Strictly speaking, Mercury is no longer retrograde as of 8 PM Monday night.
I was chatting with an informed client – the best kind – and she looked it it up.
“10:16 PM Monday night.”
Eastern time, didn’t think of that, huh. Gemini, they’re like that – a great source of trivial information. Sometimes unsorted. Have to take the data the way it happens.
Looks like, according to my software, Mercury goes direct at 8:16 PM, Central Time. Not that I’m counting down the hours, minutes and seconds, not me. But there is that.
The problem is, looking at that same data, Mercury doesn’t budge off its two-degree mark for the remainder of the week. To naked eye observation, Mercury will look like a bright star, right before sunrise, for the next couple of mornings. That’s about it. No real big change. Or rather, nothing that isn’t covered in the audio (free) or video (paid subscribers only) message.
I was stuck on the highway, in a neighbor’s little Hybrid, as I was driving to far north Austin for a quick TV spot. Low clouds scudded across the sky, a few big drops of rain, then a blowing sheet of rain, then a dry spot. I got to thinking about one afternoon, or an evening, on a motorcycle, many long years ago. Memory was a little fuzzy, but the more I thought about it, the more I recalled.
It was a Thursday, summer, in July, in Dallas. I was working in North Dallas, and living close to the south side. I must’ve left work at 6 or so, the sun was low, not really breaking through the heavy cloud cover, making it feel like night. Warm summer night, me, in a helmet, t-shirt, jeans, boots.
Headed south, I turned west on the loop around Dallas, looking at the rain clouds and sheets of rain headed towards me. I was hoping to skirt around the edge of the storm in a mad, rush hour dash homeward. The big loop arced westward, then southward, and the very leading edge of the storm’s rain was just hitting the eastern edges of the loop. I recall, probably from an overpass, being able to see what was happening, at rush hour, with that storm.
Youthful optimistic ignorance is wonderful. I had that in boat loads. Still have the ignorance, but the optimism is tainted by humanity and reality. I thought I could outrun the storm front. I was thinking about that very afternoon, wondering what to do with the image. What I recall, there was a wreck on the freeway, all traffic was diverted to a single lane, the storm caught me, I got soaked.
At 50, or 70, miles an hour, rain doesn’t feel like gentle raindrops ponderously and lugubriously landing on one’s head. Each tiny droplet of water stings. Each is a micro shot of pain, like an artist’s sand etching away at glass. It wasn’t pretty, I was soaked, and I’m wondering what the point was. That big, black cloud rolling up on the Dallas skyline, the highway, stretched in front, the very idea of outrunning the rain?
Two Meat Tuesday (the book)
astrofish.net
(cure for the common horoscope)
Maverick:
While some faithful might think that the term “maverick” refers to a renegade, the term derives from a San Antonio rancher who refused to brand his cattle, no, this about a different Maverick – one who is definitely unpopular in South Texas.
I don’t care about the sport, the teams, or much else. What I do care about is that guy’s writing and observations. Brilliant.
I never claimed to be objective, but that’s a stated bias with my work, from the opening.
Footnote: image
