You may be wondering what malfunctioning circuitry in my smoking coal of a brain managed to associate Carl Sagan’s Cosmos with Debbie Harry and Blondie’s Heart of Glass. I guess I just find it amazing that it takes 15 billion years worth of unimaginably warm stars, nuclear fusion and insanely huge explosions to cook up something as smoking hot as Debbie Harry.
The first 4:30 minutes are a must see. From “Carl Sagan’s Cosmos”:
If you have never seen the series, I strongly recommend you do. Though the Cold War stuff in it is dated, nothing else really is.
You’ve spent the past 15 billion years not existing, you should be used to it by now.
Dennis made his hand into the shape of a gun, lifted it slightly and then flicked it, as though he were trying to dislodge something thick and salty from his finger. He angled his head to the left, looking to the right, then made a rushing sound. “There ain’t no fuckin’ monkey up there.” He sounded convinced, but the increase in his Tourette’s tics betrayed his subconscious fears.
The corrugated rusted tin of the rabbit shed was blown up by another gust of wind and flapped back and forth against the wooden frame. The sound was similar in pattern to a cat running through the room - tah-dhum, tah-dhum, tah-dhum.
“There it is again! He’s getting pissed, Dennis!”
“Man, fuck that monkey! Tttt-tttt!”
“You don’t fuck the Devil Monkey, Dennis. He fucks you!” A bolt of lightening and then a rumble of thunder deep to the North seemed to underscore my point.
“Shut up, fucker! Schwwwwaaaaaa!”
More rattles echoed from the rabbit shed, causing my back to crawl. I was freaking myself out now. Not that it was terribly difficult. The sound coming from my cousin’s rabbit shed did have the rhythm of a living thing. All one needed to complete the effect was a highly suggestible state of mind– and that’s exactly what Bunt’s weed and Dennis’ Tourette’s– were providing.
Bunt was Dennis’ 60-year-old dad. He grew his own pot in his tomato garden out back. I’m not sure what he did to it, but to this day, it’s the best weed I have ever smoked. It was downright hallucinogenic. Bunt himself was crazy as a loon. I wasn’t certain if it was his own Tourette’s affliction or the decades of drug use that were the cause. Bunt claimed his grandmother had turned him on to smoking grass when he was nine years old. But you had to take everything he said with a grain of salt.
Another bolt of lightening and the thunder was growing louder. The tin roof was wild with simian mischief. I turned to my younger cousin, Pete, “What the fuck was that thing?”
It was an unanswerable question that we had asked each other for the past two years.
“Fuck…” He shook his head and shivered mildly.
You see, the Devil Monkey wasn’t just the product of a stoned mind looking for cheap entertainment at Dennis’ expense. It was a legend– a real, live creature that terrorized the small community where Pete and Dennis lived. Well, it terrorized Pete and me at least. Everyone else remained blissfully ignorant, choosing to hide behind their unsubstantiated skepticism.
It had been a pleasant spring evening. Pete had stolen some pot from his sister and we went down the driveway to smoke it under the willow tree. Pete had built a pipe out of several plastic bottles he had taped together, with a piece of foil as a bowl. It was an incredibly effective device. The pot itself was somewhat curious– it was a deep brown color and soggy.
I was somewhat concerned. Knowing Christy, that “pot” could be just about anything. “That looks kinda weird,” I pointed out, as Pete filled the bowl.
Pete shrugged and lit the mound, inhaling deeply. He had made the decision for both of us. No matter what it was, I wasn’t going to let him do it alone. He passed the pipe to me and I inhaled, somewhat carefully. It had a strange chemical taste but, like whiskey shots, the hits became easier and easier to take.
Eventually, I grew aware of feeling somewhat numb.
“What the fuck is in that?” I burst out laughing.
“I don’t know!” Pete burst out laughing.
Within seconds, we were sitting out under the willow tree, our arms around each other laughing without restraint.
“Shhh-shhh-shhh!” Pete managed to choke out, “we’re gonna wake up mom and dad!”
We both collapsed, laughing even harder.
I laughed so hard and so long that my entire body hurt. My eyes were filled with tears and for several moments, I hallucinated I was nothing more than a pair of lungs connected to a windpipe. Some deeply-buried chunk of lucidity in my head managed to squeeze out a thought, “We’d better go somewhere!”
Though not particularly well articulated, my point was we were in serious danger of waking up my Aunt and Uncle. We had to get out of there fast. It was an almost impossible task. Any time one of us uttered the most innocuous sentence, we’d both laugh even harder than before. We were laughing so hard we physically could do nothing else. After what seemed like hours, we managed to get control of ourselves long enough to stand up. We were both somewhat wobbly as we started off down the pavement, having decided to walk around the block a few times.
