A Tale of Exploitation:

I suppose it’s easy for the Rationalists to dismiss. According to the theory of confirmation bias, the moment that I ‘choose’ to believe that I had a bad childhood I will focus in on all the negative times and ignore all of the positives. But that is itself a pre-

Judiced rationalization. For instance, it PRESUMES that there even WERE good times, or that I need to be reminded of them should my mindset grow too negative, or that the good times all ways and invariably balance out the bad, and that this happens for EVERY one, but that either we all go through the same things but at different times, or those of us who wind up in a rutt – a lesser station in life – do so by some ‘fault’ of their own:

Either ‘imbalanced chemistry’ or the even murkier modern myth of ‘personal choice’. The TRUTH is that my mind does not need to be reminded to perform this set of exercises. With Libra in my House of Self, it’s done this my entire life. And that is no foregone conclusion; this is not the first time that I’ve noticed that I’ve all ways striven to ‘balance’ my inner world as my whole interpersonal world fell apart around me. Nor is it the first time that I’ve noticed that my life is one that I’ve been living backwards: that my childhood was a sort of project I’d intended to ‘complete’ within my adulthood, and that now that I’m older I am trying to learn how to be a kid. Plenty of times I’ve rationalized that my childhood was not so bad, even saying once after I’d finished reading Waiting for Godot:

‘My life has been a happy one. Yes:

There was some oppression. But I have survived. And now I’m good.’

I still remember where I was when those exact words crossed my mind. And only now I realise I plagiarized them from a Marxist lecture.

But part of it’s true: I was oppressed.

The fact that my own thoughts were taken from a lecture further proves my point:

My entire life, I’d had no life.

There is some thing about the Truth that has a way of upsetting our attempts to level rationally with our peers. It’s not politically correct, nor is it ‘fair and balanced’ as we (or SOME of us) would like to be. A revelation is accompanied by an extremely BIASED emotion. But because it is begotten by the Truth, this feeling is a truthful one, and so one must conclude then that the Truth is Biased. This is no foregone conclusion, even if the reasoning for Truth sounds circular to tin ears.

One cannot ethically dismiss the possibility of such a Truth, and it alone musters the Deep Emotions up against the (dated) monarchy of Reason.

All ways my attempts to see the bright side offered only fleeting, insecure, and superficial relief. The Truth now is that each memory of joy that I can conjure in my desperation is swiftly over-shadowed by a memory whose pain consumes its pleasure. One would expect (and really hope) that every grim recollection would, by the same token, have a silver lining.

But that is not so; I would have to contrive it, as I all ways did to cope.

It’s not as though all human life is doomed to failure.

Plenty people my age do not seem to think so, and I’m getting to the point that I no longer laugh at them for their naïveté, nor even envy them for their blissful abandon. I simply, calmly, but without that Libran pretense, rather with the heartfelt equanimity of a Zen master, come to accept the fact that my peers, for the most part, had some thing I never did: a childhood. Even those who had a miserable childhood still can say that they were CHILDREN. They were kids. But I could not afford that privilege.

My whole life, up until the last few years, I’ve had to be the Grown-up. And that is a fact that no swindling pretense can extricate from my Heart.

When I first realized this there was an intervention. I broke down. My ex’s Mother had manipulated my own into taking me to the Mental Hospital (a sort of cozy, passive-aggressive version of an Asylum, as befit their family’s character) that the former worked at. When Father tried to set my old Casio keyboard ‘straight’, for it was crooked (to his mind) upon its stand, I flipped out. I meant no harm to a soul. It was purely aesthetical.

I simply began to re-

Arrange the layout of my whole bedroom. The bed became diagonal. My keyboard too.

My parents did not bother once to ask me what was wrong. They never had; it was all ways a ploy my Mother used to learn how bad my grades were, even when I was in Middle School and got no worse than B’s, and on occasion.

So I went to the Hospital gladly.

It was like being in my ex’s house again, and she had been the closest thing I’d ever known then to an alma mater.*

*‘Nurturing mother’.

I was surprised to learn it, nonetheless, and for much the same reason, that my ex’s mother had ‘successfully’ won my own mother’s favour.

They were just so diametrically opposed: Ally’s mom and my own were archetypal opposites, and Ally and I had agreed.

Yet Ally would no longer speak to me, so I never could figure it out.

I think that I understand it now, though: Ally’s mom and mine had common goals. The former did not care about me, but that I keep away from her daughter. The latter did not care about me either, but just that I do not tarnish the family’s reputation.

So a compromise was reached.

Where was I? I was playing with tiny coloured index cards within my bedroom, trying to discover the mysteries of Chi. Having become frustrated with women, I’d decided to join a cult. It would take me some time to get out of it. The leader’s books, still published post-humously even decades after his death (I think decades, definitely years) continue to peer at me each time I pass the New Age section of the local Barnes and Noble.

This is not neurotic projection, but poetic personification. Even the O’s in his damned name look like blank, staring eyes.

I could continue to elaborate, but I forego that burden.

My point has been made, I am exhausted, and we are past the point that any body sensible would dismiss my exhaustion.

Yes: to speak of ‘sensibility’ seems all so to be hyper-rational.

But it is thankfully only to speak from experience. I only retain my rationalist habits be-

Cause, until recently, I did not know yet from EXPERIENCE how sensible people can be. Lo and behold! It is a virtue that tends to be in direct proportion to Kindness, and often it is in inverse proportion to condescension, at least where the object of con-

Descension would be me.

Does this make me biased in favour of my fans? Hardly.

It simply indicates that, as an empath, I can tell which critics are emotionally unstable and which ones are stable. And the stable ones I hesitate to call ‘critics’.

I do not care how astrology works.

I did not write this as an ‘essay’ to be published. That I’d even think of it that way, and that the audience intended would be scientific positivists,

Only underscores the tyranny I lived under throughout my formative years, as far as my creativity had been concerned.

It is sufficient to say, with childlike abandon: that it DOES work. I have Known of its practitioners to be beneficent and healing people,

Even if I had to come to terms with their Humanity and take back a few shadows in my Self to get to that point.

I have Cancer in my Tenth House. This is not a growth of cells.

It is an astrological symbol referred to as ‘the Crab’. And it is every bit as tragic as the medical Cancer. The trick in both cases is to spot it early.

My whole life has been reversed. By this I do not mean a recent change. I mean that since the day and hour of my birth I’ve had to deal with adult pressures that only an adult can be expected to handle. That boundary – betwixt the adult and the child – was violated. And I feel like Lao Tzu, the Taoist sage whose name means literally ‘Old Boy’, who was Rumoured to have been 600 years old when he was born into his most historical re-

Incarnation. And like Merlin,

I age backwards. I paid MY dues early. I intend to party the rest of the way. This is not the first time I have said this. My only regret is that I did not adhere to this ethos with more valour and rigour. I won’t lie: Having fun

(for me, at least) is HARD.

Only a twelfth of the population will have lived through what I’ve lived through. Just as the theory of evolution suggests that things like Dogs, Cats, and Humans are the work of millions of years of natural mistakes, so it is that thousands of years of studying individual case histories have produced our present and incorrigible body of Astrological fact. Anecdotal evidence is hard to dismiss when every body has a story, it gets harder to dismiss when every story’s different, and it becomes impossible to dismiss when the Stories follow trends. Nor is it that all of the stories offered by Astrology apply to everyone.

