On the Darkside, this makes you a slippery, manipulative, unreliable reality-dodger with delusions of adequacy and an addiction to sentimentality and self-destruction.
ANNOYING HABITS
Punctuality
You're not late as such, but you get lost, can't remember where you're going, or what day it is. It's whoever you're meeting's fault for putting you under so much pressure; stop off at a bar for a consoling drink or several.
Toothpaste
You squeeze from the middle and leave the cap off, but are usually using a tube of shaving gel or hemorrhoid cream because you don't do small print; blame the bathroom's owner when you throw up.
Temper gauge
0 to boiling point in a minute or two, building up a good head of steam to drive the whine engine, which can go for weeks at a time but not in any logical direction; often runs off the rails or over innocent bystanders.
personalityconfused, chaotic, contradictory
Brightsiders describe you as two fish tied together and swimming in opposite directions. Not really a good start, is it? They say this conflicting image represents your reach-for-the-stars-side and your degradation-junkie Darkside, pulling each other every which way (they don't mention that the rope that ties you together is what usually garrotes other zodiac signs who get involved with you). This kind of implies that your Darkside is separate from your Brightside, which suits you because it means you can deny its existence and, at the same time, blame it every time you mess up. (Yes, I know that is confused and contradictory, but confused and contradictory is what you are.) But it's not true, is it? Both your fish have dark underbellies.
You have candy-colored dreams in which you are the handsome hero on a white horse who rides in and saves everybody, asking nothing but everlasting gratitude and unconditional love in return; this explains your Brightside rep. for clustering around sickbeds, retraining as an alternative therapist or marriage counselor so that you can make it all better for the sad and inadequate. Let's pause and savor that magnificent irony for a moment before wondering what you are really up to. Emotional tourism and vicarious wallowing spring to mind, mainly because if by chance you do manage to get anyone back on their feet and they start succeeding at life, you get insanely jealous and start pricking their brave new little balloon of self-esteem.
Your natural habitat is murky emotional depths, where you drift about vaguely, moaning about the intolerable pressure the world puts you under (possibly someone has asked you the time). And because you have the willpower of a marshmallow, whenever you feel cosmically hard done by, which is most of the time—you didn't ask to be born, you whine adolescently—you climb into a bottle or book a vacation in the Altered States of Fantasia. Staring at life through a glass darkly (or just through a glass), you appear helpless and put upon, but you're not: you know the manipulative value of martyrdom and suicide threats. If found out, you get all Virgo, and escape into hypochondria or start sweating obsessively about the small stuff.
Anyone who has to deal with you should always carry a tape recorder, for anything mutually agreed two minutes ago you will deny utterly two minutes later (although you will then deny that it's your voice on the tape). Your instantaneous mood changes make Cancer look like an emotional Mt. Rushmore. You set out on a sentence (e.g. pass the salt, please) full of optimism and jollity; by the time you get to the end, you are one with Eeyore and everybody else has lost the will to live. What you want now is never what you will want in one minute, or what you did want three minutes ago. Persistence of vision is nature's way of letting us see the world as a constant picture rather than a flicker of separate images; you don't have it.
b***h rating
A-. Stealth-class submarine bitchery; you're so wishy-washy topside, people underestimate the powerful emotional location system that allows you to hook directly into others' weakest points and go in with a spiteful trident. You always hit below the waterline, and leave a slow corrosive poison in the victim's system.
Collective noun
An angling tip for non-Pisceans. You may find yourself, for some bizarre, zodiacal reason, in a damp, windowless drinking club full of Pisceans. Mournful eyes stare at you accusingly, as tears splash steadily into beer. You are dissolving in a Whine of Pisceans. Don't smack them with a wet fish—that's just what they want.
FAVE DEADLY SIN
As you are a weak-willed sensationalist, you have regularly been led astray by all seven DSs, often all at the same time (which may explain some of your mood changes, but is still no excuse). Anger and Lust seem uncomfortably proactive and positive for you, and Greed is a bit too much like hard work, so Envy, Sloth, and Gluttony are your solid drinking crew—especially Envy, since you could have been a contender if only your cruel parents hadn't held you back, and everybody else in the world hadn't made your life an absolute misery.
blame your planetball of confusion
Pisces and Jupiter were never going to make it through the night; the Jolly Gas Giant is far too positive, although it does explain the occasional red flash of ambition glimpsed as you turn with the tide. Neptune's much more your sort of thing: unfocused, nebulous, and wet. Since you're a Black Belt blameshifter, you don't need me to tell you what to do when you've behaved really badly, again.
