A Rollerblading Crusader for Justice

By day, he is a cheerful greeter in a big box chain store. But by night he is a crusading superhero.

As superheroes go, he’s very low-key and unassuming. Nobody in town knows his real name or his true identity, but his superhero pseudonym is “Jim.”

Like all superheroes, “Jim” uses his unique superpower to fight the forces of evil. But this superhero has a specialty. The only evil he combats is the evil of discrimination. Even more specifically, he only combats discrimination against cripples.

Superheroes these days need to have niches, just like lawyers. They need to tap into unserved markets. “Jim” noticed that whereas there are a bunch of laws protecting cripples from being fucked over, no one enforces these laws. Thus, he developed his own brand of vigilante justice.

For “Jim,” this justice quest is personal because he, too, is crippled. Since childhood, he’s walked with a limp. And everybody knows that when nature leaves cripples lacking in one area, it always compensates them for it in other ways—- like how all blind people have acute hearing and all deaf people have super sensitive tastebuds. Well since nature cursed “Jim” with a limp, it blessed him with the ability to turn people into muskrats.

Yessir, you better not piss “Jim” off or he’ll turn you into a muskrat with three blinks of his left eye. And the way to piss him off is to fuck with his people.

Because “Jim” is a modern superhero, he has an app. That’s how cripples in distress send him an SOS. They contact him via his app. When “Jim” first set up shop as a superhero, he got a lot of messages from cripples who were pissed that someone was illegally parked in a cripple parking space. So “Jim” donned his superhero outfit, raced to the scene of the crime and turned the driver of the car hogging up the cripple space into a muskrat. (“Jim”’s superhero costume, by the way, is pretty much just a burlap burqa. It’s designed to disguise his true identity while still being comfortable and functional. In order to conceal the fact that he has a limp, whenever “Jim” is on duty as a superhero, he rolls around on rollerblades).

“Jim” doesn’t get parking SOS calls anymore. Ever since word got around town that a rollerblading guy wearing a burlap burqua was turning people illegally parked in cripple spots into muskrats, nobody illegally parks in cripple spots anymore.

Now “Jim” concentrates on righting more egregious wrongs. Consequently, while he is a great hero to cripples, most everyone else in town sees him as an outlaw. When he turned the liquor store owner who refused to put a ramp on his establishment into a muskrat, he stirred the wrath of the local Chamber of Commerce. And because he turned a landlord who refused to rent to cripples into a muskrat, all the landlords hate him, too.

With all these powerful, politically-connected forced aligned against him, the town council unanimously passed an ordinance making it a capital offense to turn someone into a muskrat. So “Jim” is a wanted man. There's a big price on his head. So he operates in the shadows, turning dirty no-good discriminators into muskrats and disappearing into the night, one step ahead of the law.

Wouldn’t that make a great superhero movie?



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Here's to you, Shit Haulers!

Thanksgiving always reminds me of horseshit, in a good way.

There’s this Thanksgiving Day parade every year in downtown Chicago and they stage it on the streets around the building where I live. And since the parade is full of horses, after the parade is over, there’s horseshit on the streets.

And then I go spend Thanksgiving with my family in the part of Indiana where a lot of Amish live. And because the Amish ride around in horse-drawn buggies, there’s a lot of horseshit on the streets there, too.

When I return home all the horseshit is gone, which means that someone came out on Thanksgiving in the cold and cleaned it up. And it reminds me to give thanks for all the unsung heroes in this country and all over the world who clean up and haul away everybody’s shit.

Shit haulers don’t just clean up the streets. They empty out our port-a-potties and pump our septic tanks. They toil in our stables and kennels and on our dairy and pig farms.

Shit haulers have a proud heritage. Hell, shit hauling may even be the world’s oldest profession. Now granted, the job market for shit haulers may not be as robust as it was in the days of yore, when all transportation was horse or oxen drawn and royalty excreted in chamber pots. But as long as there is shit, there will always be plenty of call for people to haul it away, until such time as there are shit-hauling robots.

So we all better pray like he'll that the shit haulers never form a union, like the United Brotherhood of Shit Haulers. Because if they do they can rule the fucking world. Imagine if all the shit haulers all around the world went on strike simultaneously. Shit would pile up all over the place and we'd all have typhoid or something. Or even worse, we’d all have to clean up and haul away our own shit.

