“Rogue, thou hast lived too long!”
Shakespeare’s Antony & Cleopatra [II.v.74]
That’s Cleopatra addressing the messenger with his bad news. Original source of “Don’t kill the messenger.” Might’ve been a Mercury Moment, as the littlest planet starts to unwind from its retrograde pattern.
Just missed “drinko de gringo.” Not an original term, but it certainly applies around here
Taurus: At the very end of this horoscope, the day it is over? From that point, forward, all good, all the time, in Taurus. From May 13, 2010, onward and upward. The hardest part of the scope of this scope is getting Taurus to that date. While it’s warmed up considerably here, there’s still an urge to sleep late. Still cool in the morning with the window letting gentle spring dampness saturate the air with, well, it’s a wet cold. Good weather to be snuggled up, under that winter blanket, leftover at the foot of the bed, just for the time being.
Good weather to have a fat cat as a house mate, warm and cuddly, not real interested in getting up at the dawn’s earliest light. Much to be said for this. Regrettably, I doubt you can spend the next week hibernating in bed. If you can? I’d suggest it. If you can’t? Then use more than the usual amount of caution. Realize that we’ve got a seven-day window to get through. Then it’s good. What can you do between now and then to make sure it’s good when it gets here?
Gemini: The University of Texas is credited with having an excellent Business School. I was in a coffee shop, and I noticed a recent UT Business T-shirt.
“Business School: No Buses, Bridges or Beakers.” Never thought of that as a selling point, but it did make good advertising. As did his companion’s T: “Three letters MBA, BMW.” I liked the first one, better. I liked it a great deal. No Buses, Bridges or Beakers.
I’d adopt a similar mantra for Gemini as we plow through the waning points of both a lunar phase and Mercury being retrograde. If it requires an engineering degree to develop the plan, probably not a good idea these days. If it requires earth-moving equipment, again, probably not a good task for a Gemini, not yet. And most important? Handling caustic substances like harsh chemicals? Not good, not in this next seven days.
While I was just going to mildly mock the Business School T-shirts? Turns out there’s nothing to mock and some good advice there. On that one shirt. You know what to avoid, now.
Cancer: Polaroid Cameras were a technological marvel, at one time. Shoot a picture, them peel the photo out of the camera and watch that film develop in minutes. Instant, permanent records. The cameras got smaller and easier to handle to the point that there was just a camera body, a push button, and the glossy photo emerged from the front of the camera.
As I recall, film is increasingly difficult to find, and the “gimmick” cameras are now all digital toys. Of which I have several.
Polaroid is long and almost forgotten, a mere footnote in technology’s history. I was thinking about a “Polaroid Horoscope” for Cancer. Look through the view finder, click the shutter button, wait a minute and out pops an image. Preserved for the next few years.
Those old photos, though, they do age. Yellow, discolor and eventually fade away, so it’s more a memory of the moment, and it’s less permanent than previously presumed. That’s the problem. The problem you’re facing this week? It’s not a real issue, it’s a Polaroid moment. Won’t last forever.
Leo: A valid sense of the absurd is most important for Leo survival. Now. Not later, not next week, not last week. Varies from person to person, how that will be received and perceived, but that’s my story.
A valid sense of the absurd. An appreciation for the seemingly random and chaotic way the universe seems to be run. Leo Land is like that, for sure. It’s been one untimely event after another, and the problem being? You’re just too close to the issue. You can’t see the big picture. If you could see the big picture, you’d find this greatly amusing. If this was occurring to anyone else, you’d think it was a joke. Or sick and twisted humor. Or something. Which is why I like the sense of the absurd. I live in a land where the absurdist point-of-view is present every day. Almost quotidian. Quite the accomplishment.
A valid sense of the absurd. That’s what you need to make it through the next few days. Seriously, consider how it can all be reduced to an absurdity. Reductio ad absurdum. There, in Latin, you can use that.
Virgo: Shakespeare’s The Tempest might have been the last play that that the literary character we call Shakespeare wrote. I call him a literary character rather than author because, other than his name, there’s a relative paucity of hard facts known.
The main guy in the play is a magician named Prospero. At the end of the play, he symbolically breaks his mighty spear, his magic wand. Thus ends the play, thus ends Shakespeare’s life. Heavy symbolism and it’s all but rote for most traditional Shakespeare criticism. Easy to see how and why.
