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More words from Rob:

Images are Dangerous

How I Got Started in the Horoscope Writing Business

But how?

Meditation?
Drugs?
Shamanic quest?
The Jungian technique of inducing a waking dream
or the mystical method of astral projection?

Maybe you're lying in bed enjoying a lucid dream.

Or are you one of those exceptional fuckers
who can see the unseeable
through the sheer power of your love-making?

Hope you're not among the minority of tormented souls
that does it the hard way:
getting yourself "kidnapped" by "aliens."

And Goddess forbid that you're one of those poor creatures
who's got to half-fall asleep on your couch
and hallucinate the Televisionary Oracle
surging out of a television or computer or radio
in subliminal blips.

Although on the other hand
we'll take you any way we can get you.

Here it comes, beauty and truth fans! Twenty-Two Days of World Orgasm! Guaranteed to be more thrilling and infinitely less alarming than a planet-wide near-death experience!

Take New Year's Eve and Christmas Day and Ramadan and Passover. Add national election day and Halloween and your birthday and the Superbowl and the start of the new fall TV season. Even then, you still don't have a holiday as stupendous as Twenty-Two Weeks of World Orgasm!

Imagine our most brilliant scientists pulling off a daring nuclear attack on a comet, diverting it from a sure collision with our beloved planet.

Visualize a mass landing of flying saucers on the White House lawn, as a peaceful diplomatic corps of angelic extraterrestrials delivers the gift of a technology that will provide free energy for all humans and turn the Earth into a garden paradise, creating a planet of six billion billionaires with six billion unique religions.

Picture the discovery of indisputable archaeological evidence proving that everything we ever thought about the history of our race is much stranger and more amazing than we could ever imagine.

Only then will you begin to fathom the spectacular catharsis that awaits us when Twenty-Two Months of World Orgasm finally arrives!

Are you ready to answer the call, beauty and truth fans? Have you learned to cultivate the sacredly uproarious oozeglimmer of your mysterious kundalini? Can you swirl and billow the slippery throbwiggle on command, uncoil it long and slow and sweet?

If so, congratulations and hallelujah!

But if you're still a little short of mastery, the Televisionary Oracle is here to help. Whether you're a tantric adept-in-the-making or a struggling neophyte just beginning to understand how important it is to involve your body in your spiritual quest, we're happy to welcome you now to the Kundalini Pledge Drive.

The Kundalini Pledge Drive is nothing less than the Dress Rehearsal for the Big Event ... the Warm-Up for the Ultimate Celebration ... the Ritual Foreplay for the End of History! Guaranteed to whip your erotic riches into a reverent frenzy in plenty of time for the coming of Twenty-Two Years of World Orgasm!

I'm your co-host with the Holy Ghost grin, Rapunzel Blavatsky, and I'm proud to announce that this is a perfect moment. It's a perfect moment because even though none of us knows the exact arrival time of Twenty-Two Decades of World Orgasm, and even though we have not yet fully guessed all of its shockingly intimate secrets, the seductive signs of readiness are mounting.

Have you seen them, beauty and truth fans? The omens and hints? Have you sniffed the pheromones of the Cackling Goddess as she invades us with her full-scale, pull-out-the-roots anamnesis, Her Reverse Armageddon of Pure Joy? Have you caught a glimpse of the coming Covenant of the Global Jiggy Snake? Do you know the sweet, moist fire of the Fuckissimus?

Let us know. We want to hear. Report the healing emergencies you're witnessing ... the spiral lightning juice you're feeling on the inside of your endorphins ... the rowdy ruby glissando you're invoking as you die to the old way of dying.

Tell us every secret, beauty and truth fans. Amaze us. Reveal how many hours you're making love without losing your concentration, how deeply you're looking into your lover's eyes until you see the birth of solar systems erupting therein, how fiercely and craftily you're working to make your compassion and lust flow from the same primal reflex, how sincerely you're doing everything in your power to love every creature, every plant, every rock in the world with the same primrose hurricane juju you bestow upon the slippery sacred soul who excites you most.

