Is Bradley Sands a Superhero?

                We as a nation occasionally ask ourselves what constitutes a superhero. Do they need more attention than normal citizens? Are they out fighting crime? Should there be a dress code for a superhero? Once confronted with a superhero do we react positively or with some confusion? How do they pick a sidekick or is that an antiquated notion perpetuated by our mainstream media?

                Using all of these criteria, we can determine Bradley Sands is indeed a superhero. He needs our attention to support his day job of writing. During the night he fights evildoers using his regular name. Looking at how he dresses, he wears a mean beard, the kind of beard you wouldn’t want to bump into in a dark alley late at night. Confusion seems to be the only way to approach what he does. To sweeten the package he has a side-kick, a hand puppet polar bear who chews on the face of crime.

                His secrecy makes it impossible to judge his crime fighting skills. Since I don’t know much about law-enforcement, I’ll assume he does an adequate job and give him a 7.2 for his record on crime fighting. I don’t want to give him too high of a score because I want him to keep on striving to make the world a better place from his secret location of Boulder, Colorado.

                I can go over some of his work. At least the stuff I was able to find online. He writes Bizarro books, meaning surreal, strange, other-worldly and primarily funny. One of his little shorts (entitled “Work for Megacorp and let Megacorp work for you”) appeared recently on Pangur Ban Party, an online literary magazine curated by the graceful and amiable DJ Berndt. 

                You’ll be inspired to work for Megacorp after reading of these exploits. Each chapter dives a little more deeply into the inner workings of that mysterious corporation. I like the heart this story has in spite of its absurdest leanings. Among some of the stranger things are blow-up dolls, reproduction in the workplace, and awkward office conversation. But the part I adore is how the central character “Dad” is invulnerable to these office problems. He’s needed somewhere, cared about outside of the office and has an outside emotional attachment to people. This saves him.

The story resonates with me as I’ve seen both examples: of those so addicted to work they watch their personal lives fall apart, and the flipside of this trend: people who care just enough about work to have energy for those truly worth caring about. Representing time as this thing stretched out into infinity interests me. Often work appears to float away, whittling the days into nothing, where departures of employees and arrivals are the only things keeping things in a slight flux. No windows are just icing on the cake, as more corporations do this as a way of getting people to work harder. Work hard enough and you can be exposed to daylight. 

                For writing something refreshingly honest about work I think yes, Bradley Sands is a superhero.