The Diamond Island

I was going over my various papers and uncovered a small plastic bag containing three plastic gemstones.  A big square blue “sapphire”, a medium-sized yellow oval “topaz”, and a small red circular “ruby”.  I did a double take, because I hadn’t seen these things since I bought them at a bead store ten years ago.

It was a whim kind of thing.  Some friends and me were looking over the various cool little beads and buying some just because they looked cool.  Who doesn’t like little prizes?  I bought that combo of fake gemstones because they reminded me of some accessories I used to have even way farther back.  What the heck, I must have been stashing a message for myself down the line.

In the seventies, one of the hot toys to have was the foot-high doll known as GI Joe (with Kung Fu grip), from the Adventure Team.  Basically GI Joe was a character part of an international (as in, American-dominated) troubleshooting force.  He went around with cool vehicles and accessories to all corners of the earth doing stuff like rescuing important diplomats, blowing up evil spy headquarters, and recovering stolen treasures.

A serious candidate for the holy grail of GI Joe play sets was the Mummy’s Tomb set.  It came with a cool yellow all-terrain vehicle to put your GI Joe in, tools like pick and shovel, a pith helmet, and best of all a super cool turquoise green, highly detailed sarcophagus you could open with detachable mummy inside.  Totally cool!  It also came with three small plastic gemstones – the sapphire, topaz and ruby in the colors and shapes described above.

I don’t get how GI Joe was supposed to preserve international peace by digging up an Egyptian mummy and artifacts in the desert in a setup heavily suggestive of western looting of foreign artifacts.  But to a kid in the seventies such nitpicking details are irrelevant to finding treasure and digging it up!  If only there was a giant scorpion or something to guard the treasure.  Other packs had a giant cobra guarding a sacred idol or a giant clam guarding a treasure chest.

There was a 45 record put out by Peter Pan Records that came with a comic.  You would listen to the record while reading the comic and imagine you were part of a GI Joe adventure.  It was called “GI Joe and the Secret of the Mummy’s Tomb.”  In this story, GI Joe goes to a tomb looking to recover jewels stolen from a museum by a thief/con-man named Mummy Barka, who holes up in an old tomb with booby traps and mirrors.

Barka dresses as a mummy and tries to scare GI Joe away, but Joe isn’t having any of that!  He captures the bad guy, rescues the jewels (all the other artifacts are not important I guess), and escapes before an earthquake destroys the entire area.

As is often the case with toys, most of that stuff ended up lost, broken, or in some cases stolen by neighborhood kids when you weren’t looking.  I still have the record and book, but no player.

I’m looking at the gemstones I bought a ways back, and decide the Internets are the place to go!  I uncover a wealth of GI Joe Adventure Team nostalgia sites and get to see pictures of stuff I’d forgotten about.  I also find sound files of the original record and listen to the past come crawling back to my brain stem from the distant past.

I wouldn’t play the same kinds of scenarios now.  I identified with GI Joe then, but I wouldn’t now.  I’d be some other character opposing Joe’s colonialism and uncovering the truth behind the one-sided scenarios you’re expected to accept without question.  I’d uncover another story and make that my fun.  Looting artifacts from other countries?  No way, I’d be digging for psychological treasures with a close watch on my own shadow.

Maybe that’s why the secrets of the Mummy’s Tomb came back to me.  I’m ready now to have the real adventure, and guard the secrets against square-jawed, dull thuds looking to plunder antiquity for cocktail parties at duh-buddy headquarters.

My folks have had many nicknames for me, and because they had to listen to my records all the time, they nicknamed me “Mummy Barka”.  I got mad then because I thought they were teasing me.  But now I see they were calling me who I should have been.  Recovery and protection of sacred treasure using trickery and cunning!  It’s a new thought I never had before, and I’m going with it.

On a random patrol for craft goods, K and I came across a trade center in the far off zone many stoplights of traffic agony from our usual sector. We landed and investigated the internal quadrants of the trade center and found ourselves the usual assortment of goods you find at craft stores.

But this time, we came across something a little different. The lanes of sticker fields were a little more varied than usual, but that’s not unusual in a trade center off the beaten track. I find one or two sticker sets that step outside the norm all the time on ventures like these.

No, what K found on a sensor sweep beggared description. Hanging on a discount rack on the far side of the lanes, in a tiny, easy to miss area, was a series of packets. No price, but the label said, in so many words, eighty-five dollars worth of stickers, a true value.

