"A magnificent comeback after the recuperative year of the Rabbit.  We will throw caution to the four winds and roll up our sleeves for all sorts of grandiose, exhilarating, colossal, overambitious and daring projects.  The indomitable spirit of the Dragon will inflate everything to larger than life size.  Somehow we will find ourselves bubbling with excess energy.  It will be wise not to overestimate ourselves or our potentials in this combustible year.  Things appear better than they actually are.
    On the brighter side, business will be good and money can be generated or obtained easily. It is the time to ask your bank for a loan.  Big spending and lavish plans are the rule of the day.  The mighty Dragon sneers at the prudent and penny-pinching.  He gambles for all or nothing.  He will stimulate us to think and act big, even overstepping the bounds of caution.
    Orientals consider this to be an auspicious year to get married, have children, or start a new business, as the benevolent Dragon brings good fortune and happiness.
    However, this is also a time to temper our enthusiasm and look twice before taking a plunge.  For although the Dragon showers his blessings indiscriminately on all, he disappears when the time comes for making retributions for our errors.  Successes as well as failures will thus be magnified.  The Fire Dragon, (Jan 31, 1976 to February 17 1977) is especially feared, as he wreaks more havoc than the Dragons of other elements.
    In the Dragon's year, fortunes as well as disaster will come in massive waves.  This is a year marked by a lot of surprises and violent acts of nature.  Tempers will flare the world over and everyone will be staging some real or imaginary revolt against constrictions.  The electric atmosphere created by the mighty Dragon will affect us, one and all."

>> Lau, Theodora. _The Handbook of Chinese Horoscopes_  1979 Harper & Row. p. 95
 
 

This year is the year of the Metal Dragon, which means it's all of the above, but with an extra unbending, absolute, fundamentalist, militaristic twist.  All of this emerging-police-state type of ugliness we are seeing is right in line with the energy of this year, and so it might be unwise to try to meet that sort of thing head on.

...Another story from another Year of the Dragon

The Best Part of the Trip.
a memoir
(c) 1992, 2000 M. Komoroski

Time.
Time wound down on the road, crazed, sultry, hard & wild, but it wound down.  Mile markers clicked off, our only clock, two digits, three digits, four, machine-gun sweep-hand counting the distance that counted the time.  1970 Toronado, built when the only thing cheaper than steel was gas, and the only thing bigger than this car was the future, raced an old Plymouth Demon Duster on the Spur of Interstate Seventy out of the District, speedo reading 115 just before it quit, and still we went faster, and faster still, the car stable as a gyroscope, intrepid and uncheckable cutting a swath through swirling aether, a gleaming, beaming, ithyphallic pirate ship from another time.
Dave & I sailed it, four sheets to the wind: four sheets of fresh DC acid, 125 mics per hit, white blotter wrapped in an opaque bag, which served to keep the light out and the dreams in.  We carried a mental pipe bomb we imagined we'd parlay into gas and food money all the way to the West Coast.  But first we were headed to Cleveland.

Cleveland.
Where the Cuyahoga River was so raped and defiled it had actually caught fire a few times as it flowed quiet and unrelenting to the black hole of Lake Erie.  It churned and burned like the nightmare of an alchemist, a beaten child fighting back sporadically to no real effect, as the macabre miracle of burning water left no impression on denizens of that town, the river's display a mute symbol nobody much bothered reading.

Symbols.
But some symbols have substance, mass and heft and points, cutting edges that can open your guts and augur fortunes you never wanted to know, and beneath that Tree of Odin of Eden of you and me and the acid gods all, paying Whitman's "inexorable price" which "must still be paid for the same great purchase." Some symbols yawn like traps on the path to the water hole.

Eden.
I have been there, to Eden, and I have been to Cleveland, and it's not as bad as everyone says.  Not as bad as the safe home places that reptilian cold and subtle constrict and anesthetize till only Panic can rescue you, and you run through the jungle, heading lemming-like for the Edge.

Allison.
Her name means "truth teller."
Allison awaited our arrival in Cleveland, using grammar from a nationless language:  'I want you should come and get out me this place.'
I'd met her in the darkroom where she wore a buckskin dress, beads, two long braids,  accouterments of yet other nationless peoples.  She looked at me like an agent in deep cover and mouthed the password: "Not everybody is into Pranksters, nor even knows who they are.  But I do."
We wandered DC on acid, feeling life surge through us till it was time to go.  She thought I loved her because I told her I did.  What else could I do?  The words sprang like a trap from my lips, bittersweet honey smooth lube trapping lie.  The lie that got her got me too.

