Oh lordy I been getting spooked real bad lately. Those of you who are a big hot mixup of a little nervous, a little psychic and two steps from batshit will know what I’m talking about. One minute you are goin about your sad old day fine as normal and then suddenly there is something Else in the room. This can range from your regular old lady ghost sitting at the bottom or next to your eyelids, to a fully-fledged scary clown demon somehow in all of your cupboards simultaneously. No one can know how it came to this, but it was definitely because your were shirking your duties on the internet and saw a facebook ad for a scary movie.
Regardless, you gotta do something cos you can’t just spend your days sittin and sweatin with your back to the wall until your wife’s little brother who is taller and wider and hairier than you gets home and there is another target in the house which reduces your chance of getting ghost killed by 50%. Here is:
Operation Opposite Coward: Grand Strategy for Ghost Fights
Stage One: Getting the Population On Side
The population is you. Enemy population is spooky ghost.
You will probably not be prepared to fight a ghost. Money has it that less psychic adults have told you the majority of your life that anything that spooks you doesn’t exist. Do not be one of those people. They are always the ones that the monster goes for first, which is fair enough. I would be angry if someone said I do not exist. Or at least perplexed. I clearly do and that is a rabbit hole I am not gonna crawl down in cos my brain and head are too big.
If you gonna fight the spook on its terms you’re gonna have to do some weird things that would be inadvisable to tell your girlfriend or psychiatrist about. You’re gonna need some magic, a few delusions of grandeur and a deity or two just to be on the safe side. I find it helps to realise that 100% of everybody has stupid ideas about reality and at least yours helps you fight monsters.
Stage Two: Arming the Troops
It is a bad idea to go into this empty handed. Karate does shit all against ethereal creatures.
Guns also are useless because they kill people not dead people. Tasers are tools of torture and should be avoided. What you need is some straight up +1 or more magic items. Luckily the lord did see fit to gift you with an imagination, which is why you are in this damn mess in the first place but hey nobody real ever wanted their life to be boring.
Right now, on and around my desk I got a talking skull, a magic statue of a knight holding a very non-magic letter opener, a badly whittled magic wand, a straight up Gandalf staff I made with my father, a wizard hat with a couple of gold stars left sewn into it, and a giant Templar broadsword forged and reforged in Canada by Canadians. I use all of these things at various times in various pre-writing rituals, ghost/demon fight preparations or to make me look stupid in front of myself and myself only. I’m not going to tell you how the pre ghost fight ritual goes because you gotta make up your own one this ones copyright. Just know that in the otherworldly realms your imagination is your greatest weapon, your best friend, your direst enemy and a complete red herring. You gotta use it or it will use you.
Stage 3: D-day
Now comes the hard part. You gotta put your top one fantasy bittersweet emotional resolve soundtrack on and get yourself in a headspace to die. You are almost definitely not gonna die from this but it helps to Be There.
It’s good to have a bit of a ritual. Prayer or magic words or like slappin yourself medium hard in the face till you’re pissed off. Look back on your life and remember all the things you are fighting for and then remember some more important things because really what you’re fighting for is 30 minutes in a house by yourself without being scared of your own imagination. When you are like 80% ready you should just go for it because trust me you aint gonna get readier.
Figure out where the ghost is, which is easy because the ghost was inside you all along, and then just charge at it. Don’t break into a run because houses are small and you need a satisfying amount of time for this, just kinda walk real hard and purposeful. Start forcefully saying some magic words or the lord’s prayer or screaming “DEATH” in that half-whisper half-scream thing so you don’t freak out the neighbours too hard. Chase that ghost around your house, around all the scary basements and cupboards, just fuckin stamp around chasing spooks like the god damn hot crazy mess you are because you’ve got this far and it aint done you no bad.
You will feel it go, you will feel its fear. It will flee you and leave your place. The weight of its gaze will lift from you and you will be freed from the shackles of terror. At this point you should allow yourself a small celebration of music and a glass of whiskey and then you should probably do something important with your precious time.
Plan B:
Reading a magazine, talking to a friend on the internet or going for a short walk are also good options.
Skydekkerix 