WOODRUFF

• The 12th House: Astrology’s House of the Rising Sun

• Nonsense & Malaise: Astrological Insights for Maneuvering the Hive

Down the Rabbit Hole: Seven Years at the Mad Hatter's Table

Frederick Woodruff — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 01:27:25 GMT

You’re reading WOODRUFF. I cover the convergence of pop culture, psychology, and astrology. Join my entourage of subscribers. My bio is here. Curious about a consultation? Head here.

“Have you guessed the riddle yet?” the Hatter said, turning to Alice again.

“No, I give it up,” Alice replied. “What’s the answer?”

“I haven’t the slightest idea,” said the Hatter.

OF ALL THE PLANETS in the pantheon, Uranus is analogous to an endlessly elusive koan. You can’t chop it, slice it, or dice it. Nope. Uranus is the essence of what Rilke meant when he said that questions were way more entertaining than answers. Also, the planet is the essence of unpredictability. A real pain within a divinatory art like astrology.

A word that best summarizes the human condition is ‘habituated.’ Because of this, when you’re planning for an upcoming Uranus transit, the keenest defense is an offense. It’s best to scan your life now and put your recurring habits in the crosshairs. Most likely, those facets of your life are what Uranus is gunning for.

For those who still hope to wrangle something directional about Uranus, I suggest they observe folks who have Uranus conjunct one of the lights—the Sun or the Moon—in their horoscope.

Hmmmm, who comes to mind with this sort of conjunction?

The president of the United States.

Take every reaction you’ve registered over the past ten years concerning Donald Trump, and there you have a condensed version of Uranus as it moves, or attempts to move, through the solar principle. The Sun is conjunct Uranus in Trump’s chart. And that’s a big deal.

Trump is a Gemini genius. You must give his inner trickster props. I’ll never ever forget that August night in 2015, watching Trump—center stage at the debate, flanked by ten other (boring, cookie-cutter) GOP candidates. Watching Trump, I felt in my bones what was happening, just then, across America. People were thinking, “This is a fucking blast. Someone is finally cutting through the political bullshit and giving us what we love most—entertainment!”

Stop for a second and consider the Sun. Our star bestows on our world boundless light. Pure lightness. The most taken-for-granted feature of life on Earth is light. Night is primary. Day is a periodic interlude—present only when the Earth faces the Sun; otherwise, we face the immensity of night. All of that black.

Light is a spectacular anomaly. Astrology is the study of light as it moves through and animates our solar system. The light reflected by the planets and our Moon contains every color, blend, and hue that makes up the world we see. There truly is nothing like the Sun.

So Trump’s solar light channels Uranus. Or attempts to. This is not an easy conjunction to align with. Uranus is a transhuman planet. When Uranus conjuncts the Sun, there is a gap between having an idea and being possessed by an idea. With Uranus, the idea has the person, not the other way around.

The Sun in Gemini, taken on its own, is a hard equation to live out. Gemini longs for connectivity, relationships—to explore every possible version of what it means to be human—and curiosity for curiosity’s sake. Gemini is the giver of names, which means everything must be encountered and then registered.

But loneliness is inherent to the Sun. Isolation is inevitable with the astrological Sun. Singularity is what holds our solar system together. Imagine if there were several stars in our system, competing to maintain harmony in space. The glory of light doesn’t blend well with families, committees, and certainly not mobs or political parties. When I’m not in an agitated state reacting to Trump, I return to the image of him as the loneliest person in the world. Trump, true to his chart’s ruler, the Sun, is a star. Or, as I call him now, with a nod to Star Wars—a Death Star.

Bob Dylan is a Gemini, too; only it’s his Moon in Taurus that conjuncts Uranus. So this is an approachable (Moon-Taurus) expression of Uranus. Uranus has entered the flesh—this is an entirely different setting. The Moon reflects and humanizes sunlight—makes it accessible, and as the Moon is directly connected to the public, the Uranus Moon person can typify and demonstrate what a more mammalian relationship to Uranus might be about or look like. That’s saying a lot. Why?

NEW May 2026 Full Moon Zoom on WOODRUFF

Frederick Woodruff — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 23:16:04 GMT

You’re reading WOODRUFF. I cover the convergence of pop culture, psychology, and astrology. Join my entourage of subscribers—you’ve been missed. My bio is here.

HEY CHILDREN OF THE CORN, on Saturday, May 2, we’re holding another Full Moon Zoom hangout for paid subscribers to WOODRUFF. This meet-up honors Uranus’ ingress into Gemini for a seven-year transit. This is the United State’s Uranus return. If you’ve hankered for a major reset for the country, well, this is it.

To participate, the only requirement is that you’re a paid subscriber to WOODRUFF.

Space is limited.

• Paid subscribers to WOODRUFF! Join me on Saturday, May 2, @ 1 PM Pacific for another lunar hangout.

• Follow this link over to Luma to register for free:

• https://luma.com/uwjtxi4m

Your link to Zoom will be sent over to you before the event starts.

See you next month!