We each got one, and continued our search, K for knitting stuff and me for other items. I came across a stand of sticker books which I’d never seen before. A whole bunch of stickers in the fields I’ve been trying for years to close up my collection in!

Back home at command central, we looked over our assortment of booty and marveled. The lane stickers were good. The booklets off the stand I found a nice completion find. That enough makes it worth while. But when we opened our bargain sticker packets, which ended up being ten dollars each, our eyes bugged out.

Basically, we were looking at packets of stickers that hadn’t sold well, or couldn’t be returned, and were put together in a value pack for easy selling. Dozens of the finest stickers, many of a kind I’d never seen before, and I’m pretty familiar with the Sandy Lion and Mrs. Grossman lines. Both of us got about 60% of the same stickers, but the other 40% were different.

In effect, we’d gotten a real smörgåsbord of stickers. Probably about fifty sheets, or a hundred dollars worth for ten, which tells you how marked up these puppies are. We’re kicking ourselves for not getting the other three packets. But that’s how it is when you score a secret Sticker Stasher stash. You never know when it’s going to be the mother lode, and chances are if you miss the full tractor beam haul, it won’t be there when you head back for a repeat performance.

K and I are just glad we manage to get our claws on some of the treasure. But the Sticker Stasher strides along his merry way, stashing stickers and eluding the pursuit of those meddling kids!

I take a look at my hall pass, and the lifeclock is a big fat black color.  For whatever reason, the boog-a-loos don’t come descending on my head.  They haven’t departed.  The house is still haunted with weird stuff.  The faucet in the kitchen is now leaking.  I have to get that taken care of.  The electrical guys haven’t been back to finish the work.  I guess I’m just learning to live with wacky toilet time, the creaks and groans at night, and the bugs that appear to plague me.

K and I used last weekend to organize and unpack from our emergency move a year and three months ago.  We got good work done, and cleared some space, which was a help.  I got some of my piles of papers back into line, and came across a poster from back in the day.

The poster came with an Alien doll I got back during the craze of the movie that came out in 1979.  It’s a drawing of scenes from the movie with a few artistic licenses thrown in.  That movie was all the rage with my classmates in 6th grade.  A group of folks from a rival class tried to put together a home movie based on their devotion to that science fiction classic.  Crumbs, if only they’d had YouTube back then.

I dug out my Alien baseball trading cards, a complete set except for number 61 – “the chest-burster”, and gazed at all the pictures.  The puzzles got me to thinking about back when movie trading cards were all the rage after Star Wars.  I have to organize these darn cards of mine someday – Blue, red, yellow, green and orange Star Wars cards to name a few.

I had to trade that one for card number 1.  Back then number 61 cards were a dime a dozen, so I figured I’d be able to get another one easy.  Unfortunately, the series stopped being sold on my next trip to the local seven-eleven (which is a hair salon now, go figure), and I’d somehow given away all my extras.

I meditate on the movie, and recollect memories from my young fascination with the film.  I decide to go to Best-Cry and buy the DVD for ten bucks, as I haven’t yet added it to my collection.  K and I have an evening where we watch the movie and have a blast.

I remember seeing Alien for the first time at a late show in D.C., at a theater that sadly, no longer exists (though you can see it in Exorcist III – the main character and his best friend go there for their yearly mourning ritual to watch It’s a Wonderful Life).  Alien scared the pants off the crowd several times.  It was awesome.

The DVD has several deleted scenes that I’ve never seen, and which are actually pretty good.  I feel like I’m seeing an old friend again, and discovering something new about them.  I rethink my old experiences in light of the new scenes and how I might have thought.

My copy of the novel comes off the shelf and I read it three times to get every nuance.  A line from the scene where the remaining crewmembers are talking to the decapitated head of Ash the android sticks out at me.  He asks them if they’ve tried to communicate with the alien.  It’s a dead end for the crewmembers, but I wonder if Ash, being an android with a gender-neutral point of view, isn’t speaking of something outside the crew’s immediate experience.  He was probably trying to mislead them, but he might have thrown them a crumb from the limits of his artificial brain process.

I get to obsessing over the film.  Then I start looking up Bigfoot movies that I suddenly remember watching on Channel 20 WDCA during that channel’s glory years.  There’s this movie where a bunch of college students uncover a mummified Bigfoot and it comes back to life to rampage.  I used a tape recorder to tape the sound when I was a kid, and I listened to it at night with my blankets over my head for years until I recorded over it.  I use the mighty power of the internets and find out it’s called Curse of Bigfoot, and it’s available on Amazon.

