Big Mamma and Sunny Boy on the road to The City Of Angels.
Sunny Boy was born 75 years ago today, in the cruel heat of Shreveport, Louisiana. I know how hot it is there during this time of year since I decided to stop at one of Harrah’s river boat casinos for a $40 breakfast back in the Summer of ’96. Actually, the breakfast was free. The $40 was my contribution to the Edwin Edwards slush fund. The trip from car to casino scorched my brain. I got on the phone and called Sunny Boy to tell him I was where he was born and couldn’t wait to leave. He laughed.
Shreveport was a place to be born, not stay. When he was a little boy, they packed up their Joad-like-lives and ambled down to Southern California, where characters like “Big Mama,” and “Uncle Johnny” would take center stage in young Sunny’s life. It’s where his mother would divorce and it’s where his troubled father would wrap his car around a tree in a drunken haze and mercifully leave this world.
Born on August 1st, “Sunny Boy” truly suited him. He had all the markings of a shining young Leo. His Sun and Mercury were conjunct, positioned at the end of his 10th House. Sunny was bright. Handsome too. Libra rising conferred good looks and charm. Mars in Scorpio at the end of the first house would serve him well later on. Women always fancied him without his really trying (something I always admired from afar). Jupiter in Scorpio in the 2nd seemed to top off what could and should have been a grand life, promising comfort, coming with a sense of psychological depth and the ability to tap resources for gain and rebirth at key moments. Life could and should have been a series of unending open doors. But it wasn’t.
If you haven’t already figured it out, Sunny Boy was my father and he would have been 75 today. Some of you know that he passed away on March 5th. It was the day that transiting Chiron in Aquarius landed smack dab on my natal Chiron in my 3rd House. Transiting Neptune decided to crash the party as well. Fitting, since I had always felt like he was more my brother than my father in many ways.
We fought like brothers masquerading as father and son. We had come to blows twice and a third time, I was in such a violent rage, that he knew better than to cross a line he had before. I think for the first time in his life, he had actually felt frightened of me and this from the man who once said to me, “If you strike the king, you’d better kill the king.” Like brothers, we would usually patch things up and we’d be best friends again.
I learned about anger from him.
Anger was Sunny’s dark God and I saw it’s daemonic and possessive qualities first hand. I also saw how it could be a liberating force, righteous in the correct application. I spent most of my forty years working on this tricky dynamic, mixing nitro and glycerin based emotions, fueling my early Sex Pistols and Clash punk days and beyond. I have felt it’s self-destructive force and I have seen it’s bright illumination.
Anger is Luciferian at its core. It was the combustive force of rebellion against God. Most of the New Age is Luciferian. Make no mistake. Anger is the vibration of differentiation, separating the self for moments at a time. When anger is not present, the ability to feel a sense of unity is much more palpable and possible. Anger allows us to stand apart. In some ways we have to go through Lucifer in order to arrive at a sense of wholeness. Lucifer is not the end point. Lucifer is not the tip of the pyramid. Lucifer is the bright light of anger and for anyone to come to terms with their humanity, they must come to terms with this–their anger.
Most paradigm shifters are mortified of anger. They are afraid that if they get angry, their whole, carefully constructed temple of dreams would come crashing down around them in a maelstrom of gale force, out-of-control fury. And they might be right. But in not going through the initiation of anger they cannot move beyond a certain point in their own development, no matter how many affirmations or intentions they bundle up in prayer flags of deliverance. What’s even worse is that I believe that their unresolved issues with anger are manifest in senseless slaughter, inhumane acts, genocidal aggression and murder for profit. It’s correlative is cancer and it’s eating us alive. They aren’t alone though. The “common man” has unresolved anger and there’s a whole bunch of people that are really angry without a context for it’s expression. We have these flash points like G8 and G20, which are collective vents of pressure released, but even those were mediated with agent provocateurs, posturing false anger and aggression, which is truly Luciferian in it’s diabolical intent to fool people and erroneously sway opinions.
We’ve got an anger problem and it’s because there is no container for it. It manifests in shotgun bursts of road rage, nasty asides and cutting remarks. The internet has become a lower Bardo for cruel, anonymous, drive-byes and character assassinations. All of these serve to diffuse anger to a certain extent, but it’s kind of like putting a bottle cap on a bursting well head, 5,000 miles beneath the ocean surface.
Beneath the anger is grief. Plain and simple. Ancient grief. Grief as old as the plains and the rains. Grief for the world that we allowed to be stolen from us. Grief co-mingled with the shame that we have been tricked and fooled into believing a particular version of reality, a reality engineered by those with more resources and an avaricious spirit that seeks to consume everything in sight and leave nothing behind.
It’s a galactic plague of locusts that consumes all things, including souls, getting us in on the act of consumption, stoking our appetites to eat one another in a wretched form of social cannibalism. My friend Willow has commented on this and how those deeply invested in the feel good new age movement, just look the other way, not even bearing remote witness to the planetary ouroboros in action.
For better or worse, anger was one of Sunny Boy’s dark gifts he bestowed upon me and I have been in the emotional dojo with it for most of my life. I’m getting better, getting clearer and not afraid to push the button if I have to. Anger is just part of the broad spectrum frequency of emotion we are endowed with. We can sample it if we need to, just like joy, sadness, passion and any number of emotional subsets related to those states.
