Tuesday, Oct. 18, 2005 I'LL ASSUME everyone reading has survived the lunar eclipse; but you may need to dust your hat off. I had this whole kind of normal typical extremely busy day of writing astrology planned for yesterday, and I was at the "almost finished" point of the Lemonade December horoscope (when you get as far as Cancer, you're "almost finished," according to Yasmin Boland), when I noticed what a beautiful day it was outside. One of the Book of Blue models you've seen portrayed on the cover of Planet Waves a couple of times, Melissa, had expressed a highly enthusiastic desire to be photographed nude at Pere Lachaise Cemetery (where Jim Morrison, Samuel Hahnemann and a few other notable freaks are buried). I said I would call on the next nice day. So, it being true that there was beautiful weather in Paris Monday, I called her and next thing I knew, we were poking around a quiet corner of this huge graveyard, really, a mausoleum yard, right near the entrance and the guard house, but in this odd spot where nobody seemed to go and nobody famous was buried. I'll be sharing some of those photos, and others from the pleasantly creepy genre, once the Sun arrives in Scorpio. This mission was part creativity and part my desire to make an impression on the cosmos, apropos of the eclipse, that I really like taking pictures; this, in keeping with my "talk to eclipses with actions, not just words" theory. The photo project continued on the Metro where, during rush hour, without any prompting at all, my devoted photographic subject spontaneously began to disrobe on various crowded rush hour trains (to wit, the #3, the #5 and the #10), much to the amazement and entertainment of bystanders, as I dutifully documented the experience. In case anyone is wondering, such inclinations usually have nothing to do with sexual promiscuity (which is in itself an arbitrary term based purely on a moral judgment). If such exists, it's is another critter entirely. This is more like creative intensity and the urge for a different kind of expressive freedom than most people would dare to consider. It is only the repression of sex that makes nudity a powerful erotic statement, so in a way you cannot separate the two; but one is more in the symbolic realm, conveying an idea. As well, some people just like to push the edge for fun and, and as Melissa (who is from Italy, and studies music here in Paris) said yesterday, "People should be naked everywhere because everyone is already naked." Meanwhile, speaking of the president, this must be a very tense week. The newspapers are reporting that nobody really knows what Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor investigating potential crimes of the Bush administration, is going to do -- but he has until Oct. 28 to do it. And from what I am reading in the blogosphere, the press conference is going to be in the Dirty City, not in Chicago, where he is based. There may or may not be criminal prosecutions in the Valerie Plame spy outing scandal, which now points to the top political assistants of Bush and Cheney and this thing being called the Iraq Working Group, a committee in the White House which was devised to con the public and political community into thinking that Iraq was some kind of real threat (updates appearing at http://rawstory.com/ ). Whether there are criminal prosecutions or not (and I have predicted that there will be, based on the chart for the Bush Administration II), we do need to relish this moment, wherein some of the most vicious war criminals of our times, men accustomed to absolute power, are contemplating what rather unpleasant fate may befall them, and hoping their evil enchantment will hold up. We can only hope that Frodo makes it with that magic Teflon ring to the Cracks of Doom in time. Apparently the "conquer Iraq" ideology is a brainchild (if you can call it that) of the Cheney faction; the elder Bush, if you recall, chose to leave Saddam in power after the 1991 massacre to keep stability in the region -- there is an amazing quote from George H.W.'s book on this subject, and if anyone knows where to find it I'll post it here. I believe you can find it on Snopes. One day in the spring when I was roaming North America, I paid a spontaneous visit to my old therapist and mentor Joe, in Woodstock. He told me he was reading the diaries of Marco Polo. Marco traveled far and wide and among the places he visited was Iraq...which at the time was called...Iraq...and the author/voyager comments (paraphrasing): "Unless these people have a very strong leader, they do terrible things to each other." This is not true of everyplace. It is not, for example, true of England, where there is currently a very weak leader and people are still reasonably polite and queue up for the cashpoint without much happening. And it's not true of the United States, where most people still mind their own beeswax and go about getting through the day in relative calm even though there is absolutely no leadership at all except maybe for Oprah. And France could function with no government at all. The people have it programmed into them very nicely, underneath which is a bubbling well of anarchy that comes out a couple of times a year and then goes back into lurking.