Set some records tonight. One for longest shift: 14 hours. One for latest time worked: 3:45 AM.
Longest shift ....... 14 hours ..... previous record 12.5 hours Latest time worked .......... 03:45 ..... previous record 01:30
I get overtime + shift premium. Back tomorrow at 10am. Sleep now…
This is so dirty that, according to the New York Times Magazine, “Auden publicly denied authorship, which is why we can reprint this without permission and with impunity.” So here it is!
The Platonic Blow
W. H. AudenIt was a spring day, a day for a lay, when the air
Smelled like a locker-room, a day to blow or get blown;
Returning from lunch I turned my corner and there
On a near-by stoop I saw him standing alone.I glanced as I advanced. The clean white T-shirt outlined
A forceful torso, the light-blue denims divulged
Much. I observed the snug curves where they hugged the behind,
I watched the crotch where the cloth intriguingly bulged.Our eyes met. I felt sick. My knees turned weak.
I couldn’t move. I didn’t know what to say.
In a blur I heard words, myself like a stranger speak
“Will you come to my room?” Then a husky voice, “O.K.”I produced some beer and we talked. Like a little boy
He told me his story. Present address: next door.
Half Polish, half Irish. The youngest. From Illinois.
Profession: mechanic. Name: Bud. Age: twenty-four.He put down his glass and stretched his bare arms along
The back of my sofa. The afternoon sunlight struck
The blond hairs on the wrist near my head. His chin was strong.
His mouth sucky. I could hardly believe my luck.And here he was sitting beside me, legs apart.
I could bear it no longer. I touched the inside of his thigh.
His reply was to move closer. I trembled, my heart
Thumped and jumped as my fingers went to his fly.I opened a gap in the flap. I went in there.
I sought for a slit in the gripper shorts that had charge
Of the basket I asked for. I came to warm flesh then to hair.
I went on. I found what I hoped. I groped. It was large.He responded to my fondling in a charming, disarming way:
Without a word he unbuckled his belt while I felt.
And lolled back, stretching his legs. His pants fell away.
Carefully drawing it out, I beheld what I held.The circumcised head was a work of mastercraft
With perfectly beveled rim of unusual weight
And the friendliest red. Even relaxed, the shaft
Was of noble dimensions with the wrinkles that indicateSingular powers of extension. For a second or two,
It lay there inert, then suddenly stirred in my hand,
Then paused as if frightened or doubtful of what to do.
And then with a violent jerk began to expand.By soundless bounds it extended and distended, by quick
Great leaps it rose, it flushed, it rushed to its full size.
Nearly nine inches long and three inches thick,
A royal column, ineffably solemn and wise.I tested its length and strength with a manual squeeze.
I bunched my fingers and twirled them about the knob.
I stroked it from top to bottom. I got on my knees.
I lowered my head. I opened my mouth for the job.But he pushed me gently away. He bent down. He unlaced
His shoes. He removed his socks. Stood up. Shed
His pants altogether. Muscles in arms and waist
Rippled as he whipped his T-shirt over his head.I scanned his tan, enjoyed the contrast of brown
Trunk against white shorts taut around small
Hips. With a dig and a wriggle he peeled them down.
I tore off my clothes. He faced me, smiling. I saw all.The gorgeous organ stood stiffly and straightly out
With a slight flare upwards. At each beat of his heart it threw
An odd little nod my way. From the slot of the spout
Exuded a drop of transparent viscous goo.The lair of hair was fair, the grove of a young man,
A tangle of curls and whorls, luxuriant but couth.
Except for a spur of golden hairs that fan
To the neat navel, the rest of the belly was smooth.Well hung, slung from the fork of the muscular legs,
The firm vase of his sperm, like a bulging pear,
Cradling its handsome glands, two herculean eggs,
Swung as he came towards me, shameless, bare.We aligned mouths. We entwined. All act was clutch,
All fact contact, the attack and the interlock
Of tongues, the charms of arms. I shook at the touch
Of his fresh flesh, I rocked at the shock of his cock.Straddling my legs a little I inserted his divine
Person between and closed on it tight as I could.
