I always thought vision boards were just for New Age types. The kind of person who would prefer to shove a crystal up your ass rather than drive you to your proctologist appointment. But then one day I saw a YouTube video of Oprah explaining to Reese Witherspoon how she uses vision boards to manifest things she wants. I realized that there were plenty of things I wanted, like money and possessions.
I decided to make a vision board myself, so I went to the 7-Eleven across the street. I asked the bodega clerk if he had any vision board supplies. He gave me a sad, grevious stare and pointed to a door in the back of the bodega marked, “EMPLOYEES ONLY.”
Even though I was unemployed at the time, I opened the door and entered a dark, musty room where I came upon an old man standing behind a fold-out table. He stared at me and took a long toke from an opium pipe. Finally, he asked me in a deep Brooklyn accent, “You here for the vision board supplies?” I nodded and the man gestured to the table. There was everything I needed—magazines, posters, even glitter glue.
I got an armful of supplies and asked, “How much?” He just shook his head gravely. After about a minute of complete silence, I started slowly backing out of the room and left the bodega, unsure whether or not I had just shoplifted the items.
I had done plenty of research on how to make a vision board. I knew I was supposed to glue pictures or words I cut out of magazines that represented realistic goals of mine for the next year or so. The half hour it took me to make it ended up being the most decisive minutes of my life.
The next morning I woke up with car keys in my hand and a new Tesla in my driveway. It was the exact same one that I had put on my vision board the night before. Without questioning the situation for a moment, I got in the new car to take it for a spin. But after only seconds of driving I realized the car had no brakes and I crashed it. I nearly died, and it’s still at the bottom of that river for all I know.
The vision board got creative with manifesting the next goal, which was an image of a stack of money. It manifested like this: I was walking down the street and some punk valets from the science center shoved me into a tornado telephone booth that they had filled with a bunch of twenties. Though disoriented, I didn’t know how this could go wrong. My vision board was finally paying off.
But as I started to grab at the whirlwind of money, the high velocity speeds quickly overpowered me. I got tossed about the booth and swallowed about five hundred dollars in cash. A doctor had to surgically remove the bills from my stomach and then informed me they would not suffice as payment. He only took cards or checks.
Now, I’m not a moron: after it became clear the board was cursed I tried to get rid of it. I threw it in landfills, furnaces, even the Atlantic Ocean. It would always end up back on that bathroom wall clean, pristine, and somehow drier than before. Finally, in desperation, I took a Zippo lighter to it, and within minutes my whole house had burned down. All that remained was the vision board, still in perfect condition. I picked it up out of the wreckage and saw an image that I only then remembered pasting to the board: a photo of a fire pit, from the damn Southern Living catalog.
The worst was yet to come. I had put a clip art tombstone on the board because it was a goal of mine to take more naps. I thought “Rest in Peace” was a cute way to express that. But now I’m sure the vision board will take that literally, as it has done with my other goals.
So before my vision board murders me, I need to warn everyone about what is coming.
Don’t hate me, but when I made the board I glued a picture of a mushroom cloud onto it, simply because I wanted this year to be “bomb.” I meant “good”; I can assume the vision board doesn’t know that. In a similar vein, I also added a picture of Earth exploding. All I had wanted was a reminder to do my part to combat global warming. I meant it as, “Don’t let this happen!” But now I see that this subtext was unclear.
I’m certain that my vision board is planning on blowing up our beloved planet. I only pray this blog post gets to the government and NASA before it’s too late. As for me, I only have so much time to live, and I pray to God that my vision board doesn’t take the other eight billion of you down with me.