Dave understood.
In moments, in moments only, reaching wispy cumulus highs, we talked the crazed chatter of the Big Ideas, laughing like teary eyed Buddas, Pound's "filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor."
Dave.
Mentor friend, optimist, who strode his thin white Minnesota frame into Anacostia to score a quarter pound of pure cocaine.  He got it at a cut rate, since it was part of a haul stolen from the Jamaicans.  Money from the coke bought music, paints, fabric dye, photo film and paper, shrooms, XTC, and time to watch our minds explode and enjoy the show.

1988.
People thought we were gay.  We weren't, and didn't care, which was True Freedom. Gone all of two weeks and our "friends" feared we'd died, certain that some stern God was going to smack us back into line at any moment. We lost our friends, becoming traitors to to our bright futures in the Washington DC of the Reagan-Bush error.

Dave's Flashback.
He told me he'd never had sex, except with his mother, when he was eight.  At nine, he witnessed as his father beat his little sister until she did not move or cry anymore, then load the family back into the car, and drive it off a cliff.  The sister's death was attributed to the "accident."  He could play any musical instrument, the first time he picked it up.  He said, We are the great minds of our generation.  I questioned.  He waved his arms and said, we are on the cutting edge of the student body of one of the best universities in the world.  If we are not the great minds of our generation, then it will be someone a lot like us.

Car
Night quiet humming speed, mosquitoes, moths and beetles tapping smashing martyred on the windshield.  Stop to piss in country dark: wet grass and vines smell musky as fresh come and you look up, through a crystal ball from the inside out -- looking at the past, at stars in places they were light years ago.  God's own TV screen: all of time and space in perspective, made me giddy with anticipation of the unknown, too much too hard too fast for sane and small men, cowering under their roofs at night.

Day comes, the Sun squeezed kicking alive and unknowable with its cutting newborn scream demanding, and we pull into a truck stop on the turnpike.  Careful the light doesn't fry your retinas, what with your pupils still cranked open on the acid.  Day upon us now with the piss yellow light of reason, to keep your eyes on your shoes, and pungent little morning men scurry around, make busy sounds.

Breakfast and showers.
Coming down, gaining apparent mass, losing apparent velocity, passing through Einstein's equation backwards, picking up density.  Would have stopped to sleep, but hearing Allison's call, a black hole vortex love trap sucking me to her, drove on toward Cleveland, Minneapolis, the Badlands, and Points West.
-30-
 

I try my hand at hammering some copper wire.  This is inexplicably satisfying.
 

2.25.99
I spent yesterday like I will spend today, trying to cut through the haze and get something done.  Yesterday I ritually cleaned out the spring, digging gobs of clay and rocks shot through with rust.  The spring has to be dug out periodically anyway, and so when I do it I make it a ritual.  I think about the emotional or physical ailments I want healed in myself and others while I dig the muck out of the spring, smooth the clay, etc. Yesterday there was a rock that was a particular challenge, down at full arm's length extension in the spring.  That had the nasty blood-like rust stuff, which probably explains the iron taste that creeps into the water when there's a drought ... or has till now.  Maybe this will fix it. Additionally, though, this rock represented to me a physical ailment a friend of mine has.  I dug all around it on my knees on the rocks, getting my hair in the water and all, but it was not budging.  So I probed around in the clay with the butt end of a potato rake ( It seems wrong to stick metal tools in a spring.  I did it once and did not like how it felt.)  So I used the wooden handle, and managed to pry out the rock with that.  Then I set up a borrowed vid cam on a tripod shooting up the waterfall and played slide guitar next to it, making my first ever "music video."  It was educational.

3.1.aa5
Spring was clear enough to drink today, and tastes wonderful.
 