The upright warmth of his belly lay all along mine.
Nude, glued together for a minute, we stood.I stroked the lobes of his ears, the back of his head
And the broad shoulders. I took bold hold of the compact
Globes of his bottom. We tottered. He fell on the bed.
Lips parted, eyes closed, he lay there, ripe for the act.Mad to be had, to be felt and smelled. My lips
Explored the adorable masculine tits. My eyes
Assessed the chest. I caressed the athletic hips
And the slim limbs. I approved the grooves of the thighs.I hugged, I snuggled into an armpit. I sniffed
The subtle whiff of its tuft. I lapped up the taste
Of its hot hollow. My fingers began to drift
On a trek of inspection, a leisurely tour of the waist.Downward in narrowing circles they playfully strayed.
Encroached on his privates like poachers, approached the prick,
But teasingly swerved, retreated from meeting. It betrayed
Its pleading need by a pretty imploring kick.“Shall I rim you?” I whispered. He shifted his limbs in assent.
Turned on his side and opened his legs, let me pass
To the dark parts behind. I kissed as I went
The great thick cord that ran back from his balls to his arse.Prying the buttocks aside, I nosed my way in
Down the shaggy slopes. I came to the puckered goal.
It was quick to my licking. He pressed his crotch to my chin.
His thighs squirmed as my tongue wormed in his hole.His sensations yearned for consummation. He untucked
His legs and lay panting, hot as a teen-age boy.
Naked, enlarged, charged, aching to get sucked,
Clawing the sheet, all his pores open to joy.I inspected his erection. I surveyed his parts with a stare
From scrotum level. Sighting along the underside
Of his cock, I looked through the forest of pubic hair
To the range of the chest beyond rising lofty and wide.I admired the texture, the delicate wrinkles and the neat
Sutures of the capacious bag. I adored the grace
Of the male genitalia. I raised the delicious meat
Up to my mouth, brought the face of its hard-on to my face.Slipping my lips round the Byzantine dome of the head,
With the tip of my tongue I caressed the sensitive groove.
He thrilled to the trill. “That’s lovely!” he hoarsely said.
“Go on! Go on!” Very slowly I started to move.Gently, intently, I slid to the massive base
Of his tower of power, paused there a moment down
In the warm moist thicket, then began to retrace
Inch by inch the smooth way to the throbbing crown.Indwelling excitements swelled at delights to come
As I descended and ascended those thick distended walls.
I grasped his root between left forefinger and thumb
And with my right hand tickled his heavy voluminous balls.I plunged with a rhythmical lunge steady and slow,
And at every stroke made a corkscrew roll with my tongue.
His soul reeled in the feeling. He whimpered “Oh!”
As I tongued and squeezed and rolled and tickled and swung.Then I pressed on the spot where the groin is joined to the cock,
Slipped a finger into his arse and massaged him from inside.
The secret sluices of his juices began to unlock.
He melted into what he felt. “O Jesus!” he cried.Waves of immeasurable pleasures mounted his member in quick
Spasms. I lay still in the notch of his crotch inhaling his sweat.
His ring convulsed round my finger. Into me, rich and thick,
His hot spunk spouted in gouts, spurted in jet after jet.
from the New York Times Magazine
What follows is a magazine-article length essay. It’s good reading! And educational!
“The desire to be connected with the cosmos reflects a profound reality.
We are connected—not in the trivial ways that the pseudoscience of astrology promises, but in the deepest ways.”
Today’s lesson is about astrology. Not that a gemini has certain characteristics or a libra likes this or that; or that it’s a lucky day to buy a house or meet a new friend. It’s about how fundamentally wrong, untrue, inaccurate, impossible, and dangerous astrology is.
