This book was going to give me so many superpowers that our government disarmed its nuclear weapon arsenal and replaced it with pictures of me. It not only promised to teach me the titular abilities of floating and turning invisible, it was going to show me how to see auras and merge with objects or people to learn their secrets. And twice there’s a picture of a man in a jumpsuit flying outside a pyramid and firing some kind of remarkable beam out of his belt buckle. It never showed me how to get that power, but awesome, right?

The book shows many different ways to achieve invisibility. The first has nothing to do with optics; it’s just not being noticed. As you walk through crowds, be careful to not think too loudly or bump into people. Then no one notices you and you’re invisible! This is a garbage version of invisibility that made it in on a technicality, and it was so not going to work for me. I’m going to be a merciless agent of justice all up in evil’s face, and I need to be imperceptible, even when that’s impossible. Luckily, the book included some magic spells, potion recipes, and prayers that could make me the kind of invisible I was looking for. I didn’t have a lot of luck with any of them, but since the person who wrote this book is probably mentally handicapped, it’d be rude for me to dwell on this fact.

The guide was written by Commander X, an author I was not that familiar with, except for my vague recollection of him hiding decoder rings in my childhood cereal. He gives many stern warnings that invisibility is not to be trifled with, but check this out: Invisibility better not trifle with me. It in fact did, and no matter what witchcraft crap I drank, I remained very easy to see. I had a little better luck with levitation, though; a power that’s rated in three stages, and the first two are hopping. As someone who already knows how to hop, I got to start on the third and final stage – flying through the air at will. I didn’t get very far into it, but even being a beginner at flying through the air at will is pretty good.

I was a little disappointed with Commander X, since the only thing his (her?) book did for me was destroy my definition of the word “hop.” The only evidence of levitation was a drawing of five guys playing light-as-a-feather-stiff-as-a-board at a slumber party, and that’s no use to a superhero. I need to launch myself into the sky after Dr. Killraven’s Derigiblaster with the speed of vengeance. I don’t have time to sit down while the four guys who follow me around chant and nudge my chair into the sky with their fingertips. Also, there’s no photographic evidence of people turning invisible, which if you think about it, might be more convincing than if there was.

Let me try to explain this in terms you can understand: YellowBamboo.com is the damn face-rockingest website ever. For only 10 dollars you get four videos of a man waving his arms around and a one-page guide that teaches you to unleash unseen tai chi phaser blasts. Plus, you get a video of a practical power demonstration where four lunatics on a beach scream and charge at a man who knocks them all into sand by putting up his hands and going, “AGGHHHHHHHH!!!!!” I admit that it almost seems staged, since two of the attackers gently lower themselves to the ground before the man even moves, and the other two fall exactly how a six-year-old would if you told him to pretend he got hit by magic. But if it’s fake, how do you explain how none of them can move until another man comes over and waves his hand over their forehead? That’s the sound of checkmate, skeptics.

Yellow Bamboo training: I’ve completed the training for Yellow Bamboo, and for reasons known only to mystery, I’m not going to tell you how powerful my unseen forceblasts are. But tell you what, run at me screaming and see what happens. I just hope you bring a jar with you so there’ll be something to carry you home in. To reach my level of kickass, first you have to eat only white rice for a whole day and spend 30 minutes reciting your mantras between the hours of 8pm and Midnight. It’s best to not cheat on this, as you are dealing with powers beyond reason. Next, the instructions call for the following: “While you inhale, imagine you are vacuuming in a bright red fire through the top of your head.” Holy crap, consider it done!

Next, imagine your skin peeling off to reveal white meat. Then ask forgiveness from your creator for each individual part of your body that has done wrong. Even though my body parts tend to engage in naughtiness as a team, I apologized for each of them on their own, just in case. After this, imagine yourself disappearing, then dressed in white and flying through the sky. While you’re up there, look down and apologize to all living things you’ve wronged. Now imagine appearing before your creator. Since by this point you’re flying skinless and invisible with flames all over your head, you might want to imagine up some infrared goggles and an asbestos suit for your creator’s safety. Here’s the great part: While you’re there with your creator, you’re allowed to ask Him or Her for any gift you’d like, but let me tell you something: If you pick anything other than the ability to shoot tai chi energy blasts at your friends, you’re a total wuss.

