On Being Invisible

Ever wish you had a super power? It's often not all it's cracked up to be.

It was fun for a while.  But when the novelty of it wore off it was just like any other worthless skill.  Like knowing how to juggle or how to do that thing where it looks like you’re pulling your thumb off, it just doesn’t have any practical use.

You might think being invisible would have a lot of benefits.  Like if I was a spy and wanted to sneak into a building completely unseen to steal some secret documents or something.  Well just because you’re invisible doesn’t mean you can get past locked doors or open safes or anything.  You’d have to stand there and wait for someone to come along and open the door and unlock the safe for you.  Then quietly tip toe in total silence past whoever is in the room making sure not to leave footprints on the carpet or breath too loud or cough or anything to give away your presence.

Even then, lets say you do get the secret documents, how do you get them out?  They can’t just magically float through the air past security while you hold them.  So, I don’t know, it’s just not as easy as it may seem.  Not that I ever wanted to be a spy or anything. 

I suppose it would be handy if you wanted to eaves drop on someone’s conversations, provided you could get in the room and then were able to stand completely still while you listened.  But if you really wanted to hear someone’s secret conversations it would probably be easier to bug the room or put a recorder in there. 

Really the whole invisibility thing is nothing more than a glorified party trick.  Like I said, it was fun in the beginning, sneaking up on someone and poking them or something.  Then they’d be like all, “What was that?  Something touched me!” And they’d be freaking out.  That was fun to watch.

Most of the time any of the stuff I did was just juvenile.  Like this one time I was at a party with some friends. And I was following my friend Terry around trying to figure out a way to screw with him.  That’s what guys do to each other because, you know, it’s funny.

So Terry is standing there talking with this girl, and she’s pretty and not immediately repulsed by him so he thinks he’s got a chance of getting her number or whatever.  So being the good friend I am I decide I have to try and mess it up for him.  Terry has known me for awhile and so he’s way past the point where I can piss him off just by poking him.  I suppose I could have grabbed the girls butt or something but I’ve done that a hundred times and Terry would have known it was me. Plus I didn’t want to mess with the girl, Terry was the target. So I had to be a little more clever.

Now, when things are inside me they are invisible too.   That’s why you can’t see my tongue and heart and liver and stuff.  Though it would be kind of cool if I could control that.  Just showing certain, say, layers of myself.  I’d be real popular in medical school if I could just show my internal organs for example.  Of course when some smart a*s med student asks the professor “Oh my God what is that!? And points to some anomaly in my body I’d probably freak out and then they’d get a good viewing of how the urinary system works.

Now, if I put something inside me you can’t see it either.  Let’s say I bite into a sandwich. Once it’s in my mouth it’s gone.  Can you imagine how gross it would be if you could actually see the sandwich getting chewed in my mouth. 

So I suppose, back to the spy thing, I could have put the secret documents in my mouth or butt or something and snuck them out that way, but that’s gross.  Plus most secret documents are in those manila file folders labeled Top Secret and they are fairly rigid and large.   Too big and stiff for my mouth or my butt.  Ha!  I just said “to big and stiff for my mouth or butt!”

Anyway, at the party, I filled my mouth with water, which is not as easy as it might seem when you’re invisible because you can’t lift up a glass or anything so you have to like sip it out while not moving the glass and hope no one bumps into you while your doing it because the glass might spill and the person bumping into you would be like, “Hey, there’s an invisible person here drinking out of my glass.”  And then everyone would be trying to find me and grabbing at me and it would just be a mess.

So I fill my mouth with water and I go over to where Terry is hitting on this babe.  Now I got to be careful here because I’m really close to them and if either of them makes a sudden movement they could bump into me and, well, you know what happens then.  I debated for a moment of just grabbing Terry’s pants and yanking them down to his knees but I thought that would be mean and my original plan would be funnier.

I’m standing about a foot away from Terry and bend over putting my face down by his crotch.  And I’m thinking if I suddenly were to become visible right now I’d have a lot of explaining to do, not just about the invisible thing.  Anyway, my face is now just about a couple inches away from Terry’s crotch and in a steady stream I start to spit the water out of my mouth and onto his pants.

It took a couple of seconds before he felt it and then he was like, “Oh s**t!  What the hell?  He’s wearing khakis so almost instantly the wet spot was covering the whole front of his pants and he starts rubbing it which just made it spread more, all the while he’s like, “What the hell? S**t!”

