Enough already

Saturn enters Pisces and I stop complaining

It behooves me to tell you, once again: we’re about to lurch into a new epoch. I know, I know. On Monday, Saturn enters Pisces for the first time since Showgirls was playing in cinemas. For more linear takes on this cosmic development, please see my Saturn in Pisces explainer and Saturn in Pisces horoscopes, via NYLON. Otherwise, let’s take this from a Georgia Nicholson perspective, as you like it.

Pisces is the sign of the martyr — embodied by both Jesus and Judas — and when the planet of responsibility hits, we — the perpetual victims — are in for a shock. The last Saturn in Pisces tour was a reckoning, and in some ways, a renaissance, for the gloomy Gen X: Clueless, Reality Bites, Trainspotting and the death and deification of Kurt Cobain.

I have Pisces entirely in my first house of intrinsic selfhood, and I was born with Mars here too. My friend Dexter says that Mars in Pisces is the bombshell placement: Marilyn Monroe, Michelle Pfeiffer, Carrie Fisher. The cinematic body. I can be your fantasy, until you grow tired of me. Last night, I was at a Lord of the Rings Rave (I have to say: the trans drag star Fabiana brought real artistry to her Gollum) and ended up making out with a hot Omar Sharif type. It felt good until I realized, once again, that I was playing a role, morphing into something that he could “handle,” all for his entertainment. As the Taurus Justin Vivian Bond once said to me: “I’m tired of being interesting. I want to be interested for a change.” And, while I too prefer to be the hunter and not the hunted, I can’t say that I’m not inviting something here.

I can’t help but invoke Lady Gaga, circa 2010: “If I sleep with someone, they’re going to take my creativity through my vagina.” And it’s not even from sex (which, by the way, can leave me decimated in the 40 hours following an orgasm, supine watching American Pie) but from seemingly all contact. I told a friend yesterday that as I become aware of my empathic/intuitive powers, I’m seeing myself mirror my friends’ and family members’ illnesses and anxieties. My body is a vessel, and it’s been smashed under a deluge. He refuted: Maybe I’m willfully giving myself to them. Maybe it’s my way of wanting intimacy.

Which is to say: If it takes two to tango, what is my part in this dance? And what if, through a battered, limited perspective on what relationships offer, I’ve set the terms for an endless, repeating Ragnarok of disappointment and devastation?

I’m in recovery for things I’ve survived, working the steps to take responsibility for my life in the present. The issue is: how do I deliver justice to the victimized parts of me, which live entirely in the petrified past? How do I assuage the call for vengeance? The world is moving on. I’m in my thirties. The nightmare is allegedly over. Now what?

Saturn’s foray into Pisces breaks the narrative of being at the mercy of forces beyond our control: social media, streaming platforms, substances, relationships. Invoking Pisces’ opposite, Virgo, Saturn recruits tools of discernment and discretion. I’ve made an inventory, these past months, of what emotional insobriety looks like to me:

INSOBRIETY INVENTORY

1. TV/Movies/Comics as a numbing agent: Why do I believe that I deserve to watch something every time I eat, considering the fact that I eat six meals a day?

2. Sex apps: Have been liberating, but dark magic always has a price

3. Romantic fixations with no basis in actual desire: Does this person person make my blood race, or do I just want to prove that someone like him would ever kiss someone like me? Am I seeking a lover, or a parent?

4. Food as a “treat”

5. Substances to “correct” a bad mood: A third dip of K is rarely the solution!

6. Living/spending beyond my means: If this is a requisite for sobriety, I’m not sure how to live in NYC without falling off the horse (is that the expression?)

7. Career expectations which will “save me” or instantly change my circumstances: Look out for my book deal, any minute now! (I’m sleeping on couches)

8. Trauma splitting: See a future post, probably for paid subscribers only

9. Pulling a “geographic:” Don’t hold me to this one…

Now what? What I can hope for, in the two years to come, is to grow up, or to at least wake up from the static. I can’t keep feeling like I’m the last to know what’s happening to me, like I can’t access my own agency, choice or vision. I’ve embraced that I’m a child of God, but I don’t think God wants me to behave like a child, confusing surrender with paralysis, electing to atrophy while my dear friends make their dreams come true. Enough.

Emily and I went to see Corsage at IFC (honestly, just rewatch Marie Antoinette) and then hit our beloved Lanterna in the West Village, for tea and cake. I told her that I haven’t had success because I can’t sit still, that by running and resisting, I make it impossible for destiny to find me. It’s an addiction to chaos, a drive to affirm the pain of the past, a belief that the discovery of peace means forgetting the suffering. To know prosperity would be an injustice which I can’t allow. This agony is my own, my testament.

If I’m to survive this transit, I’ll have to create some sort of container for this pain, or else it will overflow and subsume everything. I’ll have to build an iron vessel and believe that it can’t be broken. Pisces is the host of all consciousness, collectively and concurrently, and the deliverer of quantum selfhood: we are both mortal and messiah, Dionysus and Kronos, Christ and God, Jean Grey and the Phoenix, all at once. I embrace a future not of one “higher me” defeating the abject, but of a triumphant whole, an all-self which incorporates every part; a faith which affirms the past and allows for the blissful embrace of the present. I don’t know, but I believe…

Shabbat Shalom (and Happy Purim),

David Odyssey

P.S., here’s more to enjoy:

My beloved Melissa Rich had me on her podcast, CHIC NYC, to talk Sam Levinson, Sex & the City and House of Yes (the movie, not the club)

Here’s my cinematic guide to astrology, for NYLON

March Horoscopes, for NYLON

March books are open for readings. I’ve launched a new 35-minute “check-in reading” for returning clients. Let’s go!