Boy, was I wrong!!!

About  Harry Whittington–you know, the guy who was shot in the heart by Dick “Deadeye” Cheney.  I was talking about the shooting with my wife the other day and I observed that since the guy was a friend of Chney’s he was probably a war criminal and deserved to have been shot.  Nope.  Turns out he was pretty decent, for a Republican, especially on the crime issue.

As a member of both  the Texas Board of Corrections and the bonding authority that builds prisons, he knew something about the penal system.  He knew that the severity of sentences has no effect on crime.  A direct quote from him:

“Prisons are to crime what greenhouses are to plants.”

Right on! Get well soon.

Credit–thanks and a tip of the Greyfox fedora to Molly Ivins, who supplied the above information in one of her most excellent  syndicated columns.

The Age of Aquarius:  what it means

One reason I love astrology is because of  the way it helps me understand what is going on now.  It is far from infallible, but it is a darn sight more reliable than, say, the daily weather report.  Or triple-bypass surgery, for that matter.  Anyway, I intend to expound here on the Age of Aquarius and what it means, but first, I will explain–more or less–what an astrological age is.

Astrological ages are delineated by the precession of the equinoxes, which in turn arises from the fact that the planet wobbles on its axis due to gravitational forces exerted by the Sun on the bulges of the oblately spheroidal Earth at the Equator.  As you know, the earth is somewhat tilted relative to the plane of the ecliptic–this is what makes seasons.  In the temperate zone, at different times of the year, sunlight is more or less direct–most so at the summer solstice, when the days are longest and the sun appears to be most nearly overhead.  Winter is just the opposite–short cold days.  On the equinoxes, the days have twelve hours each of light and dark. 

The precession thing means that over a span of time, the Sun’s position at the Vernal and Autumnal equinoxes, relative to the Zodiacal Constellations on the plane of the ecliptic, moves widdershins (“backwards” relative to the conventional Aries, Taurus, Gemini… order) through the signs.  At this time, on the Vernal Equinox, the Sun appears, to an observer on Earth, to be between Pisces and Aquarius.  This also means that the Earth’s axis, which in the Northern Hemisphere is now pointing, more or less, at Polaris in the constellation of Ursa Minor (“little bear” AKA the little dipper), will in time point at a portion of space where there are no visible stars, or at a different star that will then be known as the Pole Star.   In 13,000 years, the Pole Star with be Vega, a bright star in the constellation Lyra.  In 26,000 years, it will be Polaris again.    Okay, with me so far?

For the past 2000 years or so, the north end of the axis has been pretty much leaning toward the constellation Pisces so that the northern hemisphere, where this astronomical/-logical system was developed, “faces” that constellation on the plane of the Ecliptic, the Celestial Equator–hence, the Age of Pisces started, roughly, with the birth of Christ.  Coincidence?  I don’t think so.  It is also no coincidence that one of the seminal events of the 2000 years preceding that–the Age of Aries the ram–was the sacrifice of the ram by Abraham. 

Two thousand years before that was the Age of Taurus, the bull, during which time one of the primal images was the sacred bull of Crete.  Throughout the Age of Pisces, one of the most influential and central images was that of a fish, which is a symbol of Christianity (also a rather involved pun in Greek, which I don’t want to get into here).  Aquarius–the age we are entering now– means water-bearer. (Exactly when this age started is a matter of some debate–one astrologer sets the date at January 23, 1997.)  Has anyone else noted how prevalent water has been in the news?  The Indonesian tsunami of December 26, 2004, for one thing.  A little thing known as Katrina, for another.  Not to mention all the associated floods, or the rise of sea level due to global warming.  Here at the start of the Age of Aquarius, the polar ice caps are turning to water, and polar bears are drowning.  Oh, and the permafrost in the tundra is melting.  These times are not speculation, they are observed phenomena.

Traditionally, Aquarians are said to generally friendly and humane; honest and loyal; independant and intellectual.  Some of these traits were seen at their best during the Summer of Love, 1964.  However, today’s airy-fairy New Agers who think that it is all unicorns and rainbows, who think evil is a myth  and folks like Stalin are merely misguided are in for a crushing disllusionment when the Age of Aquarius comes to full flower.  Some of the dark-side attributes of Aquarius include being “intractable and contrary, perverse and unpredictable, unemotional and detached.” (This from http:www.astrology-online.com/aquarius.htm).  The good stuff–inventive and intellectual–seems to be manifesting largely in the area of computer and solid-state technology.  Other positive triats–humanitarian–seem to be manifesting in a lessening of homophobia among the young folks.

By way of contrast, some of the dark-side attributes of the Age of Pisces–gullibility, fearfulness, dogmatism, clinging to traditional beliefs while denying evidence to the contrary, etc–coincide with some of the worst excesses that we all are witnessing now.  The Age of Pisces is dying–there can be no doubt of this–but it is dying slowly, and dying hard, wreaking havoc on the environment and culture with its death throes.

Please note: the visible constellations only roughly correspond to the metaphysical Zodiac of signs.  Constellations are not uniform in size, but each sign takes up a uniform 30 degrees of the 360-degree Celestial Equator.  An intuitive inference from this might be that the metaphysical cycles were pre-existant when the ancient sky-watchers superimposed it on the Zodiacal map and did their connect-the-dots thing to create the corresponding symbols.

Also, it should be noted that the keynote of the Age of Pisces was “I believe”; the keynote of the Age of Aquarious is “I know.”  In my book, the less you believe, and the more you know, the better off you are.


Precession illustrated and explained:  http://www.revealer.com/platonic.htm
More on precession: http://ancientegypt.hypermart.net/royalarch/

Credit:  Thanks and a tip of the Greyfox fedora to my righteous old lady, soulmate, and partner in crime, Kathy Lynn Douglass, for proofing this, and making helpful suggestions and additions, and providing the last two  links.  Any screw-ups are mine alone.