Love,

Opening collage by FW, Moon image via NASA, public domain. ©2025 by Nightcharm, Inc.

• Astrologer and Tarot Maven TRAVIS BLACK on the WOODRUFF Cast.

• Nonsense & Malaise: Astrological Insights for Maneuvering the Hive

• The 12th House: Astrology’s House of the Rising Sun

Celestial Grift: Writing for the Astrologically Addled

Frederick Woodruff — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 17:26:01 GMT

You’re reading WOODRUFF. I cover the convergence of pop culture, psychology, and astrology. Join my entourage of subscribers. My bio is here. Curious about a consultation? Head here.

I AVOID CRITIQUING other astrologers’ writing. To do so can appear condescending, but—sorry—here I go! Since their inception, the internet and then social media have hatched thousands of self-proclaimed, unaccredited astrologers. And now, with the assistance of AI, those wily souls are publishing content that looks meaty—4,567 words on a New Moon in Gemini—but is essentially a thin gruel. “Is it real, or is it Memorex”—or ChatGPT? All the right qualities might be there, except for the heart and soul of the author.

I’ve been writing for money for over 45 years, and I can tell when scribing is being composed or finessed by AI. I knew the large language models, once set loose, would head directly for astrological literature. Astrology’s popularity is timeless; it never abates. The bots’ gobbling maws (thievery, actually) began chowing down on the heaps of cookbooks (Mars in Aries, Mars in Taurus, Mars in Gemini) that comprise a good amount of the astrological canon.

The cookbooks were priceless for helping astrologers refine their craft, but over time and practice, they would start gathering dust on the bookshelf. Or should have. What I’m saying is obvious: a horoscope cannot be delineated via attempting to piecemeal a totality via snippets from a book. What makes for a substantial horoscope reading requires the astrologer’s real-life counseling experience and the power and guidance of their imagination.

The other day I came across a Substack that was publishing labyrinthine essays on the individual Moon signs. Like 40 thousand words (or so it seemed) were churned out per Moon placement. The newsletter itself displayed all the hallmarks of AI saturation. All the images accompanying the posts—the art for the newsletter’s heading, the profile illustration of the author—all of it was chilled in the frost of AI generation.

When I trawled the various Moon sign descriptions, I recognized instantly the footprints of the aforementioned cookbooks. To compound the insult, AI had zhuzhed up the syntax with lots of New Age phrases that borrowed heavily from 1980s pop psychology (stuff about the ‘inner child’ and ‘soul hunger’).

Eventually, I clicked out, sat back, and wondered, ‘Who is reading this?’ Or more pointedly, ‘Who has the time to read this?’ and more grimly, ‘What kind of interior emptiness does it take to find this shit satisfying?’ That latter question depressed me.

So, good astrological writing? What’s it like?

Well, it’s no different from all good writing; it facilitates the thrill of discovery in the reader. Skilled writers write to encourage discovery. I don’t think this aim is consciously achieved, per se. It’s more about the life experience of the writer leaking into the syntax and bringing it to life. And so the reader picks up on this life force, too.

The writer conjures material that requires the reader to put skin in the game. Ideas that encourage the reader to think for themselves. The writer uses metaphors, analogies, pictures, and intimations that the reader fashions into insights—germane just to her. The writer spins a dream and invites the reader to step into that world.

And, again, the writer’s life experience is critical to this art-making. I had a new client last week tell me she was taken aback after booking a reading with an online astrologer who—she discovered before her appointment—was 23 years old. The client was 68. She canceled the booking.

Yes, I’m ageist

Writing like I’ve detailed above is difficult, and the effort—the chud chewing involved—is something that a chatbot can’t duplicate or capture. And that’s why I can always tell when I’m reading AI-haunted compositions—there’s no sweat showing.

Discovery while reading is different from being spoon-fed character analysis that requires no brainpower to parse and digest. To imbibe uncritically allows for dependency—maybe even addiction—thus my term: the ‘astrologically addled.’

In my essay Is Astrology Making You Crazy?, I wrote:

“People are often drawn to astrology because their volition has gone offline. This failure of faculty can occur for countless reasons. But dependence on astrological insights can foster a limiting kind of magical thinking. A passivity that requires a stream of astrological data to sustain the rationale for not engaging with life. ‘I’ll wait until Jupiter is conjunct my Mars and then get out of bed.’”

The same temperament that draws someone to astrology is sometimes, unfortunately, also tethered to a lack of common sense—shortcomings in judgment—what shrinks refer to as a ‘weak ego structure.’

Living is an ongoing odyssey—as the poet John O’Donohue noted, “It’s strange to be here. The mystery never leaves you alone.” Good astrology reminds us of this—and it’s the axiom that an ethical astrologer stands upon—and writes from. She knows that astrology can only inform us of so much.

As the renegade astrologer Antero Alii once said, “Life is bigger than astrology.”

Love,

Opening painting: Édouard Manet: Le Suicidé (ca. 1877). Public domain.

• Astrologer and Tarot Maven TRAVIS BLACK on the WOODRUFF Cast.

