X

It’s a bar, simply called ‘Abandon All Hope.’  Making my way towards the front and I have a thirst that needs quenching.  All the bottles with shiny liquids swishing in.  there’s not many people in the bar, but two men, dressed in wool cloths sit at the bar.

Going to the bar, the bartender asks, “What’ll be” or something in some tongue I’ve never heard, but understand without hesitation.  

“beer”  I tell him, ‘just a beer.’  Taking a stool, I drink a swig to calm my burning thirst.  Looking at the two men sitting next to me, seeing them real close, one of them looks ugly, the kind that makes you keep staring and the other is quite sympathetic.  Lifting my beer to them as a toast.  One of them spoke up, the sympathetic one.

“what do you think of this place so far, Ivan,” he says with a round cup in his hand and a smirk o his face.

“I think this place sucks,’  I muster.  Looking at the ugly one, the ugly ties to say something, but he starts laughing instead.  A long hard laugh that gets the sympathetic fellow to join him.  They laugh so much, I join in as well, not knowing why.  The ugly one has tears in his eyes as he stops himself from laughing.

“That’s exactly what Dante here said when I frist brought him down here,” the ugly one replied with a smile on his face as well.

I looked at Dante and saw his face, sympathetic with all of us humans.  Looking into his eyes, I saw the stars deep in his eyes, the stars he wrote of.  Looking down at his hands, I stare at his frail hands and wonder how those hands wrote such great poetry.

Looking at the person sitting next to Dante, looking at the ugly one.  I realize who this person is.  It’s the one who wrote the tales of the Aenid.  In Latin he wrote.  The same man who guided Dante down here.  This ugly man laughing with a beer in his hand is Virgil.

All I could do was laugh in unison with the other two.

“Listen, listen, Ivan, I was just discussing with my good friend here what makes a poem nowadays.  In my days, we poets just wrote and our writing had a form, it had rhyme, it had stgructure so much structure, pyramids could be eredcted there.  We rhymed and we were loved for it.  We had poets who sait in dusty rooms while the plague took our families, but us poets still wrote disregarding the miseries for we saw hope in death, hope in life, but we never gave up, that’s the key, isn’t it, not to give up?

“But must we really suffer when writing this poetry?  Must we really live many lives just to write a piece of art?  When I wrote my poem, back in my days, poets were revered…”

“In mine too”

“Yes, in yours too, but back in my time, my dear friends, we had stages to perform our craft.  Stages that held long hours of poetic lines memorized to audiences waiting with silent hearts.   But in my day, poets were a dime a dozen, and in Dante’s, only you educated people survived, am I right, but…”

“Yes, lets get to the point now, since Ivan is here, go ahead, ask him, let’s get a modern”

“Yes, a modern point of view…well we would like to know what you tact on poetry is these days. Since the stage is gone and the epics are no longer being written, what us poets want to kknow, is how you survive as a poet in your day”

On the spot with two great poets, what was there to say but, “by writing, I don’t stop writing, I keep on, looking for what you wrote.  I read what you gentlemen wrote and was inspired by those words.  Thousands of years later, I sit in my room, much like Dante’s and not like Dante’s and with my pen I scratch out my existence and my worries in a world gone topsy-turvy and then I go to a stage much like Virgil’s and not like Virgil’s and I express myself the best way I can.  This poetry that comes fomr you Dante and from Virgil, I still compose in my heart.  And still I read to what crowds come.  In your days you had thousands, but this art is dying and I’m doing what I can to help, let it survive.  Strive on, to endure.”

“I like your answer young man, but let me ask you something else.  Do you believe in muses?  Or where does your inspiration come from?”

I thougt of this and answered my drinking buddies the best way I could.  I picked up my glass and took a drink that satisfied a little bit of my tortured soul for the first time in many years.  Taking a drink and not feeling lonely, having two of my peers waiting for me to give an answer and me eager to talk, spoke up, “Yes, I do believe in muses.”  I said in between two drinks of my disappearing beer.

“Told you he did, now drink up.”

The ugly one took a long drink from his goblet, with driplets falling over the edges of his mouth, onto the rough cloth he was wearing.

“Now what kind of muse, now since you said you believed in muses, I, we want to know if you do have a muse and if you do have one, can you describe it, if you can?

Looking the poets straight on, “I do have a muse and her name is Sara.  She’s this girl I’ve loved since I met her.  I don’t know why, but I’ve been writing for here ears since I’ve met her.  Every poem I’ve written was written for an audience of one and she is the person I’ve been writing these poems for all these long years for.  Every waking moment I have, I think of her, every place I go, I remember her, her face, her smell, her eyes, I know her and she knows me, I love her and she love me.”

“may I intrude real quick.  Then Ivan, if you are writing with a muse, then what are you doing down here?”

“oh I know what kind of love you speak of.  It’s that love that can’t be contained in life, but we try so hard to mimic with words, this love that takes all our lives to live  as, I know what love is and I know your love.”

“Don’t get too sentimental Dante.  We still have somewhere else to go”

“No, Virgil, I was just remembering.”

“Now you did it Ivan, you’ve brought him back inot one of his moods.”

“No its just that we all have our own Beatrice.”

“You just have to say that name, now I’m going to hear Beatrice this and Beatrice that for next hundred years.  Do you know I barely got him to stop talking about his love.  Do you know how long it took me to help Dante forget about her?”

I knew this was a bad idea, but no the great Dante wants to meet his lovesick poet, looking for his love and why because he told me earlier, “I have something to tell him,”  well here we are Dante, what do you have that I so important to tell Orestes, tell him, go on.”