Use your imagination! Surprise us. Unveil the idiosyncratic trick you use to stoke the old spiritus frumenti, the amethyst dragon gumbo, the fiery doppelganger blubber. Our Grails are standing by, ready to register the signature of your diamond moonflower chrism and pearly chthonic thunder. Reveal your own personal strategies: What magic do you invoke to lust globally and fuck locally?

Now I'm going to turn it over to the chronicler of the Televisionary Oracle, my colleague Osiris Rockstar. Osiris would like to present his own special perspective on killing the apocalypse.

I'm pleased to call attention to the fact, by the way, that his ideas both dovetail with and contradict my own. And that's exactly the way we like it here at the Televisionary Oracle!

Osiris?

Thanks, Rapunzel, and hello everybody.

Excuse me a minute, please, while I shout.

WAR! FAMINE! PESTILENCE! EARTHQUAKES! CRIME! SCANDAL!

Those storytellers known as "journalists" love and thrive on the nihilistic vision of the world captured in screaming headlines like that. But they're not the only fabulists to do so. A majority of the prophets down through the ages have been allergic to the possibility that the future might hold something besides endless tragedy.

The sixteenth century's creepy horror-meister Nostradamus wasn't the first, but he has been one of the most enduring. "In the year 1999 and seven months," he bellowed back in 1555, "a king of terror will come from the sky." Nope. Didn't happen. Yet his mystique still infects the imaginations of millions.

Ghoulish modern soothsayers continue in the scare-the-crap-out-of-'em tradition. At last count, three hundred twenty-two notorious latter-day oracles foresee cataclysmic "earth changes" that will create beach-front property in Nebraska. There are innumerable other augurs who, though they agree that most of humanity will be wiped out any minute now, see the death blow coming via other means: lethal solar flares, nuclear war, incurable new diseases, global warming that leads to the melting of Antarctica and the inundation of coastal areas on every continent, or an evil artificial intelligence that achieves sentience on the Internet.

We shouldn't neglect to mention the sentimental old favorite, the plagues of the seven angels as promised by the Bible's Book of Revelations. Though conjured millennia ago, the vision is as fresh as a morning kiss for hundreds of thousands of fear-worshiping fundamentalists, who fantasize that it predicts the Lord will scour the Earth clean of everyone but them.

So why are only the most terrifying omen-slingers so popular and prominent, even though their track record is so dismal?

First of all, the few optimistic prophets that have arisen are usually so boring that no one wants to bother listening to them. In the last five hundred years, Jules Verne is one of the rare exceptions.

Secondly, zoom-and-boom seers typically offer up far more hard-to-believe scenarios than their doom-and-gloom counterparts. Millions of angels will swarm into view of our naked eyes, they promise, for instance. The restrictions of gravity will be abolished. Time will no longer move in just one direction. And it will all happen in a twinkling.

The third reason the terror-mongers sell the most newspapers and captivate the most imaginations -- and it hurts me to say this -- is that our culture treats cynicism as a sign of intellectual vigor. It's smart to look for the worst in everything!

What's my view? I confess that I suffer from that peculiar variation on chauvinism which leads me to fantasize that the historical era I live in is more glamorously important than all the others. Secretly, and to my embarrassment, I harbor the hope that we are indeed approaching a radical turning point in the history of humanity. What fun, what glorious delirious dangerous fun, it will be if Twenty-Two Days of World Orgasm really does occur, unleashing a series of planet-mutating events that will rapidly expedite the end of history and the beginning of a shatteringly different future.

And yet, there is a part of me, a part of me that feels older and wiser, who suspects that even if we ARE in the midst of the Logos Calling Us Home or the Collective Upgrade to the Fourth Dimension, it just won't be as simple and obvious as all that. The change will not be some overnight world-wide presto-chango like an asteroid plunging into the Earth or everyone instantaneously developing telepathic powers.

Happily, the jingoistic part of me that yearns to be alive when Everything Changes can find a common ground with the cool eternal part of me that regards the all-or-nothing mindset as the peculiar signature of patriarchy's death throes. Together these two aspects of my psyche conclude: We are living through the apocalypse and the resurrection right now. The corruption and redemption are happening and will continue to happen side by side. The collapse and the renewal. The grievous losses and the unpredictable awakenings. There will be no clean break.

