Pluto in between and the return of indie sleaze

Hey Mom, can you pick me up? Pluto's leaving Capricorn and they're glamorizing 2008

Dear reader, I am back from hiatus, and I am ultimately not sorry, even though I spent the past few weeks feeling guilty for dropping the ball. It turns out that having a powerful creative urge to start a weekly forecast didn’t mean that that format would sustain my creativity. I think I assumed I’d have enough juice left over to tackle more ambitious writing, and then I added a monthly horoscope column and video forecast. I won’t bore you with my thought process but suffice it to say that from now on, this Substack will feature more essays like this one and maybe the occasional Sunday Postcard when I’m feeling genuinely inspired to write one. It’ll also probably be updated less frequently, but I think we’re all collectively ready to leave laboring in the content mines in the 2010s where it belongs. Quality over quantity and all that. Thank you if you’ve been here, and thank you if you’re still reading.

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It’s 2024, and the Pluto in Capricorn era is ending the same way it began — in the bargain bin of yesterday’s decadence. People newly saddled with the knowledge of collapse, but also doing their best to forget. To top it all off, the recession that was supposed to come in 2023 has been postponed to sometime later in 2024, when Pluto will (for real for real this time) finish its time in Capricorn. The girls, most crucially, are reselling their American Apparel on Depop.

It was only a matter of time before the pendulum swung from clean girl aesthetic matcha latte to smudged eyeliner Pabst Blue Ribbon, but something in the collective is yearning to party like it’s 2008 again, and the thinkpieces have been heralding the return of indie sleaze since 2022. Is this really the wave, or is this just a meme that started generating takes? Unclear, but there might be something to this. I wasn’t aware of an “indie sleaze revival” at the time, but now that I think about it, 2022 is probably when I went on a big nostalgia kick for the music that defined my college years. Sleigh Bells, Santigold, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, CocoRosie, The Knife.

It probably shouldn’t, but it feels slightly embarrassing to admit this. I’ve never glorified my early 20s. Those were definitely not the best years of my life by a long shot. I was always looking forward to getting better with age, to glowing up and growing up and being less of an idiot and generally happier as a result. But then 2020 happened, and then COVID disabled me while the pandemic was being disappeared from public consciousness, and it’s been harder to pretend we’re still on an uphill trajectory.

It’s me, the dickhead in the fedora

Now that we’re talking about this, I don’t know that it was so much wanting to relive my youth as it was wanting to be momentarily transported to a world that no longer exists. Or to a world my memory can play tricks on because I have so few photos of that time. Maybe the mystery is just that at the current speed of obsolescence, 10 to 15 years is roughly how long you need to cook your time capsule before it browns with sentimentality, but there’s also something kind of quaint about a world where most people still owned brick cell phones and Facebook hadn’t yet become uncool, or a threat to democracy. I know better than to say shit like this, but the illusion that this was a more innocent time is a tempting one.

I don’t think anyone who actually lived through that time thought they’d be romanticizing it later. But the brokenness of the system hadn’t yet sucked the fun out of everything, and the hedonism didn’t feel as empty. I am fine with being challenged on this point, but I don’t think I’m only saying that because I happened to be young back then. More and more, I’m convinced that the biggest difference between then and now, the biggest thing that the Pluto in Capricorn years took from us, was the assumption that the future would always be there.

No one called it “indie sleaze” at the time. There was hipster trash, but that wasn’t something you ever owned up to. The ultimate status symbol was a typewriter or a fixed gear bicycle, and on the weekends, everyone who was anyone in Allston would end up at the basement show, the attic hootenanny, or Smiths Night at The Model, where a shitty beer still cost $2 at the time. Two of my friends both got those inner lip tattoos that were supposed to fade after six months, but are still very much intact. I DIYed all my haircuts and box dye until one disastrous Venus Retrograde in 2010, but after I got it “fixed” by a professional, everyone just assumed I was growing out a Skrillex mullet on purpose. There was no way to fail but up. If you were on the road to looking like a thrift store emergency, you kept going.

