So for the last three or four weeks, I’ve come to the growing suspicion that my latent mutant ability (did you know that being left-handed is a mutation?  Because being left-handed is totally a mutation) has finally begun to surface.  The mutant power? The ability to break every single zipper I touch.

Seriously.  Wait, where are you going?  Sit back down.

In the last three weeks I’ve broken no less than four zippers.  I broke the main zipper on my Bag of Holding (R.I.P., Bag of Holding; you held all my stuff,) I broke two zippers on my wife’s duffel bags, and finally I broke the zipper on my lunchbox, all without even doing anything out of the ordinary.  One second, working zipper, next second, zipper hopelessly broken.

I imagine that somewhere, in the dim distant future, there will be a roving band of survivors led by Mel Gibson who are trying desperately to escape from a one-eyed warlord’s stronghold, only to come across the final barrier: a chain-link fence made entirely of zippers.  The plucky young kids will look to Mel Gibson and he’ll run his hand (and his other chainsaw hand) through his graying hair in desperation.  Just as all seems lost, the grizzled old man that has tagged along with them and improbably not been killed during the entire adventure will shuffle his way forward, his beard foaming over his sunken chest like dirty dishwater.

“Wait,” he’ll croak in an ancient, trembling voice, “I think I can help.”

As everyone watches, wide-eyed, the old man lifts a palsied hand and touches the fence, which immediately is reduced to its constituent atoms and falls to radioactive dust, blowing away in the wind.  Mel Gibson’s eyes widen even farther, like they did in Mad Max when he saw his busted-up buddy (but seriously, that bug-eyed thing was creepy, am I right?) and he’ll look at me and say, “You’re the Gormally, aren’t you?”

But my powers, having burned themselves out in that brilliant flare, have drained me, too, and I smile once before turning to ash and drifting away.

Mel Gibson and the children escape while the one-eyed warlord’s pants fall around his ankles, preventing him from continuing his chase of the heroes.  “What the hell?” he yells in fury, “What just happened to my zipper?!”