WHAT'S IT LIKE TO NOT BE A MUTANT?

You know, I really hate it that everybody I seem to know is a mutant these days. It's really gotten to be a burn, you know, especially since several of the people I've encountered have this X-Ray laser vision they use to cook with. I don't even have a microwave.

Which naturally means I'm a loser. Though I feel like a retard. Yes, a retard in that every single person on earth--from the President of the United States who can lie with impunity and get away with it because his telepathic powers allow him to subconsciously convince millions that he's just brimming with integrity, to the almost tiny little man somewhere in a Chinese rice paddy who concentrates on his growing crop and causes it to grow more quickly--everyone has some kind of power but me.

That trick of the President's is a pretty good one, and it shows his ambition. It takes a lot of verve just to try and see if your mental abilities are strong enough to convince 59 million otherwise normally superpowered human beings to vote for you. Especially since you screwed up your entire first term, with no help from those super powers, you'd think there wouldn't be telepathy strong enough in this world to accomplish that feat, but mutants being mutants are apt to go to almost ridiculous lengths to display to themselves that the ego's gentle nudgings are in fact true and somehow part of their superpowered character. Heck, if the President hadn't had that other group of mutants to save his Presidency, mutants with the power to intimidate with a smile that emerges out of one side of an otherwise growling face, mutants with Loki-like cleverness, mutants with powerful and superhuman weapons and zombies at beck and call, we probably would have voted him out. But you know what? It's also entirely possible the President, knowing his "other" mental powers, the ones that help superhuman humans to commonsensically reason, just weren't up to snuff and that he'd bitten off more than he could chew by opting for a job bigger than he was, simply used his well-hidden mental abilities to "compel" a group of superhuman punks from the Middle East to commandeer airplanes and speed them into the World Trade Center. Think of all the mutants who died. Think of the losers like me who died, too.

Doubtless, you superhuman readers out there have already sniffed up a whiff of jealousy with your superhuman whiffer-sniffers and sense the resentment of a total loser coming straight from my room into your superhuman temples of doom. Don't worry: It's not some special power. At least I don't think I have some kind of latent superpower to make people feel cynical, at least not that I've discovered yet. Still, I like to identify with that skinny Chinese man. He's got it down, superhuman brothers and sisters. He uses his powers so gracefully, and he doesn't have to adorn himself with the superhuman costumery of his American collegues. That's part of his schtick as a superhero. He's not out to impress anybody, but impresses everybody. He just looks out at his field and convinces his plants to grow a little more quickly. He certainly doesn't try to pull the same trick on his finances. And maybe he could. If so, the fact he just doesn't look at a Chinese Yen and make it grow into unimaginable proportions is probably testament to his wisdoem: He knows how to use his super powers. He doesn't try to use them on his kids either. Like any good father, he probably values the time he gets to spend raising them too much to try to hot wire the situation and make them grow up too fast. I wish I could be like him. I think I'd make my hair grow faster.

Shoot. I'm completely powerless. I can't even dash cigarette ashes in my ashtray without getting them all over the floor. That really sucks. I sit in the dark and you know what? It's dark. I can't see through any kind of darkness. I go for a walk and it actually takes time to get around the block. I've never been able to speed anywhere instantaneously. Can't even multitask. I guess I'm a loser. Not fit to be fed.

You know, earlier I referred to my condition of powerlessness--or, let's just call it superpowerlessness--as akin to being a retard. That was a mistake. It's common with me. Since I'm so powerless, I'm constantly on the lookout for someone less powerful than I am. I've really got a lot of contempt. Man, if you're a retard, and if you're trying to read this, despite all the big words I think I'm utilizing well because it makes me feel like someone superhuman, or at least more superhuman than the people who can't read so well, like retards, well, I'm really sorry about that. I should have said something like, "Sometimes I feel like a mentally disabled person with an intelligence quotient lower than 60." Still too many syllables. Sounded way too politically correct, too. Who talks like that? Even if we think that way, we never say it. Because we think we're so super-powerful, we simply assume that the other superhumans just understand it. Political correctness doesn't play too well in Superpowerlessnessville anyway. That ain't a town anywhere on the map, and that's why it's called Superpowerlessnessville, and that's why superpowerlessness as a matter of political correctness doesn't play all that well in Superpowerlessnessville. Nobody likes people bending their words way around the subject simply to help point out that you and the rest of the inhabitants of Superpowerlessnessville, the town the superpowerful have come to save, are actually superpowerless.

