Libra 30° / Scorpio 0° (October 22)

This is as far as I will get today on this. I have reached out and will see what comes back. It would be nice to get these issues addressed once and for all. I am getting into the habit of equating an hour of time with a page of the manuscript and that is probably the most liberating aspect of this process thus far. We are ready to take flight and it is a glorious feeling. Trying as best I might to let the motivation surge and yet I feel so tired. I’m sure it’s not anything serious just a bit run down why wouldn’t I be. I am not really looking forward to Scorpio season, I must say. There is always a little bit of dread associated with it. I will do my best to push through and sound expert in the process. But really I just need to wake up and go straight to work and make some major headway. Five to six pages every day over the next several days. That is the basic shape of things and there can be no more distractions. I should be ultra-proud of the manner in which I have conducted myself and the path that I have cleared. We will not be intimidated by petty personages with no scruples. That is not going to happen to us. We will fight and forge on. I have to give myself the gift of getting this all into my body now. My nerves feel soothed and I’m on a path toward success and I will front-load the work in the dark months. There are just a few short weeks now until the end of the year, and I want to use this time as a fertile one, creatively. And just give myself over to the book in an extreme way for the next four months. That is all that round one of this process entails. And what a way to eat winter. I don’t need to go anywhere or see anyone, really. Not even for Christmas.

The following blocks of text are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 1026-1030. 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.

Okay so when I was a junior in high school the open faced Jeep I was riding to school in was hit by a school bus. The road leading up to our school at the late time of the morning we were arriving had full busses, also late, tricking in and empty ones shooting out. We were stopped at the little road that opened onto this bigger road and the last thing I remember is my neighbor Jeff, who was a senior and brother of my friend, Karen, said “I think we can make it.” And then the next thing I knew was only two things. The smell of bananas and Bruce Springsteen. I had amnesia. Karen had been eating a banana and Bruce was on the radio. My head was bleeding profusely. What happened was that we got hit by an empty school bus and we flipped, rolled, over. I was the eighties so I didn’t have on a seat belt. So when we flipped upside down, imagine, I’m upside down, but I hit my head against the “roll bar” on the jeep which bounced me back into the car, against gravity as we continued the 360-degree roll that landed us back upright. I would have been crushed probably if I hadn’t bounced off the bar on my head and face, huge gash, many stitches in my head.

Thinking about what an operator he was, I now realize my father would have done something tricky. I remember my parents suddenly becoming friends with Karen and Jeff’s parents—and they weren’t chummy with anyone that lived in our still fairly waspy suburb of Wyckoff. I know now those things must be related. Something to do with insurance money I’m sure. My father was a district manager for Metropolitan Life and he was a tricky Gemini so something would have come of it. Karen was among my besties for sure. She was in love with this guy for whom I too had bromantic feelings. We were upwardly mobile, socially, together, and went from drama school nerds to pretty popular in a rather short stretch together. We were self-taught sophisticates and the object of our affection was French, a super soccer athlete who played varsity freishman year and went to college on a soccer scholarship. He was also something of a sophisticate. We went to see Bent on Broadway. We did mescaline. We spoked pot together daily. His the father was the chef at Le Cirque. He had a brother, three years older, and all their combined friends were like male models, many of whom went to Deerfield and other “academies” and whose girlfriends likewise attended private school.

Only later, when I moved to Paris, and was invited into BCBG enclaves did I get a taste of this kind of world. I didn’t know at the time that his whole vibe was just really French. Funny that as I write this the band Soccer Mommy just came on doing their song “Cool”. What can we make of life’s little synchronicities, right?

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An appointment with a client in L.A. in the morning; then will set off to Provincetown for a wee sojurn. Must get air in my tires and schedule an oil change. Aren’t you happy, dear reader, to know all that. There are larger things brewing in my mind as well. I have some alone time and, being so fleeting, I scarcely know what to do with it. I am determined to stay on the straight and narrow and continue my fairly radical life style (if not diet) en route to getting back into the hot room by Thursday where I’ll remain for all time. I don’t know with what else I’m occupying my time but for going through so many papers all piled up. It seems though t that I can be at the end of that process today and I must face some big questions.

