Voodoo or voodon't?

Some time before my retirement I was angry--again--with my boss. Phil had been my boss since the late 1980s and we'd had a contentious relationship for nearly 20 years.

A couple of years before my latest anger at Phil my coworker, Sherry, as a joke had given me a novelty voodoo doll. I took the voodoo doll off my bookshelf and stuck some pins in the heart. "Have a heart attack on me, Phil!" I yelled, my maniacal laugh ringing throughout the house. I listened to myself, thought this is crazy, took the pins out and put the doll back on the shelf, where it sits to this day. Nothing bad happened to Phil, but I had a creepy feeling.

A few months later I read in a psychology text of a test where students were asked the question, "If you could kill someone with your mind, and no one would ever know, would you do it?" The great majority of people said yes.

I think the purpose of the question, at least as I inferred it, is to see if people would kill if they had no fear of punishment. Apparently many of us would. So it's the fear of being caught that keeps us from capital crimes. Of course, if I could kill people with my mind, it would mean other people would have the same power. What if they wanted to kill me? Would you rather have a guy sit in his easy chair and think you dead, or come at you with a gun or knife?

Good god, the things I think about...


I don't know anything about voodoo, except for the popular idea of putting pins in dolls. I went to the Internet and looked up voodoo dolls and found the same popular novelty dolls I tried to use in my plot against my boss. I also found that for $75-$150 this company, Planet Voodoo, will make a voodoo doll in someone's image.

The doll in the picture is bound, which means the person represented will be kept from hurting you, without them being hurt themselves. These nice folks at Planet Voodoo also remind us that whatever we wish on someone else will come back to us triple. Good thing I took the pins out of Phil's doll, because the creepy feeling I had were these awful pricking sensations in my chest...