Doug sat at the bar drowning his sorrows — he’d had a bad day. First, his wife left him for a phys-ed teacher and he found his car had been keyed in the middle of the night. When he arrived at work, he was told his job had been made redundant and he was no longer needed. To top it all off, his doctor’s office called with his test results; Doug had herpes. Probably from the phys-ed teacher.

And so Doug was pounding shots of tequila between sobs. A man sitting at the other end of the bar watched him intently for a few minutes before weaving his way carefully to Doug’s stool.

“Buddy, you look like you’re having a hell of a day,” he slurred.

“You don’t know the half of it,” Doug replied, sniffling.

“Let me cheer you up,” the man said. “I want to show you something.”

The drunk man led Doug over to a window and pointed to the alley four floors below. He explained that the way the buildings were built allowed a thermal to rush up the alley whenever a subway train went by underground. This thermal, the man insisted, was so powerful that it would hold a man in the air and gently lower him to the ground as it dissipated.

“So basically, you’d feel like you were flying,” the man finished.

Doug expressed his disbelief and the man said he’d prove it. He waited until a train rumbled by and leaped out the window. Unbelievably, the man hovered serenely just outside the window before floating slowly toward the ground. As he regained his footing, he looked up at Doug and yelled, “Now you try it!”

Doug waited a few minutes until he could hear a train. He climbed up onto the window sill, took a deep breath, jumped… and plummeted to his death on the concrete below, screaming all the way.

A waitress happened to be walking by and poked her head out the window only to see the drunk man standing over Doug’s spattered remains, giggling to himself. She grimaced and called down to him, “Superman, you are SUCH a prick when you’re drinking.”

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