Like do I truly have enough to say to write this next big book. Or do I have too much to say. I can never tell. I know I need do things differently this time around and that is to start writing. I want to send out memos to my fellow employee on all the different departments of the brand need doing what to. We have so many spokes in Wheel Atelier that just amping them all ever so slightly could yeild great creative and commercial reward. On this is what I shall focus. On this and the snapshots of the signs which I’m writing into as we speak and will constitute a spate of 24 signs somewhere behind me in this Blague in January.

I must also read the grant which Brian King has sent me as it includes Afterglow. I will need to apply this subtle tweaking of departments to the festival doings as well and then speaking to the tweets should constitute the meat of the letter to sponsors. I think that is all becoming demystified as well. We shall see.

I must admit I am one of those people who is prone to magical thinking and it’s one of the patterns (no doubt found in my astrological charts) that I come up against, again and again. I am without a doubt a major excitement addict, living frugally on the surprise of the great next thing that’s going to happen. Which is delusional but for a fractional element of Belief. It’s the other 99 and 44/100s that I have to look out for. Becaus it will just wait around for the .56 to do it’s thing. And either just stay in some isolated form of limbo or act out, meanwhile, in anticipation. I dread things and long for things. I want to do neither.

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This was my grandmother’s birthday, same day as Abraham Lincoln, and she actually ended up looking a lot like him believe it or not. When I was born her husband had just died a few months before and so I was named for him: William. I was the only grandchild not have met him. Her maiden name was Brennan. She was a large woman. She and all her sisters looked a like. They were imposing plump mountains. But my grandmother was always sick and for the last ten years of her life, probably, she weighed something like eighty-five pounds. She had sticks for legs, her stockings always fallen down, and she was curled over like a shrimp, her face super sunken. A cartoon old lady. Her hair was a shock of white, worn with a side part, held in place by one barrette. She had bush black eyebrows, though, which seemed incongruous. And she absolutely had Lincoln’s bone structure.

I have a picture somewhere I will have to find it. I should have found it already because I was meant to go through all the stuff in boxes in the basement so that, when it came to it, we could move on a dime. I don’t want any more to do. I want to use the time to go through everything I have. I am coming up on a very good spate of time where I don’t have to much think about more than what is directly on my plate. I am so into letting go of the past, and to do that I have to mine and make my piece with it, throwing or giving objects away. I’m really interested in doing all new things, I truly am. Vin da Bona. He is seventy three and went to Emerson college. And you don’t need to know why that is or isn’t relevant.

Meeting with Sebastian. Biz Structure. ECommerce. Hard to sell something people haven’t touched. Ideas to Wholesale unless independents. Valery. Trunk show. Commish too high. Deck Foundre. How has the whole marke changed. Exoticism. Sixteen percent eighty dollars and up. That was all meant to be nonsensical to you.

I need to say that: The MCC, from which we get a rousing $500 under the festival grant, has a $2500 one that I didn’t quite get to last year (as you know) for Glow at Oberon in summer. It is a project grant, by the way, and I asked MCC last year if we could apply next (meaning now this year) or was it for new projects only. It isn’t apparently. It would be for a project between June 2018 and July 2019, so a thirteen month window. I’m thinking that we should go for it and use it for the next incarnation of Glow which we could do in another Boston location in the coming year, maybe May or June 2019, some place like Jamaica Plain. I just can’t tackle all it takes to go for it myself but I would like some help so I’m wondering if Anna could look into it for us. But before I ask her I wanted to find out what you paid her hourly and what she was paid total for what she did for you (because we should be reimbursing you this in any case) and if she is into this sort of thing she could go from strength to strength finding us more and more grant money, which helps us and pays her!

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I just read that one of the girls in First Aid Kit is allergic to gluten. I’m beside myself with grief and terror as a result.

Growing up my favorite person in the world was Dave Verm (an abbreviation of his name). He was the son of my parents’ best friend. He was four years older than me and had a sister five years older than him, as I did. I wanted to be with him all the time. I hated my own sibling and i loved him and his. His parents grew up in Jersey City as mine did; and both our families moved from there to Wyckoff, we followed them there. They moved to Illinois then Ohio but they always stayed with us when they visited back east. I looked so forward to their visits or when we went to the midwest to see them. And then they visit us every summer, “down the shore”. I was in David’s wedding—he’s divorced now. He came to see me in my first (and only one of two) Broadway shows.

