we are talking from adolescence up til now) only to do so from a decidedly nariccistic approach. An emoji to say that I still obsess over your mom for my own sick and selfish reasons—no thanks. Some relationships are just too long on the shelf to rekindle. That might sound selfish of me but I’m afraid it is how I feel. Anyway I want to revist something I’ve previously written to how I feel about it.:

Since as long as I can remember we have always called synchronicity: sign posts. A string of which one wants to characterize the majority of ones circumstance if possible. Sign posts are instant communion with the infinite/eternity. They say you’re on the right track, keep going. We’re always try to help clients open up to them. The night before last Penny Arcade participated in an art show and addressed the audience, touching on the subject of synchronicity. And how ones life should be all about it. The way she deliverd it was hysterical. I can only paraphrase: something like: If you’re not experiencing synchronicity with some regularity by the time you’re fifty you’re pretty much fucked. I could feel Stella mentally raising the roof and silently offering amen, as I was. So yesterday I found a journal from 1992 and thereabouts. I hadn’t opened it since. I had decided in the morning I was “going to do nothing all day” which, I find, can be a recipe for a) doing more than usual; while b) letting things happen to you. So I sat and went through this journal for a few hours and of course there were phrases I still write in journals. You know those. When you’re like, holy merde, I was saying that to myself all the way back then?…

The physical journal itself came to me in a magical way. It was an empty book, blank white paper, hard red cover; the only thing in it was a title of sorts cursively written on the overleaf, in pencil—to be revealed at a later date!—and the price of 50¢ in the same pencilled hand. I wrote in it during a difficult chapter in all our lives. So many of the loving lights in our lives were being snuffed out by AIDS. The pain was palpable. And its all over the journal. As is synchronicity which suffused my Sunday, yesterday. In real time the journal chronicled the years I worked with Tony Randall’s National Actors Theater. My first year I was an intern and something of a costume-changing live prop in the Feydeau farce, A Little Hotel on the Side, at the Belasco. The second year I understudied three parts, and went on for a run in one of them, in The Seagull, directed by Marshall Mason, at the Lyceum. Marshall was also directing Larry Kramer’s The Destiny of Me, downtown, starring John Cameron Mitchell. Marshall took us all to see it and that’s how I first met JCM.

The journal is this double helix of absolute elation at being on Broadway as a young actor in New York and of utter sadness, fear, dread, horror and surpassing anger. Finding and reading this journal brought me right back. As did, of course, Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart last night on HBO. Then an actor I hadn’t seen since she too appeared in A Little Hotel on the Side: Daniele Ferland, who was already a great actress as a teen when I first met her, appeared in the cast. More Proustian waves. And, in a particularly poignant moment in The Normal Heart, the mention of Wellfleet from whence I watched. Then Mad Men was waiting on demand. Robert Morse. That same Seagull year at NAT we performed a benefit for the company and I got to share the stage with that genius. I watch Mad Men religiously. But last night, as it began, I thought I’ve loved Robert Morse since I was a baby. (I remember thinking it was a weird-glorious synchronity meeting him at the time—but, as it was, I had been working on a Tony Randall impersonation at Gotham City improv when I first met him, so I wouldn’t say I was getting the feeling I was conjuring people to me, but I wasn’t going to discount the possibility either). So last night watching Mad Men I thought, I’m going to take to social networking today singing Robert Morse’s praises. And then a prescient flash. I have an inkling: this is going to Robert Morse’s episode. And so it was. And in such I way—I won’t spoil it—that makes the hair on the back of my beyond still stand on end. Yesterday was potent and affirming and fun…..

I feel like I’ve been flung off of a carousel run amok. But it was one I wanted to get off of so I’m grateful for the fact despite feeling a bit bruised by the violence of the landing. A typicaly Monday in many ways awaits. Yet I’m finding myself feeling anxious over silly things like getting cars fixed or other banalities of life. I don’t know about you, reader, but for me that is a sign of something underlying.

