Darkside Zodiac

Darkside Zodiac: Stella Hyde: 0824927633109: Books

ISBN: 1578633109
ISBN-13: 9781578633104

Taurus is a feminine, fixed Earth sign ruled by Venus.  It is the second sign on the zodiac wheel, directly opposite Scorpio, and is named for the constellation Taurus (the Bull), which plods and bellows behind the sun at this time of year.

On the Darkside, this makes you a stubborn, sybaritic, rut-bound bully, fueled by dull resentment and an insatiable love of money.

Annoying Habits

Punctuality

You are never late; you have never been late; you will never be late.  People in Switzerland set their clocks by you, train companies call you for advice.  Strangely, everyone else is always late meeting with you.

Toothpaste

The Taurus toothpaste tube always lives in a toothpaste-tube cozy on the third shelf down and is always rolled up from the bottom.  If anyone moves it – let alone squeezes it in the middle –you kill them.

Temper Gauge

0° to boiling point in about six months, but on a regular five-year cycle.  Much earth-shaking; small buildings fall down; you gore everyone within reach.  ten days later people armed with chocolate can approach you.


Personality

obdurate, opinionated, overpowering

Brightsiders have enough trouble trying to gloss over your Darkside, so I don’t know what you expected me to do.  They call you things like slow but sure, steady and reliable, when we know they mean that you are stupendously dull and will move only when poked with a stick; they refer coyly to your love of beautiful things and traditional values, when we know they mean that you are a hidebound, reactionary Übermaterialist, super glued into a rut several feet deep; but even the most loopy starry-eyed of them fail to dress up the fact that you are a stubborn, obstinate, opinionated authoritarian, and all of them throw in the towel in the face of your overpowering urge for money.

Alright, being soul-sappingly boring isn’t the most stygian you can get on the Darkside (although tell that to your desperate family, mouthing “Kill me now” through the windowpane at passersby as you get out the Monopoly board for you bi-weekly game).  But being a dull boy is the least of it.

What you really like is stuff; in your mouth, on your plate, in your bank, in your bed, in the bag.  You stubbornly refuse to accept the folk wisdom that tells us we can’t always get what we want.  You can!  And when you’ve got stuff, you hold on to it with a grip that it would be laughable to describe as viselike.  Possessive seems too weak a word.  It’s a brave astrologer who tries to take anything away from you (even if only to clean it).  And the evil spawn of paranoid possessiveness is murderous jealousy and resentment.

However much you got, you resent the fact that: 1) you haven’t got any more; 2) other people may have stuff; and 3) other people may have more stuff than you.

Although you are not a people person (of course you’d sell your grandmother – she’s depreciating quickly and will soon be worthless, but if you shift her now, you could pick up a nice little investment Hockney print or two), while you have them under your hoof you are possessive, jealous, and resentful of them too.  You timetable their every hour, always want to know where they are,  and stamp your feet if they are not back on the dot specified by you.  Your children try to leave home the minute they can crawl.  Videophones are going to be something you buy in bulk.

Your pig-headed obstinacy, obdurate opinions, and refusal even to say the word “adapt,” let alone “change,” are all a result – Freud may possibly have said – of a lack of imagination.  (He was Taurean; it takes one to know one.)  Your little bully brain can’t compute more than two variables at once, so when faced with something complex or unusual, you go rigid and do what you have always done.  Often that is nothing, so you tend to get buried alive by avalanches you refuse to notice, or dispatched by clever matadors.

What softens your tough hide (and makes it easier for the rest of us to lead you by the nose) is your self-indulgent hedonism.  A case or two of Margaux, a 10-course banquet, a team of sun kissed masseurs – a you’re anybody’s.

Bitch Rating

C+.  Others think this is because you are naturally kind and charitable, but they are wrong; it’s not that you don’t want to bitch, you’re just too slow-witted to really make an impact.  When you do try, you make dull, painful remarks about other people’s lack of fashion sense or money.

Collective noun

A field tip for non-Taureans.  You may find yourself, for some bizarre zodiacal reason, in a meadow full of Taureans.  No one is talking, but the rhythmic sound of regular grass-chomping syncopates smoothly with the soft rustle of bank statements being filed.  You are corralled in a Stodge of Taureans.  Stay awake, or get trampled to death in the rush for the buffet.

