Time of the Sea Goat

Dick Nixon -- A Fallen Cap

It is only weeks away from 2009 and suddenly, we, in the western hemisphere, are in the midst of the winter solstice and I, for one, am really feeling it. Outside it is dark and cold and Christmas music is blaring in every retail outlet that I wander into. Every year this sudden “winterization” and Yuletide megabomb happens up here in Vermont and it all seemingly takes place right out of nowhere. The snows fall and holiday traffic locks everything up and it all becomes tedious bedlam. Indeed, Hanukah and Christmas Eve (Eid has already ended) are approaching and with these cultural milestones our direct movement towards shorter and darker days will finally end, but the movement toward the gradual increase in daylight hours and sunshine seems deathly slow going at this point.

These sensations and perceptions are all part and parcel of “the slowest time of year.” As the lights dim, we are all forced to take stock of our prior year if not “our entire lives” and to feel that it was all worth it (or not!). As the freneticism of the holiday season blazes on, it is often impossible to slow everything down and to simply accept where we all are positioned. The snow keeps falling and the holidays can make us feel that we are not “where we wanted to be.” I am here, but I really wanted to be there! And of course there is no escape to “there” – whatever “there” may represent to you personally. This is the difficult feeling of the holidays.

This very deep feeling of taking stock of your life and your place within it is beautifully aligned within the sign of Capricorn that begins during the winter solstice. Even though I am only a Capricorn rising, I believe that I understand a bit about this sun sign, especially because many of my friends are double Caps. These folks are a force to contend with to be sure. They are powerful and ever moving toward big goals, yet they are careful in existing in the definite present as they slowly aim quite high in their life pursuits.

The saturnine quality of the Capricorn is undeniable. There is a stark realism to the Capricorn native and even though this realism may result in the ultimate kill joy effect, it is very much a permanent state of affairs with Capricorn. The sober light of day is where the Capricorn native exists best.

As a large peasant family sits around the table during the middle ages in present day Eastern Europe, let’s say on January 1st, the decision must be made as to what animal needs to be killed, so as to have enough food to get through to spring. A wrong choice could very well result in starvation of the family or the destruction of further animal husbandry. This kind of high stakes decision making is what the sea goat excels at. He or she or it knows how to survive and how to plan accordingly.

Here, then, is where the Capricorn resides. The Capricorn native is more able to make this decision than any other sign. They know the right way to turn from within their very bones! And of course Saturn tends to govern bones and the skeleton. The relationship between time and the human skeleton is one of the most undeniable connections that exist on planet earth. Cappie feels the aging process taking place. Gravity slowly pulls everything down. The seriousness of time passing is a wave length that anyone touched by Saturn understands.

The connection, then, between Christ’s birth (though probably not the right birthday – most sources point to him as being Aquarian) and Capricorn is apparent in a little baby sleeping in the hay. Mary and Joseph have no money nor do they have a hotel/motel room and they don’t even have Skype. Yet, they have hope and some wonderful stars glimmering in the sky and they can simply wait it all out. Peace be onto all beings.

An astrologer’s worst feelings of self-doubt and self-loathing tend to accompany a horribly botched natal chart, an incorrectly guessed sun sign (this often happens in a crowded environment i.e. loud bar!) or a transit read incorrectly… and realistically this can happen any old time for astrology is no easy art form to master or even to influence -- it would seem to be pure geometry, astronomy, art and feeling. Proponents of the scientific method need not apply. It is all in the interpretation.

I profess to not being able to even perform transit readings and I am still awaiting the time when I can begin to study angles correctly for I was absolutely terrible at high school geometry and to this day angles seem difficult for me to read or interpret. Several real astrologers have told me that at some point they will help me to begin understanding the angles when I finally commit to it, but at this writing my wife and I are busy moving into our new condominium, so once again, it would appear that learning about angles and transit charts will have to be put off for a while longer. All in good time I say!

For now I am still content reading more about the planets, the houses and about understanding their relationships within particular charts while furthering my sense of even the simple sun signs. As a fledgling astrologer and as an English instructor, I hope to feel content as a grounded observer of planets and elements as they flow through the lives of us complicated humans and to write about these movements, if at all possible. We humans are also always changing. The human life is infinitely complex and to study it takes incredible fortitude. Our natal charts and inner natures are difficult to understand and they are all worthy of several lifetimes of study – too bad we probably only have just one!

In any event, it is worth a try and the story that I have now embarked upon describing in this month’s blog entry is one in which for over fifteen years I misidentified the sun sign of a friend and band mate of mine from the musical group “Blue Harvest”. This misidentification has to do with this month’s sun sign being, of course, Sagittarius. Yes, I realize that Scorpio falls into this month as well – but that was last month’s column…

Before getting into the specifics about the sign of the archer, let me share some of my personal history having to do with playing in a particular band. Blue Harvest was a blues and rock band that was around in the early nineties in Boston consisting of yours truly on guitar, AJ Jackson on bass, numerous drummers including Dean Sommese, Rebecca Harold on keyboards and lead vocal and Jean Hlady on piano and vocal. We tended to play a mixture of blues-based material and often we would churn out some current rock standards.

Not only was Blue Harvest an eclectic mix of folks, it was also a thirsty band and I can remember one gig at Sir Morgan’s Cove in Worcester, MA at which we were paid in drinks alone and if I remember correctly, we “earned” plenty of “money” that night. And though we were perhaps just pikers starting out, we did play with taste and conviction if not with perfect precision as a result of our “pay”. And always we did strive towards making a connection with the audience no matter who they were. Rainy Sunday night shows, however, were especially difficult for “connecting” – probably because there was no one in the tavern! In addition, we would get on stage with no sound check and the inevitable sounds of feedback would ring out from time to time and I remember that the monitors never quite had the right mix in them.

I will always remember when it was time for Jean to sing some songs in our set like “Heat Wave” by Martha Reeves and the Vandellas; Jean would really put out a wonderful spirit involving full voice and jumpy stage energy! In fact, Jean was able to interpret a song that had migrated from decades before into the early nineties because she was able to to summon up that same level of positive energy from within a much different time period with both precision and grace.

The audience would love it.

Jean would later be responsible for writing a character review & analysis of my personality that would allow me to eventually make my way into the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. As a respected librarian in Watertown, Jean was able to mention some of the skill sets that I possessed and that would eventually aid me with negotiating difficult classroom work and student instruction. And until graduate school, I had no idea how much I would need those supposed skill sets!

While I feel that I was close to all the members of Blue Harvest, I always felt a distinct connection with Jean. She was a bit older than I was and though she could mix a mean gin & tonic, she always had her shit together as a mother and as a wife to the Boston-based guitarist and Berklee professor Craig Hlady of the group Holiday Bash. She was always successfully accomplishing any assorted number of tasks. Outside of her many “adult” (I was just a kid during those times, or so it seemed) responsibilities, Jean would still show up at band practice with optimism and energy and I always respected her for that. The five of us would gab incessantly; we’d drink mixed drinks from a thermos and then get down to trying to play the cover tune that we were rehearsing; on occasion we played some of my originals. Again, we did some older R&B, some current POP tunes and many a blues number.

I will always hear in my mind the rehearsing of the song “Sad, Sad, Sad” by the Stones and Jean complaining about the lack of chord changes (the verses were really only F major to C and C sus4). Yeah, it was boring for the pianist to be sure. Suddenly, though, a bridge section cropped up during the song and at least 5 different chord changes suddenly popped out. Jean then complained about the number of chord changes! No matter what was going on in the world – Jean told it like it was. She was a steady Capricorn to be sure! She had that Capricornian sensibility all around her.

After Blue Harvest imploded, I lost contact with Jean, but I remembered that a Capricorn had given me a new solidity and a new lease on life. Jean’s steadiness was moving me forward too.

Fast forward to Montpelier, Vermont, in late October of this year of 2008. I hadn’t seen Jean in over a decade.

Wow! As I walked into Rhapsody, a health-conscientious restaurant in down town Montpelier, I nervously awaited Jean’s arrival… I know that we had both aged and “moved on” … would we still have those great conversational flare ups like we had all those years ago?

Suddenly, Jean was there! Wow! I couldn’t believe it. Jean hadn’t changed much at all and we nervously tried to decide what to eat. My wife, Deborah, was with me and together the three of us stumbled around figuring out what was good on the menu. Abruptly, I started to talk to Jean about what we should drink and then the old dialogue started in again. We had a choice of only beer or sake and then we started to recount the benefits of each kind of liquor – this was classic Blue Harvest dialogue…whose liver would last the longest?

Eventually, we all settled upon a table and pulled up our food trays and sakes. For the first time I really looked at Jean and she looked fine. Her hair was still luxurious and chestnut and she was smiling with a sense of joy. I suddenly felt secure about all of the long years that had gone by. I know that we weren’t the same people, but I knew that we would still be friends without a doubt.