He became an alcoholic. I talked to him as often as I could ten years ago. He would be whispering saying he was hiding in a dark room. From who? His kids, spparently.And then he disappeared. He tweeted something and it was very God-y. I hope he’s okay. I have reached out to his kids and nobody ever writes me back. It’s so strange. I can only speculate. Did he become born again and the fact that I am a queer astrologer and performer living parttime in Provincetown made me diabolical in his eyes? Well it’s not impossible. His sister is a great grandmother. She had her first kid in the 1980s while I was in college. That’s a lot of procreating.

Oh I don’t know folks. All is entropy I suppose and there is no clear understanding why things have to get so much worse in life. I can’t say: I’m tired of all the problems, deaths and health scares—because they will only become more frequent. It becomes increasingly difficult to look forward to things. Sometimes I wish I was a drug addict or alcoholic so that I could sit in meetings. I’ve gone to them in my past during times of hitting the wine bottle hard; and I learned a lot, but it wasn’t applicable to me and I found people mostly complained and their lives never changes. It was all about maintaining the status quo, not spiraling upward which I feel we are meant do to.

I loved Dave. I miss Dave. But at this point I suppose I don’t know Dave. He had everything handed to him in life—his father was a superachieving waspy game player who made sure he got his, even, stepping on others to get it. But he was rather self-made for being something of a worm. He was also pretty gayish. Dave was all boy as folks used to say. But he was a bit Dazed and Confused. He was an outsider. He was immature. And come to think of it he was an alcoholic already at the age of thirteen. Still he was the closest I ever had to a big brother and he was reckless and dangerous and rough and tumble and I loved that. He turned me on to Elvis Costello when I was fourteen and everything sort of evolved from there really.

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When I was a senior in college I had pretty much already ammassed all the necessary credits to be a double major in English and in French. Boy oh boy do I need to sharpen those latter skills. Anyway, I was thus free to take a lot of graduate level (600) courses. I took one called Atonality and Abstraction which focussed on four characters—composers Webern and Schoenberg and the aritsts Kandinsky and Mondrian. What the course description didn’t say was that the professor, whom I now imagine was a lesbian in her late sixties. I just did a google search and found her by typing int he name of her class. Her name is Roye E. Wates and she is/was an amazing character. She is a professor of music. Whatever possessed me to take the class I can’t tell you. But what the class catalogue didn’t say was that the connective tissue between these four artistes was that they were all Theosophists. I will get into that subject, no doubt, in ensuing Blagues.

It’s just that I wanted my brain to keep evolving and though I don’t regret anything about my life I do think that I would benefit from higher learning. I just need to figure out how. There are simple things which come to mind that could help. Becoming more warrior like. Aries takes a warrior approach to life, entering into forms of training, if even of his own devising, that will keep him on the straight and narrow toward goals. He has difficulty when goals shift; being so rigid can make one easily broken. Anyway…I was thinking earlier about the approach to these chapter headers which will serve, in draft form, for next years H.A. books; but can also be a template for the next big book—you will hopefully soon learn what that is. Anyway all is poetry and that is kind of the point.

I think back to my salad days in Boston and those summers, before junior year, and after senior year, spent on my old red Columbia bicycle, riding all over the city. I loved tha bike though I left it to rust outside back of my Newbury Street apartment as I moved to Paris after school. I had this idea of changing my name to Pan and becoming a cabaret singer but I wouldn’t actually open my mouth to sing on a stage until twenty years later, and only once, in between, at an audition for Hair where I sang form James Rado, whom I knew, along with Jerome Ragni, from the restaurant I worked in Hoboken, after moving there slash New York in 1987. But this was 1985 and my bike sat rusting. I had bought it from a shop on Commonwealth Avenue called Bicycle Bill’s when I was a sophomore at BU when, as one might expect, my nickname likewise became Bicycle Bill.

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.