Think Unhappy Thoughts

A small boy in Canada looks at a picture, strokes a locket, prays, and fifteen thousand miles away a woman in Ashfork, Arizona tests negative for Cancer four days before starting chemo. A monastery of forty Mongolian monks meditates for forty days and the global level of depression lifts, just a fraction… but does it work in the negative. No doubt there are enough bad thoughts out there to cover the entire surface of the Earth in a fine layer of radioactive dust. The question is, can we concentrate it? Can we sweep that dust into a pile big enough to bury someone in.

Do not worry. I am not asking you all to wish someone dead. I am not that sort. I would not even request pain for another. No, something highly frustrating, inconveniencing, and costing $2,250 (12,000 LE) ought to do. His name is Tarek Amin Galel Adin, and that is how much money he stole.

You will probably need a few details to help channel your negative energy, so here goes. He is a stocky, Egyptian man, forty-five to fifty years old, who can make an outfit of belly-inflated, dirty T-shirt and gray slacks look like horns and a red cape. He has a large face, broad smile and expressive eyes well versed in ‘patronizing,’ ‘sarcastic,’ ‘reassuring,’ ‘conveniently confused,’ and ‘oh-so-sincere.’ His general appearance comes off as dusty gray-brown, but perhaps that is just the lighting of the old-fashioned furnished living room in my mind where he sits eternally smoking out of one mouth, and eating all my Toblerone with another, while the third spins lies and cotton candy promise that distort and dissolve in your determined grip. No doubt he would be a pedophile if his brand new yacht and twenty-year-younger, pink-veiled wife did not satisfy him.

He is our old landlord, and he has admitted to stealing our money, and suggested we try filing a police report against him. However, I do not want to rely solely on such a faith-based form of enforcement. I need something more certain than the Egyptian police. This is why I am enlisting your help in some negative energy projection.

Picture Tarek’s BMW’s front axel cracking in half while he is driving between Cairo and his villa on the North Coast. Focus in on that axel. It is greasy and has collected much dust and sand. It does not so much snap as tear, and in slow motion a deep black gorge grows, separating the lighter, sandy exterior. You can see the layers and patterns in the metal and then it goes blurry with vibration as it breaks clean through. As the front wheals bend outward the car crashes down onto its belly and goes into a long uncontrolled slide which rips hoses, breaks tubes, kinks shafts, and shears bolts. The car finally comes to a stop, but another minute goes by before he stops screaming. It is a hot Friday afternoon and there are few other cars on the road. He slides open his LG and gets half way through dialing a number when the lithium-ion battery dies.

Now repeat that thought.