As we sat talking about the obvious updates to our lives, it struck me that Jean was speaking quickly and that I was getting a sense of “burning through ideas and a relentless catch up.” Within my body there was a feeling of freneticism, which I didn’t normally put down as Capricorn energy. Usually as I hang out with a Capricorn person, I usually get a sense of solidness and ground and even a certain kind of slowness. It is a feeling of safety and of “Oh, here we are. All is OK.” Although Capricorn energy can get heavy at times, it is certainly grounding! As a triple air sign, I find it extremely beneficial to spend time with anyone who possesses the qualities of heavy earth for it certainly grounds me to the spot in a beneficial manner. Yet here we were sitting and I was tiring quickly as we shot through pictures and various stories.

I didn’t know anything about astrology in Blue Harvest days and almost as a sudden wish Jean blurted out a story about how she and her husband Craig first dated decades ago on his birthday of Christmas Eve: December 24! OK … so at least he is a Capricorn.

“Jean … when is your birthday?” I asked this last question sheepishly.

“Oh, it’s great because it is in the same month as Craig’s … December 20th.”

Suddenly the burning feeling and the freneticism and bubbling joy was making sense – Jean was a Sag. Duh, Erik. How had I made up a whole history of her being this solid and heavy Cappie?

As I was whisked away into my past years, I suddenly thought about Jean’s being late sometimes, her wild optimism about how something fun was always going to happen (it usually did) and how she was continually setting new directions for her young son and husband (translation: sending arrow after arrow into the sky). Then I noticed her chestnut hair and happy-go-lucky smile and there it suddenly all was!

Now certainly it can be argued that Jean is almost a cusp and an adult … why not make her into a Capricorn?

Well, I guess that depends on how strongly you believe in the power of 12 sun signs. You can’t really be 2 at one time – it just doesn’t work. Now if Sagittarius begins on the 22nd of November, then really, as far as I can tell, Jean is always going to lead with a little bit of fire and a strong ability and desire to escape the confines of home since she is a December 20. Of course I don’t know her rising sign, but for now, let’s not go there. A Sag is a Sag: Tina Turner, Jimi Hendrix, Noam Chomsky and Britney Spears … the arrow flies and flies fast and high! Sag is nothing if not ebullient energy.

Something stung me!

You are walking outside in the chilly air and suddenly, as if out of a bad dream, you notice that the trees have lost all of their leaves and that they stand naked and bare against the sky. Underfoot, as the leaves begin to turn into mulch and decay, you now absorb that the earth feels cold. You look up and again gaze at the sky. Though it may look quite striking when the sky is a clear and pure cobalt blue, you observe that with the setting sun comes an understanding that you are now starting to live in a vista of gray, black and white hues. Welcome to the twilight zone! (This is when the theme music used to kick in when Rod Serling was still around smoking cigarettes.)

Here in Vermont “the twilight zone” tends to happen around October 23rd, which definitively ushers in the time of the astrological sign of Scorpio. By the time Halloween arrives on the 31st it is difficult to understand if we are all living or dead or somewhere in between. Make no mistake about it; this time of year is very much about death and dying. Reevaluation of all kinds of relationships tends to also begin during this time of year. Narratives of all kinds begin to fade, decay, or unravel.

If I may be so bold as to generalize and consider Scorpio a “November sign”, I believe that it is self evident that there is a starkness to Scorpio individuals, events and places that are unmistakable and unavoidable. November has a peculiar energy to it and the energetic field of a Scorpio is like no other, it is akin to a radiator that is suddenly turned on in the room; if you listen closely you can almost hear the hiss. It invades your space as if through your very pores. The Scorpio individual to me is like a tautly pulled guitar string that is being played with a violin bow. There is indeed an intensity in the room when a Scorpio walks in and whether the individual be a loud person or a quiet person, I believe that the guitar string quivering underneath is felt by everyone on some level. This feeling I also compare to the sense of starkness and razor edge clarity that one might receive from a visit with a Zen master – the interaction penetrates down to the very core of your being. A Scorpio native is adept at “piercing through” just like your favorite psychologist.

In beginning a discussion about the sign of Scorpio, perhaps it is best to start with a question concerning its monthly emergence. Is the month of November ever easy to take on by anyone? I would say not. It heralds in energetically the most demanding time of year. Is the Scorpionic circumstance, individual or place ever a laidback walk in the park? I think not. Scorpio intensity demands attention just as does the successful negotiation of the period from late fall to early winter. Successful participants find themselves alive and well in the New Year of 2009!

For North Americans and Northern Europeans alike, November simply put becomes an existential time. What is left for any of us when the leaves have all fallen, clouds drift overhead and a cold drizzle becomes virtually ceaseless? Home owners and renters alike start pulling down the storm windows and the living space gets sealed in tightly. That awful dry heat gets turned on. Homeless people try to move indoors somehow. I believe that this all causes a disconnection with the outside world that results in an additional existential uneasiness as the approaching winter begins to make itself known outside and human communication starts a drastic cycle of winding down. Does this not suggest the very process of something or someone dying and rotting away? Extreme as it sounds, I believe that we lock our own coffins every year as we shut ourselves into our homes in order to endure the oncoming winter. It is a practice run.

Now maybe it is only the wife and I who get SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder), but I tend to believe that there are many other individuals like us out there. Even the most cheerful people among us become broody and self-reflective as the concept of mortality shows itself to be real in nature when the bare trees bend in the mounting cold winds. The body begins to feel stiff and cold and it seems harder to get up in the morning and to face the labors at hand. The pace of life has to slow down and for the first time since early summer, people begin to really feel tired and to sleep more.

All of this, then, becomes the very life blood of the Scorpio native. These folks do not go for the light and easy feeling and conversation that for instance a Libran like me loves … Instead, the Scorpio native will cut to the chase with force and precision as if time were indeed growing short. A surgeon performing a life saving operation under pressure typifies the intense Scorpionic figure putting out a particular energy into the world. Life is meant to be lived with passion and it is to be pursued with fervor!

I might go on a limb here and state that most Scorpio individuals are gifted at cutting, slicing, stabbing, and poking. There is a sharpness and penetrating approach to them that is unavoidable. One Scorpio in particular that I know has a perfectly lethal backhand volley. Scorpios enjoy negotiating layers and burrowing to the core of a particular individual or situation.

On another level, we might begin to examine Scorpio as a destroyer or an exploder. These two acts can be examined as good or bad depending on the circumstances. A nurse shooting up a patient with toxic chemotherapy could very well be looked at as a Scorpionic figure. She is acting out of a feeling to save the patient with lethality and precision. There is nothing more Scorpionic than this act. A weapons expert may be trying to do the same thing as he plants a car bomb under the car of particular individual. Both of these are Scorpionic acts which involve intensity, lethality, and precision with very different motivations.

I am not implying that all Scorpios are assassins or spies, but they very well could be! A Scorpio knows how to “fulfill a mission” and it is a rare thing that a Scorpio native will abandon a mission in that this is simply not what a fixed sign does. A fixed water sign will slowly flow forward inch by inch if necessary and make sure that “the Sting” takes place. Again, it is necessary to say that “the Sting” can be the successful completion of a client’s difficult natal chart just as much as it can be the disconnecting of a security system. Generally speaking, Scorpio does not suffer fools gladly, and this sign wants to reach its goals quickly and efficiently and to receive or make plans for another mission!

Through my own experiences with Scorpios, I have to say that the sex thing is connected to them somehow as well. And this statement can have nothing to do with promiscuity, but more with sexual expression. In another life long ago I played in a band in which our drummer was a stripper. She was also an excellent song writer. We were also roommates and from what I could tell, she was not any more sexual than any other person, but the stripping thing is obviously connected to the language of sexuality and money! Another Scorpio I know is an excellent acupuncturist and she can speak easily about the body and sex and about the energy centers within the body. Again, here we can see that Scorpio can be very much interested in the body and probably sex is most certainly one of the languages that the human body speaks.

Scorpios are amazing people and offer us many gifts of health, rejuvenation and understanding. Just don’t double cross ‘em! This month features two Scorpio songwriters who continue to penetrate us with their voices and instruments.

The Boss, Balance, and Twilight Blues

Here we are once again folks, on the cusp of the chilly autumnal season and if you are alive at this moment in the Northeast, then you are without a doubt experiencing the autumnal equinox coming on and introducing the beginning of fall and no matter how you slice it, yet another season of death and decay will soon be under way. Things be moving on as they often say … year after year for that is the cycle of life on the mothership earth. Even as an October Libran native myself, I always find this time to be overwhelmingly serious and depressing. It is a period of time in the calendar that signals perhaps the most pronounced shift from one condition to another. This might be broken down best as a sudden shift from hot to cold! And, indeed, this is a shocking time for all of us humans, animals and plants alike! We sort of all go Libran for a month as we try to find some equilibrium between body temperature and home thermostat. The skin gets dry and the outdoor winds blow cold, yet the sun shines brightly.

