Weekend Entertainment Guide 5/25/25: Saturn in Aries edition

The balsamic phase of the Saturn-Neptune cycle continues

Saturn moved from Pisces to Aries last night (8:35 p.m. Pacific on May 24, 2025). I held Weekend Entertainment Guide to give time for more Saturn in Aries posts to roll in. Saturn and Neptune are now both in Aries, where they will make an exact conjunction in February 2026. However, this conjunction has not happened yet, so we are still solidly in the slippery balsamic phase of the Saturn-Neptune synodic cycle.

Where I was eight years ago

In May 2017, I started a two-year run as a vendor selling homemade journals at the Whiteaker Community Market in Eugene, Oregon.

People tended to assume I named my booth Backstreet Girl Notebooks after the Backstreet Boys, a music group that was popular when I was in middle school. That wasn’t it, though. I’ve always preferred oldies music, and so the booth was actually named after “Back Street Girl,” a song by The Rolling Stones.

2017 was the year after 2016, the year that I abandoned a decade-long interest in fiction writing. The final straw for me and fiction writing, though this wasn’t the first straw or the only straw, was the Cowboy Poster Incident. Amid the occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in eastern Oregon during January 2016, a member of the literary community in Portland, Oregon, posted on Facebook about a confrontation that went down in Portland: an unnamed Portland store had a poster visible in the window that depicted a cowboy with a gun. The community member then went into the store and asked the storekeeper to take the poster down on the grounds that having a poster showing a cowboy with a gun was insensitive in light of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge occupation. The storekeeper ultimately complied.

There is no point in naming the individual who made that Facebook post. I think the exact same post would have just been made by someone else if that individual had never been born, based on the number of supportive comments that accumulated on the post cheering the removal of the cowboy poster.

I never saw the cowboy poster that changed the course of my life. I probably wouldn’t have chosen it for display in my home, but I also probably could have walked by it a hundred times without knowing there was anything offensive about it. At that point, sensitivity readers were starting to appear on the scene to help writers catch offensive content in their books before publication, but what sensitivity reader would have caught the cowboy poster?

And what would all these people on Facebook have done if the storekeeper had refused to remove the poster? And what if the problematic item in the window had been not a poster, but a book that some writer like me had poured potentially years of time and effort into? I knew then and there how much help the literary community would be if any book of mine was called out as causing offense: they’d be at the front of the mob with the biggest pitchforks as they howled for my book to be destroyed.

Well, stick a fork in me — I was DONE. It was obvious to me that I couldn’t force anyone to have my back if they just didn’t. At the time, I was responsible for financially providing for my family, and I simply could not take the risk of publishing a book that some unhinged mob might viciously turn on for reasons I would have never seen coming.

Some hearing about all this might say that I am carrying out a vendetta against things that happened in my head. It is true that no published work of mine was ever canceled. However, it’s a very normal part of life to observe the experiences of others and learn from those observations. It is also true that the published work of other writers was canceled in crazy ways for crazy reasons, and I am not crazy for watching what happened to them and drawing the conclusion that it was possible for something similar to happen to me if I ever published a book.

In order to function, we need to know the basic rules of the world we live in. Astrologically, this is the role of Saturn. Some rules are stated explicitly, perhaps formalized as laws, while others we pick up through observation. The rule I picked up through observing the Cowboy Poster Incident and other similar incidents as Saturn in Sagittarius squared Neptune in Pisces — the waning square in the Saturn-Neptune cycle that began with the 1989 Saturn-Neptune conjunction — was that it was not safe for me to publicly express any opinion or observation on any subject because someone might get their feelings hurt and become irreparably damaged in a way that entitled them to exact unlimited revenge on me indefinitely.

I didn’t stop writing after I became aware of that rule. I simply confined my writing to my private diaries. I figured my dangerous opinions couldn’t hurt anybody there.

Back to selling diaries at Whiteaker Community Market, I figured others living under the same rule might also want private diaries they could fill with their dangerous opinions. Under that rule, perhaps a fitting one for repressive Saturn clamping down on unfiltered Sagittarius at the time, anyone’s honest view of anything seemed as unwelcome as the secret girlfriend described in “Back Street Girl”:

Don't want you out in my world
Just you be my backstreet girl

Please don't be part of my life
Please keep yourself to yourself
Please don't you bother my wife
That way you won't get no hell

No matter what our sex lives looked like on a literal level, we were all metaphorically in that position of having to keep ourselves to ourselves. After all, our manners were never quite right.

