How to sterilize a Thought Hippopotamus

They clog up your brain's waterways: this invasive species must be eradicated.

Janeen McCrae

Nov 27, 2023

Don’t like to read? Allow me to read it to you 👈

They are not real.

The end.

Sterilized.

Done.

But they are real.

You know it. You sense it. Your internal river guides point them out as they punt along your brain’s estuaries and backwaters. Thought Hippopotamuses have infested your mind waters with their bloats and pods and sieges and are pushing out the native species. They are eating all your lily pad thoughts and juicy idea melons. Imagination and intention are powerless against their gaping jaws.

And they keep on coming. They reproduce like nanobots, clogging the raging river of your mind with their fat plug of incapacitation—a menace to your sanity, they must be eradicated, and with much urgency.

No debate.

Sign the agreement.

Your first question will be “What?”

This is a fair question—a good question—although in the Who, What, Where, When, and Why of it, you’ve jumped the gun a little. (Fear not, there are no guns! Unless you include a dart gun, but now WE’RE ALL jumping ahead of the process. Of the facts.)

The What is the following:

A Thought Hippopotamus is, simply put, your greatest enemy. It has one face but many names in the lexicon. An unwanted thought, a vagrant thought, a destructive thought, a nasty thought, an errant thought, a useless thought, a wild thought, a dumb thought, a false thought, a bitch of a thought, a dark thought, a hateful thought, a jealous thought, a negative thought, an intrusive thought. You get the idea.

A Thought Hippo kills motivation, productivity, self-confidence, libido, creativity, love, and all the good stuff that keeps you functioning as a human being.

It is CLASS A: EXTREMELY DANGEROUS and will stomp through the fragile ego-system of your mind with its stumpy legs, squashing and mashing and thrashing at your psyche like a leathery, brick-with-eyes machete.

One with teeth. Foot-long sharp incisors will slash at the couch of your skull’s living room with frightening precision.

It has an enormous head and dewy eyes. Eyes that will subdue and hypnotize. It will take over easily, all while pushing native and intuitive thinking aside.

A Thought Hippopotamus will flip over your confidence boat as easily as a beer mat from the edge of the bar and drink from your skull with all the aplomb of a thick-skinned, blood-sweating Viking.

Long story short: Thought Hippos. No bueno.

That’s the What of it.

The Who in this story is you. It does all the above to you, which is why it must also be you who undertakes the sometimes daily task of sterilizing each one, in turn. This must be done in your brain until the population of Thought Hippos gets manageable and the clog clears with an “Oh, thank God!” sigh, even if the relief is only momentary. And right there—that’s the Where and When of it, too.

The Where is ‘in your mind’ and the When is ‘every damn day’.

But why the Why? Here’s a sentence from a 2023 study published in the New England Journal of Deep Thoughts and Mind Maladies:

“For every Thought Hippopotamus allowed free-brain reign, additional pressure is created upon loving thoughts, pushing them against the inside of the human skull and creating pressure that cannot be released without the use of force.”

It’s an interesting study. Amongst the findings: “EDM and specifically “trance music” was proven to be the LEAST EFFECTIVE manner of relieving the pressure felt due to the presence of Thought Hippos.”

Another tidbit from the study. Participants did not like the word “sterilized” associated with the word “hippopotamus” due to the perceived cuteness and plushability of the hippo. For this reason, the word sterilized or sterilization will be replaced with the word neutralized from this sentence forward.

Neutralizing the Thought Hippo, er… neutralizes the destructive tendency of a Thought Hippo in its relentless stomping and floaty pursuit of your glory, your success, your future.

Sign the agreement.

So that’s the Why. Let’s get into the actual detail of the How of it, which is not part of the Who, What, Where, When, and Why. This seems like an oversight. Let’s correct it.

How to Neutralize a Thought Hippopotamus

The neutralization process for all strains of Thought Hippo follows the same steps but with nuances depending on the kind of Thought Hippo you encounter. The basic steps are as follows, along with an explanation of the most common and problematic blobbies you may encounter floating in your glorious waters.

Step 1:
Find and identify your Thought Hippo (see categorization below).

Step 2:
Prepare your dart gun dosage to subdue the creature. Dosage is based on weight. (Some weight and dosage examples are provided below.)

Step 3:
Tranq your hippo and note where it lands. If it is in the water, don’t let it float away.

Step 4:
Act fast. As the tranquilizer takes hold, massage the neck of the creature with forceful fingertips until its eyes roll back and it gets all floppy. Remember: the skin is THICK and you must subdue it with total love energy shooting from your phalanges. Stand back. A newly neutralized Thought Hippo will automatically begin to ascend as a balloon into the air of your consciousness, never to reproduce again. Fear not—this is not one of those balloons that will destroy the atmosphere or burst and get caught in the tangle of a mangrove swamp for all time.