Neptune, the eighth rock from the sun, is huge, yet somehow insubstantial, a whirling ball of cold wetness (molten rock, water, fluid gases), and the windiest planet in the solar system. It took three people (an Englishman, a Frenchman, and a German) to find it and persuade it to come home. They worked out where it must be because the erratic behavior of its orbit-buddy, Uranus, meant that something, somewhere was leading it astray: guess who? Neptune's famous for its intermittent and unpredictable hazes, an unreliable number of moons, and a faint, half-hearted ring system, parts of which have drifted off. It leans sideways and take about 165 years to lurch around the Sun, sponging off each sign in turn for about 13 years—although if feels like longer.
It's named for Neptune, the Roman version of the Greek Poseidon, god of the sea, wine, and horses, the permanently foul-tempered, grumpy, and hungover brother of Zeus. You can often see him painted on the insides of ancient Greek wine bowls, sloshing steadily through a sea of wine—your kind of god.
who's got your number?check out the opposition
Your polar opposite sign is Virgo: the naggy, hyperorganized, detail-obsessed bleachaholic. What would a self-deluded, dysfunctional escapist like you want with an a**l-retentive despiser-of-the-weak like your average Virgo? How do you have this—shall we say—understanding? Well, like good cop and bad cop, or arch villain and fixer, you need each other to make the Darkside work for you. It's all about elements (undesirable one, of course). You are Water; Virgo is Earth. Put them together and you get mud; it always makes you pine for the gutter, where you have spent so much quality time; but Virgo uses it to cure all those nasty psychosomatic rashes.
Don't you wonder, as you drift about the world in a haze of aimless confusion, why someone as unable to run their own life as you are has not simply dissolved in their own juices? (Probably not; you've only got a short little attention span.) Or what the mysterious force is that helps you occasionally get things done (and no one, least of all you, knows how)?
Respect your inner Virgo; it cleans a little patch in your fish bowl so that at least one beam of real light penetrates the murk every now and then, and nags you into remembering that fish do have a backbone, even if it's bendy and made of cartilage. Don't get too organized in there; if you start making lists of all the terrible things you've done, you'll have to shoot yourself, or have another drink.
sexlet's pretend
You love someone to take charge, lash you to the bedpost with your own fishnet stockings and give you a sound spanking because you have been very naughty; or dress you up as a great big baby and force a Chardonnay-dipped pacifier into your mouth; or make you shuffle around on hands and knees playing doggies, fetching your leach between your teeth and doing what Master says. If that's all a bit expensive, you can always just stay at home and dress up as interns and nurses, or prisoners and wardens. It's not for the sex (although you quite like sex, and 90 seconds is plenty long enough for your attention span). You do it: a) to stop being yourself, and dissolve into someone else; and b) to abase yourself and make someone else responsible for you.
You are tooth-achingly sentimental; lovers shrink before the accusing, beady-eyed stare of the 2,000 cuddly toys that cram your boudoir, and go red in the dark at the thought of the pet names (Bunny Bluddikins) you give them. And you always confuse sex (OK) with love and affection (yes! yes! yes!), which is why Scorpio always fools you.
DARKSIDE DATE
You always get a date because you are totally indiscriminate; anything with a pulse will get your juices flowing, and you sometimes think that maybe you're being a teensy bit too picky and dead-ist. Your signature seduction technique is emotional blackmail ("I've only got six months to live" is always a winner). Your ideal date is with your partner's best friend, whom you take to a murky wine bar, where you don't let them get a drink in edgeways as you tell them how misunderstood you are, stare into their eyes, and sob that they have always been the one. Once you have scored, you deny it all—even when the photographs are produced—then blame your partner for being so horrible that you had to find comfort elsewhere. If you don't have a partner to deceive, your ideal date is anyone who'll buy you a drink.
What kind of love rat are you?
Supreme—you are one with the rat-force. If things are the least bit difficult, you feel under pressure (your partner asks you want you want for dinner), or if a better offer swims by, you simply drift off, leaving partners, children, debtors, etc. to tread water. You never feel guilty because it's always everyone else's fault.
IMCOMPATIBILITY RATING
Aries—they take it out on you when the world confuses them.
Taurus—you despise people who have no control around addictive substances (cake).
Gemini—they cheat on you with your best friend, then disappear.
Cancer—It's just all mood swings and self-pity with them.
Leo—they demand unconditional attention; so unreasonable.
Virgo—try to organize your life, so you are forced to run away with their best friend.