But more than that. We are each living through the apocalypse and the resurrection in our own little personal way. The radical turning point, the death of the old order and bloom of the new, is framed in the storylines of our most intimate dramas. You are being pushed up to and over the brink that is most challenging and meaningful to you personally, and I to mine.

A Cosmic Crucifixion may indeed come -- maybe even Twenty-Two Weeks of World Orgasm, who knows? -- bringing a global brouhaha that whips up media hysteria to psychotic levels. But what's more likely is that you will be invited and divinely assisted to mercy-kill your life's most oppressive structures -- thus clearing out an empty space for an as-yet unimaginable new groove in the shockingly beautiful future.

So will your own experience of the apocalypse and resurrection be excruciating or liberating -- or both? It's up to you, beauty and truth fans. I truly believe that the Goddess (or whatever passes for the Goddess in your world view) will conspire to corrode, dismantle, or blow up anything that's getting in the way of you expressing your soul's code--the blueprint you came to Earth to embody. Will you cooperate or not?

My own personal soul's code, by the way, compels me to ask whether our expectations actually help create the future. What if there is even a grain of truth in the notion that what we think will happen tends to come to pass? No need to get fanatic and literal about the idea; just imagine it has some credibility.

By this hypothesis, it is both insane and stupid to revel in visions of doom to the exclusion of other scenarios. And it is just as dumb and crazy to be entertained by bad news and to yawn in the face of good news.

One of my favorite games here at the Televisionary Oracle is to pose and then answer the question, "How can we kill the apocalypse?" In other words, what leaps of the imagination and ingenious actions can we take to crush rampant pop-nihilism? What entertaining tricks can we employ to create an environment in which it is more fun and interesting to play with prophecies of boom and zoom instead of prophecies of doom and gloom? How can we reinvent ourselves so as to interpret the Goddess' daily little deaths as a gift to outwit the huge, irrevocable annihilations?

Here is one of my answers to the question: Cultivate a tradition of pronoiac prophecies. Pronoia, for those of you unfamiliar with the term, is the sneaking suspicion that the whole world is conspiring to shower you with blessings.

I would like to get started on those prophecies immediately. Here's my first batch for you, beauty and truth fans.

A rowdy new class of genetic engineers will arise. They'll have little interest in creating oil spill-eating bacteria, frost-resistant strawberries, or other useful hybrids. Considering themselves to be a cross between computer hackers and performance artists, they'll create fun monstrosities that appeal to their sense of play and perversity, like winged horses and trees that grow leaves resembling one-hundred-dollar bills.

The rise of the pantheosexual movement will present a new threat to sexual law and order. Describing heterosexuals, gays, and bisexuals as narrow-minded, pantheosexuals will claim to have erotic feelings for everything from tornadoes to garden hoses to rose bushes to all twenty-two genders of human beings.

A new breed of well-read, charismatic homeless people will arise. They'll spread understanding and laughter through their communities and will be routinely feasted in the homes of grateful Americans.

Nintendo will shock its target audience with the release of its "Codependent Bodhisattva" video game, the first-ever model with socially redeeming value. In it, kids must negotiate all eight levels of Buddhist enlightenment with a grinning, bespectacled, red-robed character who resembles the Dalai Lama.

Cities strapped for funds will create a 900-number option for the 911 emergency line. Wealthy users will pay one thousand dollars per minute for the privilege of having their calls answered first and fastest. Poorer users may get slower response, but at least the service will remain operational -- thanks to the 900-number subsidies.

Supernatural apparitions of the Cackling Vulture Goddess will outnumber those of the bitchy Virgin Mary four to one. Furthermore, unlike the Virgin Mary's, the Cackling Goddess' chimeras will appear to people of all socio-economic classes, appearing on the hoods of lobbyists' BMWs and the wine glasses of legitimate scientists, as well as on pizza billboards or oil slicks in parking lots.

