How to Believe

Lately I’ve been spending some of my time studying two languages and fake-learning at least two new skills that take tools, patience and years of practice…but I don’t have years or patience so I’ll just go until I get bored. Days later, exhausted from hammering some metal or leather thing, I take a break, sit at my desk and click fake things in the fake world, looking for something quick I can learn and maybe even master in a matter of minutes. My real life Rosetta Stone gathers cobwebs because it takes too much time. I need immediate satisfaction.

I Google “how to become invisible.” I also accidentally learn how to become invincible as a bonus. With so many ways to do it, it’s clear there’s a whole world full of people who would like to disappear and plenty who never want to die.  There are directions, some involving actual magic. Some links that I follow just employ ‘intense focusing’ as the secret. I try them all with mixed results. Some of the instructions come with warnings: Do not try step three until you have mastered the first two steps. You risk “serious mental damage” if you do. Of course I skip steps, because I’m lazy and because learning things has always involved risk for me, risks this part-time masochist is eager to take. Mental damage? That’s all?

In the end I suffer none and realize that I need to move on from this or suffer a fate greater than mental damage: boredom.

Step four then: Come back to the real world, at least the world where I can learn something real and quick. I don’t even want to be invisible, not for one minute. So naturally, I find this while trying to escape: “How To Act like A Cat” and “Play Act Like Kittens.”  This is something - really something I can get into. These are skills I can teach others and possibly pass on to my family. My family of the future will act like cats.

Easily distracted, I move on to Yahoo Questions, possibly one the most entertaining things about the electronic world.  This girl thinks her boyfriend is a werewolf. She says: “(He) told me he was a wolf inside of a human body. I freaked out on the inside but because I love him, I pretended to be calm about it.” One time, she woke up to him licking her arm. I actually believe this story – rather, I believe that she believes it. Is it so wrong to believe in someone? I don’t think so.

Now it starts to get interesting. I google “how to disappear” and the more enticing “how to disappear completely and never be found” comes up. Of course it’s a book written by a Good Samaritan named Doug Richmond and you can buy it on Amazon and of course the Amazon reviews are almost as fun as the actual book (I bought it). Here’s one review that I couldn’t help but love: “I read it in one night. It was very imformative. I followed the instructions very carefully and hid myself. I was found the next day at 9AM by the feds. I am now serving twenty years in the pen. Thanks a lot Doug Richmond.”

This experience brings back a memory: A friend’s dad when I was in high school drunkenly bragged to us one day about how he had faked his own death. The details of his story are foggy but he says he was on a Mississippi riverboat that caught fire and crashed and he swam ashore and was presumed dead. He supposedly used the opportunity to “start over” after owing a debt or being in trouble with the law or something like that. I think he was a bald-faced liar because he struck me as being one of those guys that claim to have been a Navy Seal too. Which brings me to my last finding: People who claim to have been Navy Seals. You would think it was an anomaly, something rare. Well, think again. For every actual Navy Seal, something like 300 people claim to be one. Here’s a checklist on how to spot one, although you should easily notice that the person you’re dealing with probably exhibits more than one sign of being a good-for-nothing scoundrel. 

And so it seems I’ve distracted myself from the real world trying to find some quick fixes but I think it all ties in - and in fact, it’s threads of thought like these that inspire me to do more real life work. The real and fake worlds don’t have to be so disconnected. And now I know how to disappear, which might be one more useful talent..