Although the beginning of cool weather ushers in the very best air quality (even for this particular air connoisseur), there remains a permanent fright (read: frost!) in place of the upcoming overly cold winter and the shortening days that include significantly less sunlight than existed in excess only a few months before. Suddenly everything has “moved on”! And indeed, during this seasonal change it is difficult for me to release my powerful memories of waiting for the upcoming summer because actually I waited a long time for summer and it already came and went! Wow! Where did it go? Time does indeed begin to move more rapidly as we age. This October I will be 44 and am trying to figure out what that means exactly.

During this particular autumnal equinox of ’08, I am especially drawn to thinking about my father who is in the last stages of Alzheimer’s disease. It is easy to see plenty of metaphorical material around me that now speaks about my own shorter days on this planet: my graying hair, increasing jowls and now my completely bedridden father who no longer possesses thoughts of any coherence. Autumn signals a kind of twilight of the soul and this often results in a heavy heart. I believe it was Duke Ellington who said that twilight is the saddest time of day.

Another topic that connects with all this for me has to do with how we can all learn to relish this time of year just as the Libran is forced to do so if he or she is to survive another birthday, the dropping of the leaves, and the slow but steady change to a landscape of grays has to be felt and understood; it is nature’s way. Libra understands this. Suddenly we have all arrived at melancholia and there is no choice in the matter. You can’t fight what is happening in the outside environment no matter how hard you try. A tropical screensaver just won’t cut it when the outside landscape is gray.

After 44 years of living in this sign of cold balance and analysis, it would seem that by now that I would have developed a technique for staying grounded and content as a “triple” Libra (natal sun, moon and Mercury are all in scales – Mercury to me is huge!) as I move through the inevitable seasons. Nevertheless, I continue to struggle and know that I am not alone. Bruce Springsteen aka “The Boss” seems to have this same planetary composition of “triple Libra” as I do and I believe that he stays grounded through the pursuit of hectic musical undertakings and various political projects which keep his air moving (a definite necessity for Libra!). Of course this is all completely conjecture on my part since I don’t know the Boss personally.

As a general rule, Libra tends to stay healthy through intellectual communication and any communication cessation or breakdown tends to drive this masculine and cardinal air sign crazy. Yet, here is a slightly contradictory point! Libra also enjoys a certain amount of stasis in order to realign the energies, but if it is completely imposed upon the Libran native, then the particular stasis in question is absolutely not desireable! Forced stasis and a lack of intellectual and artistic communication for the Libran are akin to a slow and steady death. The daily routine and the work day have to be allowed to move around somewhat. Even though Libra yearns for a perfect continuing homeostasis of its own, when the outside world gets stuck in its own stasis then look out world, gentle Libra gets pissed off! Libra is that impossible sign that wants matter to move in addition to staying the same. As we are all just entering into a difficult Mercury retrograde period this week, it is becoming especially painful for Librans to see virtually all technology and relating and communication breaking down. Little positive movement is going on as can be evidenced in the financial markets.

Libra is of course a cardinal air sign and it wants to be able to initiate projects. The sign may be viewed as lazy, but often there is activity brewing under the surface and it will indeed be exposed with quick enthusiasm in due time. Unfortunately, as a cardinal sign, Libra may gloss over many of the details and timetables necessary for carrying out a particular venture. They sort of want to be the idea people. Hopefully there is a Virgo around who can lend assistance with the actual detailed nuances of an undertaking. Libra will want to blow into a room with a pure idea that often can be quite a good one, yet the reality is that some earth signs could really help with doing the actual hard work with some water signs putting some human feeling into the undertaking and the fire signs burning the midnight oil of enthusiasm and initiation.

The Libran is a good thinker, but she needs other signs to support her with particular tasks and directions that involve actual hard day to day work. Perhaps a final wisdom that can be attached to the sun sign of Libra is that although Libra detests large crowds, the sign does work well with other astrological energies in smaller groups and perhaps only then is when the Libran finds true harmony. Libra can then become the fresh air that everyone needs.

Chiron for me is in the sign of Pisces

It is said that where Chiron resides in your chart is where you are wounded and where you must heal your wound. Often my feet get hurt and I tend to lose faith in the universe and most isms quite regularly -- both of which I believe correspond nicely with Piscean dilemmas. The one area where I have yet to lose faith is in the healthy student and teacher relationship. It is in this area where I believe my healing often begins. In addition, specifically, I believe that I can assist students in achieving writing success. Hence an additional posting for this month:

Classroom Strategies for the Development of Writing Confidence

by

Erik Kaarla, MA; MEd.

Even now after having been a writing instructor for over thirteen years, I am still amazed by the magic that goes into the writing process … or the complete lack of magic. Sometimes there just isn’t any writing process because a particular student doesn’t get any writing done. This is always frustrating for the student and doubly so for me as the instructor, for I feel as though I have failed the hapless student essayist.

Fortunately, I feel that most of my students can somehow get that writing engine to turn over eventually, and frankly, I think that it has much to do with letting the writing simply happen. Over the course of my years of teaching in the writing classroom I have come up with some methods for improving the level of writing confidence in my students who are active readers and not suffering from any acute learning disabilities. These techniques I believe to be quite straightforward and effective, but first I would like to share some background information about the writing process itself.

In The Discovery of Competence, Kutz, Groden and Zamel talk about the purposefulness of advanced student writers absorbed in their writing processes in much the same light as I would characterize the budding first year writing students who do possess some self-confidence and a belief in achieving writing success:

These students, experts as they are, are also voicing their anxiety as they begin the task of writing a particular paper. But they know themselves as a writer, as a learner. They know what to expect next in their own idiosyncratic processes. And they can see the shape of the whole project. They can trust that they will ‘end up somewhere -- eventually.' They are lost in the process, but only temporarily, and they can trust in the now-familiar experience of being lost and eventually finding a way out. (13)

Of course every part of the writing process contains pitfalls and stumbling blocks that can end the student's journey towards a completed draft. Through well-designed pedagogy and assignment selection, an instructor can positively influence the outcome of a student's attempts at writing a difficult essay. Proper topic selection can help produce results in students to whom composition seems mostly arduous drudgery.



Spending Time on Topic Selection

Young writers carry within themselves a portfolio of pictures and sounds that are made up of experiences, creative notions, fears, and values. These portfolios provide wonderful sources of inspiration to be explored during the writing process. As a student goes about the business of approaching a new writing challenge during the creation of a draft, these creative portfolios should influence the writing process and the resulting product. Be the writing outcome marginal or extraordinary, it is important for the author to feel some kind of victory. If this feeling is positive -- regardless of how outsiders view the writing -- then it is clear that this author is ready to write again come the next opportunity. (Kemppinen 37)

Often struggling writing students have track records of never completing drafts on time. If these students are overly chastised for this deadline-missing behavior, the consequences can be disastrous. A single student’s anxiety level may go through the roof, which may even end with the student dropping the class or stopping any meaningful participation for the rest of the semester.

Sometimes draft non-completers are simply labeled “basic writers.” Researchers like Walter Minot and Kenneth Gamble have made multiple suggestions in the area of teaching basic writers. Minot is Professor of English at Gannon University, and Gamble is an associate professor and Chairman of Psychology at Gannon, where he teaches courses in personality theory and learning theory. In their 1991 article appearing in the Journal of Basic Writing, Minot and Gamble examine other studies concerning the writing process.

Basic writers may not differ from other students in any externally identifiable way except that their writing performance on specific writing courses falls below that of the average freshman at that college. Once identified as such, researchers and teachers alike will probably view them as a homogenous group and will pay little attention to the important differences that might exist within the group. We find similar instances of oversimplification and over generalization in areas where more sophisticated theories of behavior have been applied to writing. (118)
As much as we have to examine the writing process in its entirety, doing at least a forty-five minute block on topic selection with corresponding exercises is always a worthwhile activity. What I often like to do is to give each student 3 potential topics and to have them come up with a thesis statement and an outline as to how they would cover the particular topic in question. Within this assignment, I ask them to take note of several things:

Is it easy to come up with 3 major points that would constitute the body of the essay?

Do you envision a struggle when having to expound on these 3 separate and distinct ideas?

Are you excited by your thesis statement or theme and do you really want to explore it to its full potential?

Upon first hearing the topic that everyone was to write on, did you feel excited and motivated, or did you feel stressed out about having to come up with content?