So here’s to you, shit haulers! Thank you for your service. Where the hell would we be without you? You keep the world turning.



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First they Came for our Parking

Someone was parked in the cripple parking spot, just as blatantly and brazenly as could be. No cripple license plate, no placard hanging from the rearview mirror, no nothing. Now of course I’ve experienced this kind of thing before. What kind of professional cripple would I be if I hadn’t?

But this one was different. This one was an omen. There was nobody in the car and it was just an ordinary sedan of some sort. But I knew the car had to belong to a white supremacist. I mean, it made perfect sense, what with all the political shit that’s be going on the last year or so. You never hear white supremacists spew venom about cripples per se, but you know we’re on their shit list. We have to be, right? If we weren’t, it would make a mockery of the concept of supremacy. If I wanted to join one of their fucked up little fraternities, like the KKK, I bet they wouldn’t let me because I’m crippled. I could be the most hateful sonuvabitch on the planet and it wouldn’t be enough. It takes more than just hate to be one of them.

Whenever you see those pointy-headed assholes marching in their robes, none of them are ever in a wheelchair or tapping a white cane. They never have sign language interpreters at their rallies.

So it's logical that they would see reserved cripple parking as a major threat. Reserved cripple parking is always in the best location in the parking lot, right by the front door and everything. If I was a white supremacist, I would think that those spaces belonged to me, dammit! They’re my goddam birthright! My ancestors built this fucking parking lot!

And all these pea-brains are feeling especially emboldened these days because they have so many kindred spirits in high places. So it's also logical that taking back the prime parking spaces would be high on their social agenda.

This is just the opening salvo. I don’t think the white supremacists will be content with merely seizing our real estate and leaving us to fend for ourselves. That’s not nearly spiteful enough. Today they're appropriating our parking spaces. But tomorrow there will be a cripple Trail of Tears. They’ll round us all up and march us all off to be confined in reservations (aka nursing homes).


I looked at this bland sedan and felt much more than the usual piss offedness. I was steeped in a deep sense of inevitable doom. Ever since that fucked up election of about a year ago, I dreaded this day would come.





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If I Had a Stephen Hawking Talking Box

If you're wondering what to get me for Christmas, I'd sure love to have one of those Stephen Hawking talking boxes. I don’t really need one but I think it would be a fun toy to have and I’m kind of bored.

The main reason I want my very own Stephen Hawking signature talking box is I believe it would make me a lot funnier. Because those things prove that old saying, “It’s all in the delivery.” Like suppose I tell somebody to fuck off. It’s a lot funnier if I say it with a Stephen Hawking talking box, don’t you think? What with that deadpan robot voice and all?

Imagine Stephen Hawking doing stand-up comedy. He could tell a bunch of stale old mother-in-law jokes. It wouldn’t matter. It would be hilarious coming from him. Or better yet, imagine him as a ventriloquist. His dummy tells a bunch of stale old mother-in-law jokes in a robot voice and Hawking never moves his lips, or anything else for that matter. I’d laugh so hard I’d probably piss my pants. I can’t remember the last time a ventriloquist had that effect on me.

Back before there we talking boxes, cripples who couldn’t talk had to communicate using much more primitive methods. A lot of them had alphabet boards, like my friend Rafferty. He’d point to letters on this board and spell stuff out. It took forever to communicate a simple thing, especially if the cripple couldn’t spell worth shit. For shortcuts, Rafferty had a bunch of frequently used phrases (FUPs) on the flipside of his board so he could communicate important things with a single finger point. The two Rafferty FUPs I remember were I have to go to the bathroom and I want a Southern Comfort Manhattan.

I imagine you can do the same with a Stephen Hawking talking box. Just push a button and it says one of the many FUPs you’ve programmed in. I know the first FUP I’d program into my Stephen Hawking talking box would be fuck off. But I know that sooner or later I’d end up in big trouble because I’d lose my cool and tell a cop to fuck off. And it would probably piss off a cop twice as much to be told to fuck off by a Stephen Hawking talking box than it would otherwise. So I’d have another handy FUP that would say, I’m sorry, officer. I’m spastic and I accidentally pushed the wrong button. I meant to say thank you for your service.



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