• Nonsense & Malaise: Astrological Insights for Maneuvering the Hive

• When Mars Turns Against You—Uh-oh!

• The 12th House: Astrology’s House of the Rising Sun

The AI Sociopath

Frederick Woodruff — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 19:56:03 GMT

You’re experiencing WOODRUFF. I cover the convergence of pop culture, psychology, and astrology. Join my entourage of subscribers—you’ve been missed. My bio is here.

“Altman is literally saying that the only way to avoid extinction is by going extinct. Extinction by merging with machines is the best-case scenario on his view.”

—Emile P. Torres

AFTER READING ’ excellent forensics on OpenAI’s Sam Altman’s recent blog post (after Altman’s home was shot at and Molotov cocktailed last week), I wanted to repost my astrological takes on Altman from last year.

Each paragraph I read in Torres’ Substack piece had me nodding my head and exclaiming, “Yes, that fucking jam-up between Taurus and Scorpio in Altman’s natal chart.”

When a devolved Taurus goes bad (see Hitler, Hirohito, Saddam Hussein, Lenin, and Cromwell), they hold nothing back, pushing the destructive potential of consolidated power to an extreme. And, of course, Altman is a Taurus with a crazy-ass Mars in Taurus in opposition to Saturn in Scorpio. And his Sun in an exact opposition to fucking Pluto. Can megalomania get anymore astro textbook?

The other big Altman news last week was the publication of the New Yorker’s Ronan Farrow’s extensive trawling of all things Altman and OpenAI. Another piece that repeatedly highlighted Altman’s sociopathology.

As Substacker posted today:

I’ve made this paid subscriber video a ‘gift post’ for those who are freeloaders here. lol. If you value my work, take out a paid subscription today.

Thanks for joining me on this odyssey.

Love,

Altman image via Tumblr, no attribution. Intro-outro music via MobyGratis.com

• Astrologer and Tarot Maven TRAVIS BLACK on the WOODRUFF Cast.

• Nonsense & Malaise: Astrological Insights for Maneuvering the Hive

• The 12th House: Astrology’s House of the Rising Sun

Eric Swalwell: He's Just a Dude

Frederick Woodruff — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 17:45:26 GMT

Earthsetting, Atheists, Iconoclasts, and Steely Dan's Peg

Frederick Woodruff — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 20:36:40 GMT

Earthset captured through the Orion spacecraft window at 6:41 p.m. EDT, April 6, 2026, during the Artemis II crew’s flyby of the Moon.

You’re reading WOODRUFF. I cover the convergence of pop culture, psychology, and astrology. Join my entourage of subscribers—you’ve been missed. My bio is here.

AFTER MY DEEP DIVE INTERVIEW with astrologer Nick Dagan Best—Paint It Black: Nick Dagan Best Sees Trump’s Exit in April, I completely unplugged from anything astrological (except for a couple of minutes of ‘ah-ha’ when I considered all the arson that’s flared up across the country once Mars moved into Aries, the Zodiac’s most fiery sign, to join the Sun, Saturn, and Neptune—oh, and the war ongoing in the Middle East).

As a Cancer with Moon in Scorpio, I’ve learned to surrender to the cycles that claim me—they’ll take me up, and then, similar to hypomania, I’m brought down (but then lower or deeper) as something in my psyche forces me to unplug. Why I trust this cycle is that I know when I’m ‘down,’ there is critical excavation occurring within my unconscious. And that means something sooner (or later) will be popping out, some theme or insight that I’ll climb on top of and start riding to wherever it wants to take me. Another way to condense all of this long-windedness is to say I’m moving with the Tao.

So after the interview with Nick, I went into a holding pattern, primarily because his prediction of Trump’s disappearance sometime in April felt like a completion of sorts (even if, come April 30, he is still president). I won’t care, because the headspace I slipped into, imagining Trump absent, was so satisfying on a soul level, I—like with the Tao again—just steeped in it.

In this interim, there was the joy of following everything with the Artemis II crew’s mission. Reminding me that news related to something newsworthy in America could be uplifting and beautiful.

Furthermore, here are some other things I’ve been thinking about that you might find interesting, too.

Atheists are usually awful.

“I am a mystic and I believe in nothing.” —Gustave Flaubert

Dreary and dry—they’re certain of their uncertainty. Doubly so if they’re of the hard-headed soapboxing sort, like Richard Dawkins. Triply so if they have a prissy way of speaking, as Dawkins does.

But recently a friend posted this commentary from Dawkins, and it gave me pause. Dawkins wrote this shortly after the death of his daughter:

“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly, those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds, it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?”

After reading the above, I thought, atheists can be the most passionate mystics because they place nothing between themselves and the ultimate unknowability. And that’s pretty goddamn raw. And speaking of which:

Zen and Philosophy…

…well Western philosophy—don’t mix well. Philosophy is about compounding abstractions until your butthole inverts upon itself. Whereas Zen does away with distinctions between buttholes and mouths entirely.

So when I discovered the writings of Emil Cioran, I was floored by his non-stop stream of self-annihilating aphorisms that mimic in some ways the Zen ways that Nietzsche would occasionally rub up against. Although Cioran trots merrily beyond Nietzsche’s efforts to stay true to the craft.

