"When I was little, I wanted to be three things: a cowboy, an artist, and the Incredible Hulk. The funny thing is that all three wishes came true.  I love my horse, I'm a writer, and I have more in common with Bruce Banner's dangerous side than I'd like to admit.  What I wanted so much as a child were power and invincibility, but what I actually found was a hidden core of indestructible rage that made me a better artist, person, and mother." ~Delilah S. Dawson, On the Hulk: You Wouldn't Like Me When I'm Angry

I had a little dark moon party over the weekend (pitch sky makes for great yard fires). Vindictive's coming out party of sorts. I made my famous scrumptious pepper dip and poured wine and we built a backyard fire on homemade firestarters. I am still pooped.

The secret superhero identity idea is a strong one, it clearly resonates. One of the librarians admitted that his office chair in the cataloging bowels of the building wears a Batman cape. One of the bio teachers has an alter ego named Supressed who is polite to idiots but who can make your dogs like her better than they like you. Etc. Since most of the people I know are teachers too or work as teaching supporting staff, all this summer thought play is work for me kinda. Come fall, my class on Emerson will have a new unit on DIY superheroes - what could be more Self-Reliant than that?

VIRGO Beauty and pain are often linked. Every rose has its thorns. A good florist will handle the danger. And when there's no one to take away the prickly truth of the matter, go on and assume the role of protector.

 More thunder is rolling in on a darkening afternoon. I got home from work just ahead of the sky cracking apart. Good weather for a nap.

"I'll take Batman.  Golden age Batman or campy Silver Age or grim Batman or the aging Dark Knight of even Batman 2099.  I'll take whoever chooses to answer the Bat-Signal on a given rainy night. I'll take him for all sorts of reasons.  Because he's a weird superhero.  No powers, just his self-discipline and talent and personal hang-ups. Part vicious vigilante, part neurotic warrior saint.  With his private cult of unrelenting mourning, he's the costumed patron of the walking wounded, of simply Not Letting It Go." ~ Austin Grossman, Me and Batman and You, from Last Night a Superhero Saved My Life.

It's a collection of essays not really about the superheroes exactly, but about each famous author's relationship to the preferred hero of their childhood. Why that one?

And what of my heroes? They aren't in the book. I liked Wonder Woman well enough, and did see her film on opening night, but meh. Nothing bad ever happened to her (celibacy is a huge drag but doesn't count as trauma) - daddy issues got added to her plate in this version, that helped a little, but still. I like Storm, throwing thunder like bowling balls in the strike zone. I hated Lois Lane even though she was a writer -  always needing saved and too stupid to see Clark for what he was, dumb bitch..

VIRGO  Your circumstances are where you are, not who you are. Some environments are harder to escape than others. Today you'll have to wriggle and fight to unclench the talons that hold you in a place.

Remember when love had you riding on unicorns? Now when you look down, it's a horse. No, wait — it's a bike. No, wait — you're not riding anything. You're just standing there, going nowhere. No one is to blame for this. It's the natural progression of relationships. Mars enters Leo, infusing our passions with the creativity needed to get back to the magic.

Queen of Cups (reversed)

VIRGO The passive approach would work if you were on a raft floating down a river with its own agenda. But you're not. You're standing on the path that splits into many possible directions, and you have to decide which way to walk. (Ya mean stomp?)


I had a dream that I was throwing knives. I woke up and thought: YES. I googled it. Knife throwing falls into the same category as competitive hot yoga, the difficult and pissed off end of concentration martial arts. I started trying to find lessons locally.

I haven't yet. But what I did find is a place that will organize an axe throwing party for you (with beer). They bill it as a bonding team building thing.

So I sent out a 'would you be interested?' text to all my faculty and friends at work. And 2 funny things:

1. Within minutes, EVERYONE had responded that omg they would like nothing better, especially while drinking beer, to let fly their F-U.

2. They all said something like, This is why we love you, you are a great hater (you are Vindictive)!

I thought I was keeping that kinda well hidden (?), telling jokes all the time, but no, my known quantity is furious. And I thought I would stay quiet on the social down low until I felt all peacenik sweet again. But all the good people I know, they'd all like to hurl a hatchett too, they just don't walk around feeling it all the time.

Soooo, (out)rage(d) is the new nice (?)

The trine of loving Venus and lucky Jupiter invites us to be happy first and let the circumstances catch up to us to support the feeling — or not. Your approach is simple: They treat you well; you'll treat them even better, and this will start a snowball effect of positivity.

