ASTROLOGY AND THE SINGLE MAN

(c) Breeze Vincinz

Once upon a time I befriended a clairvoyant. And like all of my relationships, platonic or romantic, its formation was fierce, quick and alcohol laced (well on my part at least, he was a teetotaler). I haven’t spoken to my teetotaler clairvoyant friend in quite some time but he popped up in my head today; the end of what I imagine to have been an extended patch of bad times for the past week or so. My weight loss has plateaued, I got stood up on Valentine’s Day (fuck you Joey!), though there have been a ton of “better” I have unwittingly skidded into the “worse” in the dysfunctional marriage between me and my job, and to top it off I was witness to three, yes THREE (!), separate fights on the bus ride from work… one that I unfortunately was a part of when a zaftig and disheveled young woman loudly proclaimed that I was trying to steal her bag because I, dressed in a turtleneck, jeans, boots, leather jacket and laptop bag, looked homeless and was trying to steal her purse. I blame it on my lack of sleep lately as well as just the accumulation of bullshit going on but I very ashamedly have to admit that… well… I read her for filth. I read her from chimpan-A to chimpan-Z. I called her everything but a child of God. It also didn’t help that this woman, who quite frankly looked like a tousled understudy for the movie “Precious”, was actually gathering sympathy from people on the bus while she pined on in the most dramatic of tones that could have rivaled Loretta Divine in “Colored Girls” about how “Somebody almost walked off wid alla my stuff!” All of a sudden I was the male antagonist in every Black female empowerment story, from Mr. in “The Color Purple” to Russell in “Waiting to Exhale” to Basil in “The Women of Brewster Place”. There I was just reading my book… and this chick had the bus believing that I raped my dates and thrown babies out of windows and was trying to steal alla of her stuff…

Needless to say I was enraged. But the more I think about it, the more I realize that the argument was just the explosion… the wick was lit a long time ago, a couple of weeks ago. I have been walking around in a fit of rage and anxiety for quite some time now. And when I posted a brief summary of my exploits with 5B (Berta the Big Bipolar Bitch on the Bus), someone replied that it must be a Libra thing because he has been feeling angst ridden also. It provided a little solace. Partly because it somewhat relieved me of some of the responsibility of my own childish behavior of screaming at the top my lungs at some mentally unstable woman with a glandular problem or making farm noises at said cow-like woman as she wobbled off the bus. But mainly because it made it seem as if there would be an end to this “bad patch” I’m going through. That this will all blow over, I’ll continue to lose weight, I’ll accomplish more tasks at work, I’ll go on other dates; that this is all just a bad patch of time right now, that there’s something going on in the neither regions of existence that simply screwing with me and Libras right now. That somewhere in the far regions of the cosmos that some god picked up some guitar, started strumming and it made my constellations vibrate, and put this big bitch on the bus to fuck with me.

It brought my clairvoyant friend to mind because I am almost certain that if I explained all of this to him, he would very methodically start to chart out the motions of the stars right now and explain how that indeed something is in retrograde with the seventh house of something and that’s the cause of my intense anxiety nowadays… which always pisses me off. On one hand, I appreciate the idea of astrological based “bad patches”; that shit just happens because some star in some galaxy bust a nut and your constellation just happened to be into bukkake at the time. But on the other hand, my friend makes it all sound too fate-like, too inevitable, too hopeless. For example, I am a Libra. If I remember right, some of the characteristics of my sign include being over emotional, judgmental, addictive, open-minded and flaky. Now, some of that may or may not be true, but I’d like to believe that whoever you are, whatever your sign, you can improve your disposition and be whoever you what to be. I will concede to the fact that I had very “Libra-esque” responses when I got stood up on Valentines’ Day (fuck you Joey!) as well as my experiences on the bus (double fuck you 5B!). But, I will also have to say that, I am not always in those manic spaces, I don’t like to enable those manic spaces, and I don’t think those manic spaces are intrinsic to Libras only. It reminds me of skit in Lily Tomlin’s “The Search for signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe” where her doctor blames her over emotional state of mind on her menstrual cycle and she responds, “But doctor, I’m having job trouble, I need to find one, the woman that my husband is in love with is much younger than me, a very good friend of mine committed suicide… and you think that it’s my period… and not my life.”

My clairvoyant friend, in that scenario would indeed claim it to be my period, and not my life. As would other friends who claim themselves to be armchair psychics and have Libra associates who share my penchant of choosing wrong men, lowering standards of acceptability too low, passive aggressing myself into oblivion. Whenever I speak of opening up my heart/home to someone who in broad strokes doesn’t deserve such kindness from a virtual stranger, my friends automatically pelt me with tales of how their other Libra associates are just as gullible, soft-hearted and delusional. I think in certain ways astrology is an offset of spirituality whereas people are just trying to figure out life but I’m a little disconcerted with the idea that my zodiac sign is an accurate indicator of who I am… or maybe like racism or homophobia, I’m being judged on something that I absolutely cannot control. And maybe that’s where my discontentment lies, how much control do I really have over my life if my destiny has already been etched in the stars?

Now my clairvoyant friend lives in a world where reality and spirituality are all in the same. A world where spirits walk among us every day and speak to us frequently, where navigating a life’s path is similar to reading a bus map, where fate is as inevitable as dusk. So it’s all connected to him, my parents doing it in January, me being born in October, being stood up on Valentine’s Day (fuck you Joey!), my argument on the bus (double fuck you 5B!), it’s all related… and all unavoidable… and I’m just a little uncomfortable with that.

One thing my clairvoyant friend told me was that he had a hard time making/keeping friends because people would either demand that he tell them their future or when he did, his “visions” were as unfavorable as they were dead on true and they blamed him for it. I told him he would never have to worry about that with me because I never want to know. Even if I planned a trip home to Chicago and he flat out sees a crystal clear vision of my plane dropping in a ball of flames, don’t fucking tell me, I don’t want to know. I don’t know if it’s being delusional or not but I don’t like the idea of being powerless to my own fate. It kind of screams hopelessness and victimization like, “I’m going to die anyway, why not have the five pounds of macaroni and cheese and follow it up with a bottle of gin and cocaine.”

I’m not completely convinced on the idea of life being predetermined but if it is, I think my destiny is not to believe in destiny. I think I was meant to believe in change and hope and evolution. Don’t tell me that the plane is going down or to not make the date on Valentine’s Day because he going to ditch me or to avoid the 5:36 p.m. crosstown bus or to pledge my undying friendship after a couple of hours of tequila shots at the Bear Bar… I think I’m supposed to experience my life unscripted and rehearsed. I’m supposed to do this improv style. And that’s not my zodiac sign talking… that’s me.