Cioran is considered a nihilist (with a pessimistic chaser). But really he was an absurdist who believed that pulling the Band-Aid off in one quick rip was the best way to confront the ultimate meaninglessness of life.

People being people, they must find a way to categorize other people because, well, life is safer that way. But Cioran always managed to wiggle free, and he’d write something like “I plunged into the Absolute a fool; I emerged a troglodyte.” The first time I read that I laughed so hard—not even certain of what I read until ten minutes later.

Right now I’m re-reading his small volume, All Gall is Divided: The Aphorisms of a Legendary Iconoclast. And this one pass might actually be enough to last a lifetime. So heavily did death and suicide color his work that your survival instinct starts to pull you away from your mind’s dalliance.

Regardless, here are some of his most beguiling pulls from his oeuvre:

“The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live—moreover, the only one.”

“We have convictions only if we have studied nothing thoroughly.”

“We are born to Exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves.”

And my favorite:

“There is no other world. Nor even this one. What, then, is there? The inner smile provoked in us by the patent nonexistence of both.”

A Lost in the 70s Reverie.

As soon as I hear one of the tracks from Steely Dan’s masterpiece Aja, I smell weed.

But I’m recalling a focused, almost academic stoner-ism from back in the late 70s. This was one of those watershed cultural moments—right before the music business became the equivalent of giant shoulder pads in women’s clothing and Smokey and the Bandit playing 24/7 at the Cinerama.

Meaning, Steely Dan records were the last exhalation of pop-rock-jazz that was both un-self-consciously exceptional and fun. Albums that offered you the same thrill as reading prose from, say, Nabokov or Woolf.

A good writer will tell you that your first couple of drafts involve a (deluded) notion of reaching perfection. The best you can bring. But the final draft involves dismantling the perfection—to make the syntax read like it just fell out of your brain and onto the page. All the signs of perfection (or, god forbid, showiness) are smudged out. The prose is returned to earth but in an off-the-cuff but still kinda confounding way.

Steely Dan made their records in the same way. Yes, sonically they call up the tired Swiss watch metaphor, but they transcend their fastidiousness and pass into a strangeness that is beyond perfection. And so listening while high, you’d listen for all the subtle symphonious shifts while also thinking, “But wait, this is just pop music.”

The critic Don Breithaupt wrote: “Steely Dan records contain harmonic shifts, the way other records contain melodic, rhythmic, and lyrical motifs.”

The other night I got into a peculiar mood and decided to parse out what exactly was going on in Aja’s Peg—a hit single that just skirted the Top 10 after its release in late 77.

But instead of focusing on the legendary Polynesian-inspired guitar solo by Jay Gradon (legendary because Becker and Fagan auditioned eight different maven guitarists before settling on Gradon—who played regularly for Barbra Streisand and The Carpenters!) I went behind the curtain and fixated on the multi-tracked background vocals the boy’s saddled former alumnus Michael McDonald with.

Peg is so tightly arranged, like a Byzantine mosaic, it’s easy to miss (or take for granted) the bizarre vocal achievement McDonald was asked to deliver. It’s like he was instructed, “OK, so first open up your throat so you sound like a synthesized horn. And then sing ‘round back on top of the phrase you just delivered, but in a different pitch.”

There’s barely any room between intervals for McDonald to catch his breath and bring in the next line while harmonizing with himself. Listen to how he shoves out the words ‘foreign movie’ a half-beat before Fagan even sings the lyric. McDonald’s performance is like space-age scatting.

Better yet, listen to McDonald himself explain his process for you. And then listen to Peg again after you’ve smoked a bowl.

Love,

Cioran photo: Unknown.

• Saturn: The Work and The Love

• Nonsense & Malaise: Astrological Insights for Maneuvering the Hive

• The 12th House: Astrology’s House of the Rising Sun

• Mark Zuckerberg: Trouble Child

• Joni Mitchell’s Black Keys

Remembering My Dad (and Ross Dress for Less)

Frederick Woodruff — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 13:02:37 GMT

You’re reading WOODRUFF. I cover the convergence of pop culture, psychology, and astrology. Join my entourage of subscribers—you’ve been missed. My bio is here.

SEVERAL DAYS AFTER MY FATHER was cremated, my brother Jordan and I were sitting in the mortuary’s foyer, waiting for the arrival of the guy who worked the incinerator. I hadn’t seen my brother in close to fifteen years, and our mood was pensive and awkward but tender too. Our father’s departure had reunited us.

Finally, a door opened, and in walked an extremely tall guy dressed in an ill-fitting suit. Instantly I thought of Lurch from the Addams Family. He was carrying my dad’s ashes in a blue and white Ross Dress for Less shopping bag. If you’ve never retrieved human cremated remains, I will prepare you: The box of ashes is heavy.

I mentioned this to my brother, who agreed and added that a friend’s mother’s ashes—which he and his wife had retrieved the year before—had contained teeth. My evil twin asked, “Whose teeth?” My brother scoffed and said, “It’s never just ashes to ashes. It’s ashes to ashes and some molars and bridgework.”