This naïve reduction is an absurd inflation, for were that so then no one would judge of any one, and no one would help any one. The rationalist will contend that these are but two different ways of coping,

And that so long as there’s a choice there is no reason to eliminate either completely; one can simply CHOOSE to ‘deal with’ one’s own life and others either by condemnation or commiseration. Yet such a choice would be tragically arbitrary to make, like voting in a bad election. It eliminates the third party: Empathy.

By avenue and grace of the Empathic Gift, one can Feel one’s way into an other’s pain. Granted that one remembers one’s own identity in the process, one will be stricken by just how ALIEN the suffering of others is to one’s own. We do NOT all go through the same trials. And some of us DO suffer more than others, or at least we suffer less as the result of our own foibles. To take any more blame upon ourselves would be to snap under the weight and strain of others’ foibles.

And that’s a mistake so tragic that it would be cruel to make those others (in this case, my parents) face the shame of it, when I am no longer AROUND to blame them, but the Truth persists as advocate for me.

Those of us who have lived with a Tenth House Placement in Cancer have spent our whole lives at Sea gazing out for a lighthouse in the night-time myst, the night being a premature adulthood in a life whose morning and day we had only barely glimpsed.

When I find that light, in the form of a beautiful, motherly astrologer telling me it’s OKAY, and that she UNDERSTANDS, we’ve found our birth-right, and that lighthouse carries all the light of Truth and all the warmth of Love. If YOU would disagree, Know that you disagree from a position of privilege.

I am only thankful that I found this sanctuary no later than I did. And that some of the repairs that all ways were in order have all ready been underway.

This was not the first Sign to appear.

DM.A.A.

A Tale of Pretension:

A Tale of Pretension:

All of my peers, my self included, were born with Capricorn in their North Node. Ours was a journey to be dispossessed of the entanglements of home and to be thrust headlong into what my best friend in high school called (with great presumption and cliché) “the cold, adult world.”

It was not that the adult world was objectively cold, even in the intersubjective sense of sterility, objectivity, and narcissistic apathy. All of that was a projection. It was rather that we all learned quickly that it would not live up to our expectations; WE would have to tell the WORLD who’s boss, and that would have to start by playing the game of life by its rules, and only after having sold out to the system could we HOPE to buy your souls back and to recreate the system in the image of our childhood fantasies. The world could not be EXPECTED to be a beneficent boss, but it WAS the boss, so we had to appeal to it just long enough to beat it at its game. And we could not do so by acting like the boss from the beginning.

I barely keep in touch now with my graduating class. I think oft on the song by John Mayer, “No Such Thing”, wherein he professes that there is no such thing as the Real World, [but] just a lie you have to rise above. It is not unlike the song “Real World” by Matchbox Twenty, wherein Rob Thomas wishes that the real world would just stop hassling him. I would listen to that song over and over on my best friend’s iPod on a bus ride to a Marching Band tournament. He never understood why I liked that band so much, even though they WERE on HIS iPod.

In that song by John Mayer,  though: he sings lightly, all most talkingly, about how he wants to run through the halls of his high school and scream at the top of his lungs. He wants to bust down the double-doors of his ten-year reunion, and as he stands on these tables before you you will know what all this time was for. (Sorry for spoiling the ending.)

That was how I envisioned my ten-year reunion, approximately. I just did not expect that so few of my peers would share that sentiment. The sounds of my close pals mocking John Mayer’s voice slurring “Am I living it right?” on “Why, Georgia, Why?” apparently did not echo into the halls of my discretion.

My peers grew up to be largely what my best friend would have called “pretentious douchebags”. There is a sort of Satanic trap underlying people whose life purpose is material competence. It is no wonder that in the Christian religion Capricorn, the Goat, ruled by Saturn (“Satan” in Hebrew), the Fallen God of Law and the archetype of Cardinal Earth, is vilified as the antithesis of all that Jesus Christ had come to teach. Jesus was of course the principal mystic of the Age of Pisces. As Pisces was my Sun sign (I say now in case you have not yet surmised), this set me somewhat against the rational arrogance of the Goat, preferring the matriarchal moralism of the Crab in my South Node.

There is a mire of arrogance that haunts my peers now. I call it a mire because once caught one has trouble getting out. Such extrication requires a put-down that my water-sign tendencies tend away from (I never had much Scorpio in my chart.), and if I try to muster such condescension I am met with the EXPERTS in one-upmanship (an other word that my best friend enjoyed because the thing it signified he so despised).

It begins with innocence. I approach an old friend seeking mental clarity. (we both are, though the old friend might deny it.) He then does not hesitate to classify whatever it is that I’m “interested in” (using for healing) as one of a number of consumer preferences that he is familiar with but politely impartial towards. Then I try to expose him, compelling him to LOOSEN UP A BIT by acting silly and evasive. So he lets the proverbial claws out, dismisses all my “interests” outright, as though the world needed to know what “true taste” is, and withdraws coldly. Why is this a mire? Because in the process I am left accused of being “pseudo-intellectual”, “pretentious”, and “immature” by the very people who have seemed, to my mind, now not to have aged a day since they were in the seventh grade, calling video games that did not convey their notion of “reality” by that old, unacademic name of “gay”.

And how am I to escape the accusation, innocence intact?

The truth is that I’ve all ways known that there was more to life.

My first friend in the class of 2011 (my own class being-2009) was a Gemini. So was his South Node, as well as was so for the rest of his peers. He initiated me into his peer group; under the Trojan Horse that we were both born Russian we became friends, though the mystical causes that underlay this were totally lost to us.

The Class of 2011 has therefore as its North Node Sagittarius. It would be a while before these traits would show; they were two years younger than I, so they were not yet at the point that all my peers were at: the test of adulthood, so to speak. So it must have been the freedom-loving, easygoing, airy Gemini tendency that I so loved and craved covetously in those people. That of course explains the fact that my first key into the Gates had been born with a Gemini Sun Sign.

Later, it would be the wild and careless, but yet fundamentally well-meaning, loyal Sagittarian North Node that piqued my interest. These people praised me for my being-philosophical; I could teach them how to become the optimystical intellectuals that they were meant-to-Be. This stunned me. I thought very little of my self. But then: that’s all that I knew growing up. My parents were aloof and held me only to their own standards, which proved in later years to have been nearly totally unphilosophical. My peers were even worse. They looked at me with a look that I recognize to this day in Capricorns, for it only appears in them: a sort of condescending pity, as though I protested some thing that could never change, and even if it could change it would be of no greater consequence.

My generation loved J.D. Salinger. They did not mourn his death so much as they craved its fruits. He had been holding out on us. It is remarkable how like-a-Salinger-character they all became.

But I was different.

I was never Helen Silsburn, Rhea Fedder, Lane Coutell, or even Holden Caulfield. At most I was Seymour Glass. Yet I am still alive, and unmarried. I have yet to reach thirty-five, but I don’t doubt much that I shall.

My life has NOT been a game played by the rules, as Holden’s History professor had insisted.

I was born with Capricorn in my Fourth House.

And Cancer in my Midheaven.

And this changed everything.

DM.A.A.

A Tale of Tyranny:

The Scorpio archetype is often the least readily understood, most often misunderstood, and most tragically understood sign of the Western Zodiac. Its function primarily is the preservation of Justice for the downtrodden. Suppose that a child is born to an inattentive and dogmatic father. The father, reeking of privilege and condescension, casts out all his children to fend for themselves, for he has no further need for them. Hitherto his other children were forced into servitude, and their lingering “debt” to him for his “kindness” bound them to a path that barred the way to charity. So it was that MOST of the outcast children perished in agony whilst the tyrant enjoyed the complacent boredom of privilege. But one survived. And that was the Scorpion. Scorpio is the outcast and rejected child that grew up on its own in the wilderness. It learned the law of the land, not the law of the kingdom. It had no education in civilized life, but was raised by wolves, an outcast to both its own kind and its foster parents, a perpetual alien to the world of Intersubjective Relationship.