“Ivan, listen to me closely.  Love is fickle emotion.  You can have your life after love, but if love is dead there, who do you keep chasing it.  I followed and searched for Beatric starting in hell, then to purgatory and onward to heaven.  And you know what, when I found Beatrice in heaven, oh yes I was happy, overly excited, but you know where the sadness came in this love, well Beatrice was already dead.  There was no way she was going to come back to earch with me.  These reports of yours, they are saying the same to you.  You can search the underworld for your love, but let me be the bad guy and tell you that your love is dead.  Your love  is not going to return to you.  You might as well give up your search and concentrate on the real problem here.  Ask yourself this, what got you here and how are you going to get back home.  This isn’t life down here.  You can’t solve a problem by finding the mistake, which is your love for Rhonda, but you have to search deep in your mind, in your heart and you must realize why you love the dragon, for its this love of the dragon that’s going to lead you down roads of destruction and many more Rhonda’s along the way.  Once you find the purpose and home of the dragon, it is at that place that you can slay the dragon.  It is does not have anything to do with Rhonda, there is no love between you two, this is all about this love of the dragon.  Once you figure that out, my young poet, then you can make true progress.”  Dante spoke as he picked up his mug and drank down the old suds.

I didn’t want to believe what he had to say.  I had this ugly feeling in my soul.  My teeth were on edge, like millions of drillers wanted to come out onto my tongue.  My mind was flying in all directions thinking of what Dante had just explained to me.  I looked at Virgil and he nodded to me as if I understood what had transpired at this moment.  I looked at the clock and it’s hands were moving backwards.  Looking in my drink and seeing millions of particles floating, lands and other worlds, solar systems in a shot glass, floating in a liquid universe.

1 Cor 1:26 – Consider your own calling brothers.  Not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth.

What is my calling, you may ask?  But Lord, I know my calling, and it is to talk to you daily, write for you daily, and praise you daily, the more I do what you want me to do, the more blessings I see, not necessarily personal blessings, but these blessings for my brothers bring joy to my heart as if these blessings were mine as well, but your glories, Lord, these I see and hear every day as well, and just the same, Lord, I see your mercy and chastenment, oh Father, forgive my sins.  So consider what it is what God wants from you, not what you want from God.  It is easy to want things, but to do things, that is an entirely different matter.  There is lots of times I am so lazy I don’t even want to help my brother, but I know there is no difference between a brother in Christ and a brother in flesh.  So I must help out as much as I can, even when I don’t want to; that may be the best time to help someone else.  It is being able to leave that sluggard behind, that old lazy sloth behind and do something, not because I will get paid for it, but to do something right because it is the right thing to do.

               And I remember that I am nobody.  I am not powerful;  I am not of noble birth.  I am a mixture of cultures of bloods indigenous to the Americas, a remnant of the savages that were slaughtered, but even I know my place, have learned my place when it comes to you, dear Father.  Like Gideon, I was afraid, not wanting to speak up.  Like Moses, I am a murderer of lives cut short.  Like Paul, I am a prisoner praising your name every day.  Like Peter, I have denied you more than three times and still you answer when the phone rings.  Like David, I have slept with married women and lied behind the husbands back.  Like Solomon, I have prayed upon false idols, because this woman told me so, or the popular people in this material world worshipped them, and I wanted to be like these popular people. Like Jonah, I have closed my ears to your words, only to be swallowed in jail, in the belly of the beast I prayed, and still you brought me out.  Like Thomas’, I doubted your existence, saying you cannot be real, how foolish of me,  but through this all, Lord, l still have the gift you imparted upon me because you knew before I was born, I was to come back and praise you.  Like this, praise you in places where you are made fun of, where you reside and are thrown away daily, but I know you Lord, and you know me and like that criminal who was crucified next to you, I know you are blameless and that you have died and risen for my sake and because of my faith, I too will be in paradise, happy to be in your presence, happy to see you once again.

