Pisces season turns me into a 19th century public menace and I hate it

Wee wah wah wee woo!

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away¹

There’s some pretty awful stuff in the world: tax havens, Jeff Bezos, rising neo-nationalism, Peter Dutton…but Pisces season deserves its place on the steaming pedestal of shit. To be fair, Scorpio and Cancer season come a close second and third; during any water transit it’s like my worst traits are dialled up to 100% and then displayed as an X-ray to a group of medical students who say, “That looks awful.”

And my worst traits (a particularly noxious mélange of neuroticism, self-obsession, and manic hyperfixation) are that bad, so much so that if someone developed a time machine and sent me back to the wrong era, Freud would be the one doing my X-rays, combing through my eggs like an Oedipal Easter Bunny to find the hysterical ones.

Now, I have issues with other seasons too, but they’re benign. Libra season is a bit wishy-washy, Capricorn season is purgatory if it were a time of year. But these are easy to brush off. They’re your weird aunt at Christmas who’s started talking about Theta healing and your red flag is half-heartedly raised but you’re able to wrangle her with a few well timed glasses of champers and polite (but firm) conversation redirection.

But Pisces season is a meteorite and I’m a dinosaur low on the predator pecking chain and I watch my life flash before my eyes as it comes hurtling in. It completely destroys my sense of time. I believe this melancholy, this bone-ache despondency, is going to last forever and ever like Doctor Who. My sadness is fossilised, then regenerated over and over again like Groundhog Day and then I end up in the Natural History Museum of the future where they have a wing dedicated to my lamentation.

In the same spirit as the sadistic computer in Harlan Ellison’s ‘I have No Mouth and I Must Scream’, I want everyone to feel my ephemeral anguish, the depths of my pain which right now feels more important than world hunger. Pain which will inevitably pass on the first day of Aries season when I get the fuck over myself.

Navel gazing is not good for me. I get entranced by sad belly button fluff. It sighs with its tiny lint voice: ho hum, woe is me.

When I told my mother about my difficulty with water seasons, she asked me, “Ok. If you know that you get sad around these times, what can you do to prepare for next season? You know, to mitigate it?” I blinked myopically at her, dumbstruck. What did she mean prepare? That wasn’t in the job description of a melancholic dandy. I hardly expect Byron or Shelley outfitted their google calendars to account for water season sadness (although since I’m a Virgo moon and Mars, the idea is seductively appealing).

“Mother!” I exclaimed in the same emphatic tones that Marianne Dashwood used with her horrendously sensible sister. “I am here to feel, not do things that will invariably improve my mental health!” And then I fainted on a conveniently placed chaise lounge to prove my point.

My partner, bless him (I make him sound like he’s dead but he’s alive and I vex him endlessly), calls me ‘indulgently sad’. Which, at first, I vehemently denied.

But upon reflection, my seasonal astrological sadness wasn’t a concealed bottle of passion pop in Camperdown Park. It wasn’t a vodka cruiser at one in the morning at the Ivy. It wasn’t even a $5 dollar beer at Scary Canary (if you pretend you never went there when you first turned eighteen shame on you). It’s a Penfolds Bin 95. A Henschke Hill of Grace. My wailing is vine-grown, lovingly harvested, distilled into a bottle, left to age in a cellar then transported to a swanky restaurant in the Rocks to be carefully placed on a rack in a temperature-controlled room, and then served alongside a degustation of intergenerational wealth on a parsnip reduction.

If I actually were to be transported back in time, I probably wouldn’t have much time for reclined sorrow. Ideally I wish I could swan around in half-mourning clothes (I think purple looks rather dashing on me) and read sad bits of poetry like Julie Karagina in War & Peace and shackle some poor Boris Drubetskoy to my side to also conveniently sigh so that he may win my affections (and my fortune). But truth be told I come from working class stock so I’d probably be either in a workhouse or dead. And I really don’t think they had time for navel gazing.

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I saw a psychic last week which was a transcendental experience. I arrived early, nervous, brimming with excitement. Here I was, about to be told by the universe that I was special. That great things were about to happen to me. I was ushered into a blue cushioned room with incense and soft-twinkling wind chimes. I set my phone to record and awaited my glorious destiny.

Instead I got spectrally bitch-slapped by the ghost of my Deda² who told me in very firm Eastern-European terms to stop wallowing in self pity, and wax my moustache.

There were other things said of course, which gave me a healthy enough dose of reality that my eyes were watering with the sting of the human condition, but I did feel better when I left. Or at least twenty four hours later when I had a debrief with my mother, my friend, my sibling, my aunt, my partner, and a bottle of champagne. 

So here we are. Me and Pisces season. The centaur versus the fish. The sensitive in a wave of emotions. No longer to be washed away. No longer to be rattled like a twenty-two year old at Stereosonic. I am implacable now, so stoic I make the busts of Caesar and Epictetus weep with envy. I return to mum’s earlier question, her rallying cry, her call to action. What can I do next time to prepare? I think on it a while, explore my options, schedule them into my GCAL.

And then I rip the hair from my upper lip and have a big old cry.

1. Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley

2. Deda/деда = Grandfather