Astrology Is Fake, But Cancers Are In The Eye Of The Storm
Picture a storm. Picture yourself living in a coastal village, and you wake up one morning and look out your window and there it is: the storm. Far away, still, but Oh Jesus. Do you understand how bad this is going to be? Soon you will be waist deep in your own flooded kitchen and there will be an eel wrapping itself lustily around your one leg and you will be struggling to make yourself heard above the scream of the emergency sirens, and do you understand all this? No. You don’t know very much about Weather. It doesn’t matter. The storm is coming for you regardless.
Futile to try and understand the origins of the storm, because no amount of looking at charts or googling “Why must this happen to me” will prepare you for it. Soon you will be standing on a chair in your own flooded dining room and there will be a school of flying fish launching themselves at your face, and you will suspect that you are crying but you cannot be sure, because there is rain somehow rising vertically from the surface of the water, and you are unable to distinguish seawater from tears. An orca is knocking in a business-like fashion on your front door. He means to kill you, of course. Picture it. This is what it is like to be a Cancer.
One minute you are peacefully in the middle of your pillow fort, phoning your friends about glitter, and then fuck, there you are terrified in the attic of your own flooded home, struggling up through the skylight to wave at the helicopters so they can come and fetch you. You are wearing a karate suit because it seems like a good thing to wear in situations of Danger. You often find yourself in this karate suit, because there is no one more skilled than you at identifying situations of Danger, or situations that potentially could be dangerous if forty things went wrong in a row and everyone around you dropped dead at the same time and you were abandoned by your partner via a shockingly cruel text message.
The helicopter picks up and you sit there in your sodden martial arts outfit and over the thudding of the propellers you hear a paramedic asking you how this happened. Did you not see the storm coming? Have you not grown up all your life in this notoriously storm-besieged village? Aren’t you used to this by now? You spread your hands, as confused as they are.
One minute you are reading an issue of Archie comics at home, in the middle of your pillow fort. The next you are in a bar dressed up like Veronica (karate suit on underneath in case of Danger), using shot glasses to spell out the word HELP. The word DANGER. You are Tom Cruise (born 3 July 1962), bouncing up and down on that couch and everyone is thinking Tom, what is the Plan, here? What message are you attempting to send? You don’t know! You are a Cancer. You are a devout worshipper of the Storm God that is your feelings, and you must obey its commands.
The Storm God said Tom Cruise, hoist yourself up on that sofa and freak everyone out. You did not even question it. You just thought Hup, here I go. Hup, this is probably going to cost me Big Time in the long and actually even the short term, but what can I do? I am a Cancer. You are Lindsay Lohan (born 2 July 1986), doing seriously every single thing that Lindsay Lohan has done for the last five years, and everyone is staring at you trying to form the word Why with their mouths and you are gazing back at them with innocent surprise. What is the big deal? You don’t know. You are a Cancer.
You have no idea how this happens, despite your fabled intuition and widely lauded emotional intelligence. It’s true that you are good at hugs, and knowing when your friends are sad, and how to talk to someone’s terrible old grandpa at a wedding. You do not especially want to do it, but you can smell loneliness the way police dogs can smell drugs, and you are incapable of ignoring it. This is why your pre-school teachers were always pairing you off with the strange children that no one else wanted to play with. Everyone else laughing it up on the other end of the playground and you stuck practicing the recorder with the kid who eats his own ear wax. This is why you adopted that cat with eye problems.
There is no doubt in anyone’s mind that you are highly sensitive to the distress of others. Why then are you so completely appalling at dealing with these issues when they apply to your own self? Why? You have no idea. You are a Cancer. You are born between June 21 and July 22, and this fact explains nearly everything about you. You should carry a business card of some kind.