Fave deadly sin

“I’ll have all them, now” is naturally your first thought, since the desire for some new stuff fogs your brain.  When you finally understand you’ve got to choose, you go away to ruminate, and come back some days later with the obvious answer: Greed, with a substantial side dish of Gluttony (maybe served in a jus of Lust).  You think having and holding until death do you part is sensible behavior, and nothing is ever going to change your mind.  As for Gluttony, what’s wrong with liking your fodder, especially if it comes at a prix fixe?


Blame your planet

Mighty Aphrodite

You have just thrown the widows and orphans out of the 19th-century workhouse you bought for a snip and plan to develop into loft-style apartments; you have shifted all your funds from ethical stocks to the industrial-military sector; you’ve just eaten all the pies.  Even you think you are acting like a tool of Wall Street.  So shift the blame onto your planet.  In your case, it’s Venus.

Surprised?  Expecting something a little more – how shall I put it – substantial?  Don’t be.  Venus is named for the Roman goddess of love and harmony, which is a politically correct disguise for Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love and just plain having it.  She is renowned for going after the many objects of her desire with a singularity of passion and purpose that is admired and emulated by land-grabbing evil emperors, asset strippers, and eight-year-old girls everywhere.  Trust me. you couldn’t have a more effective mentor.

Venus is the second rock from the Sun, and our nearest neighbor (which is nice for you, because you don’t like straying far from your paddock).  It likes to be chased, so it orbits the Sun just that little bit faster than we do, but not so fast that we don’t get the chance to admire its beautiful, creamy, luminous complexion.

It has the kind of atmosphere you are at home with: solid, reassuring, you could cut it with a knife; and stubbornly it refuses to spin counterclockwise on its axis like the rest of us.  It’s your kind of place.  If it wasn’t so hot on the surface, you might put in an offer.


Bad Moon Rising

The Darkside of Taurus’s Darkside

It’s not all sunshine on the Darkside.  You know just how power-crazed and monomaniac your innermost thoughts and secret fantasies are, but where do you think they come from?  The Moon, that’s where – or whichever area of your birth chart the Moon was moodily plotting when you were born.  The Sun is our daytime self; the Moon represents our inner psycho.  The nippy little wretch rushes around plunging in and out of signs every few days, so throughout Taurus’s month in the Sun, the lunar nuisance charges around like two tons of potential pot roast breaking angrily out of the slaughterhouse.  That helps to explain why two Taureans born only days apart store their money in entirely different offshore accounts, depending on which sign the Moon was bothering at the time.

Moon in Gemini

You occasionally suspect it might be possible to charge in more than one direction.


Born Under A Bad Sign

The Scum Also Rises

And another thing.  Your sun sign is modified by your rising sign.  This is the zodiac sign that was skulking over the horizon at the very minute you were born.  If your sun sign is your ego, then your rising sign gives you your public manners (such as they are), your Sunday worst.  It’s the painted smile behind which the real, disgusting you lurks.  Some astrologers maintain that its malign influence affects what you look like.  Be afraid.

If you were born around dawn (unlikely, I know, given your slowness on the uptake; doctors would have to lure you out with chocolate creams and a lucrative contract), your rising sun sign will almost certainly be the same sign as your sun sign.  This means that your image is only a slight spin away from the grim actuality beneath the mask.  Yuck!

Cancer Rising

You look rather worried; is it free-floating anxiety, or have you just found out exactly what boeuf wellington means?


Don’t You Love Me, Baby?

Venus And Taurus

Taurus and Venus have a thing going on anyway, but just how much of a high-maintenance tease or bunny-boiler you are may depend on where the solar system’s heartless tart was blushingly dropping her handkerchief when you were born.  Oh, and Venus also has a say in how harmonious you blend in with the rest of the world, but what do words like harmony have to do with the Darkside?  Now, for astrological reasons that will fry your brain (basically, Venus is far too luxury-loving to move too far away from the Sun, and her orbital rate is in bed with Earth’s), Venus only ever appears in your sun sign, or two signs on either side of it.  In your case, bulls, that means Taurus, Pisces, Aries, Gemini, or Cancer.  This is what it does to your love and lust life.

