Pictured: Joe Rogan getting incinerated by Elon Musk on his own podcast.

I spend a lot of free time lately reading through comic books like one of those pasty middle school indoor kids who would rather count data bits and megabytes than get some fresh air and throw a ball or beat up the kid with sickle cell anemia by the swings. Longtime readers of TWAS aka TomWritesAboutStuff aka Tom Writes About Stuff aka Another Useless Website will know this hobby is brand new. I hated comic books and superheroes for decades because they were, and still are, dumb as shit! But I’m fascinated by them now, and much of my ENRAPTURED ENJOYMENT comes from the special skills and powers each caped crusader has! Captain America throws his shield around like a spaz. Spider-Man can crawl on walls and eat bugs. Iron Man gets drunk and eats bugs. Batman wears a giant belt with things in it. Superman can cook bugs with his eyeballs. Wolverine gets drunk and throws his claws around like a spaz. So many superheroes, so many specialties!

Naturally, like many of you who also read comic books (e.g. none of you, not a single one), I’m a man in my mid-30s who will still occasionally daydream about the kind of superpowers I would have if I were able to pick anything. They say that what you desire says a lot about you. For example, if you pick flying, that tells you that you desire the ability to travel and see exotic, faraway places in your own convenience. If you pick invisibility, that tells the world that you want to be a pervert who enters high school locker rooms so you can check out jailbait dicks and balls. And so on and so forth.

Alex Mack was a teenage girl who could strike fear into her enemies by threatening them with 40,000 volts of electricity from her fingertips!

If anyone has seen the Nickelodeon show The Secret World of Alex Mack, then you already know the premise! For the other eight billion of you, the show is about a teenage girl who gets nuclear waste dumped on her and she develops the power to zap things with her fingers, hover objects in the air, and turn into a glistening puddle of silver goo. These powers are pretty stupid, but I was seven years old at the time and I wanted nothing more than to be Alex Mack. I spent a lot of time daydreaming about waking up one day with the ability to fly, or eat pizza whenever I wanted, or play video games without my parents hollering at me to goddamned stop. These powers are pretty stupid too, but the point is that I wanted to do something cool besides juggle and/or split the atom on my kickass Yomega Raider yo-yo! I wanted to fuckin’ float around town or something.

I had given this a lot of thought over the years and have settled on one power and one power only. The power for me. The power that tells the world that I’m terrified to die, but I’m also terrified to live forever, and I want to find a happy medium.

I want the ability to stop time. It’s so simple and perfect, so very useful, but not without its cons. I’ve developed an extensive system of laws and rules around stopping time to prevent too much world-breaking manipulation, which I’m going to spend the remainder of this post nauseatingly picking apart in great detail. Feel free to skip all this and move onto Fox News or MassiveBeltBuckles.com or whatever else my typical reader base is into. I wouldn’t know! It’s your life, not mine!

Axiom #1 – Everything Reverts to Its Original State Once Time Starts Again

This is the single most important rule of stopping time. Nothing that physically happens during the time-stop remains in reality afterward. Do you want to gorge yourself on seventeen bags of French fries? Great! The French fries are out of your stomach and still in the bag once you start time up again. Want to smash your greatest enemy in the face with a tire iron, beating his head to an unrecognizable bloody pulp? Fantastic! He won’t have a scratch on him afterward. Are you tired and want to grab a time-stopped nap? Hell yeah! You’ll be exactly as tired as you were before you paused that clock. Heck, do you want to make some progress on Elden Ring? Sorry. All that time spent will amount to nothing once your save reverts back to the pre-time stopped state.

Godspeed, lady! Wrangle yourself a minute hand!

That doesn’t mean you can’t still have a little fun! Everything you do during your adventure will remain in your memories once you’re finished. You may not be able to write that book, or build any muscle, or knit that sweater, but you can binge on the entire 440+ episode run of NCIS! You can watch 45,000 horror movies! You can read an entire library of books! You can walk to Arizona and check out the Grand Canyon! You can master juggling! You can learn everything there is to know about calculus or string theory or Lou Diamond Phillips.

Unfortunately, if we have to stick to these rules, there are also naturally some extremely unseemly things you can also do if your personality aligns with chaotic evil. Let’s just say it has something to do with all the people frozen in time who are unable to defend themselves. With great power comes great responsibility, and if you want to be a supervillain about it then you are going to be a supervillain about it. You will face no consequences, your victims will never actually be hurt, your victims will never actually be aware, and you’ll get off scot free.

Maybe.

Axiom #2 – You Can Die

Think of it this way: the world becomes yours if you stop time. Any aging that occurs during the time-stop gets reverted. Any changes you make to your environment reverts to status quo. If you fall off a mountain, any injuries you sustain can be reversed if you have enough faculties to hit that off switch. If you fall off a mountain and you die during a time-stop, that’s it. You are dead. You yourself are unable to hit the off switch, and nobody can do it for you.

Scary stuff right? It depends on how you think about it. Once you’re dead, you won’t even know or care. If you die during a time-stop, the entire universe will be too time-stopped to even know or care. On the other hand, damn, you could be responsible for single-handedly destroying all of existence in the multiverse. But who will know? Certainly not you. So don’t worry about it!

Axiom #3 – Other People May Have This Power

Of course, Time Sickness is a topic for another day.

And you’ll never, ever even know for sure. Someone could tell you they just stopped time and beat your head into a bloody pulp with a tire iron! How would you believe them? You’d have to take their word for it? That would be preposterous!

Of course, you could get an inkling. Give a guy an 1100-page book and he could break it down for you in two seconds. He could tell you about every bulbous, misshapen skin defect on your penis. But maybe you showed him your penis a minute ago and you just forgot?? Hmm, this one isn’t thought through very well.

But the axiom stands. Other people may have this power, and you could be time-stopped every other nanosecond for the rest of your existence. It could be happening right now! Now there’s a thought experiment for ya.

I certainly don’t want to kill or rape people, but man do I want to burn through a Wheel of Time book without worrying about using up my precious life minutes. I want to be able to watch a season of The Shield without feeling like I’m wasting my time doing stupid shit.

In short, I want to live longer on my own terms! Don’t we all. This will be a reality for me some day, and I’d hit the science lab and read up on inter-dimensional wormhole manipulation and time dilation quantum physics…

…I just, uh…

…I just don’t have time.