My investigations go deeper.  There’s a Bigfoot movie called Creature from Black Lake that I’ve never seen, but I think I might have and forgotten.  See, there’s this scary music hook that I can always remember and associate with Bigfoot.  But I don’t know where it’s from.  So I Netflix the movie and see if that leads to anything.  K shakes her head at my poor taste in B-movies, but I think Creature from Black Lake actually is a decent monster movie.  It does not produce the music I’m straining to remember, however.

I finally go to YouTube and find an old show called Monsters, Mysteries, or Myths, which was narrated by Rod Sterling of Twilight Zone fame.  It’s a TV show that tried to explore Bigfoot, the Abominable Snowman, and the Loch Ness Monster from a “somewhat” scientific viewpoint.  There’s a three to five second sound bite where the music that’s stuck in my head plays, and I recognize it.

It’s weird, because that one brief sound bite has stuck in my head since 1975, and only now do I reconnect with it and get into the vibe with a show that scared me so bad I couldn’t sleep for weeks.  The show was re-edited with a different narrator and shown again in the early 1980s as The Mysterious Monsters, which I think I saw and that probably dredged up scary memories.

What this adds up to is that old scary spooky feeling again.  I’m getting the shakes, and yet I can’t stop looking this stuff up and re-experiencing it.  In particular, the self-destruct part of the Alien keeps replaying in my head.  The last crewmember’s endgame and final confrontation with the monster, all while experiencing nearly unbearable panic and fear.

I wonder if my mirage is up to his old tricks again.  Come to think of it, my garden troubles might be his doing.  He does know weeds and soil like the back of his hand, and it would be a laugh-riot if my folks got a bumper crop while K and I got a crummy harvest.  I just discovered the parental units have planted corn and it is already almost ready.  The stalks were hidden by their tomato plants.  Argh!  The garden beat-down knows no depths.

In a certain sense, the movie Alien is about discovery, both of something new and different (even if it’s a horrific one in terms of what happens to the crew), and Ellen Ripley’s inner resources.  It’s a message, one that I observe and reflect upon.  I don’t get the sense that I’m supposed to do anything more than that.

I have a dream.  In it, I encounter the creature from the movie.  It jumps on me like a cricket, and we wrestle in a dark place for a long while.  In Alien, the creature is more than a match for any human because it has inhuman strength and snap-reflexes in addition to claws and slime-lubricated teeth.  But in the dream, we’re equally matched somehow.

The alien snaps it piston-like teeth into my cheek, and instead of eviscerating my face, I resist and slide out of its grasp.  Some sort of understanding passes between us, and all of a sudden I’m “one of its kind”.  We lay on our stomachs together, cheek-to-cheek, and listen to the darkness.

Every now and then, you have to mount a major expedition against the destructoids of your life and raid them back. I get pretty worn out dodging the null-skull bursts and sphincter-clencher teeth-chatterers all the time. The time comes when you pack your ship full of biscuit barrels and set them to ka-pow!

So K and I, along with the folks, pile into the Ready-cart and load up with all the refusoids we can carry on our laps. This is a mission of utmost craziness to the maxx, and we are going to show those cling-on mutants we mean business. The old man has been accumulating some navigation readings for possible doom plunder, and they all sound good. Dunderheads are go!

I won’t go into detail as to what everyone acquired on this mission of mystery, but suffice it to say we all came up videos, very nearly for free. Alas, retroactive cling-on damages have a way of sneaking up on you even when all guns are blazing on the Judas Priest interocitor.

Doom plunder 4: The nefarious commie co-op disguised as yuppie food store

Located unknown draft cider samples from ancient crate, probably from dromon time travelers. Powerup was minimal, but my science officer was happy to have a new species to identify and enter into the gene banks. The major find was a cache of long buried raw honey from the olden days, sealed with a rough cap of pollen and other castings. Combined with the no tea that has become tea, healing was +1!

However, the cling-ons spotted us immediately and fired away with total dumbty-doofus cloggery. We made the jump to hypersteak, but a cooling bottle came loose and began to leak on my trough.

Doom plunder 3: Unsettling educational toy depot pretending to be chain toy store

Major sticker stasher find. Located and beamed aboard spaceship and construction equipment stickers sufficient to fill gaps in collection. Bonus round included googly-eyed dinosaurs and wizardly paraphernalia stickers to boot. Bonus-bonus round when I locate enough Xmas stickers to fortify my Xmas sticker arsenal. I’ll be ready for the holiday season all the way to the crypt! I put these finds into my shoebox collection of sticker goodies for use in the future. My artistic crafty side has been bumped up +1.