Scorpio’s skills in fending for its self at all costs imbibed it with the notion that all life is a game of zero sum. Survival is for the fittest and the perpetuation of the predator is all ways at the expense of the prey. Friendships were neither entitlements nor sources of amusement, except when the weaknesses of friends became cause for amusement, even then at the expense of the amusing. Friends were resources to serve the Utilitarian purposes of the Quest, to be protected jealously only insofar as they might be put to use. At times sacrifices had to be made, and so Scorpio cast off its weaker friends and found stronger ones to fill the place. At times even the stronger friends had to be challenged and robbed. All friends were potential enemies, and enemies had to be kept closer than friends could ever be. A friend of strong but generous character was to be exploited; its generosity was its weakness, and its strength was its utility. The outcast child of a King would not be “fooled” by generosity, for the King had only ever been generous so far as it would privilege his preferences. Generosity was the instrument of Privilege to use towards the ends of Injustice. Justice was only to be found in the wilderness.

I have spoken of a Quest. This Quest’s purpose was Justice. To be redeemed, to validate its existence, Scorpio had to work its way back into the Kingdom. Its entry went largely unnoticed, though rumour of a creeping shadow or a band of thieves grew swiftly. Scorpio infiltrates the Kingdom of its slighted birth by avenue of the catacombs: the network of sewers and burial sites that the Royals do not wish to see. (This is the story of Jak and Daxter in Jak Three.) It is a cat burglar that climbs up the fire escape ladders to reach the rooftops and that sets up a network of spies to infiltrate the palace, as in Sly Cooper. Finally it comes to the throne of the King, who does not remember it. The King asks: “Who are you?” and the Scorpio replies: “I am your outcast child. You have violated me. Your irresponsible activities of privilege have wound me up in this wretched state, clawing for survival. And I watched you live in privilege. Now I shall collect what is owed to me.”

So the King is overthrown, the outcast avenged, the children redeemed, and Order and Prosperity restored under the banner of Justice.

Of course we who have had the privilege of living in the City know that this entire account is one-sided, and as Jung attests: one-sidedness, though it lends momentum, is a mark of barbarism. As our philosophers keenly remind us: Romanticism begets Fascism. Kierkegaard insists that all passions burn to their own destruction. So it is that, like Anakin Skywalker, and plenty of anti-heroes before him for that matter, Scorpio is inclined to become an agent of the very force that it had been born to vanquish. And, true to form, it will not know this, for it has not enjoyed the privilege of our education. When it receives information it grows combative, for it is clever enough to deconstruct any narrative. It is not yet wise enough to see its self in a mirror as it repeats the karmic history of the human race even as it scoffs nervously at the thought that any one could outsmart it. Fate outsmarts it; its adversaries are mere messengers of fate for the tragic anti-hero.

Truly, our privilege is not a privilege but a right, and our right is our power, our power our responsibility. When the Greeks eliminated the “right to fail” they rose above the barbarians. But the Scorpio will only scoff at such sophistication, reminding us that “barbarian” was a Greek invention, as though to make us forget of the horrors that that word had properly signified. The slighted outcast of the Kingdom will retort by drawing our attention to Daemonides and the cruelty of sophistication, as Vonnegut does in his books. Yet when has any one of us seen brutality in the kingdom such as has been the work of a Scorpio? Leo inflicts pain out of its ignorance. Scorpio inflicts pain on purpose. And every Scorpio fears vampires moreso than Zombies, for the weak-minded evil can be controlled, its moral weakness an added convenience. A strong-minded evil is not only a veritable adversary but a Black Mirror that the well-meaning public cannot cloud in all their appraisal of the Scorpion’s “beneficent” agency.

Let’s return to the present day, then.

The Scorpio’s intent is of course to raze the Kingdom to the ground and to establish a wilderness. When the Scorpio man does not wish to work, for all avenues represent the agency of the King, he becomes a radical Marxist, daily reminding his friends that life is a matter of subjective, relative fact, that freedom lies outside the walls of the city, that morality varies from class to class, that nothing can be possessed and nothing is required, and that to subordinate one’s self to servitude is to enslave all of one’s peers by example. His seemingly easygoing spirit draws in the downtrodden, humble souls who find their disillusionment under the supervision of a monarchical and absurdly tyrannical and arbitrary “boss”. Yet even in his sloth the Scorpion plants the seeds of a later hegemony. It is EASY for him to say that the boss’s oppression is necessary; he has never HAD one. He can pretend towards having been oppressed by the system and by his family, for those of his peers who have known such injustice would gladly open their hearts to him. Their affect predates their intellect in so triggering a matter, and it is long before they realise the startling fact that he had only ever been a “victim” of his own frivolous misadventures, and that he was never met with the prolonged cruelty or serious threats that they had to labour through. But by that point he has all ready accused THEM of having been false victims, so what can they say to retort? He has cheated them of their revelation before a jury of their peers, for long before they realized that his victimhood was a show he convinced the hard-nosed realists that victimhood is self-imposed and the bleeding-hearts that HE has been victimized by the people that were in fact his own prey. He might fear reproof eventually, that his prey will catch up with him, but shelter is in the arrogance of the survivor, for he has never known an adversary who is more prone to recover and avenge than himself. The only evil he fears is in the mirror.

What he obscures by brutish and unbelievable dishonesty is the simple fact that pain is not necessary. His own pain was not NECESSARY, except towards the ends of his own survival. On the WHOLE, his entire condition was a tragic error on the part of the King, so it was never justified. But having established himself as his only end he saw pain as a virtue, and so it would be a blessing to those that he would have to hurt in order to perpetuate the only value he had: himself.

Underneath the lie is the truth that he should have admitted to begin with: that it was IGNORANCE that created pain. That it was PRIVILEGE, that it was PREFERENCE, and that it was COMPLACENCY that all conspired to oppress. That we are not all victims in this life whose goal is to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. (As Watts reminds us, this is traditionally an expression for the impossible and idiotically futile.) A victim by necessity requires an oppressor, and it is either the Ignorance or the AMBIVALENCE of the parasite that makes possible the pain of the host. When the Scorpion dismisses the sufferings of his friends, humiliating them by praising their bullies, he obscures this fact. He himself becomes-bully, and then by playing the role of a victim he obscures the fact of bullying once more. Finally the true victims recognize him for a fake, once they have moved past the shock and disbelief that any “person” could be so cruel as to use them in their innocence. Until then they cannot be brought to believe it, even as they criticize him daily for his villainy and he rages against them for their own “oppression” of his appetites. Yet his appetites are all ways parasitic. He depends entirely upon the kindness of jaded and broken people who can, at least for some short time, be made to feel, against all Reason, that he is every bit as jaded and broken as they are. He can never reciprocate their kindness, and so he pretends towards an injustice in the relationship, early on, and holds them in his illusory debt until he takes from them, by force of cunning, and often by force of law or plain physical aggression, more than they can afford. THEIR lives become secondary at that point, even in their own EXPERIENCE, to HIS. And at that point his existence is seen to be an error, his birth the mistake of the King but his survival the mistake of his own. And yet by then it becomes seemingly too late to stop him, for he has all ready set up a network of his peers who would gladly act as jury in a Kangaroo Court, believing fervently that their proprietor is innocent and that his adversary is guilty.

