Shadows, Shadow Play

Toying with a simple pen and ink depiction, I was trying to convey the messages of Mercury in its apparent retrograde pattern, and what that means, how it plays out, and what the future holds by way of looking at the past.

The timing is what interests me. The messages have largely been familiar, and while my earliest teachers talked about how “Mercury in retrograde is bad,” I’ve grown to understand it is a natural time, and can be useful.

The image, I started with a simple line drawing of the alchemical glyph for Mercury, the symbol I associate with the planet. It looks like a Venus — or female — symbol with a little set of horns sprouting from the head. It is supposed to be a winged helmet, associated with Hermes, the messenger of the gods, later known as Mercury. Although somewhat distanced, Loki is similar in form and function. Personally, I like the character Puck from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream as a mercurial fellow. That symbol, though, a simple line drawing, small circles, stick coming out the bottom, a cross bar, then, the little ears on the top, again symbolic of Hermes’ winged helmet. Mercury had wings on his sandals.

“Fly monkeys, fly!”

Sorry, wrong mythos. Anyway, the glyph? Venus with little antenna, for communications.

Shadows, Shadow Play

June 13, Mercury arrived at 16° Cancer. Mercury crawls up to 26° Cancer, turning retrograde on 6/29. Mercury retrogrades back to 16° Cancer on 7/23, staying at 16° until 7/28. Mercury doesn’t arrive back at 26° Cancer until 8/24 (coincidental with the Sun going into Virgo).

Shadows, Shadow Play

I’ve got a pepper plant thriving with my abuse, overwatering, drought, too much attention, no care, and similar inconsistent behaviors. It’s about two feet tall, and the shade in the direct sun is negligible, but as the afternoon light dips lower on the horizon? That plant can cast a shadow up to a few feet long if only for a short time. The shadow is ephemeral yet still exists. It can appear longer, taller than the object causing the shadow itself. The shadow of Mercury can extend well beyond the known limits of the actual, observed retrograde. This Mercury in Retrograde?

the Portable Mercury Retrograde

Portable Data

This started as a daily web-based diary. Over time, it grew into a web-journal, a web log, a weblog, and then a blog. Half dozen addresses at least, but the basic location was something like astrofish.net/xenon. Been at a three or four URLs since then, and gradually, I rolled it all back in-house to just astrofish.net. But pouring through the older entries, there’s one like this one, Testing material that starts out to address what this is about. The old definition of a blog was a series of chronological entries. The challenge, over the years, mine has grown, shrunk, grown, and the various destinations have changed. Purpose. Purposes. Goals, destinations, notations, and more. Or less. Some fiction. Some prose. Few, if any, real attempts at poetry. But daily observations, astrological notes, vignettes from life?

There is an image I’ve been reluctant to use, the backsplash for the namesake for the weblog, Xenon. Early 80’s artwork, the first series of pinball machines with a computer (noise) chip, plus the artwork’s lurid design. As much as I would like to steal some of the imagery, and I have, I’m also cognizant of copyright, fair-use, and proper attribution, so even if I could? I haven’t, at least not recently. My actual machine ownership predates me having any kind of access to digital imagery. No pictures from back then.

While my original machine now rests with a collector, the imagery in my mind lives on, and that spun off a name for the web (based) journal, that became a blog, that now defies any taxonomy at all. Therein is the problem, and the solution.

Defies taxonomy.

Off and on, for years, I included the tag line, “Experimental and Experiential.” Paging through the old entries, decades past?

Portable Data

When I first broached the topic of living in (near) downtown San Antonio? There was a singular highway sign, then two, a pair, one at the north end of of I-35 and one at the southernmost point along I-37, Austin and Corpus Christi, as it were.

“Bexar County Line.”

It became a thing, with me. As a joke, under a special astrological array, I bought (rented) a domain name, eventually, that project became a collection of images, mostly culled from a downtown in transition, and documenting, for me, the intersection of cultures, all thrown together there. Here. But bandwidth and data grows exponentially, the interest in my own project, a simple excursion for myself, that gradually fell away. Rolled most of it back into the blog. The “Bexar County Line” site got subsumed by the daily blog.

Portable Data

There’s a couple of arbitrary internal markers, categories and subcategories, used by the current blog software. Pointers, really. One is “blog posting/article,” as in, pick one. I’ve tried, don’t know how successful it is with portable data, but as my own semi-random taxonomy, over 500 words tends to be classified as an “article,” whereas the more common 100 to 400 word pieces I tend to mark as “blog,” but that’s my own guideline. More blog-style, less journalism.

Portable Data

What’s portable data? Some amazon links, the affiliate link, started when I would recommend a book, but now includes some products. Many of the old links still work. What doesn’t work? What doesn’t work and I find annoying? The same amazon links that were framed as an (iframe) placeholder, usually the cover of a book or a DVD cover of a Shakespeare play. But those didn’t make it. Gradually have to be trimmed. In the same vein? Stupid YouTube links don’t stand up well over time. Nor do any local newspapers. However, in an odd note, British tabloids still stick to the older format links. In one example, I had. A post with six links to six different outlets with a single line of commentary and the link, and years later, none of the links worked.

Portable Data

Unrelated: Prescient Port Royal (trip preparations) notation. “When a grown man lives at home with his mom? Pathetic. When a grown man lives at home with his dead mom? Classic.” (Link love.)