Daily Afflictions: The Agony of Being Connected to Everything in the Universe

Andrew Boyd's brilliant "Daily Afflictions" purports to be a satire of self-help/spirituality books; a kind of "power of negative thinking." It's very funny. But much of it also happens to be true. There is an invigorating power in squarely facing just how bad things can be, and Boyd's amusingly paradoxical "affirmations" will show you how to make the darkness visible (to quote Jung, one of Boyd's mentors; along with Nietszche.) Learn to find your inner corpse; embrace your inner psychopath; enjoy the boot camp of a dysfunctional family; intensify your failure; experience the wonder and power of the Void (which seems to be Boyd's word for "God") and much, much more. Boyd's basic message: pain and suffering are good for you. If that doesn't make you laugh, then go read Dale Carnegie.

... I picked up Daily Afflictions as an afterthought, expecting it to be a relatively trite satire of self-help books. But as I read it, I laughed. And then I bought it. And then I bought another one.The book sits by my bed and has, on occasion, helped me to get out of it--I have lost track of the times I've read particular passages (one of my favorites is the tragedy of commitment: "the future is full of possibilities that I must shoot in the head"). And what was originally just amusing is now actually inspirational. Daily Afflictions is a synthesis of philosophies I find persuasive, particularly existentialism, and it encourages me to plunge into things without fear of failure and wallow around in the hopelessness of it all.Sound cheerful?Boyd begins with an Oscar Wilde quote I enjoy and he seems to take to heart: "If you are going to tell people the truth, you had better make them laugh or they will kill you."Boyd both makes me laugh and tells the truth--what more can you ask for?

Hey, that Anthony Lappe guy *really* likes Boyd's book. But I concur with him wholeheartedly, four times over. I once saw Boyd go head-to-head with Deepak Chopra in a sweaty, no-holds-barred round of quantum mysticism and when the ectoplasm cleared, Chopra's Giant Within looked like a whimpering Inner Child. Not pretty. But don't take *my* word for it; take *MY* word for it, from the backcover blurb I wrote for this brain-wrenching blend of agape and schadenfreude:Today is the First Day of the Rest of Your Life. Unless, of course, it's your *last*, in which case this little book is all that stands between you and the yawning maw of endless night. Brother Boyd preaches the gospel of being *in* nothingness---facing, and embracing, the brutal truth that the Cosmic Web of Interconnectedness is Zoloft for bliss ninnies, that we are motes in the unblinking eye of a godless cosmos. Forget New Age gruel like Chicken Soup For The Soul; Daily Afflictions is *ammonium nitrate* for the soul, calculated to reduce your most comforting self-delusions to scattered atoms. A Stuart Smalley for people who live their lives inside quotation marks, Brother Boyd teaches us to work through our irony, turning irony about irony into sincerity, even profundity. And I mean that from the bottom of my heart.

I just got the book this weekend and read it from front to back in a feverish 4 am session. Boyd somehow combines the ideas of Nietzsche, Buddha, Camus, Gandhi and Lenny Bruce into a paradoxically coherent worldview that sums up everything I feel and think about politics, sex, drugs, love and hope. "Daily Afflictions" is often angry, morbid, and bleak - and it is the most inspirational thing I have read in years. The book is the perfect holiday gift for the conflicted, hyper-sensitive worldchanger on your list.

You want to buy this book. No, actually, you want to buy 30 copies of this book, and you want to wrap them up in recycled wrapping paper, and you want to give them all your friends. Why? Because Brother Void understands you. And he understands your friends. (And he understands why your friends haven't been returning your calls.) He groks the essential nature of your artistic passion, he understands your ambivalence, and he clearly gets your misguided attempts at finding true love. Not only does Brother Void understand you -- he understands Nietzsche (and he knows how to spell Nietzsche too.) Daily Afflictions is an incredibly insightful, funny, intelligent, and meditative take on mortality, love, work, failure, politics, life in American society, and the 21st century self. It's a small, beautiful book which can be read and re-read. It's perfect for the bus, for the beach house, for the bathroom, or for the bartender (who should probably memorize pages 37 to 43.) There is not a wasted page in this work - it's a perfectly-crafted read from the introduction to the index.