Happy Birthday Sunny Boy (Leo), The Liberation Of Anger and Lucifer’s Trial

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.