Step 5:
Feel the lightness in your brain. Rejoice!

Step 6:
Light a candle (ceremonial)

Step 7:
Get back to your watching post. Just because that Thought Hippo cannot reproduce, does not mean there won’t be others. Always be on the lookout for new hippopotamus.

How to Identify Thought Hippopotamus: A Guide

There are three primary categories of Thought Hippopotamuses. Study and memorize so that you may get faster and more adept at neutralization.

The Nero Hippopotamus
This strain of Thought Hippo encompasses all the dark thoughts. Of all the Thought Hippopotamuses, this is the most dangerous, encompassing depression, hateful thoughts, jealousy, bitterness, ‘you suck’ self-loathing, and the no-good of you, etc.

Approach with EXTREME CAUTION!

The Nero is a very fiddly hippo and hard to catch—but it is possible. It’s a lurker, often barely visible until ready to capsize your life. It typically floats with nostrils ever so slightly above the surface, closing off eyes and ears so that you are unaware of its presence until it is ready to strike.

The Nero strikes in two ways—or sometimes both, in a tag-team kinda way.

One, the Nero lunges suddenly out of the water and strikes you down, and two, it quietly disappears beneath the surface of your mind and pulls you down with it with a satisfying ZWART! sound. The Nero has a very dense body and sinks effortlessly to the bottom of the riverbed. It can hold its breath for 5 minutes. Unless you too can hold your breath for five minutes, you are a goner.

Weight:
As in all things to do with the Nero Hippo—Extreme. Some say it feels equivalent to the weight of a large multi-story brutalist government building upon one’s shoulders. Their primary goal is to drown you, and due to their weight and density, they have the power to do so at will. Due to size, a team approach is recommended to quell this monster.

Recommended Tranquilizer Dosage:
Due to—again—the extreme thickness of the Nero hide, a large gauge needle is required to administer the recommended 12-hippojoules of therapy units per dart. Seven darts are required (minimum) for adequate dosage. Wellness check salves and ointments from friends are also recommended at the time of dosage.

Hungry Hungry Hippo
Greedy f*cker! Reality—or your sense of what’s real or not—is this Thought Hippo’s main diet. It loves the firm land and earth of your vulnerability. It can run at a staggering 19 miles per hour on land should you choose to flee, but when not on land relishes the float of your stream of consciousness.

Examining the scat of the HHH reveals it devours common sense and shits out misinformation.

This is a wrong-headed Thought Hippo. It eats all logic before you have a chance to process it. Bad information is eagerly consumed in its gaping jaws, which provide 150 degrees of conspiracy theory. Cults, believing liars, Flat Earth—these are common touchstones in the lives of people overpowered by this ravenous slob. The HHH will MAUL you and in some cases, swallow your life whole. Extremely violent, it has also been nicknamed the ‘berserker hippo’ due to its penchant for biting onto your mind-body and throwing you into the air like a rag doll to break your connection with reality in one snapping motion.

Weight:
The more the HHH is fed, the heavier and huskier it gets. Gauge weight by eye-balling. The size of a Volkswagen bug (approx. 3,229 lbs. ) is common, but they have been known to reach bus (approx. 5,798 lbs.)

Recommended Tranquilizer Dosage:
Three milliliters of deprogramming juice per pound. A course of extra research antibiotics, denial of access to social media and forums, and throttling of media consumption are recommended.

Cocaine Hippopotamus
This is an introduced species, brought on by contact with almost anything requiring a decision. It has no natural enemies and if left unchecked will reproduce like wildfire. Sometimes affectionately known as ‘the overthinker’—though addiction is far from affectionate to its victims—the Cocaine Hippo is extremely invasive, and once activated, floats down your thought stream and begins to form a raft of circular thinking that halts the flow of, well, everything.

It is the eddy King (or Queen), swirling around ankles while crushing momentum with a snap of its suitcase-sized jaws. Cocaine Hippos live in what is termed a “collective siege” and charge at anything perceived as a threat, sucking the simple thought into a whirlpool of what ifs, but whens, and what about. Your thoughts cannot escape this swirl.

Weight:
Measured in grams, Cocaine Hippos can tip the scales at a hefty wage. The cost is the weight is the value is the price. What’s it worth to you? That’s how much it weighs.

Recommended Tranquilizer Dosage:
A small amount of meditation to begin with—just to get the taste—then adjust dosage accordingly until subdued. This Thought Hippo will often line up for you, which makes darting them easy.

Now that you are aware of the existence of Thought Hippos, we wish you the best success in subduing, neutralizing, and banishing all your Thought Hippopotamuses. All of humanity’s waters are infested by this menace.

Take comfort in this fact: You are not alone in these waters.

Now.

Sign the agreement.

Yours in tiny thought,

Janeen