And besides, and this is what really shames me, retarded people are well known for being super-strong. Get one of those folks mad at you and you'd better get out of the way because if they decide to hit you, you're going to remember it. Often, those among the superhuman who have deigned to work with the retarded have to be exceptionally well-trained in the use of their super powers. Especially when the retarded get older and, for some reason, more likely to get explosive on a whim (and please don't get me started on the obvious comparisons to the President), well, many superhuman care-workers have to have training in karate, tai kwan do and other of the superhuman martial arts.

Martial arts. I tried that when I was a just another superpowerless teenager, when all the other kids on the block were discovering their super powers. It was like Christmastime on that block. Girls discovering they could freeze a boy in his tracks with just one look. Boys who discovered that their superhuman skills in throwing a ball through either a hoop or over the heads of other superhumans was a superhuman power in itself that lent them superhuman rewards like college scholarships, hot dates with superhuman beauties and even special perks delivered them under the table. None of that did much good for me, nor did karate classes. Even the mental discipline involved in karate was a futile exercise. After all, why even bother to hone your body into a superb fighting machine when everyone around you is invulnerable? Why even think about developing excellent abilities to relax in an instant, like a Zen Master, when relaxation gets you nowhere in this world where the superpowerful are everywhere?

I suppose martial arts works for some. Take Chuck Norris. He's a short little runt. He probably grew up with an inferiority complex among dozens of superhuman humans. One day, he got to reading his Justice League of America comic book and found those ads for Charles Atlas strength training in the back. Some of us are old enough to remember those: That lame picture of that guy getting sand kicked in his face by a beefcake dude while he's trying to impress some babe on the beach. Has that ever happened to you? Probably not. You're all-powerful. Even though I don't have the ability to see for thousands of miles, I think I can still see it in your eyes that you've never had sand kicked in your face the way I have. Anyway, I bet Chuck Norris, 13-year-old wimp, saw that ad and decided to change his life. I might be short, he thought, but I can compensate. I might not be a superhuman, but I can fake it. The funny thing was, he met a group of superhumans in Hollywood who all had the power to bestow superhuman powers on losers like Chuck Norris. He became superhuman by the graces of the superhuman. I've never met one of the superhumans who gave Chuck his superhuman powers. O.K. Maybe I have. They just never let on because they didn't like me all that much.

How on earth is a guy supposed to compensate for his own superpowerlessness when everyone around him is endowed with all sorts of super powers? Everywhere you look, the superhumans rule with their superhuman powers, and the list of those powers is almost endless. Absolute masculinity. The ability to become the center of the universe at will. The power that allows some superhumans to just look at another and instantly become superior to them. Others look at strangers and, even if the strangers are superhuman, they're suddenly sheared of all their powers. The superhuman women all have irresistable beauty. Ultra-grace. Those are only a few powers, all of them the super powers I just don't possess. I have none of those. Most of those superhuman powers are beyond my comprehension. In this world of superhumans, sometimes I just don't know who I am.

I do share a small circle of friends who found each other because we didn't have any super powers. Like the people on the television show, Mutant X, superhumans had been experimenting on each of us for a long time. One had been subjected to the superhuman power to alienate by dozens upon dozens of superhumans who concentrated all their power on her. She was almost dead by the time us superpowerless humans found her. Our leader had been terminated by a group of superpowerful businesspeople. He said the experience of being subjected to the superpowerful effects of this strange "termination" thing was excruciating. We believe him. Since not one of us has even one single vestage of a superpower, we've gathered together for our mutual protection against the throttling assaults of the superpowerful world of the superpowerfully endowed.