Libra—just so unreliable.
Scorpio—they make spiteful remarks and try to control you by manipulating your emotions.
Sagittarius—spend most of their life hanging around in bars.
Capricorn—won't pay off your credit card bill, so you are forced to turn to a life of crime.
Aquarius—sneer when you say the stars are God's daisy chain.
Pisces—blame you for every little thing that goes wrong.
relationshipsthe kindness of strangers
Quantity is the only thing that will absorb all the neediness you pump out, and that will generate enough energy to replace all that you absorb, so you swimming around with a huge school of acquaintances. Because you have a nano-attention span, and can't be bothered to do any work on existing relationships, you are always looking for a New Best Friend. Your New Best Friend can do no wrong: he (or she) really understands the supersensitive inner you; is never harsh or critical of your lost weekends, and you inability to hold down a job, like all your Old Best Friends were; you know he is a perfect, superhuman being who walks on water. When the water inevitably reaches his knees, you launch a few spite-lade torpedoes at his weak points, then drift off to look for a new New Best Friend. You target the sick, ugly, outcast, or psychologically damaged, because you think they will be grateful and fulfill some of your many needs: constant unconditional affection, someone else's emotional depths to splash around in, and a chance to be codependent—your lifestyle of choice.
At the same time (nobody said this was easy) you need a hero to feed off (like a cleaner fish that floss food from sharks' teeth), who will let you be a doormat so that you can get yourself off the boring hook of personal responsibility.
Brightsiders claim you're a romantic, but you're just a sentimental drifter. You float in and out of relationships and marriages without a second thought, pulled by the strongest current.
workthe curse of the drinking classes
No one understands. You are an artiste. It may say "clerk" in your job description, but you are in fact a misunderstood genius. Brightsiders say you are creative (salon talk for unemployable), so you think this gives you license to stare blankly at the wall for hours at a time, or even close your eyes to await the muse. The snoring is always a giveaway, and the slumping slack-jawed and drooling on your desk. And I wouldn't trust you in the caring profession (another dumb Brightside suggestion) since it is obviously just a ruse to get near the pharmaceuticals.
So is there anything you can do? Well, not a lot. You should never work with heavy machinery—you'll forget about it, and drift off to the water cooler for some juicy gossip (you are the master grinder at the rumor mill); or in anything that really matters, such as neurosurgery or air-traffic control, where concentration and steady hands and needed. Your lack of energy and coordination, and a pig-headed adolescent determination to buck the system, man, don't help. When you are not praised extravagantly for the work you imagine you have done, you feel hard done by, sulk, b***h, and go to the bar for the rest of the day, or week.
DREAM JOBS
Where's the fun in dreaming about a job, here in dreary old reality? You are a pro, you need a dream job in Fantasy World; so I consulted the J. Walter Mitty Corporation, Fantasy World's leading headhunting agency, and they suggested that you might like to be considered for:
World dictator
When you are world dictator, you can make every one of your fantasies a reality and then, because you won't want them any longer, you can command all your subjects to think up some lovely new ones.
World's greatest lover
It's not what you think: it's you floating in a bath of champagne while beautiful people of all sexes sob and weep in sheer adoration of your sensitive self, pushing tsunamis of affection at you, however badly you behave.
crimes and misdemeanorshow bad could it get?
So what sort of criminal would you be, if sociopathy became the new world order? How would you spend your days (or maybe nights) if you really lived on the Darkside? You are a pushover for the romance of crime, the fantasies of wealth and power that fog the brains of most doomed petty criminals, the adolescent buzz of getting one over on the suits; you see yourself as a dashing Robin Hood sort of person (except that, after you have stolen from the rich, the poor shouldn’t' hold their breath). You are magnetically drawn to degradation and the lower depths, and would do anything to join a street gang, but your crimes would be small-time (robbery to fund one of your addictions, unconvincing bogus charity scams) or inadvertent (busting parole driving over a state line because you got lost). When caught (inevitably) and doused in reality, you squeal immediately and give up all the gang's secrets.
You weren't paying attention when they explained about the law, but just as you resent the laws of physics applying to you, so you resent any man-made justice applying to you. When you go to court you sob, lie, and bluster, and push the emotional manipulation buttons (your poor white-haired old granny, brave legless little Timmy who depends on you, etc.) and swear on your baby's eyes that you were out of town and didn't do it. The judge nominates you for an Oscar.
Jail suits you just fine: no decisions, no responsibilities, and big-time villains to get in with. Steel bars don't mean a thing to an escapist of your caliber.