There comes a day, after a sleepless night, when the anxieties of life morph into purpose. The impetus to express what that is inevitably fades in the attempt. There is the retreating regret that it has taken fifty some odd years for some semblance of revelation to occur. It is alchemical, the shift. And it must be total.

I’ve always suspected that life couldn’t be lived in half measures, though I see others do so, seemingly succesfully, all the time.

For me, on this day marking [nearly] the first third of a year past my [redacted] birthday, I can be filled with recrimination for any so-called waste of time I caused or I can see it as an accumulation of fuel to further myself and “sin no more.” And just plan to live longer.

I glean in myself a dual purpose. A most original but heretofore largely ignored, save in spurts, dedication to the theatre; and one devoted to the continually unfolding discovery of my spiritual self. I enjoy the fact that stage and sacred space, theater and temple, performance and priesthood are historically and culturally linked, once one and the same.

Synchronicity is symptomatic support by the universe of ones realization and pursuit of their individual spark of purpose. [And though I fear I might not be on the same page, now, as I was at the start of this paragraph, I might find that I am, ultimately, with even wider geometric dimensions.]

It is important to be reminded of the connection of the theater-temple connection, to be sure, but I must now also include a new entrepreneurial spirit, and one of aesthetic and design, that has also been ignored. Just as any interest in the written word has been. So now we have more four-pointed intersectionality between the stage and the mage, the artist and the commercialist. All of which is coming together in quite a unique way.

I thus feel that I am zeroing in on something more complex but no less essential a design for living. And it is rather through the elimination of obstacles, not the adding of new thoughts and influences, that the doors of my future self-perception, from this present perspection, shall open.

I’m lost in a binge of The Man in the High Castle. I know it’s not great (neither to be bingeing nor is the program all that), but there is something unavoidable about it that’s hard to explain. And I know that, before the ritualization I have planned for the Equinox, I might require this final form of escape. I think I really pushed my luck yesterday and I have to remember there are severe consequences for letting my guard slip. There is a certain vigilance that I must, by rights, live with and by every day of my existence. And it is something which, if I choose not to institutionalize it, must be personalized with persistent attention. It’s just too easy when not in the right frame of mind to make bad decisions and the added stresses of situations (albeit, again, of my choosing) can warp ones resolve and understanding.

I am grateful for the fortune but I cannot waste this grace. I think that is a promise I can make to myself. Confidence, after all is confiding in yourself. I just (again choose to) do so publically. I always want to qualify that by saying something akin to “but nobody here here really reading” but I’ve learned that’s not necessarily true and I have made the mistake of assuming anonymity and have gotten sloppy in not disguising certain people, places and things which might put noses (mostly those stuck up ) out of joint. Let’s just say we don’t need to give people excuses not to like us; because they will take it, making the symptom the cause, and lay all the blame for their dog-eat-doggedness upon. you if you let them. Don’t let them. Oh I also watched that HBO documentary on “the inventor” Elizabeth Holmes. And so I tweeted: Is it me or do you think that Elizabeth Holmes—see HBO’s “The Inventor” had a weird obsession with @MiraSorvino ‘s Romy character?? The voice, the hair, the black “business-woman’s” outfit??…and really is “I invented the Edison” that much different from “I invented Post-Its”??

Anyway I harkened back to this a-musing memory bliss today:

I love Julia Child. Who doesn’t, I know, but she has always held a special fascination for me. When I was a waiter in 1986 at the Harvest in Harvard Square, she and her husband Paul would come in for lunch. You would here “Bonjour Roger” in that booming unmistakeable tenor as she greeted the tiny alcoholic nicotine sodden  maitre d’ whose name she properly prounced in French, ro-jay. Paul, a curled shrimp of a man who had already suffered his series of small strokes, followed hist towering wife into the dining room where she would always order the same thing: a burger, rare, no bun. She is a Leo and I’ve often remarked on the similarity between her choice of lunch and the bloody meat one would throw into a lion cage.

