Free Will Astrology

ARIES (March 21-April 19): Jim Moran (1908-1999) called himself a publicist, but I regard him as a pioneer performance artist. At various times in his colorful career, he led a bull through a china shop in New York City, changed horses in midstream in Nevada's Truckee River, and looked for a needle in a haystack until he found it. You might want to draw inspiration from his work in the coming weeks, Aries. You will not only have a knack for mutating cliches and scrambling conventional wisdom. In doing so, you could also pull off feats that might seem improbable.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): One possible way to tap into the current cosmic opportunities would be to seek out storegasms — the ecstatic feelings released while exercising one's buyological urges in consumer temples crammed with an obscene abundance of colorful material goods. But I advise you against doing that. It wouldn't be a very creative solution to the epic yearnings that are welling up in your down-below-and-deep-inside parts. Instead, I offer a potentially far more satisfying recommendation: Routinely maneuver yourself into positions where your primal self will be filled up with sublime wonder, mysterious beauty, and smart love.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): I'm not an either-or type of person. I don't think that there are just two sides of every story and that you have to align yourself with one or the other. That's one reason why, as an America voter, I reject the idea that I must either sympathize with the goals of the Democratic Party or the Republican Party. It's also why I'm bored by the trumped-up squabble between the atheists and the fundamentalist Christians, and the predictable arguments between dogmatic cynics and fanatical optimists. I urge you to try my approach in the coming weeks, Gemini. Find a third way between any two sides that tend to divide the world into Us against Them.

CANCER (June 21-July 22): No one actually looks like the retouched images of the seemingly perfect people in sexy ads. It's impossible to be that flawless, with no wrinkles, blemishes, and scars. Acknowledging this fact, the iconic supermodel Cindy Crawford once said, "I wish I looked like Cindy Crawford." Our unconscious inclination to compare ourselves to such unrealistic ideals is the source of a lot of mischief in our lives. Your assignment in the coming week, Cancerian, is to divest yourself, as much as possible, of all standards of perfection that alienate you from yourself or cause you to feel shame about who you really are. (More fodder to motivate you: tinyurl.com/SoftKill.)

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): Barney Oldfield (1878-1946) was a pioneer car racer who was the first ever to run a 100-mile-per-hour lap at the Indianapolis 500. He was a much better driver while setting speed records and beating other cars on racetracks than he was at moseying through regular street traffic. Why? He said he couldn't think clearly if he was traveling at less than 100 miles per hour. I suspect you may temporarily have a similar quirk, Leo — not in the way you drive but rather in the way you live and work and play. To achieve maximum lucidity, you may have to be moving pretty fast.