something silly, something serious & then some(more)thing(s)
A couple months ago, The New York Times published a piece explaining that, because of the wobbly angle of the earth’s rotation, my zodiac sign (Sagittarius/centaur archer, adventurous & optimistic) was 2,000 years out of date and I was actually an Ophiuchus (the serpent bearer, the 13th zodiac sign wedged amongst the twelve-traditional-signs, qualities unknown).
Now, this breaking news was NEW news to me but is definitely OLD news to any active astrology-heads out there. The ancient Greek astronomer Hipparchus spotted this wobble at least a hundred years before the wise men saw their star over Bethlehem1, so if I’d been paying attention at all to the celestial bodies for the last 34 years (not to mention the 2,000 years before that) this wouldn’t have come as such a surprise.
Before I go any further, you should know that I’m ok.2
I’ve never grounded my sense of self amidst the stars and I know very little about the ins and outs of the zodiac beyond the fact that (I THOUGHT) I was born beneath the man-horse-archer. In fact, I avoid all kinds of potentially illuminating categorical systems (Enneagrams, Myers-Briggs Tests, What Character From the Office Are You Quizzes, etc.) for the perhaps unfounded fear of being put into a little box by someone else. Classic Sagittarius, huh? Total Creed Bratton move.
Also, a quick surfing of the net taught me that in tropical astrology, it’s always been more seasonal and less constellation based so, again, under Western Star-Law as far as I understand it, legally, I’m still a Sagittarius and this freak out is completely unwarranted.
But! BUT! The reality is that when I was born on December 5th, 19913 in a hospital in Boone County, Missouri, the stars above my head and behind the sun couldn’t be connected into the shape of a guy with a body of a horse firing a bow and arrow. Instead? Well, instead they can be connected into the shape of a guy holding a snake or, and HERE’S WHERE THINGS GET INTERESTING…some people don’t see a guy holding a snake. Instead, they see…
A guy with snakes for legs.
i.e. -
A SERPENTAUR (!)
My first question? Pretty obvious.
Are the feet heads?
I mean, you tell me.
Fair enough, no fish heads are poking out of a mermaid and horse heads aren’t present in centaurs (unless two centaurs…who both have the recessive “horse gene”… hook up…???4), but it still feels like the phrase I read, “snakes for legs” [Not “snake (singular) for legs” plural)], implies that those feet GOTTA be heads, particularly when the evidence of Medusa (see: “snakes for hair”) is definitely rendered artistically as “each hair has a head”.
Now, I’m sure even in these divisive times we can all agree that while hair is heads, hair is definitely not legs.
If your hair has a mind of its own? That’s just a bad hair day, put on a hat, Gorgon. But if your LEGS have TWO minds of their own? You’re gonna end up walking to the Everglades to try to swallow a guinea fowl with your feet. A disaster! And, worse, if you have two snakes for your two legs and they have fundamentally different desires? The chances of you being split in twain just got exponentially higher.
Now, snakes are obviously famous for being anti-leg5, so there’s also something pretty messed up about forcing them to be the one thing that, by definition, they lack. After all, every snake is just a leg away from being a lizard, ya know? Plus, since we’ve already established that these feet are heads, these snakes don’t know the first thing about HAVING legs, let alone BEING legs.
Classic Ophiuchus line of thought here, huh? Ol’ snake-for-legs can’t make up his mind.
On an unrelated note, or one only tangentially connected via the compelling mental image of “noodle legs”, I recently slipped on some ice after getting TOO LOOSE at yoga and strained what my friend Betsy6 thinks could be my intercostal muscles. I just turned 34 and I’m already trying all kinds of new things!
ICE IN CHICAGO
And now a muscle-straining pivot to the other ICE that’s been in Chicago this year.
Words don’t feed adequate to capture the reality of having masked and armed Federal agents terrorize a city I love. The whiplash between THIS section of the newsletter and the one above is also roughly how it feels on a regular basis.
ICE and Border Patrol agents deployed tear gas in neighborhoods and outside elementary schools, entered a day care near our home with guns to remove someone who had legal documentation to work in the US, and illegally arrested multiple American citizens. The Federal government says they’re after violent criminals and the “worst of the worst” but the facts don’t lie.
