The Onion newspaper cites a government study showing that America's top product isn't cars, corn, pot, or porn, but rather rich, buttery goodness. "Soaring demand among consumers for the melt-in-your-mouth sensation of buttery goodness meant that more then 32 million tons were manufactured and consumed last year," the report said. I advise you to make that experience a top priority in the coming week, Scorpio -- even if you're normally a bigger fan of what The Onion terms "crispety-crunchitiness" or "chewy, double-stuffed deliciousness." According to my analysis of the cosmic omens, you're most likely to thrive if you pursue silky, smooth, velvety, plush feelings of every kind.

You can still listen to my long-range, in-depth explorations of your destiny in 2008. Each report in the three-part series of EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPES is about 6-9 minutes long. A new short-range forecast for this week is also available.

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With the authority vested in me by the little voice in my head, I'm pleased to give you permission to add another job title to your résumé: prophet.

Am I being ironic? Only partially. The truth is, you generate numerous predictions every day. The source is your imagination, which tirelessly churns out visions of what you'll be doing in the future. The featured oracle of the moment may be as simple as a psychic impression of yourself devouring a fudge brownie in an hour or as monumental as a fantasy of building your dream home in Hawaii.

Your imagination is a treasure when it spins out scenarios that are aligned with your deepest desires. Indeed, it's an indispensable tool in creating the life you want; it's what you use to form images of the conditions you'd like to inhabit and the objects you hope to wield. Nothing manifests on the material plane unless it first exists as a mental picture.

But for most of us, the imagination is as much a curse as a blessing. You're just as likely to use it to conjure up premonitions that are at odds with your conscious values. Fearful fantasies regularly pop up, many disguising themselves as rational thoughts and genuine intuitions. They may hijack your psychic energy, directing it to exhaust itself in dead-end meditations.

Meanwhile, ill-suited longings are also lurking in your unconscious mind, impelling you to want things that aren't good for you and that you don't really need. Anytime you surrender to their allure, your imagination is practicing a form of black magic.

These are the imagination's unsavory aspects, which Zen Buddhists describe as the chatter of the "monkey mind." If you can stop locating your sense of self in the endless surge of its slapdash fantasies, only then might you be able to be here now and want what you actually have.

But whether your imagination is in service to your noble desires or in the thrall of compulsive fears and inappropriate yearnings, there is one commonality: Its prophecies can be pretty accurate. Many of your visions of the future do come to pass. The situations you expect to occur and the experiences you rehearse and dwell on are often reflected back to you as events that confirm your expectations.

Does that mean our mental projections create the future? Let's consider that possibility. What if it's at least partially true that what we expect will happen does tend to materialize? Here's the logical conclusion: It's downright stupid and self-destructive to keep infecting our imaginations with pictures of loss and failure, doom and gloom, fear and loathing. The far more sensible approach is to expect blessings
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The preceding oracle comes from my book, PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings. It's available at Amazon or Powells.