Virgo 26° (September 17)

I have a cold. Let’s hope that’s all it is. I have very little energy which is worrying but…what can you do. I am slowly getting myself out of the writer’s block while also putting other wheels in motion. I have to make this fun for myself. It isn’t easy but I really do want to have some fun in the process. It has been six years since I suffered quite a large emotional blow and I can scarcely believe it still lingers, and I’m cross with myself for not fully healing by now, but I suppose these things cannot be rushed. I feel a great deal better when not on this rock. I’m hoping to hear back from counsel I reached out to because I don’t want to face yet another uphill battle on my own. I am working as well as can be expected and I know I need to make certain sacrifices for the greater good. It’s difficult when you feel huge chunks of your life are missing and need compensating for. I suppose that is also my problem and responsibility, but the clock just keeps ticking and the wind blows the pages off the calendar and sometimes I feel my output pales in comparison to others’. This is going to be the lasts for many things this year. Which hopefully means the beginning for a great deal. I am writing a lot so I don’t want to say anymore here. That’s why I’m going through all past Blagues. Reruns if you will.

I meant to say that I had very strange obsessive dreams. The one hinged on the fact that I couldn’t remember the word “for a cadaver of someone who died of drowning” and I kept going around asking people including my high school A.P. English teacher who had it on the tip of his tongue but went into this giant library to look it up. I realize that library has factored into my dreams before. The other similarly obsessive dream hinged on my having to pinch hit as a hair cutter in this salon, which has also factored into past dreams I think, and then I popped out for a minute and bought some objets as Christmas presents, one being a pen and inkwell set up which I thought was three bucks but turned out to be two-seventy-five. I went to pay and all my credit cards were missing from my wallet, so I had to do search of my entire bag. In both cases it was this kind of dream where you try and try to “find” what is lost or some resolution but it just goes on and on, compulsively, with no wrap up. It was exhausting. I am definitely fighting some kind of terrible.

The following blocks of text are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 856-860. 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.

So I was telling you the other day that I found out recently, well, a long time ago, but I only recently starting researching the fact that, I am INFJ in Myers-Briggs speak. This is characterized as Introverted, Intuition, Feeling, Judging. Okay fine. One of the characteristics of being INFJ is seeing patterns in things, which speaks to my interest in all things metaphysical, astrology in particular, which is this perfect mandala for existence on so many levels—that is to say that every nook and crannie of experience seems to folow the twelve fold logic of the astrological signs and houses, one through twelve, as they give way to one another, ad infinitum, on what isn’t a static circle of the zodiac but a never ending upward spiraling staircase, something, in its patterning recalls DNA, the base and railing of this imagined stairwel, forming a sort of double helix—Jacob’s ladder also comes to mind as does the song Stairway to Heaven.

I was musing on this in the car yesterday. Driving my 85 Mercedes into Provincetown with the top open and the windows down feels fantastic in any sense. And I was already enjoying the previous day’s revelation about rushing, which I’m really fighting against doing even as I can justifiably consider my life to be a never ending series of deadlines. It starts with perishing thoughts along that perception and realizing what the hell are we rushing towards? I think rushing is a symptom of not really doing what you want to do or at least including bits or seeds of that truest dream into your day to day. So I myself need to work on that I realize. I might be best off doing it on a local level for awhile. At least I might as well give it a whirl. And so fresh from that realization I had another one:

The old adage “we really are just passing through” can be taken quite literally. I should contextualize this by saying that I am not one to get very attached to very much—my Aquarian moon (which als makes me something of a cult leader lol) perhaps contributing to my often nuts-and-berries existence of non-material attachment and the fact that, as compared with most people, I could probably pack up my entire house in a matter of days and be on my way somewhere else. At the very least I could lock my front door and walk away with the entire contents of my home left as it is and neither miss or nor need anything from it that isn’t in my suitcase. I travel often. In fact I get very antsy unless I’m in a city, even though I presently have no home in a city—each year we sort of pick a place and just go there, but these last three years Stella has been doing a masters degree so we’ve stayed by, in Boston, which I liked more than I thought I would. Anyway, I’ve always felt “stuck” on the Cape in winter dating back to 1998 when we first bought a house.