Over the last few months, I helped edit some short documentary videos for a company called GO FOURTH MEDIA that was created to spread awareness of the violations that are occurring. Social media can feel like an echo chamber, and GO FOURTH is aimed outside of left-leaning-circles to create media for people who have been as yet unmoved or unconcerned about the uptick in State violence.
There’s a pattern of ICE agents targeting parents and caretakers at elementary school drop offs and pickups in our neighborhoods, so for the past few months Abby and I and our neighbors have filled out spreadsheets, picked days and corners, and stood outside with whistles and phones out to be on watch for masked agents in unmarked cars who are actively harming our community. There’s been a lull for the past few weeks, but just this morning we learned that Greg Bovino is back in town to ramp up detentions/abductions in time for the holiday season.
A silver lining has been feeling strangers shift into neighbors as the community comes together to protest, witness, and resist. It’s awakened me to the existing ecosystems of community care — networks of care and mutual aid that are arising against this unique threat and will persist long after this heightened threat recedes.
Take care out there and please consider a donation to ICIRR or your own regional organization today.
SOME(MORE)THINGS
I re-watched director Joe Wright’s and late great writer Tom Stoppard’s ANNA KARENINA last night and loved it all over again. I think this one got middling reviews at the time, but it continues to knock my socks off. In this house, we love an intentional adaptation that plays with form to capture the spirit of the source material!
Consider cancelling your Spotify account! They run ICE ads, pay artists fractions of a cent, and pour millions of dollars into AI military technology. NOT GREAT. Personally, spending ear-time on Deezer and Bandcamp these days instead. Deezer makes it easy to transfer your playlists from other services if you’re curious!
Like millions of 30-something-millinials before me I’ve found a new found love for analog film. Lingering with an image instead of a mindless scroll?? What a treat! I so rarely revisit the thousands of snaps living on my phone, but lately I can’t get enough of the 36 exposures per reel that take a week or so to be developed. I can’t bring myself to post these darling little exposures to be gobbled by the social media feed yet, but here’s one that my 3 year-old nephew Arie took:
I might be biased, but I think he’s already got a great eye AND a passion for pushing a button that creates a fun flash of light!
I wrote and illustrated a tiny book for my aforementioned nephews who just learned about ghosts. There’s currently only a single, hand drawn copy in existence that belongs to a five year-old and a three year-old, but I scanned a digital copy if you’re curious and brave.
Finished the novel ON THE CALCULATION OF VOLUME I - Groundhog Day time loop as literary fiction. I dig it!
Got a SteamDeck and now? Now I’m a gamer. Getting my space legs in NO MAN’S SKY and very open to any beloved indie game recs you have! Trying to figure out how to get my hands on some of Alice Bucknell’s experimental games at the moment… A co-op game inspired by black holes and quantum entanglement and love? Very much my jam.
I love the tiny awards (a favorite this year is 10,000 Drum machines) What if we all worked together to keep the internet a little goofy?
I’m on a real Ursula K. Le Guin kick over here; listening to Earthsea and working my way through an anthology called A Larger Reality that includes all kinds of beautiful ephemera from the daily life of a writer interspersed with essays from other writers who loved her work.
Also slowly making my way through The Best American Essays of 2025 — a favorite so far is Christina Sharpe’s powerful “The Shapes of Grief.”
What about you? How are you winding down and recharging this year?
I’m excited to shake things up and play around with cadence and content in this newsletter in the new year, so stay tuned! Perhaps even a NAME CHANGE? I’ve loved hanging out in PILLOW FORT, but sometimes you gotta just add a fresh coat of paint and/or not have the same name as a Target children’s line brand.
As always, thanks for reading and coming along for the ride.
xo,
Will
Considering slipping this sentence into every essay I write from now on. Please sound off in the comments if you think I’m ok.
BEHIND THE SCENES: your freshly 34 year-old-friend got “The Best American Essays” edited by Jia Tolentino for his birthday from his loving partner and subsequently spent his lunch break writing the thing you’re about to read. Please review footnote #2 above and sound off in the comments.
Please, please, please don’t quote me on this.
Not unwarranted in my opinion. They were just trying to share and then BOOM, cursed to crawl on their bellies for…ever? Look it up in the Bible — it’s In The Beginning
Betsy isn’t a doctor but she does do Pilates and a trust her.