Look, up in the sky!...is he really wearing that?

Ladies and gentlemen, my job sucks. Between pretending I give two shits about the mouth breathing bottom feeders that walk into my department asking for "That cord that connects to that thing to do that whatchacallit," hiding my unadulterated contempt for the corporate shills that make up management and pretending to be shocked when one of the many, many flaming homosexuals that've been hired because, well, it's California, comes out of the closet, I really don't have much time for daydreaming. However, a thought came to me when I was listening to random Mexican 491 trying to describe what he wanted in high-speed Spanish after I told him, twice, that I didn't understand.

We live in a dangerous world. Between the ever-present threat of nuclear war, the AIDS epidemic and fat women who still, for some reason only God can possibly comprehend, think they look good in revealing clothing, sometimes it's easy for a recovering comic book geek to wish for some ethnically diverse, super-powered group of selfless adventurers to fly by in their supersonic jet that they managed to acquire without any apparent source of funding and save the day. Well, unless you're a recovering comic book geek with the kind of cynical personality that can look at a baby and think to himself "At some point, Charles Manson was probably an adorable, thumb-sucking toddler, too." Then you immediately get into The Zone and start thinking of reasons why the world would suck even more if superheroes existed.

First of all, a subset of humans who can fly and shoot lasers out of their eyes couldn't possibly be far removed from the rest of the Earth's sentient bipeds. The presence of superheroes would inevitably bring about the presence of supervillains. You think I'm an asshole? Just wait until Johnny Traumatic Childhood suddenly discovers that he can make lightning shoot out of his palms. All those wedgies and date rejections he had in high school just left a crater where your favorite multiplex used to be. So much for the Iron Man sequel, suckers! Hell, we'll entertain the idea of a supervillain coming into his own just because. No sordid past, the guy's just bored. This has the potential to be much, much worse. Ultraprick with a grudge against jocks might stop at using his anthropomorphic knife fingers to make sure the captain of the football team sings like a ten year old choir boy for the rest of his life. You get a guy who can blow shit up with his mind and wants to fuck everything up just to see what happens? Insurance brokers'll be pissing their pants in the first fifteen minutes.

If that's not bad enough, think about what happens whenever somebody gets really good at something that everybody wants to be good at. You'd never admit it, but when the realization hits you that you'll never be that guy, your opinion of him suddenly drops like a cock at a senior citizens meeting. Now, with people who can set themselves on fire with a thought, save the world and not even smell like burnt hair afterwards, you're gonna' get mighty envious with the fucking quickness. Mobs form for the express purpose of proving they've got bigger dicks than the dude who just saved a bus full of retarded kids while breastfeeding a newborn puppy, and all of a sudden you have really big piles of corpses killed completely out of self-defense, just because the middle-age stockbroker got a hair up his ass over not being able to freeze oceans with his breath.

Breeding poses an issue, too Believe it or not, but there are actually women out there who choose mates based solely on how they believe said mate's sperm will mingle with their egg and ultimately create the most awesome offspring ever. So let's say Susie Sorority manages to shack up with some ruggedly handsome superhero. What happens when one of the kids turns out to be a dud? The firstborn can run the mile in less time than it takes a virgin to get off fucking a head cheerleader, but his younger brother, well, he's got a decent free-throw. "Why can't you be more like your brother?" is gonna' drive up the suicide rate in this country so fast you'll start wondering if Emo's been declared the only music able to be legally played for the rest of eternity.

Hell, fuck breeding, just think about how you're gonna' measure up to these broad-shouldered knight errants? You think it's hard finding a date now? Wait until you're suddenly in a wooing competition with some gargantuan, green-skinned behemoth who, let's face it, is pretty likely to have grown at least somewhat proportionately. Suddenly that sports car doesn't seem so great, does it, sparky? You'll be lucky if the eighty year-old widow with shingles and halitosis down the street looks at you twice.

Lastly, government regulation. Marvel ran a little story arc called Civil War a while back that featured their world's American government trying to regulate superhumans' usage of their powers and force them to get a license to superhero (fuck you, I'll use superhero as a verb if I want to). Folks, you have to fork over a hundred bucks just to fish in this country. How long do you think it's gonna' be before some South-bred politician puts his foot down and declares war on all these flying, spandex-clad fanboy wetdreams come true? I give it a week, a month tops, before the skies have so many missles flying around trying to take out the chick they called a gift from God the day before because she pisses Super Unleaded.

So before you go all giddy fantasizing about a world where Milo Ventimiglia can swoop down and end all the world's problems in five minutes with a sweep of his emo haircut, chew on that for a while. There are no easy solutions. Especially with Halloween around the corner. You think it's hard to find a costume now? Just wait until the indecisive horror film fanatic who just figured out he can punch through mountains comes to town. Have fun being the Easter Bunny every October 31st for the rest of your life!