"I find it is a great strain for me to believe what I see, and I am becoming afraid occasionally to look at some things in case they would have to be believed."
- Flann O'Brien, The Third Policeman
Dubious Superpowers
- Bulletproof underpants
- Unerring ability to correctly use “literally” and
“figuratively”
- Lasso of shame
- Always finding what one is looking for
- Motivational skills workshop leadership expertise
- Ability to shoot dental floss from fingertips, or silly
string, depending on circumstances
- Invisibility socks
- Nonfatal curiosity
- Selective hearing loss
- Human kindness
- Infallibility in matters involving faith, morals, and tech
support
- Poop that smells like peppermint
- Never applying the front brake first
- A superhero suit made out of memory foam that guarantees
comfortable naps in otherwise uncomfortable spots, and which incidentally
doesn’t make the wearer look fat
- Ability to apply inexorable logic to accept what cannot be
changed without bursting into tears
- Secret power to initiate onset of hot flashes in others
regardless of their age or gender
- Ability to open new CDs using only fingernails and patience
(and not teeth)
Elements of Mysterious Heroic Backstory
- Being tragically orphaned at a young age and left with a tremendously
positive cash flow generated by Papa’s extensive interests in South American strawberry
jam plantations.
- Event causing parents heartbreaking deaths never
conclusively determined to be an unfortunate Act of God, a malicious act of
Caltrans, or a particularly creative form of murder/suicide; all three theories
coincidentally agreeing however that beyond any doubt, substance abuse was involved.
- Credible rumors that unexplained three-year hiatus from
crime-fighting and damsel rescuing were connected with an almost fatal addiction
to cat dander; which by the way, was only licked by chamomile shampoo and
positive affirmations
- Founder and First Customer of the Witless Protection Program
to avoid conspiracy theorists, despicable in-laws, and door-to-door
preachers/storm window salespersons.
- Empathy for the downtrodden inexorably combined with
unlimited power to hold downtrodders responsible.
- Scientific discovery that the degree of a person’s verbal genius
in mixing metaphors in hilarious ways is inversely proportional to their bodily
hirsuteness; for which a single-use Nobel Price Category was invented to award the
Nobel Prize in Mind-Bending Uselessness That Just Might Lift Homo Sapiens Up
Next Rung of the Evolutionary Ladder, if Only We Could Answer the Question:
“What?”
- Inventing a wearable monitor that measures how many rocks
have been taken in one’s rocking chair and how fast each rock is. The device is
programmable to establish a goal of rocks/day and speed/rocks, and to provide
motivational reminders throughout the day, and can be uploaded via Bluetooth to
one’s social media of choice.
- Being born without double-jointed thumbs but at the age of
11 learning through self-guided meditation how to make thumbs double-jointed.
- Posthumous speculations about whether or not you really
existed or were a postmodern take on the myth of Sisyphus’ ultimate happiness
written by Pat Nixon using the pseudonym Idiot Nonsavant.
Miracles I Might Perform If Nominated for Canonization
- I will create a polar vortex limited in time and space to
people in the green room waiting to speak at a climate change denier
convention. They will however be suddenly, mercifully painlessly, and
permanently frozen into embarrassing positions.
- The next time my kitty has an allergic reaction to the food
she can’t digest and loses her hair in patches, I will shape one hairless patch
like the face of the BVM with bleeding scabs for eyes.
- I will assure that the doctors who cure a photogenic poverty-stricken
young brother and sister of a fatal disease will be credited with miraculously saving
the childrens’ lives, instead of giving credit to that old hypocrite Mother
Theresa who caused untold suffering and premature deaths of poor women who she
forced to have too many children to feed, and who generally died in childbirth
before they were 30.
- I will give everybody who drives a car the power to find a
perfect parking place three times in his or her life.
- I will create lasting peace on earth by genetically
modifying human DNA to eliminate chromosome combinations that cause people to
be mean. (Kidding. God created Man in his Image, so god only knows how to fix
that mess.)
- I will give everybody who regrets having a tattoo the power
to wish the tattoo away, but only once in their life; so wise up people
contemplating that heart-shaped dolphin tattoo.
- Publicly eliminating an infestation of scary bugs and
spiders from the vicinity some people who are deathly afraid of bugs and spiders.
What I’d want to be Patron Saint of
- Cats with food allergies causing their fur to fall out in
patches
- Finding movie parking spaces
- Persons with cat dander addiction
- Strawberry Jam Plantations
- Impatient people whose impatience is mostly justified
- People who begin three sentences in the middle of each
sentence they attempt - that they may
resolve each sentence chronologically and intelligibly to the amazement of
friends and relatives who had begun to despair at their increasing incoherence.
- Skate boarders who defy convention and don’t cut their hair
like skateboarders and/or who refuse to wear baseball hats backwards.
- People who just want to make a perfect light flaky piecrust