So it is that when the Scorpio man FINALLY gets a job it is not long before he turns from Marxism to the opposite extreme: Fascism. The spirit of vengeance permeates this transformation as much as any other, poisoning his every word. If HE, the central purpose of existence, must be made to suffer in servitude (though of course by his own device and for his own purposes, for he was never in fact a victim and suffered little in the way of “coercion”, save for negligible peer pressure) then so must ALL men. The very friend he had had who had to answer back then to a “boss” must NOW answer to the SCORPIO. For if the “boss” was necessary, is not the pressure of one’s peers?

Of course, I was that friend. It evidences my point that I refer to myself so late and so secondarily in this piece, as though my only function was to be the friend and tool of a narcissistic manipulator. As much as it pains me to admit, I become more relieved by the moment. If any doubt is cast upon my own victimhood it is only because the account its self comes from such a position of renewed strength now that any thought of my becoming a “victim” again would be ridiculous. And so one might wonder if I was ever a victim to begin with.

There are several ways to identify one’s own victimhood. One may never prove it effectively to others, at least not until one is in good company again, and victimhood inevitably perpetuates its self by drawing the victim away from good company by every deceptive device available. Yet once one knows that one has been abused, one must swiftly recognize this: that one has not the right to fail. All counselors, professional and unprofessional, who will shelter the victim’s ego but prevent its healing by its own empowerment are part of the oppression. The truth is that one does not get to choose misery. If one chooses to remain a victim the abuse will inevitably perpetuate its self. As Marion Woodman attests: the feminine can be every bit as cruel as the masculine. To do nothing in the face of danger to one’s self is to do nothing in the face of danger to others. One’s self is an end in and of its self, and as a part of the Whole, the primordial Unity, it may be the force that saves and heals an Other. It is not that the Self is a means towards the Other’s ends, but rather that when the Self has been actualized most beautifully then it merges with the Other.

The second step is to admit that pain is not necessary. Nature does not hate us. All of our suffering comes from expulsion from the human community which is our birthright. This includes the Scorpio’s suffering most notably. The Scorpio becomes the very oppressor that he had set out to destroy. He has not brought Justice to the Kingdom. He has become-the-tyrant, and unlike the Old King the New King rules by vindictiveness and a surpassing cruelty. The Old King banishes his own children to the wasteland. But the New King reduces the entire KINGDOM to a wasteland, and HE becomes the predator at the top of the food chain.

The third step is a simple test of character. We all co-exist by generosity. Generosity is not peculiar to the King. It is the network that we have all ways used to survive even under his arbitrary tyranny. The fact that this virtue cannot be stolen from us, but only repressed by the King’s privilege, (a fact subtly overlooked in the Romanticism of the Scorpio’s Tale) makes it possible to render the egoism of the monarch a sort of joke. The jesters in Shakespeare’s plays love to joke about the mortality of the King who is allowed a short time to “monarchise, be feared and kill with looks”. The ignorant and negligent tyrant can be made a secret joke by the people so long as the people are unified, even if their unity is non-violent. In FACT, it is the very non-violence of their union that prevents them from falling prey to the radicalism of the Scorpio. Why appoint a beneficent dictator when your neighbor can simply “hook a brother up” (provide)? Was it not all ways THIS generosity that the Scorpion had used to navigate his way around the city, all the way to the top of the palace where his rival slept?

The third test is to ask one’s self: have I given all I could? If I have housed a thief, if I have healed a traitor, if I have funded a swindler or promoted an invader, then I am innocent. It is HE that used his Will to render evil in the midst of my goodness. I can never be blamed for being so “stupid” as to be ungenerous, for that is to suggest that it had been INEVITABLE that my “friend” would betray me and use me. To say that is to preclude the possibility that the Scorpio would have chosen Goodness over Evil. It would be to dispossess him of that RESPONSIBILITY for his actions. If *I* am to be blamed, HE cannot be. I can only be held responsible for the fact that I WAS generous, and that such generosity was blameless, for if I should withhold resources from my peers I would be the evil. The evil Scorpio all ways maintains a gap between what he CAN do and what he WILL do, for it is only so that he can avoid mersion with the human community. What he reserves for himself he does to serve as a reminder of his own autocracy, not simply his autonomy. However noble the cause, if he must be coerced into it, he will refuse, even if he does not hesitate to use such coercion towards his own perpetuation-as-parasite. So long as he has your next meal under lock and key, he can persuade you to do “this for me”. He can even convince you that you owe it to him. Yet most of what he has to give was either stolen or given with a grace that he does not possess.

Generosity is the arbiter. Without it good and evil are reduced to equals, and again the veil of tyrannical ignorance is cast over the eyes, for we then forget the fact that pain was the work of evil. So long as I know that I’ve given all I could to my treacherous friend, I know that he was treacherous. And I require no vindication from my peers in this matter; they are all ready turned towards the devices of treachery. He will tell me now that if they are all ready turned then I’ve all ready lost. But in fact I’ve won. For beyond this tragic kingdom is an other that rests on a higher plane. There my new friends wait for me. There they can help, because they care. They know their privilege to be a right that I reserve. They have only to see the TRUE me, the bruised child that the Scorpio rejects as weak even as he exploits that weakness. He does not recognize the “weakness”, by avenue of which I provide for him, as strength. And so if I can take this journey into the deep indigo Heavens, if this path is available to me and closed to my traitor, then the less time that I have to spend professing my pain and position to a crowd of dishonorable thieves, the better off I am. If they are all ready turned-to-Evil, then I owe them no account and no warrant, for it was only for their sake, out of generosity towards their character, that I would have ever spoken. If they cannot reciprocate such generosity, I am absolved of all my karmic debt.

Dm.A.A.

Public Letter to Kresten X. Taylor:

I know you too well. I expected a big slab of dried bull shit and I got it. Thankfully I have too much on my mind to read it, and your writing bores me any way. So let’s just skim the surface, for I know that’s all that you would do at any rate, and while you as usual are settling for the lowest possible path I shall not feel inclined to work too hard to compensate. For once.

A thief in fact seldom asks for any thing. Pickpockets go unseen, robbers break and enter, etc. You praised the concept of a con artist, and that’s what you are. Don’t think you can fool me. As Camus said: charm is being able to get what you want without asking. I don’t give a fuck about how you got my belongings. You gave away my sweater to Alex Riccio. I literally saw this fucking kid wearing my sweater at a McDonald’s one night.

IMAGINE that, John Lennon.

I glimpsed [the word] “Marxism” here so as usual I guess you’re making a “statement”. Well here’s a statement for you, wise-guy: it makes more sense than any thing that I would have wound up a Marxist in your midst for there were never any boundaries with you. All of the PROBLEMS of Marxism that surround parasitism I’ve experienced with you. All the boundary dissolution and violation was there as well. And I only maintained my position as an honest Marxist by expecting nothing more than what I need[ed] and giving to the greatest extent.

I never held out on you. So you wound up with my belongings in your possession. But they were never yours to give, sell, lose, damage, or keep. Under every ethos we have discussed up until this point (and you’ve exhausted your time for new arguments, which was limited by my rather SAINTLY patience) you have failed. Under Marxism I deserve them because I need them, and I should feel at liberty to enter your place of residence and simply take them. Under capitalism they are mine, you have them, and that means that you have to give them back. I can’t break into your home, I’m not going to stalk you, and your “friends” have not been very good interventionists.