When most people think about effective superheroing, they think of Batgirl struggling against inescapable bonds while being slowly lowered into coconut oil by Catwoman. But superheroes with mind abilities can be even more powerful than that. For example, Professor X’s mind powers are so amazing, he battles evil from a wheelchair. So I figure if I harnessed the karate of my brain to go along with my already fantastic gifts of invisibility and levitation, I could fight crime even without a wheelchair. Could... but WON’T.

I chose Practical Psychic Self-Defense because it sounded a lot like something a brain would read before it kicked a mugger brain in the groin. Plus, I needed to protect myself from evil telepaths. Anyone familiar with super-crime knows that the worst thing that can happen is for the toughest guy on your superhero team to get mind controlled. Ask the surgeon dragging swordfish teeth out of Aquaman’s colon how much he likes it every time Superman runs into a hypnotist. And let’s be sensible here – by the end of this article, if I get a superhero team going, I’m going to be the toughest one there, by far. The first psychic criminal we meet is going to mindblast me, and I’m going to wake up covered in laser burns while my dying partners explain how I devastated them with my belt buckle beam.

The book was valuable in helping me learn how to identify and defeat negative spirit beings, or Negs. These can be anything from energy vampires to alcoholic ghosts, but the most troublesome Negs the author has come across are astral snakes and spiders. I didn’t get hung up on how spooky this was, though, since battling evil spirits requires transcendental enlightenment, and I still think it rules when fat people slip on ice. I couldn’t achieve a spiritual awakening if you tied my kundalini chakras to the Ecto-1 and jumped it over the Marshmallow Man. Even so, I bet I could totally take a drunk ghost or this guy’s hippie brain spiders.

Astral warriors interested in skin care, take note: The author warns you 18 times during the course of this book that battling deadly astral spirits can cause skin blemishes. Now you have two choices: Explain to your friends that these are battle scars from dream combat, or as the author recommends, draw on them with a ballpoint pen to make them disappear. It’s never made clear whether this groundbreaking skin treatment works on regular acne or just acne you get from fighting ghosts.

Now, sending your astral body into another dimension isn’t going to do a lot of good in fighting crime. It leaves your body comatose, which is both a hilarious and handy ability if you’re in Weekend at Bernies, but out here on the tough streets, you’re just asking to be used as a dong depository by pervert villains. However, once you actually get to the other dimension, you’re guaranteed to be a hero. If every movie about dimensional travel is to be trusted (and they are), 90 percent of all alternate universes are spooky ones where Nazi Germany won, and I’m confident that my rugged sense of American rock ‘n’ roll could easily kick start the resistance fighters into overthrowing fascism. And if I end up in a medieval dimension, where dinosaurs survived and evolved into cowboys, my modern sense of rad could have that place skateboarding in sunglasses in less than three musical montages.

This book was written by Dragonstar, and as if you couldn’t guess, he (she?) is a member of a cult of secret magicians who have been secretly doing magic since the time of Atlantis. There’s a slight chance Dragonstar is an idiot, though. Not because his or her book doesn’t work; I totally traveled through other dimensions. It’s just that I think it was stupid for Dragonstar to write about Dragonstar’s secrets right on the book jacket and not on some ancient parchment in a booby-trapped volcano. To heroically fix this error, at least in my copy of the book, I crossed out Dragonstar’s biography with a color crayon and replaced it with “Ordinary and non-magical, Dragonstar has NOT been launching his soul into the stars for generations.” So if you’re reading this, Dragonstar, or more likely, RIPPING THESE THOUGHTS FROM MY VERY MIND FROM UNDER THE SEA, your secret’s safer now than it was when it got to me.

Most of the book describes fun tricks you can do while you’re in other dimensions, like walking through walls or turning around to look at your physical body sitting next to Dragonstar’s. Awesome! However, to make it to the astral plane, you need to first get your astral self outside your body. This is evidently so complicated and dangerous that Dragonstar doesn’t tell us how to do it. But he does make it pretty clear that if you don’t know how to do it, it’s probably your own fault: “Any description of this kind, even though it be but merely a suggestion of the facts, might give an untrained person at least a hint of the process, which might lead him to experiment, and which might bring upon him very undesirable results. I shall pass over this stage, for the reasons stated, which will meet with the approval of every advanced occultist and careful student of the occultism.”

So now that I’m an invisible, levitating dimension traveler with the ability to wipe out dream snakes and slam distant joggers into the ground with nothing, there’s a good chance the next time you hear from me I’ll be thanking the mayor of Earth for honoring me with the Nobel Crimebusting Trophy. Until then, godspeed, citizens.