The Diamond Island

When it comes to K, the cats, the folks, and I the New Year comes in October.  For whatever reason, the Celtic New Year is how we wrap things up psychologically and get ready for the approach of the next randomly generated encounter.

Tangent.  As I type this, a bunch of candy just leaped off the shelf and fell to the floor.  Yes, this is the first Halloween where K and I are in a haunted house and know it.

October is when the spirits of the dead are supposed to come back and pay a visit to the living.  The ancestors are believed to communicate with you in dreams, and give sneak previews of the year to come.  Needless to say, my dream journal has been filling up.

In my last one, I was in the role of the curmudgeonly doctor House, from the TV show, and my patient was the expectant Mother Mary.  With her in tow were a bunch of prophets who never talked to anyone, but if you listened to them you might hear something worth hearing.

She was trying to trick everyone into believing there was something wrong with her, and in true House dramatic fashion I uncovered her scam.  Because I had revealed her trick, she passed on some wisdom to me about myself, then left me to listen to the prophets for a while before they all went on their way.  I won’t say what I learned, as it’s rather personal and/or probably only relevant to me.

But Mother Mary as a trickster archetype with a posse of prophets?  That’s a new one for me.

Back to the main topic.  The last year has been rough.  Culture seems at a backwater standstill, the country needs new shoes, and there’s only charlatans at the helm of a bus with no wheel.  The bees gave me some breathing room, so K and I booked the humans a stay of buy two get one free at our favorite short duration emergency retreat.

The Honeycomb Hideout would have to be staffed by the two girl cats who can’t stand each other (there’s a movie in there, I know it), while Michael cat was boarded up because he’d taken a megamouth hit to the thrusters and we couldn’t deal.  A third day reinforcement assist from the allies and friends aisle covered the gaps.

I’ve mentioned secret doors before.  Some of those secret doors reach into awesome heal-ups.  If you ever played the Zelda games, you know what I’m talking about.  Always remember to bring your bottle to stock up on healing spirits!  The big one for us is a place I call Destroyed Bourn.

We pull up with a trunk full of medicine and protein materials for fabrication, hit the wood pile for sacred flame, sacred fire right out of Doctor Who, and get right with the weird stuff that goes on here.  The trees have been waiting for us to come and tell them stories of the messed up real world where human beings do the beat down dance.

I’m driving to the parental unit’s batcave with K, and while we are waiting at the stoplight, we hear bagpipes.  I search in vain for the source.  It’s coming from the woods, and it sounds like some kind of battle march.  Well crumbs that about sums up the times, doesn’t it?

All the transmissions coming in seem to carry a certain amount of radiation identified as belonging to the economic Three Mile Island that never was.  I keep hearing denials along the lines of “this is not the great depression.”  Well, no duh buddy!  That ship has sailed.  I don’t think it’s the “Very Great Depression” either, as some econ blogs have been naming it either.

What if it’s The Depression?  As in, the one big monster that overshadows all other “adjustments” in the rich soaking the poor?  As some may know, anything preceded by “The” in its title, at least in the faerie lands, is way more powerful than any other combination of names.  This ain’t “Big Dude Depression” or “That Depression thingee”, this is THE thing.  The one that all others will be measured by.  Hope you’re ready for the barter system.

Started thinking about a movie I saw a few times as a kid, back in 1974.  Rumplestiltskin.  The dwarf that spins hair into gold for a girl who has been jacked by her father’s unrealistic image of her.  The impossible task.  I think no matter what the rich people do, the train wreck is happening.  This country’s AAA rating is toast.  We’ll never guess that name in time to send the dwarf into the center of the earth in fire.

So I watch an In Search Of… episode on YouTube.  The one about the Loch Ness Monster.  Great stuff.  Delving into the deep like a deep-sea diver for the one shot that will give us some information about the unknown.  That’s where I’m at.  But all I get from that are blurry motion pictures and straight up shots of bubbling mystery that could be anything.  I still believe there’s something going on there.

Despite the attempt to destroy the public’s attempt to be relevant, I come across a public access channel on my folk’s cable channels.  Heck, if there were more channels like this, I’d actually subscribe.  But the one channel can’t handle the weight of 99% need, and some of the programs don’t do it for me.  I understand.  Trying to break through is tough.

Amazing stuff is going on in the underground.  All you have to do is remain open.  Seek, and you shall not find.  Sit down, and wait patiently – the mystery shall give you clues.

Looks like Blink and Frankie are both on the mend.  Blink is back to her normal, neurotic needy self, and mischievous Frankie is causing havoc again.  Phantom dog was sensor identified as a Barghest and got the ka-blammo.  The resident fox dropped by to say hi again, always a good sign.  And stress levels returning to nominal amounts.  I tell ya, that superstructure and engine stress will drive you batty.  Oh yeah, Nomad got the torpedo surprise courtesy of K’s birthday Level-Up, so goodbye Sector 2.2.  Everything’s coming up starbases.

“I’m going to give you something.  A pocket full of monstrous killer bees that sting and sting and rip flesh to tiny bits with their claws!  Send them against the crumbum volley aliens, and the flush prophets, and the mindfield you are in.  I grew them in the stinky soil of your diseased garden of weeds.  But you still have to live in my haunted house until I say so.”

