Rob Freakin' Brezsny!

I first encountered Rob Brezsny through his Free Will Astrology column, which I stumbled across in NewCity. I always dug his horoscopes, finding them compelling in a way that had nothing to do with astrology as I understand it. Of course, love and understanding do not have a consistent relationship in my life....so I loved Free Will Astrology without any understanding. A while back, I was wandering around the internets and somehow managed to come across mention of Rob's book, "Pronoia is the Antidote to Paranoia." I was intrigued by the description on Amazon, added it to my wishlist, and bought it a couple weeks ago. I started reading it during last week's funk. Here is what I found:

I fucking LOVE Rob Brezsny.

No, seriously. Some of what he has to say is just....pulled right out of my head. There's an urgency and an optimism that resonates with me on so many levels - and I don't mean that Suzy Sunshine dimple-ridden child-like innocent optimism that makes me want to paint something black....I mean a full-body grown-up gritty optimism that has some meat on its bones and some experience under its belt. I love the way this man assembles words, too - jumbling together paradoxical ideas in a way that might seem nonsensical if I didn't understand, in the nucleus of my every atom, what he meant. It's brilliant and transcendant, and I love it.

Some excerpts:

In the New World, you'll be a fascinating enigma worthy of a best-selling unauthorized biography and I'll be an inscrutable genius whose ebery move is packed with symbolic meaning - and vice versa. That will be the law in the New World - far different from the Old World, where schadenfreud is epidemic and your distinctive flair is supposed to make me feel worshipful or diminished.

Yes. Hell fucking yes.

I am in a tiny minority in my belief that evil is a fucking bore. But how dare Udo Kier, or for that matter Dan Rather and Stephen King and Eminem and Ridley Scott and the editors of the New York Times - how dare they proceed on the assumption that 'good has a limit' and that 'good isn't as interesting' when there are so few smart artists and thinkers who are brave and resourceful enough to explore the frontiers of beauty and truth and joy and compassion?!

Ditto. I run into this again and again in life, even from people who purport to be working for a "better" world...yet they focus so much on the heartbreak and misery, without ever acknowledging how fucking hard it is to find the sunshine in this world's hellacious cloud cover.

Demand equal time for new about integrity and joy and beauty and pleasure and renewal and harmony and love. In your personal life, be alert for stories that tend to provide evidence for the fact that all of creation is conspiring to give us exactly what we need, exactly when we need it.

I swear to gods, practically these very words have come out of my mouth before.

And so...if you reject a lot of the bullshit out there, and are looking for something capital-T True...I recommend Pronoia.