Live from Marin County, California

Total Eclipse of the Big Yellow Ball

The planets are coming, the planets are coming! I mean, they're disappearing. Sort of. It's a solar eclipse, babies. Everyone under his or her desks. Or is this the day we look at the sun through a pinhole in a piece of cardboard or else we go blind? Confusion reigns.

According to my master Internet astrologer, Jeff Jawer, "A Solar Eclipse in Aries suggests that when we start pushing hard in a new direction (Sun in Aries) we may go too far too fast. The eclipse implies that the personal will (the Sun) encounters emotions, old patterns and unconscious forces (the Moon) that require special consideration."

Jeff's advice? "Slow down and take some time to reflect on who you are and where you're headed, so that you can avoid catastrophes and make the most of this special event."

But. It's a rainy Friday in Marin and everyone is hotfooting it out of town for higher ground. Spring Break is next week and parents are whisking their children off to Aspen and Hawaii and China. They're breaking their necks to get the hell out of the San Francisco Bay Area, the same exact area that other people are desperately trying to get to. Everyone jump up in the air and trade places! It's a holiday! A school holiday, which means that we have to actually take care of our own children. This makes people in Marin sulky and a bit shattered. We don't get to play. It's the children's turn to play. And it's raining like crazy; it's near biblical.

I live on the top of a steep hill, so if the rain goes on forever, my house will be the last to slip its foundation. I will be the last to surf down, standing on the roof in a red chenille robe, not unlike the Grinch. I will surf down into town and blow my horn of catastrophe, as the astrology suggests. No, this cannot happen and I must take measures: my astrologer has advised me, after all.

I am to Slow Down. For a writer who works from home, this means:

a) Slip into coma

b) Die

c) Go back to sleep

I am glad they did not suggest I speed up, because that would make me anxious (see: Work). No: It said my unconscious needs special attention. I take this to mean, cheesecake. Unfortunately, I ate the tiny Meyer Lemon cheesecake from Studebaker Bakery last night. (In Marin, we shun regular lemons and always use Meyer lemons, which may be Jewish lemons or magic lemons, but we do know they are superior lemons -- in some fashion that shall remain a mystery.) Desserts have taken hold at my house, for some nefarious reason. I ate a small cheesecake, and then had a scoop of Breyers chocolate ice cream as a chaser. So. My unconscious is sated but my ass is climbing up my back, getting bigger and starting to become shelf-like. I can rest my cell phone and wallet on my ass while I am standing in line at the store. This is not good: I consider this a Catastrophe, though I doubt it is to the scale that astrologers suggest. I await a greater catastrophe, unless I slow down. So I am writing this very, very slowly.

If you haven't begun to die from boredom yet, I will tell you a brief story involving the garbage situation at my ratchety little dry-rotty house.

If there is anything worse than stumbling out of the house at dawn with a six-year-old in tow who hasn't put his shoes on yet and whose socks are now caked with mud and headed toward one's car mats, it is stumbling out of the house to find the garbage can not just broken into and its contents spread thickly down the driveway. It is stumbling outside to find the garbage can...gone. Missing; MIA at the very least, and possibly a homicide. Wherever that garbage can is, it may now contain a body. We know not what we do when we innocently set that can out on Thursday night for the garbage men. We step into the Unknown, here in Marin. The deer and the opossums and the raccoons and the wild dogs (see: Wildebeests) are all after one thing: sustenance. And don't tell me there isn't a dollop of malice involved when they manage to drag the garbage can away to, like, Novato. They are thumbing their noses at us house-poor homeowners in our German cars. They are saying, in effect: "Fuck you, we were here first." They are saying, "NOW go find your garbage cans, you greedy white scoundrels, you. By the way, the T-bones were fantastic. Next week, we would like to request more roughage. Kohlrabi, maybe. We will let you know."

It's garbage day, and I have no garbage can. And the sun is disappearing. I am definitely going back to bed. Buh-Bye.

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