Crystal Baws horoscopes: 20th anniversary edition

Aries

This month you’re evicted from your 7th House of Love because your landlord wants to split it into flats and create even more love for himself in the tight-corridored love slums he plans to create. A few doors down outside your 1st House of Self you find the contents of your personality strewn on the lawn below a REPOSSESSED sign. All other ten houses are also empty and locked, acquired for a song by off-realm entities interested in investing in the reality market. Your only option now is to live rough outside your zodiac begging nightmarish ancient gods for the right to exist.

Taurus

Swigging dregs of a paleo bone broth at the gym, your neckless head cranes up to see a poster for a 4D Chess Competition. You sign up, sure your red-pilled high IQ honed in the marketplace of ideas can do battle in the transcendent arena your podcast bros also strategise in. Turns out it’s just chess though. The old lady who lets you in explains that actually, all chess is already 4D chess in that you don’t play in a frozen moment but across a series of moments we call time, it’s just your pawn-like brain didn’t know that. You mutter something half-remembered from a podcast about tesseracts and she tells you to shut up or you’ll get a thick ear. Joke’s on her though, because they’re already thick from MMA.

Gemini

After much lobbying, secret meetings and firm backroom handshakes, BP convince the world’s governments they own the sun. Expect your first bill through the door this month. To avoid paying too much, BP have released a pack reassuring the sun’s eight billion worried consumers if they want to opt out, they are free to avoid eating food deriving energy from our home star and can instead lick the walls in deep subterranean caverns for nutrients, or simply move to one of the barren, forbidding exoplanets orbiting Proxima Centauri where sunlight is, for the moment, still free.

Cancer

When life gives you lemons, squirt the juice from those lemons into the eyes of everyone you know.

Leo

This month, after a bite from a tomcat with toxoplasmosis, you become Catman. From a tattered armchair before a wall of CCTV monitors covering every corner of your home, tangy with the smell of cat piss, you watch for cat crime amongst the masses of badly-behaved strays you let in. Your newfound abilities include tutting and shouting, “Oi!” and “Stop it!” and you pack a utility belt of laser pens, shit scoopers and water pistols. Meanwhile the real superhero in this caper is the toxo, guarding over your grey matter watching for signs of willpower, or the scourge of independent thought. Swooping between neurons it stops chemical-pushing synapses moving dopamine across the brain so you reply to that friend’s text about going for drinks, or smashes no-good serotonin smuggling receptor rings conspiring to make you start a new non-cat hobby.

Virgo

You develop a pilot for a soap opera in which every character is played by a goat except for yours, a local Casanova who sleeps with everybody in town.

Libra

This month you discover intelligent life living in your groin as it makes attempts to communicate, waking you with strong signals from deep beneath the duvet. First contact is a cheesy, rotting meat-like smell. Then after your greeting of “I come in peace,” a potent pong like countless skunk carcasses exhumed from a mass grave of camembert. What could the language mean? It’ll take you months to decipher the nuanced syntax of stinks. Instead of gazing up in wonder with butterflies in our stomachs, we should’ve smelt downwards, feeling sick to our stomachs at the profound grammar of guff long before this historic day! Tomorrow you totally should get whatever is transmitting this eye-watering language seen at the doctor though.

Scorpio

Like the scorpion, everybody shuns and fears you at work. Your thick exoskeleton makes peoples’ skins crawl and colleagues rightly give you a wide berth to avoid getting stabbed by your barbed comments. You lurk in the stationery cupboard, or buried under paperwork, watching your prey wander the office, to the water cooler or for a nice breakout chat with a workmate. But should they forget you exist and wander too close to the desk you’re laid beneath, then BANG! You explode from under it impaling them with a remark about their flaky heels and then BANG! You fucked up that presentation! BANG! Stupid brain! BANG! Short-thoraxed idiot! BANG! BANG! BANG! You strike until the victim collapses sobbing and exhausted, whereby you drag them under your desk to feed the young you carry on your back, who should really be at school.

Sagittarius

October fills you with pride as your maths wiz tech bro son builds his own LLM to write covering letters for entry-level coding jobs he won’t get. AI will create new jobs though. You reassure him in a few years he’ll either be mining precious metals from dangerous asteroids in the Oort Cloud because he’s less valuable than the robots, or climbing into a vending machine to pretend he’s an advanced LLM every morning for an 18 hour shift.

