Category: Astrology

this past Thursday I was summoned for jury duty. in my experience, jury duty is an opportunity to do a lot of reading. so with this in mind I brought along my copy of the Lotus Sutra to study while being held in the jury services waiting area.

the Lotus Sutra is one of the many books to survive the radical culling of my personal library I must do in preparation of moving this week. the new lease starts on Thursday, but moments ago I received word that we can pick up the keys tomorrow. my current apartment no longer is capable of housing all my books, so for that reason alone I’m overjoyed to be relocating. add the fact that I will be cohabiting a delightful house overlooking downtown and the ocean with a woman I love dearly, all for a reduction in rent, and I couldn’t be more excited. it is a privilege to have books to pass along to someone else, so there are presently three bags full of titles I will be sending off to some friends, plus I’ve donated at least four bags worth to the library that employs me, plus I traded in two more bags worth for $70 in trade credit. I had to restrain myself from immediately using all of that credit to purchase an unabridged two volume Isis Unveiled by H.P. Blavatsky and a copy of Albert Pike’s Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry. Instead I picked up a textbook on electromagnetism, a book of stories by Malcolm Lowry, The Holographic Universe by Michael Talbot, and The Epic of Gilgamesh. if it is in my fate to own the books I passed up, they will be there next time I visit the used bookstore.

back at jury duty, the Lotus Sutra seemed to be protecting me. I made it through the first round without my name being called, and the morning was moving along nicely. I thought that so long as I maintained the right view, the right intention, the right speech, the right action, the right livelihood, the right effort, the right mindfulness, and the right samadhi, then the selection of jurors would pass over me and allow me to escape the bureaucratic hell karma had determined would be my lot for the day. since this desire is obviously a vulgar, profane goal arising out of my ego, and not out of my buddha-nature, with 30 minutes left in the morning session my name was included among those prospective jurors who would be required to return to the courthouse that afternoon for potential placement on a jury panel that had begun selection the day prior.

the case needed one more alternate juror to begin proceedings. were I being questioned for an official spot on the jury, and not as a potential back up, I might have kept my mouth shut and participated, but, not wanting to sit through the entire trial on the off-chance I’ll be needed to fill a vacant spot come deliberation time, I told the judge I harbor deep resentment towards my ex-FBI father, and this resentment has led me to a principled, political opposition to the police as such, and the judge dismissed me. the use of expedient means by buddhas and bodhisattvas is one of the prime lessons of the Lotus Sutra. the next day, the day I traded in books, Mercury retrograde started.

yesterday was 9/11, never forget.

reactionaries have utilized any and all means to register smug contempt for Gavin Newsom these past few days, with a record-breaking heat wave leading to California’s energy companies warning of the possibility of blackouts as a result of added strain on the electrical grid. Newsom issued a directive that urges Californians to reduce power usage during peak times, generally 5 – 9pm. the rejoinder from those eager to castigate the pretty boy/petty tyrant asks, sarcastically, how outlawing the sale of gas-powered vehicles will lead to reduced power usage, since in that eventuality everyone will need to charge their electric vehicles. far be it from me to criticize someone for criticizing Gavin Newsom, for whom I reserve a special disdain, but electric cars are generally charged overnight, when energy consumption is at its lowest. this is not to disagree with those who bemoan how mismanaged California’s energy is, which is manifestly obvious to anyone paying attention to it.

speaking of draining energy, this past weekend was a reminder to me of the importance of taking preventative measures against vampires. vampires are adept at finding ways to harness energy for their own gratification with a minimum of effort. indications someone you are dealing with is a vampire include: negligible interest being paid to whomever they seek validation from; disregard for the time and energy required to maintain cordial relations; actions directly contradicting any illusory evidence of their ostensible care; willful ignorance of any efforts to communicate hurt feelings. if vanquishing via the traditional wooden stake in the heart is not an option, I recommend, once their true nature has been revealed to you, that you deny at every opportunity their attempts to reconcile. vampires must be invited into one’s life, after all, and while difficult, it is not impossible to retract an already opened invitation.

there are no major astrological events worth commenting on at present, which reflects, personally, the doldrums of being a week away from moving into a new place. my apartment is very small, so I can’t really begin dissembling the living space I’ve inhabited for the past seven years until there’s somewhere to move things to. the moon moved into Aquarius last night at 8:40PM PDT, almost exactly when I got off the phone with Erikk, who, like everyone else I know, it seems, is also moving in the near future. I wanted to start yesterday on these near-daily, astrologically-tinted posts, but the site I purchase hosting space from was down all afternoon, which prevented me from accessing my blog.