when i was seventeen, as a game sent to me by my good friend

At that age, I read the stranger by Albert Camus and that book changed my life.  Since that first reading, I have read that book about fifteen times.  I was working at my first job, which was at the Greenwood Public Library, which is now known as McDonald’s.  Go figure, huh.  I had a car, a brown Buick; a Somerset was what it was.  It was a cool car; I used to go all over the place with it, with my friends and girls.  I remember going to the beach a lot and smoking a lot, and hanging out with these high school girls from my class at Moody High School.  The weird thing is that me and my friends used to hang out with these two girls, two cousins who were very beautiful.  One of them was a skinny girl whom I like a lot, but her cousin, was thin, but had a body that was rocking and rolling.  I remember being at the beach with these girls and I took off my shirt and the cousin, I forget her name, would stand next to me and rub her hand into my hairy chest and tell me how much she liked my hairy chest, because all these other boys she knew from school, were that, just boys.   And me, I was weird about it all.  I was their friend, their close friend when we were not in school.  But when it came to school, for some reason, I was ashamed to be seen with them.  Why, I don’t know, and I still think about that, about why I acted like I did not know who these girls were when I would see them in high school, but outside of school, I was their best friend.  I think that is very strange, indeed.  At high school, I was taking calculus and smoking lots all the time.   My hair was long; it went to the middle of my back.  I used to shave my head and only the top of my head was long.  I knew all these girls that had a crush on me from high school, but I did not do anything about it.  My anxiety was really bad and I did not talk to girls because I was afraid or I was a big pussy.  That is all I can think of when it comes to my relationships with girls.  It was no until a couple of years later that I would lose my innocence and I would think differently about girls.  At this time, I was a philosopher and a poet.  Girls were very far from my mind.  I read Nietzsche and Camus and Sartre.  I discovered Baudelaire in my life and started to read lots of popular fiction, like Grisham and Crichton.  When I was seventeen I was in charge of my life, and all I wanted to be was a poet.  Kind of like J. Keats, but little did I know what my life had in store for me?  I was taking classes at Moody that were audio visual video tape classes.  I used to make commercials, produce them for my class, and I used to snap lots of photos with a bad-ass camera that I bought with the money I was making from working at the library.  I used to play piano very much, and my piano teacher had me accepted at the Berklee College of music, located in Boston, Mass.  I was into Nirvana and Pearl Jam.  I really enjoyed Pearl Jam a lot.  I was getting into that underground indie scene, which would only lead me to even better music in the years to come.  I remember I bought this collection of compact discs, which was everything that John Lennon had recorded as a solo artist.  It was a compilation compact disc which consisted to four separate compact discs.  This was the most important buy that I made in my young life.  I loved these recordings so much.  I remember these crushes I had on certain girls, who would come in and see me at the library all the time.  They would look at me and ask my questions, and they would wait for me to ask them out.  But I was a naïve and stupid little boy, not realizing that these women were throwing themselves at me, so I ignored their advances and wondered late at night, why I did not have a girlfriend, and I wondered if I would ever have one.  My sexual tastes were questioned, and I wondered if I was a homosexual, not that I have anything against them, but I was curious about myself at that time, because I could not talk to girls, but I was able to talk to boys, any boys without any trouble.  Later on in my life, I discovered I was not gay, but that is at another age in my life.  When I was seventeen, I was already snorting things and popping pills like nothing.  I remember shortly before my eighteenth birthday, I had smoked a reefer, a marijuana stick, and I locked up my door, and when inside to my calculus class.  About twenty minutes into the mathematical lecture, by a teacher who thought he was the Jaime Escalante of South Texas.  My calculus teacher had all these sayings on his wall, from ‘poder es querer’ to a bunch of sayings that screamed Chicano pride.  What I do remember most about my teacher’s wall, was this long picture from M C Escher that always caught my eye.  Well, twenty minutes into this mindless number game called calculus and the security guard came in and asked for me by my name.  I went outside and saw police searching my car.  I was asked to open the car and the police dove in and searched my car thoroughly.  Fortunately nothing was found, except for two little seeds in the back seat.  My car smelled like weed because I and my two friends had just burned one on the way to school.  The vice principal at that time, told me that he did not know what was going to happen to me, but he sent me back to class and told me that I had better change.  That night was a Friday night, and I decided to cut off my beautiful long hair, to show the principal and all others who know about my predicament that I was capable of changing and that I needed a chance to prove to them that I was a good person.  Obviously it worked, for the vice principal called me into his office and told me that they were not going to pursue the case against me because for one they were just seeds, but also because I had shown initiative that I wanted to change my life.  This was the first time I lied about my usage, and it would not be my last.  I guess this was the first time that I was able to lie and get away with it, and use the knowledge to my ability, and get what I want.  It was not until four years later that I found out that what I was doing had a name already in the philosophical world, and this knowledge was very acute in my actions.  There are a lot of other things that I did at this age, but I’ll save that for next time.

16

.

She was tired.  Covered in blood, none of it her own, she replayed in her tired mind all the times she could remember the aliens picking her up.

            As much as she fled her destiny, it was always there, behind the cars, the capitol, the town lake, the water towers, moon towers, Pease park, the bark trees, the barbecue joints, the dirty men, the old dresser, the bathroom stall, under her bed, in her trunk, in her pillows, in the Gutenberg Bible, behind the frat boys faces, in all the syringes, the pale faces she woke up to, its always been there, etched in the stars.

            And just like the stars appear nightly, without fail, her stars came to her, right on time, not a minute too soon nor a minute too late.

            All good things come to an end and life on Earth was now over for Danielle.

            She looked to the east, saw the sun-light creeping over.  She looked up and winked.

            And there sat Danielle, on the corner of Cesar Chavez and Congress, at a bus-stop waiting for her spaceship to take her away, at twilight, weary.

XV  The Devil’s Backbone

 

Six months ago, Damian and I were driving to San Antonio to go party at Fiesta.  Fiesta is a two week mardi-gras-like party that is held in San Anto every April, annually.  It is a great time.  If you’ve never been there, you should go there once in your lifetime.  It is something you will never forget.

            However, it was a late night, and we were driving to San Anto at about three in the morning, the witching hour,  trying to reach Fiesta.  I had been up on meth, obviously my favorite, and I wanted to get away from all the shit Austin was throwing my way.  The bills were piling up, from credit cards to breaking contracts with leasing agents, to unpaid traffic citations, not showing up to court, in a timely manner, or even in a timely dress, not showing up to court-ordered probation, dealers wanting money or pussy or both, and me, feeling wigged out, again, for the umpteenth time, wanting to quit using, but not having the willpower to actually quit;  therefore I decided a little down time with my own folks would do me some good.

            The expressway is so quiet at this time of the night.  There are hardly any drivers on the freeway.  I made the choice, while we were in New Braunfels to take a little side trip. 

            There’s a little range of hills to the west of this central area of Texas, which is locally known as the Devil’s Backbone.  There have been reports over the years that this is a hot spot for unexplained phenomena.  There were reports, a couple of hundred years ago, that whole complete Indian tribes disappeared in the middle of the night.  The first Texans would write reports of tracking down tribes who were wild one night and all of a sudden, the next morning, no trace would ever be found of a tribe or anybody gathering at the same location where there was a wild party held the night before.

