Here’s a piece of hard-earned wisdom: pre-Islamic spirits of the Arabic peninsula whose portfolio includes the ability to re-write reality don’t appreciate cleverness.

Oh, sure, they CLAIM to appreciate it. But not really. Especially when the purveyor of said cleverness is drunk off his gourd. I think it’s an ego thing; after umpteen millennia of being trapped inside the ancient equivalent of a Bic lighter, they’re a mite resentful towards the human race as a whole. And with resentment comes a feeling of superiority. Which makes no sense, ‘cuz hey: you’re in the magic jar and I’m not, but it’s a very human reaction.

Maybe he was just pissed at me and Marv drinking Everclear out of his vessel; I dunno.

Marv was the one that came up with the wishes, though; said Derek told him about it after reading the Monkey’s Paw. Smart kid, I guess, in a nerdy “I can bend these rules until they break” sort of way. Done it my way, I’d probably have just wished for winning lottery numbers, or something. Now, thanks to that little perv, our night of drunken debauchery resulted in the complete destruction of my entire life.

Did I mention that I hate nerds?

Oh, don’t look at me like that.

I’m fine with people who’re smart and like science; take my best friend Marv’s as Exhibit A. Keeps talking about going back to school to finish up his PhD in molecular biology, though between you, me, and this bottle of ass-tastic diet Cola, I don’t think he’s ever gonna do it. Likes banging his wife and cranking out kids too much to ever give THAT up. No, I’m talking about passive-aggressive dorks who don’t want to learn social skills, and get themselves beat up because of it.

Like Derek.

You want to know how I got A’s in school? I studied. Hard. Yeah, I didn’t take all the really tough classes, but I knew what I could do and I did that as best I could. I got that from Coach, and dammed if it didn’t work off the field as it did on. That was Marv’s joke back in the day, though: that I was gonna pass him by taking PE and choir, compared to his Honors English and AP Chemistry. He likes science, but he knew how to crack a joke, y’know?

You know what I told him, the last time he complained about it? “If you don’t want to be stuffed in a locker, stop being a *&%! and mouthing off to people that’ll do things like that to ya.” Harsh? You don’t know Derek. If he’s so smart, he should be able to figure out how not to be a social reject. Jeez, Marv and Julia’ve bent over backwards to get him into advanced programs and special schools. He’s not abused. He’s not ignored. He’s just a pretentious BS artist who’s got his parents worried he’s going to climb a bell tower one of these days.

He’s not even a real nutjob – I can see one of those guys, and he ain’t it. Some of the bozos back in the day would have been diagnosed with Asperger’s nowadays, and it wouldn’t have been wrong – they actually had brain issues, though we didn’t have a name for it back then. Course, being high school kids, we didn’t know what to do about it; we just knew they couldn’t figure some stuff out. Yeah, we’d josh around with ‘em a bit, but never too much. Derek, ignoring what his dad says, ain’t that. I’ve seen the eyes; they’re too sharp for someone who doesn’t know what’s going on. His sisters know, too; he’s got them in trouble too many times not to have his parents figured out.

Well, so I wasn’t welcome back at la Casa de Selone after that. Diane and Stacy got a kick out of it, though. I could see them giggling behind the door. Still, it took me a ways to get Marv to come drinking with me again; even still, I think he’s projecting a bit more than usual. His kid ain’t him, and he’s not his dad. Really, has he ever slapped Derek, other than that one time? (And you know how long it took me to get him over THAT one? It was an ACCIDENT. Even the cops said so. But no, Marv had to freak out and go on a bender.)

But anyway – three months of groveling, and I finally get my friend back; had to go antiquing with the honey and find some piece o’ crap Arabian lamp as an “I’m sorry for being a dumb moron and telling you the truth about your asshat of a son” peace offering. And that's when I learned not to make wishes thought up by pretentious teenaged passive-aggressive BS artists against a djinn who’s already pissed you were drinking out of his lamp. They’ll just mess you up. Which brings us to the present.

They (whoever ‘they’ are) say that one of the most common complaints teenagers have is that no one listens to them. I can confirm that one. Of course, I’ve got a jinni whacking everyone I talk to with a mystical Stupid Stick, so maybe it’s not the best comparison.

