We apologize for the delay in getting Jenny's column posted this month. It's my fault, not Jenny's. It looks like Mercury got the best of me early in the month.
-- from Susan at Lesbian.com

In the beginning of the month, I was freezing in the Endless Mountains. Women were walking around in down parkas, asking each other, “Is this June in Pennsylvania?”

Then I got flooded in Washington, along with the Archives. They say the Constitution is still safe. And actually, it looked pretty good to me this morning, when I read that the Supreme Court had wagged its collective finger at Bush’s personal torture chambers. I hadn’t expected that much of this Court.

So my summer has started with more than its share of odd weather. But now I’m looking for a sunny July. My lover is flying in from Ecuador this afternoon, so I’m walking around singing, “Reunited, it feels so good…”

Mercury has just entered the sun-ruled sign Leo, and even as I speak, it’s slowing down. Getting into a beach mode, so to speak. Ready to just lay itself down on the handiest chaise and enjoy the sun on its face.

Yes, Mercury, the planet of communication and transportation and general busyness, is going retrograde on the 4th of July. While the fireworks are bursting and sprouting, people will be standing around, wondering what happened to those people they thought they were meeting at this spot. Or they’ll be sitting on their blankets, asking each other who was supposed to bring the bottle-opener and the napkins. .

But hey, the confusion angle will wear off a few days, and then we’ll all get used to the more somnolent pace of Mercury retrograde. For the next three weeks – which takes us almost to the end of July - we’ll all put off the things we never really wanted to do anyway. Suddenly a bout of meditation (segueing into a nap) will seem more important than starting some big new ambitious project. We can read all those fat books, reminisce with our relatives, dig out the old recipes and have a barbecue.

When Mercury is retrograde, the past always becomes more vivid and immediate, so I’m sure there will be a lot of patriotic sentiment this month. And maybe there will even be some serious analyses of the past, some sense of the intersecting histories we’ve lived through in this country.

A lot of sick old people will be searching frantically through their attics and basements, looking for their birth certificates, or some proof that they exist. And if they can’t find any paper trace of a past, they may not have a future, since (starting July 1) their Medicaid benefits will depend on their being able to distinguish themselves from illegal aliens. This will be especially bitter for the descendents of those who were kidnapped into this country to begin with.

Meanwhile, Congress is still futzing with the immigration issue, drawing up blueprints for long, high, extremely discouraging fences. They say that they have to make the country secure by walling off Mexico, and then they’ll be kinder to the immigrants who are already here. Gosh, I wish more of those guys were followers of that little-known Christian faith, the one that says, “Love thy neighbor.”

My lover could have been on an earlier flight, but she changed it to give herself more time at the immigration checkpoints. It’s only a small thing, a few more hours without her. But I came into the US myself a month ago, and I remember the disorienting feeling of switching realities, entering a place that’s tighter, tenser, more compressed. A box of rarified but highly artificial air. That’s how this country feels to me, even though I was born here.

The whole place is getting more like a theme park every day. Paranoialand. They give us all a bunch of balloons, and tell us to ignore the guys in the flak jackets.

How did this happen? When did the land of immigrants become a gated enclave? This is one of the rides in Paranoialand – the animatronic journey through the official past. The national myth will get trotted out even more fervently this year, and we can choose to cheer this parade of ambitious, freedom-loving, civilization-creating white men. Or we can see the empty space around them, the things that aren’t mentioned. The history that lives in the back alleys of Paranoia Land.

I’m predicting a pretty high fantasy index for July. Mercury retrograde will contribute to the lack of focus, and there’s also a sun/Neptune inconjunct on the full moon (on July 10), and a Mercury/Neptune inconjunct close to the new moon (on July 25). I don’t know what they’re going to be saying but I can tell you right now, folks, they’re gonna be lying to us. You can count on that.

But I have to say that it looks like a pretty good month for the prez, with a great trine in air signs boosting his personal star. By the end of the month, Saturn has moved out of the danger zone around his ascendent. Doesn’t look like he’ll be impeached, at least not right away.

Nothing much new happens while Mercury is retrograde, and after it goes back into the water sign Cancer (on July 10), it will be a month of wallowing in feelings and memories. During the rains and winds and sunshine of July, we’ll all be walking around in different versions of history. Will we only remember what we’re told to remember?

Something in us always longs for the truth. Like my lover at the airport, truth has to be picked up. She moves softly, going barefoot through the steely frame of the metal detector. She has to be recognized and claimed.

In July, when you walk backwards towards your past, make sure you’re walking towards your true past, and not just a pretty version painted on the wall. Truth is the history in our bones, not the history in the books.

Index of Jenny Yates' Writings on Lesbian.com