Posted by aloe on Jan 03, 2026
now that's what i call the bleak mid-winter! i swear it feels like i wake up, make breakfast and its dark. ah well, at least it's past the solstice.
moon in review is the moonly newsletter from me, aloe. i send one out every first-quarter moon. it recounts the previous lunation, from one new moon to the next. and if you thought the last one was short...
🌑 november 20th
then, get ready for an even shorter one, i guess. and late again too, just a day before the full moon. but like i said it's the dark times. im hibernating and surviving and working on weird internal stuff.
and music, though! i have another tape for ya. i tried a clutch of new things on this one — distorted vocals, yellin' and screamin', i kind of used the bass for chords and did just a sparse lead guitar layer. it was another big swing in terms of just trying shit like i was talking about last time. and once again as i worked on it i went through kind of a journey; from having the idea, to doubting and second-guessing it, to pushing through that and just doing it anyway, to winding up with another personal favorite. so i reluctantly chalk up one more point for loosening up and being less judgmental while i'm working on these.
last letter i said i was a little torn between making it a "good followup" to the (catchy, relatively attention-getting) demo preceding it, and making it maximally sloppy and impenetrable so nobody gets the wrong idea. and i think it hits a good middle ground there — by which i mean, i managed to mostly totally ignore all that and just work on the next thing in the queue, whatever little idea was bouncing around my head the loudest. if anyone ever takes anything away from all this going on about process, let it be "Just Do Work." i know that's platitudinous to the point of being useless, but that's not because the people who say it are stupid, it's just impossible to put better words around it because it's so based in a direct personal experience. it's like trying to express a spiritual conviction or religious truth in that way. without shared external reference points for analogies, it's not possible to really explain it to someone who hasn't felt something similar. so you can only either try to be poetic, or resort to insipid nonsense like "reality isn't real" and "you can't edit a blank page" and so forth.
which isn't to say it can't be cultivated, encouraged, or even taught; just that it's very unlikely to be successfully transmitted wholesale in a given chunk of language. like any really big, worthwhile insight, living with it is a practice. it's crystal clear in ecstatic moments, then obscured beyond all searching, then suddenly clear again. and the only way to state it is so simple it's insulting. Just Do Work. most of the rest is overthinking it. that's the practice i'm trying to build, the truth i'm trying to get used to.
🌕 december 4th
anyway ! then i had my balls removed :) and you can read all about it on my blog, i did a whole writeup. kicking myself right now for not saving at least a bit of that for newsletter material .. but that's ok, i wanted to get it out there and it gave me something to work on in bed. i also added a little website section to hold that post and a couple others about transition-related things, and link out to some other relevant sites. i've learned so much from girls i sorta know just posting online over the years — and more than learning, felt so much. like, the warm sunshine pouring into hidden places, just sharing an interest or a curiosity or a potential experience with somebody, when it's something that doesn't get talked about too often. it's corny but i love thinking i could be that girl for someone.
annnd yeah, then i was in bed for a while, and that's about it for this moon. told you it'd be short. between the surgery and the season i'm giving myself a third of a christmas vacation on this one. hopefully i can put the juice toward catching up to the actual moon next time.
🌑 december 19th
your present lunation began with the new moon of december 19th, waxes to the full moon of january 2nd, and wanes to the new moon of january 18th. saturday, december 27th was the first-quarter moon of this lunation.
prior panic is playing at as220 on friday january 23rd with the orrs, full lineup tbd. by then the sunset in providence won't be until 4:49 !
let's wrap it up with our tarot card. ready ?
your card is: the five of swords. pull your own cards at aloe.gay/tarot
lol, lmao. need i even ? the classic struggle card .. waite says "Degradation, destruction, revocation, infamy, dishonour, loss." guy never pulls a punch
but i kind of like that sometimes. i often take these Bad Cards as like, a call to acceptance. like, yeah, shit sucks .. it's dark all the time, it's cold, nobodys hiring. it's kind of affirming when the cards reflect it back in their potent symbolic language. it's kind of cathartic to take a minute and feel into how Woe is Me, for i Am so Very Stabbed. i remember using this lens on the 10 of swords a couple times in readings, and 5 is kind of a mini-10, the little-ending of side A of the record.
it's notable how, unlike the 10, this one also includes the stabber. or in the case of this simplified illustration, includes those two parallel swords raised over the tangle below in apparent victory. rachel pollack says: "Actually, many people who look at the Rider picture and do not know what it intends to illustrate see it as positive. This is because they assume the largest figure is the focus character, and so they see the card as triumph and satisfaction. Only if we know it illustrates the theme of defeat do we look primarily to the two figures moving away."
this tracks for the ending-not-ending i think. the card contains both the loss and the laid-down arms, but also the true folly, the illusion of a win by force. we can even trace the paths of each through the rest of the suit — with the defeated retreating to calmer waters in the 6, while the victor keeps on foolishly gathering up all the instruments of his own demise in the 7.
so dont overthink it! (swords are analytical, remember.) it's the middle of the damn winter. have a good cry if you need to, even. then retreat somewhere warm and get some rest <3
thank you so much for reading my newsletter! we're hosted by comradery, a cooperatively-owned platform for supporting artists and community projects. i host all my work that i can online for free; if it means something to you and you want to see more of it, please consider making a recurring donation as low as $1 a month on comradery, or a one-time tip on ko-fi. anything helps a whole lot in my effort to build a sustainable art practice and life for myself. my website is aloe.gay, and you can write back to me at aloe (at) aloe (dot) gay. i hope you have a good moon, i'll see you around the next first quarter ~