The first thing I have to say towards this is that I’m a Gemini, and also a twin. That means that my brother was born in precisely the same place, just a few minutes before I was. Nine minutes to be exact. But the same planet was rising in the same constellation and that supposedly dictates the destiny of our lives. You’d think then, given that we have essentially the identical astrological chart, that our lives should then be roughly the same! I guess we should live together here in Louisville or back in Grand Rapids, having probably gone to the same college and pursuing essentially the same career. We should act nearly the same way, react the same way, pursue friendships and relationships in basically the same way. After all, it’s written in the stars! But a quick study of my personality and that of my brother would reveal that this is not true. He works on computers for a living, I work in health care. He went rather far away for school, I stayed closer to home. He enjoys computer games—I can take them or leave them and would really rather be reading a book. As children he was always outside gallivanting around; I was content to be in my room building space ships out of LEGO. If the fundamental principles of astrology hold true this should not be the case. But it is.
I know plenty of people who “believe in” astrology, who think it’s an insight into someone’s personality or compatibility in love or business. There are also a few who just think it’s fun, or who even think there’s insight to be found in it in tiny ways.
Truth be told, there is an insight to be found in astrology. It’s that as people we share a lot of common characteristics, and that broad generalizations are easily applied to all of us in our daily lives. Sure, today might be a good day for everyone who was born between May 21 and June 21 to “test yourself today — it’s the perfect time to bring out hidden qualities that you may have only suspected.” And it might be true that those born in late February have a “love life that could use a little spice today, so compose the perfect love note and send it to the right person. It may cause quite a stir, but that is just what you’re seeking. Things should get hotter soon!”
I think it’s generally a good idea for people to test themselves—regardless of the month of their birth. But someone without much of a love life who’s a pisces might not find that particular horoscope useful. What then, do we say when our daily horoscopes don’t apply to us? “Oh, that one’s wrong today. Tomorrow’s will be better.” Keep in mind that the idea behind astrology isn’t that it’s supposed to predict the weather (which is difficult enough for actual scientists to do) but to determine the course of your life, the direction of your days, based on the supposed influence of the stars and planets. If you reread those horoscopes you’ll notice that they’re not really a prediction, just general advice that anyone could carry out that day. And not anything very new or unexpected, either.
But let’s examine what happens when we turn our lives (or even just a single day) over to the charts and graphs of the astrologer. Even if it’s “just for fun” and supposedly harmless you’re giving up quite a bit. You’re saying that basically your life isn’t for you to determine—it’s already been decided by the rising and setting of the stars and planets, millions and millions of miles away at the hour of your birth. To say that your astrological chart determines your personality, your lifestyle, even your chances for success in life precludes the possibility of free will. It tells us that we’re not able to change our personalities, our situations, or even maybe our thoughts from moment to moment. If something doesn’t work out it wasn’t “in the stars.” If a relationship fails it’s because “their signs weren’t compatible.”
I suppose that sort of thinking excuses us from taking responsibility for our days and our lives as well; anything that goes right or wrong is the fault (or credit) of the heavens.
Hopefully by now all this sounds a little Bronze-age to you. If not, read on.
It seems to me that what people would really want is the idea that they’re in control of their fate; that the choices they make every day shape the outcome of their lives—not the predestination determined by the placement of a distant planet relative to the position of some faraway stars. An examination of an average person’s life story will easily show nothing to do with the desire to be in control of one’s destiny or not, it’s a simple concrete fact. The choices you make shape the life you live, the personality you have, the people you surround yourself with. It doesn’t matter if Jupiter is in Scorpio, if you choose to do or say something it’s those words or actions that have the effect.
Let’s take another example, just to be thorough. astrology.com for June 10th 2010 (those two other horoscopes above were also from astrology.com) says that an Aquarius should “Reconnect with old friends or family members — you’ve got stories to tell each other, but more importantly, you need to reinforce each others’ memories of past events. They don’t stay fresh forever!” and while that’s certainly a good, cheerful, saccharine piece of advice to follow it would be letting a paragraph on a website choose for you what to do that day. Should you spend your evening on Facebook hunting down old college friends? Sure, if that’s what you want to do. I won’t argue that reminiscing is sometimes a good thing to do, but shouldn’t someone born on, say, January 28th decide for themselves how to spend their day? Granted I can come up with a few less desirable things one could spend their Thursday doing and I suppose atrology.com is as good a site as any to get any idea of what to do if you can’t come up with anything on your own.