Citing the growing threat from "entertainment criminals" who relentlessly create soul-shriveling films, TV shows, music, and magazines, Amnesty International will launch a campaign against a previously unacknowledged form of terrorism: the genocide of the imagination.

The national murder rate will plummet after a cable TV network begins to broadcast live childbirths twenty-four hours a day.

The average length of an act of heterosexual intercourse in America -- which is currently only four minutes -- will jump to eighteen minutes by the end of this year.

An organization calling itself Morality Is Trendy will launch a successful boycott of all products that advertise on TV shows that refuse to depict in a favorable light the following: talking hummingbirds, green eggs and ham, senior citizens playing water polo, and healthy people with multiple personalities.

Stunning new trends will include gay children, holistic crack, and computers that can talk to the Goddess. Also look for digitally remastered CDs of the Big Bang, prestigious vacations in refugee camps, and an aphrodisiac that stimulates compassion even more than sexual passion.

A mass ecstatic frenzy will infect more than twenty thousand housewives in Iowa next summer. Much like the maenads of ancient Greece, they'll renounce their volunteer slavery and take to the woods and hills for an orgy of singing, dancing, and dramatic readings of Women Who Love Too Much.

Shamanic scientists at Drivetime University will reveal the process by which the pineal gland in the human brain can be turned into the "Televisionary Oracle." They'll describe the Televisionary Oracle as a kind of naturally occurring "television" that serves as a switching station for one's "Holy Guardian Angel."

The recovered memories movement will take a bizarre turn when many adults begin to recall under hypnosis long-suppressed memories of joy and peace experienced when they were children.

Biologists at the Menstrual Temple of the Funky Grail will furnish conclusive evidence that men have "periods" analogous to a woman's menstrual cycle. They seem to correspond to changes in the relationship between Earth and the planet Mars, the biologists will claim. At the peak of the male "marstral cycle," which can last up to ten days every month, the adrenal glands release a hormone that makes men more likely to be irritable, more skilled at disguising their irrational impulses with logical explanations, out of touch with their feelings, and prone to violence and poor judgment. There's also a vulnerable phase preceding the period, which the biologists will dub PMS, or Pathological Macho Stress. Fortunately, revolutionary new meditation techniques also developed by the Menstrual Temple of the Funky Grail will offer hope in the struggle to reduce the social costs caused by this under-recognized natural problem.

That is it for "Pronoiac Prophecies," beauty and truth fans. Hope you enjoyed them. I would now like to turn things back over to the Head Shamanatrix herself, Rapunzel Blavatsky.

Rapunzel?

Thanks, Osiris, and hi again, beauty and truth fans. I'm very pleased to let you know that this is an incredibly perfect moment. It's a perfect moment for many reasons, but especially because I have been inspired to say a gigantic prayer for all of you. I've been roused by your gorgeous vibes to unleash a divinely greedy, apocalyptically healing prayer for each and every creature who can hear me -- even those of you who don't believe in the power of prayer.

And so I am starting to pray right now to the God of Gods ... the God beyond all Gods ... the Girlfriend of God ... the Teacher of God ... the Goddess who invented God....

O Dear Goddess, Who Never Kills But Only Changes:

I pray that my exuberant, suave, and accidental words will move you to shower ferocious blessings down on all the beauty and truth fans who hear this prayer.

I pray that you will give them what they don't even know they want. Not just the boons they think they need, but everything they've always been afraid to even imagine or ask for.

Dear Goddess, You Wealthy Anarchist Burning Heaven to the Ground:

Many of the divine chameleons out there don't even know that their souls will live forever. Please use your blinding magic to help them see that they are all wildly creative geniuses too big for their own bodies.

Guide them to realize that they are all completely different from what they think they are and more exciting than they can possibly imagine.

Make it illegal, immoral, irrelevant, unpatriotic, and totally tasteless for them to be in love with anyone or anything that's no good for them.

Oh dear Goddess, Who Gives Us So Much Love and Pain Mixed Together That Our Morality Is Always on the Verge of Collapsing:

I beg you to cast a boisterous love spell that will nullify all the black magic that has ever been cast on all the wise and sexy geniuses out there.

