Birthdays are an affliction nobody wants to be rid of. It's just too bad each solar passing seems faster than the last.
I was blessed with another this week. They're not angst filled for me like they are for some. I embrace birthdays and tend to go ahead and make a week of it.
My astrologer, Celeste L. Stardazed, tells me that's a very Libra thing to do. I'm not sure. I kind of think individual people make their own individual birthday rituals. One of mine is to kayak.
I don't do a lot of reminiscing in my day to day, I don't want to live in the past. But around this time I tend to think a lot about the time I was born in and the time we're in now.
"That's a very Libra thing to do too, SJ" That's Celeste. She's here with my new yearly horoscope. It's another of my birthday rituals. I read one a year. She's calls it "The SJ Horrorscope".
"Stop making things up."
"Be quiet, I'm trying to type."
"Then stop typing out loud."
She's telling the truth. I made that up. Celeste is pretty straight, scientific even. She punched my birth year, date, time, place and credit card number into her smartphone and soon was telling me what stars I was born under and what's up for me in the coming year.
As I was telling Celeste, I was born in the 2nd year of Eisenhower's second term. It was a much different time. Televisions were black and white, twits did not tweet, and the Republican president balanced the budget with high taxes on the wealthy.
That Republican president also created the interstate highway system, NASA, and raised social security benefit payments. He signed civil rights legislation twice. And just for good measure, the hero of World War II took on the military industrial complex, kept defense spending under control and the country at peace through two terms.
Compared to today, it was reverse wrld. If one of the current crop of Republicant presidential candidates called for a return to the good old policies of Eisenhower, they'd be shouted down and run out on a rail. Infrastructure, jobs, research, civil rights, peace...obviously, the General wouldn't be allowed in today's Republican pup tent.
Instead, the Democrat candidate's debate on the night of my birthday showed there was still a place for Ike's vision of America. And the old democratic socialist who's crashed the Hillary Inevitability Theory seems to be pushing that vision the hardest.
It's enough to make a die hard independent like me change registration so I can vote in the primary. Which leads us to Celeste's predictions for my year. Could it happen? What's in my future?
Well, because horoscopes are magical things based in science, that's for me to know and you to ponder. I don't want to jinx anything. That wouldn't be logical.
I'll allow that the registration change is probable. The one sure thing is a $129.95 credit card bill.