            Maybe that’s where this strange activity comes from.  Magic mushrooms and tall tales.  Eating ‘shrooms with an empty stomach gets you tripping a whole lot quicker than if you had a full belly.  I hadn’t eaten in days, so if I came across a batch of mushrooms, hmmm, hmmm, hmmmm, hummm, I would definitely have an intense trip.

            We took a right, drove for a couple of miles, took a left, hung a quick right, passed over a little creaky bridge, drove for another mile, found the fork in the road, and took the one less traveled by, went down a caliche road, until we finally came upon a green pasture, our magic field.

            We jumped the barb wire fence, which was so flimsy, we could have knocked down the fence with one easy kick, and we went in search of cow patties.  We came across some cow patties right away, and we waved our flashlights over them and saw no mushrooms.  We went in search of more patties when Damian remembered that someone had told him to look under tree growth, under the branches, and you would find some mushrooms there.  I don’t know, but I guess it has something to do with the spores and shade and sunlight.  Or was it moonlight?

            The lights that were so far away, suddenly got closer to us as we ran around in the darkness.  We had no idea in which direction my car was.  What if the lights belonged to a stupid Texan red-neck with a gun.  He would surely shoot us Mexicans and say it was self-defense.  Then they would let him be an honorary member of the Texas Rangers.

            I came to, hours later, as dawn was breaking, and I found myself naked in my car.  Damn, did I do it again, have sex without protection, while I was passed out.  That fucker Damian, I thought, what a scumbag.  I sat up in the back seat and noticed Damian was in the front, naked as well, but he was shaking, as if he was cold.

            “You don’t remember what happened,” he finally said in a hoarse voice, as if he had been smoking or screaming all night long.

            I heard Damian mumble, “It wasn’t me.”  That dumb fuck.

            I turned on the car, got on the road and looked for the interstate.  I knew exactly what had happened the night before, but I was trying to play it off.  I saw what they did to him.  Poor Damian.

14

Claire de lune, moonlight.  Peaceful to the ears.  They keys being hit, the colors intermingling, the lights ring out with tune.  Fish in the air, monkeys underwater.

            “Glad to see you awake, Danielle.  How are you feeling?,”  he asks her, while gripping on the steering wheel, tightly.

            “Oh, I’m sorry” he jumps in his seat, “Hi, I’m Chris, Chris Oetzi.  You may not remember me, but I know all about you Danielle.”

            “What’s wrong Danielle?  I am your friend.  Me and you, we are both alike.  Not like soul mates, but we are the chosen ones.  Ever since you were a baby, man that was so long ago, I remember seeing you, so small on the gurney in the spaceships.”

            “To Austin.  It’s a beautiful town, and I think you should see it one last time.”, he says nonchalantly.

            “Dani, you have lots of questions that need answers.  So let me start with simple ones first.  You are not experiencing hallucinations.  These creature are not a figment of your imagination.  No matter what amount of mind-altering substances you are on, and I feel for you, for what you’ve seen tonight must be horrible in the state you are in.  These beings, or monsters as you described them, are beings from space.  Aliens.  From what space, I can’t tell you, because I don’t know myself-“

            “Is it a dance move?”

            “Not necessarily.  They may come from the heavens, but they care about us.  So they have been studying us humans for the past 20,000 years and especially in the last hundred years, they have been choosing the best specimens to relocate to this new Earth.”

            “You, Dani, you are one of the chosen ones.  The aliens are here for you.  It’s the same with me.  They are here for me, just like they are here for many others.”

            “Danielle,” spoke Chris softly, “there come times in your life, when you might not like to, but you have to accept the facts.  Its like that old adage, ‘sometimes to finish something, one must go against everything to have it accomplished’ or like when you ask why the sky appears blue?  Why love hurts so much with the loss of a loved one.  Sometimes you have to accept life on life’s terms.  Do you understand?

            Danielle, looking out the passenger window, she sees the sun-rays come over the hills, and to her that is peaceful.

            They drove on, while Chris and Danielle sat in silence.  Danielle thought and thought and saw icicles form in the corners of her mind.  They got too heavy with sun-light and they fell back to earth, crashing and breaking into millions of crystals.

            Danielle already had her hand on the handle before Chris pulled to a halt.

            “No matter how far you run away from destiny, fate will always catch up with you.”

13

            I had wicked thoughts.  Ugly fantasies running through my head.  I thought every girl hated me and every boy wanted to have sex with me.

            We got to his apartment complex and I needed help walking up those stairs to his apartment.  Imagine, this medium build guy carrying a girl that looked like she had just been saved from a Jewish Death Camp, well that was me.  Spent, emaciated, limp, weak, crazy.  It’s funny how we can look back on our past lives and poke fun of it.  If I can’t do that, then I can’t take any criticism on my part.

            Sometime near the morning, I felt hands over my body.  At first I thought it was Ross trying to get a feel.  I knew I could push him away and not worry about a thing.  Shit I was tired.  I pushed the hands away.  Then I felt them again. “Fuck Ross, I’m not in the mood,” I moaned through my teeth.  I felt hands all over my body.  My thighs, my arms, my breasts, my face, my ears, my feet.  I don’t know if it was groping or rubbing, but I got fed up.  I finally opened my eyes to a surprise.

