When I was somethingteen, I lived in a rather preposterous neighborhood wherein all of the streets were named after flowers and all of the houses were pre-fab clones, divergent only in color. I had a friend on Petunia Drive, who I controlled by threatening to throw him into my closet, which I had convinced him was filled with tarantulas. I would leave him in my room and go out “to get some snacks,” and sneak a peak into the room via a small hole I had drilled in-between its thin wall and the back of the medicine cabinet.

He would stare at the closet in terror, never once getting the nerve to inspect for himself and see if my claims were true. I learned quickly that people in this neighborhood were gullible.

Their gullibility rained down in spades when they all started murmuring about “the Satanists”. From what I could piece together, one of them had been to a garage sale at a house in our vicinity with the street number 666. They had seen, on one of the tables, a Satanic Bible. Word of this spread for a bit and I eventually rode my bike around until I found the place. 666 Honeysuckle Court. There was a big, bearded guy in a Harley Davidson sweatshirt on a ladder in the front lawn, trimming evergreen trees into these funky upward truncating spirals.

I got his attention and asked if he had had a garage sale recently. He said yes and I asked him if there was a Satanic Bible at the sale.

He said there had been.

I asked if he had sold it. He said, “Are you a Satanist?”

“No, I don’t believe in Satan, but everyone here is afraid of it and that’s funny.”

He laughed. Then he explained that he had bought it specifically to put it out in his garage sale and freak the neighbors out, “It’s funny ‘cause of the house number, y’see.”

So, I knew that there was at least one actual human being in my neighborhood.

Now, what I should have done, is bought the book from him, written a cryptic clue in pig’s blood on its inside cover, left it somewhere that someone would find it and lead them on a wild goose-chase mystery scavenger hunt with clues hidden in ridiculous places all over town.

Luckily, however, my neighbors took care of the fun for me, as my friends began reporting that their parents were in therapy. Apparently, so distraught were they that they lived so near a Satanist, that they all needed counseling.

The stories started coming down the pipes, a la the telephone game of dark rituals and human sacrifice. “Blocked” memories started popping up. Really zany stuff, you know: Goat sex and blood-drenched gangbangs; that kinda thing. So odd that so many of them were “victims,” yet none of them felt the need to go to the actual litigation level. After all, didn’t we know that this guy lived at 666 Honeysuckle Court?

Of course, there was only one psychologist in town and he was - surprise, surprise - a devout Christian. He also bought a really nice new car that year. Praise Jesus.

Mind control is not all that difficult. It’s the art of slow-entry hypnosis and it can make people believe that they will purchase anything, approve of anything, hate anything, love anything, worship anything, remember anything and forget anything. Car salesmen do it. Books do it. Politicians do it. Parents do it. Priests do it.

Is it being done to you right now?