That is precisely my approach. Even better better - if you've never had my treating you well treatment, you haven't lived.

I have completely neglected the reverse, however. So. New rule of thumb. Treat me poorly, and I will treat you in kind plus one, an experience you will also not soon shake off. And in this way, perhaps, I will start a snowball effect of watch yourself.

Think of a new X-men character called Vindictive. More than sweet to the good guys, she is the one you call when you're in need of being treated so well that it feels like a balm lightly scratched into the back of each one of your blood cells, wonderfuull washed over and through you. But betray or mistreat or malign or undervalue her, then the balm will be replaced with karmic salt and applied with equal thorough care. The blistering of regret slow and steady and unstoppable. Wouldn't you root for her? I would.

Janis -Ball and Chain 
(turn it up)

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on the waterfront

The Greek poet Hesiod said, "It will not always be summer; build barns." Try to store some emotional warmth up today. Capture it in a pic. Jot a note. Make a list of the things you can do to keep your energy, creativity and playfulness alive when things change, as they inevitably will as Venus squares Neptune and Mars squares Uranus.


Thunder is roaring down the gorge right now. I looove that booming. But the poor dogs are losing their shit. Begging me, as if I summon and control dooms.

Says every woman, sooner or later, seems like :/

VIRGO The same people who bring out the best in you also bring out the stress in you. The grace of the day is that those two things won't happen at the same time. If you keep on the sunny side, so will those around you.

Deeeep breath in....exhaaaaale.....

When Ears was very little, when he would get sick like with a cold or flu, always his body would expell pure fire. The poor little guy's ass would blister from acid shits; his brow and armpits, wherever sweat pools, would blister too. Of all the things I regret, letting him attach his heart to Trainwreck, that is right up there. Regret blisters me where it pools.

He was beautiful, Trainwreck was. Women flutter around him like moths to well-wrought imitation flames. And, he seemed good with kids. Mine loved him.

If you stand back from your romantic partners in retrospect, how much in them do you admire? Respect? Would you emulate? In how they treated you, as a friend or lover, or in any other way toward anyone or anything?

Note to self: assholes are not the same as penises, so don't get wet for them.

A friend of mine recently told me that I was vindictive. It really bothered me, thinking of myself that way, and after all the peacenik yoga shit. What did he know of wronged, anyway? But. He knows enough. And he was, is, right. I work hard, I build this life, I stomp through the halls of it, I never make promises or oaths of allegiance lightly. And the whole time, my idling state now is fuckitfuckitfuckfuckitfuckit like a small outboard boat motor in need of a tune-up it isn't going to get.

"Fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you. And fuck you." ~You Don't Have To Say You Love Me, Sherman Alexie

The Whites - Keep on the Sunny Side (Charlie Chaplin)

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ain't afraid of no tom cat fill my brains with poison lalala

Cowper's fluid

"What good is a menage a trois when you have a soulmate? "

hahahaha

Just goes to show, if it can happen to Beyonce...at least J doesn't spin it like some unfulfilled personal demon driven to it crappola.

ha

VIRGO Time is supposed to prevent everything from happening at once, and yet it may fall down on the job, at least in your case. Your popularity surges — a hard thing to keep up with.

Remember the day I went looking for a not-Shitty P with Sunshine?

I never did find a frog after the turtle found me. But being stubborn as hell about it, I went hiking through area wetlands the next few days like perusing frog tinder whatever. Finally, in a shallow puddle drying out in the blazing sun, I spotted a half-frogged tadpole, muscular short legs, and I nabbed him. I was like, 'Dude, life is an iffy proposition.' Odds were not on him. But.

Look who showed up fine finally. Wary. And does not like photo shoots at all. I am taking adjective suggestions for his name ('not-Shitty' is not a word and sets the bar too low besides).

VIRGO Who tends to you when you're feeling fragile? It's that person you want to reach out to you today, because it very well may be that the two of you are on a teeter-totter. When one needs help, the other is strong.

"Smart love" may be a contradiction of terms, but no one, not even love, can be foolish all of the time: Even a stopped clock is right two times a day. Mercury tugs across the sky at Pluto to bring awareness to what's really important. You may find that what your heart wants not only is intelligent in a way but is good for others, too.

VIRGO Respect where you've been and what you know; set a limit to what you're willing to accept from others. If you don't lay boundaries, you'll be insulting your own experience.