Something doesn’t feel right, but sensors are unable to clarify, and the group fails its Perception check. We warp out of the sector, further confusing the cling-ons, and they give up. They’ll just have to trust to the ambient stupidity of the drones to flush us out.

Doom plunder 2: Mature nerd store masquerading as one of those dumb comic shops

Old pal of my pa regales us with tales of what’s been up lately. I take advantage of the noticeably higher selection than normal of educational resources with half a brain stem or more. Crumbs, have I really been going to this out of the way locale for twenty years for sequential art infusions? I decide to pass up Book 3 of Omaha the Cat Dancer (I’m leery of the last volume’s revelations about Omaha’s boyfriend and where that might lead), and instead tractor alongside my hull some Polly and the Pirates by Ted Naifeh (he did Courtney Crumrin, which I thought was bloody excellent, so it’s a reasonable risk to take), and the complete Persepolis, which has been getting some buzz in the comics tendril farm. My graphic novel study gets a free roll at +1!

I notice the cooling bottle is leaking, as that’s why my trough feels damp. The mess is cleaned up and put away, and normal functioning resumes.

Doom Plunder 1: Advanced pizza technology factory overlooked in an alleyway

Time to fuel up and get some grub for the stomach people. Vace is one of those things you put on the friendly star system list and never lose touch. Mmm-mmm. Thing is, they keep changing location to reconfigure their shields and cloaking device, so they never get assimilated by the Dork. Healing is +1 to the maximum overdrive way up in your soul. It’s heartening to know there are people out there who make food and that’s all. I support them with my ducats!

I keep getting the feeling people are looking at me funny.

Doom plunder 0: Estate sale in the nice part of town with opening for commoners in the floorplans.

A nice dwelling, in the old school upper cruster sensibility, including eccentric use of hallways and space. Wonderful foliage for relaxing view after a hard days work of ripping people off. Mostly poor taste in furnishings and wares.  Sheesh, all the capital must have gone into the coordinates. But I locate a die cast metal car circa 1940 and get it for a song. The toy altar can always use more fetishes, so who knows? +1 something for sure.  But I’m getting the feeling our raid is at an end. We plot for home.

The group finally make their Perception check, and begin to laugh at me. They point out that my shorts look like I went to the bathroom in them, and not in a good way. That coolant bottle was listed as “green tea with honey”, but it turns out it was more like “artificial dye mixed with plastic globule sugar substitute.” My pants have been dyed a nice light tea brown in the seat, which explains all the looks I was getting.

I may have gotten the loot and dodged the cling-ons, but the joke is still on my backside!

I hit the Civitan garage sale for the first time this year. I scored the usual hot dog and cola snack, which always tastes better in the sale area than it would on the street. Don’t ask me how that can be so, since it’s generic cafeteria fare. It must be the yummy field generated by the Civitan charity goodness. Yes, I have received the sacred hot dog and cola vice snack from the elders of a local free market cooperative.  Go me!

I can never tell what I’m going to find there, because it’s both random and the usual regulars peddling the same junk they were ten years ago. You have to pay your dues by showing up and participating, and you never know how many points you have to save up before you dig up a treasure. You could pay ten visits and get a mediocre find, or pay two and get a unique magic item. Have a random!

Well this time I came across a real treat. Right out of a childhood desire in a manner that could only be described as an uncanny coincidence. A few months earlier to this garage sale discovery (I’m not sure how many months it was), I was gathering up some of my old magazines to study and go over for meditative contemplation. I came across the March 1980 Space Wars (Volume 4, Number 1) I got a long ways back from a newspaper shop in Athens, Ohio.

There’s an article I remembered reading as a kid, which reviewed a board game that had come out in the wake of the initial Star Wars phenomenon. The game is called Freedom in the Galaxy, and it allows two players to recreate an interstellar conflict between rebels and imperials in a galaxy similar in concepts to that portrayed in Star Wars. I read this review as a kid and remembered being wowed by the whole idea, wishing I could get a hold of this game and play it.

One player takes the side of the Rebels, who are trying to restore “Freedom in the Galaxy”, and the other player takes the side of the Imperials, who are trying to discover the hidden Rebel base and destroy it before the Rebels gain enough power and influence to challenge the Imperials. Each player takes turns running “missions” to advance their agenda and block the success of the other player’s missions.

