Sometime in the past 24 hours, I had my Saturn Return. Exactly, according to Astrolog. Those of you who are complete Doubting Thomases (or Eugenes, or Francises, or Leopolds, or whoevers) may not want to read the next few paragraphs (as of now I don't know how many paragraphs I'm going to spend on the subject) so consider yourself warned. Otherwise, I will now ponder the significance of my first Saturn Return (similar I guess to My First Sony, but Oh So Different).

A Saturn Return, for those of you not astrologically inclined or educated, is the point in your life when Saturn (the planet) returns to the exact point in the sky where it was at the moment of your birth. It's sort of a good delineator, and tends to indicate certain types of things happening in your life. It happens somewhere between your 29th and 30th birthdays, so all this lines up very nicely with that otherwise round number so the Doubting Whoevers can just write all this off to "I'm Turning 30" angst and leave it at that. Those of us who don't dismiss it out of hand, however, can look further into the astrology books and say, "hey, what does a Saturn Return mean for me?"

My particular Saturn Return is complicated by the fact that just as Saturn was getting really close to the position it was in at my birth it went retrograde, astrogical lingo for what happens when an object in the sky appears to stop going "forward" (the direction it goes most of the time) and starts going "backward" instead. "Planets" (just about everything astrological is referred to as a "planet" for convenience's sake) only go retrograde for a bit before they "go direct" and go the way they normally go once again. Last August Saturn got to within one degree of where it was in my birth chart before going retrograde. This means that all the typical "Saturn Return" stuff that usually happens got dragged out eight months longer than necessary, but it also means that it came to a head this week.

And how.

Thursday night I was reading along here, and I discovered that Sheepish's grandmother had passed away (she knew it was coming soon enough), which reminded me of what I'd written about my brother's death when a friend's dad died (see previous entry), which reminded me about when my brother died, which set off a chain of remembrances.

Also, by coincidence, my oldest friend-that-I'm-still-in-touch-with Ben, whom I've known since elementary school, was getting married this weekend. Here, as a matter of fact. So I started thinking about how amazing it was that I've known this guy since we were about 10 and he's getting married (wow!), and that set off a whole 'nother chain of remembrances.

When it all was done, my whole life had passed before my eyes. Not in that flash you supposedly get when you think you're going to die, but in highlight mode. The game film, if you will. A summary of the first almost-thirty years of my life (30 in November).

It's weird.

I don't think of myself as a "failure," but I'm not done. I can't say that as of right now I've hit any sort of marker, anything equivalent to passing GO so I can collect the karmic $200. But it's also hard to tell when you're in something what your position in it is. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle as applied to a human life. So looking at what appears to be the overarching theme of my life, I'm not sure that I've reached any stopping points. But I can't say that I haven't either. I Just Don't Know.

It's weird because I can see all of the pieces getting ready to fall into place, but they haven't yet. It's like now is happening in slow motion. My life is a pool table where somebody is slowly knocking things around, apparently with no motive, but there's a portent that they're really setting things up so that they can run the table, corner-side-corner-corner-side-side-corner-eight-ball-corner-pocket wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am insert-your-own-cliche-here. And until they started you didn't know it was coming. I am suspicious that's what happening now.

I can size up where I've been, and where I am, but I can't tell right now what's next. Usually I have a clue, but now I'm at this blind corner. I'm not sure if that's the corner marked GO or if it's just Free Parking.

I'll know soon enough.

(2000-04-23)