The first rule of horoscopes is to remember that your horoscope is not written for you. It does not address you specifically. Horoscopes are written for “people like you,” which is to say that you should read them like a person like you, but a you who reads horoscopes, understands them, and trusts them.

Any complaint about a daily horoscope’s failure to discuss or predict your lunch, daily expenses, or death are the complaints of a person with laryngitis to a lamp.

People like you are those who were born around dinner eastern standard time on November 18 at 41.7000° N latitude. I am one of those people like that: we are called Scorpios, and like many a Scorpio, I am passionate and faithful and fall in love daily and I am also mistrustful and perpetually isolated in my own unemotional head. Like many Scorpios, I am devoted to my friends and cruel as bureaucrat denied a raise just before taking your call. Like many Scorpios, I am kind and rude, instinctual and devoted to logic, whip-smart and dumb as a box of string; I am both and neither in so many ways and all of none of them at all most of always. Perhaps you can and can not relate, if you are and are not a Scorpio.

Here is the Scorpio horoscope published for the month of October 2014 in a truly great local magazine (that is not sarcasm; the Chronogram really is a great Hudson Valley magazine and I even wrote one article for it in the 1990s); there are still a few days left for all of this to come to pass or none of it to come true or all of it to not come true in a way that spookily proves it was correct from day one: (ahem)

You may be wondering when things are going to change; you may start to think you’re going backwards rather than making progress. You may seem to lose sight of an important goal, or some crucial idea that you’ve been developing. Fear not. The astrology of the next few weeks is certainly mysterious and will leave plenty of people guessing. Yet as those weeks unfold, you will discover that something is brewing under the surface, and that something is likely to manifest on the day that the Sun ingresses your sign, which is October 23. Now, this leaves a question of what to do if you find yourself in a zero-gravity space, or feeling like you’re unable to think clearly. Your chart says that you will get maximum value from getting lost in your work. Proceed with what you are doing, with full devotion, authentic passion and a healthy dose of curiosity. Imagine that you have no need to think about what’s coming next, nor any desire to do so. Keep yourself focused on the task at hand, which over the next two weeks is likely to get more interesting and take on a value of its own, that is, to be interesting for its own sake. You could call this art or science in its most essential and sincere form, which is the setup for an inevitable breakthrough

The paragraph ends with no punctuation, neither a period nor an exclamation point. The other 11 monthly zodiacal missives for October’s impending October-ness (these were published on October 1th, right split-lickety) all conclude with concluding punctuation. Minor typo? Absolutely; every publication (even this one) has typos. They are a fact of life, like dust on a computer screen or sunlight. But might this absence mean something? What if I “act as if” and read it—the typo and the entire horoscope—as if it means something?

An “inevitable breakthrough”? That sounds exciting. But can a breakthrough be a breakthrough if it is inevitable? Don’t I have to be a participant for an event to be a breakthrough, and if it is inevitable aren’t I not a participant but a bystander?

It still sounds exciting and I can not wait for October 23, which was … last Thursday. What happened then? The sun was ingressing my sign. I wrote a throw-back Thursday piece that day, which covered the past (an old photo), the present (an award this blog had won), and the future (I concluded with a sentence about wanting to learn to meditate, which was unrelated to anything else I had written). Um, wow.

The horoscopianizer was right: the sun was ingressing all over my place last Thursday, but that may be only because I don’t have any curtains and my room faces the sunrise.

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for October 29 asks, “Yesterday you invented a new astrological sign. Today, write your own horoscope—for the past month (in other words, as if you’d written it October 1st).”

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