I’ll Super Hero Another Day

I had seen so many things before, like how Word always defaults to 12-point font. No matter how many times I set it to 14, there it goes again: Aptos instead of Times New Roman, with its teeny-tiny 12-point.

And that laptop. So fresh and new five years ago. Now it wheezes, heating everything in sight.

And once slush gets in your boots, the heck with keeping warm. Try as you might, cold always finds a way. Relentless, like I should be.

So I would super hero my life. Not soldier through like the unwashed masses, but blast the hell through everything. I laid the best kept plans.

I mean, how do you plan not to live the way you have always lived? Seriously. There is no plan. There is only revenge.

There is hate enough for timetables that shred in imaginary ways. Expectations that will never be great. The to-do list on hold from yesterday, to be there instead of here, let it be done already.

I’ve enough of whatever keeps me up at odd hours, watching clocks tick, and animals snore. Their bodies heave softly, never too much of a racket. That would be unseemly. Too uncivilized.

How do they do it? Sleeping sixteen hours a day when I exist on five or six hours with generous self-deprecating naps in front of the TV?

I mean, for once she could ask what I thought of the movie and not hear silence or worse: me mumbling incomprehensible things.

I’m not some mental giant. Repositories of knowledge are lost on me. Yet every form of entertainment seeks to have me identify with incredible superheroes who never lack words. Their actions are seamless, their reasons undoubted. They make reality, not merely subsist within it.

But back to the animals who never question why they exist. So naturally they slumber blissfully, not worried about meaning and purpose. No, they're content to not be a predator's snack.

Out, out darn Spot! Mittens! Your paws are too perfect! Soft reticulations, the slight touch of pink, blushing between those foot pads. Fur that would soften the hardest hearts. So many shades of white that any artist would unpack twenty pastels, from the tenderest hint of grey to the brightest mental hospital white.

Which is never white anymore. Pink to the rescue. To tame the savage heart. Pink as the blush on a child’s face when coming in from the cold. A hard recess play time, like so many others, an offering to tired teachers, who, when confronted with confounding behaviors, always slip a knowing look, an understanding gaze. “There but by the grace of God, go I,” Sincerely said, as all has been done already. All that can be done. Recess is done too.

But I should be in recess. Is that it? The gavel the judge pounds with, the entry into rest? Deserved or not. Lawyers who find precedents and pretexts, explanations and exculpatory defences for living like so many others who lost their way. Whether through their fault or through that of another.

All laid to rest.

Which offers me nothing. Except for the banality of living. When all around me, people say what they feel and jump on every opportunity. It isn’t the excitement that I yearn for. It isn’t the sudden revelation. The certainty and the harsh truth were revealed at last for all to see.

It isn’t even the notoriety. Not the evening news, the topic of conversations, the hushed, sad remembrances. The what-happened-to-him?

No, I will settle for a footnote. One minute of silence. The trumpet blast.

Like trading in a perfect car because the payments are too high, then paying off the car loan while riding the bus.

Or deciding that that vacation would be better spent on groceries and a knowing look from the one who matters the most.

Or fixing everything that’s broken, whether you know how to or not. Then find that you spend far more time on it than you thought you would.

This isn’t rocket science. Elon’s dreams are not my own. More like my dreams exist in the great unknown. To chip away at. To find some way to make it last for another day.

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I woke up to a cheery blast from that old clock radio that my Dad left me in the garage. Still works. It will probably outlast the heat death of the universe.

And then there was also that cold splash. The water never heats up anymore, not since she went back to work and started taking long showers.

I’ve learned not to mind. Let’s not overthink this. Besides, was there ever a cold breakfast that never mattered? More like a hot breakfast to one who bags their lunch and skips the vending machines.

Never underestimate how complicit we are in all the complaining. The helpful nod of a sympathetic friend that hides the unwinding, the aphorism exists to serve the need. For a reason. A simple phrase, really. Wait for it:

Why all the fuss?

Shouldn't we be infinitely adapted to this life? Yearning for trouble, chewing up the scenery like ravenous beasts? We, the inheritors of eons of evolution, victorious over dinosaurs, yet wimping out over the slightest setback?

“You’re going to be late,” she said—over coffee and my half-thoughts on destiny and endless personal victory.

I should fall into her eyes. So clear and earnest. So rambunctious and carefree. She’s the perfect counterpoint to overthinking everything.

It flashed through me how she would laugh when others complained. No stiff upper lip. More like an unwillingness to give in. Sheer pig-headedness. “You’re not going to get the best of me!” she would say.

Which is to say, events would not best her, and undeserving people would not get her best effort either.

But there is no more time for my dithering. I look at my watch and imagine running to the bus. So much better than walking. Keep warm, and that January New Year's resolution will not need another excuse.

I will run to the bus. Next, I’ll run up the stairs, imagining that it is only the elevator that is on the fritz.

Which suits me fine. I’m this animal who sleeps fitfully only. A new breed, in the evolutionary train. What gives? How is everything measured?

Oh boy! There I go. I’ll super hero another day.