“I mean, sir, in delay
We waste our lights in vain, like lights by day!
Take our good meaning, for our judgment sits
Five times in that ere once in our five wits.”

Mercutio in Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet (I.iv.44)

Horoscopes for 7-14-2026

Moon conjunct Mercury (rx) 19° Cancer 7/14
Moon conjunct Sun 22°Cancer 4:59 AM 7/14
Jupiter oppose Pluto 7/20 4° Leo/Aquarius

(How to use these horoscopes.)

Horoscopes for 7-14-2026

Cancer

For a few months now, I’ve used an electric blower to “blow dry” my driveway. It’s just a battery-powered leaf blower, not terribly expensive, and not too loud, nor, for that matter really that powerful. It came with a couple of batteries, but one wore out quickly. Still, it functions, as tool for quickly sweeping out a garage or blowing the Live Oak leafs from the front walk. That’s about all it can do. Still, I’ll do that, and I was thinking about it, as I was looking at your current astrological conditions, plus what’s ahead, and what’s behind. I would start blowing the leaves off in one direction, and the summer breeze would kick up and as fast as I was blowing the leaves into the yard, the gentle summer zephyrs would blow them right back. But I did get started and with the inception of the new moon, despite Mercury blowing everything right back? I’d suggest you start with the “Mercury Retrograde clean-up,” although, it might feel like you blow the leafs over into the yard, and the breeze blows some of them back. There is measurable progress; albeit, not that much. But progress?

The Leo

I’ve been keeping paper notes for all of this career, with some scraps that predate even current situations. It’s a habit that sustained me well enough. Paper notes don’t really age. I mean, they do, but they don’t. Likewise, I have a few books that have margin notes in them, and I hold those to be precious. The idea of “pen and paper?” I’d like The Leo to resist the concept and what it represents.
[continue reading…]

This Sunday: Eagles Nest Elite

“The fated sky
Gives us free scope, only doth backward pull
Our slow designs when we ourselves are dull.”

Helen in Shakespeare’s All Well That Ends Well (I.i.119-21)

Eagles Nest
1235 Basse Rd
San Antonio, TX 78212

Store phone: 210-354-7343

11 AM – 4 PM

This Sunday: Eagles Nest Elite

Sun into Leo 7/22 2:14 PM
Mercury direct 7/23 5:58 PM 16°18’ Cancer
Full Moon 7/29 9:37 AM 6°30’ Leo/Aquarius
Jupiter 6°25’ Leo

NB: Bill King’s Brake-O

Kramer Wetzel’s Aura Photo

astrofish.net/travel

we hit the jackpot

Heard it on stage, maybe once? Maybe not even then, just the weird radio. Reckless Kelly, from if I recall, San Marcos.

“Still, we hit the jackpot, baby, you and me
We were born in North America in the twentieth century”

It’s the chorus to the song, “North American Jackpot” from the album, American Jackpot/American Girls.

Album date suggests I never heard it live, just on the radio.

American Jackpot

Just Watch Me

Dark, comedic set-up.

“The line between surveillance and communion is thin but strong: not a knife’s edge but a discernible, navigable border.” Page 22.

Starts with that as a point.

The relentless need to bring minutiae of life into focus for everyone, a post-modern spin?

”There’s an intimacy to streaming, like inviting people not into your home but into your brain.” Page 104.

Really, more like false intimacy, implied, but not for real. The short novel is a post-modern spin from inside the head of a 20-something who can’t et it together in NYC. Kicked out of a food-service job, she starts a live stream to help raise money to keep her brain-dead baby-sister alive on life support.

Told first-person, peppered with the literary equivalent of screen shots to show what the audience of her live stream thinks.

Just Watch Me

It’s a darkly comic voice that tells a tale of death, redemption, and friendship — real friendship — against the backdrop of the of the post-modern, interconnected world, now streaming live.

Just Watch Me

The Notebook A History of Thinking on Paper

As the title suggests?

