Credit: Dangerous Minds / Public Domain

I was fairly certain I’d seen Solar Plexus Clown Glider at The Black Heart back in the day, but it turns out that we’re not talking about a lesser spotted stoner rock band here, but instead something altogether more sinister that people have supposedly seen when under the influence.

The story goes that for centuries, a corruptive entity has been haunting humanity. One that takes the same form every time. That form looks to us like a demonic clown made entirely of oozing slugs or snakes. One that comes to us when we’re at our weakest and preys upon our fear, bombarding us with hallucinations of the worst possible things that can happen to us. It feeds on the fear these hallucinations inspire before until we’re nothing more than a shaking, empty husk, before drifting off for more people to torment.

It’s all to do with chakras, you see. It’s called the Solar Plexus Clown Glider because the solar plexus is one of the seven main chakras, the one responsible for our most intense emotions, and our feelings of perseverance and desire to win. The Clown Glider (Clowder? Nah, that just makes me think of clam chowder, and now I’m hungry) infiltrates our subconscious via the solar plexus because once you break that down, your victim is essentially defenceless.

It’s why the phenomenon has been seen by so many drug addicts and people who spend a lot of time high. When your psyche is that exposed, so it seems, one is vulnerable to attack from any source. Be that someone in our real, tangible world trying to take advantage of you or something in the spiritual world trying to sap you of your willpower and desire to fight back.

The phenomenon has been spotted in the testimony of those who participated in the CIA’s MK ULTRA experiments, and most recently-hold up, wait a minute.

What the fuck is this clown nonsense?

Yes, I’m sorry, but sometimes you’ve got to call a spade a spade and say, ‘Why the fuck am I reading people earnestly talking about Chakras?! Since when was the solar plexus the centre of all perseverance?!’ And something else, I’m trying to remember, what was that other thing-oh yeah, that’s right, ‘DEMON CLOWNS SAPPING OUR WILL TO LIVE LIKE IT’S ARE YOU AFRAID OF THE DARK?!’

Y’know what the Solar Plexus Clown Glider really is? Deep down, when you’re no longer entertaining any wee-woo bullshit from hemp-clad freaks who reek of patchouli? It’s a chain email. Yeah. It was a spooky email that was sent around in the 1990s that claimed that “Solar Plexus Clown Glider” was a trigger phrase that meant a spirit would come and fuck your face or whatever. Then, at the bottom of the email, the above image would be pasted, and they’d tell you to forward the email to ten friends in order to stop the glider from fucking your face. Or whatever.

If your “friends” really hated your guts, they would send you the tricked-out version of the email, which contained a line of code that would have the image flash up on your computer screen when you least expect it. Oh, the days in which things that could scar you on the internet were fun and frivolous and not… Y’know, genuinely traumatic. That said, a few years later, we’d have the Slenderman ARG, and we all know what the consequences of that were.

Sure, it’s all a bit of fun to pretend these things are anything more than a lark, but you never can tell what the consequences of them will be.