As students discuss their feelings with concern towards these processes, often their stress levels come down significantly. This, in turn, makes it easier to go forward with the assignment in question.

As instructors of English, we all are glad to recount various writing process theories for our students. Some of us may even choose to engage the classroom in philosophical debate over whether the "process" or "product" has the most value. Whether or not we write in our free time ourselves usually influences how much emphasis we place on the hallowed methodologies of getting started on a piece of writing in the correct fashion; perhaps we choose to emphasize in front of our classroom that there is not any one technique that is the best for all writers, but that there should be a certain reverence for composition as an ongoing process.
Donald Murray has theorized about the act of teaching composition through the technique of understanding and isolating the writing process. He is quick to show that it is different for each writer, but that there is plenty we can learn from trying to map this process out.
If we stand back to look at the writing process, we see the writer following the writing through the three stages of rehearsing, drafting, and revising as the piece of work - essay, story, article, poem, research paper, play, letter, scientific report, business memorandum, novel, television script - moves toward its own meaning. These stages blend and overlap, but they are also distinct. Significant things happen within them. They require certain attitudes and skills on the writer's and the writing teacher's part. (Murray 4)

In order for students to be able to write a basic narrative essay that makes a statement about an experience they have gone through that resulted in a profound change, the student needs to pick out that singular experience, gather and arrange historical and sensory details, figure out their impact, and then recount the experience as clearly as possible. This is no easy task for even a seasoned writer. To write is to make a commitment to tell a story that matters. If a student is lacking in self-confidence, this can become a problematic undertaking. The student may feel that his or her story does not need to be told. The student may feel that the details are hard to remember. Self-confidence directly plays into the invention component of this topic and that is why this is a difficult process for early college writers to begin the semester with and this is the precise reason why I begin my Composition 1 courses with essay #1 being "An Experience that Changed My Life Forever."


Processing the First Narrative Assignment

In the classroom I initiate small group interaction after the students get a chance to think about what a life changing experience actually is. In groups of three and four, the students "sell" their choice of topic to the other members in their group by verbally stating how this event changed their lives. I won’t accept a vague answer like "I really made some great friends at camp that summer!" or "That trip to France really made me think."

I also forewarn the students that they should avoid writing about an embarrassingly personal topic, unless they can discuss it maturely because of their being far enough away from the time of the experience or because of their coming to terms with it. My central focus is on their topic selection skill. I tell my class that I am always available for individual discussions concerning these topics via email. It has been my experience that if you can't write a little something about yourself, then the construction of a process analysis or an argument essay on a designated topic is simply out of reach.

When beginning any writing project, a solid topic is a stepping stone towards achieving writing success, especially in the case of the resistant writer -- there is no better way to have the students feeling good about the assignment than through assisting them with topic selection. In Writing Relationships, Lad Tobin discusses how a poor topic choice can hinder a student:
When I [Tobin] asked him why he was writing a comic essay on making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, he had no idea. I suggested that if the essay was meant to be satiric, he ought to think about who or what was being satirized. He seemed totally confused and asked for an example. I said that the essay could, for example, be making fun of technical writers who complicate simple processes. He looked irritated. (37)

Later Tobin is able to get the student to think about such ideas as topic relevance and about commitment to saying something substantial in an essay. Educating the reader in a mature and well-thought-out manner should be the writer's goal. In Tobin's account, the student soon connected with a more realistic topic. Having a student select a defined topic that involves him or herself in some meaningful life situation helps to motivate the student to tell a story, and hopefully to tell it well. The ownership of the personal narrative can't be denied, especially in the case of writers who just can't seem to get through the writing process. If these writers are allowed to have a stake in getting through the invention process in order to begin composing ideas about something meaningful, the results are often well worth the wait.

Discussing the Writing Process

When the college freshman sits down to write and nothing happens: what is to be done? Probably very little because the student doesn't know where the instructor's office is, not to mention anything about the office hours. Perhaps it is 2AM and the student is attempting to write something in a notebook while there is a party going on in the background. Whatever the case may be, it is imperative that a savvy instructor make room in the beginning of the semester for focusing on the writing process and on what to do about it "if yours doesn't work." David Murray ponders the writing process in a succinct fashion.

This process has been revered - and feared - as a kind of magic, as a process of invoking the muse, of hearing voices, of inherited talent. Many writers still think that the writing process should not be examined closely or even understood in case the magic disappear. We can study writing as it evolves in our own minds and on our own pages and as it finds its own meaning through the hands of our writer colleagues and our writing students. (Murray 3)

As Murray suggests, the writing process is indeed a mysterious concoction. As a writing instructor, I can say from firsthand observation that the students who performed with above average success in my Composition classes from 1995 - 2008 learned much about their personal writing processes in the beginning of the course. Most of these students were able to finish work within deadline parameters, and their work tended to have more content than did those students who did not take the time to delve into just what makes their respective writing processes tick.

I have been fortunate with most of my sections of Composition having had a diverse mix of students. Within a good racial, cultural, gender, and writing ability mix, students were often able to see many differences between their respective writing processes and to learn from one another. Students who displayed more of the signs of self-confidence and some academic maturity tended to proudly recount their respective writing processes. They seemed to instinctively know that the writing process was important for producing descriptive language and writing that demonstrated critical thinking. In the case of ELL students who spoke up about their writing process - they didn't necessarily have a better command of English than the other ELL students who remained quiet, yet the vocal ELL students simply tended to have a stronger belief that their writing process mattered and might prove to be a good model to others. Was this empty boasting on their parts? Maybe, but it seems that students who achieve writing success often do want to share their ideas; they feel proud of these ideas, and in this way help others not to be stuck in the hinterlands of never being able to create a draft in time for class.
When college freshmen must begin to perform peer edits and to interact in a decentered classroom that more or less runs on the individual's stick-to-itiveness, basic writers are shocked. Students lacking writing confidence are completely immobilized. They do not know what is expected of them and they do not know how to deliver "the academic goods." The building block for successfully writing numerous essays over the course of the semester always involves the use of a fine-tuned writing process. Here are some key points to direct students toward as they develop their individual writing processes.


1) Always respect the composition process and establish early what works for you and stick to it!

2) Spend some quality time on thinking about the exact topic that you will be writing on.

3) Establish goals for your invention work, drafts and revisions that are in line with your writing process. Is your invention process very involving and complex? If this is so, always be aware that to quickly try and come up with a draft may prove futile and could jeopardize your forward movement; take all the time that is needed in order to respect your process.


Using Questionnaires for Writing Practice

In a newly developed program of writing instruction Lonka et al. devote a substantial part of their student-centered pedagogy to the writer coming up with a characterization of his or her own level of writing confidence and writing style. They achieve this through having the writers take a lengthy questionnaire as they compose and draft an essay. This practice assists the writer in seeing himself or herself in the writing process. The writer must fill in specific point values from a certain range in order to give a proper answer to a question that targets the writer's nature. Some of these questions include: How willing are you to model your writing after some other text? Do you see writing as more a modeling process than as a regurgitation of knowledge? Other topics the authors go through involve perceptions of self, procrastinatory behavior, perfectionism, and if process or product is more important to the particular writer.

Of course writing is an intense journey of self-discovery. Studying the process of writing itself is even more a focused experiencing of self. It is for this reason that Lonka et al. decided to bring the writer right into the very core of the composing process (57). Speaking to Differing Learning Styles Writing confidence is indeed necessary for getting through the invention and revision processes in writing, especially when work must be completed within distinct time frames. In order for students to get through the lengthy process of writing college-level essays, they must feel competent with their own understanding of texts. How a text is dealt with in class becomes very important in freshman English classes. Exactly what classroom methods are being employed to bring texts alive for students? What seem to be the chief teaching techniques that are reaching students? Is lecturing proving as constructive as interactive group work? How many different kinds of learners are there in the classroom? Psychologists Kolb and Fry came up with an innovative classification of learning characteristics:

The learner, if he is to be effective, needs four different kinds of abilities - Concrete Experience abilities (CE), Reflective Observation abilities (RO), Abstract Conceptualization abilities (AC) and Active Experimentation (AE) abilities (qtd.in Tennant 101). Kolb and Fry go on to describe how AC and AE people are CONVERGERS, CE and RO people are DIVERGERS and finally, how AC and RO people are ASSIMILATORS. These three typical learning styles of students are quite different from one another, and a large number of students are not picking up information easily from, say, a classroom pedagogy based on lecture alone. The writing confidence of freshman students can be in jeopardy right here already if a class is a requirement and the students who are CONVERGERS (in that they need to employ active experimentation in order to learn) cannot do that in a particular lecture course.

