black and blue

i am being fucked hard by mercury. in retrograde. and fuck you too, you cocksucking planet!

i am soooo not going to bore you with a long list of my recent personal woes -- marked, as is characteristic of travails during this accursed time, by delays, setbacks, and general lack of moving-forwardness. but i will say in brief that car problems and delays in remedying same, technical difficulties, false starts, sudden changes, and other unwelcome situations that have befallen me over the last two weeks are coming at dismayingly regular intervals. to say nothing of the wider world's fresh wars, natural disasters, mass murders, and celebrity divorces. i mean ... it's enough to make a girl want to sit down and cry. and/or fuckin' hide away for the next 12 days.

that's where al swearengen comes in. just yesterday we finished watching season 2 of deadwood. (and i am still infected with the cursin' bug. huh -- ya think dubya's been watching deadwood a lot, too?) in an episode called "e.b. was left out," the newspaperman, merrick, is bumming b/c tolliver's thugs fucked up his press equipment. al puts on his frontier-guru hat and literally smacks merrick upside the head. he asks if merrick is dead, and the man replies no, but bruised certainly. then al says:

"pain or damage don't end the world, or despair or fuckin' beatin's. the world ends when you're dead. until then, you got more punishment in store. stand it like a man -- and give some back."

words to fuckin' live by. except i am not sure how to give some back, in this sense, to a celestial body.

perhaps i can give some back to mercury simply by not crumbling (or hiding). maybe that is something. what pisses me off most about this particular bout of zodiac trauma is that, rather than hand-wringing like last time, i thought i would try to use this interval for reflection and deliberation, as the more positive interpretations (spin?) suggest. but i have been so busy dealing with the bulllshit that i have no bandwidth for ponderments.

so as far as the giving-back goes ... that's mercury 1, me 0.

hahah. i'm still here. so ... i win?