            There I was laying in bed, on my back, and there were two aliens, one holding my legs down and the other on my right side, inserting a needle in my arm.  It wasn’t a hypodermic needle, but rather a large syringe and I don’t know if they were inserting or drawing up liquid.  I, of course, began to fidget in bed and I began to cry out for  Ross, but no words were coming out.  There were many moans once again that I expressed in that horror room.

I still don’t know if I dreamt this situation or if it actually happened.  Why would my uncle be there, even when he was dead.  And aliens, why would they be there.  Why had I always dreamed of them.  Ever since I was a kid, I remember seeing these beings around me.  What is they want?  With me?  Do I have something special? Am I special?  I don’t know the answers to these life’s mysteries.  Sometimes I wonder about all these experiences of mine and I am confused about what to think.  What did I do to deserve this?  How is it my fault?  You know, it’s better to get high sometimes.  To deal with these questions, these problems, these worries, well, a shot was the best solution.

12

Symposium – a social gathering at which there is free interchange of ideas, a formal meeting at which several specialists deliver short addresses on a topic or related topics, a collection of opinions on a subject

Dr. Wiggington – If he had sideburns, I would diagnose him as a confused young man, unsure of his sexuality.

Dr. Tames – Who talketh, walketh the scoffeth.

Dr. Reavis – All right, all right, lets begin this.  Let me take roll.  In no particular order. 

Dr. Reavis – Dr. Reavis… oh, that’s me, Here and last, but certainly not least, Dr. Tames.

Dr. Gonzalez – Let me say my piece first.  As all of you know, I have been on several missions to the canals of the deep pacific.  I have seen all kinds of life down there.  There are many beautiful life forms on this planet.  We all come from organisms and bacteria.  When life began here on Earth, it was not God who made us in his own image.  But rather it was the right temperature.  We, as earthlings, are a fluke of the universe.  Life is not a miracle, but the human brain, most definitely is, if there is such a things as miracles.  How is it, that we lonely apes, because we did in fact evolve from primates, were able to invent language.  We even went further with language for we had uses for it.  How is it that a person can write words to communicate with someone else.  Let us look at communication.  That is very much an earthling invention.

If aliens exist, I believe water would destroy these beings, because water to a life form, is a very alien thing.  Only on this planet, does water exist.  In this whole universe, there is not one planet, who’s gasses have evolved into water, that ever great life-bringer.  Science proves that water has created life, so how can life be elsewhere, if water does not exist elsewhere, or rather, cannot exist in this universe.  Perhaps in a black hole, with anti-matter, but that is heading in the realm of mathematics and physics, and I only know of the biology and geology and mariners of ancient lore.

If aliens exist, I believe water would destroy these beings, because water to a life form, is a very alien thing.  Only on this planet, does water exist.  In this whole universe, there is not one planet, who’s gasses have evolved into water, that ever great life-bringer.  Science proves that water has created life, so how can life be elsewhere, if water does not exist elsewhere, or rather, cannot exist in this universe.  Perhaps in a black hole, with anti-matter, but that is heading in the realm of mathematics and physics, and I only know of the biology and geology and mariners of ancient lore.

Dr. Tames – Get off his piece now.  Why doesn’t someone lighten this place up and enlighten this etude.

Dr. Bruce – Let me go on.  I want to be the voice of reason in this haphazard talk we are undertaking.  As you all know, I am a mathematician.  I don’t believe in anything, unless it can be proven.  Why, the only truth I know, which is the only truth in the whole universe, has got to be the concept of two plus two.  No matter what, two plus two will always equal four.  If we are on Neptune, and an extra-terrestrial had two ships and then it had two more flying ships, the total is four.  The same on Earth, two rocks plus two more rocks will always come out to four rocks.  It will never be five rocks, nor will it be ten rocks.  Look at your hands, everybody, you got two fingers and you add two more fingers, this is so simple, what do you have?   Now, it may be called something else, wherever you go, be it Uranus, or Venus, but this four is universal.

Therefore, it is hard for me to believe in something which mathematics can disprove.  What Dr. Gonzalez was hinting at, was the mathematical formula known as Drake’s Equation.  This equation proves that life on this planet is a fluke.  God did not put us here.  God did not have a garden of Eden and made woman out of Adam’s rib.  No.  There is no life anywhere in the universe.  The universe is composed of gasses and energy.  Is energy life?  That is a question that philosophers have struggled with since the dawn of time.  And what has trying to figure out that question ever got the philosopher?  Nothing.  The philosopher either went insane from thinking too much, lived alone much of his/her life because it never got off its stoop of thinking, he let women live their lives without him.  What did they write, nothing but boring tracts where cogito ergo sum, seems to be the penultimate idea.  No, we most definitely are the only thinking race in this whole universe.  Only the human race could devise racism, only the human race could devise murder, only a human could love a human, for we humans are just too, I don’t know, what can you say, human?

Albeit, there are some diseases that can alter the human biology, just as well.  How is that possible, you might be asking yourselves?  Any of you doctors of high estimation ever come across a subject that had the Floe-jowls?  Any of you?  Naysayers beware.  This is a disease that transforms the patient’s epidermis into a crocodile-like species, which in the final stages, some patients have come out resembling the features of an alien.  The common alien;  the extra-terrestrial that is most described by all the nitwits and pundits in this society, from the shores of Tripoli, to the banks of the Hudson River, to the ends of the Nile, to the heights of the Himalayas.  You do know of what alien I am referring to;  the alien being that most of the people who have been abducted have claimed to have seen.  The being that is gray, about four feet tall, that comes and abducts them wherever they are, especially when they are sleeping.  Always when they are sleeping?  What is the deal?