“Was there a connection between notebooks and creativity?” Page 14.

I am unsure. Saw the title and blurb on a book list. Checked out the library copy. Read the first page. Bought a copy from the bookstore. Stuck a bookmark in it. Then checked out a different copy from the other library because I like the book-reading software better.

The opening gambit sucked me right in with the brief narrative thread about the rebirth of the legendary line of Moleskine line of notebooks.

“The Romans, when they eventually succeeded the Bronze Age and Hellenic civilisations of the Eastern Mediterranean, adopted small Ulu Burun-style tablets, which they called pugillares or ‘handhelds’.” Page 19.

PDAs gave way to smart phones, and yet, the concept isn’t so new?

pugillares

Really, think it through, that’s the name that should be applied to all my handheld devices, over the years. Or?

zibaldoni

Weblogs. Blogs. Daily written diaries. The profane, profound, and mundane.

“The basic principle was simple: when you found a piece of writing that you liked, or found useful, you copied it out into your personal notebook.” Page 53.

Or, what would probably become, a commonplace book — my own spin on that, Pink Cake — its working title was “quotidian,” as a play on words. It’s a collection of useful quotes, my collations and curation.

While, ostensibly, about the history of notebooks, The Notebook also traces the history of thought, and how we think on paper, the transmission of ideas, and as noted, the common place book. Towards that end, better than any class notes I ever took, I did record quotes and such, and I’ve long since used a commonplace book as source material, but in recent decades days, almost exclusively with nothing but digital. Still, it’s how I learned. Continue to learn.

“Melville kept a small notebook in his pocket at all times, and wrote up a more formal journal each night.” Page 155.

Studying Sir Isaac Newton’s notebooks?

“The apple story, in other words, was a deliberate myth-building exercise; and it was one of many.” Page 175.

Thought so. The notebooks proved it thus.

Travel journals, based on older logbooks, those were a source, all done on notebooks. Then there was Ruffian Dick — the way I recall, that story was based on Sir Richard Burton’s notebooks from an American excursion.

Half Price Books used to sell blank books, $3.95, maybe even $2.98, my records are a little dated, and that was the perfect price point. I remember walking over to the South Lamar Half-Price and fetching up several of the blank books. Each year I’d get some for my sister. Became a thing. She claimed she loved the blank books as a starting point, and she carried one at all times, think she still does. I have a few leftover in my library, flipping through one, I found some of my original study of the tarot, the symbolism, the various cards and the interpreted meaning. Really dated material, but that was also how notebooks worked.

Other chapters include what we know to be true, at least, my own, empirical evidence suggests that this works, but an active kind of journaling, detailing thoughts and feelings around personal trauma helps relieve the complications, moral, physical, the mental aliments that derive from trauma. Not new information, but interesting to see the validations. Science in a notebook.

The Notebook A History of Thinking on Paper

The points used for illustration — the data the author selected craft a careful narrative thread about the accumulation, curation, and dissemination of knowledge via notebooks.

The Notebook A History of Thinking on Paper

• Notes:
Moleskine
Canvas Journal Covers
Ruffian Dick
Field Notes
Typical Goal Setting
A Couple of Take Aways

“But first let me tell ye, if ye should lead her in a fool’s paradise, as they say, it were a very gross kind of behavior, as they say; for the gentlewoman is young; and therefore, if you should deal double with her, truly it were an ill thing to be off’red to any gentlewoman, and very weak dealing.”

