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Slightly Less-Than-Helpful How-to’s from Popular Bands

RADIOHEAD’S “HOW TO DISAPPEAR COMPLETELY”

Follow highway leading out of town and drive until road gives out, then take a left.
Buy tube of ACME Vanishing Cream from traveling snake oil salesman.
Go home, only to be admonished by girlfriend for making such frivolous purchases.
Counter with $650 sandals she bought last year and has worn once.
Avoid flinching when she says you’re an asshole.
Confidently clutch handles of plastic shopping bag containing tube as she storms off and slams bedroom door.
Bring bag to bathroom, take out tube, and uncap it.
Dispense a medium amount of cream into palm; rub hands together.
Apply to skin, working in a circular motion, ensuring complete coverage.
Wait for invisibility to occur.
Check yourself in mirror regularly to make sure you haven’t missed any spots.
You should probably work on making those handles disappear, too.
Still not invisible?
Not even a little bit transparent?
Sucker.

ROB ZOMBIE’S “HOW TO MAKE A MONSTER”

Earn both your MD and PhD.
Inherit fortune, castle, and twisted manservant from recently deceased, Eastern European relative.
Travel to castle on a dark and stormy night to inspect holdings.
Go crazy.
Develop radical ideas about transitory nature of death and vaguely Nietzschean notion about perfect human archetype.
Endure the jeering scorn of your colleagues as they dismiss your theories and accuse you of trying to play God.
Vow to show them all, the bastards.
Purchase surplus Tesla coils, widgets, and paraphernalia from Russian mail-order superstore and set up clandestine laboratory in castle basement.
Scour local burial announcements for suitable host body.
On a dark and stormy night lesser or equal to the night of your arrival, defile burial ground, exhume aforementioned corpse with aid of twisted manservant, and cart body back to lab.
While readying body for surgery (remember: double-stitch everything), send manservant out to local university to snatch brain with explicit instructions that it be a healthy, normal specimen and not one of the hundreds of abnormal ones the students use for experimentation.
Wait patiently for manservant’s return while grandmother-of-all-storms brews overhead.
Inspect brain brought back by manservant, and, in spite of massive degeneration of the hypothalamus, decide — oh, what the hell? — to put it in anyway. (A brain’s a brainm right?)
As fury of storm breaks overhead, install final piece of creature, raise hands to cosmos, and cry out in a loud voice as you bestow life upon dead tissue.
Watch on in horror as your creation flunks out of numerous Ivy League universities, yet still goes on to become CEO of a major multinational conglomerate and win a second term as vice president of the United States.

U2′S HOW TO DISMANTLE AN ATOMIC BOMB

Having tracked your archnemesis for years — always getting just so close to taking him down, but always losing him and being forced to deal with his constant gloating — receive call one morning from nemesis informing you of plot to detonate low-yield device in densely populated urban area.
Begin frantic search for bomb.
Eventually find bomb. (Search should take no more than seven minutes of screentime and should wind up at local mall or convention center.)
Ask officer-in-charge if area has been evacuated.
Remove jacket.
Walk around, making knowing “hmmm” noises.
Order everyone out of the room.
Using a pocketknife, unscrew the four Phillips-head retaining pins.
Gingerly slide off protective shell. (Once shell is away, throw to floor, causing loud clatter.)
Observe twisted mass of wires and other electronics.
Wonder briefly whether you can buy pre-assembled nuke out of the back of Popular Science, and if it is not an enormous leap of faith on the part of any megalomaniac to buy an untested weapon of mass destruction with only the vaguest guarantee that it will work. (”Be the first on your block! Build your own bomb out of spare lawn mower parts! Send $2 to… for complete plans!”)
Chide self for getting sidetracked. (Seriously, lives are at stake here.)
Locate payload and follow red, green, and blue wires back to timer switch.
Immerse self in huge, internal debate about which wire to cut and whether or not your nemesis anticipated you choosing that wire and didn’t instead make it a completely different wire.
That is, unless said nemesis knows you well enough to predict the probability that you’d think it would be a different wire…
Check timer as last few seconds begin to tick away.
Cut the red wire.
No, wait! Cut the gre–

Originally published in Opium Magazine.Print #1 (2005).

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