I’m always pathetically grateful for January, this blank slate of a month, in which I can resolve to clean up the utter mess I made of the holidays. I always mess up the holidays. Combine my logistical incompetence with the social demands of December, and you have the Hindenburg of social faux pas. I could tell you everything I did wrong last month, but then I’d end up in bed eating the Funyuns of Shame for another week, so let us not speak of it.

Suffice it to say that as 2015 begins, I’m taking stock of my life and realizing that [...]

Turducken is a dish consisting of a deboned chicken stuffed into a deboned duck, which is in turn stuffed into a deboned turkey. If turducken is your totem animal, you have multiple layers of limp energy with no solid internal structure whatsoever.  

Turducken energy is complicated, overstuffed, and excessive. When Turducken waddles onto your table, you can be sure your goose is cooked on many levels. For example,

you may be trapped in a terrible relationship, unrewarding job, or unsatisfying ménage a trois because you lack the backbone God gave your feathered brethren. Call on Turducken to help you absorb [...]

Fear is a terrible sensation, one we never, ever want to feel. How lucky we are to live in a time and place where it’s so often possible to avoid the things that scare us most: violence, disease, natural disasters, dangerous animals, and, at least until the very end, death. Instead, we get to sit around on our widening behinds watching television shows…about violence, disease, natural disasters, dangerous animals, and death.

Hmm.

I noticed a long time ago that fear often comes packaged with enthrallment. We don’t look away from accidents or guns; we give them our rapt attention. This tendency [...]

The lungfish is an African creature with awesome skills. In dry times it digs into the mud, encases itself in a hardened mucous shell, and lowers its metabolism to 

almost nothing. It can stay that way for up to four years, reviving and emerging when rain finally arrives. Occasionally people make bricks out of the mud, and on rainy nights newly-awakened lungfish start slithering out of their walls. Altogether charming!

Use Lungfish’s spiritual essence to help you spend most of your time totally lacking in ambition or motivation, thrashing around at rare intervals just barely enough to survive. [...]

Task Six: Let Your Meta-Self Flow Through You

Task Hello, beloved readers! If you’ve been following along—or if you’ve read my recent book, which is finally out and about in the world—you know it’s time to learn the Sixth Task of Bewilderment (pronounced “be-wilder-ment”). It’s all part of the process of waking up to your inner, deeper, higher purpose.

Task Six is about learning to let inspiration flow not only through your limbs and heart, but also through your brain. This delicate operation can’t work well if you haven’t mastered at least the rudiments of earlier Tasks, particularly Task One, which is to calm [...]

Compared to former Lame Animal Totems, such as the blobfish, this month’s winner is downright fetching. Compared to most animals, however, it is not. I speak of the the gnu (wildebeest), an antelope that looks as if it were assembled by a committee of people deeply angry at each other, and which could not win a battle of wits with a cantaloupe.

If wildebeest is your totem, you wield the awesome power of extreme awkwardness and profound stupidity combined. Use gnu energy at parties, driving others away from your favorite foods with your honking voice, lack of focus, and random, [...]