August 10, 2004

• Moi-kure-eee Wet-rug-raid

  Yesterday afternoon was a Mercury station.  I didn’t know that until late last night when I checked my email and found the Celestial Weather Report. 
  Meanwhile, Greyfox and I had been busy doing those things we tend to do
  when Merc goes retro:  He left behind in my fridge the dozen eggs
  he had called ahead and instructed me to boil for him the night
  before.  While he was here for a few afternoon hours, I trimmed
  his beard.  At the laundromat later, when he came out of the
  shower I noticed a little tuft under his chin that needed a touchup
  trim.  I was going to do that when we got back to my place before
  he headed back to town.  We both forgot that.  Rich Humbert
  calls the ordinary screwups that most of us do around these times,
  “informational dyspepsia.”

  He was born when Mercury was retrograde and he says, “Those of us with
  Mercury Retrograde in their personal horoscopes, and that’s about
  twenty percent of the population, find their mental processes operating
  at a high level while the rest of the population struggles to find
  those lost keys or puzzle out directions with reversed numbers.”  
  The communication difficulties and memory lapses the majority of people
  experience in retro are the normal state of mind for those with Merc
  retro in their charts.   I have a close friend with such a chart,
  and following his train of thought can be a trip.  Maybe it was
  lucky for me that my mother was in labor for a couple of days before I
  was forcibly delivered with forceps.  Mercury made a direct
  station two days before I was born.  Uranus went retrograde on my
  birthday, but that’s another story.

  Our ISP was down for a while this morning.  That’s typical Merc
  retro stuff.  Another typical example just occurred while I was
  writing this.  The ISP had come back online and the internet
  answering machine took a call from Papa-Do-Run Transport, one of the
  banes of our existence.  That flimsy excuse for a shipping
  expediter handles UPS shipments out here because UPS doesn’t exist in
  our neck of the woods.  Either Greyfox forgot to instruct NA World
  Service to send the latest literature order for our group by USPS
  Priority Mail, or he told them and they screwed it up again.  The
  order before this one got as far as Papa-Do-Run and then got returned
  to NA because Papa-Do-Run “couldn’t find” us.  Eventually, after a
  few phone calls, it got to us via U.S. mail.

  Of course, this situation was set up before Mercury went retro, but my
  exchange with Theresa at Papa-Do-Run was typical.  Her message
  said they had a UPS parcel for our group care of Greyfox, call them
  at….  I got offline immediately and called.  She listened
  as I identified myself and started giving her directions, then she
  started talking over me to someone there, and came back to me to say,
  “He’s already left.”  The driver, with our package presumably,
  though it’s hard to tell from her gibberish.  First she says,
  using incomplete sentences and a hysterical tone, she can deliver it
  and then she says no, “he’s gone already,” so I take that to mean he
  took the package with him even though he doesn’t know where to take
  it.  Three times as she’s babbling on to me she said she’d made
  the call, “as a courtesy,” but she had to be gone.  Once, she
  actually said, “I’m out of here.”  Finally, I cut off her
  hysterically defensive monologue and asked her what she wanted me to
  do.  She quieted suddenly, paused a moment, and said, “Oh… give
  me the directions.”  She didn’t repeat any of it back to me,
  apparently took no time to write it down, just said okay and hung
  up.  I wonder if she’s the same one that used to haul her kids
  around with her on deliveries and let them scribble on our packages
  with crayons.  Oh, well….  Mercury is retrograde.

  I’ve done some of my most prolific and productive memoir writing with
  Mercury retrograde, but it’s a struggle to keyboard.  More typos
  than usual and many other ways to screw up–about as many as there are
  keys on the keyboard, squared.  The memories surface, and if I’m
  wise and prudent (and courageous) I’ll get some of them written
  down.  I first bogged down after I finished the late ‘sixties /
  early ‘seventies, the interesting part of my life.  Scanning in
  all my childhood pics helped pull up memories and motivate me to write
  that portion.  Now I’m into a difficult time, one that for many
  years I tried to forget.  Trying now to remember it… well,
  that’s an iffy business.  But Mercury retrograde can help with
  that, so unless something interesting happens here and now my next few
  entries might be memoirs.

  Meanwhile, today Mercury is conjunct its natal position for me, and
  spang on a major nexus of my “intensity” stellium, AKA the
  curse-blessing pattern.  today’s chart
  shows Mercury (the traditional ruler of my sign, Virgo) and Mars (my
  most elevated planet) both opposite Uranus (which rules my natal chart
  because of it’s station on my natal day).  I just
  uncharacteristically screamed at Doug over something that’s only an
  everyday annoyance around here on most days, seldom cause for a raised
  voice.  Today there is also a T-square pattern, with Moon opposite
  Pluto, both square Jupiter.  Rich says, “This pattern suggests a
  surfeit of information; we may be bombarded with too much to take in
  and process. Our heads may be whirling and buzzing.”  I guess
  that’s what happened to poor Theresa at Papa-Do-Run.

  Jupiter is in Virgo, conjunct my natal Sun / Chiron conjunction. 
  And that’s enough for me.  I’m getting frustrated at all these
  typos.  I hurt my throat yelling at Doug and he still is not doing
  what he said he was going to do.  That situation needs my
  attention, even if in this mood I’m likely to just piss him off and
  trigger more resistance.  I am outta here, anyway!

  Well, not quite…  As I wrote the line above, he thanked me for
  keeping him on task, saying, “I may not appreciate them, but I need the
  reminders.”   I have neglected to mention today’s harmonious trines: 
  between Moon and Neptune (which are conjunct in my chart and in
  Greyfox’s, and those conjunctions of ours are conjunct each
  other’s:  our “twin” star stuff); between Venus and Uranus (I’ve
  been “tough loving” my kid a lot for a couple of days, trying to wake
  him up); and between Sun and Pluto.
  

  • 5:11 pm
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