I make this point to show that the students who are not being reached in the classroom often have poorer and poorer self-image as a result of compounding frustrations in the classroom. As educators, we need to become keenly aware of these pathways and attempt to see which of these learning directions may be more effective for a particular student who is having visible learning difficulty. We need to understand how to develop the student who is lacking, for example, in abstract conceptualization abilities. A classroom based solely on principles of active experimentation (AE) will not effectively reach the students that rely mostly on their concrete experience (CE) processing skills. In other words, it is essential that throughout the semester the instructor combine elements of interactive assignments, oral presentations, peer editing and individual composing exercises, so that learners of all styles have a chance to negotiate the writing process successfully. A variety of teaching methodologies should help in reaching each and every student.


Please see a list of Works Cited here: http://www.geocities.com/erikkaarla/thesis.html


Thanks for reading!

Analyze This!

In a hopefully valiant effort to confront more of what is “negative” or “excessive” in my own natal chart, I have decided to analyze all that is overly Virgo or Virgonic in me, and then, perhaps, to expand from there to other signs in the future. This effort, is, of course, timely, because we in the western hemisphere have now entered into the time of Virgo -- that pristine patch of sharp light, titillating early evening coolness, and strange aloneness that heralds in the arrival of the fall season and the month of September, a fairly definitive end of summer methinks. I think Don Henley’s lyrics from “The Boys of Summer” make the statement best about the change in seasons: “Empty street, empty lake; the sun goes down alone.”

I would make the argument that there is a collective aloneness of spirit that strikes all of us as the supple richness of summer begins to slowly wane as the nights turn longer and colder. The sunlight is no longer as brilliant and forceful as it was, in say, mid-July. The cooler air is intoxicating now yet it comes with the inherent sadness that new growth has died and even old growth will even soon be trampled underfoot with the coming of the falling leaves. And what was the summer that just passed about anyway? Many of us can’t remember it that clearly. The Virgoan heart both yearns for the fecundity of summer and for the bounty arriving at the end of the summer’s abundance – it is an impossible emotional resting place to be even for a mutable sign. As crickets cry out in the night there rises a feeling of panicky sadness and delight – such is the complicated change of seasons in the Virgoan heart. The time before Libra and October arrives is unique –in any shape or form it seems quite virginal and pure.

Perhaps a few of us have already even dreamed about the approaching snow. I know that I did just the other night – and it wasn’t pretty! I found myself shivering on and off for the entire day upon awakening.

This summer, having recently acquired my exact birth time from the City of New York through the correct forms and pleas (Thanks Laurie!), it appears that in my natal chart I have 3 planets in Virgo. That’s a lot of Virgo! In fact, in taking a look at my entire natal chart it would appear that I am mostly “Libra and Virgo” – doomed to balance and analyze I am! I would venture to say that this is not an easy chart to come to terms with. It is here that I have some self-loathing suddenly coming out because I realize that there is a prissiness and fastidiousness to me that is unyielding and un-repentant. Yeah, I have plenty of Virgo in me, but how does this manifest itself?

Well, the apartment has to be vacuumed a certain way and the bathroom needs to always be clean (usually, I take care of it, so the wife doesn’t have to go crazy). I am always taking vitamins and obsessing about what I am eating. I hate the thought of aging and I often have an upset stomach from all of the vitamins that I consume. Though I wish it were not so, it would seem that this is very much a part of who I am as a human being. It would seem that I desire things to be a certain “correct” way at all times and if they are not I am distressed. Here, then, is the Virgo in me coming out daily as regularly as you please. I want things orderly and neat. OK, I admit it! Dishes in the sink seem almost lethal.

This month’s posting comes with a scalding confession from me: I have always been a bit annoyed by sun in Virgo people as a result of their nitpicking and their difficult personas of “exactaholicism” and constant criticism. My wife is Virgo rising and her laser-like fault finding freaks me out to no end. How strange, then, to discover that as I am in the world either when teaching English class, or playing guitar, bass , tennis, or cleaning the apartment that I, too, am displaying this same exacting quality. I suppose now is the time to really come clean (HaHa!), then, and to send out an apology to all Virgos everywhere that you are all part of me and I am sorry if I felt somehow better than you. The truth is that I suck! I nitpick and get lost in systemologies just as much as you do and I point the finger at those who are less than exacting. Hello Pot – This is Kettle.

Another confession I must make to all my readers (if there actually are any of you out there) is that my Virgoan nature has been under scrutiny by various psychologists for over a decade now. In my therapists’ offices always I am told to FEEL instead of to analyze, yet in my early home life I was taught to be exclusively rational as a child and not to feel and this has created some problems for me that have followed me around all the way into the present day. During all of those years of therapy I simply could have turned to my healer of the moment and said: “Dude, I have three planets in Virgo. It is very hard for me to stop analyzing and to start feeling. Please show me some clear techniques for transcending this block. If I combine that all with the Libra in my moon and sun… most all emotion escapes me! Can’t we all just get along?!”

Well, trained analysts don’t like to deal with astrology during their appointments ... at least not usually (secretly I am glad of this fact), so often I am met with some bewilderment about my strange New Age views.

But I do know myself today better than ever before. Not only does Virgo analyze, but there is also a kind of cold and mutable sense to the analysis: “If I had the power … I could make this better by doing this ______ “(fill in the blank). “Indeed, this should always be done like this ________.”
“On the other hand, let’s change it to this _____________.”
Strangely, since Virgo has a mutable quality to it there is no fear in changing direction and analyzing the next minutiae that comes into view out of the rear view mirror. Indeed, the Virgonic view of the world and universe tends to intersect with the reductivist idea of Occam’s razor: All should be reduced to the simplest level in order to guarantee truth and goodness. In this way I feel that Virgoan wisdom is indeed profound. There is a Zen-like focus to the entire approach: Boom! This is happening right now and here are the basic parts to the phenomena; let’s analyze it all down right now and get it right!

Since I have put up Charlie “Yard Bird” Parker’s picture up for this month’s blog, I feel that I should say a few words about Mr. Parker. He was the hippest of the hip in Jazz -- yet he was analyzing things all the time -- how could he have been such a laidback cool cat, then, and a Jazz icon at the same time? I mean analyzing things endlessly is really square, right? Well, this is a difficult piece in the Virgo principle to deal with indeed. My hypothesis is that Bird knew the mechanics of the vibrational universe and that he was simply tickled by it – there was no need to ANALYZE further; Bird maybe analyzed where Max Roach or Bud Powell were going on any given night in order to get the groove right, but that was the extent of it. End of story. Bird was probably at the zenith of Virgonic wisdom and suddenly all had been reduced to its smallest parts and coefficients and the cosmos played perfect music that came out of Bird’s alto on command – even the plastic one!

Another Virgoan by the name of Goethe wrote brilliantly and pointedly in any number of disciplines and it seems quite easy to see where the gifts of analyzing with prowess could produce a transcendent work like Faust taking on the task of explaining the very phenomenology of good and evil in a narrative. This is no small feat.

Finally, though, the female Virgo is somehow supposed to be chaste, they are also often knockouts and the true movie beauties! Lauren Bacall, Sophia Loren, Salma Hayek, Amy Winehouse – all born in the time of the corn maiden. Beauty like that must indeed be perfectionistic because these women of movies and song certainly seem as if designed by Aphrodite herself. All of them, though, have the bug of a loner in them that must be appeased from time to time. Needle-like perfectionism on occasion needs to be able to take some time off. Yet after the vacation, the precise Virgoan is ready to serve others once again whether it be through the stinging licks of guitarist Joe Perry of the rock band Aerosmith or through the twang of Shania Twain’s voice. Virgo gets it done right and dots the I’s and the T’s in the process.

The Time of the Lion

My Dad is Dead



In this later portion of the month of July heralding in the time of Leo in the year 2008, I find myself in the sad position of having to begin mourning the death of my father. What makes this especially strange and disorienting for me is the fact that he is still very much alive, but in the late stages of Alzheimer’s disease in which it seems like his ability to move around and to eat by himself is at long last winding down. He is often in and out of the hospital for various ailments that involve the shutting down of his connections between his brain and his body. He is having grand mal seizures even though he is on anti-seizure medication. He is no longer able to walk on his own; it seems like only yesterday, however, that he was carrying groceries for my mother and washing a few dishes. The two of them would walk down a short hill to a market close by to their home in Espoo, Finland and shop very slowly and deliberately for food items.

My mother, Taina, is my father’s sole care provider now and due to some of her own neurotic proclivities, my sense is that she has suppressed her noticing of the steady decline within my father’s general condition. Both my parents reside in the cold clime of Espoo, Finland and I am their only child.

As for myself, I live in Burlington, Vermont – ironically not so different from Scandinavia in both temperature and climate. My wife and I are late bloomers and are just now getting our own acts together in our mid forties. My wife’s father is already deceased.