So I’m giving you an ultimatum. It shall be generous.

I want to see my old Casio in working condition on my doorstep by the end of the year. That is EXCEPTIONALLY generous. Don’t push it.

I don’t remember how they wound up there. But you agreed to borrow them. So they are your responsibility. Beyond that let me remind you that I was working at one point in your best interest and then in the interest of Alanna, whom you had PURPORTED (albeit falsely) to love.

Don’t bullshit me Taylor. You don’t like it. I don’t like it. Be a man for once. Pull through.

And I’ll be enquiring with Alanna about the Tarot cards. And I’d stay away from Anthony were I you. I’m not sure how you two would CLICK nowadays.

DM.A.A.

P.S. You don't come off as a convincing stand-in conscience. I have too much self-value to be fooled by that. And I KNOW that you don't have the kind of self-respect to say the same of me. It only PAINS me that I must remain your stand-in conscience. I wish you'd grow up and face the facts for once. Dm.

Revenge of the Revenge: Episode One.

Link to Original Document:

http://www.craveonline.com/mandatory/1059278-the-worst-quality-of-each-zodiac-sign

[My] Reply to Original Poster:

Wow. Just from the opening paragraph I perceive a total superiority/inferiority complex. Any one who HAS to condescend upon EVERY one, to the point that those people do not even VALUE themselves as people, does not just have an issue seeing boundaries but must totally lack self-worth. I won't pretend that I'm writing this for your benefit. It probably IS out of pity, but I won't be sentimental about it; reductionists have this annoying habit of "seeing through" basic kindness, even if it's a convenience. I'll just be blunt yet subtle. You must think little of yourself, for you are certainly one of the above (my guess is Leo, but I do not really care.). Yet it must be a comfort to find just as much fault with EVERY one, pretending that you're helping them by bullying them into the same state of desperation as YOU find your self in daily. It must give you that manic-depressive rush of superiority that is fleeting but what all people with weak consciences live for. Well: let me burst that bubble for you. You are not enlightening the world against inflation. You are simply promoting your own and infringing upon others' space. There is no intrinsic need for [this sort of] negativity; hatred does not balance, but it obstructs. Astrology, as is the case with all spiritual disciplines, is aimed at understanding the Soul. The ego sees ego everywhere, but the Soul remains pure. People have a birth-right to understand themselves without being infringed upon by hostile and intrusive narcissism. They don't HAVE to read your work, admittedly, but it is caring and empathy that brings even the most deluded souls to forums such as these. People all so have the right and even obligation to understand one an other. You do nothing but obstruct this with your fault-finding. You offer no solution, only hatred. You don't nurture the best to defeat the worst, nor do you understand the worst well enough to prune it. It's all just "good fun" to you. But what is it REALLY? Why would you spend the time to write this? Just for kicks? The cause is all ways deeper. It is insecurity. You can't handle yourself and other people; it is a facade. You see in them the disappointment of your preferences and your expectations. You leave them no room for their OWN preferences and their OWN expectations. And that is because you've missed the entire spiritual purpose underlying Astrology: to see the Soul in people and to love it. By inviting people to hate what they don't understand you cloud both love and understanding. And while that may appear "okay", it's a child's view of the adult life. It gets old after third grade, honestly. Dm.A.A.

[My] Reply to Commenter:

Okay, so aside from my applying all of my above comments to your reply, what the hell do you mean by "manipulative"? You fail even to address the traits of Scorpio as being manipulative, even though they logistically tend to work their way into positions of political power, whereas Pisceans and Cancers tend to be artists and entrepreneurs mostly. This bothers me. I've dealt with some manipulative people, but had it not been by the admission of a close few I would never have even known what that word meant. USUALLY I see the best in every one, and I hold them to their own standards rather than mine, unless I feel violated. So exactly how is that behaviour "manipulative"? It troubles me. It seems as though you seem to be UNCONSCIOUS of these moral factors and so any appeal to the deeper emotions is an inconvenience to you. It's all most as though one's only right in life is to screw every one else and any one who makes you feel otherwise is out to get YOU. So who is "playing the victim" here? And who is ACTUALLY the victim? You literally call some one manipulative and blame that person for playing the victim all in one breath. So effectively you blame YOUR victims and then add insult to injury by accusing them of LYING. Of course! No one could be hurt by YOU. Every one is supposed to have the thick skin that YOU do. As though that thick skin weren't won by bullying others. Here's a tip: if some one breaks down crying in front of you, you DON'T have the right to question that person's motives. It is too great a risk to gamble on some one else's well-being. If that person is trying to "get her way", or "get his way", that's his or her RIGHT, because the fundamental principle is to treat others the way THEY want to be treated, not the way YOU want to be treated, and only to abstain if they do not reciprocate. One really has no reason to do less, so if some one is HURT by you and makes you feel BAD about it, grow up and admit you did some thing WRONG. You MESSED UP. It's okay. We forgive you. But do NOT do it again. Own up to it. Jesus. This is grade-school stuff. You don't unlearn arithmetic when you study calculus. why would you unlearn kindness with experience? Get with the program. Astrology predicts a time of mutual compassion after this Kali Yuga bullshit's over. Pick a side: are you going to be a victim-blaming asshole, or a compassionate and conscientious person? You only empower fakes by condemning victims, for fakes will all ways treat their OWN victims mercilessly and yet tug the heart-strings of those victims with their own histrionic tendencies. By YOUR standards, we should all ways blame those sensitive souls who tend to become victims for their kindness rather than modeling ourselves after them. Well; you're wrong. The only reason you find so much fault with people is that you hold all these people to your standards but do not reciprocate. If some one is hurt by you, you pretend he or she's "playing"; it's not REAL what he or she is going through to you, because it is "not you". That's fucked. Each sign brings some thing beautiful to learn from. I would not be INTO this stuff were it not for the fact that it truly lifts the veil of ignorance. I could find fault all day if I still wore that damned veil. It's tough enough trying to see the best in people without having to deal with people who've given up. It's like you don't think it's a problem that society is run by sociopaths and you don't think that there is a place for people to be taken care of and to profess their rights, as though all kindness were a sort of mind-game and not the fabric that holds people together. Last note: don't be an emotivist. You might feel upset by people, and you have the right to say so, but that right goes BOTH ways. You cannot dismiss people based just on your own feelings, unless you KNOW they're encroaching on your boundaries and your values. It helps to HAVE values in the first place, rather than just preferences for how the world should be and bitterness that it's not so. If you can't TELL the difference between a victim and a manipulative bully, stay out of it. You DON'T want to be mistaken for the latter, or worse found out to be so. Life is tough enough, so why not admit it? Having a thick skin is just an other layer of bullshit. (don't read too much into that metaphor.) Rather than having your own preferences and getting mad at people for how THEY choose to be, observe their RIGHT to be that way, and do the right thing: honor that right as you honor yourself. And it all starts by respecting your own boundaries. Dm. 

Dm.A.A.

A Tale of Clandestiny:

A Tale of Clandestiny:

One grows not by pruning but by watering. So it follows that any one who challenges me to shed my values absolves herself in like kind of any right to judge of me. If she initiates the process of alchemical transmutation in me she is not at liberty to stopper it, for she does not possess the power to justify such a hypocrisy. That power all ways rests with my consent and the consent of the Spirit that informs us both.