But what are the mechanics of astrology? Our friend with the January birthday is said ruled to be by the motion of the planet Mars. I’ll take that to mean that Mars somehow dictates what that person does, says, how she acts or goes about her day. Let’s look at the real influence of Mars, 48 million miles away: The light from Mars is nothing but a dim reddish (if you’re lucky to catch it on a good day) pinprick in the sky that’s already 15 minutes old by the time it reaches Earth. And then it barely has enough energy to excite the red cones in our eyes. The gravitational influence of Mars upon things on Earth is essentially nonexistent—the motion of Mars couldn’t tip over a penny.
You’ve a choice here. You’ve either got to accept that you’ve got no control over your life, and that it was determined at your birth by the order of the heavenly spheres or that you can in fact determine the outcome of your life or your day. It’s all or nothing for either side, and to give astrology any credence at all is to throw out free will in exchange for incomplete thinking and unsubstantiated claims.
If you’re going to be a mature, rigorous thinker you’ve got to dismiss astrology out of hand.
(If you don’t want to be a mature, rigorous thinker you’ve got more problems than even an astrologer can solve. You’re beyond help and you’d might as well go have your tarot read or your palm or something.)
My second contention is that astrology can be a barrier to self discovery and understanding. I said above that astrology is dangerous, and this is how. If you’re going to base your thinking about yourself on your “chart” then you concede the ability for self discovery and self improvement to the astrologer. You’re basically giving up on the idea that you can change, improve, grow. Everything about you was set when you were born. It’s your fate. It’s in the stars.
And that’s simply a fallacy anyone who’s gone from a child to an adult can easily set aside. Hopefully you don’t have the same temper-tantrums you once did when you were three years old. Hopefully your ideas and opinions about things have changed over time. Hopefully you won’t let a bunch of broad generalizations dictate how you think about yourself and how you relate to other people. Granted, most of the descriptions of people based on their astrological signs are encouraging and upbeat and might help you feel better about yourself. After all, no one wants to go looking for their sun sign and find out that they’re a deadbeat who can’t get ahead in life. We’d all rather be told that we’re curious, fearless, enthusiastic, and get along well with others.
It’s kind of disappointing to accept that most people in our culture have just about the same kind of experiences and just about the same kind of traits. We are all different in our own ways, but we’re also only human. If you get broad and general enough, you can come up with descriptions that easily fit anyone regardless of the month of their birth. The danger lies in accepting these broad generalizations of ourselves as molds for us to fit in or predetermined sets that we should play on. Who you are as a person is more than a blurb in a newspaper or a couple paragraphs on a website—our personalities are constantly changing with each new thought, each new day, and each new experience.
My last, and (hopefully) short point to make is that I have to put astrology in perspective for myself, from a Buddhist perspective.
I’ll briefly digress and offer a Christian perspective as well, since a lot of people I know are Christians of various flavors. Aside from those Calvinists who believe that life is predestined from Creation, most Christians believe in free will-the idea that God lets them determine the shape of their lives. Most would also (somewhat contradictory) agree that God has the final say in all things, not the daily horoscope or a chart based on someone’s birthday. In this way astrology also contradicts most Christian thought and theology and might be some kind of a sin being that it stems from ancient pagan beliefs. You’ll have to ask your minister, priest or pastor about it.
The Buddha teaches us that all conditioned things (basically everything around us) have three characteristics. Two of them apply to astrology specifically: Anicca (which, not entirely coincidentally I have tattooed on myself) means “inconstancy” or “impermanence” and teaches that everything is in a constant state of flux. Everything’s changing all the time. The second principle is Anatta, which means “non-Self” and says, in part, that people are characterized by an ever-evolving consciousness and thus are never permanent or static entities. My “self” today will be different from my “self” tomorrow—even if it’s in a small way. The air in my lungs will be different, the food in my stomach will be different, the thoughts in my head will be different. I’ll change.