Before the book and movies about her during the last decades, I always thought she would make a great subject for a work of art. I won’t go any further into that thought lest I actually end up pursuing this instinct myself. At the very least I think she and her husband would make great costumes for Stella and me, come Halloween. But, obviously, there’s more to it. Here was a couple who worked together (even though you didn’t know he was behind the scenes), who had no kids and were rather late bloomers. They were also obsessed with France and had an affinity for Cambridge, Massachusetts and Maine. All of this I can relate to.

She described herself “as the cat looking at the king” when she was a student of Le Cordon Bleu—what can be more Leo an expression than that. And what person from any other sign could turn what was for her a personal passion into an entire movement, changing the way Americans cooked, forever. What other sign could see a chef superstar embodied in the form of a fifties something woman. I’m happy I had the few opportunities I did to wait on Mrs. Child whose name couldn’t be more fitting for someone who lived life with a childlike exuberance and who gave so much to the world.

By day’s end today will begin another turn around the wheel and enter the sign of Aries. It’s Equinox, bitches. And there will also be a Libra Supermoon which means I have more power than you do. Seriously. (Not really). Client day extraordinaire and yet another day of reinforcing the feeling of loving what we do. I am very much internally ritualizing this new start; and, to that end, I am consciously tying up loose ends on the previous year. This is even more a time of change for me to mark than the (winter) Solstice is; and certainly more than the celebrated New Year’s Eve and Day which I always find alarming and depressing, respectively. Still not every marker between the past and the future serves as a clear break. There are lingering bits of information and some blurred lines to define and clean up. Such will be the transition here as I more into my fifth year of writing this daily Blague.

I was free-associating on the following and some point in the recent past and thought it might make for some meandering reading:

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.

So what is the formation of your day. Never mind what is the formation of yourself. We talked about Aries being the framework the other day, now we go a bit further. Take a look at your life. What form does your experience take. How is your experience constructed. Do you have room for what you want—literally and figuratively?

Every so often (and I know I’m not alone in this) I get the urge to create a curriculum for myself. As children we didn’t have much say in how our experience was structured. In grade school we were ushered through different subjects with no say; in high school we were herded from room to room with practically no say. After school sports or piano lessons we didn’t know we wanted or not, for the most part.

In college we had choice but learned that if we didn’t now self-impose these types of structuring we would likely fail. I pretty much got all straight As in college but my one year study abroad—a first year program that wasn’t set up properly coupled with the fact I never went to class but instead traveled around the whole time—I failed Cubism, okay?—completely tanked my four-year average to the point, now, that I feel applying to grad schools would be a rough road to hoe. All these years later!

Form. Structure. The simplest ones work best. First comes the hard wood of the tree then the blossoms then the fruits. I think of Aries as the hard wood. Also as the hardware on which all the other signs run as software. This is why the sign rules the physical body. Your body must be fit and healthy to be an instrument for all the other aspects of self that the ensuing signs express. So it’s the same with circumstance. The physical body of our experience must be fit, sound and simple. The form of our life must be akin to the well-toned body of a warrior. We can not lead a flabby l ife and expect to be happy.

Look at the Aries people around you. (People of a sign are the best “living” examples we have of any sign’s energy.) Those born under the sign of the Ram are ascetic by nature. They don’t have a lot of aptly named stuff. Even if they have every material want, they try to keep it real. Many an Aries person, especially those with a big bank roll, tend to espouse Eastern philosophies or disciplines that stress the fact that materiality is fleeting. Unlike other signs, Aries people tend to struggle with too much fat in their diet, metaphorically speaking of lifestyle.

I don’t know what to do, always with all these random blocks of information that are embedded within the posts of this Blague. I will have to think about that moving forward. At some point I will have to read back, say, ten Blagues a day, dating back to the beginning so that I can make some notes on archiving—like a little legend of what needs to be flagged and for what possible purpose—what possibly finished work might evolve out of these seed beds of potential first drafts. I will ask myself (and answer myself) on this subject in the coming days. (Just another example of how it is these blurry transitions in the Blague, year on year, need clarifying to myself, first, and then to you all second.)