The bullying skeptics laugh at my fortitude, suggesting that the privilege of experience entitles her to my undivided attention. They laugh that I should “probably” (with [their] trademark ambiguity and avoidance) heed her warnings, subordinate my will to her advice, and shed my own conscience, all in one motion.

Yet values are not so easily eroded. A tree does not shed its core, in most cases, maintaining its shell. It simply puts on more and more rings. It does not un-root its self, even as it grows higher and higher in its pursuits. Its seasonal changes are purely superficial.

So it is that we mature not by shedding our dearest values and replacing then with new ones. Nay: such a “transformation” would be an exchange of masks at most. The Soul is incorrigible, even if it is yielding. So it is that we prevent the worst of miseries: that a boy privileged by experience begins to fancy himself a “man” and therego betrays the fight against privilege initiated by his less fortunate or ruthless peers.

Nichole was wise but not just. So long I’ve accommodated her unsettling statements that she holds no moral sway over me. She is still rooted in the passions to the point that they might poison her judgment. Perhaps she attracts the amoral to her as insects are attracted to honey. And she too is an insect: the Queen Bee whose honey nourishes them, but whose venom keeps them at bay.

She is not wary of the world; she is either still a child within it, crawling up as others, by her own admission, observe her ascent patiently from on-high. Perhaps she is WEARY of the world, but that is just exhaustion from the steep climb that we must all, over several lifetimes, brave.

So who is she then to judge of me?

When Kresten betrayed me for Alanna, I did not “honor” what they would have liked to call their “relationship”. Theirs was the NEGATION of a relationship, borne from the annihilation of seasoned loyalty. It was cursed from the very start.

Nor was it that having-known-Alanna-first had been of any service to me in preserving my relationship with her. Once it had been spoiled by Kresten, it was never again the same.

So it is that where **** and +++++++ are concerned I do not flinch. I owe no loyalty to ****, and he is probably every bit as amoral and conceited as was (and [daemonstrably] is)

Kresten. I do not feel a debt to their privilege of having-known-each-other[-]first; if Kresten’s self-entitlement is so deep as to warrant TREACHERY, mine is hardly so severe, for I owe no loyalty to be betrayed. And I CERTAINLY do not honor the relationship for its own sake. That would be commitment of the Naturalist Fallacy, and such Fascistic romanticism would vindicate Kresten’s seduction of Alanna by its having-been-done alone. NO one is entitled to such depravity. Not on my watch, and it is my affect alone that I require as warrant. If they wish to defend their own emotions, they have to contend with mine, for I remain a victim of my own kindness, doomed to watch them destroy one an other. And to think that Alanna did not think I was akin to God! Imagine God watching his children wage war just out of ignorant self-preservation alone!

I bring no war here. I bring only love. If Nichole’s naiive theory were true, and all relationships that are meant to be SHALL be, and all relationships that ARE are MEANT to be, then it would make no difference for her to make money off of natal readings for the unrequited lovers. If she admits to qualms and hesitations, she all so admits to such readings, deviant conventionally but not necessarily (as she believes them to be) deviant spiritually, having the potential for DESTRUCTION. And where destruction can happen so can creation in its place. So how come she “knows” that the WILL, unregulated by the Spirit, did not bring **** and +++++++ together, as it had for Alanna and Kresten? It is not arrogant of me to assert the Truth: that I had loved Alanna, that I had served her more loyally than Kresten had ever served ANY one, even his self, and that my love for +++++++ now SURPASSES even THAT love that I’d had for Alanna. Why should I sell my self short? I would be oppressing my self and cheating a fine woman of an opportunity.

So if what exists might have been built by Will alone, and not by Fate, and this is so ubiquitous that Nichole would so readily shy away from the Will a priori, then why not own my OWN Will in carrying out what I posit to be the Will of the Spirit? If I am FATED to be with +++++++, all that remains is that I destroy what fateless man created and build what God intends. I will not have His will be thwarted again. I serve Him, not vainly, and so it shall not be in vain that he sends me messages, elating me with each step that I take towards +++++++.

It is unfortunate if Nichole lost her husband to an affair. I now see the root of those troubling quivers in her voice that a smile cannot hide each time that she laces her privileged reflections on love and romance with pleasure and perhaps vengeance.

One thing is certain: with Scorpios the diplomatic laws of Libra hold no sway, unless the Scorpio allows its self to be disarmed by its disarming Venutian neighbour. Certainly Libra will not disarm ME, the Piscean whose Love is an exaltation and an IMPROVEMENT upon the vanity of Venus.

The portents are in accord: I shall no longer be-Alone. If it was a Scorpion that put me here, that Grey Lizard Kresten Taylor, then it shall be a Scorpion, of an Eagle-s Dignity, that redeems me of my solitude and redeems Scorpio of my contempt. No other force is strong enough to move me now. And only that force moves me, daily towards its loving grasp.

Dm.A.A.

A Tale of Redemption:

All right. So let’s hammer one thing out now:
You are in no position to judge me.
As long as you have known me I have only ever done what I considered to be right. It’s no concern of mine what YOU consider to be right. I’ve spent an entire lifetime developing my values and the plans I need to actualize them. You never will find time enough to sway me from this course. You are but one man, out of all the people I’ve encountered.
When you meet me, you do not deal with one man, but with all of those people. It’s not as though I preclude the possibility of your own devotion to the people you have known. But neither do I see reason to surrender my own autonomy and integrity to someone who is totally a self-professed degenerate. You act first and rationalize later, and it is all ways done by blaming people for some thing wherein they were never in the WRONG to begin with. You have, in your profound arrogance, finally found a way to be at once infallible and all-powerful: moral relativism. Now NO one can judge of YOUR actions, even if you yourself feel them to be self-interested. Yet FAR from accommodating the autonomy of your peers in an easygoing manner you take every Absurd opportunity to condemn people for not living up to your standards. As though you’d ever had the ETHOS to judge of me! You would go so far as to tell me not to go into the WATER at the OCEAN. I suppose that you do not remember that I went into the water when you were intoxicated, the same day you’d crashed your car on meth, to keep you from DROWNING yourself. And it was no less of a spontaneous act. It was simply an act that was harmless and considerate, in both cases. It was no MORE spontaneous, either, than the conditions of my first meeting Alanna. And each set of circumstances was produced in total independence, and often defiance, of social expectations. I just simply never NEEDED the points of view of my peers as a point of reference; my own values were at once much too sophisticated and all so much too simple to require looking over my own shoulder. I was plainly a Shaman. And I’ve been consistently harmless.
YOU have NOT been harmless. We’ve all watched you fuck up your life and you had the nerve to TELL us what to DO as though we’d OWED IT TO YOU. The other half of your whole scheme, the first of which is to be totally unaccountable to others, is apparently to have all others be held accountable to you. It is of no concern to YOU whether it was simply RIGHT that I should go into the water, either to save your life or to celebrate mine, or whether or not it was RIGHT that I should be with Alanna. You only ever registered that it was some thing that YOU did not WANT. And far from noting my superiority to you in ethical dominion, over simply my OWN life, you tried to displace your own EGOISM onto me. I was made to feel suspect for my own clarity. And that is unpardonable. I was never self-interested; let’s get it straight that YOU were. So what fault you might find with me is your own. It is nothing but a function of your own self-interest, by your own admission. You venerate your own emotive preferences, and every thing that does not fall into the category of “what you want” falls under the category of “what you don’t want”, and far from acknowledging the categories of “right” and “wrong” you simply describe EVERY thing that falls under “what you don’t want” as “what others want”. And since you can’t accommodate all others, you flip out. But you are never in any position to condemn me, for far from acting out of “what I want” I simply do “what is RIGHT”. And I am at LIBERTY to do that without need to answer to your totally illusory authority. You’ve worked it out, in some sort of drug-induced delusion, that every one is out to compete with you, and in this paranoia you demand that they “balance out” their own debauchery by accommodating YOURS, for that seems “fair” (despite its being, were it so as you have suggested, a proliferation of degeneracy on both sides of the proverbial fence.). But all that you PROVE is that at the root of all your condemnation is an attempt to GET AWAY WITH every thing you do, by finding fault with people A PRIORI. You’ll never have the courage I did, either to break away from your peers, however wretched they may be, nor to go to the lengths I went to for a cause or for even a loved one. It was YOU that cheated on Bianca. Not the other way around.
I am not trying to bully you. When I began to write this I wondered why I should think to open it the way that I did. Then I recall your tone in text. And it daunts me that even as a capitalist you could so abuse my personal belongings, to say nothing of my personal connections with others. But then I am reminded that this was all ways how capitalists behaved. They don’t hold themselves accountable to a Higher Purpose or the dream of empathic SOLIDARITY with all beings, as in the Marxist or Buddhist vision. They simply do whatever the FUCK they can get away with, and they try to hold you in their DEBT irrespective of how well-intentioned, self-sacrificing, and COURAGEOUS are their victims.