The Rebel player travels through the galaxy trying to recruit characters to the cause, undermining the loyalty of planets under Imperial control, searching for resources such as ships or technology to strengthen followers, and sabotaging Imperial resources such as military installations. Meanwhile, the Imperial player tries to locate and trap Rebel groups, use brute force to crush unrest and restore loyalty, and search for the Rebel base.

The Imperial player has the advantage of overwhelming military strength and vast resources at the start of the game, while the Rebel player has only a few resources and a small group of characters to start with. However, the bureaucracy and inflexibility of the Imperials limits their ability to perform certain actions. The Rebels have no such restriction. The Imperial player, despite vast resources, does not have the ability to control the entire galaxy at once. Therefore, the Imperial player must be strategic and methodical in order to use the advantages available. Meanwhile, the Rebel player must be extremely careful and not confront the Imperial player directly. The longer it takes the Imperial player to find the rebel base, the better.

During the game, the Rebel base slowly gains in military power. At a certain point the Rebel player “cashes in” the base and receives a fleet of military ships capable of challenging the Imperial player. If the Imperial player has lost numerous planets due to unrest it will be unable to support it’s own military, while those same planets now support the Rebel player. Also, if the Rebel groups have grown in power by adding new characters and obtaining cool gadgets, they are able to perform missions that undermine the Imperial player’s special abilities just when the Imperial player needs them to fight the Rebel fleet.

For example, several planets in the galaxy are designated “Imperial Secret” planets, such as the Casino Galactica or the Mutant World. If the Rebel player finds these secrets they may benefit (the Casino grants extra goodies) or suffer problems (the Mutants can wipe out an entire Rebel mission). There are certain core worlds to the Imperial player’s control called “space faring” worlds, which if they go into revolt can cause major problems for the Imperial player. There is a Domino Effect in play, where certain worlds can cause other worlds to turn to the Rebels if they revolt.

The Imperial player can fortify planets with planetary defenses to make it harder for Rebels to land there and look for help. The Imperial player can also purchase “Atrocity Units”, which can destroy entire planets to keep them from helping the Rebels. This shifts other planets into disloyalty, however, so it must be used judiciously.

The game is broken into different levels of play, starting with the introductory System Level, the intermediate Province Level, and the ultra-huge Galactic Level, which can take 20 hours to play.

Reading about this as a kid really excited me. The Empire Strikes Back hadn’t come out yet, and Star Wars fever was still going strong. But alas, I didn’t have the resources available to locate and purchase myself a copy. It remained an unobtainable kid’s fantasy and faded into a cool idea floating around in the tidepools of my memory.

Back to the matter at hand. I put the old magazine aside for later study as I rearranged my assortment of materials for reading and meditation. I think about the old game that captured my young Star Wars imagination on and off for the next few weeks. Then I head to that garage sale.

So, when I came across a vendor selling a mint-condition, never been used copy I felt a cold thrill and my vision tunneled over to the box. I bought the thing for five bucks and took it home with me to read with savage glee for several hours.

Dreams do come true. Sometimes you just have to be patient.

As you may have read, my mission to UFO girl was a big fat failure, and I have to go back to my mirage with bad news. I go on vacation with K and we hike out in the wilderness, only to return to a house with a serious problem.

While we were doing our thing, a huge storm front moved through the area and our circuit breaker box became flooded with water. The electrical hookups to our residence are near ground level, which makes them eye level when you stand inside in the basement. The water runoff of our back yard is poor, so in a sustained, multi-day storm the water backs up under the porch. The seal on the power line had failed, and so water was dripping into the box and out onto the counter in front.

K notices the growing pool of water, so we go out back and try to re-route the water flow away from the wall. This seems to help, but we’re not happy, as water and electricity do not mix well. Now that I think about it, we were crazy to be sloshing around in a pool of muddy water with a circuit breaker box taking on water. Life is full of close calls, fun for the entire family.

We keep our senses alert for funny smells and sounds, and stay at the ready for an evacuation with the cats if need be. I had recently donated some clothes to a co-worker’s friend who lost everything in a house fire (where the teenagers, who were being bad by staying up past curfew noticed the fire and warned everyone in time to escape). So, of course, my nerves are extra jittery.

Our sleep is jumbled, and the day we are supposed to have to recover from our vacation is blown in stressville. We contact our landlord to get an electrician in, but I have to take some extra days off to make sure the seal and box are replaced. The whole thing is basically a panic attack that turns into a big hassle.

