More in the ever-entertaining ‘regular-folks-in-superhero-costumes-performing-mundane-tasks’ idiom, this time from photographer Gregg Segal:

There are more on Gregg’s website, and for other posts documenting our love for this milieu, check out our previous encounters with a down-on-his luck Captain America, and various sci-fi characters in domestic settings.

My friend David snapped this awesome photo of a zombie-fied Incredible Hulk guarding some bikes in Greenpoint.

Zombifying any pop icon makes it it exponentially cooler. It’s true. Have a look at this zombiefied Elvis karaoke robot and see if I’m not right.

My glasses are broken and it’s time to get new ones.

I don’t give things up very easily — never really bought into the “get the next and newest” craze that’s swept the nation. I use things ’til I just can’t anymore, and also have the unfortunate habit of developing an emotional attachment to inanimate objects.

My glasses have been there for me, right there on my face for three years, and I’ve seen a lot with them. And they were pretty tough, too. I only take them off when I’m sleeping or showering.

I was hiking to Uluwatu, a temple in Bali located on the edge of a cliff high above the ocean when a monkey leapt from the trees and ran laps around my face and shoulders. He knocked my glasses off and onto the crumbling, moss-covered pathway. They teetered over the edge, flirting with a dive down into the churning blue ocean as I threw the monkey deep into the forest like a furry soccer ball. I put them back on, unharmed.

I swam with stingrays in the cloudy surf where the Southern and Indian Oceans collide, my glasses folded carefully against my palm with one stiff, cramping thumb.

I used that same thumb to hold the same glasses against my palm when leaping from a giant boulder into a deliciously freezing swimming hole in the mountains near West Virginia, jamming the glasses back onto my face as I dog-paddled to the rocky shore. I gulped hot, humid air through suddenly stiff white lips, smelling trees, tobacco and Budweiser as my body heat fogged my newly cooled lenses.

I biked 30 miles each way to and from work for a while. While the rest of co-workers saw traffic jams and Support The Troops stickers on the back of SUVs in Ashburn traffic, I saw hawks, deer and the occasional blacksnake.

I was in the hot room at the Russian-Turkish Baths last March — it was 180 degrees in there and the metal arms of my specs stung my face. I left the room when I couldn’t take it anymore and dove into a 40 degree pool, crinkling the coating on my lenses and covering them with hairline fractures. I still wore them for months.

I took a hit or two in the face at my completely candy-assed boxing class in DC. This wasn’t even supposed to happen, though — the puncher was daydreaming about the instructor, I think, and I was thinking about pummeling the puncher.

The glasses gave it up completely last week in the lamest glasses-breaking story ever: I accidentally walked right into the edge of my bedroom door, totally sober. Then it was really like getting punched in the face. The frames shattered, lenses went spiralling across the floor. Now my eyes are limping around, frames scotch-taped together. the new ones should be ready tomorrow. I look weird, no getting around that.

Sometimes I get really bored and angsty. I think that my life’s being wasted, just plopped in front of a screen while everything drains out of me one pixel at a time. But just now, right this minute, when I use my smashed, taped glasses to look back at that life … parts of it look really, really good.

If the Garment District is low on wire hangers, they need to call me soon. If Smuckers has a jar crisis this week, they need to let me know by Friday. As mentioned previously, I’m a terrible packrat and I’m moving. Everything must go, and it’s a little heartbreaking.

While the bleeding-heart greenie in me, the boy partially reared by the thriftiest woman of the entire Depression era hates to see such useful stuff hit the bin, there’s another kind of heartbreak happening here. A lot of the quirky errata that clots my shelves is soaked in personal, emotional significance, and on some level, letting the item go means chucking the memory out into the road.

In my mind it’s no different than Congolese power figures or Orishas in Santeria - collections of ordinary objects are repositories for powerful feelings and forces beyond human understanding. One man’s wooden figure with nails in it is another man’s prayer for strength, made in a time of duress and filled with sadness and hope.

Or, in my case, an Incredible Hulk pinata:

My sister came to visit me on for my 29th birthday (2005) and gave me this pinata, filled with candy. I was suffering some serious heartbreak at the time — a woman I loved had left 2 weeks before to go home to her side of the planet. I felt numb most of the time, a paper dummy filled with wood shavings. Sometimes termites would invade my wooden body and chew up my guts, making me cry, cry, cry. My work was heading south, and every day at the office felt like stepping into crosshairs.

Jess (my sister) and I had been on the outs for several months. We spoke, but briefly, and mostly at family functions. Every time we talked, we focused on not fighting rather than actually communicating.

We love each other so deeply, me and Jess, that it’s hard sometimes to cut each other a break. She and the lady that had recently left shared a love for me, a naked loathing for each other and a temper like our green paper friend up there. I’d been stuck in the middle and it made me resent everyone.

But then it was my birthday, at one of the lowest points in my life, and Jess came to visit. And instead of saying anything at all about my situation, she came in with a big bag and bigger heart and gave me a big, long hug as soon as she walked in the door.

“You know I love you, Jeff, right? You’re my fucking brother and you always will be. Now check this thing out,” she said, pulling the pinata from the bag. “Open that bad bitch up, ’cause we both need some candy right about now.”

Then she took me out to a Mexican restaurant where we ate, drank margaritas and talked about everything in the world.

Do you think the person that finds that pinata will pick all that up, too? Either they’ll get a sweet blast from the Hulk’s paper skin and feel a lot more at home in the world — or I’ll get to hang onto that a little longer. It’s a win-win either way, really.