#simon ritter

East meets West Classic Asian-Oriental garb at the Phoenix Festival on July 20, 1997

A ficlet of my Spidersona not paying attention. Based on this post.

Being Spiderman has a lot of things that make it really hard to be Spiderman.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s great. I love my job. I love the fact that I’m Spiderman. Sometimes, when I’m having a depressive episode, I’ll start counting the good things in my life, and whenever I do, I always end up saying “I’m Spiderman” somewhere in the list.

But there are things about being superhuman that they don’t tell you. You don’t learn about it in school. You don’t get a pamphlet. There’s no support group, or trainee program, or “How-To” guide I’m aware of. Things like life-threatening danger and massive responsibility? You expect those. It comes with the superhero territory. Every now and then, though, you get things that you just wouldn’t think about.

One of these things happened on my way home from school. I was walking by the Greek place on Hoyt Street and - I’ll be the first to admit this - I wasn’t really paying attention. (In my defense, Salma was dragging Abraham on her Chirp account and I wasn’t about to miss out on the drama.) Normally, this kind of thing isn’t a problem. But when I moved out of the way of some construction, I ended up ducking into an alley and forgetting to duck out. That’s when I hit the wall of the yoga studio.

Except I didn’t quite hit the wall.

When I stepped forward, some stupid Spidey-instinct kicked in and I stepped up onto the wall.

For half a second, I froze while I registered that something wasn’t right and my brain scrambled to process the information.

I was walking, I approached the wall, I stepped onto it, I stuck to it, gravity started to pull on me from my back instead of the bottoms of my feet, I...

Oh, shit.

I stuck to the wall.

In public.

Without the costume.

I panicked and unstuck myself, landing awkwardly on the cement. I looked around, making sure absolutely no one had seen me. The construction workers were too busy, right? They couldn’t have seen it happen. Was anyone walking next to me?

A quick scan told me that no, there wasn’t anybody walking near me (a Brooklyn miracle if there ever was one), and yes, the construction workers were all too focused to have seen my slip-up.

I breathed a sigh of relief and a quick prayer of thanks before continuing on, a little shaken.