But back to my revelation. I got this sense that my time in any home, including the planet, is so terribly fleeting that I’m passing through any place I live, including the one I call home, which for me, is an experience so acute to the degree that I’ve managed to turn it around and gain this new perspective of choosing to visit the Cape when I’m here, as one of my favorite places that I visit frequently year on year. Right now I’m in this house. Next year I will be too. After that who knows. But I’ll still include this in my mix. It’s still up to me. I don’t need to retreat somewhere and be stuck there I have infinite options because I keep giving myself infinite opportunity. Already I feel the adjustment is working; I feel terribly less anxious and as if I’m on a sort of permanent vacation, punctuated with business appointments and meetings. But the truth be told. Stella has finished school; I’ve completed one festival and am about to execute a second; I wrote a book proposal which is now in the hands of a reputable agent; and we have a business plan all but finished and ready to be seen by investing eyes. All this will what is already a creative and rewarding private consultancy, which is the backbone of our work, and the soul of our business.

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The working out of some bits that I will perform in front of the curtain at Afterglow is now on my to-do list. I have flirted with a few ideas in the past but now I must actually get some thoughts on paper that I can work up into five-minute bits. This first one I’m going to work on we’ve been having so much fun with lately. It all started with this line of comedy that popped into my head which was: We moved to Wellfleet for the Jewish eye candy. And I’ve been working on that a bit—not just the jokes but the notion of doing Jewish jokes at all which can really fall flat.

 So it starts with: We were talking about Provincetown, probably coming off gentrification, but we recently moved to Wellfleet. For the Jewish eye candy. What? Wellfleet? Oh yeah, It’s super intelligentsia, academic, many psychologists, thinkers, which is so sexy. And chic, yes. Gorgeous people, thin, lanky, beautiful JD Salinger Jews, you know. (Am I wrong? No) Eye candy. Of both sexes. Many, many gorgeous couples, walking the beach, gorgeous couples, mostly mothers and sons but gorgeous. On the beach walking. All lean and kibbutzy. Long lanky legs, kicking out in front of them, like this, you know, walking, zero body fat, because they’re weekend eaters, otherwise just a little melon in the morning a little avocado something for lunch and maybe some sushi from Mac’s shack, so to rock a skimpy their little late 1970s looking gymshorts or bikini with an unironic No Nukes tee-shirt. Gorgeous, eye-candy.

I eroticize the Jews. I’m an honorary Jew so I’m allowed. I grew up in a mostly Jewish apartment complex. I went to pre-school at Jewish Community Center in Jersey City. All the boys there, my earliest friends, Jewish—Richard Rosen, Steven Cantor, Jeffrey Finkel—I don’t know where I”m going with this so I think I’ll have to stop…..I think most of the humor is in the above bit anyway. And it’s meant to be sure and I’ll just be fleshing it out.

One of the other bits I was thinking of doing I actually did write about here before. It was on the theme of No Vacancy at B&B’s and so forth. I actually think I can combine them. I think I’ll do a lot of Provincetown style jokes. I don’t think I’m thinking all that clearly today, not sure enough that I can make a compelling comedy attempt today. I think we’ll just let this one go by undetecte, whadya say? You’ll let me slide, right? Anyway, I better quite while I”m ahead lest I really insult someone.

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It’s 5:55 on a Saturday, late August. I have the creeps, I don’t know why. I’m not anxious. I just have the creeps. It’s sort of ridiculous to. I suppose I feel a bit like something from the past is going to come back to haunt me in some way. Is’t that odd? I don’t know that I’ve felt that way ever in my waking life. I know I have experienced that feeling in dreams, particularly, with one recurring dream in which I may have killed someone and buried their body in the back yard of (it’s always) my house (in Harwichport). I suppose I have to ask myself do I really miss my life in Harwichport. In so many ways I did. But I don’t think I really liked it much. I need a walking town. This is becoming extremely clear to me. It’s why I like Belfast but there really isn’t all that much going on there. But that’s okay too. It could be Portland. I don’t know. I wish I knew. I wish I knew why I was so convinced of things and then I’m not. It makes me wonder if I’m not a bit kooky.