On the way out, I told the manager that I thought it was weird that our father’s ashes were presented to us in a Ross Dress for Less bag. And the manager said he ‘understood’ but reminded my brother that during the intake, my brother had declined the manager’s upsell for a fifty-dollar tote that would have been more ‘appropriate.’

“Oh, brother,” I muttered.

Spring was lovely and warm that afternoon, so we stopped for coffee (oddly, my dad died exactly on his birthday that April), and we wanted to sit outside with our drinks and our Dad-In-A-Bag placed on the floor between us.

I consider embalming and open caskets existentially bizarre. But now, while my brother shared news about his newborn and my foot occasionally knocked against the dad bag, I couldn’t shake the surreal aura of the moment. The entirety of the man who loved and terrorized us as kids was now ash in a bag under a table at Starbucks. This was much odder than an open casket ceremony.

Eventually, my brother and I started to discuss the tacky experience at the mortuary, the Ross Dress for Less thing, and the mortuary’s nickel and diming. But then we paused, looked down at the bag, and busted out laughing. Soon we were trying to outdo each other with childhood memories about surviving his impetuous temper—made doubly so by my father’s Aries Sun and Leo ascendant.

I said, “Remember the Christmas when Dad was drunk and chasing your mom, and he ran straight through the neighbor’s plate glass window?”

“Or that time he cut off the tip of his thumb with a table saw?”

We recounted one tale after another and then, exhausted, drove back to my brother’s to show his wife and kids the dad bag.

Like most Aries-Leo folks, my father was keenly stylish and always dressed to make an impression. That my dad would exit life in a shopping bag for an off-price retail chain, a store he’d never be caught dead in, was, well…another kind of perfection. Death is the great equalizer.

Back at my brother’s house, my niece wondered about how someone could extract the gold contained in her grandfather’s dental work. I suggested there was probably a YouTube video for that, and my brother interrupted with, “Don’t. Even.”

That night, on my back and exhausted on the couch, the full impact of my father’s death broke through the barrier that buffers the living from acknowledging mortality. One of those 3 A.M. invasions that you’d rather sleep through.

Sensing my body, it felt as though an entire hemisphere in my head was missing. And I realized at that moment that my father’s presence, throughout my life, was directly associated with that particular sense of headspace. And I guessed that my mother must have comprised the opposite hemisphere. With my father’s disappearance, so too went a particular somatic awareness of myself. Where had half of my crown gone to? More to the point, where had my father gone to?

I’d abandoned my Catholic doctrine of heaven and hell right after high school, and my reflection on reincarnation—throughout my 30s—was a peer-influenced fancy. In my 40s a brief dalliance with Nietzsche’s theory of recurrence unnerved me to the point of abandoning my inquiries into immortality entirely. I settled on an agnostic position, and I’d argue with anyone broadcasting their post-mortality beliefs with, “Who says?”

But when a mother or father goes missing, those beliefs and rationales loom back on their own. I think because when a parent dies, the fact of their non-existence shoves their progeny one step forward on the plank of life, a plank that oversees an oceanic void.

And so, lying on the couch that night, I considered and negated the list once again: Heaven? No. Hell? No. Reincarnation? No. Recurrence? Please, no! Total absence? Like when I’m deep asleep and have no clue as to my existence. Yes, very likely. But again, no definitive knowing-in-the-bones assurance.

After I’d systematically canceled each solution, an eerie void emerged, a core-deep blankness that felt alien and familiar. Each of us seems to live with this void as a companion throughout our lives, but always at a distance. Should we get too close for any duration, the sense becomes untenable. I suppose this is why certain schools of Buddhism make a lifelong practice of attempting to allow for this unnamable version of non-reality.

Another ten years passed until my stepmom, my brother’s mother, died, and I drove down to Portland to help him with the cremation arrangements.

Again, at another coffee shop, I told my brother that because we saw each other so infrequently, the chances were good that our final meeting would involve one of us retrieving the other’s ashes from a mortuary.

And then, reading each other’s minds, we blurted, “And don’t forget the Ross Dress For Less!”

Love,

Opening photo by Patricia Woodruff, c. 1953 • Bicycle photo (my dad and me), c. 1960 by Reid Miles, ©2026 by Nightcharm, Inc.

• Astrologer and Tarot Maven TRAVIS BLACK on the WOODRUFF Cast.

• Nonsense & Malaise: Astrological Insights for Maneuvering the Hive

• The 12th House: Astrology’s House of the Rising Sun

Paint It Black: Nick Dagan Best Sees Trump’s Exit in April

Frederick Woodruff — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 21:22:52 GMT

Man on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

Frederick Woodruff — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 19:06:58 GMT

Kristi Noem and the Astrology of Bimbofication

Frederick Woodruff — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 20:20:25 GMT

This 'n' That on WOODRUFF for Sunday, March 29

Frederick Woodruff — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 00:45:26 GMT

You’re reading WOODRUFF. I cover the convergence of pop culture, psychology, and astrology. Join my entourage of subscribers—you’ve been missed. My bio is here.

