I, Superhero!! :. Mike McMullen
addict popping Hershey’s Kisses. There’s not a whole lot to compare it to.
There, that’s better. Not as good as the first ones, but they level me out a bit. Damn. This is no good. How am I going to get through this? Maybe I should’ve had an orange instead.
HA!
Good point, inner voice. An orange wouldn’t have done it, unless it was one of those chocolate oranges that break open into little wedges like the real thing. Mmmm, chocolate orange. Okay, focus. You screwed the poochola today, but you can start again tomorrow.
No, that’s not the right attitude. If I start again tomorrow, that means I can pig out tonight. I’ll start again right now. Maybe I need some more water. I look over at my jug and see I’ve only drunk (drank?) about one third of it, and I already feel bloated. Man. Rough start.
Diet Log, Day 2
8:00 A.M.
Sooo hungry. So very hungry.
NOON
Bag of M&M’s in trench coat keeps exposing himself, chanting “Eat me, eat me.” Two green candies hang suggestively between his legs. He sickens me, but I want to be his friend. Am confused by this.
5:00 P.M.
Spent last half hour with Hershey bar to wrist, sawing and sawing. Never broke skin. Now too tired even to lift it to mouth. Staring at chocolate, weeping gently.
Diet Log, Day 3
[I tried to transcribe my notes for day 3, but it was mostly a lot of illegible scrawlings, curse words, and doodles of me gunning down various health celebrities and breakfast cereal mascots.]
Needless to say, I’m a lot better now. Wait, maybe I do actually need to say that. All right, “I’m a lot better now.” I’m sticking to the diet, exercising (almost) daily, and I’ve lost ten pounds in just a few weeks. It took a while to get started—weight loss at thirty-four isn’t quite the cakewalk it was at twenty-four—but since I figured out the Secret, it got a lot easier. No, not that Rhonda Byrne “wish your reality into being” nonsense: the real secret is that it’s not so much about what you eat or what workout plan you choose, it’s about your motivation to stick to whichever diet you choose. I call mine the Three-Step (See? Always with the three steps) Motivational Plan for Keeping My Motivation to Lose Weight and Keep Walking in Place to Get in Shape and Become a Superhero.
Step 1: Post pictures of Biscuit wherever I usually snack (on the fridge, at my desk, on the toilet, in the crawlspace under the house, etc.).
Step 2: Remember that whenever I’m tempted to snack or eat something unhealthy, Biscuit’s high school graduation will be in seventeen years.
Step 3: Decide whether I want to be there.
After that, the rest is a cakewalk—a low-fat, sugar-free cakewalk, but a cakewalk nonetheless.
CHAPTER 4
SUPERWHATNOW?
or, All the Good Names Are Taken
Step 2 on the Threefold Path to Superherodom is Guise. I need a pseudonym to use in my exploits to keep my true identity hidden, my family safe, and my Facebook account free of super villain friend requests.
I look to “Those Who Came Before” for inspiration and soon realize I need much more than just a name: I need a persona, an entirely new identity. For instance, Batman is the dark, lonely crusader for justice; Spiderman is the witty, happy-go-lucky kid; and Superman is the overgrown Boy Scout. As I mentally page through hero after hero, there seems to be precious little in the way of defining archetypes left for me. “This calls for a brainstorm,” thinks I, so I get out my “stay up too late and have a brainstorm” kit, which is pretty much just Diet Mountain Dew and Allegra. In no time, or maybe it just seems like no time because my heart’s pounding so fast, I come up with a list of possible identities. And I’m not gonna lie; some of these work better than others.
Potential Personas
DOGGUNNER
I could roam the streets with a pack of dogs of various sizes and breeds, each with a proportionally sized firearm strapped to it. Think Chihuahuas with handguns, golden retrievers with.410s, and Irish wolfhounds with M-60s. I would have a different call for each of them, so if I was trapped under a steel girder, about to be snuffed out by the maniacal Dr. Crazyevil, I could whistle Dixie and a poodle with a .357 would run to my aid.
Pros
Let’s do the math on this one.
Dogs = Cool
Guns = Cool
DogGunner = Cool2
Cons
Having to carry the Super Pooper-Scooper everywhere may cut into the first-mentioned coolness.
THE ANTIPUSSYFOOTER
The Antipussyfooter would be the hero who, while the super villain is soliloquizing about world domination, sneaked up from behind and donkey punched him. Plus, I could call the bad guys names like cupcake, and princess, and it would fit perfectly into my chosen milieu.
Pros
Results. Dammit.
Cons
Well, there’s the obvious problem with the name.
THE TINKERER
I could be the good guys’ equivalent of a mad scientist, dreaming up and constructing various gadgets in pursuit of justice. Think James Bond if he built his own stuff.
Pros
I like to tinker.
Cons
I have no scientific, technical, electrical, or chemical training or experience. Most ideas would never leave the bar napkin on which I’d sketched them. Plus, the name sounds too much like The Tinkler. This is likely to erode the intimidation factor.
JUNKPUNCHER
This one is fairly self-explanatory.
Pros
Being hit in the inventory is absolutely debilitating, so the one move I have would be quite effective.
Cons
After our first few encounters, my nemeses would probably see it coming. Plus, the move would be fairly ineffective against castrati and masochists, groups that probably make up a statistically disproportionate percentage of the super villain population as well as chicks, who make up a tiny fraction of the super villain population.
Hmmm. None of these seem to be working. Maybe if I turn to the animal kingdom for inspiration? I explore that avenue for a while, but the longer I think, the more it seems like all the good animals are already taken. There’s Batman (and Man-Bat), Hawkman, Wolverine, King Cobra, Copperhead, Killer Croc, the Lizard, the Vulture, the Scorpion, the Black Widow, Doctor Octopus, Killer Shark, Black Manta, Man-Bull, Monkey Man, White Tiger, the Penguin, Hawk, Dove, The Badger, Ant Man, Black Falcon, Black Panther, Yellowjacket, the Wasp, Rhino, Spider-Man, the Blue Beetle, Diamondback, and those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head. There are innumerable others and, just to cover the rest of the bases, the generic the Beast and Animal Man. I think the only animal-or insect-related name left available is Daddy Longlegs, which sounds more like a pimp than a crusader for justice.
The problem, as usual, comes back to my ordinariness: I have no special powers or skills. I’m a thirtysomething, middle-class, white male. If I was a minority or had some recessive trait, it would give me something to work with. If I was an enraged, indignant black man, I could be something coolly ethnic like Pitch-Black Midnight Panther X. On the opposite end of the spectrum, if I was a muscular, albino Israelite, I could be the Vanilla Jewrilla. Hell, even a genetic flaw/birth defect would help. If I had a parasitic twin, I could be One and a Half Men, taking the underworld with one hand tied behind my back—because that’s the one of the four that didn’t work so well, and it was already behind