They Love Me For Hating Them

That silver trumpet Sidney's wealthy grandfather bought him was the most beautiful object I'd ever held me my hands. Even if it was for just a little while. I was eleven years old. It was the most complicated machine I'd ever seen. I stared in amazement at how the elongated tube twisted and turned and how the air Sidney blew into the end of it was manipulated by the valves. I wanted one. I wanted a silver trumpet like that more than anything I ever wanted. I begged my parents to buy me one. Their adamant refusal was the first time I realized they were too poor to buy something that expensive.

That wasn't the end of it though. My father talked to the band director, who suggested that a brass cornet would be less expensive than a silver trumpet, and to appease me, he bought that instead without me knowing it. My mother couldn't contain herself. I knew that she had been working on my father to try and buy me that instrument so I would at least play a musical instrument. Her previous effort to get me to take piano lessons hadn't worked out.
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They gave me the cornet as a surprise at the dinner table one night. The whole family was there. They worked up the suspense until they brought out the brown plaid covered instrument case and proudly handed it to me. I knew when I saw how short the case was that this wasn't what I wanted. It wasn't a trumpet, but something less than that. I was disappointed beyond measure. I got so angry I tried to destroy it. My father's disappointment was palpable. He couldn't afford what he bought me, and I was bitter and ungrateful.

I wasn't just ungrateful. I went berserk. Why would I not? It's my trademark. Worse, my having a hissy fit because I didn't get what I wanted defined my relationship with my father. He didn't deserve being treated that way. Now that I'm an old man sitting around reflecting on my past life I regret what happened back then. It's happening a lot these days.

I suspect that's the real reason I never learned how to read sheet music. I refused to learn to play that cornet. Oh, I played it alright, but as an instrument of torture. My resentment and spitefulness knew no bounds. Eventually, the new band director switched me over to playing the tuba, but I still refused to learn to play it by note. I memorized my parts to play them. I still don't understand very well why that wasn't good enough.

My father was born in Libra. He was an idealist that bordered on being extremely opinionated. I didn't start studying astrology until I was in my early thirties. When I was a boy living in my father's house I didn't knew that Librans are particularly sensitive to their public image. I thought it was exactly what I was told. That my parents held public jobs as school teachers, and that anything their children did was a reflection on them, and threatened their livelihood. It was especially true back when I was young, and even more so in Mississippi.

I learned to manipulate my parents by the behavior I displayed in my formative years. It wasn't that unusual a thing for me to do. I manipulated every situation I could back then, and still do. That's what you do when you have a Scorpio Ascending sign. I didn't know that either when I was growing up. I was told I was evil because I was an ungrateful brat. I didn't know that manipulating people is normal for a Scorpio anything.

Everybody got Scorpio somewhere in their natal chart, and wherever it's located, the aspect of life that location pertains to is where the native is gonna manipulate the world around them. So, it's not just me if that's what you're thinking. It is me, however, that's responsible for figuring out why I"m such an asshole. Everybody got Libra somewhere in their natal chart, and wherever that happens to be will be that part of their life where they're sensitive about their relationship with the public. I just happened to focus on how to manipulate that region of people's lives because it worked with my father sometime.

Everybody gotta do something and have somewhere to go. I don't know why that is, but it seems true enough. The way things went for me is that my spitefulness and bitterness toward the world turned me inward. Soon enough, I realized that I projected my idea of the world on to the other people around me. When that realization occurred, around the age of thirty years old, I eventually realized that wasn't peculiar to me.

Everybody projected who-they-think-they-are upon the other. It didn't take much more figuring to actually see that despite my realization of how things are, that practically everyone else, if they did understand projection, ignored it. For me, that became my real career. Nothing is more entertaining or amusing to me than slyly causing other people to realize they're exactly what they accuse other people of being, and that their ignorance of it makes for great fun. I can't lose. Just making fun of them is exactly what they're looking for help with. That's true misanthropy. They love me for hating them.