I speak only for myself honestly, my friends had good hair

I remember where I was when the economy collapsed. Do you? Around the time of Pluto’s very first ingress into Capricorn, I got laid off from my part-time job at my dorm’s late nite cafe, so I got a job doing data entry at a real estate office that year. My coworkers convinced me to get my real estate license, which was kind of a funny thing for a 20-year-old to have, so I studied for the exam that summer and had already started renting out crappy apartments to other college students when the stock market crashed. You’re the real estate agent? one guy asked, a little incredulously, when I showed up in cut-off shorts, battered TOMS, and a nose ring. I liked to think of that job as some sort of funny hat I put on, another semi-ironic thing in a time of big irony, but it was self-employment, so in a weird way, it kind of rescued me from job insecurity. I was not “good at it” or cut out to be a salesperson — I was unhinged. I was having my very first big spiritual awakening at the time and had just discovered synchronicity and manifestation. I forgot about this until my friend reminded me recently, but when I was working on an application for a bunch of frat boys, I told them all to visualize themselves getting the apartment. You weren’t really supposed to admit you were into astrology back then.

Two more months went by, and we elected Obama. It was the first election I was old enough to vote in, and as cringe as this sounds now, it contributed to an ambiance where progress felt inevitable. And you could be part of it too, for the low cost of casting a ballot. Pluto in Capricorn destroyed that illusion, and thank god for that. But in my memory, “2008” is also shorthand for a time when voting felt like a meaningful political process, when it felt possible, and not even all that hard, to change the system from within.

In January 2021, I downloaded

Sarah Kendzior

’s Hiding in Plain Sight so I could begin to process the last four years on my mental health maintenance walks around my neighborhood. I remember thinking that this was one of the best inadvertent descriptions of the Pluto in Capricorn era’s monster under the bed, on a worldwide level and especially in a USian 2nd House Pluto Return sense:

The crises of political corruption, organized crime and endemic racism are all connected, and they shape everyday American life. But in addition to these structural problems, we contend with specific powerful individuals who have acted against the public good their entire careers. We see the same old men, again and again, vampires feeding on a nation and draining the lifeblood from words like "treason" and "trauma" and "tragedy."

There is a reason they call it a criminal underground: you walk over it every day, unaware it exists until the earth shakes below your feet. In the eyes of autocrats and plutocrats, the future is not a right but a commodity. As climate change brings unparalleled crises, the future becomes a rare asset, meant to be hoarded like diamonds or gold.

To millionaire elites, many of whom already had an apocalyptic bent, a depopulated world is not a tragedy but an opportunity—and certainly easier to manage as they insulate themselves from the ravages of a literally scorched earth. The last four decades have led to the hoarding of resources on a heretoforth unimaginable scale by people who have neither baseline respect for human life nor a traditional sense of the future. Their destructive actions have programmed a desperate generation to settle for scraps instead of settling the score. — Sarah Kendzior, “Hiding in Plain Sight”

I don’t think I actually realized how much I was grieving the future, or I guess my former idea of what the future meant, until an experience I had in Greece last summer cracked me open. Only when grief cracks you open can you even begin to make space for possibility.

What I mean by this is that if you’re too busy bypassing loss, you’re bypassing creativity too. If the last 15 years exposed the full extent of the late stage cancer choking the world, then we’ll spend the next 20 refusing death. The future is a tricky thing because it can be stolen, and it can be sold, but no one has the ability to eradicate or contain it. I am not saying this to sound glib, but as someone who has given away too much mental real estate to doom and dread to find it seductive anymore. I made a vow, a challenging and complicated vow, to receive life with open arms no matter what package it came in. That is what it means to refuse death. The future is ours, so long as our grief rituals include dancing at the funeral of the past. I bet they throw good parties in the cyberpunk dystopia.