Letter from a Burned Out Superhero

I am so fucking sick of you guys.

It's not just that you're supervillians and you make my life overly difficult. It used to be that, but now it's not that. Not at all. I'm used to that.

It's how damned boring you all are. Every one of you is entirely predictable and just keeps doing the same thing over and over. Circuit Breaker, you're always trying to get machines to run amok. Professor Kill, you're constantly trying to ferret out my secret identity. And the Rocket Gang...it's like you can't even concieve of an activity that doesn't involve robbing a bank. You rob fucking banks. Do you realize how ineffective robbing a bank is? The money is immediately traceable and the banks are insured. That's why you're caught every time. Because you don't learn.

You want to hear something funny? When I started out on this whole superhero kick I actually was looking forward to having arch-nemeses. What fun would this kind of gig be without sparring partners to constantly match wits and brawn with? I imagined a whole host of people who would test my abilities, my brains, my conviction, to the utmost. I wish I had written some of those imaginings down on paper, I could write a comic book out of them and make a million dollars. I even thought up some interstellar foes. That was some hardcore shit right there. Not only would we find out that we're not alone in the universe, but we'd be threatened by them, with me as the only one able to stand between humanity and annihilation. Stirring stuff. Really golden.

You people, though, I don't know where you came from. Or why. I can tell you all about why I'm a superhero, though. I bet you all are dying to know. Pull up a chair then. Here's my super secret origin:

I don't know where my powers came from. And I've seen the Spider-Man movie like a million times so I know that if I try to use my powers for selfish, financial gain then it will just backfire on me. Also I have no clue how to make money with super strength, flight, and ice powers. Maybe an ice-making company will hire me. I won't go into professional wrestling. Because again, the whole Spider-Man thing, and also wrestling is completely gay.

A guy had to have his fun somehow, though, and this whole flying deal made my commute a breeze, so now that I had time to kill...sure, why not stop some crimes? There's my secret motivation. My dark secret. My Achilles heel or something. I can just see you now, Professor Kill, cackling as you read this letter and rubbing your hands together. You are always rubbing your hands together. It's disturbing.

I mean, I guess I should be grateful to you clowns (especially you, Clown Strike) for giving me something to do and someone dramatic to fight. Otherwise my superhero career would be just as boring as my day job. (I'm not telling you what my day job is, but I bet I've sold at least one of you a used car at some point in the past decade.) I couldn't begin to know why you all do what you do. And to be honest, I don't want to know. You're all so boring the greatest origin story in the world couldn't save you.

I mean...what kind of hidden past could someone like, say, Neo Cleopatra hold? You have a hypno-voice, a loose grasp on ancient history, and scanty clothes. I get it, Cleo, you're sexy and daddy never paid attention to you. Is that all you've got?

Deepest Knight, you look cool but wearing medieval armor just isn't working out with the whole "I'm made of night and am sneaking around" thing you're trying to pull off.

Larva, you are the most disgusting thing I've ever seen. If I were you, I'd kill myself. Let me make you a promise. If you try to jump off a building I will not make an effort to save you.

Sticky Fingers, quit mugging people. You're really bad at it and you're lucky I haven't thrown you into space yet. The only reason you're not in jail is because you're the most ineffective criminal in the city.

Do you see? Do all of you see? This is why I'm writing this letter to all of you. I'm tired of this bullshit. There's not a one of you that's bringing anything new to the table and I'm just tired of playing around. I'm getting to a point in my career here where I'm really trying to get my shit together, and I don't see you arch-nemeses as really advancing this particular aspect of my life.

So this is it. I've given you all plenty of chances to revamp yourselves. I've even given a couple of you advice on how to do it. But either you're just not smart enough or you're not motivated enough. I don't know, maybe it's me, maybe I'm not tempting enough a target. Somehow I doubt that, though.

Effective immediately, I am retiring from the superhero biz. I will no longer hunt you out or stop you from committing a crime. If I see you on the street, I'll just pass by. You won't be seeing me in the skies anymore (except if I'm late for an appointment and the subways are being lame), and here's the best part, I won't be seeing you anymore.

Don't try and find me or I'll just pound you. The fact that I've gotten all your email addresses for this letter should tell you that I can find you if I really need to. Stay out of my hair.