Now, compare this report of sleep paralysis to a report of alien abduction, and when they are put side by side, you must be an ignorant person to dispute that these two occurrences do not seem similar.  Alien abductees report a state of paralysis, just as I have observed at the Sleeping Institute.  Alien abductees also report that they cannot speak, just like the subject who is under sleep paralysis.  Do you doctors see where I am going with this?

Aliens are not coming from Venus, Mars, or Uranus.  They are not from the Cancer Constellation, from some black holes, from under the sea.  They are not from the future coming to the past to see what went wrong.  They are not communicating with us, with crop circles, or megaliths, or pictures on the sides of mountains, or through petty abductions, because my fellow doctors, in the end, kidnapping is a petty crime

If perhaps, extra-terrestrials were coming to Earth, how would they communicate with us?  How would they convey messages to us?  I think the only way they can communicate with us, is by abducting humans.  They come to Earth, perform oral surgeries, anal probes, and other tests, that we find so horrible.  Its like this.  When we were kids, we all had magnifying glasses which we used to torture the ants with.  Don’t you remember?  What was the purpose of that?  We had the power, is the only reason I can think of today why we tortured those ants.  We humans are way bigger, thousand times bigger than the ants.  Therefore we could stomp and drown them, because we are the dominant species.

A planet full of primates, especially primates that can walk and talk and go into outer space, and write books, and add up two plus two, and play music, and tear down mountains, and kill off humanity.  All of us monkeys, with opposable thumbs, grabbing items, which no other animal on the planet can do.  But the most important of all our inventions, is the ability of speech.  There it is again, communication efforts.  Our speech is special, it is unique, as is our writing.  Out thought processes.  What makes a human write an autobiography.  We write and speak of ourselves, we idolize each other.  We watch television shows were we see beautiful humans and it pushes emotions in us that make us want to be beautiful like the humans we see on magazines or television.  That is something I can’t grasp, because we are all very beautiful, in a certain way, who has the ability, the gall to say this woman is more beautiful than this other one.  What sparks our brains to distinguish such ideas in our little heads?  Is the appearance of extra-terrestrials something that we humans need so we can realize that no one is more special than anybody else.  In the very end, my neighbor, my wife, my children, my mother, my father, my siblings, my ex-girlfriends, all of them, the president of the United States, Albert Einstein, A. Hitler, Glenn Gould, all of us, are simply monkeys.

Dr. Smith – Anyways, let me start off by saying, once again to get everyone in order again, that the whole existence of alien life forms are false.  They are fake.  They do not exist.  They are a figment of imagination.  From the writings of Haydon in the Aurora, Texas sightings, to the paintings of UFO’s above Mary Magdalene; aliens are nothing but a figment of our imagination.  Once one person, on drugs nonetheless, starts to see and reports alien abductions, it gets the ball rolling.  Others come forward, and they tell of how they too have been abducted.  They lift their stories of abductions from the people who are making them up.  They too want to feel special; they are just a copy of an original.  In our post-modern world, even our lives are lives that have already been lived; we are just usurping them because we have nothing else to do.  Therefore, these new victims of ‘aliens’ are also abducted while they are sleeping.

Now if you add the epidemic that is destroying our county, which is drugs, it makes these hallucinations a bit worse.  They become nightmares to the victim.  Where sleep deprivation only brings about dreams of abductions, a drug psychosis brings on the nightmares of kidnappings and anal probes and death.  People with insomnia, speak of horrors that they see daily, but you mix up drugs that don’t make you fall asleep, and bam, the psychosis only gets worse.  Mix up sleep deprivation and methamphetamines or opiates and you have people saying they are getting abducted nightly.

How is it that so many people around the world have the same visions?  These are people from all walks of life, people who we have tried to find a connection between them, and all we have found, all of us in the scientific community, have found nothing to link them together.  They have the same signs, from bright lights to missing time, same drawings of saucer-shaped ships to cigar looking vessels, same beings, which is the same picture thousands of people around the globe have drawn from their own memories, same abduction stories, where the abducted is picked up late at night, and prodded my several gray beings and also several troll looking ones, and they all seem to see the same alien.  How can people see the same creatures, night after night, describe the same tests, when these people don’t even know each other, much less they are separated by thousands of miles, from oceans to oceans, from one distant culture to another distant one. 

In short, the alien being, the gray being, the one who controls the spaceship, that creature has become, in our society, the new boogey-man.  There are no more stories that scare our children to sleep.  Gone is the tale of the werewolf on big full-moon nights.  The vampire, ha! he has become childish fodder, for he doesn’t scare people anymore, but rather people want to become the undead.  Our kids look in any mall, and you will see the remnants of a gothic culture.  And serial killers, well, there are so many now, that most of the time the person next door to you is so deviant that he or she is going out and participating in a killing spree, with anthrax, with snipers, with terroristic planes, you name it, and its been played out in our culture so much, it is no longer taboo. 

And since we are talking about taboo subjects and Satan, then what do any of you have to comment on the practicing of anal probes.  Why do so many abductees complain of getting anal probes?  Is our fecal matter that important to other species of life, is our dung so fascinating to E.T., that they must penetrate a phallus into our rectum for ‘research purposes’.  I don’t know, but to me, it looks like some of these abductees just want to be prodded anally.  Anal sex is still so taboo in the bedroom, that what if an alien, which is the equivalent of Satan, is just coming in our bedrooms late at night, to explore our sexual frustrations.  Is the alien, just a nice Satan, who comes and probes our humans anally?  My friends, my fellow colleague, just exactly who is reaching climax at these soirees.