Remove, banish, annihilate, and laugh into oblivion any jinx that has clung to them, no matter how long they've suffered from it, and even if they've become accustomed or addicted to its ugly companionship.

Conjure an aura of protection around them so that they will receive an early warning if they are ever about to act in such a way as to bring another hex or plague or voodoo into their lives.

Dear Goddess, You Sly Universal Virus with No Fucking Opinion:

I pray that you will help all the personal growth addicts within the sound of my voice to become disciplined enough to go crazy in the name of creation not destruction.

I pray that you will teach them the difference between oppressive self-control and liberating self-control.

Awaken in them the power to do the half-right thing when it is impossible to do the totally right thing. Arouse the Wild Woman within them -- even if they're men.

And please, dear Goddess, give them bigger, better, more original sins and wilder, wetter, more interesting problems.

Oh Goddess, You Pregnant Slut Who Scorns All Mediocre Longing:

I pray that you will inspire all the compassionate fuckers out there to love their enemies just in case their friends turn out to be jerks.

Provoke them to throw away or give away all the things they own that encourage them to believe they are better or more special than anyone else.

Show them how much fun it is to brag about what they cannot do and do not have.

Most of all, Goddess, brainwash them with your freedom so that they never love their own pain more than anyone else's pain.

Dear Goddess, You Psychedelic Mushroom Cloud at the Center of All Our Brains:

These curiously divine human beings I am communing with deserve everything they are yearning for and much much more.

Please arrange for a statue to be built in their honor, or a memento of their genius to be launched into orbit around the Earth, or a flurry of gossip to be spun out by smart people who adore them.

Help them win the battle against time, and learn to talk the language of the most scientific angels, and master the zen of temper tantrums, and get a fabulous mommy and daddy in their next incarnation.

Teach them to push their own buttons and unbreak their own hearts and right their own wrongs and sing their own songs and be their own wives and save their own lives.

And please give them lots of gifts, dear Goddess. More gifts than they think they deserve. Bless them with lucid dreams while they are wide awake and solar-energy-operated sex toys that work even in the dark and vacuum cleaners for their magic carpets and a knack for avoiding other people's hells and a secret admirer that is not a psychotic stalker and a thousand different masks that all fit their face perfectly and their very own 900 number so that everyone has to pay to talk to them.

Oh Goddess, You Fiercely Tender, Hauntingly Reassuring, Orgiastically Sacred Feeling That Is Even Now Running Through All Our Soft Warm Animal Bodies:

I pray that you provide all the compassionate fuckers out there with a license to bend and even break all rules, laws, and traditions that keep them apart from the things they love.

Show them how to purge the wishy-washy wishes that distract them from their daring, dramatic, divine desires.

And teach them that they can have anything they want if they'll only ask for it in an unselfish tone of voice.

And now dear God of God, God beyond all Gods, Girlfriend of God, Teacher of God, Goddess who invented God,

I bring this prayer to a close, trusting that You have begun to change everyone in the exact way they've needed to change.

And if I've forgotten anything that will help their cause, please flash it into my imagination in the coming days and months and decades, and motivate me to perform any tricks or carry out any project that will encourage an abundant flow of sweaty creativity to flow through them, inspiring them to become more wildly disciplined, compassionately horny, aggressively sensitive, ironically sincere, lyrically logical, insanely poised, and macho feminist.

Amen. Awomen. And glory halle-fucking-lujah.

There you have it, beauty and truth fans. A personalized prayer just for you. A prayer that'll probably come true simply because you didn't even ask for it.

You may now kiss yourself on your own lips.

Calling all wise fuckers

Calling all love bombs

skilled in the art

of lusty compassion

Calling all sexlaughers

whose every burst of love

recreates the divine joke

that birthed the cosmos

Prepare your gorgeous self

for

Twenty-Two Months of World Orgasm

If we've got to annihilate the boundaries,

let's do it with eros, not thanatos

LUST GLOBALLY, FUCK LOCALLY