Perhaps a key task of the Saturn-Neptune cycle that began on March 3, 1989, at 11°54’ Capricorn was changing the boundaries of society’s institutions (Capricorn) to open them to people who had been left out in the past. In terms of LGBTQ rights, for example, I would much rather live in 2025 than 1989 — I think some good things happened during this Saturn-Neptune cycle.

As a synodic cycle wanes, however, we may lose touch with the initial valid grievance that set off a push for reform.

The waning Saturn-Neptune square (first exact on November 26, 2015, and then there were two more hits in 2016) roughly coincided with my own Saturn return in early Sagittarius, which might explain why I was so personally affected by it. The rule I came to understand at that time was perhaps an objectively awful rule, but it was at least a clear, consistent, and unambiguous rule. I followed the rule, and I was able to continue providing for my family.

The balsamic phase of the current Saturn-Neptune cycle began on January 20, 2021, when Saturn at 3°55’ Aquarius was 45° away from Neptune at 18°55’ Pisces. Although Saturn and Neptune will be very close to each other during summer 2025, we will remain in the balsamic phase of the cycle until the next Saturn-Neptune conjunction takes place on February 20, 2026.

So far, the balsamic phase of the Saturn-Neptune cycle has left me nostalgic for the awful rule of eight years ago that was at least clear, consistent, and unambiguous! As I put it in the preface of Booby Prize: An Astrological Novel, published on December 31, 2022:

I can at least appreciate the consistency of a world that is too predictably fragile to tolerate me publishing any sort of novel whatsoever. Whether such a world is right or wrong, I have the peace of knowing where I stand in it.

However, a world where I am simultaneously in trouble for publishing and not publishing the same novel is a world that will make my head completely explode.

Look, I want everyone to have a good life no matter who they are. I want people to have the right to make their own decisions about how they identify themselves and how they run their personal lives. I don’t want to hurt anyone or make anyone’s life harder. But talk about what sensitivity reader would have caught the cowboy poster — what sensitivity reader would have come up with the plot twist where I eventually felt compelled to completely reverse course in order to accommodate someone who effectively identified as the Aunt of a Published Novelist? I have lived through a lot of very strange stories that would be funnier if they had happened to someone else.

I withdrew from my efforts to become a published novelist in 2016 because I got the impression, based on how I saw others being treated, that there would be no empathy for the good intentions behind my speech if I said something that someone took the wrong way. I dug out my old novel and self-published it in 2022 because it turned out that there was no empathy for the good intentions behind my silence either. I made considerable sacrifices because I sincerely believed that was the best way for me to meet my obligations to my family, and in return, I got accused of being an underachiever. This broke my heart.

As Saturn and Neptune remain in their balsamic phase for the next several months, both going back and forth over the cusp between Pisces and Aries, the rules are definitely still in flux. Perhaps a new law will be clearly handed down after Saturn and Neptune finally officially conjoin next year, but we are not there yet.

In the meantime, what I recommend is for people to just give each other the benefit of the doubt. Instead of coming down hard on someone for whatever infraction, consider that maybe there is another side of the story you don’t know about — that maybe they had valid reasons for handling a situation the way they did. As Martin Luther said in The Small Catechism, “put the best construction on everything” instead of assuming the worst. Most people are trying as well as they know how to do the right thing, but we are in a moment where it is exceptionally hard to define what that is.

Backstreet Girl Notebooks never made a lot of sales. The remaining inventory, along with a couple of newer items, is listed on Etsy. “Scenes from a Realignment,” my contribution to Changing of the Guards: Pluto on the Precipice, contains excerpts from my diaries between February 2016 and October 2020, and it definitely includes content more inflammatory than any cowboy poster could ever dream of being. If I’m going to be accused of underachieving, then all the facts are finally going to come out. The August 20, 2017, diary entry cited in “Scenes from a Realignment” was written from my booth at Whiteaker Community Market.

I actually first discovered “Back Street Girl” through the Lambchop cover, linked below.

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