Congratulations on Becoming a Super Hero!

Congratulations! Today you will wake up and discover that you have new superpowers. Normally this would be cause for celebration, however in your case you are a laughably poor superhero, the worst in the world in fact. How, you ask, did you beat out the likes of Aquaman, Ant Man, and Bucky? Your power is, believe it or not, even more limited. You’ll understand once we go over your origin story.

It’s wacky tacky tie Thursday at your office. You’ve gone through nearly your entire tacky tie wardrobe, donning aquarium ties, cow pattern ties, even ties filled with the faces of presidents. Today, however, you will don the last of your collection, a keyboard tie (a gift from your mother –in-law circa 1990 for your birthday. She hates you). As you adjust the tie in the mirror you’ll run your fingers along the keys as if you were a musician (you’re not) in a gesture you find hilarious (you think you’re the office cutup, but people really just wish you would die). You’ll be shocked when music emerges from your gaudy cravate. Stunned, you press key after key. Each time you are greeted with a perfect note eminating from the tie. You immediately grasp the gravity of this discovery. Surely this power was given to you so that you could somehow improve the world.

As you sit in your tiny cubicle matching up accounting figures you will formulate a plan which involves making keyboard music in order to frighten drug dealers who are easily scared. Eventually, you’ll concoct a costume and dub yourself “Phantom of the Rock Opera,” a hero who attempts to frighten criminals with pieces from the hit Who opera, Tommy. After foiling some easily spooked drug dealers (they smoked their own substandard product, and thought you were the government coming to steal their teeth). You’ll be overjoyed at your success, and will continue to formulate and execute such ill-founded plots. Of course, this will set in to motion a series of events which culminate in your being shot to death by meth addicts outside of a warehouse in Tahoe.

Congratulations on Having Your Gym Membership Revoked!

The nudist gym you attend doesn’t have many rules. No firearms on the premises, no running around the pool, no sex outside of the sauna, and no pets. But you’ve managed to set up a new one: no people named Greg Kinear who are not the actor.

You managed to do it in a way no one ever expected: you did not stop talking. Seriously. For a solid two hours every day for the last two months you have just not shut up and today they’re not going to take it anymore.

Hans, the insanely huge Swedish guy with the tiny dick, is going to grab you by the throat as you step in the door. It’ll be weird, because you’ve already been slipping out of your shirt and your arms won’t be in the sleeves. You’ll be there, arms under your shirt, with a massive hand around your throat and a man’s penis just a foot below eye level. If you were gay, it would be arousing.

But you’re not, you’re just a man who likes to work out in the nude, so it’ll be awkward for you. You’ll struggle for a few minutes, which will look like a worm squirming, before Hans just lifts you up to eye level so he can talk to you “face to face.”

“Greg,” he’ll say, stentorian voice emerging from deep in his chest. “We need to talk.”

“Is this really the best context for this conversation?” you’ll ask.

He’ll shrug, and do so without shifting his grip on you. He really is quite buff.

“We never really see you in any other situation. It seemed like the right time.”

Mary, the 47 year old owner, will emerge from the shadows next to him, finely toned breasts glistening with sweat. She clearly just left a sauna session with Teddy, the 17 year old paper boy she’s teaching about life. When she speaks it will be clear that the decision is final.

“Greg...” She’ll shake her head. She’s never had to eighty-six anyone before, and its not easy for her. “Greg, I’m sorry. We’re just not the right gym for you.”

“Why?” you’ll ask, shirt finally pushed up around your neck and arms crossed in front of your chest.

“Your life isn’t as interesting as you think it is. Let’s put it that way.”

She’ll nod to Hans and he’ll deposit you back on the street simply by sticking his arm through the door. Then he’ll gingerly shut it and turn the lock.

On the street, you’ll feel a great sadness. You finally thought you belonged somewhere, but just like at the Y it was not to be.

Chin up, buddy. Go tell the police that Mary’s involved in repeated statutory rape. A little blackmail always makes you feel better. And congratulations on having your gym membership revoked. Get a hobby.

Congratulations on Playing World of Warcraft for Another Month!

For most people the $15 subscription cost wouldn’t be quite such a hurdle, but you’re a full blown addict. I don’t mean to say that you play WoW to the exclusion of all other social interaction; that goes without saying. I’m saying that you play WoW to the exclusion of almost all other activity.

You’ve been living off of canned goods you stockpiled in 1998 after your roommate showed you Dawn of the Dead and you started to scream that “they were coming.” It isn’t unusual for you to just piss in the corner in lieu of losing precious seconds of leveling time.

It would be hilarious if it wasn’t so pathetic. Your savings have bottomed out completely now and you can’t even pay your rent and internet, let alone the minimal credit card payment required to keep playing. You even stopped paying for heat, since “it was always warm in Azeroth.”

With the impending financial disaster you’ll have finally hit rock bottom. You’ll log off for the first time in nine months and emerge from your tiny apartment into the blinding light of the hallway just outside of your apartment.