And Pizza Boy, go to college already. You are dumber than a bag of rocks.

Letter from a Concerned Parent

I wish I knew what was going on inside of your head, son. Sometimes I look at you, at the things you do and say, and I just don't know where they came from. It's like at some point you became someone else's kid. Maybe you have a different set of parents on the other side of the town.

As a parent you always suspect that one day this will happen. After all, I was a kid once myself, no matter how baffling that idea is to you, and I remember breaking away from my parents in the same manner. And it's not that I don't know what causes such a thing to happen, it's just that there are so many things that DO cause it that I can't pinpoint what's happened between us in particular.

Modern life can be so unfair sometimes. You and I, we're only given so much time together before you're going to school and participating in other activities and hanging out with your friends. In comparison, we see each other only occasionally. There are huge chunks of the day where I don't know what's happening to you, what you're observing, and what you're concluding from those observations. You are experiencing so many wonderful things, I'm sure, and probably a lot of setbacks. Do you know yet that this is what everyone goes through, or do you think you're being singled out? These are the kinds of things I wonder when you come home from school withdrawn and quiet. Then you go up to your room and play video games (we can hear it from downstairs, you know) and it's like you're determined to live life inside your head.

Sometimes I see such cruelty in your face and in your words that it shocks me. I didn't teach this to you. These are not ideas I ever expected a child of mine to favor, that in fact we actively avoided, so how have they become such an absolute in your life?

Sometimes you do the oddest things and I can't tell if you understand the world around you at all. There have been a lot of times when I've considered giving in and seeking professional help for you. But you always bounce back right before I do, which just confuses me further.

And sometimes you explode with delight at something, really come alive, and I feel so proud of you. You're the sharpest, cleverest one in the room whenever that happens, and I imagine you one day finding the cure for AIDS or figuring out time travel or ending poverty: something suitably brilliant from our suitably brilliant boy.

I wish someone could provide me with a list of what has influenced you the most in your life. What events have shaped your thinking, but no one ever gets that, not even for themselves. The best I can hope is that one day you'll be ready to open up to us. That one day you'll throw open the doors to your head and invite everyone in. Not yet, though, you're still setting up and everything has to be just perfect.

I can certainly understand that feeling but I hope you don't wait too long. Time moves on whether we're ready or not, and you'll be an adult soon.

Remember, always remember, that your parents love you no matter what. You are our greatest creation. And hopefully someday you'll create something similiar and be able to feel the truly unique and overwhelmingly powerful love that a parent has for their child. Maybe on that day we'll finally understand each other again.

We love you. We can't say that enough.

Letter from Your High School Sweetheart

I have stared at this screen for thirty minutes trying to think of how to start this letter. And now that I've actually started typing I still don't know how to start, but I'll keep speaking and typing, because if I stop then I don't think I'll ever start again and what needs to be said will go even longer without being said. And that won't be helpful for either of us. Am I being cryptic enough?

Do you remember our our first few dates? Our kind-of courtship? I do. I remember just feeling so trapped by high school and the people I was around and the relationships I was in and then...you were there. To be honest I don't even know how you came into my sphere. We had nothing in common and no classes together, so there was no reason for our paths to cross. I guess it was a six-degrees-of thing that eventually lumped us together.

I remember you being really shy towards me and later confessing that this was a reaction to how confident I was and OH MY GOD that was the cutest thing I'd ever heard in my life. If only you knew, I thought, how tattered my life actually was: a grand production missing all of its players, half the sets, and most of the script. I was confident because it was either be prickly or be utterly depressed. But you figured that out eventually.

We started hanging out in the same clump of friends and you seemed less and less of a weird outsider and I got kind of curious about you. You also had this...I don't really know what to call it...it was like you came from a different country with the same language but a different dialect. Except not that severe. You just had a different way of speaking than the people I hung around with and it was only noticeable once you actually noticed it. If that makes sense.

Then you let fly that you thought I was really smart and at that point I absolutely knew that you were: a.) hilarious and b.) the sweetest boy ever. I love that you were attracted me because you thought I was confident and smart. I think it was really that kind of attitude that made me fall in love with you. Without really knowing me you already respected me more than anyone else I knew. It was, and remains to this day, one of the sexiest things you've ever done.