Five people have been shot today outside Pittsburgh.  Some of them could be members of my family, but there is no way to know.  Every time a gun gets sold in America, we are all a little less safe, but that's the way the National Rifle ASS wants it, since that is what will keep profits up for weapon makers.  Really, it's a kind of justice: the US supplies both sides of most conflicts, the world over, at least as long as their credit is good.  It's only fair we ante up some bodies into the pot.  We keep these conflicts going in order to have a place to dump our surplus weapons.  That's what keeps the ever-growing "military intelligence" community in business: lining up the next wars, so there's not a backlog of missiles and land mines.
For example, the right wing death squads all over Latin America are US trained (at the School of the Americas, Ft Benning, Ga.)   These people are every bit as bad as Hitler's SS, and they are financed with YOUR tax money.  Soon American Boys and Girls will be down there helping them... and macing any of us who don't like it.  The Moslem fanatics who have taken over Afghanistan were set in motion as an arm of US foreign policy to be trouble for the Soviets.  The US armed Saddam Hussein to fight Iran, and then bombed him because we said he had weapons.  (How did US intelligence know what he had and where? Maybe they gave it to him.)  The US also gave him permission to invade Kuwait, and then betrayed him and went to war anyway.  Meanwhile, of course, we were also arming Iran, in exchange for US hostages NOT being released before Reagan could seize the White House.  It can be real tricky keeping these wars coming.  Often the paper tigers, rogue states, and religious fundamentalists our government keeps trying to scare us with just don't have the bite to give any credibility to the government.  Our "friends," on the other hand, are mainly authoritarian dictators, modeled after Hitler & Mussolini: Marcos, Peron, Duarte, Pinochet, Suharto, all American Puppets.  All careers ended through sheer incompetence.  All stole their countries blind. All protected and backed by the US, most recently in the case of Pinochet.

So since the Military Industrial Complex has kept the world in a perpetual state of low-grade conflict for 50 years, murdering millions of helpless civilians for arms-merchant profits and continued military pork, it's only fair that 20,000 or so Americans get "caught in the blow-by" of this macabre sacrifice, when you consider the huge wealth built on the blood and bones of innocents by our brave armies.

The only satisfaction I can get is in the thought that what comes around goes around.  God is a cosmic jokester.  Mussolini was a perfect punch line to the joke that was Roman power.  It takes a long time, but Justice always has the last laugh.  The Generals and politicians don't believe it.  They think a whole nation can cheat justice forever, just because they themselves have been able to cheat justice all their lives.... well.

Look at slavery.  If the Civil War and subsequent racial and sectional tension is what Justice did to America for a few thousand slaves, what do you suppose is going to happen to us as a result of the New World Order enslaving the entire globe, except for the areas we've designated as permanent weapons dump zones?
 

3.2.5aa
Whirlwinds in front of the house today.  Winds of change.

It's time I wrote the bit about Buggs Bunny, now that the year of the rabbit is over and hence, the excuse to focus on the rabbit totem... Oh well.  Time is relative, and some time is more relative than others.

So as a child I was pretty heavy into Buggs.  He had a depth and a resonance that was entirely missing from Speedy & the Chopper Bunch or (gack) the Super Friends.  I liked that it wasn't a straight-up good vs evil thing.  Oh, we were always on Buggs' side in the conflict, but not because he was always "right."

Later in life a friend turned me on to the notion that Brer Rabbit in the Uncle Remus stories was a kind of slave hero, surviving by stealth in a world where powerful enemies sought to make a meal of him.  These stories on one level are object lessons on how to behave in a peasant society, and on another level they are like Zen Koans.  For example, as R. A. Wilson & others have pointed out, the Tar Baby story illustrates the principle that you become attached to whatever you attack.

Later still, I learned that the rabbit is a very powerful totem animal in many Native American systems, a trickster no less in power than the coyote, but also with fecundity as a major part of its survival strategy, so you get the sex energy in there too.

That's when I started to decode Buggs, see him as a kind of a stripped down Hayoke, or trickster figure, and I have compiled a list of characteristics linking Buggs to traditional trickster mythos.
 

1.  Plays tricks on other characters out of boredom.
1a  Usual pattern: boredom+potential victim {maybe justification?} -->  trick --> success  --> Pride --> trick--> failure  --> caught in his own machinations  -->  pulls sex-change act to escape --> no longer bored.

2.  Lives in the earth, in his hole.  If this were dream imagery, we might say it was symbolic of the womb of the mother.

3.  Wins against stronger characters by using their strength, lust, pride, greed against them.

4.  Can easily shape-shift into the form of an irresistible female of the species of his pursuer, causing him to stop chasing Buggs for food, and begin chasing Buggs for sex, culminating in the inevitable wedding scene...

5.  Cannot resist sex himself with a female of his own species (they all look good to him,) even when he knows the pink bunny is really a warty old "witch"  (sorry friends)  and still laughs like one...
5a  Cannot resist "Carrots" either.

6.  The name Buggs, confirmed bachelorhood, constant references to the film Casablanca ("This looks like the beginning of a beautiful friendship;") cross dressing, and the oral thing with the carrot all suggest bisexuality.