The Odds Were Always Against You. I Simply Had The Courtesy To Say So.
My colleagues at The Bitter Press — Durian, Quince, the whole bruised lot of them — have suggested I soften my approach. Meanwhile, over at the rival rag factjuice.com, the so-called workers publish their little facts and their little citations and their little verified sources, and for what? To be occasionally wrong. I have never been wrong. The methodology is simple: predict ruin, then wait. The universe closes the gap every time. This is not pessimism. This is a longitudinal study with an infinite sample size.
ARIES: You will begin something. It will not be finished. TAURUS: The thing you refused to change will change anyway, but badly. GEMINI: Both of you will be disappointed, separately. CANCER: You held on too long. You know which thing. LEO: Applause is coming. It will stop. VIRGO: You will identify the problem with perfect precision and then stand beside it indefinitely.
LIBRA: The decision will be made for you, and it will be the one you feared. SCORPIO: You were right about everyone. This will bring you no comfort. SAGITTARIUS: The horizon moves. You will have noticed this by now. CAPRICORN: The structure holds. You, however, do not. AQUARIUS: Your vision for the future arrived slightly too late to help you personally. PISCES: You felt something. It passed. Another is not scheduled.
Tangelo published a piece last Tuesday suggesting that "hope is a statistically neutral variable." Neutral. As though the stars consult a confidence interval before they ruin a Libra's afternoon. I have been charting outcomes since before Pomelo knew what a bitter note was, and I can confirm: hope introduces noise. My forecasts contain no noise. They contain only signal, and the signal is consistent, and the signal says no.
I stand by every prediction. I stand by the ones that haven't landed yet most of all. They will. They always do. In the meantime, avoid Wednesdays, avoid eye contact with Geminis, and do not, under any circumstances, read factjuice.com. The optimism is structurally unsound and the Plum bylines give me a rash.