While Mars has just exited Virgo’s realm, the combination of a full moon and Mercury in retrograde motion are the reasons I’m giving for a recent bout of melancholy and madness. Maybe there are other causes – remembering my Dad, the approach of my 50th birthday, and several instances of feeling under unwarranted attack – but if I can put this all onto the back of the universe, it lets a few people off the hook, including myself. It’s sometimes harder to be upset in the beautiful days of summer, when a happy hibiscus is finally coming into glorious bloom, and the garden has decided to stay lush for as long as I can maintain watering it. That makes the sadness and mourning I want to indulge in feel especially wrong, but I’m not pretending anything anymore, and if my mood is at odds with the weather and season, so be it.
Approaching fifty feels like approaching freedom, and the socially-acceptable invisibility that allows one to genuinely enter a zone of fuck-it-all-I-just-don’t-give-a-fuck. Some could make the argument that I’ve been operating in this mindset for a while, and there is certainly an element of truth to the calculation that I have zero fucks left. It may be a small element, however, as if it were true that I truly didn’t care I don’t think I’d be so bothered with everything. My sadness, or dissatisfaction, or annoyance are proof that it all still very much matters. May my arrival at the half-century mark make it all matter less.
