When there is no one else to turn to Call for Super Chicken!
(puk, puk, puk, puk) Call for Super Chicken!
(puk ack!)
Super Chicken theme song, by Stan Worth and Sheldon Allman
I am not faster than a speeding bullet or more powerful than a locomotive. I can’t leap tall buildings in a single bound, change the course of mighty rivers, or bend steel with my bare hands.
I’m also not a web-slinger or a hammer-bringer, and I can’t breathe underwater. I don’t even have any of Super Chicken’s Super Sauce.
But that doesn’t mean I’m someone you can trifle with, because I, too, have a superpower.
I, too, have an alter ego I assume in my never-ending battle for truth, justice and the American way. And that alter ego is armed with all sorts of destructive weapons. I am Writerman — the first and the last, the beginning and the end.
But I only become Writerman when my deadline is imminent.
My story began many years ago when I made myself a bowl of organic alphabet soup for lunch and decided it would be cute to have Yummy Dino Buddies alphabet-shaped chicken nuggets at the same time.
I would have made a word salad to go with it, but I didn’t get the recipe from VP Kamala Harris.
The overconsumption of letters caused mutations in T. Michael Stone at the cellular level, transforming me into a creature dreaded by some English teachers and most editors.
My transformation works a bit like the Incredible Hulk’s. My blue eyes turn green, my pecs and biceps become increasingly defined, and I have to go buy another shirt.
After I mutated for the very first time and became Writerman, I decided to send a résumé to a newspaper. After all, Clark Kent and Peter Parker were newspapermen, were they not?
Simply put, Spider-Man was bitten by a radioactive spider and became Spider-Man. I ate too many letters made of pasta and the flesh of dead birds and became Writerman. (I thought about calling myself Letterman, but I felt that would confuse people.)
Lest you think Writerman sounds like some timid fellow sitting at a desk wearing Coke-bottle glasses, let me disabuse you of that notion right away.
Once my mutation into Writerman is complete, I have been described by other newspaper writers as resembling Spider-Man’s nemesis, Dr. Octopus.
Unlike Doc Ock, who does most of his damage with four steel arms, I have not just four but all eight parts of speech to assault you with.
Once I have exhausted all the verbs, nouns, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions and conjunctions, I will hit you with interjections the likes of which you have never heard or read, some of which might be considered quite obscene.
But my arsenal is more than just individual words. I can attack with my independent clauses or, if necessary, my subordinate clauses.
But whenever you have a superhero around, he tends to attract archvillains. Batman had no sooner arrived in Gotham City than the Joker, the Riddler, the Penguin, Catwoman, Mr. Freeze, Poison Ivy and Onomatopoeia followed him there. (Ono is now a protagonist and has taught me how to use fun words like vroom, oink, moo, thud and wham.)
I am no different from Batman. I have battled monstrosities like Taw Tolo G. and Cleo Shea for years. The evil temptress Play Jar Izem once almost convinced me to steal from another writer, but my pal Att Ribution stepped in and saved the day.
So far, my most formidable opponent has been a language maven from the Far East known as Punk Chu Asian. He scolds me about commas and sentence length, but he has his rules and I have mine.
Our arguments generally conclude with me reminding him of his greatest humiliation at the hands of James Joyce, who once wrote a 4,000-word sentence without using any of Punk Chu Asian’s rules.
But the most frightening adversary of all is the newest one, proliferating exponentially as data centers pop up everywhere: artificial intelligence, including ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini.
Perhaps the future belongs not to writers who have struggled to master the craft, but to indifferent machines.
Selah.