Well, it’s official–I’m an orphan!

God, that sounds sooo Charles Dickens–”Please, sir, may I have some more?” and all that.  But my sister Alyce called at seven this morning to tell me that mom had finally died.  Sunday, they took her off life support and put her on a morphine drip so she would at least die free from pain.  Dunno if I’d want that–I guess I’ll find out in good time.  Meanwhile, sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

I have this odd sense of dislocation, largely because this is all happening like 4,000 miles away.  From time to time, my sisters expressed–I dunno–a sense of envy/resentment towards me, that I wasn’t there to help them deal with her.  Mom had a very rough last five years or so, declining into depression and near-senility.  She stopped cleaning her house, it was over-run with mice, and it is a wonder she didn’t burn the place down, lighting cigarettes and forgetting about them–there were burn marks all over the place.

I am lucky, I guess, in that she was still relatively hale and healthy when I last visited her.  Instead of spending the time  doing meaningful things with her, I mostly drank.  That is just something I have to live with, another on the long tiresome  list of things to forgive myself for.  I kind of have to do that–if not, there is a minute possibility that some day I might just decide that I don’t deserve to be drug-free, and resume my old insane and self-destructive ways.  That is not a viable option–as things stand now, I would rather die clean than live loaded.  But I digress.

My biggest regret is that I never got around to asking her about her given names.  “Syble Dee”–no one else in the family has those names–and I saw a family tree of ours going back hundreds of years when I was applying for tribal membership.  The names are fraught with metaphysical and magickal significance.  I know her mother had some telepathic ability, and she herself seemed preternaturally intuitive at times.  I may get a chance to talk to her younger brother when he comes to Pennsylvania for the funeral. . . .

Still, it is kind of odd.  I’ll be going along, doing this and that, and BAM!  I think, shit–Mom’s dead.

I guess this is normal.  I don’t know.

I have scant experience with normal.

Syble Dee Wade, RIP–

Goodbye, Mom!

The last few weeks have been rough.  I came down with a nasty
virus three days before my biggest show of the year.  
Between that, which blunted my ability to interact with customers, and
a delayed shipment of laser pointers, blowguns, and brass knuckles,
sales were low.  I still haven’t shaken the virus
completely.  Lately, my ME/CFIS has been worse than ever and I
have been experiencing an extraordinary amount of pain and
disability.  The other day, I had to use one of those little
electric scooters while grocery shopping, since I couldn’t walk without
screaming in pain.  Then a few days ago, my sister Alyce called
from the East Coast to tell me that our mother was in hospital and not
expected to live.

This distressed me.  Not that she was dying–she has been
depressed and in pain and wanting to die for years–but because,
once more her wishes were being ignored.  She had made it plain
that she wanted to die at home, in privacy and with a modicum of
dignity and comfort.  Instead, she was carted off to hospital,
where she will be plugged into machines and surrounded by noise and
bright lights and bad smells and strangers.  I wouldn’t treat a
dying dog that way.

But that is the way it has been for her.  She lived for forty
years in a house she hated, located in a small town she despised. 
She wanted to live along the river–she loved nature–but that house by
the river cost a few thousand dollars more than the one my father
wanted.

During the war (WWII)–despite her ninth-grade education–she did so
well at the navy depot, she was promoted to supervisor, and had a dozen
women working under her, some of whom were old enough to be her
mother.  One of them became her mother-in-law.  She loved the
work, but quit because she got married, and married women didn’t
work.  Had she stayed on, she could have retired in luxury in the
‘sixties, instead of having to scrimp along on the widow’s pension and
Social Security she got.

I am not sentimental, however.  She had the parenting skills of
a wolverine.  She did the best she knew how, but she had no good
role models.  Her father was a clasic Southern redneck–his dogs
came first, followed by his guns, then his whisky.  His family
didn’t even finish in the money.  Her mother–we all called her
Momma– had lots of children and baked a lot of biscuits. 
When my mother’s dog Becky died, she got all weepy and prety much fell
apart—even though when I visited her, never once did I see her show
any affection for the critter, or be anything but cruel to it.  Go
figure.  Anyway. . . .

Last night when I went to bed, I left my cell phone turned on, for
some odd reason.  It went off at five this morning, dragging me
out of some much-needed sleep.  It was my sister again, calling to
tell me that mom wasn’t expected to live out the day.   What
was I supposed to do with news I was expecting and could do nothing
about?  Could it not have waited a few hours?  I asked her,
did she not realize it is five in the morning here?  She got
defensive, and I hung up.  Stupidly, I left the phone on.

Twenty minutes later, just as I was drifting off again, the phone
rang again.  This time it was Mark, my other sister’s
husband.  He was seething with indignation about how “ignorant” I
was, didn’t I care about my own mother, yadda yadda yadda. 
Anyway, we had some words, I invoked the f-word, and may have hung up
on him. 

By now, the whole bunch–except for Alyce’s husband, who is
great– is probably loaded.  I imagine the real reason Alyce
called me so early was so that she could start drinking right after the
call.  They are most likely filled with self-righteous indignation
at cold-blooded, nasty old Greyfox.  I don’t know.  Whatever
they, or anyone else, may think of me is none of my business.

I do know that Mom–who may still be hanging on, at least
physically, as I write–will finally be at peace.  Soon, if not
now, she will be with God, and reunited with Becky, and her own mother,
and all her other friends who preceded her in death.  For that, I
am happy and grateful.    So why am I crying?

Maybe because, right now, there is a mom-shaped hole in my universe. 

And a smaller, similar hole in my heart.