If you’re anything like me, you hate flying and are terrified of clouds turning to solid ice and falling on you. It’s just the way I’m made, ya know?

People have suggested all the usual ways of dealing with flight anxiety over the years, from raising my arms out to my side and making sputtering airplane sounds like I did as a kid to sneaking onto the aircraft a small monkey trained to give me a blow job. The idea with the latter is that you’re so horrified by what’s happening to you that you’re generally too distracted by receiving a disgusting monkey-suck to notice you’re a million miles in the sky in an explosive soda can. I can’t speak for others that have given this technique a go but all it does is make me feel terrified and ashamed at the same time. Never again, kids. Never again.

Also, if you’re anything like me and you pretty much travel in the sky as a pulsating battery of unease, there’s a little trick, should you have survived the journey, once you get back on the ground.

If at all possible, upon returning feet to this horrible rock of ours, I take a bath, letting all the bad energy just get absorbed into the water, sort of how they make perfume from ferrets by soaking a shitload of them in a tub with some other stuff like pretzels and sofa leather and then bottling the results. Except it’s not ferret the water is being infused with, it’s pure, white-knuckled, crackling madness, the kind gramma used to make.

I don’t travel with bottles or anything, so I leave the tub filled for awhile as I go to gather some from garbage cans. I’m not too comfortable with people staring at me while I root around in the trash, and if you’re too clean and amazing, like I am, you really collect some unpleasant looks, so I like to wear a disguise. My disguise is I wear no pants and put on a long ZZ-Top style beard and shades. When people think you’re homeless and not someone they want to invite over for a meal, they just look the other way out of pure instinct, so it’s a fairly fool proof approach to collecting pretty much anything you want. Once, to test my disguise, I walked up to a woman at a food court, slowly took a fistful of penne pasta from her plate, and proceeded to eat it over the course of ten minutes while she strained to go on and on about how “You’ll never believe what Jessica did last night.” Sweet.

Back in the room, with a garbage bag full of plastic water bottles, the thing to do is to just go on and fill up those bottles with bath water. Once you feel you have enough of them filled up, go ahead and drain tub ( Do NOT leave the water in the tub any longer than you have to, otherwise you’re inviting some pretty wicked shit into your life).

Now you’re limited only by your imagination, which, sadly for a lot of you, is pretty fuckin’ limited. The rest have a world of edutainment to explore, bottles at the ready. As I am already traveling, I tend to have a bag handy, simply emptying it of the razor-lined condoms I take with me, and then filling it with my bottle-stash.

Currently, I’m stationed in a pretty well-populated, high pedestrian traffic area, so there’s not a lot of searching for subjects here. Your situation may very.

Today I wasted no time. Stepping out of the hotel lobby into the plaza area, I spotted a young girl, around 13 years old, I’d say, uncapped a bottle of water, and squeezed it in her face, stopping her in her tracks. Her friend, walking beside her, began simultaneously berating me and checking on her friend’s state. The berating eventually stopped as her friend’s state became more of an issue.

I found the pair to be particularly curious to my eyes from another land as the two were dressed in what I assume were Australian schoolgirl uniforms, funny little round hats and proper dresses and all. The girl I had splashed had covered her face with her hands, and gone still after a bit of thrashing. Like in a horror movie, her friend went in slowly, frightened of how quiet things had gotten. The girl puled her hands away with a spastic motion, revealing the fury in those terrible eyes. She’d taken a mighty dose of my DARK WATER, a thing that isn’t nearly as perverse as it might sound, but is nonetheless as unpleasant as the name implies. All I could think of was the the “infected” from ’28 Days Later’ as the girl began cursing like a sailor in a barely intelligible rasp of a voice.

The little girl’s friend’s reward for trying to console was a quick swipe to the face, tearing the friend’s left cheek out, leaving it dangling in a fatty hunk, her teeth and tongue visible through the wound. It was quite possible the most exciting thing I had ever seen, but I had other shit to do so I left.

The next target was a perfectly nice looking Chinese man that was sitting on a bench, enjoying a smoke and watching the people go walking by. I actually joined him for a little bit, taking in the striking variety of faces and styles all around me in the bustling mall area.

I saw an ibis!

The man appeared contented, glad to just be there with his smokes and an ass good for sitting on. Gave me a bit of perspective, it did, and I thanked the elderly of the world for reminding me that it’s the simple things that matter in the end, and that it should never be a hard thing to do to just stop and let it all move around you, to not be the madly spinning record, but to be the needle that plays it all. The man seemed to sense my thoughts, turning to me, nodding with a kindly, wizened face, his smile turning him into a woodcut print of creases. I smiled back, and squeezed a bottle of water into his face.

His face burst into blue flames for a millisecond and then his head exploded. No dramatic buildup this time, just a brilliant flash and then nothing. This was no gory, Cronenberg-style explosion, this was more something out of a science fiction story, with the head simply becoming atomized in a furious blue flare. Miraculously, the man’s scream went on a few seconds after the head had gone, as though his agonized soul was crying out, wailing on its trip into hell.

That last lil trick gave me an idea, so I walked to the center of a courtyard area of the outdoor mall, an area where the local schoolkids appeared to have made into a hangout, displaying their colors and markings to show what tribe they had joined with or wanted to join with. I think I’m old enough now to not look like I haven’t graduated yet anymore, so I was met with suspicion and disdain, which suited me just fine as I walked a circle around the inner courtyard space, drawing a circle with the water that poured from another bottle. When I had closed the circle, I stepped away, jogging up a few steps to watch from a terrace above.

Not just the kids, but all the people in the courtyard had followed me with their eyes up to where I watched, laughing and saying who knows what about my awesomeness, until the sounds coming from the pavement got their attention.

With no warning, no rumblings or theatrical glows, the circle of ground within the water ring I made simply fell away, down into a nothingness with an enormous stone on stone sound. No impact. Simply nothingness. A dead silence overcame the audience.

From above, I simply tossed the bag of remaining bottles into the void, watching them swallowed up by the pitch, the inky emptiness. Not knowing what they were seeing (it was too subtle, too strange to KNOW what was being seen) the darkness rose up from its pool, towering over everyone, looming well above the third story of the mall, thick as a house and emitting a demonic crackling like live wires, the kind of wires you’re plugged into when on a bumpy flight thirty thousand feet in the sky.

It had no face, and yet it turned to me.

“What would you have me do, my master?” It crackled, a voice like a fork in a socket, a sound like feedback devouring feedback.

Knowing my wishes without a word from my lips, lips that are at this very moment enjoying a fine green tea, the darkness simply fell, pouring itself down over the people, the people who barely had a chance to think to scream before simply vanishing beneath the horrible cleansing. Where once there was life, there was sparkling pavement and neat, textured trails where vision impaired folks would feel their way along the mall.

The darkness drained away, back into cracks in the ground, most of it draining back down into the gaping maw of the well I had created.

Again, without being told, the thing knew my wishes, leaving the lone ibis untouched as it wandered off to another part of the mall as this one had been stripped clean of any food leavings for it to snap up.

You should see what I can do with the bathwater that results from being around freaky anime people.

More later.