moon in review 🌓 may 23rd

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.

late ass. whatever. im just a late person. i show up late with a iced coffee. everyone puts up with it cause my contributions are so valuable and im cute :3

🌑 april 17th

also ive been struggling hard lately. like even more than previously. that's actually what i—

wait, i have to link the songie first. good lord, that was a long time ago. it was still coat weather when i started writing that. it has kind of a chilly energy actually, yes-no? i wonder like, what season my favorite songs were written in. i definitely associate listening to certain songs and albums with certain seasons. i wonder how it lines up with their creations. they have a thing like this in indian classical music right? pieces for different times of day and stuff? some european classical too i think. probably way more but those are the two i know of. this is actually one of my favorite things about music, how the experience of it changes with the hour, season, year after year. i guess the music at a rave is sort of composed "for nighttime." i could probably come up with a ton more examples if i thought harder. summer jams. brat summer

talk about a long time ago! anyways. im following through on turning the songie project around on itself and starting to brush off old things and think about smooshing everything together. i started reworking one of the old ones and wound up making kind of a solo guitar version, which is good because i would love to start taking a few of these around live soon. plus if i get a good video take i can post it to keep the posts rolling while i work on album tracks. which im totally not stalling on getting started with...

speaking of stalling, im stalling. just like ive been stalling on writing this letter period. i think part of it was just decoupling and reconfiguring the relationships in the "finish a songie" -> "post to website" -> "write the letter" pipeline, and being anxious about losing whatever small momentum i might have been building with that consistency. but i can't really think of a way to shift gears into album mode without all that getting at least a little quieter, because it's literally the same time i'll be spending working slower and more carefully on something i want to release all at once.

anyway, thats all fine really, its just im also procrastinating cause of the kind of perennial moon in review problem where i don't want it to be my vent blog but some moons im just trudging through some kind of hellacious corner of my psychological landscape for most of the time. i got in therapy again and i didnt do my little monthly calendar where i write down tiny notes of what i did each day in the squares, i just left them blank and used them to cross off days and keep track of my estradiol, so i dont have that to look at for ideas either. but so what i think im actually going to do here is try to write about one particular salient clump of the mentals from as much remove as i can muster, because i did come to one broad conclusion im sort of enthusiastic about sharing, and it also just feels like, honest, to write about that in the moon review letter, when i look back at the moon and thats the main thing that jumps out?

🌕 may 1st

ok, so, remember the tiny hi-vis clad self-part who says "boss, it's the fascism" ? that's a good starting point for this line of thought. this character has become something that's oft-referenced between friends and i as we traverse the vicissitudes of a collapsing empire. but i actually want to talk about an alternative route to follow from that inciting question, "why do i have a bullet journal now but i feel worse." not to say i think the reflexive jump from there to "you're cortisol-soaked all the time from everything going to shit" is even particularly thought-terminating, i think it's a great reminder and i'll take it as often as i can get it. (and it does gesture toward a very actionable response— get involved with some kind of resistance or mutual aid. join an ICE watch or a food serve or something. best medicine hands down) i just think it's a big question and no single branch of the dialogue tree can account for everything, and i happen to be thinking about a different one right now and it's kind of refreshing.

because for me, and this is kind of specific to my situation but, for me in order to get that meditation practice (what meditation practice, by the way? my habits are actually kind of a mess right now. but i can definitely relate to feeling like overall i've got more of a handle on my shit than i ever have for most of my life, even as some parts of that are weathering a tough season.) anyway, in order to grab that handle i kind of had to disconnect from some parts of myself. or, i don't know about had to, but i did. like, the way they phrase it in the post, "i'm 10 times more on top of things than i used to be." that idea of being "on top of things" carries some kind of specific implications beyond just "i'm doing better" in the most general sense. (obviously, because the whole premise is that we're doing worse in at least one key way, the day-to-day emotional experience where "everything feels terrible".) being on top of things is about the long- or at least medium-term, about keeping plans and following through and showing up, for ourselves as well as others. maybe its a workout routine, or planning nutritious meals, or even exercising some discipline around like, weed or cigarettes or whatever, if the toll they take is in too great of conflict with that longer-term progress we wanna see. it's really a very particular type of satisfaction, the feeling of building something up, moving in a favorable direction.

and that's one of life's great pleasures, don't get me wrong. but you see what i'm driving toward, maybe— like any great pleasure, it can be an attractive place to fixate, to the detriments of other parts of life; of a more rich and (ironically) holistic framing of what matters, what's important to focus in on day-to-day. and doubly so if those other priorities were cast as standing in the way of this kind of progress before, even rightly, or if they've been hindered or cut off by outside forces. like, i think ultimately this whole idea is best taken hand-in-hand with the "it's the fascism" branch. i started working out at home in 2021, housemates and i holding a pretty tight pre-vax lockdown, with a gamified contraption no less (nintendo ringfit, highly recommended if youre into those fwiw.) and i did my routine every damn day for quite a while. the number went up, i got stronger, background pain lessened, it was great. but i freely admit that part of why it worked is that it allowed me to pursue that particular type of gratification in a time when i was reeling from being suddenly cut off from other types that were load-bearing, like live music and other social events— and that it gave me a feeling of control in a really scary time, and a way to kind of distribute my focus into a longer term and more abstracted goal orientation when the present moment was too distressing to live in.

but we need the present moment! i need the present moment. at least sometimes, i need to just plop into my body and experience what im experiencing, with absolutely no thought of consequence or accomplishment or what it does or doesnt add to anything greater. and the way toward that can definitely involve some of this stuff (working out actually just straight up feels great sometimes! meditation is famously helpful for reconnecting with the now!) but it also involves at least periodically engaging with a wildly different framework from "progress toward goals" and "being on top of things." which can be a weirdly vulnerable feeling thing to do, especially when there's so much to be anxious about, or when it feels like it could threaten that progress or represent a kind of regression. it's funny that i wrote all this just to say "stop and smell the roses," but i do think that for me right now that can fully go toe to toe with "its the fascism" as an answer to "why do i have a bullet journal but i feel worse."