Venus In Pisces

You nuzzle your beloved needily, lowering plangently for declarations of love; when they respond, you show your joy by running off with their best friend.


Are You Looking At Me?

Mars And Taurus

Taureans don’t get much hassle; standing still, looking solid, usually does it for you.  But just how confrontational, threatening, paranoid, and gagging for a fight you are depends on which area of your birth chart the bruiser planet Mars is being held back in by his buddies (leave it, Mars, he’s not worth it).  mars is the next planet out from Earth but paces its orbit rather more slowly (presumably to get some effective eyeballing in).  It takes 2½ years for Mars to get around, and on the way it spends about two months of quality menacing time in each sign.  As a Taurean, you can only be prodded into action if your food or money supply is threatened.  If your brute force expresses itself in a style that doesn’t reach corrida standards, check out Mars’ alibi at the time of your birth.

Mars In Cancer

You charge down your enemies on their blindside, out of the blue, usually about 10 years after they have upset you.


Who’s Got Your Number?

Check Out The Opposition

Your polar opposite sign is Scorpio, the scary, cool, brooding control freak.  What would a bloody-minded, bovine bread head like you want with a moody, manipulative mind gamer like your average Scorpio?  How do you have this – shall we say – understanding?  Well, like good cop and bad cop, or arch villain and fixer, you need each other to make the Darkside work for you.  It’s all about elements (undesirable ones, of course).  You are Earth; Scorpio is Water; put them together and you get mud, which is ideal for slinging, or for making voodoo dolls of people who look at you in a funny way.
Chomping your way stolidly through your usual catering-size wheel of strawberry cheesecake while you check your bank statements – as you do every second Thursday – don’t you sense, deep down, the shadowy inner presence of a fierce-eyed, black-clad guru, urging you to use the force?  Ever wonder why it is that the rest of us do not instantly dismiss you as an obstinate, ineffectual stick-in-the-mud who doesn’t realize it’s the Age of Aquarius?  It’s because we, too, can feel a flicker of the force.
Respect your inner Scorpion; it slips you that little bit of true menace that gives you cred, makes you a serious person, and forces people to admit you are a contender.  Too much, and your eyes turn red, you paw the ground, become a dangerous chunk of psycho muscle, and have to be put down. 


Darkside Date

You will always get a date because most of you are quite handsome, in a solid, thick-necked sort of way, and you just keep charging at the gate until it gives way.  Once you have decided on a datee, they don’t really stand a chance or get much say in the arraignments.
You have always given your dates flowers and candy, and no power on Earth will stop you now, even if your current beloved is diabetic and has hay fever.  (You can always eat the candy yourself.)  You are the sign that thinks oversized cuddly toys are sweet, romantic gestures  Your ideal date sees you supine on a velvet couch in a private five-star restaurant with a pretty, fluffy airhead who is willing to do all the work, won’t demand too much in the way of conversation, and will love peeling post-prandial grapes for you as you sleep.


Sex

Slow, sensuous, suffocating

Brightside astros are always blathering  about how sensuous, languorous, and lollingly delicious a night between the sheets with you is, and how they all appreciate a love with a slow hoof.  Well, yes, it may be an improvement on the wham-bam-thank-you-Aries approach, but you can have too much of a good thing.
The trouble is, once you’ve learned how to make the earth move, you just keep on singing the same old song.  It gives a whole new meaning to the word “rutting.”  Good men and women have suffocated from boredom in your bed, their hopeless sobs mistaken for whimpers of desire.  And you resent any attempt to bring a little novelty or spontaneity into the routine.  Show you a Kama Sutra and you’d try to eat it.  But you do rather like the one where you smear each other with chocolate body paint and spend all night licking it off. (although you can’t help thinking you’d get more of the actual chocolate if you ate it straight from the jar with a spoon while watching a nice video like The Sound of Music).
 

What Kind Of Love Rat Are You?

Love ratting is not your sport.  When you’ve got something, you hang on to it.  To you the code words, “I just need some space” means let’s buy a bigger field.  So even if your lover tries all 50 ways to leave, including servicing the entire Durham Bulls team simultaneously, you still follow them around the meadow bellowing piteously.  This is called stalking. 
 

Incompatibility Rating

Aries – is that a suit of lights in their wardrobe, or are they just pleased to see you.