I also never expected to fall in love in high school, and those are memories I won't ever let go of. I've been in relationships before this one and now I can't understand how they worked for even as long as they did without real love being the glue holding two people together. Do you remember the lengthy discussion we had in bed together? The both of us explaining how afraid we were of saying that we loved each other. How tentative we were...like jumping into the deep end of the pool for the first time. Except we were already in the deep end and we just didn't want to admit it.

Then we both realized that at the same time and we didn't stop saying it for the rest of the night afterwards.

I'm continuing to learn new things about love, though, and one of those things... and goddamn is this hard to admit...is that I've realized that I will always love you but I won't always be IN love with you.

You can't argue that we've grown apart from each other these past few months. We both went off to college and even though we're still pretty close to each other geographically, we haven't exactly been going out of our way to see each other. Homework has taken precedence over spending time with each other. I think we've gotten so used to our relationship that we think that it will take care of itself. And I have to admit that I fell into that trap, too.

It hit me lately, though, that we spend most of our time away from each other now. And when we do spend time together we don't ever ask questions of the other, or do anything other than our usual routine. I like relaxing with you, but it feels like we're doing so just for nostalgia's sake now. Our lives are progressing but our relationship isn't.

There's a part of me that doesn't want to do this, you should know. There's a big part of me that would like to do nothing more but crawl into bed with you and watch stupid videos. But...I've come to realize that our relationship has come to its end. And I don't know how that can happen with me still in love with you, but I do know that this is what has happened. The more I think about it, the more I start to believe that this is how everyone's relationship ends.

It's kind of amazing how little I actually know about relationships. About love. And I'd laugh at the fact that now I'm really learning, but it's not actually funny.

I hate that we've ended up like all of those couples we heard about in high school. The ones that went to college and broke up within a month. I want to believe that we're better than that, that we had more potential than the couples around us.

And I hate, I REALLY hate, that this will probably be the end of our friendship as well. I can ask you not to hate me for this, and I'm silly enough to know that you will even try, but you'll end up hating me for this sooner or later. Because it was me who started it, and not you. And if it helps to blame me, then go ahead.

Now I don't know how to end this. I didn't know how to start and I don't know how to stop. Somewhere in the middle, though, is what I've been trying to get out. Just remember that I will always love you for the years that we spent together. That was an important part of my...of OUR...lives and I won't ever forget that.

Letter from a McDonald's Cashier

I hate these people. Their eyes are milky, their fingers pudgy, and their children are numerous and loud. Sometimes when I take their order they stare at me in disdain, like they can't imagine they just spoke to someone of my lowly stature. Times like that I want to get down on my knees and laugh to the sky, forever and ever, at the irony of it all. They ask me for flesh and sugar by the pound and think that they're the ones with the better lives.

It's the worst when it feels like they're right. They eat shit but I'm the one who has to sell it just to make a living. This place will hire anyone, and does, and then expects us to automatically care about what we're doing. They would replace us all with machines if they could. Imagine that: a big machine cranking out poisons and smoke. Put your money in the slot and stick your mouth on the exhaust pipe. Super size it.

Everybody eats this shit, man. Especially the people that work here. I can't believe that. I've seen it hundreds of times and I stll can't accept it when I see one of the workers on the other side of the counter. This culture eats itself. The cows digest the cows and become furious when there's nothing left.

I do numbers to keep my head busy while I work. I keep track of how much of this and how much of that we sell each day, each hour, and I average it out and I add it up. Then I do it all over again just to make sure I'm right. I make up elaborate plans on how to steal this money from the safe in the office. So far I haven't gotten past the issue of what I would do once I had the money. I'd have to still work here. Quitting right afterward would be an admission of guilt.

I'm not a bad person. I'm just trying to take advantage of a corrupt system. I am not justly compensated for having to put up with the masses of idiots that line up here every day. If these people are going to give me money and ask me to help them kill themselves, then I should be paid enough to find a better life for myself. I'm not going to be one of those people on the other side of the counter.

There is a big world out there. And it's apparently filled with people like you. I can rise above that. I know I can. I have the determination and the brains. I just need to get out of this system, around it, above it. And the only way I'm going to do that is by ignoring the rules of that system. I gotta build my own system. One that works for me.