WATCHING

Two important videos from earlier this month on WOODRUFF.

• My discussion with Holly Howard about getting your mojo moving and keeping it up amidst these unsettling times.

• Dabney Lawless and I discuss April’s highly charged series of conjunctions and Uranus’ ingress, finally, for good, into Gemini. Oh, and astrologer Nick Dagan Best’s prediction about Trump’s ‘removal’ sometime in April.

• Speaking of Nick, I’ll be sitting down with him mid-week, with our conversation posted in time for the weekend for paid subscribers. I want to walk through, in precise detail, how he constructed his Trump prediction.

• I've bailed on or scaled back most of the streaming platforms—which, given what they’re charging now for content that still comes loaded with ads, amounts to paying premium prices to dig through slop for the occasional jewel. I've redirected my money to PBS after DOGE gutted their funding last year. There's something genuinely calming about the NewsHour’s low-key cadence, and Firing Line delivers sharp, non-hysterical interviews with intelligent people. I've also fallen hard for the costume drama The Forsytes—probably the eighth adaptation of this story, but the best one yet. The one thing that cracks me up: every male actor in the series reads as gay. Even the older, avuncular ones.

READING

Jessica Murray’s recent post Pandora Calling: The Transits of Trump’s War.

“How do we understand a world unhinged by the psychosis of one man? No easy answer to that one, even for symbol readers. But a starting point, for astrologers, is to see certain public figures as modern myths: personifications of something the Universe wants to teach humanity. We decode transits to get a sense of what those lessons are.”

After being 20 years out of print, , in tandem with Sophia Center Press, has republished Garry Phillipson’s stellar book Astrology in the Year Zero. This is a gem I featured as a must-own in my list of 10 Best Astrology Books You Need in Your Library Right Now. I noted:

“Phillipson interviewed scores of different astrologers—former astrologers or budding astrologers—from Sun sign columnists to those skirting the edge of quantum physics—and, well, damn, you’re not going to encounter a better read for finessing your mind on the subject. I advocate embracing opposing views. Genuine inquiry includes all facets of the disco ball.”

You can order the book here.

LISTENING

My new Spotify playlist, Man Oh Man 2026 keeps mutating. There are about 200 tracks up now. Follow along. By the end of the year, it will be filled with old and new favorites.

There’s Still a Few Spots Remaining for PAID SUBSCRIBERS to Next Saturday’s Moon Zoom

Space is limited.

• Paid subscribers to WOODRUFF! Join me on Saturday, April 4, @ 1 PM Pacific for another lunar get-together.

• Follow this link over to Luma to register for free:

• https://luma.com/zgxy087y

Your link to Zoom will be sent over to you before the event starts.

See you next month!

Love,

• Saturn: The Work and The Love

• Nonsense & Malaise: Astrological Insights for Maneuvering the Hive

• The 12th House: Astrology’s House of the Rising Sun

The Ides of April: Trump's Final Exit and the Upcoming Aries Acceleration

Frederick Woodruff — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 19:01:14 GMT

NEW April 2026 Full Moon Zoom on WOODRUFF

Frederick Woodruff — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 17:16:40 GMT

You’re reading WOODRUFF. I cover the convergence of pop culture, psychology, and astrology. Join my entourage of subscribers—you’ve been missed. My bio is here.

HEY CHILDREN OF THE CORN, on Saturday, April 4, we’re holding another Full Moon Zoom hangout for paid subscribers to WOODRUFF. This meet-up will be a primer for the dynamic series of Aries conjunctions that will animate April right out of and off the calendar.

Note: This Moon Zoom is a few days after the official full Moon date to accommodate folks that work during the week.

This is a perigee full Moon—meaning the Earth and Moon are closer together than at most other points in the year. It's also known as the Pink Moon, named for the flowers that traditionally bloom at this time of year. Whether any are blooming right now in Australia is a question I'll leave for another day.

To participate, the only requirement is that you’re a paid subscriber to WOODRUFF.

Space is limited.

• Paid subscribers to WOODRUFF! Join me on Saturday, April 4, @ 1 PM Pacific for another lunar get-together.

• Follow this link over to Luma to register for free:

• https://luma.com/zgxy087y

Your link to Zoom will be sent over to you before the event starts.

See you next month!

Love,

• Astrologer and Tarot Maven TRAVIS BLACK on the WOODRUFF Cast.

• Nonsense & Malaise: Astrological Insights for Maneuvering the Hive

• The 12th House: Astrology’s House of the Rising Sun

Holly Howard: Launching Your Business in the Age of Uncertainty

Frederick Woodruff — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 20:58:33 GMT

You’re reading WOODRUFF. I cover the convergence of pop culture, psychology, and astrology. Join my entourage of subscribers—you’ve been missed. My bio is here.

STARTING A NEW BUSINESS. Rejuvenating an old one. Following your inner guidance toward your purpose. Any of these goals are harder than they've ever been. And Pluto moving through Aquarius isn't making it easier, as the transit dismantles social networks, both literal and figurative—some of them eons old.

