My Magical Sea Turtle

On a recent visit to a friend's house I needed something to read, so I scanned her bookshelf for approachable titles. The books were all along the lines of Feeding the Self: Spiritual Healing Through Legumes, Daily Affirmations for Mastering Untenable Rage, and Feng-Shui'ing Those Grotesque Tubs of Legos.

I didn't want to read any of these titles. I thought about going down the hall to her daughter's room to borrow Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging by Louise Rennison (absolutely brill!) but then I spied it: THE SECRET. I had never read The Secret, but everyone else I know has and they are all now the richest people in America and the known world. Well, I would read it.

I won't share The Secret with you, because the author worked damned hard to cook it up, and she deserves her due. Here she is. She is wise. She is your guru. She will control your life better than Carvel's Cookie Puss Ice Cream cake ever did, and Cookie Puss is pretty much omnipotent.

Could she not have controlled the stray bits of hair with proper positive thoughts?

I stole the book and spirited it right out of the house. Aw, hell, since I stole it, you may as well steal, too. The Secret is thus:

1. Don't think about spilling shrimp gumbaloo down the front of your dress, because that is the exact next thing that will happen! As soon as you think of it, you will keep spilling crap down the front of your dress for eternity because you are drawing that kind of badass energy to you!

2. People die because they want to.

3. If you think really really hard that a Barbie doll dressed in dominatrix clothing will drop out of the sky onto your table where you are having drinks with friends in the East Village, it will happen. (Note: This actually happened to me, at Three of Cups. But I didn't necessarily want it to.)

4. If you go out to your mailbox expecting a check, it will be there. If you go out expecting a knife to swing out of the mailbox on an animatronic arm and gut you, that, too, will happen.

5. Depression hurts. What hurts even worse is the fact that your negative attitude is going to bring piles of hot doody to your doorstep. Stop thinking bad thoughts! Stop it. You depressed and worthless fool. do you want to bring shit on your family as well as yourself?

I took this book to heart and decided that I want a magical sea turtle to swim up to my window, with a check in its mouth (beak?) and fly away with me to the Caribbean. I am very anxious for my sea turtle to arrive. I will call him William, or maybe David, because the idea of a sea turtle named either of those names makes me smile very slightly and makes me forget about the toothed lemmings I called forth during that bout of insomnia. Which are going to heap a heaping ass of motherfucking horror on my family, per THE SECRET.

Man, if anyone Googles "toothed lemmings" + "rhonda byrne + sea turtle" they are gonna get LUCKY. Bring it on!