Back in Finland, my mother still today seems to interpret my father’s guttural utterances as real speech and the fact that he wears diapers and soils them as a simple adjustment in lifestyle. I guess that this could be viewed as a powerful kind of lasting love – yet it is still sad because it seems to involve many levels of fantasy and misperception on her part. My sense is that she doesn’t know that he is going down for the count very soon. The fact remains, however, that the person that I knew as my father has been gone for almost a decade now. It is frustrating for me because I don’t consider myself as having been a very together twenty something. When I was in my twenties …wow!... that would have been the time to have had more serious conversations with my father and to have asked him about those life defining issues that had defined our early family experiences together. It was too late to ask my father these kinds of serious questions even ten years ago when I was 33 because it was obvious that he was no longer completely there. His personality had patina all over it and his answers to my inquiries were blunted and listless. There was no real wisdom in him to impart anymore.

What makes this process of grieving for my father strangely complex for me emotionally is that for years I was angry that just when I had reached some real truths about my own very flawed childhood and youth – he had already begun to diminish like a flickering light bulb in a David Lynch film. The bastard had escaped my complicated questions – not that he had done this on purpose, it’s just that the illness seemed to really come on at a strangely perfect time for him. He was drifting out of harbor when my well-stocked boat was finally beginning to come in. It is hard not to be resentful of this dynamic that on some level went his way. There was never a reckoning between the two of us.

When I turned forty years old in 2004 I was particularly ready to call Juha on his anger, his foolish going along with my crazy mother’s plans and desires and on his hyper criticalness of much of our early family life. These topics were fated never to be discussed by Juha and me, however, because his mind was long gone by the time I had arrived at an understanding of these dysfunctions. I am not sure if I had wanted him mentally healthy in later life for purely selfish reasons, so that I could debate him and win, or so that I could simply let fly with a few of my own points of pain from my upbringing. Regardless, I was never to have any of these conversations with him because his mind and personality were already floating out to sea in crackling iceberg-like chunks.

My present therapist seems to think that all of these conversations and barbed questions about my childhood actually being put to my father wouldn’t have accomplished anything anyway for any of us. My father was who he was -- an angry and scared little boy who would take chances on new ways of life only to find most of them relatively difficult to sustain. Juha was smart and good at being “under the gun” and I think that he was by nature a friendly guy; this was the part of his personality that I could best deal with. His defending of abused animals and bullying human behavior was a thing of beauty for in this act I could see him as a strong and just man who would launch into action even against larger foes. He also stoically held my hand when I cried at my fiancée’s funeral in 1997, but there was no way that he could really relate to the hugeness of that particular loss for me. He never asked me the simple question of “Will you be able to go on?” The double Libra that I am would have wanted to hear such an honest, direct, and loving question. Instead, I had to fend for myself and decide on the answer.

Today during the summer of 2008 my mother still sends me a steady flow of pictures of my father. His face is wrinkled and ashen and there is an unmistakable lost look in his eyes; I don’t see much “soul” in there anymore. I try to imagine what he is thinking or seeing from behind those squinting eyes behind thick glasses. In his eyes I think that I see a tired and wiped out “youth”. Maybe in his reverie he is back in rural Finland during the war years, or maybe he is in New York City attending Columbia University, or maybe he is actually in a world from within a storybook in which fun and good times are being merrily had by all. Possibly he is out fishing as a youngster with his own father.

Whatever the scenario is that he now inhabits, the fiery “nowness” of him (he was a Leo) has been gone for over a decade and really it has been my crafty mother who has led my father around quite efficiently these past fifteen years. She’s kept him alive to be sure with proper nutrition and exercise, but has he been happy for this service? This is a difficult question to answer and it contains many levels ... I mean was he happy (is he happy?) being kept alive or would a quicker demise have been preferable to sitting in soiled diapers and being spoon fed bananas? My mother loves to infantilize him and in a strange way it is a blessing for her that his later years instead of being full of fury over their angry marriage have been about Mommy making food for “little” Juha. Wow! That is perfect. He became the grandchild I assume they both always wanted from me. Her hyper-controlling care giving was finally put into permanent work mode. She had received a care giving project 24-7-365.

When my father retired in 1999 from teaching in an adult education institute in Jyvaskyla, Finland – he was sixty four years old. As I think back to my mother’s fawning over him while on the phone with me as she discussed how he was feted by the principal and faculty of the institute at a retirement dinner, I can’t help but wonder if he had been forced out of that position a little early because he was no longer in control of his once methodically quick mental faculties. From pictures of this dinner event I see a growing dullness in his eyes. He was probably an excellent educator at that point with a specialty in accounting and business management and I felt sadly for him that he was not allowed to age well like some folks get to do; I recently read a review of a John Fogerty concert in Helsinki and at 63, Fogerty is said to be doing the best work of his life on stage! Though an ex-superstar, Fogerty is achieving that real depth of self-actualization late in his career perhaps in the same way as the Rolling Stones continue to do while touring well into their sixties.

This was not to be in the case of my father and for that I am very sad. More and more I believe that my father was put out to pasture as a steady decline had begun within him and I doubt that my mother even noticed it at first. My mother should have seen the decline and brought him to see a neurologist a decade ago, not that anything could have been done. It would have at least been an example of “it is the thought that counts.” Instead, she did nothing and let him drift off.

My mother may have secretly welcomed the slow down; I can’t believe what would have served her better than being gradually able to care for Juha, now as her faux grandchild or some such thing. Probably his resistance to her controlling behaviors went down to zero and my mother was able to transform herself into the perfect dictator a la nurse Ratchet from “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”. What she said was the law from then on and Juha had to comply.

When my father visited me without the company of my mother in Massachusetts over ten years ago, I remember even then seeing his frailties and this was at the same point in time when I was about to begin psychotherapy during which I would really find out what was going down within the Kaarla family dynamic and how supported I had been in our early family years together. At that point in time I was living in Wareham, Massachusetts; I was 32 and he was 63. During that summer’s month-long visit which began at the graveside of my fiancée, I believe that he felt mixed emotions about me and the funeral although I have no way of knowing what he was actually thinking.

After the funeral I was finishing grad school in North Dartmouth, Massachusetts and showing him the seaside wonders of the Cape (he loved the ocean), I believe that he must have felt some kind of satisfaction from seeing me teaching tennis, playing guitar and recording songs and negotiating the writing of the masters thesis towards my MA degree in Professional Writing from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Though he himself had gotten an MBA from Columbia, I think that he may have sensed that I was getting to be a bit more competent even than he was at negotiating life. It’s not like I beat him at anything, though. His start as a war orphan in Finland was truly terrible and it is amazing that he achieved what he did. Juha had lost all of his family during WW2 and had ended up being shuttled from one location to the next incessantly for his first eighteen years of life. Is it any wonder that his career ended at a master’s degree and a series of disparate jobs? I have no doubt that he would have enjoyed reaching the level of tenured history professor for a major university … but that was not to be the case.

From my lowly perspective, however, my Leo father’s criticalness of me never ebbed during his final semi-competent visit with me. As I showed him a video of my band playing in a large club on a high stage, he kept shouting at the screen and saying that the whole band really needed to move more and that the singer needed to put more of a show on. The video had been shot by my deceased partner who had breast cancer at the time and just getting to that show had been an arduous undertaking for us. My father couldn’t have played a G chord on the guitar to save his life. His criticism of the best group that I had ever gotten together stung like salt-dipped darts and I felt strongly that I would never amount to anything good in this lifetime for always whatever I got together was to be inferior. I am not sure what my father’s rising sign was, but he certainly knew how to launch into stinging criticism.

As my father visited during that summer of 1997, I noticed that there was plenty that I didn’t like about him. For one, there was his “silly drinking”. I call it silly because his drunkenness was never angry or noisy which was fine by me; I don’t like to make a scene either when I knock a few back. I do feel that he would lose control quickly of time and schedules, however, and just keep drinking beer after beer at our favorite pizzeria in Onset, Massachusetts by the name of Marc Anthony’s. The Italian owners loved this skinny pale man because with each gulp of pizza and splash of beer he would exclaim “Erik, this is the best pizza and beer I have ever had.” I did love his boyish enthusiasm, but he couldn’t stop himself from drinking Bud on tap and gorging himself on pizza. It was strange, then, at 32 to have to start in with “Dad, we have to leave now. I have to correct student essays tonight.” I kept having a sense that he could have kept himself more together for me; I had just lost my partner of nine years to cancer and instead of being “aware and alert” as he had beat into me as a mantra during my teen years and young adulthood … he just allowed himself to party down. Maybe that was OK – he was certainly overdue for some kind of a vacation. My mother had henpecked him to death, but I was grief stricken and under the gun at school – why did I have to play older brother suddenly? I thought that he was supposed to teach me how to keep it together.

