What ho, teeny-weeny airhead lunatics! It is I, Asperitus, the awful auspex and reader of cheeses! I have come to chastise you in the usual manner. Yes indeed!
It is time for the vile and bitter rant of prognosticative gabble, waffle and piffle. Heavens forfend, it is awful August and so we must proceed apace to read what further tyre tracks the cosmic wheels will grind into the highway of your sad and tragic little lives.
Last time we left, you were naked, splattered with rotten fruit and stranded in some village square, a moving target for foreign locals (and their fruit), in a land unknown to you by name or culture. Mayhap the 'pelting' was a civic welcome, traditional in an orchardist region which this will prove to be. Or, perhaps you had stumbled into a market gardeners' war, as rival fruiterers pelted it out for local supremacy. Or perhaps we will never know the truth for the last act of the drama was a too too solid apple that bounced off your bonce, sending you sprawling on the cobbles, plummeting into the realms of unconsciousness where those of us that know you feel you most properly belong.
So what will we find as we investigate your shenanigans this time? Why, let us drink the dread draught and so discover. Raise the tankard to wet your flapping lips, my ghastly twerps. Mischievous Mercury is first cab off the rank as he plonks his pointy end into loathsome Leo. Thus, you clamber into wakefulness as voices, concerned and authoritative, fill the air. You're poked and prodded in an eccentrically intimate manner as an unnervingly high-pitched tone buzzes and twangs in your ears.
But what's this? Great barking bandicoots, if it's not marauding Mars, grunting and belching as he bashes and crashes into your nasty sign. Your entire physical being (ugh) instanter surges with a blast of raw rambunctious power. You spring to your feet, healed of your ills, apart from the canker of uselessness that infests your being. There is no remedy for that but the final one! Still, you maffick and cavort, making loud cries of 'huzzah' and other inane celebratory utterances until you stop, transfixed! Eek! You're face to face with a garish figure, a gnarled and bony ancient creature, decked in leaves, spider webs, twigs and feathers, with a grim countenance and rough hewn jewellery emerging from every imaginable orifice, a face as stuck with sharpened points as a pin cushion is stuck with pins.
Jolly Jupiter lurches forward in addlepate Sagittarius and the creature screeches insanely, makes saltatory leaps and gesticulates wildly, urging the crowd about to welcome you as you stand in the splash of smashed and rotting fruit. 'We meet again,' says the creature in a voice like a corncrake, as vamping Venus grinds backwards into lackwit Leo. And, though you have not the slightest inkling of how this may be true, you're instanter shaking hands and wittering in that inane and enthusiastic manner, so familiar to all those who just wish you'd stop talking for a year or two.
Come the New Moon in the lackwit sign of the Lion, it emerges that this creature (you're still unsure if it's male or female) is a shaman in whatever country you've landed in (you still can't comprehend the lingo). The creature's healing touch and feathered magic have brought you back to life. And, tiny twits, this fantastical figure of rustic jiggery-pokery invites you to learn the trade so you may graduate to wearing feathers and smelling like a pigpen, all due to a bizarre notion that the two of you were connected in a past life. One would have thought the present one would have been sufficient. But yet, my loopy loonies, aspects being what they are, you fall to the glamour of unseemly doings involving narcotic Neptune and the great Sol Invicti. You head for the hills with this feathered fool, set on learning to mutter incomprehensibly (an art we thought you had mastered) whilst waving feathers and sticks in a mysterious manner.
Of course, you do have your own miraculous healing to thank for this conversion. And, due to the outrageous urges of Mars, you stop to service each breathing warm blood you pass along the way to the shaman's forest hut. As mischievous Mercury slips into anal Virgo, you arrive at your destination, the shamanic school for brainless twerps. Asphyxiation overcomes you as you stoop to enter a ghastly ramshackle affair of palings, branches, empty fuel tins and dried dung. Your new teacher bids you to silence, indicating that the creature does have some sense after all. In the shadowed gloom, among the rustling and scuffling and the sough of malodorous breezes, he she or it informs you that you must dwell in the forest for seven years (eek), learn the languages of animals (your time in the media will come in handy) and obey all instructions to the letter (egad).
Marauding Mars gropes jolly Jupiter and you're thrown to the earthen floor and used in a faintly disgusting but not altogether unpleasant manner. And, as the great Sol Invicti rams the ramrod into the anxious sign of the Virgin, you seal your fate with an odious osculation, a smelly smacker on the lips. You take up your duties but soon discover many of them involve your teacher attempting to satiate the seemingly insatiable urges of marauding Mars. While this does clarify the issues of gender, it also gives you cause (though not pause) to reflect on the nature of shamanic experience.
In idle moments, you begin trying to talk with the forest creatures but find that most of them hiss and snarl, claw you then run away. You practice snarling at them but they snarl better than you, so you skulk back to the hut and sulk. You're nervous and uncertain, tiny turnips. There's a weird feeling abroad. You stumble about, jamming fingers and stubbing toes, wondering how you got here, what it is you're doing and why anyone in their right mind would do it. An obvious clue there, when one thinks!
Stygian darkness gathers but there's no sign of your teacher! Eek! What's occurring? Storm clouds loom as lightning splits the air and thunder cracks, shaking the flimsy palings. Fierce forest beasts rattle the windows and crash at the door. Eek! Egad! Gadzooks! And other such quaint expressions to indicate surprise and alarm. Perhaps this is a ghastly shamanic rite to which you must surrender!
Then it is that the insane gods launch yet another jolly jape as a Lunar Eclipse comes with a nasty Full Moon in teary Pisces! You're abandoned and alone, just when you need someone in authority the most. You weep great sobs and sigh great sighs. From the depths of your grief you then fly into a rage, cursing them that bore you and the wasted years of a meaningless existence.
Great gods alive and dead, my airhead nonentities! Is this the dark night of the soul? A searing rite of grim despair where all who seek knowledge of the mystic must pass the demon-haunted door! Phantom forms hover about you in the air but a shimmering blackness seems to rise up and engulf you! Why, O why did you come to this dread place when all you really want is a latte and the chance to make money by bending the truth?
The dark overtakes you and you find you are lost in a nightmare recollection from your appalling childhood. As I'm overcome with creeping ennui, I cannot continue with this drivel. Should you wish to read more of it, kindly click here next month and do so. For the nonce, ave, tiny twits!
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