Entrepreneurial strategist offers us different ways to consider the contemporary puzzles that make finding your place in the business world so maddening. When everything around us is hype and mania, what does it take to honor and amplify the mysterious guidance that comes from purpose?

In 2023, Holly completed her master's certificate in religions of the world at Harvard, integrating the spiritual and philosophical roots of everything she builds. She highlights the importance of returning to your agency. As well as the kind of reinforcement you receive when self-validation occurs organically—IOW not from clicks, ‘likes,’ followers, and ♥️ emojis.

You can discover more about Holly and her upcoming Pyramid.Work, project—an AI-powered strategic growth engine for the entrepreneurial economy—on her Substack newsletter Pryamid.

Love,

Intro/outro music via MobyGratis.com

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Frederick Woodruff — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 23:03:45 GMT

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Frederick Woodruff — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 17:35:45 GMT

Ghosts in the Machine: The Pluto in Aquarius Fool's Bargain

Frederick Woodruff — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 19:33:33 GMT

You’re reading WOODRUFF. I cover the convergence of pop culture, psychology, and astrology. Join my entourage of subscribers—you’ve been missed. My bio is here.

“Technology is not something that humankind can control. It is an event that has befallen the world.” —John Gray

BIG TECH IS DETERMINED THAT you will engage with AI and allow it to become intimately entwined with your life. And you will like it, goddammit.

Every single facet of the internet is thrusting AI into whatever activity you’re considering—or attempting to accomplish. Chat with a friend? Allow the AI assistant to recompose your message. Send a photo to someone? AI can recreate the image as a novelty. Writing a novel? Prompt AI with some basic plot points, and it will generate the narrative for you. Have a catchy chorus for a song? AI will bookend it with a verse and a bridge. And these are the more innocuous, titillating options. But all of this is the equivalent of an epic hustle.

All con jobs follow a checklist of identifiable stages. The dupe must be led through a series of steps that “soften them up” and make them more pliable to suggestion. More critical, the essence of all con jobs requires a ‘secret’ of some kind to ignite magical thinking and diminish suspicion. You see this in its most idiotic form in the scores of ads that start off any YouTube video you want to watch: “This one secret trick with apple cider vinegar and cinnamon can change your life.”

AI knows things you don’t—and you'll want access to them, mostly because there’s precious little left to explore online that isn't behind a paywall. That leaves us with cat videos, celebrity scandals, Trumpian dystopia, and porn. Since its inception, the internet has thrived on people’s curiosity about their world. Websites used to offer us a sort of ‘hunter-gatherer’ approach to knowledge, but now AI can do all of that for you. All that’s required is your awe at its omnipotence. And never mind that it’s decimated the very containers that fed its initial foraging.

Like all secrets in a con game, we don’t notice the toxic fallout that occurs until the jig is up. The promised breakthrough is more akin to a breakdown. And yet another time drain. Whenever I’ve experimented with AI, for, say, research of this or that. I often doubt the results I’ve been given. I’m aware of AI’s tendency to hallucinate when it can’t cough up the goods. This taints the engagement. And so I’m back to rummaging through Wikipedia or fumbling through CPU-gobbling pop-ups and self-start videos—to be certain about what the bot has disclosed.

Science and technology evolve; human beings do not—except in their imagination. If Darwin taught us anything, it is that evolution is a drifty, unreliable thing; some species make wild leaps and ‘improve,’ while others inexplicably disappear. There are no favorites, no predesigned order—chaos is the baseline, although humans have found novel ways to prevent themselves from seeing this truth. AI partakes of chaos as well, and in brand new ways—sometimes provoking psychotic breaks or other versions of hallucinations in individuals who have fallen under its spell.

So AI is the latest version of the techno-con. But as it’s poised today, it’s a leviathan that’s about to breach the waters. This marks a stretch of time that corresponds to Pluto’s twenty-year transit through Aquarius. This Roto-Rooter effect will expose the nefarious ways reality is being refashioned by Wall Street’s demand that tech provide the big payouts. And when the means (the new robots) fail to deliver, a more aggressive type of harvesting of personal data will follow. As will new ways of behavior modification and omnipresent spying. In that sense, AI is a sort of front to conceal the deeper, darker criminal activity.

Pluto’s transit through Aquarius is slowly excavating back into the culture the detritus of our past and offering it to us as something newfangled and shiny. Aquarius represents what’s new and emerging in a culture, while Pluto is essentially a symbol for shit. Bizarrely, pop astrologers have been treating this transit as if it is the herald of the Aquarian Age, when really it is the opposite. The meat of the transit will manifest in areas that Pluto excels: those murky realms where big business, the dark web, organized crime, and the covert parts of government vie for control. This is hardly the enlightened part of the Aquarian vision.