Right before the hurricane comes in, K and I make a run to the grocery store before the drones arrive to beam aboard their protein requirements in a hoard.  Milk, water, booze, flour, rice, apple turnovers.  You know, the stuff you’d need in the last days of the acrockalypse.

Gum machines are still instruments of enlightenment, despite half-hearted attempts by the puerarchy to make them into mere sugar dispensaries.  The old school fighters of random stupidity still follow the musical harmony creature as it dances through our reality to balance the antisystem, lest it continue the path to one-sided aggrandizement.

While I’m opening my wallet for the mandatory vacuuming with bonus peak oil food prices penalty, K takes a few quarters and gets herself a little rubber figure and on the first try gets what she wanted.  A little red devil figure.  I take my turn, and I get a little robot dude and a purple devil figure.  She’s happy that she has a little devilkins she can put on her keyboard, it reminds her of our Frankie, who is a devilkins.

Fast forward back to now, and the jack up we just started dealing with on top of the usual realization that it’s all Sector 2.2 days for a while. While K works her brand new bread magic to make us bonus food, and I try to make sense of the psycho-nautical habitat we find ourselves in, we examine our devilkins figures.  They both have what look like cat ears for horns, except her ears are facing the back, so it really looks like horns, and the “Made in China” is on the tummy instead of the back.  Mine is the opposite.  It makes them both different even though they are the same thing essentially.  I think K’s looks cooler, but my purple dude still has character, he’s more cat-like.

Okay, it’s obviously a clue.  I had a dream two weeks ago, where I was trying to keep my mirage from waking up.  He was in a coffin, and I was with a bunch of people, trying to convince them to help me before it was too late.  I was chopping my mirage’s limbs off with an axe, afraid he would wake up and we’d all be jacked.  His eyes were open and looking at me letting me know he knew what I was doing.  Perhaps what I was doing was futile.

I had another dream three days ago, where I found an open entrance into the underworld, and I started digging dirt away to get inside.  For some reason, I called into the tunnel with a howl, and it echoed down into the darkness.  I grew very afraid, and all of a sudden a scary, vicious seeming gollum-like creature appeared at the opening and started trying to dig its way through.  I freaked, because I didn’t want him to escape, and I didn’t want to get yanked into the underworld or have my arm eaten off like what happens in the horror movies.  I woke up before I knew what happened.

Yeah, more clues.  How do me and my mirage deepen our relationship without letting the other make changes on who we are?  The last time I tried to do something for my mirage, he played a mean trick on me.  Maybe I’ve got this all wrong.  But I’m pretty mad, and I guess I’ve been letting things slide long enough.  This night in a haunted house is turning out to be a long one.

So I knock on the basement door to the laundry room and say, “Yo, mirage with all the spooky scary stuff.  What’s up?”

Hurricane Hanna brings in some much needed rain to the area I’m living in.  K and I are happy we don’t have to water the garden for the next day or so.  I always get happy and feel renewed when it’s raining.  But alas, the haunted house and my mirage won’t let us rest for even a moment.  It’s either crumcake bumout, or have your relaxation interrupted by troubles.

Frankie shows a limp, and we see she’s developed a swollen paw.  Well that’s just great, another hit from the crumbum volleys.  Our cats are taking hits for us, and it’s breaking my heart.  If that weren’t enough, the rain leaks into our newly repaired fuse box, and it’s scare of an electrical fire or short circuit explosion all over again.  Crumbs, and I can’t even get a day off to be ruined, that’s how Sector 2.2 this is.

I’ve had enough.  It’s totally time to put on the thinking hat of ultimate doom and figure out what is going on.  I put on my brightest red shirt and shorts, start stomping around like a big grouse, and get angry.  Any supernatural creature or ultra-dimensional being I run into had better hope they have a hall pass signed by me, or I’m going to give them the real world knuckle sandwich and kick them into the hot pot, where I’m going to turn them into food so I can make my bills this week.

I mean, I’m ready to pull my hair out here.  K is all stressed out, and that means I’m really not happy.  Time for time, and yeah it’s all in my mind, so get ready because I’m in the mood to dig ditches.  I gather up a bunch of books from my best-of friendly reading collection and start memorizing ideas.  I might not have many torpedoes left, but I can mine a few more mental paradigms for ammunition.  Shapeshifting 101, get some sense, fool!

Luckily Captain Rowdy was able to restore the main laptop computer circuit and restore lost data.  It’s an EDR (Emergency Damage Repair), so I don’t know how long the jury-rig will hold.  Hopefully by remembering to hit the manual backup override regularly I’ll dodge more croaking of the circuit until I can reincarnate the module.

I’m working on redlines now, in readiness for the third set of revisions, so I don’t need the computer right now.  I’m handling hard copy and jumbling notes about, making a module interface not as critical at the moment.

The launch patrols didn’t sight any phantom dogs, and I haven’t seen any other Unbelievables on the sensor records, cloaked or uncloaked.  The neighborhood cats all seem out in force, however, so increased activity must be going on.  I just hope commander Smokey can handle it, even though Frankie and him just broke up.  I saw a volunteer cat stuck in a tree, either scouting for Clingon jackup cruisers or cowering from phantom pack intruders while waiting for backup.

