Mars and Pluto in Deadwood

After a couple of days of foreplay, Mars and Pluto had a rendezvous at 24 Sagittarius this morning at 9:44 am PST. The symbolism: nuclear (or nuc-u-lar, depending on how you vote) weapons (John Ashcroft exploited this theme only yesterday), transportation disasters, unbridled hostility and violence.

Among other things, of course. My friend Natori, with Mars marching across her Ascendant, experienced the Mars/Pluto/Sagittarius combination in the form of a couple of Mormons showing up on her doorstep, for the first time in the many years she's lived in her house. Onward Christian soldiers (Mars in Sag) !

Thankfully, I'm experiencing this conjunction, so far, only in the realm of dreams. I don't usually remember dreams or think much about them, but last night a graphic and completely uncharacteristic one grabbed my attention. I was chattering with some nice, if somewhat unkempt and eccentric, blonde man, when suddenly he slumped against a wall. I thought he was just tired. Then another guy (who, I swear, was Al Swearengen from Deadwood) appeared and told the blonde man, in a calm, menacing voice, "In a few minutes you will realize that I've sliced the back of your head open and that you are dying."

Ack! Murder! Menace! Horror! Not my kind of thing at all. But if you are, in fact, every person in your dream (true? where have I heard/read that?), I am the victim, the murderer, and the horrified onlooker. So at some level, anyway, I guess I'm pissed off, afraid, and freaked out. And John Ashcroft is the terrorized, the terrorist, and the terror.

Today, the unholy alliance of Mars and Pluto signals high noon in Deadwood, and all of us have itchy trigger fingers. We are all ready to shoot, all about to be shot, and all standing on the sidelines, fascinated and horrified.

Either that, or it's something I ate before bedtime.

Good night, Johnny.

Johnny Carson has died.

From Salon:

Carson choose to let 'Tonight' stand as his career zenith and his finale, withdrawing into a quiet retirement that suited his private nature and refusing involvement in other show business projects.

Johnny was a Libra, the acme of cool Libran charm. But with the sun in the twelfth house and a Scorpio ascendant, he was notoriously private offscreen. That didn't matter to us; our experience of Johnny's twelfth house/Scorpio energy was that he always felt just right late at night, in the dark, in the privacy of your bedroom. You'd be lying there in bed, half-asleep, or wishing you could be. And there Johnny would be, flickering away on the TV, graceful and deadpan and ... comforting. It wasn't a Mr. Rogers kind of comforting, or a Walter Cronkite kind. Johnny was not avuncular or warm; he was Mr. Cool, with Mercury/Saturn rising in Scorpio. Yet considering he was such a smart-ass, Johnny inspired tremendous warmth.

It's been years since he left the Tonight Show, and it's surprising that the news of his death should hurt so much. I suppose losing the icons of our youth is wounding because they take little bits of our youthful selves with them as they go. At least with Johnny, you get the sense those youthful fragments are in good hands. Vaya con dios, Johnny.

Hell to the chimp

Look for me tomorrow - I'll be the one dressed in black and buying nothing.

Still, look to the day of an event and by observing the aspects the Moon will make before leaving its sign, you can get a pretty good picture of how that event will wash out in the end. For example, I'm just bitter and vindictive enough to be comforted by the absolutely retched aspects of tomorrow's Moon in Gemini. Oh, there are trines to Neptune (pretty fitting for the ultimate Wizard of Oz presidency) and Jupiter (plenty of hot air and overoptimism), but I prefer to focus on the oppositions to Mars and Pluto (the last aspect, representing "the end of the matter"). I feel confident that in the fullness of time, the Chimperor will get his comeuppance.

Here's something completely unrelated to that, and kind of funny. Last night, between the Sun entering Aquarius at 3:22 pm and the Moon square Uranus at 11:55 pm, our electricity went out. (For those who don't get the joke, Aquarius/Uranus rule electricity.) It was sort of fun staggering around looking for candles, cooking on the gas stove by candlelight... I felt like I was on one of those PBS programs where they put a 21st century family in a 19th century situation and let them see just how tough life was back then. Except, you know, I didn't have to make my own soap or anything.

Acceptance! Validation! Money!

I wrote a rather cranky and marginally self-serving article about how so much astrology writing is kind of boring (I don't put it that way, exactly; but there really is no nice way to put it, is there?), and how taking an ethnographic approach might spice up our astrology writing. Said article has, surprisingly, been accepted for publication in the April/May issue of The Mountain Astrologer.

This article was the direct descendant of a testy email exchange I had with a reader of my website last spring. I'd been feeling vaguely guilty for writing so much from a personal point of view, often using very little explicit astrology at all in my articles. All it took was for someone else to complain about it, though, to get my back up and make me fight for the right to be reflective. So in a way, she did me a favor.

Or did she? We'll see once it's published. Something tells me it's liable to rub some people the wrong way. What's a nice girl like me, with a seventh-house moon, doing pissing people off all the time?

Days of our Hives

I've got hives - itchy, maddening hives, from my knees to my ankles and from my wrists to my elbows. Interestingly, they erupted just about the same time my progressed Moon entered Capricorn - ruled, of course, by Saturn; and transiting Mars entered my first house (representing the body's "first line of defense," as it were). According to the marvelous Rex Bills' Rulership Book, hives of the skin are ruled by - you guessed it! - Mars and Saturn.

Astrology rules.

And hives suck.

The Bogart moon, and dad's nose.

Last week, while my back was turned, my progressed Moon flipped into Capricorn. Guess that explains my sudden insatiable urge to watch Humphrey Bogart movies over the New Year's weekend: Bogie was a Cap.

And so was my dad, who would have turned 79 years old today. Like Bogie, Dad was a man's man, a hard-ass, no bullshit, hard-drinkin', hard-workin' tough guy who turned to goo when it came to the women in his life. I guess I'm a lot more like him as I get older; the other day, at the end of one of my epic rants about some thing or other - the ones that are more and more frequent and vicious - I paused and observed, "Gee, I'm a lot more intolerant than I thought. I hate everybody!" "Who'd you get that from?" Jonny asked. And I realized that I seem to have inherited a bit of dad's hard streak, along with his nose.

Guess I've got 2.5 pr. Moon in Capricorn years to come to terms with that, maybe find a way to funnel it into strength instead of flintiness.

I think I'll hang on to some of dad's cynicism, though. For instance: Nice to see the administration got off its Scroogey collective ass and increased its aid to the Tsunami survivors. How long do you reckon it'll take until Halliburton gets handed a nice, juicy contract to rebuild Thailand?