I get to thinking that a certain mirage must be responsible for the scare and beat down poltergeist combination. Well, time to pay the piper.

In the basement, the spooky doll has been moved to the top shelf. I get a quick scare before I rationalize K must have moved the thing to readjust the planter pots around. No need to turn out the lights, I’m guessing my mirage is happy to communicate from the shadows of that extra room.

I tell him I blew it, and that there will be no UFO girl date. He just laughs at me. My mirage explains that he expected me to fail, so he isn’t surprised. He asks me how I felt, and I tell him I felt embarrassed and dejected. With a sullen chuckle, he explains to me that how I felt is how he feels all the time, and he wanted me to know what it’s like to be a wretched person overshadowed by a high-minded idiot like me.

I’m dumbfounded, and my mirage leaves me alone to consider the joke he’s played on me, and the lesson behind it.

I hate this place.

I was in the supermarket the other day, and the music system played a U2 song I’d never heard before. That’s always a surprise, as there are only a handful I haven’t listened to, and tried to acquire. Unfortunately, I couldn’t catch any of the lyrics, just Bono’s voice and the Edge’s guitar. Sounded a lot like something they’d done during their days in between Zooropa and Pop. Couldn’t find it on the internets, but the way I see it, I’ll find it if I’m meant to.

It brought me back to those days when I felt identified with U2. There I was, in a dark place, but sustained by the music of a close and reliable friend. Oh, but the changes there are always a coming down the line! Along comes Passengers, an experimental album with a guest appearance by Pavarotti. The album didn’t exactly do it for me. It broke the mold of what I expected from U2, and not in a good way. There was a lot of experimental music that indicated a searching in the band they had never done before. I figured they must really be busting their butts to come up with a new sound.

So, in the interim, I finally got a hold of October to tide me over. I found the majesty and personal exuberance of the album uplifting. This was the period in which I finally abandoned tapes for CDs and began to acquire a collection for play on my handy-dandy new remote control system. I focused on U2 singles and connected with sounds I’d only heard a few times on the radio, or on friend’s tape mixes. Plenty of material to keep me going for the next, most awesome of all albums.

Pop comes out, and visions of sugarplums dance in my head. The rumors say its “U2 does techno”, which to me meant they would take electronic music to the next level with their own brand of rock and roll talent. I dive into my copy and listen, waiting for the awesomeness to kick in.

Wah-wah-wahhh.

There are a handful of good songs on the album. In particular, “Mofo” I think is the best effort in that it shows what the rest of the album might have pushed forward artistically if U2 hadn’t backed off. That’s the problem. The song selection comes off as an initial attempt to push the boundaries, and ends in a lack of confidence. The bad songs come off as attempts to fill the album after having pulled back from what might have been beyond the band’s abilities.

The Pop Mart tour repeats this motif, with the band trying to hide behind the veneer of self-depreciation. Guys, if you weren’t serious, why did you even bother? I can get a comedy album anytime around the block.

Interestingly enough, this is the first tour where I manage to get tickets. The price was steep as I recall, and they’ve only gone up since then. The spectacle of the lemon and the outfits was wasted, I think. There’s no way to top the Zoo TV tour. I think that was one of those once in a band’s lifetime things. But just the same, the concert was nothing short of a religious experience. A lot of the songs from Pop played much better in concert, and I kept thinking, “Why didn’t they record this version on the album?”

My girlfriend of the time dumped me right as I bought two seats. As a result, I had plenty of room to dance. The seats were nosebleed, so I couldn’t really see the band. I rocked out to every song drunk out of my gourd while standing on the fold out chairs. I think my neighbors must have thought I was nuts and were afraid I would fall. Who cares what they thought! Finally, after long last, I could experience my heroes. It was a night I can never forget.

However, the album hardly had enough momentum to sustain me, and the words of my ex-girlfriend from that time made an impression on me. She said they had sold out like REM and were going downhill. Much as I didn’t want that to be true, I had a sinking feeling she was right.

The next album, All That You Can’t Leave Behind, certainly provided evidence for that. There wasn’t a single song on that album I could stomach, which was extremely unusual for me. I tried. I listened as much as I could stand, but no magic happened. I went with a friend to see them in Baltimore during the Elevation tour, and they were good in concert. The new songs didn’t do much for me, but all their old material was excellent. While I didn’t have a religious experience, I did have a good time.

