Autocorrect Ruined My Life

Autocorrect has ruined my life. As a consequence, I hereby conclude that the entire universe is no more technologically advanced than a PS5 video game console.

Anyone familiar with books like The Secret by Rhonda Byrne and Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill will have heard that the best way of manifesting your desires is by the simple act of writing them down.

Sounds too simple, right? New Thought has existed for well over a century and has gained popularity as of late. People fed up with moralistic dogmas and involved belief systems that demand unrealistic expectations in this breakneck-paced world find the idea of jotting down your desires as a means of manifesting them to be just the quick fix that runs in tandem with snacking on pretzel bites via Uber Eats and guzzling Ruby Grapefruit White Claw seltzers by way of Drizly.

Who's got time for a two-hour church service or mosque duty every Friday? There are so many series on Netflix, HBO Max, and Apple TV to keep up with. There are books to read, online workshops to attend. God has got to make like a computer and get with the program. If there's no WiFi in Heaven, then it must be Hell.

Jotting down a desire in the form of a prayer and sitting on it like a hot hen over an egg is as simple as plugging a thumb drive into a USB port. And any god worth the title must have a USB port.

After having read Think And Grow Rich and Claude M. Bristol's The Magic of Believing, along with Neville Goddard's complete works, I was ready to have all my deepest desires manifest in a way I would never have dared imagine. Below is a testimony to the power of setting your intention and releasing it into the universe. Here we go.

Things got off to a rocky start. To begin with, I didn't have any pens or pencils. I didn't have any paper either, for that matter. Who carries around paper in this day and age? I looked all over anyway. My daughter does have four sets of watercolors and brushes, and countless reams of colored construction paper, but c'mon. I'm a grown-ass man. And a grown-ass man needs grown-ass utensils. C'mon.

Like my phone. My phone has a Notes app. Perfect. It's a grown-ass app. Corporate heads roll because of this app. Major economic shifts hinge on insider info stored on this app. This grown-ass app holds the codes to launch ICBMs. Such an app would therefore be my pad and pencil.

I've always wanted literary renown. Nothing crazy, just enough to have the storylines I craft get discussed at cafes that only serve single-origin beans. And there must be a cornhole setup in some corner of that cafe, because hipsters need to work their delts and kettlebell manufacturers don't carry one-pound kettlebells.

For my literary aspirations to manifest, I had to start from a realistic vantage point, like promotion and marketing. Promoting and marketing my stories and novels has always been my Achilles heel. I hate self-promotion and pressuring. But I had to bite the bullet. So I wrote this down:

There. Just like that. Simple. All I had to do was wait and let the universe work itself out by way of my intention.

Things worked out perfectly. Wait. Not exactly perfectly. Let me just say that things worked out according to my intention and the universe into which I had thrown that intention. Things worked out not perfectly, but precisely.

See, I thought I had written “Become a master of public relations.”

But damn autocorrect went ahead and doctored the penultimate word before I closed the Notes app and went to bed that night under the full confidence of my stated desire coming true.

See, the stated desire wasn't my exact desire. The penultimate word got the lowercase ‘L” taken out. Either I fat-fingered over the lowercase “L” while writing or the phone autocorrected previous searches of unwholesome websites.

So what exactly happened?

The universe manifested my stated desire and I got a case of the crabs.

Overnight, I had zero problems dating. I shouldn't even have been dating because I am married, but the universe went ahead and made my wife hand me a week-long hall pass. I had no intention of using that hall pass, but the universe works in mysterious ways. Promiscuity was unavoidable. I tried my damnest.

Moral of the story?

Be careful what you wish for because this New Thought stuff really works.

I went to the doctor and got rid of the crabs. Back to the drawing board.

Now that I had proof of the universe's power to manifest my deepest desires, I knew I had to try again. This time, I would double-check my Notes app before shutting it down. I reviewed what I had previously typed:

I thought about redoing my previous declaration, double-checking the spelling and all, but I really got burned that time. And trust me—burning don't do it justice.

I decided to work from another angle:

The high-octane universe was revved up nice and good, as evidenced by my last stated desire’s debacle. Might as well go big. If you're going to walk across a frozen lake, you might as well figure-skate.

Figureskate I would. I woke up the next morning and waited a good twelve hours to check my book sales. Not a budge. I know there are lags in the postings from the time the potential buyers click buy and the time the sales register, so I went about my day, fully confident that the universe, that great cornucopia of provision to those aware of its mysterious workings, was diligently pumping out my dreams in incontrovertible fashion.

I went to work at the office. Two of the three elevators were down. I worked on the twelfth floor. While waiting in the cramped compartment of the one functioning elevator, enduring the elevator’s stopping at every single floor, I started to spill my coffee from the endless jostling of people trying to get by to either get out or in. Somewhere on the eighth or ninth floor, I'm not sure, a portly fellow wearing an LA Dodgers T-shirt two sizes too small fell on top of me as a couple heading to an ob/gyn clinic shoved him out of the way. So as not to spill my entire coffee, I held my balance. Nothing doing. The portly Dodgers fan fell right on top of me, pancaking me to the floor. And that wasn't the worst part. The worst part was that the deep, dark chasm that was his exposed belly button smashed right over my nose. It made for a clean insertion. All I could smell was dryer lint and death, with a tincture of butterscotch.

“I'm terribly sorry,” he said once the elevator door opened and enough people exited for him to stand up. He yanked his T-shirt down, but it was still too small to cover up his belly button, and scurried away, embarrassed.

“Yeah,” I said. “Sure you are.” Remarkably, I had balanced my coffee the entire time. Once I exited the elevator, however, I pitched my full coffee cup into the trash bin next to my suite entrance. Must have been the butterscotch.

Later that evening, at jiu-jitsu, I found myself under an inordinate amount of huskier training partners. I was overmatched in size more than in skill. On three separate occasions, I was pinned to the mat by opponents whose rashguards, just like the Dodgers T-shirt of the portly fellow in the elevator from earlier, got hiked up to their solar plexi, baring navels that hovered directly over my face, emitting unbearable odors of rancid sweat, baby oil, talcum powder, eczema, kimchi, psoriasis, and a melange of sour body odor swirled with fermented ass.

My only hope of withstanding such torture was relying on technique to get out from under them or, when that failed, for they were big guys, think about all the book sales were awaiting me once I got home and logged on to review the royalties report. If withstanding such less-than-ideal predicaments translated into sales, then I was game.

I was sorely disappointed. Not a single sale of my three books registered. I didn't understand. Angry, I opened my Notes app. I read this:

Goddamn autocorrect typed that when I had intended:

Sell many copies of novels

It's hard to trust in a universe that switches things up behind your back. Autocorrect was invented to speed things up for those in a hurry. Autocorrect is half-assed AI tailored to mouth-breathers with a lexicon topping out at ninety words.

I have no reason at this point to think that the universe has been coded with anything superior to autocorrect. Fools become billionaires, the illiterate get hailed as prophets, and influencers with asses bigger than their IQs sign multi-book deals. It's like a goddamn video game.

The system is rigged. We live in a simulation programmed in favor of the facetious, the vacuous, the profane, and the sophomoric. And Hell exists only for those sophisticated enough to believe in it.

I therefore don't desire things anymore. Nor should you. Take it from the Buddha.

Desire gets you in trouble.

Thank you for reading Third-Eye LASIK.

My current novel Crushed Trachea Blues is a fun, literary murder mystery featuring suicide by jiu-jitsu, an AI Charles Manson, and lots of tacos. It is available in ebook and paperback.

Its follow-up The Sisterhood of the Wick will be out in November.