Taurus – irresistible meets immovable; cliché of the titans.

Gemini – they dance around you flapping red rags until you snap.

 Cancer – they scuttle sideways when you charge at them.

Leo – impoverished royalty trying to ally with bourgeois money.

Virgo – OK they’re neat, but they don’t do neat in the way you have always done neat.

Libra – all style; you can only deal with substance.

Scorpio – they can outstare you; you can out sit them.

Sagittarius – sudden action and loud noises always spoil your digestion.

Capricorn – they have more bank accounts than you.

Aquarius – think it’s an insult to call you a materialist.

Pisces – they sink their fishy little hooks into your wallet.


Relationships

In A Field Of Your Own

There is a reason why bulls stand on their own in a field, you know.  Partly it is because, although your murderous temper only shows itself once in a blue moon, the more pusillanimous members of the zodiac would rather be safe than sorry, and would prefer to conduct social affairs with a big strong gate between you and them.  Mostly it is because, after a few days in your field staring at your collection of numbered buttercups, discussing your varied pension plans and tax-exempt offshore investments, people begin to lose the will to live.

Of course you have friends; they are those whom you meet in the same bar, at the same time, on the same day of every month.  If for some trivial reason they don’t turn up (their house has burned down, their only child has been kidnapped) or, even worse, suggest you meet half an hour earlier or even in a different place, you begin to snort and bellow and have to be placated with soothing words, food, and gifts.

In any herd activities, everybody always does what you want to do; you think this is because they agree with your choice.  In fact they are being pragmatic; they just know that life’s too short to go up against your Olympic obduracy (unless they are another Taurean).

When you get married (of course you will), after the initial flowers and baby talk business, you make it very clear that it’s going to be your way or nothing.  If your partner goes for the “or nothing” option, you just won’t let them out of the field.


Dream Job

You don’t really have the imaginative powers to dream of a job you’re not actually in.  And if somebody offered you the plumiest, most chocolate-covered job in the land, you wouldn’t take it, because you don’t do change.  But even you might consider these two:

Property Magnate

We see industrial wasteland; you see executive urban homes.  We see designated historical sites; you see executive apartments.  We see unspoilt fishing villages; you see executive summer rentals.

Asset stripper

Round peg, round hole: your ability to spot a wounded beast, a bargain, and a money-making opportunity, and your genuine insensitivity to job losses, starving families, and senior citizen suicides, make this a bull’s eye.


Work

Nine-To-Five Nudnick

You would not miss the nobility of work, if the Bad Fairy swung it so that you could have all of the money and none of the effort.  Some bulls achieve this state by being born rich (you know who I mean, Catherines the Great and de Medici).  The rest of you have to work, just like the rest of us, but steer clear of anything marked vocation or social conscience, because the only thing you care about is the paycheck.  This means you will do more or less anything, as long as you don’t have to respond to emergencies or get too sweaty, and there’s a snack bar.  Maybe once you dreamed of a more active job in Pamplona, or a china shop, but that was just youthful high spirits.

Colleagues soon learn not to walk on your patch of carpet, never to rearrange the ornaments on your desk, and never, ever to use your special mug.  They also learn not to ask you for a decision unless they have a month hidden in the schedule, to to ask you to do anything  not specified in your job description.

Of course you join your trade union, because “restrictive practices” sounds so you.  Employers are impressed with you at first because you positively embrace mind-numbing routines and follow orders.  They promote you; you demand a raise.  They laugh; you point out clause 287b (ii) in your contract.  They prevaricate; you take them to cumulative industrial tribunals and eventually the Supreme Court, wiping out company profits at a stroke.  You win.  You cannot be fired.  Result!  Meal ticket for life.


When Bills Go Wrong

Audacious and imaginative they’re not, but Taurus crimes put food on the table; they are money in the bank (or, rather, out of it).  If a plan works, stick to it: that’s your motto.  You aim to make every job as routine as possible; the nine-to-five ethic is just as valid on the Darkside.

Bank Robber

Assume balaclava (or stocking).  Enter Bank.  Point gun.  Give me the money.  Collect specified amount of cash in unmarked notes.  Stuff in knapsack.  Exit bank.  Take off balaclava.  Home to view self on evening news.

