posted by TheDellis at
1:50 am
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MY SUPER-ABILITY
We've all had the daydreams where we could fly, maybe lift a car off a trapped child, had x-ray vision or been invisible – whatever the ability, I'm sure you've fantasised at some time about being something more than you are.
A great series came out recently called Heroes. It's about a group of seemingly disparate people who start discovering they have extraordinary abilities. The show taps into that innate desire to stand out, to be somehow special.
Superheroes in comic books have been doing this for years, being above the herd, yet always with a show of humility.
Back then though, your superpowers were earned unlike the gifts bestowed on the characters in Heroes. It's the Me Generation at work there -- something for nothing.
In the good old days you had to work hard to get your super powers. You had to be bitten by radioactive spiders, or be trapped by something that emitted awfully futuristic sounding gamma waves, or you could simply have the tenacity to walk up to a recently fallen meteorite still hissing and steaming in the woods and poke at it with a pointy stick.
However you got there, you got your super-abilities. Hard work always pays big dividends.
When radioactive spiders and fallen meteors fail to appear however, you can always fall back on good old fashioned Mad Scientist Tinkering with Things Man Should Not Tinker With.
Which is exactly what I did as a child.
Once More For Science!
When I was young we lived on the side of a hill in a rather leafy suburb of Melbourne. Being the hillside, our house was partially supported on stilts and those stilts wrapped around with boards. This still left plenty of utility room under the house for storing typical garage things like the lawnmower, plus a lot of nifty spaces where a small child could crawl and play happily for hours.
I have two very clear and distinct memories of this place, the first being the incredibly fine dust that would drift down from the floorboards above and gently coat everything. This dust was was fine, fine enough to have made the filtered journey through the thick '70's carpets above, through the carpet underlay, and then somehow be worked by feet above into some of the tiniest little gaps in the underlying floorboards.
It would then sail in loving little motes through the still air under the house until it came to rest on the bare earth below, waiting for my questing and inquisitive fingers to scoop it up and marvel at the cool smoothness and silky texture of it.
This was dust without granularities, without imperfections. Your common household dust was trapped above, as such inferior things should. This dust, my dust, this was the kind of dust that would be discussed in hushed, reverent tones by people who know of such things.
Each visitation to the under-corner of the house would begin with a ritual dust-marvelling and fingering, but it was the other memory of this place that concerns us. It's the day I took a great step forward for Science.
The Glass Was Definitely Full...But of What?
In my little under-corner I had set up a ramshackle set of shelves made from jamming timber cut-offs into the interstitial gaps in the cladding that ran around the stilts.
On these shelves were lots of cleaned jam jars, Vegemite jars and the like. And inside these jars was a wide variety of liquids and powders scrounged from around the house.
Some of this included two-stroke petrol from the lawnmower, washing powder, washing detergent, brake fluid, and any other mysterious stuff kept in storage down there. Now, I wasn't a dumb kid and my parents certainly kept me informed of the dangers of poisons, and so anything with a skull and crossbones warning label did not make it into my little laboratory set-up.
Anything else was fair game.
I liked to play Mad Scientist down there, pretending to be concocting this or fermenting that. I'd stir in some washing powder into water and watch the results, only to end us disappointed when it turned to sludge. Washing powder in petrol was more interesting, as it stayed as granules.
As pure science went, it was complete crap. I wanted to make some wonder potion by mixing a bit of this, a bit of that, maybe another pinch of the other, but even at that age I was far too smart to think it would actually work. Smart that is, until the day I took down an even bigger jar, and emptied everything from all the smaller ones into it.
I ended up with a large mix of things; a disappointing sludge on the bottom, a liquidy middle, a grainy flotsam top, and all with a hugely petrochemical fumy sting to it.
And of course I was going to drink it.
The reasoning behind it was simple. Logic told me there was no way it would actually do anything beneficial, and that there was every chance it would do something very harmful. The many labels on the many containers I had pilfered from had made that quite clear. But then, what if the labels were wrong, and that Chance was right? I wasn't going to pass up the opportunity.
In the interests of hygiene, I recall finding a cut-off length of two-phase power cable on the ground and giving the concoction a decent stir. I remember looking at the circling grains of powder, having doubts, eyes tearing from the chemicals, and I remember glugging it down.
Super-Ability Aftermath!I remember waking up in the hosp-- only kidding.
I remember very clearly having some kind of flavour-spasm that involved twisting convulsions until the taste had passed. I remember standing there in the under-corner, poised for change, tense with anticpation. And I remember to my immense displeasure that nothing immediate had happened. I wasn't Bruce Banner. Nor Clark Kent. I was just some kid who'd drank down a large jar of petrol and cleaning products.
My day was actually pretty normal after that. I went back outside, played as I normally did. It was only later that my super-abilities manifested themselves.
I farted the longest, most incredibly noxious fart that the human body was ever capable of producing. It was a one-off thing, but I recall being stunned by the length, loudness and somehow tactile smell of the thing.
Super-abilities, my friends, truly are a gift.
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