Capricorn

Watching Halloween Most Haunted in the boiling global warmed October you get an idea and dust off your ouija board. You’ll use poltergeists to cool the place down. Flying plates and slamming cupboards are a small price to pay for the cooling benefits of these tormented spirits. Next stop Dragon’s Den to demo your Green Ouija Cooling System to the riveted magnates. Closing the pitch to a white-eyed Deborah Meaden who barks feedback that your father sucks off dogs in hell, you explain that every cubic inch of space is also thick with dinosaur ghosts which, if properly harnessed, can counter fossil fuels with fossil spirits that are carbon neutral, emission-free and angry to have been roused from their aeons-long slumber.

Aquarius

As you watch the AGI you developed bathe in its liquid coolant, making hyper-futuristic objects magically pop in and out of thin air, you realise the best we can hope for now is that the young computer finds a non-human fuel source that doesn’t include the elements inside you. Hopefully it proliferates its bottomless mind across some other part of the galaxy, far away from your house, or ideally, drops out of our reality altogether after computing scientific principles so newfangled that to explain them to a human would be like sending a text message to a clam.

At a loss for what to do on Halloween you pilfer Morpheus’ stash of red pills and neck the entire bag only to wake up a vast time later in an odd new world with only one shoe on. The last thing you remember is having broken through the last of 9 Matrices. Luckily you discover you also brought Morpheus’s bag of blues for the comedown.

Pisces

After trapping three bald drug addicts in a paddling pool in your basement you force your team of poundshop pre-cogs to read the whole of Wikipedia and then dream the answers to your web search queries, and it's still somehow 5% more accurate and ethical than using ChatGPT.

More on... Gemini

Famously the sign of the twins, Gemini are known for the wise-cracking homunculus fused to their chest since the womb. Although much smaller than you, this twin is the dominant partner in the relationship, making almost all of the decisions which govern your life. In truth, there is no ‘your life,’ you’re simply the twin’s mode of transport to its next port of vice.

The homuncule is luckier in love than you, often barking for you to stay still as it makes out with sexy strangers at parties or forcing you to put a towel over your head so it can have sex in private. It usually demands to commandeer your genitals because, although it has a set of its own mangled reproductive organs, they are benign and resemble a gnawed dog’s toy.

Contrary to your adrenaline-fueled twin, you tend to be drawn towards the duller professions of accountancy, quantity surveying or resource management. After a night being dragged around coke-fueled boat orgies or jet skiing with strippers you’ll often only just manage to haul yourself into the office to compile the quarterly spreadsheets and get the PowerPoint deck ready for the big pitch. The twin sits under your shirt, snoring loudly as you labour to explain your lateness and the blood on your shoes to a concerned boss. Sometimes you wonder why you bother, your linked bank accounts mean your wages are quickly blown on hailing cabs to meet its LSD dealer at Alton Towers or inviting 10,000 teenagers to a party at your house on Instagram. Its ravenous urges for hard drugs, booze and inner-city gloryholes tend to take a toll on your body. Gemini therefore suffer from a range of medical complaints, such as type 2 diabetes, cirrhosis of the liver, HIV, kidney failure, or syphilis. It is therefore important to get yourself regularly checked out by a health specialist. Your twin will often use these visits to stock up on as many pharmaceutical drugs as possible, getting you to distract the doctor with a shoulder barge so it can raid the cabinets. This can often result in you being denied vital treatment by your local health authority.

Recurring nightmares plague you in moments of micro-sleep, that one day you may shrivel up into nothing but an apologising face on the heavily tattooed arse of the small, yet dominant twin. As you drag yourself endlessly back and forth between work and the twin’s parties, you find yourself fantasising about killing the homuncule and freeing yourself from the whims of this tiny, foul-mouthed monster. Daydreaming about an entire night of sleep or eating something that isn’t drugs, you wonder what life would be like lived on your own terms and not as the hostage of this pleasure-seeking tumour. You stare at the wiry tuft of hair on the back of the twin’s misshapen, potato-like skull as it orders another ounce of coke on your mobile and consider plunging a pair of scissors into its neck. But it’s already too late for that. It would only expedite your own painful demise, rotting on your chest and filling your blood with yet more poison.

GEMINI STATS
Symbol: The Twins
Period: 22 May- 21 Jun
Planet: Mercury
Paper size: A2
Mineral: Crystal meth
Shoe size: 8
Number of teeth: 12
Coach: C
Seat: 40A
Subtitles: English
Ingredients: Tomatoes (75%), Sugar, Lemon Juice, Salt, Emulsifying Agent

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Illustrations by Darren Cullen