Big problem: it’s unsupported by any outside data source. There are no “author notes,” which would contain “I used Prospero breaking his staff like me, breaking my own pen.” No notes, not a single clue, other than purely circumstantial. Would never hold up in a court of law. Yet, the myth persists, and there are volumes of Shakespeare Lit Crit to support the idea.
This isn’t about a symbolic end to Virgo life as we know, no, this is about making stuff up — with no critical support — at all. Discern between supposition and verifiable position.
Libra: “Everybody said I was crazy. I opened up the day after Thanksgiving,” a local pit master was explaining, “sure, crazy. You know how many people flocked in here because they were tired of turkey?” He smiled a toothy, wholesome Libra smile.
While I’m not terribly enamored of his pork ribs, and that’s a culinary point with me, I have to admit the rest of his fare is most excellent. Let me recommend the pork shoulder plate. Place looks like an old garage, or gas station, and the yard behind the place is filled with oak. The kind of wood used to smoke BBQ is very important, and the wood’s flavor varies from grill to grill.
It was a slow afternoon and customers dribbled in while I observed local humanity at its finest. The Libra had big plans, but he also listened to what the customers wanted. He doubled up on sausage and cut back on beef ribs. Just what the location wanted. Give them what they want. The customers, the market, will drive desires. This Mercury RX time? Time to get yourself in alignment with market desires. Like my Libra buddy at his BBQ place.
Scorpio: I was digging around, Mercury was retrograde, and I was poking through old family secrets. Recipes. Food. The secret to old family comfort food? Two secrets, really. Sugar and butter. And “fried in shortening,” which is, I think, whipped lard. Was, at the time the secret recipe was written in pencil, on paper that is starting to decay.
I’d save some of these, maybe publish them at some point, but I’m less interested in the recipe itself, as I was looking for a certain mixture. Used to be a beverage, served in the summer time in a great, sweating, earthen pitcher. The more I dug around, what I finally came up with, these are distant memories, and suitable activity for Scorpio when Mercury is like this, digging through old family secrets, anyway.
Butter, sugar, and honey, all high sugar content items, and molasses, again, another high sugar content item. We all know the perils of butter. And maple syrup. And corn syrup. And Karo syrup. See a trend here? Everything was sugar. Not sugar-substitute, not sweetener but various raw and refined versions of sugar. The drink? It was just ice tea with fruit juice — and two cups of white sugar.
No wonder, as a kid, this was a source of comfort. All that sugar? Comfort is necessary, but what used to work? Look at what was really there, no wonder it was a comfort. Have to find a new, less debilitating kind of comfort.
Sagittarius: This happens, tail end of a Mercury Retrograde, which, for us Sagittarius types, it hasn’t been that great. Billy Idol’s Greatest Hits popped into rotation. What caught my ear, the first time around, I was listening to music at a friend’s place and her iPod had a familiar song by an unfamiliar artist.
Cover song by a distinctive non-cover song voice. Billy Idol, a November Sagittarius, just as a point of reference.
Interesting, we’ve both survived near-fatal motorcycle accidents. I got that when I looked up Idol’s info, just digging around. That greatest hits album turned out to be a real jewel. In a jewel case. (Some jokes don’t work once, and the second time? Even more so.)
It’s the tail end of the Mercury retrograde and there’s a lingering influence that’s sent us digging through old stuff. I’ve toyed with a greatest hits book. Hasn’t happened yet.
Idol’s Greatest Hits is a smashing success. Some of the music seems to stand up well over the years, which, I suppose is part of what makes classic, well, classic. That’s one of the few CDs that’s got enough meat on its bones, it’s worth buying instead of just buying a few singles. The Mercury period is officially out of retrograde soon. Unofficially? Like my jokes. Or me hammering on about classic rock.
Capricorn: I was in a coffee shop, local place, downtown. Capricorn girl works there. Voluptuous. Shapely. Flashing dark eyes, smoky allure. A mass of wavy, black curls. Olive skin, Capricorn smooth. Almost like porcelain, only not. Name tag, first name only, obviously Latina. One evening, must’ve been a Wednesday evening, I was getting a short espresso to go.
