Something is wrong with my Neptune.
This is how I found out about it -- it's a cheap, sordid story, chock-full of partial nudity and metaphysical trauma:
I was sitting in a hotel room with two professional astrologers, one of whom was wearing a swimsuit.
I met them in a casino. Five minutes later I was up in their room preparing to let them mess with my soul.
We sat adjacent to their unmade beds, hunkered around a laptop computer that displayed my astrological birth chart.
"Sun in Gemini, Pisces rising," said Shelley Ackerman, a New York astrologer and radio host.
"Your moon is in Leo, your Mars in Sagittarius," added Linda Joyce, author of "The Day You Were Born" and wearer of the jungle-print one-piece and matching sarong.
"Hmmmm. Did you go through an emotionally difficult time about a month ago?" Ackerman asked.
"Do you have trouble with authority?" Joyce asked.
"When you were a child, was your father absent?"
"Was your mother angry? Emotionally unbalanced?"
"Are you ready to settle down, have a family?"
Just as I began to wonder how it came to be that I was feeling naked when she was wearing the sheer sarong, there was a pause in the professional banter.
Ackerman looked at Joyce and said, "Why don't you handle telling her about her Neptune."
Joyce removed her big, round, red eyeglasses and squinted at my chart.
She looked at Ackerman. Ackerman looked back at Joyce.
"Isn't it time for you to go back downstairs?" Ackerman gingerly asked me.
Downstairs in the Rio Hotel Convention Center was the American Federation of Astrologers 2000 Convention. More than 400 astrologers had come from all over the world to attend workshops: "How to Live an Enchanted Life in the Aquarian Age"; "Past Lives Present Loves"; "The Eight Transneptunian Planets of the Uraniulm System"; "Using Astrology for Survival."
Having received the tip about my troubled Neptune -- my off-kilter relationship with the cosmos -- I was now searching for The Answers to The Big Questions.
I soon discovered I was not alone.
Across the casino a cluster of convention attendees wobbled their heads about, looking around, lost -- lost in the immediate physical sense as well as, I imagined, the metaphysical sense: Who am I? Where is my place in the universe?
Never mind the fact that they were wearing giant name tags on their chests and standing beneath a hotel directory sign -- these were people like me, I imagined, who understood that The Answers could never be that simple.
I headed for the workshops.
However, I learned quickly that the trouble with my planets being out of whack is that it throws off my timing. I arrived at lunch time, when most everyone had taken an hour break from I-Thou analysis.
I sat down and hung my head, alone in the universe.
Altha Mannix saved me from myself. Gray-headed and nearly 5 feet tall, Mannix was making her way toward one of the meeting rooms 45 minutes early, just to be sure she got a good seat. I speculated about her Neptune.
Mannix, a Sagittarius from California, has been studying astrology since the early 1960s.
"It's like psychology. It tells you about yourself. But it's more fun. I used to buy Horoscope Magazine and call my friend over. We'd build a fire and make some hot toddies and have a great time -- she's a Sagittarius, too," Mannix said. "Oh, it's been wonderful fun."
She was awaiting a workshop on reincarnation.
"Most people here are very sincere and are looking for something about themselves, or for something to help another person," Mannix said.
Then she spotted my planetary mis-alignment grief -- I guess it was written all over my face.
She leaned closer and offered me this piece of advice: "If you look for something bad, you're going to find it. If you look for something good, you're going to find that, too."
Making money
That said, I decided to look for abundance.
When the lunch crowd started filing back in, I approached a smiling man who carried a cardboard box overflowing with books -- the one on top said "Astro-Economics and the Stock Market."
William G. Foster extended his hand and immediately began to explain the link between Jupiter and soybeans.
"The ruler of soy is Taurus. It's a long story -- but just trust me -- it's Taurus," he said.
"And Jupiter is associated with expansion. So when Jupiter enters Taurus, you see, it's time to buy soybeans."
Foster bought 150,000 bushels of soybeans, made $8,000 in about a month and wrote a book called "Commodology, the Secret of Soybeans."
Foster, a Aquarius with Pisces rising, is a financial manager in Las Vegas. He was soft-spoken and sincere, and said his astro-financial analytical abilities surged several years ago after a rocky divorce and a business failure.
"Things are looking up now, though," he said, and his smile spread wide again.
His new project is developing an "astro-keno strategy" in which he lays out the keno numbers in a circle and assigns planets to them.
"You can convert the longitude of a planet into a number ..." he began to explain, and it dawned on me that my lifelong difficulty with math might be the result of my Neptune problem.
Making the adjustment
I decided to stay here forever, among those whose questions are huge and answers are virtually irrefutable.
I was standing in the hallway gloating over my newfound countrymen when an older woman in an orange business suit stopped to ask me -- me? -- for directions. She had a matching orange hat. And a problem with Mercury.
"Things don't go well for me when Mercury is retrograding like it is now," Vangee Kellas, of Wheeler, W. Va., said. "It's not good to travel.
"I almost didn't come, but I like to talk my language with my people here. There is hardly anyone back home to talk to, so I came despite Mercury."
She rummaged through her shopping-bag-sized purse and pulled out a folded-up piece of paper.
"I've been keeping a list of things that have gone wrong on the trip because of Mercury," she said "Number one: The pilot had to circle the airport three times. Then I didn't get my transportation voucher. Then I didn't get my change from $200. Then my room key wasn't programmed."
"I see," I said. "So when does Mercury go out of retrograde?"
"I don't know. But I have a book about that in here somewhere," she said, and sank her arms elbow-deep back into her purse, searching.
I told her not to bother, that I really didn't need to know when Mercury will go straight because I had this Neptune thing to worry about. But she insisted that I wait.
When finally she pulled out a teeny, dog-eared book of planetary graphs, she could not make out the microscopic numbers next to Mercury. She asked me if I would read it.
I did. It said Mercury would start flying right in 1962.
"Well? Is it going to stop retrograding this month, dear?" she asked. "Are we almost there?"
"Yes," I said. "We're almost there."
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