Happy First Full Day of Spring (Astrological New Year’s Day). Today begins the fifth year of my writing this daily Blague. The fifth year—can you believe it? Today I want to lead with the feeling of having high expectations (of self and others) and standards for relationships.

I feel myself a symbol of the season as I have a sense of emerging from some kind of gestative fog (mutable-water sign of Pisces) sparking into life in this (cardinal-fire sign of Aries and this..) advent of spring, so aptly named. I am reminded today of the origins of all things and particularly this Blague which has served so many purposes and gone through endless permutations. over the years. And I need to explain some of the past whilst making some projections, affirmations, straight-up plans for this Blague moving forward. To address the past history of this in order to move more mindfully into the future (and to more consciously invite you in.

The past: The Cosmic Blague started in 2015 and was that year hinged on the Sabian Symbols which are expressions of each of the 360° of the astrological year—your time of birth falls within one of these  degrees, which is a whole other thing. It’s the Cosmic Flav-a-flav. Then next two years 2016-18 I didn’t revisit the first year, then just this past year I included, with each new day, a link to the first year’s associative link for that Sabian Symbol “day” (realize there are five or six days more than degrees in the year cycle).

A hominym for this social very media platform, blagueactually means joke in French, so the creative challenge I set for myself here was to explore all possible ways  the cosmic joke manifests; I first wanted to raccount  my own comic/cosmic experiences, the seemingly too synchronistic occurances in life that punctuate it with power and divine order—extraordinary-story telling; secondarily, I wanted to channel my thoughts on how the universe is constantly taking the piss out of us—observational humor on a cosmic theme I suppose; and hopefully a combination of both things. That was the plan. But you can’t really wake up and necessarily do that everyday. So it was very helpful to use the Sabian Symbols as a go-to and perhaps rely on my musings on them to trigger all such entries as would satisfy my creative goals in this. I wanted it to be personal but in a formal way.

But after the first year, when I didn’t have the Sabian Symbols to rely on for creative fodder, or any words at all sometime, I either successfully managed to dredge up a story or two per week that satisfied my artistic mission, otherwise I began to start saying any old shit. It became a journal which is a word to use in this context to lend the endeavor an air of dignity. But that didn’t last long, the noble journal wasn’t always sustainable., and soon it became a diary for me to vent, a croakie book, declarations of hopes and aspirations and whole designs for living and accomplishing the (very Libran) ridiculous number of idealized tasks I set for myself. To that end, the Blague often doubled as a workshop drawing board for anything else I might have to write that day, and I would “throw up” a first draft of something that I would otherwise polish, elsewhere, for publication or distribution.

I didn’t always manage or choose to write everyday. Maybe I was busy doing other things? I would let some days stack up and then spend half a Saturday catching up. And then in 2017 something happened that derailed me and I let whole gulfs go by before sitting down to fill in the blanks—a major project at one point during an upset. Then forget it. You never knew what might characterize a Cosmic Blague entry. Bizarre takes on to-do lists, Dada manifestos assembled from notebooks and a million torn-paper “post-its” I hade made over the previous two years, every idea in my cranial firmament I had plucked from the ether for later purpose.( And in so doing I was also archiving all these ideas and starry notions. You see I never lost my starry notions along the way.

And so the Blague truly began giving me life. Because I was so committed to catching up I got used to showing up again. Not to say I don’t let a few go by (why even now I’m writing today’s Blague tomorrow—not a very functional way of starting this new turn around the wheel but never mind. I’m going to right now write “tomorrow”‘s Blague. And I’ll pick up exactly where I left off, so if you haven’t read this entry before reading the next one—you’ve me to blame—you’ve got it backwards.

Oh, remember: I am resuming the practice I initiated last year of including year one’s associative Blague entry which was pinioned to the Sabian Symbols associated with the degrees of the Zodiac. Mind you, the degree point for that Blague entry will be one higher than that in today’s Blague entry . The reason for that is that: the degree point for today is the starting point of a degree-period (0°-1° for instance) and the Sabian number for that is 1, so if we were to give you the degree number of 0°, that would pertain to the previous degree-period, not the one in which we are currently, this day, living.

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.