You’ll wander through your upscale apartment building, gradually adapting to the florescent lights, until you reach your destination: the apartment occupied by your landlord.

Your landlord is an old blind man named One Tooth, who spent most of his life in and out of the army, and he’s lonely. So when you show up and offer to blow him so you can get ten dollars and free rent, he’ll scratch his grizzled chin for a few moments before nodding his wizened head.

Thirty-five minutes and twenty two seconds later you’ll leave his apartment, a little more ashamed but ready to play WoW for another month. You don’t know if you’ll end up doing this every month, but that really doesn’t matter. There are purples dropping and you’re AFK. You’ll rush through the hallways until you get back to your keyboard, where you discover that nothing has happened in your absence.

Congratulations on playing World of Warcraft for another month. We’re all very impressed by your multiple level 80s, and none of us can fathom why your wife didn’t keep a winner like you around.

Congratulations on Taking the LSATs!

You’re hardly the first person to take the test who doesn’t really have any business being there, but they’re usually stoners or college students with political science degrees. Homeless people generally can’t afford the test fee, and even if they could they’d find better things to spend it on, like whores.

But your father’s on his death bed, and you wanted to show him that you could’ve been something if he hadn’t turned you into a gay with all his “college education” and “physical contact,” so you’ve spent the last six month saving your nickels and you’re going to take that test come hell or high water.

Even getting to the testing center will be quite an adventure. You’ve been banned from the bus following a public urination incident, you can’t flag a taxi, and you only have one foot. But after a series of events culminating in you carjacking a young mother you’ll reach the test center with just enough time to complete check in.

You’ll sit down and power through the test, distracting the other test takers with your furious work ethic, occasionally verbal outburst, and terrible smell. You’ll finish in a quarter of their time and, sure enough, you’ll have scored in the 90th percentile. Turns out you’re some sort of homeless genius.

You’ll make the mother, who was lot less terrified after she found out you were just taking the LSATs and not buying crack, drive you to your father’s death bed, where you’ll wave the scores in his face. He’ll just smile and say “I always believed in you, son.” You’ll call him a faggot and pee in the corner of his room.

As a joke you’ll submit one of your free scores to Harvard, with your return address listed as “under the 205 overpass on Powell.” You’ll be shocked when a letter carrier arrives with a letter of acceptance from the esteemed university, along with a set of financial aid options.

Thus will begin your amazing career as the world’s first homeless lawyer. You’ll still be homeless, but you’ll own one suit that you’ll wear to trials, and you’ll actually be really good at your job. You’ll specialize in intellectual property law.

It will be a good life for you, and you and your best friend One Tooth will be drinking only the finest Thunderbird and sleeping in your new personal storage unit for years to come.

So congratulations on taking the LSATs. Easily the best choice you’ve made in a while.

There will be a major motion picture about your story made without your permission in the near future, by the way. Get your lawyerin’ shoes on, Wally. It's what you were born to do.

Congratulations, You Son of a Bitch!

You piece of shit. You know just what you did, and its not for us to tell you, but we all hope you’re happy. As far as I’m concerned you deserve exactly what’s coming to you.

The investment fraud, cheating at ping pong, murdering your father and sleeping with your mother. I’m not sure how you thought it would end, but tonight it's all coming to a head.

You’ll be out on a date with a supermodel, one of the ones with three names, at least two of which sound vaguely Russian, and it’ll seem like nothing could go wrong. That’s when your deliciously ironic punishment will strike.

A falling safe will cave in your skull and crush most of your upper torso. According to the model it will be “kind of fucking sweet,” but also “totally gross.” We wish you’d had better taste in women so we could’ve gotten a vaguely literate depiction of your death, which we’ve been aching for for months, but hey. We’ll take what we can get.

Oh, and congratulations, you son of a bitch.

Congratulations on Your Tremendous Success!

Congratulations! As of today you will have achieved remarkable success in your chosen field, the design and manufacturing of formal clothing for large breed dogs. You’ve sacrificed decades of your life, two marriages and countless failed relationships all for your desire to appropriately garb dogs that could rip a person’s throat out at a variety of events, from boat shows to award balls.

It has been a long, thankless road, but it was so worth it to see German Shepherds the world over humbled by your simple, elegant creations. However, tomorrow your wife is going to leave you.

See, here’s the thing. We know you like dogs a lot. Like, a lot. Most people can gather it from your occupation. But what most people don’t know yet is that you’re obsessed with clothing dogs because you really enjoy fucking them.

We’re not here to judge you. As long as the dog doesn’t mind (and Patches doesn’t – we checked) there’s really nothing wrong with it, unless you use a major religion as your moral compass. But your wife isn’t going to agree with us.

When she catches you balls deep in your family Golden Lab (your partner and lover of the past eight years) she’s going to flip shit, grab the kids, and extort the living fuck out of you while living with her dad in Cabo.

