Chapter 24: The Astrologer and me. I am a shaman. You have been warned!

So, it’s been a while since my last update. Well, forgive me; I’ve been busy not working. I went to Gay Pride in San Francisco; ho hum. I have never been so cold. Four seasons in a day they say. One day after I got back I went with Mum and her boyfriend, Hugh, to Hornby Island, a tiny speck of land with 1000 or so residents off the coast of Vancouver Island. Hugh has a cabin up here. Every summer when I was a boy we spent several weeks on Hornby Island, and the place is precious to me because of the happy memories. But it was strange – do, do, do, do Twilight Zone – to be back after some 20 years away. When we firs arrived on Hornby Island it was raining heavily, and the lot surrounding Hugh’s A-frame cabin was covered with dozens and dozens of the most disgusting slugs – olive green and black and about the size of a small banana! Mum and I spent 45 minutes scooping them up with a shovel and pitching them into the surrounding bushes. We had to do this repeatedly for the first few days until the slugs got the hint. The rest of the week was OK, slugwise. Hornby Island has the best beach in British Columbia, called Tribune Bay with its miles of sheltered golden sand. And the island is covered with tall firs, cedars and arbutus trees, and salal bushes, but the forest here doesn’t have the same dark, brooding feeling of the forest around Vancouver. In fact, Helliwell Park on the island has one of the last standing first growth (ie never logged) Douglas Fir forests in British Columbia. It was a very peaceful and serene feeling, to be standing amongst these huge ancient trees. The circumference of their trunks at ground level was more than three arm spans! I felt like I was standing amongst some very old, wise spirits.

Readers must time travel here: skip forward, by imagining my routine of writing, daily gym, play with cats, movies, see friends, and each day catch my mother rooting through my stuff in my room looking for evidence of God-knows-what. My days seem impossibly full. And, then, I did a writers course out at UBC - a marvelous experience. It was a toss up for me between the fiction or the poetry course. But I opted for the former because I figured: (a) it’s much harder to get constructive criticism to improve one’s poetry; and (b) I had terrible fears about the type of person who would sign up for the poetry section. And, my, my, my – were those fears ever well founded! On the mike night (readings by students from their works in progress) middle-aged woman after middle-aged woman fought with yellowed tooth and laquered nail to get to the mike to read their poems about menopause. Poems that ran such as “Clotted friend, like any blood relative, I miss you when you are gone…”. UGH! I was going spastic in my chair at the back of the room. But the workshop was great, the weather was lovely, and it was fun to cycle around the campus of my old alma mater, which I haven’t visited in more than 15 years! I even visited Wreck Beach, a world famous nudist beach on the university campus, where the nudist hippies sell health sandwiches, blended drinks, and drugs openly with complete impunity, because the city police don’t patrol the area. The fiction writers’ course was a revelation because while my stories were well received, and while I realized that I can make it as a writer, I also concluded that I still have far to go before I produce anything commercially publishable. And moreover, even when you do get published, the money you get is negligible, unless you are Steven King. Eg, $60,000 – and that’s Canadian – for a novel which sells well, and which probably took you two years to write? So I think I’m going to go back to banking for a few more years now, and continue writing on the side. I have just finished a short story about an infidelity in a marriage, but told from the point of view of the family dog. And I am currently writing a comedic story about a woman who locks her children in the refrigerator. Kind of like the movie Serial Mom. The ideas are flowing faster than I can get them down on paper. It’s very disturbing.

Yesterday I went to a very renowned astrologer in Vancouver who did my natal chart. Wow! Spooky stuff. She got my personality down to the tiniest dot over the smallest little letter i, though some of the past lives stuff I had difficulty accepting. But I chose to interpret it metaphorically, rather than literally. So, here’s the interesting stuff. My signs are clustered in fire and earth. I am hugely Leo in personality, with Capricorn rising. Pros: strong leader, courageous, thoughtful, careful. Cons: guarded, difficulty connecting with emotion, hard and defensive, need to learn how to exercise an innate, but underutilized compassion. (Hmmmm, interesting, I thought.) I also have a tendency to go full guns and throw myself into something, and I am a perfectionist so I usually make a success of what I put my mind to, but it is very costly for me in terms of balance in other parts of my life. (Now I’m really starting to pick up and listen!) She also pointed out that the worst thing for me is to be insulted, or humiliated. It is an absolute show-stopper for me; I just don’t know how to deal with it. (How truly she has skewered me here, I thought!) And, in a past life, I was very creative/spiritual, but my work was cut off, destroyed, wiped out by a war or natural catastrophe, and my job in this current life is to finish it. I died a violent death in a previous life; she said she had strong visions of disembowelment. And I would relive this over an over again in each life – at this point, my face must have looked stricken, because she hurridly added “in a much milder fashion of course” – until I overcame the creative/spiritual block. (Lovely. My stomach is somersaulting already!). Jupiter is transient in my life starting very soon, which indicates that I will “almost certainly” fall in love over the next year. (Yay!) But the relationship will be marked by intense power struggles, which are meant to be a learning process for me. (Oh no! NOT AGAIN!) And now the coup de grace: Madame Astrologer told me that it was very clear that in a past life – “perhaps the one in which I was sacrificed and disemboweled” – I had strong shamanic powers, and they are latent in me life now. It will apparently be healing for me to get in touch with those shamanic powers – see above my spiritual connectedness to trees etc – and become a compassionate healer! But, hey, I thought. Shamanic powers! How cool. So, folks, don’t humiliate me or insult me. Don’t piss me off! You have been warned!

Idiot alert: Do NOT, I repeat do NOT go see the movie AI. Cloying Speilbergian sweetness starting at the very point about 1/3 through the movie when he took over from Stanley Kubrick. Totally puerile. And virtually unintelligible at the end. (You know when the director is forced to introduce a voice-over right at the end of the film to explain its conclusion, that he has totally lost his way.) I have decided I will never see another Speilberg ever again. They make me into an emotional bulimic.

Oh, the results of the Canada poll? Inconclusive, though most respondents reported receiving an earful when they have mistaken Canadians for Americans. But one Spaniard said I was too hard on Canadians. (You are such a nice boy, Jose!) And most readers simply did not respond at all. They, like me, are probably bored of the subject of Canada, or perhaps they don’t read my e-mails. (But they should. I am, after all, a powerful shaman!)