I’m sure there were other albums in between this one and the next. But now that I look at it, I think I stopped being interested in the in-between stuff. I detected a lack of energy in their music I’d never experienced before. Was it me? Had I changed? What had happened?

The next album came, How to Deconstruct an Atomic Bomb, and I bought it with a certain amount of reservation. Unlike the previous disappointment, I was actually able to listen to this album at first.  Maybe I was hoping they’d turn things around and didn’t want to face facts, so I tried even harder to like it.  But I soon grew tired of this album and tossed it to the bottom of my heap, along with other albums that I never listen to anymore.

It’s as if I’d outgrown them. Everything before the moment of disappointment still sounds good to me, but everything after that sounds like junk. I’m separated from a feeling of myself that I can no longer access. They have ceased to carry that projection for me.

I think, now, as I consider it and look back, that it must be a mix of things. The band members were never the heroes I thought they were, and they’ve simply run out of good music with which to hide their flaws behind. I’m no longer the same person, in that my projections don’t catch very often on others anymore. I don’t think I’ll ever have a favorite, personal band or musician like U2 was to me again in this lifetime. Too much history that can’t be repeated. I’ve left the garden and can’t go back. Even if I could, I don’t think I would.  It wouldn’t be the same.

At first I blamed U2, and I hated what they’d become in my eyes. Being my personal band, I took their transformation personally, even though it had nothing to do with me. Then, after the anger and disappointment of loss, I started drifting and walking in the desert.

Freed from my false idol, my music quest could finally begin.

There’s this elevated hillside surrounded by a semi-wooded area sixty feet from where I live. It’s where all the dog-walkers poop their canines and look the other way as they return home before anyone says, “I saw that!” At the top, there’s this old, flattop pavement, which looks like it was once from a primitive tennis court. Unless hardcore volleyball players, who love diving on hard surfaces, once played here. It’s a relic of a time when the place where I live was less developed by the pollution-people than it was.

I get the feeling that this is the ideal place to meet the UFO girl. Heck, she can’t have failed to locate my sorry brain pattern by now. I resolve to wait until I receive a message of some kind saying “tonight’s the night”. I suppose I could just stand on the hill and shout like a stupid fool, “Hey, UFO girl! What up?” I don’t have it in me. To tell the truth, this whole business is starting to be a little tiring on my brain stem. Even though I’m over the flu and my domestic chores patrol is back on track, I’m still not feeling the mo.

That’s too bad, because UFO girl materializes her spaceship into my immediate reality and proceeds to drive me crazy. All that junk I packed? Useless, because UFO girl is absolutely crazy. As in treacherous, randomly determined, force of nature nuts. As in, “Let’s drink hydrochloric mezcal plastazoids and drive the ultimate turbo bean on the wrong side of the galaxy until dimensional entities inject us with projectile mucus that shoots out our eye sockets with neutronic, magnetizing feedback.”

It takes every nerve of steel I can borrow from the hero bank just to avoid being dashed to pieces on the radioactive asteroids hurtling towards us at negative light speed. You want to name an edge-of-your seat panic sensation, I’m there. From “omigod we almost got crushed” to “if things don’t improve now, I’m dead/crazy/maimed”. I know I’m supposed to pass along some kind of message, but I’m too busy bouncing around the hold with the fossilized remains of previous victims’ clothing and decayed bits of half eaten frozen chicken nugget packages to remember anything.

There’s no talking to UFO girl about anything. My attempts at communication just inspire a fresh round of randomly determined activities. Invite some death robots aboard for some slam dance mind mashing by way of neutron wave bombardment. Carbon based units get to play target until relieved of their pants and their self respect. Then it’s hijack some space boulders and drive them through a crab nebula shouting atomic obscenities and human beings pay the embarrassment tab. It could be never-ending terror in a nightmare-inspired maul-maze butt smashing geode of psychic maggot eggs eating your soul kitchen’s best of millenium collection. UFO girl keeps me guessing what the next random natural interstellar disaster is going to be.

Without any warning, UFO girl puts her spaceship in neutral and coasts for a while. Her eyes glaze over and she regurgitates the astral remains of a stale Martian biscuit from next week’s episode. All over her command module, which she assures me is rented and of no concern. I manage to blurt out that I’m here on behalf of my mirage, who wants a date. UFO girl tells me in a voice that sounds like bad diarrhea that she doesn’t go out with miserable skulking horror worms, only unstoppable cybernetic nerd-creatures with microfilm sized hardware and/or software. She presses the ignition diode and revs the spaceship treadmill for another high speed chase of interstellar wombats and a stopover at the geargrinding refuel zone with bonus gut prize.

