I've taken two months off from the world to stare into the abyss, by which I mean my abnormally large navel. The problem with this is that when you do eventually poke your head above the parapet of your self-absorption, you discover that a ton of shit has gone down. I’m sure that so much stuff didn’t used to happen when I was growing up. This is the point at which someone better than me would insert an edifying McLuhan-shaped discussion of the mutually-constitutive relationship between news and 24-hour news channels, but, y’know, zzzz!
Just today, for instance, just an averagely boring Wednesday, they found both a new dinosaur and a missing Enid Blyton novel. Which leads me to suspect that I am really not putting my back into tracking down my driver's license somewhere in my top drawer.
I don’t know anything about anything any more. Like Rip van Winkle, I have awoken to an entirely unfamiliar world. At the point when I checked out, the shark terrorising Sharm el-Sheikh was the most interesting thing to happen to Egypt since the curse of Tutankhamun’s tomb, and Gadaffi was just a hilarious sex-addict with big shades, like Michael Jackson with political aspirations, or Silvio Berlusconi with epaulettes.
I am the first to admit that everything I know about modern Egypt I learnt from reading Death on the Nile, and Libya is very easily confused with Liberia, don’t you find? But one of the many things that I fail to understand about recent developments in that part of the world is how Yemen is not yet burning. I always thought Yemen was the real basket-case of that gang. Terrorists are always from Yemen. They have ten-year old divorcees in Yemen. Yemen needs to sort its shit out, yo.
Anyway, I have been reading with fascination about this new universe I inhabit. And I mean ‘a new universe’ quite literally: I still cannot believe, for instance, that nobody bothered to inform me that they changed the star signs.
My friends Alex and Anna mentioned this to me the other night with a heavy helping of blasé and a side-portion of yawn, as if it were no big deal. As if after almost 29 years of life as a proud, fiery Aries, it meant nothing that I was to be unceremoniously demoted to Pisces! Fucking insipid, watery Pisces! (No offence.) The only positive aspect I can discern in this is that Adolf Hitler and I no longer share a star-sign, but say what you like about Adolf Hitler, at least he was a bit of a self-starter.
Upon arriving home, I burst through the door to confront my housemate Adam with this news.
“They changed the star signs!” I yelled accusingly.
He laid down his pen. “Who is ‘they’?” he asked calmly.
I paused. “Them!”’ I said, realising that I was sounding like Julian Assange again, but powerless to stop myself. “Astrologers! Astronomers! Astronauts!”
Let me take a step back and explain, in case you too have unfathomably allowed this news to pass you by.
To put it in terms the layman will understand, and I am drastically simplifying my own advanced grasp on the astrophysics that underpin this, the earth wobbled and all the star signs got fucked up. I’m not saying this is because I haven’t been blogging, but the timing is suspicious.
As a result, there are now new star constellations in the sky that didn’t exist when star signs were ‘introduced’. (‘Introduced’ in this context is polite newspaper-speak for ‘dreamt up by the Babylonians after a few too many spliffs and a desperate yearning for some ontological anchor because Christianity hadn’t been invented yet’.)
Consequently, there is a new star sign, Ophiuchus, and good luck pronouncing that one when you’re speed-dating. It is also known as ‘the serpent holder’, which coincidentally enough is also what Gaddafi calls his female bodyguard. Because of bloody Ophiuchus, the rest of us have been shifted reluctantly along the star chart, like sulky Londoners pissed about having to move down the tube carriage at rush-hour.
As you can imagine, the response from the internet has been vastly unimpressed.
‘Cat’, for instance, had this to say: ‘I have been a taurus from birth and I have all the qualities of a taurus and I act and believe and do things LIKE a taurus… NOT an aries. What I’m supposed to just SUDDENYL change my way of thinking and point of view just because someone says I will? BS. Man I am who I am! ‘
Not since God answered Moses’s question about His name with those same concluding words (Exodus 3:14) has a sentiment rung out so powerfully. I stand with you, ‘Cat’, although I must point out your grotesque ingratitude in OBJECTING to being transferred to Aries. It’s kinda like a Yemeni being all grumpy about being handed a green card.
Like the majority of the internet-reading world, I am choosing to process the star sign information by simply ignoring it. For god’s sake, if I gave two shits about what science had to say about any given matter, I would also have to support funding for stem-cell research and believe that HIV causes AIDS and a whole bunch of other stuff that amounts to a big fat heap of buzzkill.
You know what they say, after all.
Denial: not just a river into which Hosni Mubarak threw suitcases stuffed with gold in the hope of creeping back to retrieve it once things have calmed down.
