I went to a comic book shop with my son, Quinn, and I saw these little action figures of the Guardians of the Universe. Those are these little blue-skinned alien guys who live on the planet Oa, and they invented the Green Lanterns. Green Lanterns are the ones who fly around the universe like cosmic police or something and fire these green ray-beams from their Green Lantern rings.

 

I like to say "Green Lantern" because, to me, it's just funny to say. It's like he's supposed to be this super-powerful badass superhero and he has the word "lantern" as part of his name. It just seems so arbitrary and random, like who's afraid of a lantern? It's not like, at least folks are afraid of bats and spiders, but nobody's afraid of lanterns. You'd sound just as menacing if you picked three random words from the dictionary and strung them together.

 

In fact, that is exactly what my next superhero name will be.

 

 

I am going to go design a logo for Purple Hambone Dishwasher and paste it at the bottom of this page

 

I'm not sure what kind of powers Purple Hambone Dishwasher would have, but even if he could fly through space and move planets just by thinking about it, it would be hard not to giggle like a four-year-old when he said his name. Which is why I don't understand how come more people don't find it absurd that there is actually a superhero who has the word "lantern" in his name and whose super-power is to shoot green energy from his ring that he uses to form random objects like jeeps and great big energy hands.

 

But whatever.

 

So I buy these little action figures, just impulsively, and we leave the shop and get in my car and as we're driving back home I start to think about how these little blue guys are supposed to live on this planet and be in charge of all these Green Lanterns, and I thought that was kind of cool.

 

And then I wondered if it was really really true, what it would be like. I mean not only if it was true, but if everyone knew that it was true and just accepted it as fact like they always seem to do in comic books, I mean, someone could say "My parents were Magic Warthogs who live at the center of the earth, and I can leak marshmallow paste from my ears that heals the sick and deactivates pipe-bombs from 50 feet away!" and everyone just kind of says, cool.

 

And I thought that if there really were the little blue guys and everyone knew and accepted that they were real, would someone make a religion out of them? Maybe not like think that they were gods, I guess, but more like how Catholics revere the saints and pray for their intercession in Heaven, and they even have Patron Saints for different things, like how you always hear of them having Saint Christopher statues in their cars, because he's supposed to be the Patron Saint of Travelers. Or Drivers. Or whatever.

 

But Quinn said to me, what are you doing? And I told him, the Guardian of the Universe will watch over the car and make sure it doesn't get stolen, and he'll always keep us safe. Quinn thought this was really funny. And so did I.