Mercury in Libra is trine Mars in Gemini, air signs concerned with the manner in which ideas constitute the social relations between people and others. this aspect will hover there for a few days as Mercury turns retrograde on the 9th. I expect an atmosphere conducive to harmonious and logical, if somewhat strenuous, reflection on the myriad ways people interact with each other: both practically/physically, due to Mars’s influence, and intellectually/linguistically, Mercury’s domain. this as Saturn in Aquarius squares Uranus in Taurus, a chance to actualize any sensuous illusions presently impeding one’s ability to articulate and structure desire. Virgo season being in full swing, it is time to reinforce what works and sacrifice what doesn’t, in an effort to purify one’s sphere, taking special care to exorcise all vampiric influences.

bruh I hate this blog. okay, that’s not entirely true, but I have a lot of writing that is better put to other ends, so right now I don’t really care enough to ensure this is a thriving source of varied content. but what then do I want from this? I’ve made lots of plans and thought up plenty of ideas for what might be good topics to regularly blog about, but the fact is right now any writing that isn’t going into the novel I’m working on is generally being avoided. a story and some newsletter essays, but that’s it.

I’m in the process of dedicating myself further to my artistic endeavors, trying to make better use of my time, so there’s probably some to be devoted to maintaining a more regular supply of posts here, but fact is, blogging is very low on my priority list. but the idea of having a blog is to have something to offer as evidence of the work i do without the hassle of convincing some website or legacy publication to publish me. and if that’s the idea then I should be writing all kinds of things here, because I write all kinds of things, but with the intention of submitting them for sanctification via publication.

this week is the week I’m thinking of as “starting in earnest” ie making myself work on or plan what’s next in this novel. I’m not hitting the word quotas I made but I’m letting myself get up to speed. because I’m limiting how much more research I do at this stage until I have actual drafts to work with, I don’t have time for anything like that here. but I should do something else here. maybe text generating exercises; cut-ups, algorithmic games, parody, so on. anything to keep me occupied throughout the day so I don’t spiral into despair or distraction, as is my wont. make myself laugh, write jokes, whatever. something every day. let’s do it.

music’s going well too, though of course I have renewed energy and focus for the studio when I should be putting my time in in front of the typewriter.

aries is the sign of the self so this is about me.

romanticism is an eternally returning defense mechanism against nature’s indifference/hostility that obfuscates a projected aggression on humanity’s part. nature is essentially good, purer than us, a source of salvation; beauty is not only worth suffering, but requires it, often self-induced and cascading outwards; instability walks arm-in-arm with passion and creation.

but this realization does nothing to counter the experienced knowledge that Reality is often wantonly hostile, hence the natural occurrence of defensive/reactionary formations. nor does it negate romanticism’s usefulness in times of crisis.

called out of work to smoke weed and make music

what makes the fantasy of tearing it all down and setting off along some line of flight into unknown territory so alluring? it seems that for most people this impulse is tamped down with regimented self-destructiveness at a lower frequency, via substance abuse, binge television, etc., or else it’s sublimated into a quote unquote “healthy” process of change, deliberate and sustainable, aimed at concrete goals.

it’s hard for me to deny what blind intuition and whim have done to make my life more pregnant with meaning. the world will of course intervene into anyone’s stability eventually, but Life won’t be experienced in all its splendor if timidity, inertia, and fear of pain dominate one’s existence. in his Education, Henry Adams argues that chaos is the natural course of the universe, order a fiction of human consciousness; “chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.” the sense of thrill, the thrumming energy felt when interrogating potentials unforeseen, not yet realized, and just beyond comfort, is an indication of one’s nearness to, as Clarice Lispector (Dec. 10) calls it, the coração selvagem, the wild heart of life.

this naturally leads to the counterquestion of whether courting destruction is necessary. the impulse to shake things up, loosening structural supports, all for an imagined and, by nature, unsecured different way of being, is, if you squint, or maybe even without squinting, merely the desire for death, an end to the life lived up to that point. obligations can be impediments, blocking the way to higher experience, or they can deepen the value of one’s present conditions. as I write this I’m wearing a t-shirt bearing the misunderstood William Blake (Nov 28) quote, “the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” is this a moral imperative urging that we embrace excess and search for what is above and beyond conventional, predictable existence? do we brave the inevitable pain and violence of such a decision? or is Blake saying something else? Philoctetes, enduring his poisoned wound, may serve some as a model for how anguish and destruction can be ennobled, with his convalescence proving essential for mastery over the bow of Heracles. Or, it’s the story of a man needlessly exiled for a decade only to become proficient with implements that cause further suffering.

