Friday, September 21, 2012

Worst. Super Power. Ever.

For years now I’ve maintained that I am in possession of a very particular* – if a bit erratic – super power.
As the title of the post implies, it’s not an especially good or useful super power.  As the title also implies, it’s related to The Simpsons.

Essentially, I have premonitions predicting what episode of the long-running series will be airing, either in syndications or as reruns during its regular timeslot.
These premonitions take the form of a scene or quote from a particular episode popping into my head at some random point.  I will then find that the next time I see a rerun or syndicated episode, it will, pretty much without fail, be the episode I had been thinking about.
Given how often scenes and quotes from the series run through my head, it’s not always immediately obvious which one is the premonition, so I can’t say, authoritatively, “That’s the episode that will be on when next I tune in.”
However, if I bothered to think about it a bit more, I would realize that elements of one episode in particular will be more prominent in some fashion – for example, it might be something from a mostly unremarkable or less-than memorable episode – or more repetitive and insistent.
I haven’t had many demonstrations of my power of late, simply because I haven’t been watching the syndicated episodes of the show very often, as I’m typically either watching or doing something else when they’re on.
Still, I did have a particularly uncanny instance of it earlier this evening.
A few years ago there was an episode in which the Smothers Brothers made a guest appearance as themselves (IMDb tells me it was Season 21, Episode 8, “O Brother, Where Bart Thou?”), and there’s an extended voiceover during the end credits featuring an exchange between the Brothers and Homer, and for the past week that bit has been stuck on repeat in my head.
Earlier tonight, after finishing watching some recorded programming on my DVR, I changed the channel and was greeted with That.  Fucking.  Credits.  Sequence.
Yes, I do understand that it’s not really a super power (useless or not), and that given the sheer amount of time my brain spends thinking about The Simpsons, the odds pretty much guarantee that I’ll think about an episode that will just happen to be on, but still…fucking uncanny.
I’d promise to only use my power for good, but what possible good could be performed with it?  Hell, I couldn’t even use it for evil if I wanted to.
So I guess my maxim can be, “With useless power comes…well, nothing, really.”

*I used to have another power that was even more specific, and actually even more useless.  When I still had my Kia Rio – actually, it was true for both of the Rios I used to have – I had the ability to make the “Check Engine” light come on by merely thinking, “Huh, the ‘Check Engine’ light hasn’t come back on in a while.”

3 comments:

Merlin T Wizard said...

Yeah, that's even more useless than Meg's ability to grow her fingernails really long.

"Hey! Did that break the skin? No? Still, ow."

Jon Maki said...

Yeah, if I could turn myself into Mrs. Garrett's giant rack, then I'd be on to something.

anarchist said...

Hi,

Apologies for the off-topic comment, but I couldn't find a contact email for you.

I recently published the first chapter of my story The Case of the Syphilitic Sister on the new JukePop Serials website.

The Case of the Syphilitic Sister is a detective / superhero story set in a two-fisted version of the 1930s.

The blurb is as follows: With an innocent girl dead, America's finest superheroic detective agency must find and destroy a sinister cult!

I was wondering if you'd be interested in mentioning it on your blog.

You can read the first chapter (with more to come) here:

http://www.jukepopserials.com/home/read/13

I'm also happy to do interviews, guest posts, or giveaways. If you'd like to contact me, my email is news@apolitical.info

Yours,
James.