Dm.

A Tale of Devotion:

It was obvious that Rhiannon cared more for Phoenix than for Ketchup. The first hint was that when Phoenix asked if Rhiannon loved Ketchup she did not hesitate to negate. Yet when asked if she could ever love Phoenix her response was more vague. Love was not a word that she felt comfortable employing in that instance. So it was to Phoenix’s intuition and Gnosis that had she felt comfortable using it then she would have said: I love you, and it would have carried all the weight that she was afraid to take on at that moment.

There were really two moments from that telephone conversation that stuck in Phoenix’s mind. The first was when in he identified her controlled pause on the phone as an opportunity for manipulation. She admitted to that tendency with in her self – that that was the motive for her pauses – so immediately that it not only corroborated Phoenix’s Gnosis but touched him. He would know that he could trust her through out the course of that conversation, for if she had lied through out its course then she would have all so lied about lying. Telling the ‘truth’ by de-fault.

The second instance that he could re-call there fore was when she admitted to caring for him deeply, ‘very much so’. A paranoiac would have suspected one reason that these two events stuck out in his memory in conjunction: The latter was a manifestation of which the former was the confession; she was manipulating him at the moment that she said that. Yet what motive could she have? She knew that he loved her but she unabashedly and with out defense asked him for advice: what to do about the Ketchup situation? This was not a practical or conniving person. She trusted Phoenix de-spite his due cause to be biased. Would [what] could he tell her about him? What WOULD he tell her that she could use?

In the same way that Phoenix could contrast his situation to that of Ketchup on the issue of ‘love’ he could contrast the two on the issue of Care. Really what vanquished his paranoia was the sense of bolstered immediacy with which Rhiannon made clear her sincerity. Per haps she had admitted to caring for Ketchup, and in a fit of jealousy and envy he asked if she cared for him as well. May be in fact he had asked her to tell him how she felt about him. At any rate, the exuberant, all most practical sincerity of her response, one that was only ‘practical’ because it seemed in no way falsely adorned but all most essential in and of its self to her at that moment, filled his heart with a joy more unique than the words he could use to describe it, because it felt unprompted and spontaneous. He KNEW that there was Cosmic Justice in the Universe they shared. She cared for him more than she could ever care for Ketchup, and if one could speak causally it was because, as they had both intuited by their respective Gnoses, he cared for her more than Ketchup ever could. And Phoenix had predicted this.

Phoenix wanted to know if he was permitted, either de facto or de jure, to sleep on the lucrative couches on the first floor of the University Library. Yet by the time that it occurred to him to ask the prospect seemed out of season.

He had texted Rhiannon a barrage of desperately well-meaning quotes and anecdotes pertaining to depression. At one point he referenced Hinduism by saying “Break the back of the ego.” It was immediately there after that he looked up to see the sense of division betwixt his self and the young couple sitting near by in the Library, dissolved. He became aware of how the space between his self and the girl’s young, lucrative body was unitive. He craved only to insert his member into her mouth. Yet then his ego kicked in. Hinduism never justified rape. That would be if any thing too extreme. But so would interrupting a perfectly decent conversation, what ever Phenomenal Antipathy he might have had towards the young man, who had become a de facto scape-goat for his lingering jealousy towards Ketchup.

What Hinduism DID of course justify was interrupting a bad conversation. Or entering into a good one. It would have been extreme to wave his hips before this young thing, saying “Hey girl. Ditch the dweeb.” It would NOT have been so extreme to simply approach her and say “Hey girl.”

He realized this as the young man made his exit with a noteworthy absence of pomp or intimacy. They were not dating. Phoenix realized it. He had been flirting with her.

Phoenix contemplated for the next hour approaching her. Yet he could not re-live his spiritual ecstasy. He could easily have approached, asking “is it okay if I lie down on this couch? Do they care?” Yet the excuse to talk to her would all ready have been too contrived. By the time that it had taken him to realize this she might all ready have noticed his eyes upon her one too many times. He noted her ear-phones, and he could not help feeling discouraged by the thought of interrupting her work and music. By simply formalizing this progression of “events” in his head Phoenix had successfully severed ties with the naked opportunity.

Yet why would he have taken it? He would not have allowed it to lead to any thing. He loved Rhiannon, even if she could not promise love in words or actions. This girl would merely have been an out let for the Will to Power: The energy that he would have invested in her he would have gotten back from her in interest. It would have kept him awake through the night. And the company of her could only have informed him, for Rhiannon’s sake, about the style of life that his would-be lover was immersed in. And of any thing he would have simply gotten practice talking to a girl who went to this University. It was not Biology that was responsible for this temptation. It was the memory of Rhiannon, and every thing that this girl did that was reminiscent of Rhiannon. Even the entire academic frame of reference that would have coloured and justified the approach, had he buckled to temptation or gathered the nerve, would have only been a product of the environment. And this environment, whose exquisite character had made possible his meeting with Rhiannon, now only served to remind him of her.

Dm.A.A.

                                              

Public Letter to A.S.F.:

This may very well be the last time that I try to contact you, so pay attention.

I told you specifically last time not to reply to me. You did so any way. This overstepped my boundaries. It was totally unjustified.

I don't know what happened to the naiive idealist that I cared about. But then I am reminded of Alexandra and how she saw so much evil in you. She must have been right. Don't worry. I still agree with you: she is a bitch. But it takes one to know one. Both your stories check out against one an other. You were both passive-aggressive, self-entitled people but in ways that could not co-exist.

What bothers me is how you treat me. You treat me unfairly. And I would expect you to ask "Why?" with some concern for this fact rather than defending your self. You have nothing to defend your self from. Honestly, self-defense is a right I don't ascribe to you.

I know this. Because I'm the one who's been mistreated.

Here's my question: why do you take out your own frustrations with this Kresten character on me? I told you well enough to leave him be, and that I wanted nothing to do with him. Yet I had been generous enough to allow you my perspective. It was objective enough that it needed not be expressed, but I thought I had nothing to lose by accommodating you. I was wrong. You violated my boundaries.

