Mercury Retrograde

Jim Morrison once said of astrology, "I think it's a bunch of bullshit". I'm pretty much with Jim, but I have to say there is something to the concept of the Mercury Retrograde.

It's a (thankfully) short period during which anything that can possibly go wrong does so with gusto - especially matters related to communication and travel. During this current ongoing Mercury Retrograde, all kinds of truly fucked-up events have transpired, not the least of which are the sudden death of my laptop (one year to the day after the one-year warranty expired) and the little matter of my car exploding into flames in my face while I was driving it down 64 East, just like Robert DeNiro in Casino. I also include the recent calamitous week-long power outage in Louisville as being part of the Mercury Retrograde, as well as the current financial disasters going on at Wall Street and every other international exchange as well.

It's this current "credit crunch" (is that what they're calling it these days?) that's really messing up my life right now, even more than being without a car. (I'm enjoying the 2008 Dodge Avenger I'm renting from Enterprise anyway.) It's coming at the worst possible time, since I still have some payouts to make for Toulouse-inations, and was in the midst of setting up Catclaw as a LLC and applying for Federal and State funding so we can carry out our plan to be established in our very own theatre space by this time next year.

Furthermore, this royally screws up our efforts to establish the best possible line of credit with our banks of choice, Chase and Republic Bank. For complicated reasons too convoluted for my Madison County brain to wrap itself around, credit line applications are now taking a long, long time to approve at Chase, even though my credit is, I'm proud to say, damn near flawless.

The Mercury Retrograde period ends October 15, and it can't come a moment too soon for me. These last few weeks have been a real downer. I had to chuckle and think of my good friend Aleister Crowley on the day when the Dow ended down 777 points, though.

- - JSH