No, really. Try telling Social Services that you’re not who the paperwork says you are. Cynical jokes about government employees aside, most of them try to do their jobs. Most would actually look into the evidence presented, if only in the “wow, why does this kid know the bank account numbers of a deceased 43-year old accountant from Ohio?” sense.

You’d think that most police officers would probably try to find out why a 16-year old kid was sitting in the burning wreckage of a house, holding a dead woman old enough to be his mom in her arms, crying his eyes out. Nah, he must be some random passerby, right? Probably a runaway or something, looting the house. Good thing we caught him!

Or the Child Welfare Services worker that got assigned my case. Yeah, must be a runaway. Ignore those nice clothes that he’s wearing, or the shell-shocked look, or all those people he’s telling you to contact, or all those things he’s telling you about Laura. He’s making it up. All kids make stuff up when they’re in trouble, right?

Or the court-ordered psychologist, who took one look at me, nodded his head, and signed the paperwork that said ‘he’s just a disturbed runaway; give him some medication, and shove him out the door.” Do you know how hard it is to regurgitate anti-psychotic medication on a regular basis? Well, actually, it’s pretty easy, given sufficient motivation.

At this point, I really can’t tell if it’s mind control, or if the magic is putting just the right people in my life to make a complete SNAFU of the entire situation. I’m actually hoping for the 2nd one, actually; otherwise, perfectly ordinary civil servants are getting mind-raped into doing the jinni’s dirty work. But after two weeks of being in the tender mercies of The System, here I am.

Foster Care.

Yeah, I know what you’re thinking. Most of those horror stories you hear about adoption – doing it just for the check, abandoning the kid and lying to the Social Services contact - are just that: stories. Laura and I looked into it, after the second miscarriage. Lemme tell you, we got out of that idea fast. Being a foster parent ain’t for the weak, and you don’t do it for the money. Most of the kids in the system aren’t what you call low-maintenance. The beautiful geniuses whose parents die in car accidents get taken in by neighbors or relatives. No, the rest are broken: systematically neglected and abused their entire lives. Most of them have a genetic predisposition towards addictive behavior and insanity, and as a result have the social skills and coping mechanisms of a wild hyena.

There is no magic cure for this: no hug in the night and cookies before bedtime will cure three years of being raped by your mom’s pusher/pimp/boyfriend. If you can get them young, they have a chance: the neural pathways that control behavior can be redirected, their behaviors altered. Yeah, they probably won’t be the brightest bulbs in the candelabra, but at least they aren’t psychotic whack-jobs, like their parents were. But anyone older than twelve? Their behaviors have already been set – unless they can claw their way out of that black hole, they’re doomed to another generation of abuse, neglect, and addiction.

So this is a long way of me saying that my soon-to-be foster family is one of three things: complete saints who are going into this eyes-open, who know the score and are STILL willing to take a 16-year old in, sight-unseen; they’re utter novices with their heart in the right place but who have no clue; or they’re the aforementioned horror story, taking kids in only for the Social Services check. And to be honest, that last one is extremely unlikely; according to Becky (sorry, Ms. Bennet – she’s young enough to be my eldest.), they’re actually fairly well-off. I’m hoping for “nice but clueless”, actually. My actual theory is another unconscious compulsion by Iziz. Just another thing I’m putting on my list of “actions that justify casting the djinn into the Hell of Me %$#!ing You Up”. But if they’re experienced and successful “first line of defense” foster parents? I’m screwed.

Why? Because successful foster parents are hardcases: they’re strong, firm authority figures who set boundaries and don’t let you get away with anything. And if the universe is conspiring to prevent me from actually TELLING anyone what really happened, I’m stuck being a 16-year-old ‘troubled teen’ shipped in from out-of-state.

Fear leads to anger, and anger leads to hate. Yeah, Lucas was onto something, but it wasn’t just said by a puppet with Frank Oz’s hand up its ass.

