With rue my heart is laden

With rue my heart is laden
For golden friends I had,
For many a rose-lipt maiden
And many a lightfoot lad.

By brooks too broad for leaping
The lightfoot boys are laid;
The rose-lipt girls are sleeping
In fields where roses fade.

A.E. Housman

1. Sutherland Springs, TX church shooting
2. Santa Fe, TX high school shooting
3. El Paso, TX Walmart shooting

Uvalde, Texas signage. Eerily prescient?

Watching Mercury Retrograde

“That I can keep your counsel and not mine own.”
Hamlet IV.ii.10

I’m on my second Apple Watch. I went from thinking it was a useless technical bauble, a status symbol for some, but the device earned my adoration over the years. Took a few tries to understand what it can —and can’t — do, but I’ve gotten accustomed tracking the miles I walk, or the oxygen level in my blood, and what the time plus temperature might be. Texts, while I usually don’t read them, but I like the notification.

On the first watch, a four, I think, the wrist bands took a while to get a comfortable one, but I eventually landed on plain rubber-like band.

So in Austin the other day, a few days in a row? I pulled my watch off the charger one evening, stretched it on, and snapped the wristband in two. Momentary panic, then a quick search of the rental, then a quick search online, and the horrible realization, too late to get one in the hot summer night, at least as far as I could tell. Several chain stores would be open the next morning; it could wait.

I missed the sleep data. Grateful, though, that I walked into a store, and walked out with new band that only cost, like, ten bucks. Ten bucks, ten minutes.

It was my hubris — the astrologer — that I was making it through this mess with relative ease.

That’s not how it works.

Watching Mercury Retrograde

It’s not always big stuff. I think there’s a dead tree in my front yard, in the midst of a copse of Live Oak, a single thin, arched stem that has no leaves. Thought about borrowing a neighbor’s chain saw, and then? When Mercury is retrograde?

What could go wrong?

Really should take my own advice.

“Keep thy own counsel.”

the Portable Mercury Retrograde

Tuesday at Nature’s Treasures.

May 24 at Austin’s Nature’s Treasures

Natures’s Treasures

4103 N. Interstate 35
Austin, TX 78722
Phone: 512.472.5015

11AM – 5PM, appointments encouraged. E-mail.
“It’s really him,” at the rock shop in Austin.

May 24 at Austin’s Nature’s Treasures

Use the code, “sparkle faerie” at the check out — for applicable discounts.

Price Selection Won’t Be Beat!

Vincit Qui Primum Gerit

“First to arrive gets the best deal.” (Source.)

astrofish.net/travel

• Two-Meat Tuesday – Kramer Wetzel
• Two-Meat Tuesday: Astrofish.Net/Xenon

#Austin

Old Austin, Revisited

To be clear, no one died. But the cause was to help clean out the mother-in-law’s house, a treasure trove of Americana kitsch from the last — long time.

In the shadow of Nature’s Treasures back door, almost.

“We had a reader cancellation, can anyone fill in?”

I wanted to, but I set up other appointments, and as the driving male, figured I had family business, not regular work.

The best part, got an AirBnB for a few nights. Not that the old house isn’t hospitable, but with more than half a century and two millennia of stuff scattered across bedrooms, yeah, too many ancestral memories.

Too many recollections, bugs, dust, spiders, and a single dead lizard, all desiccated. Gratefully, no more rodents thus far.

Old Austin, Revisited

It was the address for last week’s AirBnB that was cool. First off, cleaning out the house? The period feature I love, but only me? Pink tile bathroom.

“No, Kramer, I grew up with that. No. Just, no.”

The pink tile, pink sinks, pink toilet? The plumbing that uses about ten gallons per flush?

So the AirBnB, it was a retro Austin number, and close, plus? Pink tile bathroom, squeal!

There was another factor, compounding memories. The address, the street’s name was familiar.

Thirty years — or more — “Garage Sale” adventures, I encountered a vaguely familiar person. He was heavier, I was lighter, my hair was longer, and he was more challenged, like a tonsured blond monk. Washboard abs and an angry, hardened visage was replaced with grinning Buddhist countenance and merry belly.

“I know you,” and I recited his last name plus first initials.

He smiled, and gave up guessing where we knew each other from. He had Army training, then wound up as Marine MP, Captain. Between that, and his graduate work in social work, he had a far greater mental Rolodex than I did.

“In California, I used to run into former patients,” he said.

I knew him, but he didn’t recall me, not right away.

Think I’ve changed a bit.

As a spiritual mentor, more a teacher along the way, as we are the same era, he was, and his influence continues to this day, as a shining light. More like a fellow on a similar path. He was the first time I heard the term, “Shakespeare as a secular canon…”

At the time, he was living in an inherited sharecropper homestead, same street, just maybe a block or two away. He long since decamped; tony, sometimes tawdry Austin fails on certain levels. I get that. Always looking for the edge where the strange music starts.

Old Austin, Revisited

It was mere blocks away, years, now several decades in the distant past, but passing through yet again, family, futility, and friends, all of that swimming back in my mind.

It’s old Austin, revisited, and a perfect way to see where we’ve been, what’s changed, and what is the same. The neighborhood feels “cool” without some of the trendy, millennial trappings. I counted two or three of the houses still clad in what I’m pretty sure is asbestos tiles, dates the original construction to a certain era. Just a guess, but there are the echos of old Austin, still present.

astrofish.net/travel

If only there was a primer for Mercury’s Retrograde — The Portable Mercury Retrograde.

Portable Mercury Retrograde: astrofish.net’s Mercury in Retrograde

Horoscopes for 5.2.1.2022

The Horoscopes for 5.2.1.2022

Some books are available at

Eagles Nest

1235 Basse Rd
San Antonio, TX 78212

and

Nature’s Treasures

4103 North IH-35
Austin, TX 78722

astrofish.net/books

Taming of the Shrew

Solely spurred by an ongoing series from a real Shakespeare Person, I had a quick thought and commentary about Shrew. Possibly misogynistic, fearful, and narrow-minded as a play, I’ve seen it several ways. Straight, over-the-top, and the best was an all female cast in traditional period costumes.

That’s all-female cast on a London stage, I can’t tell if there was tongue in cheek, cheek-by-jowl, or just plain satire.

Best version I’ve seen, and learned from watching it.

Taming of the Shrew

Another take? Vinegar Girl.

Please support public libraries.

#shakespeare
#horoscope