I think of other people of modest to moderate means and what they do. Not all, although many, of my friends are gazillionaires. I have friends who work in New York, maybe they own their apartment there or they rent and own a house elsewhere, something small, on the Island or something. It’s not for me. I am luck in that if nothing truly could-be spectacular on the horizon pans out, I can do what I do from anywhere. I really can. I can get a small house in Sicily or Sardinia or in Gascony or, sure, in Maine somewhere, too, and still have an apartment in Paris or in Boston or both. I like going to New York but I don’t feel I want to have to live there at this time, or probably ever. Anyway, I’m trying to verbalize any thoughts I have about this creepy feeling to try to get to the core of it; though I suspect it isn’t any one thing, but a number of factors contributing to this compounded sensation.

It’s very possible that the creeps are the release of something that is no longer serving me, therefore the increasing absence of a feeling rather than one creeping in or up on me. I have always been someone who has heaped a lot on his own plate and perhaps, as a result, I haven’t driven far enough into any one direction. I characterize this as a Libra thing, being prismatic in one’s approach to creativity and manfestation. The whole renaissance man thing. And it might serve me well to be more laser as I move forward. I also think I need to accelerate this release of the creeps, as I’m experience them, by forgiving myself for my part in any past disappointments or disassociations. I imagine that would be quite beneficial. I also think that I could be more clever and executive and also throw out a bunch of old possessions I’ve been hanging onto out of fear for survival, or the preservation of some identity or sense of belonging, that have become visual reminders, now, of a past I’ve been long passed out of.

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Sometimes feelings are overwhelming, especially the wistful sort from the past. I was just writing a fellow who, with his partner, owns a hotel in Asbury Park, along with hotels in Provincetown, where they support my non-profit work. I have not been down the shore in New Jersey since just after my father died and about three years before my mother died. The whole of my childhood and entropy which came to characterize its progression had to be put in a box, behind me, for the sake of my own survival. I got into a giant mess in the wake of this big ball of tragic fiasco. And I don’t think I’ve stepped foot in New Jersey at all, actually, now in nearly fifteen years. Wow. I’m just realizing this as I type here. Truth be told, though, when I saw that these aquaintances of mine had bought and renovated a hotel in Asbury, my first thought was: I do need to go back and come to terms with the magical tragical times for which the shore was a backdrop in my early life. From the time I was seven until the time my parents sold the what was once just our summer house in Belmar prior to their deaths, the length of the shore, from Asbury Park to Sea Girt, was my personal playground and the site of many firsts, and not all of them wholeseom. I’m sure I will write all about this one day. In the meantime I still have very mixed feelings about the whole of my past.

I think I’m too used to things being ripped away from me. My parents increasingly isolated and disassociated from the many, many friends, couples with families, who made up the social fabric of my early life. We were always in groups. We lived in an apartment building with best friend neighbors who were constantly around. In summer we belonged to a “cabana club” with an even wider array of families and bbq’s and group dinners out in summer, late night, en masse, where the plastic booths or chair upholstery would stick to the sunburned backs of ones legs, and where you would fall asleep at the table, being carried to the car, slightly waking, and then back into the apartment. Then when I was eight years old we moved to the suburbs where our world already started to shrink. But still, weekends would entail perfumed couples dressed to the nines showing up in Cadillacs and Lincolns, for drinks before heading out with my parents to some fancy restaurants—or they would have parties that would go into the wee hours; and I would fall asleep to the reassuring sound of adult laughter from far off rooms. And there was always the shore. Our house had seven bedrooms and was always filled with visitors, our wrap around porch, crowded with close revelers, giving the impression our house was some sort of Inn, attracting strangers up to inquire about Vacancy, which opened these poor strangers to some harmless though certainly semi-drunken practical jokes by my Dad and his bravado filled pals.

My parents belonged to a culture. They were New Jersey. My father was from the largest Italian family in Hudson County and my mother from an equally giant Irish clan of cops, chiefs of police and local politicians. My parents were tiny, just over five foot, but they were enormously popular. But slowly, slowly this peopled word became ever vacant, until my parents world shrunk to living in a two-room apartment, smaller even than the one in which they started, filled only with plastic picture frames and encroaching demential.