I can drink coffee at night, on Wednesday evening, as I like to stay up long enough to supervise the horoscopes, in as much as I have any real say in what happens. I asked that Capricorn for the keys to the bathroom, been a bit of an issue at that place lately. I asked in Spanish, correct local accent. She looked at me, smiled a broad, white tooth smile against her dark complexion, “Huh?” She giggled. “I don’t speak Spanish. What did you want?”
Keys, for the bathroom. Please. Thank you. My misconception, my racial stereotype and my own baggage, all rolled into one. Mercury backwards, while we’re at it. Not that it matters, but my little error, my hasty conclusion based upon observation but no hard facts? Me jumping in with the wrong language, again, my preconceived notion? Not my fault. But it was.
While it was realistic leap of faith on my part? Still wrong. Are you going to use my example of a correct guess that turned out to be wrong, are you going to use that a harbinger of what’s to come in the next few days? Or are you going to do, just like me, and open your Capricorn mouth anyway?
I tried to warn you.
Aquarius: Just a few blocks west of the fabled Alamo, in downtown San Antonio, there’s a hospital, borders on the Riverwalk, again, the stuff of legends. The basement fronts the Riverwalk. Tourist trap. Been there, many times, as a tourist.
San Antonio, birthplace of the Texas Revolution, the source for freedom in the western world as we know it?
Anyway, the basement of that hospital building? There’s a bar. How cool is that? A bar in the basement of the hospital. What a good idea. Why didn’t they think of that before? There’s an oddity that’s not odd, but might seem that way. While I’d seen that bar there several times, stopped in once or twice for revels, I just never realized that it was, indeed, the basement of the hospital. Big, downtown hospital.
Street-level is different from “Riverwalk” level. There are certain striations in life. Lines that can’t be crossed. Lines not etched in sand, but fixed in stone. Between the Mars thing, the Mercury thing, and the Sun thing, you do realize that sometimes, I know — you’re Aquarius — but sometimes? These line are there for a reason. That bar generates income from space that would be otherwise under-utilized by the hospital. It works well for both. And if the food does cause a heart attack? ER is the next floor up.
- Literary equivalent:
“The heavens themselves, the planets, and this center
Observe degree, priority, and place,
Insisture, course, proportions, season, form,
Office, and custom, in all line of order;”
Ulysses in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida (Act I, scene iii)
Pisces: To hear the historian explain, I was on tour in England, in 18th Century England, it was possible to buy “Hell” Insurance. I’m not sure I trust the tour guide as a source of factual data, but that was the claim.
In as much as I’ve traveled there a quite a bit, I do enjoy partaking of tourist activities. Only, being from Texas and all, I have a stout BS detector. Which was going off with big alarms at that comment.
But it might be true. I’m not sure. Perhaps you care to dig around an get back to me on that? The bit about “Hell Insurance” for the eternal fires and damnation, and all that stuff? Be nice to get it, but I wonder if that kind of insurance can only really come from one of two places, one is church and the other is internal.
Without getting into a metaphysical discussion about whether we’re in hell on earth and heaven is anything after this? Avoiding that, I was more worried about the BS detector. Get back to me about the Hell Insurance, factual data, if possible. Which reminds me, in the Pisces horoscope, I’ve got to remind you to do your own research these days. Can’t always trust your own BS detector, not under the Mercury/Jupiter/everything else influence.
Aries: Mercury is starting to slow down and starting to turn around. Good news, we hope.
In Aries land, I’m reminded of a series of images I’ve collected over the years. One of the shots is a little contrived, or not as artfully framed as I would like, and the problem is, for that one image, it’s just a brick wall, but for that one image? There’s a telephone line guy-wire in the worst possible place. Unless, of course, you’re a telephone pole, then, I suspect that the guy wire is in the correct place — provides support and stabilizes the pole. From an artistic and aesthetic view, though, that’s a wire right in the way. Ruins an otherwise picture-perfect image, texture, bricks, colors, all of that.
One friend, while I was musing about this, one buddy suggested I just photoshop the wire out. Relatively easy, no?
No. It’s not easy. Can be done. Just takes time, and let’s face it, I’m too lazy to spend hours with a mouse and keyboard, just to make one picture slightly more pleasing. Too much work, takes too long, gain isn’t worth it.
Oddly enough, that one image has gathered a lot of attention, but that has nothing to do with me. While it can be done, this next few days, how much effort is it worth? Do the results justify the expenditure and labor?
