Looking For Mr. Mxyzptlk

After a promising early childhood I became a surprisingly low-achieving adolescent. Some child development experts in those days blamed it on comic books. In fact, when I was very young a subcommittee of The Senate Judiciary Committee investigating causes of juvenile delinquency convened televised hearings scapegoating the comic book industry. They may have been right.

Things only got worse. The coming-of-age stage of my life had a period I've heard armchair psychologists refer to as "the lost weekend." Mine comprised the first two decades of my adult life. The epiphany, albeit slow in arriving, eventually dawned on me. There was no shame in (and maybe even some advantage to) acquiring a permanent address and some visible means of support.

So, I got a job. In fits and starts I took a wife. We bought a house. We made a home. We raised a family. We worked hard. We kept our yard nice, sort of. We paid our taxes. We saved our money. Some of it.

At the risk of being completely honest, let me tell you this: I am not ashamed to admit that I've never been particularly fond of working. Indeed, there are any number of endeavors that I rank above labor on my preference list. I am not lazy but I am fully capable of slothful behavior when the opportunity is presented. I loved it when John Lennon said, "I'm the kind of bloke who can get up in the morning and start doing nothing right away." Of course, he already had some money in the bank by the time he was entertaining us with that quip.

While it is probably not advisable to reveal too much of the afforementioned during a job interview, most of you probably won't have to probe too deeply into the core of your own souls before being forced to admit that my confessed character traits are not all that exceptional.

Now and again--usually while perusing dog-eared Reader's Digest magazines in the dentist's waiting room--we come across the occasional and always uplifting story about some rare bird who, at an advanced age, achieves remarkable heights. You know what I'm talking about. A 58-year old janitor goes to college and becomes a practicing urologist. A great-grandmother who never made it beyond the eighth grade writes a memoir that ends up on The New York Times bestseller list for forty-six weeks, sells the movie rights, and spends the rest of her years in a lovely cottage somewhere in Provence where she has a torrid affair with a studly farmer who owns a famous truffle-hunting pig. Or Colonel Sanders goes from being a steamboat pilot to an insurance salesman to a fry cook and at age sixty-five uses $105 from his first Social Security check to start a chain of chicken stands that make him rich beyond his wildest dreams.

Again, I make clean breast of (pun intended) this probably-universal truth. These late-in-life rags to riches tales hold great appeal for me. I cling to them for secret hope even when I suspect, deep down, I'll be doing well to eke out a paltry existence on the wages of a Wal-Mart Greeter in my Golden Years. And only then if by some fat chance I am able to foist myself off on some gullible rube in the human resource office as a "people person."

The above disclosure is made more painful by the fact that I was this close to the American Dream. Near the end of the mortgage. A loving wife. One grown child finished with college and doing well. Another in college and doing well. One almost grown still at home and doing well. Nest egg building up a little. A softening mid-section but generally good health. A few good years left to work and save. A nice little boat with a dependable Evinrude. Plenty of fishing gear. Almost three dozen good duck decoys. Everything, really.

And then, just as we finally rid ourselves of an oppressive Christian Taliban regime in The White House we find out that their years of bungling coupled with the egregious body of work put forth by some five hundred or so political geniuses over on Capitol Hill have left our financial institutions in the hands of a powerful criminal class who have so effectively corrupted and/or duped said glad-handing baby-smoochers that the new president can't find enough honest public servants in the whole damn country to fill a dozen cabinet posts!

The stock market has gone bust. Banks are failing. General Motors is broke. Unemployment is rocketing into space while home values flame out during reentry. Foreclosures and bankruptcies are omnipresent. 401Ks have been invested in chain letters. Cripes, you guys. Don't get me started but THE BASTARDS ARE EVERYWHERE.

The upshot of all this is that things may be even tougher than I thought. My hopes of a late in life success story are fading fast. On top of that, I just found out you have to buy a ticket to win the lottery and even that doesn't really improve your chances much.

I am mad as hell and I'm probably going to take it some more. But not lying down. Starting today I am making new plans and setting new goals.

I am going to rekindle the dying embers of my promising youth. I am looking for my old comic books. I am going to seriously research and perhaps replicate the dastardly deeds of the archrivals of Superman and Batman and the whole frickin' Justice League of America: Lex Luthor, Brainiac, The Penguin, The Joker, Mr. Mxyzptlk (Pictured above. My brother pronounced this as Mr. Mittzleplitz but I'm not sure if that's right).

For alas, I am pretty well convinced that, having exhausted all honest means, the only hope of a simple, comfortable retirement lies in first achieving total galactic domination, a lofty goal for a middle-aged* man. I'm going to pick myself up and dust myself off and get started right away. Well, as soon as I get done bidding for crankbaits on eBay.





(*) Assumes the author lives to be 113.