Nurse to Romeo in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (II.iv.84)

Horoscopes for 7-7-2026

Venus into Virgo 7/9 12:23 PM
Moon 4° Gemini 7/11 12:29 AM
Moon 9° Gemini 7/11 8:19 AM
Moon into Cancer 7/12 5:47 PM

Horoscopes for 7-7-2026

Cancer

Birthdays are a great time to look back over the last year, and then, look forward at what’s ahead. The Moon enters Cancer at the very end of this horoscope, but technically, and therefore, in reality, it isn’t “new” just yet. That means this is about cleaning up, picking up, putting down, and placing everything away so you can see more clearly what the destination is supposed to be. In order to pick your way forward, the sign of the crab, the Moon Children have some metaphysical, metaphorical, mystical, mental rearranging to do. Or maybe it’s something as simple as housecleaning, sort of varies. I tend to think in terms of spiritual, perhaps grounded in reality, but some kind of birthday list of what’s happened, and how to move yourself forward in the next year, the month, the week after this one. Mercury, plus other contributing factors, make this a time when cleaning, sorting, and putting material away, in the real world or just in your brain, either way, that’s what works. Happy birthday, too.

The Leo

Some of my little Leo friends will find this improbable. Others? You can easily see this happening. The holiday is over, but the sentiments remain, and therefore? This next week, the weekend on approach and the following days, even? There’s a certain ability you have as just a Leo, like no other, and with no effort on your part?
[continue reading…]

A Couple of Take Aways

Old family friend, former neighbor, Libra, if I recall correctly, published author, noted local columnist? She left me with two or three important points, mostly gathered from casual interaction, as she’s another one of the greats from East Texas.

The connection, for me, goes much deeper, though, as I recollected. I was at school in Arizona, and a lonely winter’s night, temperature in the 70s? I hiked over to a Scholtzsky’s by campus, got a sandwich, and leafed through the tired, out-of-date magazines. One of them was a Texas Monthly, and that had one of her columns, and in it, a reference to Chaucer.

As a writer, though, and through her successes, I listened.

A Couple of Take Aways

One offhand comment, discussing books, literature, what we were reading, the craft of writing, I think I was fixing her computer that time, and other topics for writers? She had a three-book deal, really just re-publishing three of her works as a package, what she made in that deal, up front?

“I just spoke at (something) and the honorarium for 20 minutes of talking was more than three times what I got in that book deal.”

The speaking, talking, ancillary fame pays better than the selling of books.

I see how that works. Last few years, my annual amazon royalties aren’t enough to trigger a 1099. I still report the pittance because that’s how I roll.

(See musical footnote¹.)

A Couple of Take Aways

There was another, End-Of-Life example, I’ll always cherish. Her 90+ year-old father was tucked away in a garage apartment, just a temporary setting for him, but he had gotten kicked out of hospice because he wasn’t dying fast enough. I think we shared a meal at the kitchen table, and I listened, he was an old newspaper man from East Texas, and while he was near-dead, as an editor emeritus? He was still writing a weekly column. I don’t know what it was, news, gossip, commentary?

The last time I saw him, he was in the narrow confines of the back apartment, kind of an architectual afterthought as a studio, living space, with plumbing and family cars parked on the other side of the wall.

He was broadly grinning, working away on a manuscript-looking page, still writing. He had an idea for his column, as it was stilling running, and this was after being “kicked out of hospice” — for not dying soon enough.

Still writing, in his case, on a typewriter, but we all use whatever tools suit us best.

A Couple of Take Aways

How to get paid, what pays, what doesn’t pay as well, and then, still working at the craft, right up until the grave.

Used before?

“Ask for me tomorrow, and you shall find me a grave man.”
Mercutio 3.1.61

Where is Kramer Wetzel: astrofish.net/travel.

1. Bands make most of their profit from live shows rather than retainers and royalties from recorded music, especially with streaming services that pay so little. Live music, or any similar appearance is where the cash is. Or, I guess, licensing a song snippet for advertising. That must pay well. ↩

The Strongest Steel

The Strongest Steel is forged in the fire of the dumpster.

43:2 “When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee: when thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned; neither shall the flame kindle upon thee.” (Isaiah)

Knew I’d seen it before.

The Strongest Steel

Excerpt From
The King James Version of the Bible

the Portable Mercury Retrograde

#Bible