We made our way up the hill that was the first leg of our journey, chattering about things I’ll never remember. The road was lined with street lights and in the darkness of midnight, the whole scene had a somewhat surreal look to it. It reminded me of looking into an Easter egg diorama. As we turned left, something flitted across the road. We both laughed hysterically.
“What the fuck was that?” I asked Pete.
“I don’t know!”
“Did you see it?”
“Yeah!”
We both laughed harder at our own ignorance as we crossed the path of the shadowy figure. We looked around us and saw nothing. Deciding it must be a squirrel or something, we continued our walk without much more thought on the subject.
As we made our way down the other side of the block and approached Pete’s house again, we once again started laughing uncontrollably. We decided it would be best if we continued walking until we could get some sort of control over ourselves.
We walked past the house and back up the hill and made the left turn again. Again, the shadowy figure scuttled across the road– it came from the same side of the street as before and the same location. In fact, we were at the same location as before. This time we both stopped, almost in shock.
“What the fuck?!” I asked.
“It looked like a monkey!”
A chill went up my spine, as I had thought the same thing before he even said it. The way it crossed the road, the shape, everything reminded me of a short scene in Forbidden Planet when a monkey tries to steal some fruit from the table and “Robby the Robot” blasts it with an energy bolt. The way that monkey sort of limped off was what this “monkey” was doing when it crossed the street.
“… a Devil Monkey,” I observed.
“I almost don’t wanna go up there,” Pete said.
“Wait, let’s go back a bit and then come back this way and see if it happens again.”
We went back down the hill and then walked back up and made the left turn. No Devil Monkey.
“That’s weird. Come on…” I pulled Pete along up the hill.
We walked carefully, almost tiptoeing along, watching each side carefully to see if we could make out what kind of horrific creature was toying with us. We saw nothing. This time, the Devil Monkey sobered us up enough that we made it down the hill and past the house without laughing. We decided to make one more round to see if that thing would show up again.
Sure enough, just as we made the left turn and again, from the right side of the road the Devil Monkey limped across. Pete and I turned and ran back to the house.
The next morning Pete confessed his theft to Christy and we told her of the Devil Monkey. She laughed, informing us we had just hallucinated the whole thing– the pot had been laced with angel dust. Pete and I have never been convinced. How could we both have the same hallucination? I have no doubt we both saw the exact same thing. Maybe it was a cat or squirrel that just looked strange in the angel dusted night… but why did it always cross from right to left, in the exact same spot on the road, after we had reached the exact same spot in the road? And the manner in which it crossed was always the same too, like some kind of goddamn glitch in the Matrix.
To this day, the Devil Monkey– in addition to being the name of a few pets– serves as the explanation for things that have no explanation. It is the thing on the wing of a plane that crashed for no reason. It is the thing that takes one of your socks from the dryer. It is the reason Planck’s constant is 6.626068 x 10-34 m2 kg/s.
I guess it makes as much sense as blaming it all on God.
These don’t appear to be available anywhere else, so I’m putting them up here in case anyone needs them.
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I have been trying to get the Brian’s Threaded Comments plugin working with WordPress 2.3.1 for a while now. I finally sat down and traced through the HTML output of the original comments.php and the replacement comments.php needed by the plugin. As it turns out, you need to install the plugin as directed, activate it as normal, then go to Admin/Options/Threaded Comments and enter “wp-comments-post.php” (without the quotes) even if you haven’t setup a custom comments url (which I don’t). Otherwise, the plugin will not work.
So, that fixes that and I finally have Clusterlizard setup the way I want with Wordpress. I changed back over to Wordpress because I don’t want to keep dicking around with my own code. I’d rather spend the time writing stuff. I will, however, be making some changes to the threaded comments to get the reCaptcha plugin and the entry form to layout in a more pleasing way (I think the reCaptcha form should go above the submit button)… but that’s just my OCD at work so I’m not going to rush it.
A week had passed since my meeting at the Den. The clone was busy in the kitchen preparing my favorite, German chocolate cake. I was in the bedroom fixing her dresser, though I had never understood her need for one, since she never wore clothes. I was a bit frustrated trying to get the wooden slabs to fit back together properly and to stay in that position long enough for me to secure them. I was a cat farmer by trade. I had no clue about dressers.
I heard a knock at the front door and used my shirt-sleeve to wipe some sweat from my brow as I stood, “Now what the fuck?”
“I will answer the door!” the clone purred.
“No, no, I’ll get it…” I patted her firm bottom as I passed. She smiled demurely.