UFO girl says, “You ready to party?” I say, “I didn’t come here to party.” Abruptly, she lock-kicks me out of her spaceship reality and says, “If you didn’t come here to party, then get lost!” And just like that, I’m back home. I’m glad to be back, but I’m in desperate need of a drink to calm my nerves and/or a tasty meal to fill the gaping void in my stomach. I ache all over, but I’m wired like nobody’s business and a little shell-shocked. I imagine tumbling out of an accelerating psychic spaceship will do that to you.

Crud, what am I going to tell the scary guy in my basement?

My big hope to meet the UFO girl rests on a crummy sound file attached to the Internet probability antenna. All I get in the way of clues is a dream.

In the dream I’m in a museum/international center. There’s this important woman moving from one location to another. She’s got about a dozen bodyguards about her for protection, plus a personal assistant and two administrative assistants. There’s a small amount of pedestrians milling about. Nobody recognizes the woman and her entourage. They just give her searching glances as they go about their business. I’m there too, part of the crowd and probably there for the art, but for some reason I get the feeling everyone knows who I am.

A bunch of snipers appear on the second floor balconies and aim for the woman. I jump to her side and somehow by waving my arms and moving in front of her at strategically important moments the snipers are only able to hit the bodyguards, and a few of the passers-by. I pull out this weird plastic submachine gun and blow away a few of the snipers. The rest take cover and I try to get the woman and her shrinking entourage to a waiting car.

The woman takes a grazing shot to the head, and I have to stop shooting so I can carry her the rest of the way to the car. The bodyguards are totally useless, and I know somehow that I’m the only one who can do the job and keep her alive. I have to put her down, shoot at the snipers some more to make them dive for cover, and open the car door. The driver, the personal assistant, and the two administrative assistants just stand there gawking at me, ducking bullets and doing nothing helpful.

I get the woman into the car and we all leave the scene of carnage behind. I perform emergency first aid, and for a moment it’s close, but I stabilize the woman. I notice the driver making the telltale suspicious glance at us. I pick up on something fishy about the personal assistant’s behavior, and the way the two administrative assistants look guilty. I realize they’re all working for the snipers and the woman’s been totally betrayed.

The driver gets wise to my suspicions. He locks the doors and puts up the privacy window. I know he’s driving us into a trap, so I start smashing the privacy window between us with a battering ram glass breaker I happen to be carrying around. Before I can shoot the driver he books and leaves us behind. I take over the car and drive away, just in time to dodge a rocket attack lock-on.

Keeping an eye on the remaining traitors, who do nothing because anyone with a battering ram in their pocket is clearly out of their mind, I drive to an underground parking lot. Waiting for me is a limousine being driven by Lurch from the Addams Family. In the back seat is a sexy nurse with mad doctor skills. I park the car and make the three assistants back off and turn around. I warn them that if they try to see where we go, or look at our license plate, I’ll blow them away.

I carry the woman to the back seat and the nurse takes over. I know she’ll be okay now. I cover the three traitors from the window of the limo with my plastic gun. Lurch shakes his head and makes his distinctive “I don’t believe this” groan before he gets in the car and drives us away. We drive off through downtown to a secret hideaway.

The cats wake me up with demands for food, and I return to the real world with a clue that makes no sense to me. I don’t know how much time I’ve got left on my haunted house pass, but I’m getting the growing feeling that my library books are coming due soon, and the ghosts there collect late fees in something other than cash, check or charge.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch I’m nursing my shocked and battered brainstem. I have to work on putting the latest UFO girl investigations a little more, as I had to go to some rough places to gather my evidence. The Klingon patrols seem more aggressive of late, and everywhere I look, the radioactive mutants are shooting sparks at any evidence of human consciousness.

So what I gots is a measely linkdump for this rainy, supercharged non-firey Beltaine kind of day. Rather than focus on May Day labor struggles and history-of-beatdown stuff, I felt I’d be better off meditating on the fun. Always good is an insanity-point inducing musical number from an old classic, a visual journey into humanization, mockery of the drones as stupid as it is possible for a person to be, and reminders that people do stuff for creativity and relax-enjoy free of coercion.

• The landlord’s daughter from the Wicker Man
• Cloud from the anime collection Robot Carnival
• Spot the Loony from Monty Python
• An enjoyable May Day Parade in Minneapolis