The look on his face. Complete acceptance that life is people hurting you - carelessly purposefully heartlessly inevitably - period.

Ya hear all the time how you have find inner peace, go to yoga, forgive trespasses, forgive yourself, breathe and embrace what is. God knows I have believed that. But. Acceptance is the look on that kid's face.

VIRGO You're keeping track. In everything that happens, you've the equivalent of the black box of an airplane accounting for it. Flames and floods and love and war couldn't change the account of the faithful, honest witness inside you.

weekend love horoscope: the existential question

Everything else turned out fine, life would be pretty good, if only....?....I truly can't decide if I should nurture/protect that one fuck I have left to give and hope my heart grows back to fully functional someday somehow, or if I should kill that last scrap of softness in myself and hope all the pain dies out with it. To tell ya the truth, I am not even sure it's my choice - the feeling in my chest right now might well be just a ghost where my heart used to be before it got ripped out, like the maddening itch that amputees feel in limbs that no longer exist actually.

Believe it or not, when I think 'I want to see a movie', I stop and examine that thought and wonder at it, do I really feel that (?), can I *afford to feel that* if I do (?), or should I kill it if it is real (?)...even shit that small stumps me anymore.

I might be a performance of a person. And inside there is a robot at the controls. It is no wonder, in retrospect, why I was attracted always to characters like Data and never ones like Commander Ryker (TJ is rewatching that series lately) - it was foreshadowing what I would (have to) become.

VIRGO  If you learn from every scenario, the more scenarios you live, the more you'll learn. So when the question of whether to go or stay arises, if your aim is to be wiser, the answer is usually to go.

North/up is always my instinct to go. I would go see this,  the tiny cabin that he built and she made into art and they made home, then I would park next to a lake and cross seeing northern lights off my bucket list.

"..their image accompanies us in our mind both when we’re out and about and when we’re at home, even though for a long time we believe that we will never get accustomed to their absence. From the start, though, we know that we can no longer count on them, not even for the most petty thing, for a trivial phone call or a banal question (“Did I leave my car keys there?” “What time did the kids get out of school today?”), that we can count on them for nothing. And nothing means nothing. It’s incomprehensible really, because it assumes a certainty, and being certain of anything goes against our nature: the certainty that someone will never come back, never speak again, never take another step—whether to come closer or to move further off—will never look at us or look away. I don’t know how we bear it, or how we recover. I don’t know how it is that we do gradually begin to forget, when time has passed and distanced us from them." The Infatuations, Javier Marias

Portugal. The man. - I Feel it Still

Blurred Lines - ADDIE

VIRGO weekend love horoscope: Your sights are set on one that's difficult to know and hard to win due to the stiff competition. You'll succeed.

feist - pleasure
fink - black curls

 

Gallows humor: Trump on hairspray and Ms Universe (unrelated, believe it or not).

on cue

mal de coucou
n. a phenomenon in which you have an active social life but very few intimates—people who you can trust, who you can be yourself with, who can help flush out the weird psychological toxins that tend to accumulate over time—which is a form of acute social malnutrition in which even if you devour an entire buffet of chitchat, you’ll still feel pangs of hunger.

I need an obscure word of sorrow that means "awake and ready to go to but the market and nursery and pond store are all still closed for hours".

Once I had a frog in the pond. I called him Shitty-P, short for Shitty Prince Charming. Sun caught him in Art Park and brought him to me as a kind of Prince Charming lucky charm, but my luck only got worse so I let him go / kicked him out. Today I decided I wanted another, so we went back to the park to fetch a prince from this little overgrown bogspot, a glorified ditch really, where tons of frogs always are. We thought we would name him Better Adjective Prince Charming this time for good general loveluck. But no frogs were there at all, not even jumping to get away from our feet and poking sticks, it was dead quiet as if they were all holding their little collective froggy breath. I looked and looked. Then realized what was right before my eyes.

So big that I hadn't seen it, my brain just didn't compute, and old as dirt (wow).  And I sat down and leaned over the water and he swam up to me and stared into my eyes (I swear!), and when I leaned in more he craned his face toward me more, nose to nose like.

I didn't have my phone - these pics were taken by Sun's bf at a distance trying to get pics without my noticing and without scaring the turtle (who didn't look scared of jackshit, frankly).

I know all about turtles. And what they mean.

VIRGO It may be a fight to hang on, but it shouldn't be a fight to let go. Letting go is easy. It doesn't require any special skill or strength. Letting go is simply a decision. Open your hands.