I walked into the front room and immediately noticed a tall figure hovering at the door. An alien. Could this be the mysterious alien I had seen in Germany? Somewhat hesitantly, I walked up to the door and slowly opened it. The subdued light of the outer world oozed into the room, partially shillouehtting the alien. I could still make out it’s deep features. His blue skin was wrinkled badly, his cheekbones were unusually high for an alien. His eyes were deep yellow and catlike and possessed a hypnotic quality if one stared into them for only the slightest moment too long.
I have never met an alien that didn’t completely disgust me. Until now. This one intrigued me. When I looked at his eyes, I saw ancient wisdom, not the usual probing for some secret that could be used to gain an upper-hand. When I saw his long black braided hair, I saw an homage to cultures, not displays of rare metals and crafts created and arranged to identify superiority.
The alien bowed to me, humbly, “I have come to speak with you.”
I opened the door wider, without hesitation, gesturing for the alien to enter. I closed the door behind him and we sat on the couch. The alien interlocked his fingers for a moment and rested them on his thin, long, bony knee. There he sat for several moments. I was fascinated by this alien, who seemed to exhibit grace, dignity and respect. I sensed a genuine quality in him - another first for an alien.
“We are two of a kind, my friend,” the alien talked slowly and in a very deep voice.
Friend, I wondered, what is this? I’ve never heard an alien call a human that word, “Uh, who are you?”
“My name is Fredo,” the alien replied. They had taken names from movies. Evidentally, this one liked “Godfather II”.
“And how are we two of a kind,” I wondered aloud.
“We are both… different…” The alien paused, as if troubled.
“Go on.”
“You may have noticed all of my species are male.” The alien glanced at me, almost as demurely as the clone had earlier.
I hadn’t thought about it, but now that he mentioned it… “Hmmm. How do you guys…”
“Clones,” The alien replied quickly.
“Okay. And what does this have to do with anything?”
“As I said, I am different.” He hesitated again. I nodded to encourage him to continue.
“You do not seem to hold our kind in the same esteem as other earthlings. I do not hold our kind with much esteem myself. You see, I am female. The first female of my species. I am what your kind would call ‘gay’.”
“Wait. ‘Gay’ means you like others of your own sex…”
“Not among our kind. If you applied the term to us, I would be gay, since my species only have sexual relations with our own sex.”
I had no interest in further clarification. And I was soon disturbed by a thought that popped into my head, “What about my…”
The alien lowered his… her… its… voice to a whisper, “Your clone is an agent of the Governors’. At this moment, he is preparing a meal which will poison you.”
My lip quivered, “Eva? A…”
“Yes. You must come with me.”
“But…” I wanted to cry.
“We must leave at once!”
I stared in disbelief, my mouth wide open. Two alien governors deboarded a Concorde jet. Their eyes were covered with thick black sunglasses, though I had no idea why, since they had melted the moon and thickened the Earth’s atmosphere with so much of the plasma that it was eternally twilight. They were just trying to look “cool.” The assholes.
The governors paused (for effect) and waived at the adoring audience. You would have thought Elvis had just walked down a golden stairway from heaven flanked by John Lennon and George Harrison. The crowd screamed with delight. The governors smiled and nodded, the deep yellow tint of their teeth visible even on my small television.
My face reddened, “Goddammit, Eva, what the hell is the matter with these people? Fucking sheep!”
The clone shrugged.
“Fucking sheep!” I yelled at the television.
“Maybe they are happy because the governors have had a safe trip,” the clone suggested, subtly rolling her R’s.
Her innocence was maddeningly endearing. Two thick strands of her curled, platinum blonde hair framed her face. Her blue eyes sparkled even in the eternal twilight. My mouth drew up into a smile. I couldn’t control it.
“See? You are happy too,” her German accent gave me butterflies.
I put my arms around her and caught only the slightest hint of her naked womanhood before the phone rang.
“Fuckers.”
I scooted away from the clone and picked up the phone, “Yeah?”
It was Diamond Dave.
“What? Why do you always have to call me at the wrong time?”
“Hey, anytime is the wrong time. You’re always slobbering over that clone.”
I blushed. He had a point there, “Okay, so what do you want?”
“The governors want to meet with you today. At the Den.”
I sighed. Now what? “When?”
“Can you be here in an hour?”
I shook my head, “Yeah, later.”
“Why are you unhappy, now,” the clone asked, as I dropped the phone back on it’s cradle.
“I have to go to the Den to meet the governors. You stay here.”
The clone smiled as I pecked her on the cheek. She turned back to the television.