Eventually she’ll just divorce you and the story will come out. Your wife will have long since become tired of living alone, and she’ll want to marry her tennis instructor, Doug, who is a really nice guy on an unrelated note.

During the proceedings her reason for seeking divorce will come out, and you won’t even try to deny it. You’ll feel lighter for the admission, as if you’ve finally stopped living a lie. The judge will grant her a generous share of your property and earnings so that she can change her name and give your kids a semblance of a normal life.

Once your bizarre fetish becomes public knowledge you’ll find that your friends and relations will no longer return your calls. You’ll become a true pariah, living alone and unvisited in your massive mansion with Patches. Even your children won’t return your calls. You’ll be devastated, but Patches will continue to lend you emotional support, licking your palms and making eye contact during.

Oddly enough your clothing industry will be almost completely unaffected. Turns out most people buying designer dog clothing don’t really care how fucked up the guy who makes it is. You’ll lose a few more prudish customers who have the same fetish as you and fear being “outed,” but mostly your business will continue to thrive.

You’ll comfortably make child support payments and live a simple life of seclusion, releasing new designs every few months to continued accolade until Patches dies. With her death the rock of your life over the last fifteen years will have vanished, and you’ll feel more devastated than when your wife ripped your children out of your life.

We’d say find a new dog, but Patches truly was your soulmate. She can’t be replaced. So don’t try. You were lucky to have her when you did. Build a respectable statue in her memory and try to move on. She’d want it that way.

Oh, and congratulations on your tremendous success. None of us buy dog clothing, but apparently it’s quite a booming industry if it managed to keep you afloat through one of the most public divorces in recent memory

Congratulations on the New Year!

On January 1st, 2009 you’re going to wake up in a strange apartment, fully clothed, with just a touch of vomit drying on your shoes. You’ll be on a hardwood floor a few feet away from a sprawled out young woman who seems to be in the grip of some terrible nightmare.

Her body and face will be unfamiliar to you, but her expression is one you know all too well; the dissatisfied reverie of someone who mixed booze and pot last night and moved through the evening in what could be called a series of “rolling blackouts.”

You’ll give her a shake, but she’ll only react by punching at you with an adorable fist. When she punches, though, something on her fist will glint, and your heart will stop.

She’ll be wearing a ring. It will be around the fourth finger of her left hand. It won’t be anything new to you, you’ve been with married women before, especially while blacked out, but there will be a tiny feeling of wrongness in your head when you see it.

After a few puzzled minutes you’ll clasp your hands together and there it will be, on your own hand – a Cracker Jack decoder ring which had clearly served as your wedding ring last night.

Bits and pieces of the evening will come back to you: meeting the girl in a bar along with her sister, stealing her away from her group and taking her on a lengthy adventure through the city to find a hamburger joint, then finally catching up with them to watch the fireworks, hot dogs in hand. You even briefly remember the wedding, where you kissed your new wife and felt inside yourself a swell of love and rightness that has been missing from the last twenty-something years of your life.

This last bit will scare the living shit out of you.

You’ve been living the bachelor lifestyle, narrowly evading STDs and relationships like your name is Neo, and you’ve been pretending to like it a lot more than you actually do. This would trash that for roughly two weeks if it was a mistake, and for your entire life if it wasn’t.

And that feeling of warmth and belonging cut right through your drunken haze. She’s probably the right girl for you, and even if she’s not she makes you really, really happy when you’re both too drunk to stand up. You spend a lot of time in that state, so it’s a good bet you’d get along really well.

So here’s what’s going to happen. In about four minutes, she’s going to start coughing really badly. You have two choices.

You can push your new wife onto her side so she’ll vomit away from her body, then quietly egress from the apartment without waking her sister. It won’t be hard, her sister took home like three people last night and got so much nice nice she couldn’t stand up if she wanted to. Then you’ll call her up (she’s labeled “Mystery Wife” in your cell) and tell her that last night was fun, but you don’t want to structure your life around one drunken marriage, however fun it was, and that you’d like an annulment.

She’ll feel awful, she’ll be partially covered in vomit, and her brain will be shot, but at least you won’t have taken sexual advantage of her and you won’t have made a life changing decision based on really poor information.

Option two, you get up and dig through her kitchen until you find a bowl. Then you’ll hold back her hair as shit vomits into the bowl, helping her to keep her weight off the ground so she doesn’t puke all over herself.

She’ll heave for what seems like an eternity, occasionally groaning, until her body stops twitching and she collapses on to your lap. She’ll look like an angel, with her spit up ringed mouth and slight snarl from physical discomfort, but you’ll hold her there for an hour and a half until she looks up at you.

The moment those eyes open you’ll be captivated by her beauty and the only thing you’ll be able to say will be “I think you’re my new wife.” Then you’ll wrap your hand around hers and she’ll just look confused.

“Where the fuck am I?” she’ll say.

You’ll have time to sort out the details on both of these once you make your decision, and we can’t really see where either of these go, but good luck whatever you choose. And congratulations on the New Year! Its already shaping up to be a doozie.