ANYWAYS. this was a bit of an experiment so thanks for bearing with me. its nice to read that original tumblr post a little closer given the frequency with which it comes up, and it turned out pretty rewarding to do so, it actually does a lot with relatively few words and some high-test releatable stereotypes. it feels good stretching out a little here in the letter too; i'm not sure if i'll be returning to similar subject matter particularly more often or anything, but i do think i could stand to take the lesson that it's ok for it to be a bit more freeform sometimes. i mean, speaking of which, that's the really sweet thing about this conclusion i just laid out, right, like. the prescription really boils down to just loosening up a little. which ought to be kind of easy and fun to execute, for once. not that i'm trying to use it as an excuse to avoid any hard work or anything.. but all work and no play makes me jack til im [EXTREMELY LOUD INCORRECT BUZZER] jacking on my dull boy til [EXTREMELY LOUD INCORRECT BUZZER] jacks my boy til im dull [EXTREMELY LOUD INCORRECT BUZZER], am i right?

🌑 may 16th

your present lunation began with the new moon of may 16th, waxed to the full moon of may 31st, and wanes to the new moon of june 14th. saturday, may 23rd was the first-quarter moon of this lunation.

no gigs before nextfirstquarter, which makes sense cause thats in like two damn weeks at this point lol. oops!!

anyway, ready for tarot? here comes..

your card is: the seven of pentacles. pull your own cards at aloe.gay/tarot !

ok, alright, we're doing severals servals sevens. wow, seven dollars! i will love you forever, seven dollars. lol, sorry for the sudden meme density the last few lines. i always kind of wanted to make a tarot booklet thats 100% memes and screenshots, like kind of a collage? oh shit, now that i say collage, i should do that in plano. anyway

i probably would put the last few panels of that achewood somewhere on the 7 of pents. like, if we're doing the comparing numbers across suits thing, it's like. you've got seven swords? careful, friend. that's a lot of swords. seven wands, where a wand is like, a spark of inspiration? could be a lot of cooks in that kitchen. might be tricky to negotiate. seven coins? ok, sweet! lets get a couple coffees.

rachel pollack's "rider theme" (as given in Tarot Wisdom) for the sevens is "action, or maybe the contemplation or awareness of action." this comes sandwiched between the sixes, "unequal relationships" (or "generosity,") and the eights, "movement." i like how action and movement are seperate, the sevens being the kick that sets the last chapter of the suit in motion. and it makes sense to follow from an inequality too— like a potential energy, an electrical voltage, a weight perched on a ledge.

in the pents specifically, i can draw a line from the 7 with its ripening fruits to the workbench of the 8 via kind of a mixing of metaphors. like, if they were unmixed, the figure in the 8 might be preparing those fruits for canning or some other preservation for the coming seasons. or unmixed the other way, maybe the 7 is like, the mason gazing at a pile of freshly quarried stone. makes me appreciate the way the suit depicts a few different stories unfolding in parallel, by flipping between the channels where the pentacle is a coin or a rock or a flower as we move from card to card. it gestures toward the underlying theme that animates the images, the notion that each of these representations is just one of many ways the archetype could be expressed. it keeps us from getting too bogged down in the specifics.

returning to pollack's statement of the 7's theme, it feels like the "contemplation or awareness" line was added as an allowance for the pents specifically (ok, maybe cups too.) she says the figure in pamela colman smith's illustration "looks at his garden with satisfaction or concern (depending on how you read his expression.)" i think i've probably encountered the satisfaction angle more often and it's where i tend to default to, but thinking about it i have always felt a certain kind of lurking ambiguity in that face. reading just purely from my reaction to the image itself, i would probably tend to assign it a decent sized helping of melancholy.

which, and its funny how these always seem to kind of wriggle their way back around to an idea that's really relevant to the letter because im not really doing that on purpose, but maybe that's just part of it. maybe that big sigh and long deep stare are just what progress feels like sometimes. attachment is the cause of suffering after all, and waite says that "these [pentacles are] his treasures and that his heart [is] there." as he sets another harvest in motion, maybe he realizes he's tethering his heart to the earth again, putting roots down deeper and making plans for another winter in this place. which is such a precious thing to treasure! but hearts, i think, at least in part, want to fly, to soar free through boundless sky. and there's a little note of sweet sadness there that tempers the beauty of the fruitful garden, when we take that moment to lean on the staff and really drink in its overwhelming wholeness— before, of course, getting down to work.

thank you so much for reading my newsletter! we're hosted by comradery, a cooperatively-owned subscription platform for artists and community projects. i'm just using it as a newsletter platform right now, but you can absolutely set up a recurring donation of any amount to support me and my art if you're so inclined. (i also have a ko-fi for one-time tips!) 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 on the next first quarter ~

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