It’s what happens when someone gets put into The System. It’s how they deal. They come out of a crap-tacular home life, a big portion of which is chaos: you never know how the adults are gonna act. So, you’re pretty much in a state of hyper-aware fight-or-flight. That’s the fear. And people, even little kids, don’t like to feel afraid. And so they get angry at the thing making them afraid. But they can’t show their anger, at least not to their parents. So it comes out in other ways; acting up at school, beating up their siblings, whatever. But that’s not enough. Anger leads to hate: hating their parents for doing this, hating the teachers for not getting them out, that kinda stuff.

Now: put ‘em in a stable foster care. Do they get rid of the fear? No. That kind of fear is a survival skill: it’s been ingrained since they were born. Nah, what happens is that, now that they don’t need to be hide their fear, they can let loose all that anger and hate that they have built up inside. And of course, because they don’t know how to cope with their fear and anger, they come across like the hyenas I was talkin’ about earlier. That’s why being a foster parent sucks. You have to deal with all the hate that a 6 year-old son of a welfare single mother drug addict can spit at you. And lemme tell ya: it’s a lot.

Why am I saying all this? I mean, I’m not dumb. Before all this started, yeah. Just average. But I had the guts to stick with it, to know myself. Now? I’m a low-rent Reed frickin’ Richards. Which, as a consequence, means me an’ That &%$! need to analyze the whole deal. Which brings us back to Frank Oz’s puppet fetish.

I’m way past anger, and well into the burning hatred stage. Oh, it’s not from the foster system or my parents or any of that crap, but no one’s going to be able to tell the difference. I made a wish, and I got my family killed – yeah, it’s like the original. Power and Responsibility, blah-blah-blah. I know all about coping, or not coping. That’s what this is all about - the original turned the hate of his big mistake; it ate up at him, but he got it out and did something good with his life.

I don’t know if I’m that guy.

*WHACK* "Kid...don't be a %$#!"

I hate geeks.

Yeah, I said so before, but I’d just like to emphasize the point.

Of particular irritation is the inability to not talk about whatever it is they’ve re-filed their basic social niceties under. Star Trek, video games, football, whatever - fun’s fun, but I’d like to talk about something besides your kink, ‘kay?

I bring this up because I’ve got one inside my head.

I don’t even know what polyurethane IS, but I know this cup holder is made of it. And I’m really not interested in the process for making tempered glass, but apparently he feels the need to inform me of it.

We’ve gotten close. I’ve named him “That %$#!”.

Always there, giving me useless information about crap I don’t give a damn about. Structural integrity diagrams, Xeno-botany, automotive physics (ok, that one was kinda interesting), statistical patterns in real estate. Anything and everything that I look at, he’s there with a useless piece of trivia.

And. He. Will. Not. Shut. The. Hell. Up.

Ever.

Yeah, yeah yeah. The powers are nice; Buick throwing gives me a hard-on, and I could understudy one of them Cirque du Sol guys. La-de-frickin’-da. The whole danger sense thing is kind of like getting a nail shoved through your scrotum, though. But if that were all, I’d be ecstatic; go join up with Sanction, or something. It’s the other part that’s the thing. Yeah, I was drunk. Yeah, I got the powers. But I also got the life, OF THE WRONG HERO.

I can’t get out of it: the adoption, the melodrama, the angst. Sure, the first couple of seasons are going to be a breeze – most of the ‘villains’ are nothing but whiny teenagers with low-level uber powers. That I could handle - I'm not even vulnerable to whatever substitutes for kryptonite around here, lame-ass excuse of a plot device to create tension that it was. But I've got three words for you that should send both you and me cryin' to momma:

General Frickin' Zod.

Or else his magical thematic analog. Or whatever Iziz dreams up for it. To say nothing of what’s going to happen to my personal life. I was married for 25 years, fer God’s sake. Now I’m supposed to moon over my self-absorbed neighbor and ultimately shack up with an abusive shrew of a reporter who’s young enough to be my daughter? Nuh-uh.

Have I mentioned that my life sucks?

What I look like? I look like a geek on bovine growth hormones, is what I look like. Six foot something, lanky, no fat anywhere that ain't muscle that I can tell. Trenchcoat, jeans, the works. The kid I see in the mirror everyday looks like he's a half-cappuccino away from pulling a Columbine. And it's not like I can get laid to deal with it, either.