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.