What little bit of water I had left in my mouth I spit out in a spray when I started to laugh.  I don’t think anyone saw it but if they did it would have looked like this weird mist coming out of nowhere, down by Terry’s crotch.

So Terry looks up at the girl and she’s got her hand over her mouth laughing and looking at Terry’s soaked crotch. I couldn’t tell if she was laughing at him or felt bad for him.  Of course he’s making such a scene that by now everyone is staring at him, or rather at his crotch and he’s trying to laugh it off saying, “ Oh I just spilled.  Ha Ha, d****t these are new pants.”

A couple of our other buddies of course jump right in and start busting on Terry. 

“Dude, use the bathroom man.”

“Did anyone think to bring diapers?”

“I think this means he likes you.” One said to the girl Terry was talking to.

With everyone now focused on Terry’s pants it was a good time for me to sneak away and get dressed.  Oh, did I mention that I was naked through all this?  Yea, I have to be naked to be invisible, which reminds me of another funny story but I’ll save that for later.

I read somewhere that invisibility is like the third most popular super power people would want to have.  I don’t know who would ever take a poll like that or how accurate it is, but I don’t think the people responding were quite thinking it thorough.  Number one was the ability to fly.  I’d like that one too and in fact have always dreamed of being able to fly since I was a kid. 

I’m not sure what I would do with it though.  I mean, it would be cool and all, much like invisibility but aside from using it to avoid traffic or get a good view of fireworks, how exactly would you use the ability to fly?  Maybe if you were late for class or work or something, it would come in handy.  Providing it’s not really cold or rainy.  Then I think a car would work better.  Now, a flying car!  There you might have something.  But no one has invented that yet.

Invincibility was number two on the list.  Now that one would be handy, particularly if you could also fly.  In fact, it would almost be necessary if you could fly because you know, at some point your going to miscalculate a landing or ram into a building or something and you would have to be invincible to survive that. 

But like anything, there are downsides to invincibility too. A buddy of mine not to long ago got his black belt in karate.  He’s not a bad a*s or anything, he’s just been taking it since he was 6 years old and just never decided to quit.  So he gets his black belt and we’re all like giving him a hard time saying things like, “So dude you gonna go all Bruce Lee on us now if we piss you off?”  “Can you take Tony’s heart out and show it to him before he dies?”  You know, crap like that.

But he in all seriousness asked us not to talk about it because he knew eventually some a*s hole is going to be all lubed up with liquid courage in a bar some night and come up to him, “Black belt heh?  Lets see what you got Kung Fu man.”   And that’s a no win situation.  My buddy either gets his a*s kicked and everyone laughs at his black belt, or more likely he kicks the other guys a*s and then get arrested for using his stuff on some poor drunk dude.  Either way he loses and the evening is ruined.

Now imagine that you were invincible. Really invincible.  The guy in the bar isn’t much of a problem, you just let him hit you a couple of times and your fine and he’s like, yep.  You’re invincible.  And he buys you a beer.  

But then there’s the dude who really wants to see how invincible you are.  He hit’s you with a chair, or a baseball bat.  Tries to run you over with a car or even tries to shoot you.  You’re invincible and all so you’re fine, but hey, nobody wants to hang out with you or anything because they don’t want to be around when the guy drives his truck into you.  See, we’re not invincible and even with my invisibility and stuff, it’s not much help when the bullets start to fly.

So, I’ve had this invisibility thing for a while now and honestly, I could take it or leave it.  Despite the party tricks and stuff I have yet to find any practical use for it.  I guess it’s like that with most superpowers.  It looks all exciting and stuff in the movies, but who really wants to be a super hero?  I don’t think it pays particularly well and you’re always finding yourself in some precarious situation fighting arch villains.  I don’t know any arch villains and really have no desire to get to know any.

Plus, I figure all the super hero stuff would take up time from my real job and I’d probably end up getting fired. Most supervisors would probably appreciate the fact that I saved the world or something, but would still expect me to be at work the next day, even if I was really tired.

Don’t get me wrong, I get it.  Most people would love to have a superpower of some kind and like I said, invisibility is the third most desired power, so I guess I’m lucky. But when it comes right down to it, I think I’d rather be able to play the guitar really well than be invisible.  But that’s just me.