These are deep sexual undertones, no pun intended, about the fact that many people do love anal sex.  Look at the Greeks, the Romans, the modern Indians, each of these cultures loved anal sex.  Depictions of sodomy are shown in pieces of pottery, frescoes, vases.  If the same idea was so open today, why my neighbors would have a coffee book filled with pictures of sodomy.  Somewhere along the way, sodomy became taboo, so our sexual minds, because all us humans, no matter if we are male or female, we all think of sex all day long.  Sodomy was a practice that was enjoyed among both sexes, but somewhere in history, it was outlawed, and the act became an act only deviants did.  The Christians had something to do with the death of sodomy, for having anal sex, become the bad way to have sex, because no impregnating of women was to occur.  Us humans, we love sex so much, we are the dominant species on our planet. 

My research however, has shown me, that many people on this Earth suffer from a bad case of Mass Hysteria.  Let me put it this way, if one person contracts an ailment, and this ailment garners much attention from many aspects of society, be it the television news, newsprint, senators, or just plain anybody, very shortly, others start to come out with the same symptoms, and they too get that national attention that puts them on the map, so to speak.  And if you give it some more time, before anyone knows it, a whole country could be affected with this ailment.

Or take for instance, the events of October 23, 2005.  At this date, one male passenger on a flight from Phoenix to Boston suddenly got ill on the airplane.  He complained and moaned that he had this illness that transpired from the free drink he got in his first class privileges.  Within the hour, the passengers in the third class flight, they too started to complain of having gushing sweats and feelings of immanent danger.  They too got a free drink from the flight attendant, so they had all got the same symptoms.  When the plane landed, it arrived at Atlanta early because the passengers were starting an uproar, and they wanted control of the air vessel; anyways, every passenger on the plane had to be taken to the E.R.  The following month all the passengers sued the airline, with a class-action lawsuit that centered on the free drinks that were passed around.

It takes one person to speak of how they were abducted.  Then they are the ‘stars’ of all these daytime and nighttime talk shows.  One person gets their fifteen minutes of fame, and then five million other people want to be famous too. Others start to feel as if they have been abducted also.  Of course the media intervenes, and we all know how much of an influence the media has on all of us television junkies. 

The media itself has to be the one aspect in society that gives us all these nightmares to feed us this alien mass hysteria.  Through the media, there are movies of aliens destroying the world, t-shirts of Roswell, New Mexico, television sit-coms and dramedy shows that are about extra-terrestrials.  Books about alien abduction, books that try to explain close encounter of the third kind to the public.  Every way one turns, there is an instance that people can read that says that alien life forms do exist.  And us the public, we eat it all, we ingest the information like the super-information highway, and we keep it in our heads, and late at night, we have nightmares, which start the mass hysteria, and before you know it, our children are having the same nightmares, our neighbors are now having the same dreams, because these nightmares are so frequent, we are no longer afraid of them anymore.  It is like the idea of Satan.  For thousands of years, Satan scared most people to be good citizens, but the more we dreamt him, the less evil he became, and in the end, Satan became an angel of God who wanted to be like his Father, but he was cast out because he could not be his own man.  We started to portray Satan as a man, and the more he became man, in the end, Satan was just another mad man on this Earth, and by that time, we humans knew how to imprison men with minds that evil.  Be it with prisons and bars, or prisons of the mind, we humans became doctors that knew how to take care of deranged individuals such as Satan.  Satan was no longer a boogey-man, so we had to find a new idea to scare us, and what better than a being from another world.  The alien is like Satan, the alien is not of this earth, the alien is at first evil, but the more we see the alien in print, the more comfortable we humans get with the idea of alien abduction.  This alien phenomenon will one day be nothing.  It will become like Satan, scary at first, but in the end a joke.  And this joke will not even be funny.

Dr. Smith – What’s that commotion outside?  Do you hear it?

Dr. Miller – NO!, it sounds like terror!

(the door to the room the professors are sitting in, collapses.  And in struts in, this four foot being, a gray, with large eyes and a ray gun is his hand)

 

ALIEN - ^^%?>%%@##~~`~`~

            ~~~`~~`~~~~~`

            (loud screams, followed by louder screams of help.  Minutes pass and the ALIEN walks out, leaving a room covered in blood and lifeless feet)

11

            Her thighs throbbed, her chest hurt, she had one mission in mind right now, that little house.

            What time was it?  How long had she been up?  Had she really seen people’s heads blow up.  She looked at her arms and saw the dried blood, like a dried up river-bed caked on her arms.

            “I can’t believe she left me.  And for that?  If I see her, I will shoot her mouth with my shotgun and stick this cane in her ass”  Quentin cried into the parlor room he stood in, pacing up and down the corridor, pushing pictures to the floor, leaving muddy footprints with each memory.

            Blake’s wife, Eve, came down the staircase, mad as hell, “Don’t you fuckers know I’m trying to sleep, so what if Cindy left you, she was a bitch.  And you know what they say about bitches!”

            Eve – “Yeah motherfucker, I dare you to say it and then you better run, cause Blake’s gonna bring out his 12 gauge and make you wish Jesus was in this room to bring you back to life.”

            A comet races into the atmosphere and for a split second, Danielle sees the view from Saturn, the pyramids on the moons, and she is running blindly around the monuments in her brain, faster than light, trying to catch up when her feet wind up back on Earth.