I’m holding on to the last few mental torpedoes for now, in case I need a special delivery system.  I mean, talk about being stuck in Sector 2.2!  For those of you not in the know, the Star Trek arcade video game had a round where all you did was chase a crazy robotic drone based on Nomad, the super powerful probe from one of the TV episodes, as it dropped mines everywhere and set you up for blowing up real good.  The first time I had to fight that thing was in Sector 2.2 (every round was fought in a “sector”, where Mr. Spock’s voice would say, “Now entering sector…”), I was stunned.  Since then, it’s a euphemism for the suk-level.

And yeah, no starbase neither.  How’s a karmanaut supposed to recharge shields or reload on torpedoes, make repairs, have shore leave, etc. when you can’t get no dock-up?  See, right now I’m stuck at work with no backup, which means no vacation until I can hire a new console operator.  I’m literally like Kirk in “The Doomsday Weapon”, piloting a half-destroyed starship on near-automatic with only a super-engineer keeping the ship running (or as we say, my psychological automatic process).  Meanwhile, some nut is taking my real ship out for a joyride to pick up some Romulon ale and Twinkies.

Or rather, I’m stuck in the not-bonus round, getting jacked, and there’s no starbase recharge for a while.

What happened was my friend and co-worker, a British citizen, was taken into custody by immigration and detained.  Apparently some new law is roping in hundreds of regular people, even with their documentation in order, and forcing deportation hearings on them.  Meanwhile, they sit and rot in tent cities with no laundry or barber facilities waiting for a due process that never arrives (via the handy dirty trick of moving suspects from place to place at taxpayer expense without even telling the court).

His car was broken into and stripped right before this two-month ordeal began, so he wasn’t having a good time to start with.  I think the most surreal moment was when his dad told me he had been shipped to Brownsville Texas, near the border, right as Hurricane Dolly was slamming into the coast.

My friend finally accepted deportation (he’s a small guy and doesn’t speak Spanish, and living with mercenary guards and hardened Latinos was wearing him out), and in a twist of fate immigration dropped all charges and basically said, “never mind, come on back to the states anytime you want”.  He’s understandably reluctant to come back, and at least he’s gone to a country with family and friends where he won’t disappear.

Me and the co-workers have talked to him, and he’s in great spirits, trying to get his life in order after twenty years in the states.  His parents are probably going to sell their businesses and move back there in the next few years.  Tax dollars at work!  Cheap labor, come on in.  Skilled workers who play by the rules, get lost!  And they ask me why I drink.

But the net effect for me is no console operator, and work has entered a period where it’s the busiest time of the year.  I’ll make it through, but having to pilot the ship and hit the phraser button rapid-fire because you’ve got no recharge ability blows.  The crumbum volleys are a flying fast and furious I tell ya!

Even though I don’t have cable, it’s hard to avoid the backwater shadow cast over society by big business.  The ultra-rich are busy bidding for the candidates they think will be best short-term monarch for their interests.  The fleer patrol (false prophet flagships) is out in force in the mediapoly, making sure nobody talks about the issues or carries any news about what the public actually wants.  I swear, I have enough problems without having to hear about the shenanigans of McCuckoo and Ophony as they try to sell us their brand of toothpaste.

Around here where I live, it’s always a tender time during ratify-candidates-already-decided-for-you days.  It’s serious business, because depending on who is coming in or going out, many people’s jobs are at stake.  People seem to drive a little more hard-nosed, shop a little more with the jitters, and hop on pop a little harder in their domiciles.  TV and stereo systems always rise in volume during this time as folks try to drown out the stress with louder programming instructions.

Unfortunately, poor Blink our cat must have taken a hit to the life support.  She’s one of the more dedicated huntresses in our household, eliminating meeses and cave crickets wherever they may roam.  We noticed her urine was coming out wine colored (that’s fancy talk for bloody whizz).  We took her to the vet for a checkup and some kitty drugs, and it appeared to clear up.

Alas, the symptoms returned, and Blink was not a happy camper.  We took her back for a steroid injection to unclog the tubes and an x-ray, which showed no stones or other obvious problems.  We got more kitty drugs, and after a long while, she looks fine.  Hopefully it was a really nasty infection and we’ve taken it out, because the next step is bloodwork and an ultrasound, and that might get serious.

Having the cat patrol makes certain things nicer and easier, but you have to pay the upkeep costs.  Not just love, but also the physical chore of waste disposal, water and food refueling, toy playtime, and of course life support via vet specialist checkup.  Blink has been using me as her personal starbase to dock at and recharge, which I’m grateful for.  Her problems are typical of the edge-of-your seat crumbum storm it is out there right now.

Bob Dylan was right, “Look out kid / You’re gonna get hit” and “Better jump down a manhole / Light yourself a candle”  If I can just dodge those crumbum mines, maybe I can get a shot at the Nomad probe and get out of this sector.  Good thing I kept the reserve warp ready.

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.

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.

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?