Art Rustler

Shoplift art encyclopedia and Swiss army knife.  identify target painting and location.  Attend gallery.  Bribe security.  Slice canvas from frame.  Roll up and stuff down pant leg.  limp home.  Invoice client.


Crimes And Misdemeanors

How Bad Could It Get?

So what sort of criminal would you be if sociopathy became the new world order?  How would you spend your days (or maybe your nights) if you really lived on the Darkside?  Well, show me the money.  You’ve suspicious of invisible, complicated stuff like fraud or electronic crime because you suspect you will be done out of your cut by nimbler-brained Geminis (you’re right).  You like a simple plan and payoff you can roll around in.  Traditional  bank robbery; antiques stolen to order; stripping the New England homes of the obscenely rich when  they are in Malibu, and vice versa.

Violence is not an issue.  You make a very focused bounty hunter.  And you are Mr. Big hitman of choice, since you don’t get distracted, are insensitive to victims’ pleas, and will sit for days on a stakeout, as long as there are enough donuts.  You respect the law.  Anything that gives property and money such protection is a good thing; but that doesn’t stop you breaking it, if the law comes between you and what you want.  Trouble is, you never change your MO, so the cops always get you.

You blow it in court.  Lawyers (even your own) goad you into murderous rages and before you know it, you have kicked in your stall, gored the judge, and copped extra time for contempt of court.  When you are locked up, it’s not so bad.  You could buy your way out, but you may find that prison life suits you: established routine, regular meals, exercise yard with a pleasantly beaten track, people who like to talk about money – what’s not to like?


At Home

The comfort trap

You invite someone around to see your home movies.  They fight their way past a security system that makes Fort Knox look like a corner-store pushover.  The house is warm, full of herds of huge furniture.  They feel comfortably dozy.  You pour them a vase of sherry and force feed them a paving slab of madeira cake..  They are getting drowsy.  There are doilies everywhere, even under the doilies.  Their eyelids droop.  It’s getting warmer.  The furniture seems to be getting bigger.  Light classical tunes tinkle.  They are falling asleep.  Then, with quiet determination, knowing they have no way out, you start selling them mutual funds.

Domesticated Disharmony

Aries – Constant barbecues make you obscurely uneasy.

Taurus – You sit silently in opposite armchairs waiting for each other to see reason.

Gemmini – They move the furniture around when you’re not looking.

Cancer – They spend far too much time in the kitchen, worrying near your food hoard.

Leo – Their routine and baggage take up too much territory.

Virgo – constantly trying to find something to tut-tut under their breath about.

Libra – They will win any fights over sofa space and the TV remote.

Scorpio – You suspect they are secretly eating all your cakes, but don’t care to mention it.

Sagittarius – They use your special mug for swilling mouthwash, then accidentaly drop it.

Capricorn – They get up early in the morning to open your bank statements before you can.

Aquarius – They have reset all your security codes, just for fun.

Pisces – Every day your wine cellar gets a little roomier.


Décor

You have an exclusive network of interior designers able to take all your money and spend it on schemes that are guaranteed free from any imagination or creativity.  Your home is every speculative contractor’s dream show-house.  Any inadvertent interest or individuality comes from an art collection that your were advised to buy for its investment value

Sharing the Taurus home

You don’t want to share with anybody, although you do accept – grudgingly – that you probably have to let your family in.  Others who move in on you had better be ready to relinquish all their idiosyncratic little ways in favor of your one intractable little way.


Playtime

The darkside of fun

Every year you plod off to the little  place you went to last year (and the year before that, and the year before that; you probably discovered it in your reckless, madcap days as a young bullock when you thought nothing  of just upping and going into the next field – wild times!!).  It’s not too hot, not too cold, with a guarenteed food supply, comfortable armchairs, no loudnoises or sudden movements, and nothing you haven’t done before.  Your family always seems strangely glum on these vacations, but you don’t really know why.  You are addicted to guided tours, which you like because you are used to being led around by the nose.

Your ideal would be an inaction-packed fortnight in Switzerland, where you can visit your money and eat chocolate in a heady atmosphere of affluence.  Or in Liechtenstein (to visit your other money), because on a clear day you can see all the country’s borders, and you do like to feel fenced in.

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