I might go and throw my phone into the lake, yeah/It ain’t hard to quit carin’ what you think, yeah

100 Gecs (Laura Les [Dec 2], Dylan Brady [Nov 27])

I’m not quite lighted out for unknown territories, nor did I throw my phone in the lake, but I did deactivate my Instagram. a small step towards acting on the conviction that unmediated contact with Life’s wild heart is still possible.

mystic/empath/boddhisattva/annunaki [love letter emoji] • clairaudient/claircognizant/clairvoyant/clairtactile/clairolfactic [“see no evil” monkey emoji] • [cancer emoji][sun emoji] | [aquarius emoji][moon emoji] | [capricorn emoji][up arrow emoji] • check out my onlyfans for [eggplant emoji][water droplets emoji]

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~*~weekly horoscope~*~

aries, taurus, gemini, leo, virgo, scorpio, sagittarius, capricorn, aquarius

yesterday will come back if you make it tomorrow. beware people who would do you harm. send a letter to friend. no, not that friend.

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[new moon face emoji] what is shadow work? [magic orb emoji]

shadow work is when we decide to finally look in the mirror of our soul. sometimes the mirror shows us what we don’t want to see. but this mirror is in our soul. light your inner light so it shines off the mirror inside. then with lucidity, you will be ready to join the dark side. [purple imp emoji]

in “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the narrator’s conscience exacts revenge on him, for two things. one is murder, but not only murder, a murder where the victim, an old man, almost catches him, the murderer. because the old man knows there’s someone else in the room, the narrator doesn’t have the same unfair advantage he would ambushing an old man who’s asleep. so that’s weighing the ol’ Scales against him. then, after there’s blood on his hands, the narrator lies to the cops. now, who wouldn’t agree that such dishonesty denies the relative equality between souls? this is Nietzsche’s (oct 15) ironic sense of justice inverted into felt guilt, a burning guilt brought on by the double violation of near-mutual recognition.

I listened to Christopher Lee read the story and I wanted to say he overdoes it, but the narrator really is that cartoonish in prose, & so is a lot of Poe, who I’m revisiting because I’m trying to write a horror story this month; “The Sphinx” I like more because it’s weirder, more oblique and disconcerting; it has something to say about shared reality, alienation, and democracy. “The Tell-Tale Heart” seems more like an exercise in pacing. could also be an overexposure thing. cartoonish isn’t necessarily bad either, to be clear, not a critique of Poe really. idk it’s Libra szn I can’t be *that* mean. tho Bela Lugosi (oct 20) kinda disappointed me in The Black Cat (1935), “suggested by” Poe’s story with the same name and carried by Boris Karloff’s performance (and his great costumes).

last night I watched Bad Girls Go to Hell (1965), a delightfully gothic sexploit that titillates and horrifies in equal measure. creepazoid rapists & malevolent city slickers shot in high contrast black & white, cast in shadows stark enough to compete with the most self-serious of the German expressionists. not to mention stacked-brick-house 60s babes, wearing (and removing) all kinds of lacy things. all of which is to say it was extremely “my shit.”

Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity

Ecclesiastes 1:2, c’mon you knew that.

mornings are like this: the alarm goes off at 6:50am, which I snooze until 7:00am. I fail at avoiding the internet for the first 15 minutes of wakeful consciousness, winding me into compulsivity from the jump. the sink’s never empty because my kitchen is tiny and I am lazy. or, rather, I do not afford myself the same consideration I would for guests on whom I want to make a good impression (ie women I want to see naked). clean the french press, make a cup of coffee, sit down with whatever I’m working on that day: right now it’s this. sometimes I read, sometimes I waste a bunch of time looking at my screens. the sun this morning is muted by lingering clouds that had electrified the sky all night, a rare thunderstorm on the Southern California coast. for some reason I am still being coquettish about where I live. fine it’s Ventura, that’s where I live. I don’t really care if you know I guess. then I eat a yogurt, shower, sometimes hit the bong, and head to work.

on balance, I could stand to “do” more, and more intensely. maybe I’ll get into microdosing; I bought a vial of LSD at the start of 2020’s COVID lockdown and haven’t sampled any of it yet. an experiment in living and perceiving for the sake of documentation. but doing things so that there’s something to write about is extreme vanity, only for the cameras, like a Kim K (Oct 21) pap walk. all the same, vanity is a powerful motivator for me, I will admit shamelessly. perhaps I ought to accept as much, under this airheaded bimbo of a Libra new moon.