Perhaps the connection that my father and I share quite significantly is the sense that “We could have been contenders.” Just as Marlon Brando uttered these lines in the famous film “On the Waterfront”, I believe that this idea is one that I sort of received both from my father first hand and then enacted through my own actions in life.

The whole Kaarla family script was, in fact, “If only blank had not happened, then blank would have happened for us.”
There was this crazy belief that we all could have been something great… if only. My mother could have returned to learning something at the graduate level, my father could have held on to one job and found job security and I would have done consistently well in school and become famous at something.

Strangely, I truly do believe that my father could have amounted to something magnificent if his life had contained more resources, luck and opportunities … and isn’t that what all males want? I am not sure that we men necessarily want to be remembered for all time, but I do believe that we want to achieve a competency or skill that makes us feel that the hardships of life are worth enduring and that just like interest in the banks of yore – that our efforts and skills compound and amount to something in the end. Something of value needs ultimately to win out after living out a life.

Unfortunately, the depression that I often suffer from feels that this is just not so for most of us ... most of the time. It feels that for only a few of us our efforts seem to compound and triplicate resulting in something fantastic that may endure the test of time for awhile. Juha seemed to have to battle through private war after private war in order to just stay on the map of life. His efforts never blossomed into some lasting legacy, and finally, even in his last years of mental competency, he was not allowed to arrive at some supreme level of something. Instead, there was only the decline. He ended up in a perpetual down swing.

So who exactly is the person today with the receded hairline, pale white skin, skinny legs and vacant eyes in the pictures that I continue to get from my mother? Is this being still a human in all senses of the word? I wonder if his soul is present or is it imprisoned in a horrific chamber of doom screaming: “Let me out! Let me out!” I wonder if there is a relentless restlessness in that soul to escape the decaying body and mind that is its failing compartment at present. Do I wish for his death? I guess I kind of have to.

If I begin to dig more deeply into who I am (or from who I came), I arrive at my father’s father. He was a military man and in my now mother’s residence – there hangs a display case of his awarded war-time medals. He surely must have killed tens or maybe even hundreds of invading Russians in order to have been awarded all of those medals. How many of them were but politicized young boys I dare not even conjecture, but the fact remains that he did some killing and received a military funeral after my father found him lying in the street dead from a heart attack during a Christmas season sandwiched in between the war years. My father’s father was literally fighting for his home and backyard, but I believe that all that killing still carries some karmic weight and I believe that much of it is in my own body and soul.

Even though I would count my own pre-forty years as difficult and not exactly uplifting, I do remember a few times when my father was able to experience that I had, in fact, achieved a few things when I was in my mid twenties – he would have been in his early fifties then. I remember when he visited me in 1993 and I was living in Everett, Massachusetts. This time he again visited me alone without my mother. In preparation for his arrival, I had to paint “the guestroom” as it were.

At the time I was working as a telemarketer by day and playing in the band “Junction 69” by night. Right – the band name had plenty of sexual euphemism. I was platonically living with our stripper drummer/vocalist Louise and a would-be actress by the name of Ruth. Louise also had a two-hundred pound Mastiff by the name of Oscar who followed her around wherever she went. The three of us lived on the second floor of an ugly and ancient three-decker in Everett, Massachusetts. Some Vietnamese folks lived on the first floor. They were timid and spoke no English. On the third floor were probably some kinds of drug dealers who were never home.

In preparation for my father’s arrival, I took it upon myself to paint the extra room that led to a small rickety terrace. I remember having to put layer upon layer of white paint down in order for the room to at least feel clean. This was no easy feat because the floors were greasy and had dog drool and hair stuck to the grime; it was awful, but I endured applying layer upon layer of latex white paint. Eventually, that room got CLEAN and I bought a cheap futon for my father to use as a bed. I remember feeling proud when he visited me because even though rock ‘n’ roll was being played at night and I wore a ponytail, I had a clean-cut day job and at least resided in a livable apartment. He seemed to have enjoyed the visit.

Another especially vivid moment I can remember from my late teen years happened when my father really began to push me towards “proper behavior and life direction.” I believe that I was thirteen or fourteen when my father first laid into me with a particular phrase that I will always remember. He essentially chastised me with: “You are a pleasure seeking hedonist. If I were you I would grab onto work projects with vigor and a do or die attitude.” With this phrase my father virtually set into motion the idea in me that I was no good and a bad human being. Until this day I am paranoid about being lazy or of not being functional at the highest level in whatever I am doing. I attribute this exhortation to the fact that my father had a difficult life and that he was probably slightly jealous of my having a better shot “at this thing called life” – to quote the artist once again known as Prince. In comparison to my father, I truly had a good beginning in life.

When my fiancée succumbed to cancer, I feel that her marvelous brain had checked out maybe a month before her actual death. I could tell that she was truly gone then and cried and cried to a best friend over the telephone. That is when her loss hit me like an ice pick to the chest. After that, there was no going back. Even as she was conscious and even still speaking, my soul cried out for her essence because it had exited the room forever. And I do so believe that most of our essence is in the brain. It was obvious; you could feel it. The body’s death was slow and painful, but not as scary.

I have many feelings about my father, but I feel that much of him left the building a long time ago and really, “the son” in me left the building a long time ago as well. At 43 I am still not a father and I often wonder why this is. For me it seems that I am just as lost as when my father was around and I question what is the meaning of this earthly existence. Since I tend to believe in astrological ideas more than religious ones, I only wish that my father could have gone out more like a Leo for it would have suited his surviving so many hardships and losses much better than the slow withering away into nothingness while my mother changes his diapers.

The Male Cancer

It has been said by many accomplished astrologers that the most difficult sun sign for a human male to be is that of the crab or Cancer. Why? Well, it is rumored that Cancer is, in fact, the most feminine of all the astrological signs and really, if you think about it, this statement seems to hold a great deal of truth to it. In this month’s blog entry I am not seeking to vilify the Cancerian male, but it is with deep sadness and disgust that I researched a bit about the now convicted and proven killer of the UVM student Michelle Gardner-Quinn and found him to be a male Cancer. Here is a gentleman who would chloroform or etherize in some fashion his victims -- women of his choosing -- and then have sex with their near lifeless bodies. The horror of horrors is that Rooney has three children of his own! So much for the one-sided view of the sweetly nurturing and protective Cancerian. Here, instead, is literally a smothering quality within the male crab. Clearly, Rooney is a Cancer, but in a most distorted fashion.

This month’s blog entry is dedicated to the memory of Michelle (you are not forgotten!) and in it I will be taking a look at just what makes the male Cancer tick. Obviously there are plenty of solid male Cancers out there (the Dalai Lama included), but there are some also deeply flawed guys out there. Perhaps the way that this all could be examined through a question would be: Can (or how) is the father a mother?

Cancer is ruled by the cycles of the moon. The moon controls the tides of the seas and the oceans (and menstrual cycles!) and if you have ever experienced a full moon by the ocean, it is impossible not to feel the power of the cosmic energy at work here as the moon and the water are interacting in a strange night ballet. It is almost like being back in the womb. The power of the moon plus water is illusive and it is difficult to pin their exact natures.

Cancer rules the stomach and the breasts – both of these body parts are brilliantly related as well since the breasts supply our first nutrition and set the stage for all future digestive adventures. The beauty of the female stomach either pregnant or flat can’t be denied, nor can the appeal of breasts (especially with the technologically advanced Victoria Secret apparatus!). All of this information most of us know and it is easy enough to Google Pam Anderson when beginning the study of the female Cancer and to pretty much get a kind of large-chested template together, but what of the study of the male Cancer?

Here we need to embark on a completely different form of study and whether or not one is straight or gay the main point is that envisioning the male Cancer through the lens of hairy stomach and hairy flat breasts doesn’t yield the same insights as when we are studying Ms. Anderson. Instead we need to examine the male Cancer through an entirely different lens. There is a particular focus that I tend to reach for when proceeding on this journey.

I propose that all male Cancers are deeply wounded. They have to be because they contain so much of the female pain in them. I will also say that all males and females of all signs are wounded, but let’s not go there for now – that is a different story altogether.

The male Cancer is sensitive and is easily hurt -- in order to combat this he usually has to do some uber masculine stuff. A great example of the male Cancer is Sylvester Stallone. Look at his hyper-masculine body and the enormous success of the Rocky series. No one would dare question the masculinity of Sly. It is also helpful to think about his Rambo roles. The Rambo character is alienated because he feels too much and he must save his brothers still in POW camps. Someone needs to be saved! The Cancerian will be the saver. Strangely, Harrison Ford is also a Cancer and he, too, seems to be a character that often runs out to save someone or something as in the Indiana Jones series.