So if everything’s changing all the time and there is no separate “self” to my being then there’s nothing that could possibly be “written in the stars.” The truth is (as the Buddha teaches) that aside from the few things I have little control over my life is basically mine to determine, regardless of the position of Venus in relation to Capricorn.
And finally, earnestly, we take today’s reading from the Book Of Sagan:
Astronomy and astrology were not always so distinct. For most of human history the one encompassed the other. But there came a time when Astronomy escaped from the confines of astrology. The two traditions began to diverge in the life and mind of Johannes Kepler. It was he who demystified the heavens by discovering that a physical force lay behind the motions of the planets. He was the first astrophysicist, and the last scientific astrologer.
The intellectual foundations of astrology were swept away three hundred years ago and yet astrology is still taken seriously by a great many people. Have you ever noticed how easy it is to find a magazine on astrology? Virtually every newspaper in America has a daily column on astrology; almost none have even a weekly column on Astronomy.
People wear astrological pendants, check their horoscopes before leaving the house—even our language preserves an astrological consciousness. For example take the word disaster: it comes from the Greek for “bad star.” The Italians once believed that disease was caused by the influence of the stars: it’s the origin of our word “influenza.”
…
What is all this astrology business? Fundamentally it’s the contention that which constellations the planets are in at the moment of your birth profoundly influences your future. A few thousand years ago the idea developed that the motions of the planets determined the fates of kings, dynasties, empires. Astrologers studied the motions of the planets and asked themselves what happened last time that, say, Venus was rising in the constellation of the goat? Maybe something similar would happen this time as well. It was a subtle and risky business.Astrologers became employed only by the state. In many countries it became a capital offense for anyone but the “official astrologer” to read the portents in the skies. Why? Because a good way to overthrow a regime was to predict its downfall. Chinese court astrologers who made inaccurate predictions were executed. Others simply doctored the records so that afterwards they were in perfect conformity with events. Astrology developed into a strange discipline—a mixture of careful observation, mathematics and record-keeping, with fuzzy thinking and pious fraud.
Nevertheless astrology survived and flourished. Why? Because it seems to lend a cosmic significance to the routine of our daily lives. It pretends to satisfy our longing to feel personally connected with the Universe.
Astrology suggests a dangerous fatalism: if our lives are controlled by a set of traffic signals in the sky, why try to change anything?
[Take] two different newspapers published in the same city on the same day. Let’s see what they do about astrology. Suppose you were a Libra that is born between September 23rd and October 22nd. According to the astrologer for the New York Post, “compromise will help ease tension.”
Well, maybe. It’s sort of vague.
According to the New York Daily News’s astrologer: “Demand more of yourself.”
Also vague but also pretty different. It’s interesting that these predictions are not predictions, they tell you what to do but they don’t tell you what’s going to happen. They’re consciously designed to be so vague that it could apply to anybody—and they disagree with each other.
Astrology can be tested by the lives of twins. There are many real cases like this… one twin is killed in childhood, in say a riding accident or is struck by lightning but the other lives to a prosperous old age. Suppose that happened to me. My twin and I would be born at precisely the same place and within minutes of each other. Exactly the same planet would be rising at our births. If astrology were valid, how could we have such profoundly different fates?
It turns out that astrologers can’t even agree among themselves what a given horoscope means. In careful tests they’re unable to predict the character and future of people they know nothing else about except the time and place of their birth.
Also, how could it possibly work? How could the rising of Mars at the moment of my birth affect me, then or now? I was born in a closed room; light from Mars couldn’t get in. The only influence of Mars which could affect me was its gravity. But the gravitational influence of the obstetrician was much larger than the gravitational influence of Mars. Mars is a lot more massive, but the obstetrician was a lot closer.
Cosmos episode 3 “The Harmony of the Worlds”
Update! I made this into a flashy magazine article looking thing. Download the PDF
