Salutations, tiny seafood morsels with nasty little nippers and other even less pleasant bits! Last time we left, you were incarcerated below deck and seemingly doomed to a life on the ocean waves after you'd been snatched by the crew of a mysterious vessel that pulled into the bay of your seaside resort. What ho, jolly tars and other such seafaring talk! Is it time to rustle up hard tack and bully beef as we sing the shanty of the kidnapped crustacean? Or shall we just get out the cat o' nine tails and sing the thrashing song? Or perhaps we might opt for a keelhauling as we meander through the possibilities presented by the ghastly month of jaded June.
But why speculate? Let us instead and instanter pour the dread draught and drink deep of prognostication, vile and bitter. Tremble in your canvas undies, my unhygienic shellfish! It is I, Asperitus! The prophet of waffle, baffle and piffle! Attend to me as I hold forth! Of course, we've missed the ghastly Full Moon in silly Sagittarius but all that did was cause you to discover the creaking and groaning you heard was actually issuing from a bevy of slaves in the hold, each one chained to an oar. Egad! A slave ship! How cruel and yet how economically rewarding for the master!
This realization of course made you ill and cast you into despair, causing you to run through all the prayers you could remember to all the gods you knew in case you found one interested in saving you from a wretched and miserable fate. No score on the board there! We've also missed the unseemly entry (eek) of vamping Venus to lackwit Leo and a ménage a trois involving the ghastly grunt and grapple of marauding Mars, jolly Jupiter and the great Sol Invicti.
The upshot of all of that was that a redheaded bully with an authoritative manner came below deck, stole your money, chained you to an oar alongside one of your miserable and malodorous fellows and then beat you on the thighs until you began to row. You screamed loudly at first but the nasty redheaded chap just gagged you and thrashed your thighs even harder. That, I think brings us to the present, as a New Moon comes in lunatic Gemini!
Thus, we find you settling in to a life of slavery, as you muse with fellow thralls on niceties such as the angling of leg irons to reduce chafing and the inevitable concern over personal hygiene. You pull on your oar in a spiritless but muscular manner as brutish mariners regularly descend to thrash you, shout at you and beat drums to compensate for your appalling lack of rhythm.
As mischievous Mercury moves to perverse reverse, you have a delusory moment where you believe that you are Ben Hur and call to 'Mr De Mille' that you're ready for your close-up. However, a further thrashing proves to be the healing draught that cures this burgeoning fixation, just as the great Sol Invicti holds lustful concourse with dark Pluto, the underworld god. As the busy messenger rolls on down the backwards bypass, you worry obsessively about your wretched and miserable state, wondering if your current situation is a karmic consequence of the nasty and unloving things you have done. Eek! What an unsettling thought for you, my tiny seafood items. In fact, you're on the brink of deciding that, when you escape from the slave ship, you will be a better person, regardless of how unlikely that may seem to those who know you. But this alchemical streaming of guilt and compassion is soon interrupted by the thresh and flail of cosmic events of a raucous and unnerving nature!
The great Sol Invicti rolls and clatters drunkenly into your appalling sign, visiting another Solstice on an overburdened world and a sudden peevishness possesses you, despite your parlous position. The bullying redhead approaches and you rise up (as far as chains will allow) and demand egg custard for your birthday. A thrashing is threatened but you persist in these demands until all the thralls about you join in, clashing their manacles and roaring for the yellow goo. The redhead looks flustered at first then barks an order above decks. Marauding Mars badgers his belligerent way into cloddish Taurus and a raging ruckus erupts topside then makes its way below.
By my sainted aunt, little crab type thingies! Familiar faces appear, laughing gaily (at you not with you) and carrying custard enough to sink a ship, almost! It seems the 'kidnap' affair is a jolly jape arranged by relatives and boon companions! You're on a mystery voyage to an unknown destination to celebrate another year of the endless misery of your life on this wretched earth!
In other words, it's a birthday party given by family and friends! Surprise! They even serve you with a custard cake. And, as is the tradition, the candles sink down into it but they do this every year, giving you something else to moan about. As a second Full Moon comes, this time in grim Capricorn, you twitter away, catching up on all the gossip and laughing gaily.
Yet the laughter is for show as you inwardly begin to plot dark revenge, putting aside all thoughts of becoming a better person. You will of course help humanity by participating in charitable causes. But not even the insane gods will be able to help your family and friends as you exact a Crab's Revenge for this 'heave ho' of a humiliation. Click here next time for the first exciting instalment of this nitwit saga of nasty nippers, aqueous angst and maleficent mal de mer. Ave, tiny seafood miseries!
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