The Cancerian male as a warrior is a much different image from the Aries male as warrior (think Russell Crow). I think that an Aries hero will take a thrashing and be angry that his body is getting banged about and cut; he will fight harder now because he is being attacked. The Cancerian male hero will take the beatings more coolly because he is saving someone or something for a reason. This is of course the goal. The he will cuddle those that he has saved.

There can be a strange arrogance to the Cancerian male and this isn’t the arrogance of the Aries male. Now you can say pretty much anything that you want to even a Leo or an Aries male – they may yell or take a swing at you, but then the whole thing will blow over; not so for the Cancer male. He may brood at first and then begin a lengthy lecture about the wrong. The Cancerian claw will come out and grip onto you and the issue at hand and not let go and you will most certainly be lectured into the ground over and over again with the steady drip, drip of this water sign until you feel utterly disemboweled and decayed. Lesson number one when dealing with a Cancer of any gender: don’t give advice for it will not be taken well.

If we examine the current US president, we can see that he doesn’t take advice easily – yeah, he is a Cancer. Sure, he can smile sweetly when talking about Karl Rove, but don’t give him any advice about dealing with Karl Rove. Male Cancers also tend to enjoy the body in exercise and GB is supposedly an exercise freak. Also, it may be observed that the Cancerian may be able to deal with life quite well if his body is in a good place. I am not saying the male Cancerian can’t be intellectual, but generally he has to be taking care of his body first in order to have a good day. In examining this propensity, let’s examine one of my favorite authors who was both physical and heady and DARK. Can we talk about Ernest Hemingway?

A brilliant professor friend of mine said: “Hemingway was a fantastic Nobel Prize receiving novelist, but he had the ethical nature of a two year old.” I hear that. Hemingway’s eldest son seemed to claim this same fact in the documentary on Ernest produced by A&E. “When my father was with you, he would make you feel as though you were the center of the world. If he lost interest in you, then it was like you didn’t even exist.” This is another classic Cancerian quality. Since above all else Cancers feel, then it goes without saying that if they are feeling good about you then there will be much enjoyment and merriment going on. If suddenly their attention and feeling shifts to something else, well, you may find yourself out in the cold and the Cancerian doesn’t even acknowledge this! Isn’t that incredible? How can this quality go along with the idea of the Cancer wanting to nurture and to help people?

My hypothesis on this behavior comes literally from watching crabs on the beaches of Maine. They scuttle back and forth and then bury themselves in the sand. Soon they are out of the sand and searching for food and grabbing at things with their claws; perhaps they will fight with another crab while their pincers are interlocked. Soon they have buried themselves in the sand again. Can we see how this behavior has a certain pattern to it? Cancers are moody and their moods are not the light changes in temperament known to the rest of the signs. The moods of the Cancer go deep and they must be allowed to dissipate on their own. Any forcing on the part of an outside individual will result in a massive blow up of egos.

In examining a male Cancer, then, a heavy mood needs to be interpreted as a really heavy mood. What if the mood that the male is locked into at the time is that of insecurity and possessiveness? Well, the results could be disastrous for just about any female, especially if your name is Nicole Brown and the male Cancer is OJ Simpson.

The OJ trials are not much remembered anymore, but information has come out over the years that OJ the former football star was possessive, dark, and brooding within that relationship with Nicole and say what you will about the trial verdict – OJ was disturbed. The media character of OJ Simpson before the murder just seemed as sweet as apple pie. Indeed, he seemed to always be smiling and full of love. It is my opinion that under that persona was a deeply controlling man who was plagued by a myriad of insecurities and the FEELING of these insecurities ran deep indeed. It is almost easy imagining him wanting to smother a loved one to death while clinging to them with a set of heavy pincers. Overbearing nurturing seems closer to torture and murder than do many other more negative behaviors. It is unfortunate that the male Cancer is so adept at going over the top with their nurturing efforts.

Men are perhaps very unbalanced when they feel feminine care giving emotions and this goes double for the male Cancer. He can indeed feel so much that he becomes disoriented and squeezes the puppy to death.

In any event – this is all just my theorizing, but perhaps it is important to remember that America is a country that vibrates to the Cancerian pulse. Ask yourselves these two questions: How does England feel about the United States? How does France feel about the United States? Which is the correct answer? What is the real nature of the Cancerian? And how can the male Cancerian learn to avoid any and all dark flowing waters?

We all miss you Michelle! RIP

We Got Twins!

June will soon be busting out all over and for my money it will be the summer’s summer. Here in the northeast of the United States it is the seasonal cycle during which the greens are at their verdant best. The air is warm, clear, light and sensual. Flowers and trees and even lawns are redolent with color and vibrancy. There is an eternal beautiful youth to the earth during this seasonal cycle and just as it is said that Taureans and Geminis are the most beautiful people of the zodiac, it is easy to see why this is true from simply observing the months of May and June during every blessed year we are allowed to experience them. True beauty seems to have an ageless freshness to it and though the human object of beauty may be seventy years old – if the septuagenarian is a Gemini then that sense of adolescent vitality will still flow from every pore of this human. My grandfather looked poised and kind throughout his golden years and I think as a Gemini he exemplified this sense of graceful aging perfectly. My new grandma through marriage is also a well-preserved Gemini and she works hard at remaining youthful.

As a double Libran, it is said that I am attracted to Gems and I would have to say that in my former musical projects I have worked well with male Gems and in my past romantic life there have been some female Gems. Ironically, my Cancerian wife is attracted to Gems as well, but from what I understand of astrology, Geminis slice and dice Cancerians with their sharp words and deeds, so I am not sure if this is a good thing for her. I think that the Libra-Gemini pull is very much about talking incessantly about all kinds of nonsense with the end result being a lot of nothing, in fact, I did this for an entire relationship some years ago. Nonetheless, I love to talk, so it is easy for me to hang out with a Gemini and to shoot the breeze endlessly in the early summer sun.

On the flipside of the ebullient and chirpy Gemini is their depressive alter ego that surfaces again and again and it is deep and penetrating and it will darken the world around them. How is it possible for a person to be able to fall from that energetic adolescence into a kind of blackness of late adulthood? Well, it is possible. The Geminian will become depressed like no other sign (OK – today we may call this bipolar disorder) and much mud must be swum through before the cheery and bright Gemini may emerge again into the sunlight. Sometimes this process may take a very long time indeed and I pity da fool who has to be supportive to the Gemini native during this process.

Much has been said about the Gemini being the sign of the twins and I would have to agree that this is so. I would add to the mix that one of the twins is always the darker half. When this figure emerges all other folks should run for cover for the Geminian black spector is no easy quick fix, and frankly, only the Gem can fix it if he or she cares to.

It seems necessary to mention Elliot Spitzer now, the former governor of New York. Yeah, he is a Gem. Without understanding anything about astrology the duality within his life is easily recognizable. Upstanding politician and family man by day; by night his alter ego took over and only expensive prostitution could relax his existential unease and the nervousness that is the Geminian experience. While this behavior has a Scorpio vibe to it … I get mostly that duplicitous Gem scent from it all. Though I feel sorry for his family, I am not a hundred percent sure that even a team of therapists could have healed his darker twin. Gemini is all about the duality – it can’t just be fixed – it is the very nature of the sign. Eliot Spitzer is more than one persona … probably he is more than four personas; maybe he is eight personas. To separate all of these identities is just not possible, nor is it desirable. Geminis make great politicians because of all those personas. Where was the astrologist when the Spitzer’s needed one?

Gemini rules things like butterflies, monkeys, the metal mercury and the nervous system. These kinds of phenomena are forever in panicky movement going to and fro and are not meant to keep still. Bob Dylan is a Gemini – has he ever stopped touring? Has he ever stopped exposing different selves to the record buying public? Miles Davis was a Gemini – again, showing side after different side to the public and never running out of sides to expose and explore.

This is a Gemini at their finest creating any number of connections at a frenetic pace. In this they excel far more than any other sign. Gemini is the ultimate tour guide.

Some beautiful female Gems come to mind and first on the list we should put Marilyn Monroe. So much has been written about her. Hers was the nervous and comical sexuality – she was the smart flirt. Three marriage partners were had by her until her untimely death at 36. Hers was a young spirit, though. Should she have reached seventy or eighty or ninety? My sense is that her freshness was great indeed and Hollywood exacted its toll – perhaps 36 years was just the right amount for her. It is worth watching her films – there is a wit and wisdom about her if not a true warmth. Air signs don’t really do the warmth thing that well anyway -- it takes one to know one.
Finally, if you have a friend or relative who moves around a lot … please inquire as to whether or not they are a Gemini for it is the Gemini who really enjoys a change in scenery, partners, jobs and religions. Just because so-and-so isn’t Siamese doesn’t mean that there isn’t a whole other brother or sister right underneath their raincoat.