WikiHow: How To Manifest Your Desires 🌭

I want a lot of things: safety and security for my family, a fulfilling and rewarding career, an enormous and profane cannon with which I can revenge myself upon my enemies. The problem is getting them. I have no idea how to get any of those things! Cautious economic planning? Shameless networking? Magic? Is it magic? Let’s try magic. 

Right off the bat, that seems like a lot of hedging for a how-to article on psychic powers. If you’re willdy uncertain that magic exists, maybe you’re not the wizard to pen the spellbook, yeah? I have personally dated eight goth girls with more confidence in their spellwork than this guide. But this is WikiHow: Where everything is really just a best guess from somebody whose only actual skill is writing WikiHow guides, and even that is debatable.

This already sucks.

I’ll tell you what I wanted out of this guide: 

I wanted comically overly-simplified instructions about how to wield magical amulets.

I wanted one of those shitty cartoon WikiHow tracings depicting a man who has wronged me now withering away to nothing. 

I wanted this whole thing to start off with a dire warning about using your psychic powers to manifest a tulpa even you cannot defeat. 

Instead you gave me a B- yoga student thinking her one thought of the day, and a picture of homework.  I am not doing homework.

Yep, that’s homework. If homework was magic, I would have done up to three magics in my life so far. I’m not writing essays about how cool wishes would be. That’s genie fanfiction without the eroticism and eroticism is everything in genie fanfiction. Fuck it, I’m trying a new guide.

Oh shit, that is way better. I understand it even less, if that’s possible, but we’re zero paragraphs in and I’m pretty sure the author is trying to warn me about negative energy demons. Listen, buddy, I have salt, iron, and unearned confidence. This is not my first time whispering Azazel forty-two times into the ear of a rutting goat. I’m looking up spells on WikiHow — I know they’re going to go wrong. Frankly, I’m counting on it.

Fuck yes! Shoddy WikiHow illustrations of psychic ghosts! You’re still selling me the house when I’m already knocking down walls, but okay. Double sold!

Right. Every idea I have is a thoughtbomb I can use to terrorize the future. I completely get 100% of what you’re saying, and I really just want to get to the part where we start making the ransom calls.

Step two, and I’m already psychically projecting bank fraud. Man, eat unclean ass, How to Manifest Your Desires. I can only imagine How to Manifest ANYTHING was written purely out of spite by a rival magician who doesn’t get fireballs confused with midterms. Somebody needs to read the WikiHow on How Not to Suck Shit, and I think it’s you, How To Manifest Your Desires.

God fucking damn it. 

I believed in you, How to Manifest Anything! We were right there! When your wife, Mrs. How to Manifest Anything, tells you she’s about to come, you pull out to go make spaghetti. And when that spaghetti is just shy of al dente, you throw it in the garbage and eat flour out of the bag. Fuck you forever, How to Manifest Anything. At least your shitty brother, How to Manifest Your Desires, had the decency to suck hard and early.

You know what? Let’s stop beating around the bush. I was hoping to do this without alerting the Mystical FBI that monitors my internet activity, but fuck it — hi Agent Bramblebeard, I’m looking up curses. 

My chief motivator is and has always been revenge, but they won’t sell you a firearm after you write that down on the application, so:

This guide is all business, and it talks about curses like they’re hedge funds. Yes, I absolutely do want to see a high return on my voodoo. Please help me, Bank Witch.

A crappy cartoon tracing of a man withering away to nothing! 

How to Put a Curse on Someone, you truly get me.

That has to be in the running for Most Hardcore WikiHow Illustration. That dude is getting straight-up Thinner-ed and that’s just something you don’t see in How to Bounce a Ball (In Front of Men). 

Wait, holy shit — it’s the dire warning about magic turning on you!

I don’t trust any spell guide that doesn’t warn you about buzzkill wizards using Reflect. There’s even an illustration!

I’m not… I’m not sure what it’s trying to tell me. 

It looks like maybe the “cool bagboy” at Whole Foods tried to clone himself and then Acid Blast the evidence away once he was done fucking it, but he didn’t count on DoppleBrynt’s magic-resistant abs. I get the gist, I guess, but I don’t think that’s as universally approachable as you seem to believe, WikiHow. I’m sure that’s just Police Code 137 in Berkeley, but the Heartland Warlocks will never relate.

Wait is it…?

Magic. Fucking. Amulet.

This is the one part I’m already prepared for: I purchased my magic amulet last week from what I assume was a mystical minority. I’m not… exactly sure which kind of minority. Does it matter which kind? His name was Serg and he was wearing a lot of fringe, so I’m pretty sure he had magic powers, but he might’ve just been Russian. 

Listen, this is Remedial Witching 95, I’m sure it’ll be fine.

I love the DIY sensibility of Dark Arts WikiHow. They’ll never just tell you to harvest dirt from beneath the hooves of copulating oxen — they’ll include tips for making your own from charcoal and fleshlight leavings. Also it is very good to know that pickles are cursed. I have always secretly believed them to be foul magic by the way they make everything they touch taste like pickles, but I was unwilling to independently research that fact.

Okay cool, it is not my first day at Piss Jar Academy but it’s been so long since somebody assumed that, I’m honestly just flattered. This is a lot of preparation, and you know the best part? No homework. All I’m doing is cobbling together my Mystical Recycling in preparation for a psychic hate blast. I haven’t had to write a single-

I am immeasurably disappointed and my sadness is only exceeded by my white hot fury. 

You’d better hope I don’t find “Start Blood Bending Today!” on eHow or else I am coming back here with a nasty scrape and murder in my heart.

Once again, I have bought a hemp necklace from a Muscovite and pissed in a pickle jar for nothing. This is my fault: I should really learn to finish reading my curses before performing them. It’s literally the only lesson Evil Dead tried to teach me, and I did not take it to heart.

If I had scanned to the bottom of How to Put a Curse on Someone, I wouldn’t have wasted my time. It’s never a good sign when the last steps are all about trying to pretend like your curse worked by practicing the Dark Art of Minor Harassment.

Followed by a dire warning that you shouldn’t try Magically Negging your bully about this whole curse scenario…

Because “How to Throw a Bitchin’ Uppercut” doesn’t assign any fucking homework.