Archive | Astro Matters

Mercury Retrograde Casualty

I was so into this Mercury Retrograde. Delightful! I crowed. It’s a trickster, engineering sparkly run-ins, bewitching us with time-travel adventures! Then tough-love Saturn entered big-daddy Capricorn on December 19 and it’s been a shite show, not a star shower.

Website hacked, wages garnished for unpaid taxes that in fact I paid, transportation black holes, clusterfuck communications, unseemly encounters applying exclamation points to long-simmering emotional run-on sentences. Then there’s the U.S. Plutocracy taking its reality-TV larceny to new let-em-eat cake levels: Climate change denial. Orwellian language control. The destruction of national monuments and healthcare for millions. Emboldened Nazis. Stolen Supreme Court seat. Crushed net neutrality. Cabinet departments handed to people bent on destroying them. Tax welfare for corporations.*

Am I learning? Yes, motherrrrrr, I am. But these lessons are proving as charmless as a Masshole when the Sox are losing. The good news: today’s winter solstice is sure to puncture this overarching darkness. In the meantime you can find me cowering with Gracie beneath the covers with champagne, hot sauce, and oranges from Rachel, laughing like a hyena with (not at) the brilliant sorceressery of Broad City and trying valiantly not to check my phone. Bright light to you, loved ones.

*Hat tip to Shawn Levy for breaking it down.

My Wrinkle in Time

Tonight I walked home with the sunset and slowly up the stairs to my pre-war apartment, quiet and calm and drifting on a cloud of Ella Fitzgerald and twilight. I was wearing a Harris Tweed coat and a little felt hat, and it suddenly hit me that this moment could have taken place any time in the last sixty years. There once again at my kitchen window with my beautifully striped permakitten I smiled at the citysky and at at all the other women through time who’d watched the heavens from the land where I was perched. When we surrender to its magic, Mercury retrograde opens portals to other eras like a time machine that doesn’t believe in time at all.

Space Crone Vs. the Mercury Retrograde MTA

I was racing to the subway and forgot my headphones because it’d been a while since I had to block out my immediate surroundings, which is to say I’d been blissfully living in the country. So I got on the L and immediately felt like weeping because I was bombarded with vocal frye club prattle. Then a boy danced onto my car and announced he was selling a pair of iPhone headphones for $10. Well, you just knew they were used and nasty but it gave me an idea so I bought them (for $5, there’s no wet behind my ears) and before heading to my destination scooted over to the Apple Store to trade them in for ones that worked. I mean, in all my years in this city no one’s ever sold headphones on a car I’ve been on before so what are the odds it happened today? But that’s the NYC shuffle, isn’t it? Everything’s a struggle but there’s magic thrown in to lighten your load. I just wish I still was as sure I was as a young woman that this hard-won magic is worth it.

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy