The Moon Is in Scorpio, Mercury Is Retrograde...Do You Know Where You Are?

I thought it would be delightfully contrarian of me to start this astrology blog just past the Full Moon in Scorpio with Mercury Retrograde, a time when no one can tell their ass from their elbow, let alone stumble upon a new site with zero traffic. Yet it also makes a certain amount of sense for me to finally recover something quite similar under the same name. For at the dawn of the '00s, the decade with no name that I refer to as "the naughties," I created and content-managed an astrology website for a now-defunct company called Webseed. At one point I received something like 52 cents every time someone clicked on an ad that was invariably trashy and had nothing whatsoever to do with astrology. Then I was down to 17 cents per click. But until sometime in mid-2002, when Webseed went the way of so many of the dot-com empires, i.e., bust, it was a rewarding experience. People from Montana to Malaysia wrote in to my advice column. Pluto Rising got good PR on a German website. I always figured I'd start another website devoted to astrology. Not the typical Sun Sign horoscope kind of website, which I personally believe cheapens the art of astrology and contributes toward people's skepticism of it, but something simultaneously more serious and more fun, more profane and more sacred.

Pluto Rising, by the way, refers to a placement in my own astrological chart, in which Pluto is conjunct, or smack-dab on, the Ascendant, or the eastern horizon. Not everyone has a planet rising in their chart, but if it's Pluto, then you're all about transformation, in addition to being a pain in the ass and partly or completely unfathomable to most people who think they know you. Astrology itself is transformational in that it encourages awareness, reflection, healing, and change.

Pluto is also the skeleton in the closet, radioactivity, the phoenix rising from its own ashes, X-ray vision, and X marking the spot to buried treasure on a pirate's map.

For all 7 of you who are reading this, you indeed have much to look forward to!