We live in a hole in the ground. Since we're so superpowerfully superpowerless, we really couldn't do a whole lot better. Together in our hole in the ground, we look out upon the world and try to think of ways we can help the superpowerful feel even more superpowerful than they already are. Actually, we don't have a whole lot of choice. We could spit on the ground in front of most of those superpowerful folks and they'd use their superpowers to transform the gesture into "food" or "manna" or "ambrosia" given by the super-superpowerful gods to help them become even more superpowerful. Gawd. We're just a bunch of losers. Most of the time, we find ways to intervene in the lives of the superpowerful, mainly assisting them in their superpowerfulness. Sometimes we simply let them help us: This reinforces their superpowerful self-esteem. It makes them feel superpowerfully good, for if there's one thing the superpowerful have on us superpowerfully superpowerless losers is that the superpowerful have an almost cosmic power of feeling superpowerfully good all the time.

Sometimes, us of the superpowerless set sit around and watch televison. Television is a device designed by the superpowerful that helps them feel superpowerful all the time. Everyone on televison is so superpowerfully beautiful that the superpowerful who are also superpowerfully beautiful get a superpowerful reinforcement that tells them, yes, you were born in the right place, you superpowerfully beautiful person! Thank God you're alive!

The television has a different effect on the superpowerless. We sit there in the darkness, knowing that the unearthly blue rays of the machine are ensuring we never develop any latent superpowers. One girl, who has oftentimes said that her superpower is superpowerful ugliness, sometimes sits and looks at the television with a blank face. Even when the television turns off, a little bit of that blank face remains. But regardless of all that, we superpowerless people do what we can to keep up our spirits. We often cheer for the superpowerful of the world. When the superpowerfully rich on television say something superpowerfully funny, we laugh our puny little superpowerless laughs.

You know, I've been sitting around, looking at this dingy place in which I try to live and I've realized something superpowerlessly important: I don't even know how to tell a story. This isn't really going anywhere. I'm sitting in a dark room, typing. I can't type very well, either. I peck out the words with my middle finger. When I told my superpowerful psychoanalyst that, he mused that my use of the middle finger to type out everything I am saying could be a Freudian Slip: I'm shooting the world the finger. And it's true: Sometimes I'd really like to do that. But how? Even when I was at work one day, I thought I'd impress the superpowerful person in the cubicle next to mine with my superior (or so I thought) ability to type with only one finger on each hand. She wasn't impressed. She sped up her own typing until I couldn't even see her fingers moving. I don't know what she was doing, really. Whatever it was, it couldn't have made much sense to me, a superpowerless being. Her super powers, aside from being able to type super-fast a number of superior collections of numbers I can't even comprehend, also has something to do with the ability to put everybody else down. That's part of her job.

Like the boob I am, I sometimes think about the President. He has a lot of super powers. In addition to his telepathic powers of persuasion, he has the ability to mutate into the stupidest person on the earth...something obviously designed to fool everyone. How else could it be? He's the President! How could the President be stupid? This is called psychological judo. He throws everybody--even the superpowerful--off with how stupid he seems when he turns on his super-stupidity. Then they feel sorry for him and vote because the superpowerful democratic impulse means looking out for the nobodies in the world. And since the President has the superpower that allows him to seem like a nobody better than any superhuman human on the earth, he won the election. All he had to do was act stupid. Need evidence? As the days ticked off to Election Day, 2004, the President became stupider and stupider. By Election Eve, he'd made Koko the Gorilla look like a genius. That's a super power I can only say I admire.

