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Thursday, Aug. 31, 2006 | Reality Checkpoint

Dear Friend and Reader:

Well today is the big day: Saturn opposite Neptune for the first time since Watergate.

Having written quite a lot about this the past year -- the Saturn-Neptune era really came in with a splash one year ago during Hurricane Katrina -- at this point all I can really say is, the planets are saying it's time to sum up. About our lives, about the state of reality or lack thereof, the state of the world, and our motivation to participate in any of the above.

Saturn opposite Neptune is what's called a world transit. It affects everyone, and is also a turning point in history. We're halfway into that turning point now -- it will last another year, and also come with effects that ripple out about two years on either side. This one leads to the next big phase, Uranus square Pluto which begins to come into orb next year and carries through the 2012 era. Praise the gods and goddesses above.

But for right now, the first actual contact between two major planets in a world transit is always an important day. We may not know why for a while; we may have a clue in a few weeks or a month; we may have the truth staring us right in the face; but -- we are in the exact alignment and something is re-aligning.

The history of Saturn and Neptune is fascinating from a collective or individual perspective. Speaking in the individual sense, this one takes us back to 1988-1989, when we were, quite potentially, living through something distinctly related to today. What was it?

For me, it was quitting my last "real job" and starting my first business -- the Student Leader News Service in New Paltz, New York. That was the time when I recognized that independent publishing was my calling, and began working on building my first independent organization. Before that, I was the senior editor of Kane's Beverage Week, covering liquor regulation and marketing. The big stories were warning labels on liquor bottles, the acquisition of Tropicana by Seagram's for nearly $1 billion, and a marketing campaign for Tanqueray Tequila (they don't make tequila, only gin and vodka). You can tell I was a huge drinker in college. Our clients got a big laugh out of that.

The next thing I did was quit and start a news service that covered student activism and the state government in New York. We didn't make money but we did bang-up journalism. Hello to Sean Springer, Ian McGowan and Sabine Ferandou-Kleopas if you're out there reading.

Curiously enough, 17 years later, I am still at it, devoted as I was the day I tossed the first edition of Student Leader into a mailbox in downtown New Paltz to 30 subscribers one afternoon in September 1989 and thought, well, this is the beginning of something!

And indeed, it's time for a reality check. And while I'm still sitting in front of a Macintosh doing citizen media, I feel like I've come a long way since that day. But I'm very much still me.

    e

PS, ah yes it all comes back to me now...we were in business a couple of months when the Associated Press sent a reporter named David Bauder to interview us, and an article about Student Leader appeared in the newsroom of every newspaper in the State of New York -- a good introduction. That paved the way to being taken seriously from the get-go as a news agency. (Bauder is now one of AP's most trusted writers on the subject of rock music, as well as a few other topics.) 'Us' means me, Ernesto 'Che' Guzman (our campus organizing director), and Steve Bergstein, who had just graduated from delivering pizza for My Hero, and had recently been the editor of The Oracle, then the best student newspaper for 100 miles around. He was about to enter CUNY Law School and is now a civil rights lawyer, contributing editor to Planet Waves, and author of the excellent blog Psychsound that is linked from our front page. Sean Springer, Ian McGowan and Sabine arrived a moment later.

PPS, here's what I looked like that summer... http://planetwaves.net/chart.php?c=efc_fac_id_web