It’s taken me a while, but I have come to the conclusion that it’s not about feeling eternal bliss, or detachment, or even a sense of never-ending-expectancy, but to be as fluid and mobile throughout the emotional range as we can be. That’s the greatest gift bestowed upon us during our experience here and once we figure this out, then we cannot be played or directed or mis-directed. Our knowing will emerge from deeper and deeper as we trust the inherent guidance of our skillful navigation through our emotions. The way out is the way in. Thanks Sunny Boy. I hope you are resting on distant shores. You deserve it.
14 thoughts on “Happy Birthday Sunny Boy (Leo), The Liberation Of Anger and Lucifer’s Trial”
Your writing about your father is remarkable poetry and a gift after such an intense (I imagine) lifelong relationship – from your description of the chrysalis cracking as he was dying I was deeply affected by your words and the journey of death. Safe passage for both of you now.
I have Mars exactly conjunct my Moon in Scorpio which has given me some very scary moments in my life with regard to anger. Only now am I learning to direct this overpowering emotion to its target and not at my self. There are things in this life that do need to outrage us to the boiling point. The revolutions and transformations that occur are destined. I was always having someone or other trying to put a lid on me and for a long time the discomfort I caused others caused me to self-medicate and put that lid on myself for some kind of a gooey plastic pink peace….which leads to psychosis, so not advised. Anger is like roaring, letting the world know where you are and that you will stand up for what is right and just. Because there are a lot of sick, selfish, greedy, power-mongering, soulless people out there and invariably they’re the ones sitting on top of the pile…and, as Karl Marx doth say… when the pile starts exploding there’ll be no more top anymore.
A beautiful & raw post.
Belated but sincere condolences on the loss of your father, Robert. You write so well. I’m sure he was very proud of his son. Did you inherit the writing talent from him I wonder?
From reading your posts here in the past, and present, I’ve never felt that you were “an angry man” – the opposite in fact. My anntenna must not be well-tuned. 😉
It’s funny Twy. My father was much more into mechanics and tinkering. He was loaded with Cancer and Scorpio in his chart. We were very different in that regard. He was always in the garage and I was always playing sports or making my own comic books. And my mother is bright, but not a writer. I often felt like a stranger in my own family at times.
I’ve been working on the anger thing for a while now and the blog has been a creative vehicle for me to deal with it in a constructive versus destructive fashion.
Yeah but…don’t you think that’s the challenge…to channel our re-actions of anger into avenues of creativity..
having to witness our beautiful planet being plundered by turds and neck-tied retards is an insult to my soul and makes me fekin mad…in a bill hicks…george carlin way… nothing lucyfarian about it …
I think you’re missing my point (slightly) and read my reply to Twilight above you regarding creativity.
BTW, I thought that George Carlin had turned into a bitter loop tape at the end of his life and before Bill Hicks turned into Alex Jones, his rage bordered on cruelty at times. I saw him abuse a woman in an audience so badly that it stopped being funny after thirty seconds and into minute number two it was downright embarrassing. And I really like both guys.
… and don’t you find it interesting on our planet of words…that our emotions of love and anger are not better broken down and catagorized and compartmentalized … like all the other totally irrelevant shit ? grrrr…
August 1 – Lughnasadah of the long and shining hand, and here we tilt, ever so slightly, to the beginning of the fall. In the zenith of light is the dark seed, the raging shadow under a golden sun.
August 1 – Gentle mist in morning gathered into drops on nasturtium leaves, until the day clears to matte blue and the sun crowns all treetops.
“We’ve got an anger problem and it’s because there is no container for it.”
Was there ever a container?
Working downtown by the transit center, the public library, the ink shops and smoke shops, the alley of wretched bars, streets of cigarette butts, broken glass, sidewalks splattered with puke and refuse both human and canine. Rage in the street of the naked man cursing the buses, the tweakers and boarders, statutory and other rapes in the public restrooms: the maimed, the incapacitated, the grossly obese, the scarred and one-eyed, the screaming young mother with a litter of dirty children, girls in tube tops and leggings shouting come-ons to the raging shirtless young males who turn and spit and pump their crotch.
Here is the dark seed.
August 1 is my birthday as well.
Wow. On all levels. . .
Robert, I too experienced anger’s ‘daemonic and possessive qualities first hand’. My father, though brilliant, was
a terrible alcoholic. A Libra Sun, Pisces Rising and Moon in Scorpio. He was out of my life by the age of seven.
But the ravages remained. His premature death at age 52 never afforded us a reconciliation. He’s been dead
for 38 years. A couple of years ago I came to a realization that I’d been angry with him long enough. A true
healing, for me, could not take place until I forgave him. I took that first step. I’m still working on it though.
It’s hard to do when you’re on different planes– but I’m trying. For my sake (and his).
Thank you for sharing this…(it made me cry). Oh, and my first born son is a Leo Sun and Leo Moon…we call him
“Sunny Son”.
The synchs here are really interesting. Thanks for commenting Dee. It’s freaking heroic what we put ourselves through in the incarnation process on this planet.
This was a wonderful article … deep and thought provoking. I have to agree with much of what you’ve stated about emotional balance. I’m convinced that spirituality, despite what the New Age pablum dictates, is connected intrinsically to our emotional health.
Truth, Justice & Angry Ancestors
A frantic fall of freemasons emerging from the night
Good souls one and all who suffer clearer sight
To understand how rituals have fed an evil blight
That starves the world of LOVE so hate can rule by fright
There’s a brotherhood of dead masons now moving to the Light