I’m glad these things are coming up; not that I haven’t written about them before probably. It’s times like these one really appreciates the fact they took Typing in high school Do you remember wondering whether or not you should take a typing class? We didn’t know then that the whole of our adult lives would be spent in front of keyboard. Which it shouldn’t be. But, hey, for better or worse I did end up a writer. That’s how most people know me, anyway. Anyway, I think the creeps feeling I was talking about in the previous post is all about me. I think I give myself the creeps. I think I’ve become aware, and acutely so, of my own shortcomings and incidents in the past where I have contributed to the demise of good relationships or situations that didn’t need to be destoyed. And I think I destroy things because, like so many elements of my childhood, past and even my adulthood, I’ve felt that feeling of things being ripped away. So I think I tear them I knew one before they can be thus ripped. I’m a highly sensitive sort and am easily hurt and really really struggle with (not) taking things personally. I work a lot with clients on this subject, secrety working on myself in the process.

Anyway: Asbury Park. It would be fun to pursue something there. I think I’m ready to see that part of the world again. See what’s still miraculously standing and what is now the property of Lady Mnemosyne.

I am a son of Earth and starry sky. I am parched with thirst and am dying; but quickly grant me cold water from the Lake of Memory to drink.—“instructions for the dead” written on a gold Orphic tablet

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I guess it’s pretty Virgo to feel disillusioned with the world and with oneself. I am not feeling good today and I don’t know where to place the blame. On myself, yes, I know. But I’m also tired of blaming me. Other people work hard and get breaks. Why have I yet to figure out how to take a break. Even when I’m on a holiday I am playing some kind of catch up or otherwise working between times. It really sucks. I’ve been on my own for so long and I feel like I’m in high-alert mode for survival all the time. I’m not talking about material things although right now I don’t feel much like being around people who have the proverbial all. And I certainly don’t need to watch them perform their own prosperity shows. The only thing I can say fairly definitively is that I still tend to be the smartest person in the room; but I’m tired of also being the most sensitive on so many levels. Hey this is really helping to get this shit out. Because I just got a glimpse of what I might like to do…

I remember in the late eighties I was on a real spiritual trip. I was reading the Vedas and Upanishads and all that jazz (for fun). I really wanted enlightenment. It was a goal. Everything was ahead of me. I might have had that brilliant acting career—for me the chance to express myself via that craft which I loved so much (to be clear I never thought about “making it” in terms of fame or money); perhaps that’s why I never did. It was tough knocking on agents doors and dealing with the constant rejection. I think I buffered myself through all that by reading. I didn’t have a career. I had jobs. I went to them and I left them. I smoked a lot of pot probably. I didn’t drink in those days out of choice–the first, not the last, time I took a break from alcohol for clarity. I didn’t feel I needed to do it as much as I wanted to. All this to say that I feel a bit full circle. Not on the alcohol front although that might be part of it. I’ve been super abstemious as of late, after a year of enjoying some good wines. I take natural breaks. I suppose I always have. And it feels good to clear out. Just as it feels good sometimes to indulge. To everything there is a season.

I feel pretty exhausted lately. Not sure what that’s about. Not fatigues, but exhausted. Like I can barely hold my head up at times. I should probably get my blood pressure checked. It might actually be too low. And, to add to the mix, I woke up with a horrible head cold so there is that. But no rest for the weary as I have a day full of clients and promotion work for the festival. And I should be working on some creative bits on that score but I just can’t find the funny in me right now. It’s all I can do to maintain a positive attitude which is typically quite a cinch. I will admit I’m bummed that not all my expected fundraising came through this year. People love to say they love what I do but when it comes time for even small shows of monetary support these same folks do tend to take a powder. It is particularly irksome in Ptown where people will say they’re strapped but then walk around from bar to restaurant to bar spending loads of dough on crap food and pricey drinks. But what can you do. You can’t berate them for it or even give it much of a second thought. I suppose my only goal today is to take a deep metaphoric inhale that might constitute a second wind, because for the most part I feel as if it’s been knocked out of me.

Also I lost my signature Persol sunglasses as I do every year and it has put me in a mood. I had put them together in a little hug with my cheapo No. 1 readers and left them at a friends house where I was for a dinner party. The readers were still there but the sunglasses had somehow uncoupled from them. I dunno, people. I just don’t know.

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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