Some of my superpowerless friends kid me by insisting that my super power is the ability to become a super-victim at any instant. They tell me that my ability to make people feel ashamed because of their superiority is almost legendary. And my ability to make people feel guilty? They say it's just amazing. Maybe I'm just feeling smaller than they are.

Which could be a super power. Except I can never hide. If I was truly getting smaller, I'd be able to disappear. Which is often how I feel around all these super-powerful beings. Just take a look at the Vice President. He exudes an intimidating aura of superhuman arrogance--definitely a super power. I've seen arrogant people wither everyone around the the powers he utilizes. Why do the superhuman utilize powers so dangerous? Because they can. But I can't do those things. I don't try to use my powers of arrogance to accomplish anything, mainly because I really don't feel all that arrogant. What's there to feel arrogant about?

It's also interesting to note that, like the television, the superhumans in charge of the world have also developed amazing technologies designed to make them feel even more superhuman than they really are. They drive superhuman cars and they price them at superhuman prices. One afternoon, I was walking with my typical superpowerless shuffle, and zap! A superhuman, driving a superhuman SUV at a superhuman speed. She had this look on her face: Everybody, look at me, I'm a superhuman, and I'm in control.

It was obvious: The woman had the superhuman power to drive at superhuman speeds and maintain a superhuman control over everything within her superhuman vision. Most admirably, she had the superhuman power to keep the police from finding out. How do they do that?

So here's a picture of me for you superhumans to take to bed with you: I'm five foot four inches tall. I weigh one hundred and ninety five pounds. Fully clothed, I look like a stuffed hamster. I'm almost bald. My face is so fat it looks like a deformed pound cake. I've got eyeglasses wrapped around my face (there's no other way to describe this) and the frames I found in a fifty-cent bin at a flea market. No matter how I try, I just can't get away from shirts that make me look like Charlie Brown. And everyone around me, including you? Six foot six inches. Solid steel. So handsome they make women swoon on sight. In possession of the ability to have sex at will. Able to drink massive amounts of liquor in a single sitting. Perspicuousness to the vanishing point in the ability to understand football. Able to burst into flame at the slightest provocation.

This disparity between the superpowerful and the underendowed is maddening. Oh. I know. That's obvious. Why did I write it?

And I can't disappear. I stick out in a room. I don't know how many times I've tried to go to fashionable bars or nice restaurants, only to discover that if I have any super power at all it is the ability to stand out like a broken cup on a tableful of expensive china. Don't feel hurt, they say. They don't know what it's like to be unpowerful in a world full of supermen. And that's another super power those men have: The ability to never feel pain. The super power of never having to cry. The super power of never having to hide under the covers on Monday morning. Although I have met many of the superhuman race of America, I have never known one. I've passed the superhuman dozens of times--or rather they've passed me--yet they are perplexingly out of reach and unknowable.

I heard on the news once about a revolution instigated by the superpowerless. Not surprisingly, they lost. What made them think they'd win? I think I'd rather sit around and moon over superhuman women.

Some superhuman women have distinct abilities to make the superpowerless completely disappear. Some are empowered to inflict sharp pains in the chest. Others create intense anxiety. How do they do these things? One of their superpowers is that they can make the superpowerless sit around and moon over them so easily that they don't even have to think about it. Some of us superpowerless men have become so desperate that we're actually afraid to moon over superpowerful women. Instead, we moon over superpowerless women. The superpowerful among us who see that spectacle call us superpowerless men saints. We know they're laughing at us. It doesn't make us feel good at all.

Once, I was looking at my cat. My cat was looking at me. He had the most quizzical expression his face. Maybe I was anthropromorphizing, but I'm almost certain he was trying to understand how I'd just made that can of tuna appear. For an instant, I felt superhuman. Of course, my only reference point was my cat. Then, to my consternation, I learned that my cat is much better at sex and romance than I am. My cat doesn't even have to use the internet. He doesn't need cologne or money or machismo or any of the other things required by superhuman women. I felt like envying my cat. Instead, I killed him.