Curse of the Equinox

Equinoxes kick my ass.

Happens every year: Spring Equinox comes and some putridly-vile occurrence overtakes me; Autumn Equinox comes and tries, usually with great success, to outdo the devastations of the Spring. Maybe it's all in the vernacular (careful, I'm punning): Spring and Fall are both action words, bad bad action words, too.

I've already elucidated the Easter Curse and the Mother's Day Curse, so Spring's wrath should not escape your understanding. With the Autumnal event I normally welcome debilitating illness, gothic family overtones, and on occasion, therapy-worthy relationship poison. It's just a seasonal allergy of a sort, I suppose.

So this week found me--boy did it--with the "by any means necessary" clause suddenly activated by my GI tract. Think tract housing but without the glamour. Yeah. One after another hour of internal fights--a Civil War of the Gut, if you will. While still off solid food and making gad-awful rumblings which I likened to a water cooler resetting itself (my doctor grinned), the familial horror began to wind its magic spell. By magic I mean "tragic" and by spell I mean "hell", but that's another story. Read up on the "Scorched Earth" policy of warfare and you'll get the idea.

I found myself coming to terms with the Equinoxical horrors by instituting phrases like these: "It's like the places you visit versus the places you live, except with people" and "Sometimes you come to that intersection so often, the one you know you have to go through even though you shouldn't and you just wish someone would change the Yield sign to a Stop sign for your own good." I can wax philosophical, or poetic. I'd do better to wax my car.

But given time and the proper pharmaceuticals one realizes that all will pass--and pass and pass--because this is just the Equinox talking. You never fail to let it kill you a little bit, but somehow just before it all goes dark you manage to recall the date or pass by a calendar or glance at your phone to see who's really calling. Damn curses!

Evidently I have a deal with the Solstices, because they never seem to trouble me. Maybe they trouble others? I say it's because Winter and Summer are only verbs for rich folks and that, my friends, is something I will never need to fear. I know this because I am an "evener".

If you have studied the teachings of the Prophet Jerry Seinfeld, you will no doubt recall that he too, is an evener. He comes out even. Happens to me all the time. While others come into extra money and still others come up short, I always seem to come out even. The grocery store shorts me 50 cents, I find a lime in an abandoned cart. The fridge decides it wants occupational therapy for $150 a session, I get a random rebate for $75, a relative gifts me with $25, and a catalog order refunds $50 to my card because its shipment of some thing or other I'd wanted did not arrive. It's weird, but that's how it goes, and I am immensely grateful. I may never become rich, but hopefully I will always have enough.

I would like to sort out this Equinox bit though. But I guess if I'm two-for-four on seasonal irregularities what with the friendly Solstices and whatnot, that's even and therefore must explain things.

Still, I just wonder what the heck it was I've ever done to horses!