            “Why did you let him in?  You promised Blake, you promised you weren’t gonna hang out with that schizoid.  Do you wanna know why Cindy left Quentin, cause he is fucking crazy.  A crazy one.  All he does is go up and down, his emotions run him raw.”  Eve was saying as she was looking into Blake’s eyes.

            “I don’t give a fuck if he blows you better than me, but you’re a grown adult Blake, and there’s a point in your life when you have to leave your past behind.  I don’t care what crazy fun you had with him.  Would you like it if I called up Star and we went out.  No you wouldn’t.  That’s why I stay here, because I love you Blake.  I made a commitment to you, do you understand?”  Eve pleaded with Blake, while she repositioned her robe she had on.

            “Don’t yeah me”

            “You’re right Eve.  I have to cut him off.  I’ll go tell him he has to leave.”  Blake walked to the back door, with his tail tucked between his legs.  His balls had been cut off and Eve kept them beside the bed.  Blake really loved Eve.  Quentin’s never done half of what Eve’s done.  All Q’s done is get him in trouble.  He doesn’t need trouble anymore, but love.

            His thoughts running in all directions.  About who she’s sleeping with.  About finding Cindy with George.  About Cindy found in a bathtub, strangled.  Cindy getting married with another faceless guy.  Cindy kissing Thelma.  He takes a large pull on the marijuana cigarette.

            He’s blowing out smoke when he sees a rustle in the darkness.  At first he thinks it’s a deer, but its movements are so awkward.  He stands up and stares out into Blake’s backyard.  It’s a person, running towards the house.

            Its got hair all over its face, and dirt smudges all over her body.  If it wasn’t for her breasts being see-through, he would have thought it was a monster.

            “There’s these things after me, I don’t know what they are, but they look like aliens, they keep destroying everything and everybody who helps me.  So can I  please borrow your car,”  she said as if she had known these two guys for a number of years.  She stood there shivering between these two men, looking them in their eyes.  The men crouched down by the stare she was giving them, she demanded and she wanted.

            “I’m sick Eve, but not this sick,”  Quentin said breaking his gaze from Danielle to look directly at Eve.  He then looked back at Danielle, mesmerized by her dirty beauty.

            “Listen lady,”  Eve interrupted, “from the looks of it, that is all you need, is some sleep, but I’m not gonna allow you to borrow a car.  What do you think we are, stupid?  Now you better leave these premises or I’ll call the cops before you can tell us that Bigfoot raped you last night.  So do us all a favor and leave.”  Eve stood her ground, looked at Danielle and stared at her, not flinching or giving in to this weird girl.

            “Blake, either you get rid of these two degenerates right this minute, or I’m out of this house, and I’m out of your life.  I am tired to everyone with a problem coming to you for help.  Let the world figure out their own solutions,”  Eve screamed out;  her nostrils flared as big as they could get.

            Quentin revved up the engine and took off.  Then they both heard a thump on the top of the car.  It startled the both of them.  Over the front windshield, blood came pouring down.  Quentin stomped on the brakes which made Eve’s body plop down over the hood of the car and fly past into the darkness.

            “Thass the aliens.  They here to kill,”  Danielle said in a matter of fact manner.  She was tired of beating around the bush, she was just laying it all on the table now.  Quentin struggled with steering wheel as they drove over trees and rocks.  Quentin had it in 4-wheel drive and they were busy climbing the hill.

            Quentin, not knowing what to do, did the same as Danielle.  He jumped out and fell to the ground.  As he stood up, he struggled a bit on his ankle cause of the way he hit the ground,  he saw Danielle looking and signaling to him.  He began to limp towards the oak, when his truck fell on top of him

            “What is it you want?  Is it me?  I give up.  I give up.  I can’t do this anymore.  All night long you have been taking everybody, but me.  Its me you want, well here I am.  I am in your hands.  Do with me what you will.” She banged branches against her breasts.  She stomped her feet on the hard earth.  She raised her hands into the air and walked backwards.  The ship, hovered there, silently.

            She laid there, out of it.  Blacked out.  Unconscious.  Unthinking.  Passed out, without drugs, without pain, without sleep.

            Within thirty seconds, a century Legend drove down the road.  The driver saw Danielle’s body on the side of the road.  The driver pulled to a stop, got of the car and laid Danielle in the back seat, laying her down, so softly, so carefully.  The driver got back in and headed back down towards 2222, towards the city of Austin.

10

            This one cloudy day, I was living on my own in Austin, down by town lake.  I had been up for a week, eating speed and was trying desperately to find some klonopin to knock me out.

            I drove through traffic.  Heavy traffic.  I saw bums on corners saying they were Gulf War vets, but they were only drug addicts.  I saw busses full of people going places.  Either to work, to play, or to sleep.  Packs of dogs roaming around and cats running across streets.  Restaurant passed restaurant, filled with hungry people, leaving stuffed.  I had the radio on and I was listening to a DJ drone on about how the weather had been so gray for like a month.  Something had to give.  The sun still existed, it was only hiding.

            As I was getting my keys into the lock, I felt a mosquito bite me in my neck.  I swapped at the nape of my neck and felt something cold.  I turned around and facing me, was this telescope.  It was at eye-level with me.  With my eyes, I followed the shaft of the scope.  It curved upwards, and at every five feet, it was bent, kind of like a Dr. Seuss tree.  It curved all the way up to the clouds that were sitting still hundreds of feet up in the air.

            Thinking my hallucinations were getting the better of me, I took four klonopin’s, locked my doors, went to my bedroom, locked the windows, got underneath the covers, and closed my eyes.  I went to sleep and dreamt I was on Venus looking at planet Earth, covered in fire and ash.