So i repeat: why take it out on me? You were so hostile towards me as to blame me for my views on homosexuality, which were fairly unemotive and practical. So how could you find it in your heart to distance me for months after the fact, forgetting in that time that I was trying to get back in touch then with Alanna, and that you were less entitled to her company than I, your having called her a "bitch" based on gossip wherein you had no objective stance, for I'd not told you what had happened? And how could you turn to the oppressor in the circumstance for his opinion and hope to use it as a substitute? Obviously, you knew enough to see who'd taken advantage of whom. What more did you feel you needed? In LIGHT of all that, was my position on emotive sexuality not justified, or at least understandable? How could you condemn me for my hatred? After all, I was generous enough then to accommodate even my own OPPRESSOR'S stance. Yet far from severring all ties with KRESTEN for holding these views, you still spent TIME with him, and you failed even to REPORT to me that he was STILL in contact with Alanna!

So exactly what snuck into your heart like a worm that told you Kresten's homophobia was justified but not mine? Are you so prone to this myth now of the ALPHA-MALE that not only his sexual appetitites but his sexual OPINIONS he is entitled to? Are you so fucking AUTHORITARIAN (to put it gently) that you would condemn me for holding a view that only HE was WORTHY of holding?

I'm GUESSING that you asked HIM about how he felt about homosexuals, right? And that he cited all the same statistics that he showed to me and Rob. That you had to confront the bare facts of this terrible perversion and the TRUTH would have been shocking. Why then though did you not condemn Kresten for violating his own principles by seeking after some one lustfully? Has any homosexual you know ever come between you and some one that you were entitled to?

Hm. But that is but the beginning. For I've noticed that I have been very soft on you. I only required that you follow through with every thing you cared about. But let me guess: You do not like to be told what to think. You do not like to be held accountable to an other's needs. You feel as though you are being extorted. You suspect the need to DISTANCE your self from this person. Otherwise who KNOWS what vengeance he will breed, lying in wait for some one to upset his LUDICROUS and ARBITRARY standards just so that he can feel JUSTIFIED in his predation upon others?

My mistake, I guess. I figured it was not only just but PREFERRED that you be treated that way. I honored both Golden Rule and Silver Rule in that respect: Golden because that was how I'd been treated, Silver because that's what OBVIOUSLY you'd preferred. For how ELSE did Kresten treat you? I would IMAGINE that he treated you in quite the same way he had all ways treated me.

His violation was of naught but the same standards that he had placed upon me. So how can you defend him, if he's violated them? And why would YOU then violate them, even as you now defend HIM?

I suppose you must just not HAVE any values. That was honestly my just conclusion.

You know: I have all ways wondered how it is that you put up with Kresten. You are so soft, really. So touchy when people judge you. So opposed towards any sort of moral preaching. So why would you even try to spend TIME with some one as self-righteous and domineering as Kresten Taylor?

And then I thought (as I can do so with relatively less pain) of the night that he Alanna and I hung out at my home. And every stance he took he took against me. Every chance he took and it incensed me. Every glance he took he made me look inferior. Every chance he took he took to look superior.

And if my head had not been spinning

to believe that he was winning

in a game I had not known that we were playing

I would have found it much less dismaying

and I would have burst into outrage

for he had lied to me.

And now he stood upon that same damn stage

lying to my bride-to-be.

But I know you, Andrew.

You are much too smart to be fooled by a person who changes faces depending on the climate.

There's a hierarchy made of social graces,

but you'd never climb it.

It could not have been in private

that he saw a sucker full of joy

and trying to create a world

that he sought to destroy.

To fuck over and toy with

And to hold to his own

standards. (Mine and his)

but just to justify

his own being-a

bastard.

I doubt he'd mastered YOU,

Andrew. Who knew

from years of education.

The kind of sick plots that rot

within a cynical

imagination.

And the clinical deception

of this Kresten. Just supposing

as the story goes that he had never

been disposed to practice what he preached

but used it to catch us and each

of us he told a different tale

so that he'd get what he needed and to prevail.

I doubt that he saw me well-meaning

but full of a righteous valour

and decided to be so demeaning

just so as to side-step me

no. What kind of a man can find it

in his power. How can some one have been

such a coward as to operate so

gracelessly?

But let's be blunt.

he was a cunt.

Who Satan sent to punish

Saints. Who would compete

Against me without my consent

For some one that I would acquaint.

Yeah. I’m guessing that he never held you to the standards that he held ME to. There is no way that I was actually guilty of every thing he had accused me of being. Just little by little over all the years I had developed this spot of my psyche dedicated to “The Needs and Views of Kresten”. I even began to feel that my own life was simply a supporting role in his; so proud was I of such a steadfast love in so grand a friend. For I KNEW that he’d live up to every value and I only sought not to offend him even if I knew that he would misconstrue what I would do. Knowing he only cared about the values selflessly. And about me and you.

I know he could not have seen through to me without seeing just how well-meaning I was. Even when he wanted nothing to do with me it was because he knew that we were starting to catch onto his damn ruse. So he could only get out easy if he’d be the first one to refuse.

Why did I all ways have to go where HE wanted to go? Because he had the car? That didn’t matter to me. How was it I was in his debt for those times that I did not even ENJOY, much less employ?

Why did HE have to be the leader of a two-man band? Why was MY suffering not real, but his was?

And I realize he lied. There is no WAY he saw a DROP of evil within me.

Even as I write this I am transmuted in my self-image from the conniving worm I have been made to feel my self to be. For I could only justify Kresten’s existence by imagining him to be such a worm, striving towards the same sanctity that I am striving for presently.

Fuck that. I’m no worm. I am a bear. He is the tapeworm in my stomach. I’m the host. He is the parasite.

But I can’t shed my passive aggressive sarcasm quite yet.

Because I might be wrong.

It might be that he treated you as badly.

But you took it out on me because he’s tougher than you. And you thought that I could handle it.

Or may be you are just a sociopath.

At any rate, if any of this is news to you, I assure you it’s not all.

I just figured that YOU would not fall for the villainy of GOSSIP.

Just know this: I have been blessed with being Kresten’s personal slave, constantly in debt to him for his generosity for it is he who knows how to drive, how to save money, and how to fuck.

But it’s an HONOR. You know why?

Because he chose me to REWARD me for how loving and self-sacrificing I was. Knowing that I’d never be able to convince YOU of any of this. If I tried to treat his friends the way that I’d been treated, I could not pretend that I would ever see his ass defeated. For you’d never handle the same language. The same form. That within his languishing companionship I’d learned to be the norm.

Oh, and he was still bitter about Alexandra. As though that bitch had not fucked me up enough without her fucking psychotic unrequited lovers acting vengeful all around me.

I hope it flatters you to know that you were never quite so virtuous for him to exploit. Only stupid enough for him to flatter. And to “defend” from your own damned decay into depression. I all ways wondered why you’d never come to ME, my having conquered it since before yours EVEN BEGAN.

But then I am reminded of how he had been there, plotting for your own unhappiness, each time I told you to just suck it up and be a man.

What’s fucked up is you TOO held me to such a standard. But not one of you followed that masculine path, nor that stoic plan.

So you can see why I had to be rid of both of you.

Don’t bother to reply; I shall not read it.

For ONCE I need to be heeded.

Without Truth being so contradicted

That it’s reduced to opinion.

By gossips who walk into other’s topics

Unrestricted. And are then seduced

Into dominion.

Dm.A.A.