Mars entered its nocturnal home of Scorpio today, the fixed water sign.  It is a place of clandestine precision, cloak and dagger energy; sex, death and regeneration, blood sealed in secrecy.  It is a house of both powerful current and time-biding retreat, an underground fire-water much different in nature than Mars’ diurnal home of Aries.

Earlier today, my friend Ash hit me up to say that in the very moment Mars entered Scorpio, she sliced her knuckle open while doing yard work.  The blade was sharp enough that she didn’t know she was cut until the announcement was clear… at which point she was inside again, blood all over the walls, floor, everything.  The wound reportedly didn’t hurt much, and resulted in a sanguine addition to her ancestral altar.

Mars, the fist, the knuckle, if you will.  Scorpio, the precision, the hiddenness of the wound until the unknown is made conscious.  All the blade.

Minutes after Ash told me this, my landlord came over to look at the exceptional shower at my place, which just began leaking (lots of) water from the bottom seal due to a couple widening holes in the grout just above inside.  His mother stopped by with him, as she’s in town and was the one who built most of the shower herself years ago — and she’s using a knife to check the grout, aggressively scraping the inside where it was not properly sealed with an implicit disappointment.

Another knife, the water, the leaking.  Intergenerational collaboration on a place of cleansing.  Whether downright cosmo-drama or the ‘purely mundane,’ as above, so below.

Later in the afternoon, I went to help a friend with a sizable project.  Out of the blue, my Lyft driver brought up a time in 1970 that he sold a quarter-pound of weed to an undercover in Calvert County, Maryland.  A marine sergeant stood next to him in court, told Judge he’d set the boy straight.  Judge gave him three years for a quap.  Wanted to “make an example.”  Even with the marine next to him, he couldn’t stress it enough.  This fellow got beat up all the time in the pen, said it only made him angrier.  

When this young “hoodlum” of a man got out the can, he kissed his mom goodbye, hopped in his Torino, and set off for a new home in Pittsburgh.  On the way out, he made sure to stop by the Judge’s place, where he did donuts and burnouts until this punitive person’s garden beds and entire lawn were destroyed.  Drove to Breezewood with grass and branch sprigs in the grill.  Hearing this, I smiled to myself not just at the poetic justice, one might feel — but seeing Mars comfortable in its home opposite Venus’ pastures of Taurus; truly a moment of ‘anti-Spring’ in every way, reeking havoc on those who punish nature itself.

Another curiosity was my driver’s need to tell me this tale.  Despite being a devout Christian and assuring me that even his rather scorpionic, retributive actions were themselves wrong in some way, I could sense he didn’t fully believe that.  It was another profound in-between moment on another day of my life, witnessing his catharsis in the rearview as he shared this story with me.  “It’s all water over the dam” — these were his words in closing.  Of course.  As he pulled his dark red vehicle to a stop, I asked if I could take a picture of the cross on his dashboard, one fashioned from the wood of an olive tree in Jerusalem.

An hour later, I met with the president of a community board in Pittsburgh’s North Side to look at a property in his hood that has my interest.  It’s a full rehab prospect, nestled along the same street my aunt lived on until her death in April of last year, and so my desire to continue a lovely narrative loop plays into the appeal of this place in particular.  Her memorial service is in the morning, not twelve hours from now.  Time has been frozen and bent in half so much in the past year and a half, as we all know.

One of the walls adjacent to the kitchen appeared to be splattered with a tremendous amount of dried blood, perhaps mold, and we both chuckled at what a seasonally apt sight it made, lit by our phones as he showed me this distressed bando of a home.  His name means ‘he who laughs.’  Some of you will infer it.  The basement door remains so fortified, still none of the board members have been down there.

He proceeded to show me another property in the board’s possession, on a more main drag of this N.side neighborhood.  It’s a magnificent thing, at a steal of a price and worth much more in the end, given the overhead it’ll take is maybe 50k north of the first.  The other is a quaint box, this one 3,000 square feet.  He told me they discovered it used to be a grow house, and the basement is riddled with old hydroponic equipment.  It was a sight to behold.  Uncanny, this day’s marriage of watery and earthen themes, yin-ness and scorpionic secrets, the punishment of that which is prohibited in one view or another.

While Mars in Libra can have a kind of divine discontent about moving forward with any given thing, I’ve found the red planet’s ingress into its nocturnal home of Scorpio today to have announced itself clearly, if not with signature touches of subterranean subtlety.

And the not so subtle.  A man’s boiling but calculated, inappropriate public expression to his partner at the bar of a fine East Oh. establishment I sat at, having a decidedly solo dinner after everything I’ve told you.  Both of them clearly wanting something else.  Chatting with the bartender about the reasons for my observably intense expressions as I devoured in passing, bringing home a couple added entrees for appetites beyond.  Both of us judging the situation after the couple left.  Property visits aside, and the symbolism steeping them… just another rotation of the earth, reading reflections of sky.  And so I share them with you~

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