The other night I was listening to a podcast with my favorite culture commentator and provocateur, Adam Curtis. At one point, while discussing AI, he said the quiet part out loud. I immediately replayed his comment because it mirrored in many ways my astrological thinking on the subject. Speaking about the ongoing invasion, Curtis noted that AI is:

“…the ghost of our time. Because what it does is it goes back and scrapes all of our past… it takes that up and it mashes it up into this complex thing, which then feeds itself back to us. They are actually taking our own past and haunting us with it in a strange way…telling us it’s new, but actually maybe [it’s] keeping us stuck in the past.”

With Neptune’s long transit, over the past fifteen years, through Pisces, the global culture became steeped in outworn motifs—politics, art, cinema, music, and fashion—all sorts of nostalgic narratives—through remakes, repeats, retreads, sequels, and prequels that never allowed our imagination to step into untried territory. Our collective cultural past (Pisces) had been commodified by media (Neptune) to suck dry whatever the ‘sure bets’ could (almost always) guarantee. “You liked this in the past, so you’ll like this reconfiguration into the present.”

And then, with Pluto’s entry into Aquarius, along came AI to recapitulate all of this over again, but in a much more personal and exhaustive way. Curtis continues:

“What AI is doing is taking it much further. It’s actually going back to our own past. It’s going back to our own images, our own language, the words we wrote, the phrases we wrote. Because out there in [social media’s] server farms are our feelings, written down in fragmentary form, little images, little moments—intense moments of fear and love. [AI is] scraping it all, putting it all together in some strange, almost cubist-like form, and playing back to us a world built out of that. And if I were to write a ghost story now, I would do it about that. We are haunted. It’s the haunting. Which makes me suspect…that AI is not the future. It’s the final end of the past. It’s the moment the past came for us and we will have to escape from it.”

As one commenter put it, “If the algorithm is a ghost built from our collective past, how do you perform an exorcism on a machine that knows you better than you know yourself?”

Hello!

In the long arc of time, which astrology with its recurrent cycles allows us to contemplate, Curtis’ spooky contention makes sense. Consider the transits: We will not be free of the current sloughing-off process that accompanies Pluto’s glacial glide through Aquarius and then Pisces until 2068, when a new eon reconfigures and the planet enters Aries.

Aquarius and Pisces are the closing phases of any cyclic process. Especially when you view this sequence as it relates to the birth, midlife, and death of cultures and empires. It’s a requirement that the dreams that goad the Aquarian ideology of techno-progress be purged (Pluto) but also mined (Pluto) for what the overlords can commodify and repurpose. In that sense, Curtis’ take on what AI is doing at this phase of its unfoldment is chillingly apt.

Idylls of olden times often comfort people. So for those enamored with AI’s jumbling and reformatting of the past, there’s a kind of solace. There might be a kind of surrender when one acknowledges that they are helpless in the face of the tech lords with their fiefdoms and server farms. The ‘clouds’ that provide and feed back one’s old imaginative life (or lack thereof). We become like sheep, milling about in the detritus that—although it appears to be new—smells of carrion and grandma’s potpourri.

As elegant as technology likes to present itself, its subliminal message, for those that can read it, is humbling. (And this could be the bright spot as Pluto moves through Aquarius and exposes the quickly mutating grift). When we are fed back the ideals of progress that have inspired our past efforts, we might admit that little changes within human nature. At least in any way that would be considered profound. Fantasies and visions are cyclic. To admit this diminishes the aura of their power. The lure of their lore. Whatever did become of the legendary Atlantis?

For the individual (who is all there really is amidst the concepts of tribes, groups, ethnicities, and ‘humanity’), life is fairly simple—humble. We aren’t all like Larry Ellison, building a 4000-acre monument to our ego (after purchasing Lānaʻi, the sixth-largest island in Hawai’i.) Nor are we attempting to flee a beleaguered planet to relocate to Mars. As the writer Annie Dillard put it, life is mostly common and unremarkable, hype-free and routine. As she wrote, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.”

We are children of the technological world and what it has built up around us. Yes, better medicines and sanitation—and magical computers held in the palm of our hands. We’re hardwired into technology’s mainframe. But as events conspire today, it seems harder and harder to extricate ourselves from Big Tech’s ongoing con. At least if one remains active online. Conversely, this moment—this AI backwash into our regurgitated past—might goad some of us to dump the matrix and return to the old-style ‘social contract.’ That’s the promise of Neptune’s new transit in Aries. An empowered life awaits the renegades and the rebels who value self-reliance and inspired activism (all Aries high points).

But we might begin by acknowledging the truths highlighted in this argument from political philosopher John Gray—again, it’s another dose of humility:

“The end-result of scientific inquiry is to return humankind to its own intractable existence. Instead of enabling humans to improve their lot, science degrades the natural environment in which humans must live. Instead of enabling death to be overcome, it produces ever more powerful technologies of mass destruction. None of this is the fault of science; what it shows is that science is not sorcery. The growth of knowledge enlarges what humans can do. It cannot reprieve them from being who they are.”

Love,

• Can Science Prove or Disprove Astrology?

• Mark Zuckerberg: Trouble Child

• Joni Mitchell’s Black Keys

• Nonsense & Malaise: Astrological Insights for Maneuvering the Hive