WHEN FISH GO WRONG
You're too incompetent to work on your own, so ingratiate yourself into a gang, where you start at the bottom as the expendable gofer. If you survive, Mr. Big may eventually let you light his cigar, or use you as a bootscraper. You may even make it to one of these:
Brug baron
You know the market and just how much money can be wrung from the streets, and Mr. Big bankrolls you; all goes well until you transgress the Unwritten Law and start sampling your own merchandise again. Dumbo!
Pirate
Strictly the old-fashioned kind; this one has it all: romance, rum, dressing up, a fast ship for dramatic escapes, more rum, affection—everybody loves a pirate, as long as they don't actually meet one—and rum.
at homeunderwater grotty
Guests who can get the door open (it's blocked by a sea of brown envelopes and final demands) should bring scuba kit and a flashlight; watery light filters through grimy light-bulbs and the odd patch of cleaned window pane that you use to look out for debt collectors. There is squelching underfoot. Since you have kept everything you've ever acquired, and gone out of your way to take in other people's junk, closet doors and drawers bulge with the strain, and in darker corners random heaps of unnamable stuff spontaneously generate, flourish, and collapse, like ancient civilizations. Life on Earth probably started like this.
DOMESTIC DISHARMONY
Aries—you just lose the house keys; they throw them away.
Taurus—well, they shouldn't leave their caviar in the refrigerator when you're hungry.
Gemini—you suspect there's more than one person in their room, but it's too dark to see.
Cancer—dump your collection of string-that-might-come-in-handy, and bring in their own.
Leo—make you buy new lightbulbs just so they can see themselves in the mirror.
Virgo—constantly tut-tut under their breath about something they call unspeakable chaos.
Libra—have an ongoing affair with the roachbusting squad.
Scorpio—never in, but lots of strange people come around after dark and leave packages.
Sagittarius—pour all your tropical fish into the bath because they say they don't like to see animals confined.
Capricorn—won’t pay their utility bill until they see a utility.
Aquarius—making a fortune out of that anti-retrovirus culture they found under the bath mat.
Pisces—you’ve never seen them, they're always in rehab.
Decor
You and your partner decide to paint the bathroom pink. They paint the bathroom pink. You explode irritably and say you meant pea green. They pain it pea green. You explode irritably and cry, "Who chose that foul color?" As they didn't tape the conversation, they can't prove that you did, and you deny it. They paint the whole house beige, and leave. You love beige, the color of indecision.
Sharing the Pisces fish bowl
Not recommended; lightning mood swings make you impossible to live with unless you find another fish and synchronize your whining. Desperate roommates should bring their own rose-tinted virtual-reality helmet.
playtimethe darkside of fun
When you go on vacation, the rest of us hold our collective breath waiting for reports of accidental killings, international incidents caused by misunderstandings and confusion, unprecedented citywide traffic jams, and unexpected drug busts; fortunately for us, you rarely go, because all that planning, booking tickets, getting a passport stuff is so boring. No one takes you on vacation more than once, for you are a self-indulgent, nervous breakdown-inducing liability. On a guided tour, you wander off up a sleazy alley, fall in with thieves, and the whole group has to spend three days getting you bail.
You never read dull signs like "Quicksand" or "No Swimming Here," and after the fourth incident, the emergency services tar and feather you. (You blame everyone else for not reading the signs to you.) And you are always the one who holds up the plane for two hours because you don't listen to public announcements, and you are too busy gargling in Duty Free.
Vacations from hell
* Anywhere that you have to come back from by the same route you went (or anywhere you have to come back from at all)—interferes with drifting.
* Anywhere that does not have an alcohol or controlled substance du pays.
* Anywhere with your family; they make constant demands on your time, and for some reason everyone gets mad when you leave the kids on the bus...
Road rage
You no longer have a driving license because either you lost it down the back seat of your previous car, or they took it away from you, just because you were drunk/stoned/doing 110 in a 30 mph zone while going the wrong way up a one-way street (what signs?); but hey, that doesn't mean you don't drive. Of course you do road rage—everyone else except you drives so badly, and don't they know that highway regulations do not apply to you? You have loads of maps (including a 1976 street guide to Medicine Hat, and a hand-drawn chart of the sea roads of Galveston), but you always get lost (often on the tricky trip between home and garage); still, you can blame the maps.
Gamesmanship
Since you don't do rules, you cheat and foul your way through the game, successfully shifting any blame onto your team's best player, who gets ejected. What? You always take home your ball, and anybody else's that you can get away with.
