Your Horoscope for Today, Part 1

I pride myself on having regarded astrology as patent nonsense even when lots of otherwise sensible persons were giving it credence. I have never asked another human being what his or her sign is, and have only rarely told the ttuth about my own, as it gives me pleasure to misrepresent it, and then have the other smirk knowingly and say, “I thought so.” (For a very long time, before there was an Internet on which to check song lyrics, I dared to hope that Mr. Rotten had endorsed this exact practice in “Anarchy in the UK,” in which I thought I heard him sing, “Give the wrong sign/Stop the traffic line.”) At other times, I would insist that the other rephrase the question from What’s your sign? to What sign you were born under?, whereupon I would happily reply, “Births strictly forbidden.”

I’ve always found it incomprehensible that anyone could take seriously the horoscopes in newspapers or magazines, as they’re so very vague, as they of course have to be. I would very much to prefer something along the following lines:

Aries

The nervous new person where you take your dry cleaning will have a devil of a time finding one of your garments, and when you finally get back to your car, you will discover that a parking control officer is poised to begin giving you a parking ticket. Howling, “No, please!” you will dash across the street so frantically as to lose your grip on one of your newly dry-cleaned garments, which a 2003 Nissan Ultima with New Jersey plates will run over. As you pick it up, though, you’ll take comfort in the realization that having it re-cleaned will cost very much less than a parking ticket. After agreeing not to write which, the officer will smirk at you expectantly, and you won’t know if she’s expecting you to slip her 20 bucks. You will give her 10, she will not look pleased, and you will never feel comfortable parking anywhere near your dry cleaner again.

Nabisco

That attractive colleague at work who’s been bumping into you quite by chance in the coffee room so often lately will finally summon the nerve to ask you out. You will meet for an after-work drink, and it will be sufficiently pleasant for you to agree to dinner and a movie on Friday night. You will have Asian fusion cuisine and see the new Leonardo di Caprio hit Inception. You will enjoy the movie rather more than the cuisine, and the cuisine rather more than the subsequent coitus, which will nonetheless be sufficiently pleasurable for you to consider an encore. But then, when you encounter your colleague in the elevator on Monday, you won’t receive anything even faintly resembling the warm greeting your having put out made you expect.

Auto Club Member

Stopping at the Sunoco for gas, you will discover yourself unable to pay at the pump. However carefully you swipe your credit card, the machine will invite you to try, try again, and then, finally, insist that you consult the attendant. The three fellow motorists waiting for your pump will audibly impeach your ancestry when you hurry inside to do so. The attendant will be from a Fourth World country of which you’ve never heard, and his accent will be incomprehensible, but he will get your credit card working. Back outside, you will ignore the hateful looks of your fellow motorists, but will stop short of cleaning your windshield to really get their goats.

Cancer

Scanning your test results, your oncologist will shake her head sadly and finally say, “I wish I had much better news for you.” You won’t be so sure you detect much genuine compassion in her tone, and will remember having briefly dated an oncology nurse several years ago — when it was clear nothing like this could ever happen to you, who have always eaten sensibly and gone to the gym and not smoked since you were 19 — and of her having told you about compassion fatigue, whereby one who has watched many die in agony goes into a self-protective mode in which it’s difficult to feel much of anything, including compassion.

[Many of my books are now available for download from Amazon. They include The Total Babe & Other Wine Country Yarns, Lentils on the Moon (aka A Message From Jesus in Braille, aka A History of the Jews in the Hudson Valley), Self-Loathing: An Owner's Manual, Third World USA, The Mona Lisa's Brother, and, for baseball nuts, Foul Balls and Alpha Males. You need neither a Kindle nor an iPad to enjoy 'em; simply download (free) Kindle software for either Mac or Windows, and enjoy them on your laptop or other computer!]