My anger sharpened as I drove to the Den, thinking of the clone sitting on the silky material that wrapped our sofa. I imagined her perfect form, perpetually naked as was the trend these days, pressing against my trembling body. My adrenaline flowed. My fingers felt charged with energy. My mind wandered into that twilight zone that awaits anyone willing to let themselves go while driving on the highway.
The Den was the location where the aliens made their “headquarters.” They organized into a tiered governance, with each successive level taking on finer and finer control of smaller and smaller areas. The Den was the lowest tier and controlled the smallest area. It was a given that when referring to the “Den,” one was referring to the Den which happened to control whatever area one was in.
The twenty minute drive seemed to last five minutes and I got out of the car. I had been sweating badly from the anger, the adrenaline and the climate. I was, as far as I knew, the only human left who still wore clothing. I approached the building, flat on one side and round on the other - a giant cylinder cut in half. I approached the rounded side, where the entrance was located. I saw Diamond Dave and two alien governors - one older than the other - waiting for me.
As I approached, Dave looked with some interest at my reddened face, “Calm down,” he winked.
I didn’t reply and walked past him. The governors led me inside to an office. Dave followed, somewhat nervously.
We all sat at a round table, Dave and I on one side, facing the two governors. One of the governors pushed a bottle of blue cheese dressing toward me. I looked at the bottle with disdain as the governors and Dave took large gulps from their own containers of dressing.
“What, you’re gonna serve me a salad?”
The governors laughed hysterically, spewing dressing all over the table. I could see years of dressing caked around their gums and between their large yellowed teeth. I gagged. Dave nudged me under the table and I scooted away from him.
The older governor looked sternly at me with his yellow cat-like eyes. The pupils constricted as he seemed to concentrate harder on my own eyes, “We understand that you recently made a trip to Germany.”
The deep bass of the alien’s voice vibrated through my chest. I crossed my arms across my abdomen, “Yes?”
“We know that you saw an alien on the side of the highway during your trip.”
I looked at Dave. How the hell did they know that? The clone didn’t even know about that and she was with me. I tried to remain collected.
“This alien is a fugitive,” the older governor continued, “we know that he will be visiting you in a few days. We desire your cooperation.”
I squinted. What was going on here? “What do you want from me?”
The governors smiled at each other, confident they had their patsy.
The swollen moon swiftly climbed high into the night sky. A trail of plasma evaporated in the moon’s wake. Nervously, I watched the event with my head pressed against the cool bus window.
“What now?” I wondered to myself. Ever since those damn aliens had arrived, they had screwed up everything. Suddenly, we had Indian elephants in the Midwest, the atmosphere was eternally blue and dark. The temperature never rose above seventy degrees and never fell below sixty five.
I wondered why nobody else seemed to notice how badly our new “guests” had messed things up. Maybe they did and were too scared to say anything. Though, that didn’t make any sense either, since the aliens weren’t violent. They never physically harmed anyone. They were just assholes. With all of their technology and surliness, the aliens never threatened anyone. In fact, they were always sucking up to humans. Well, at least whenever they weren’t being assholes to us.
My clone scooted closer to me in the bus seat and rested her head on my shoulder. Technically, she wasn’t really a clone. The alien Governors had taken a sample of my DNA and modified it to create a duplicate of Eva Habermann. Another case of the aliens sucking up to humans. I honestly hated those aliens, but how could I refuse such a gift? I glanced upon the clone’s naked form leaning against me.
Eva put her hand on the back of my head and began to massage my scalp. One of the advantages of her being a clone of myself was that she knew exactly the right spot to massage. I closed my eyes and shivered. Her hand was cool and comforting. It seemed to absorb the excess heat collecting under my thick head of hair. Occasionally, she would scratch lightly with her blue-painted nails.
My clone was the whole reason for this little trip. She wanted to come to Germany and meet the real Eva Habermann and get her autograph. I also promised to buy her some clothes, even though they were mostly just accessories in this day and age. Another one of the many things that had changed since the arrival of the aliens. The real Eva Habermann was redundant to me now, but I made the trip for my clone.
With my eyes closed, my other senses became more noticeable. I gradually became aware of the overwhelming stench of body odor on the bus. It was a putrid mixture resembling cooked hamburger and old onions. I opened my eyes hoping to push the scent away with my sense of sight. Most of us riding the bus were males. That made sense, we seemed to smell worse than females.
The moon had stopped it’s climb. I had opened my eyes just in time to see an uneven flash of white ignite around the surface and evaporate, all in an instant. I heard a loud crackling sound and could detect the scent of ozone. There was a short pause and then an enormous explosion.
“I don’t fucking believe this,” I said, mostly to myself.
None of the other travelers seemed to notice the event. They just stared blankly ahead and the clone continued to massage my scalp. The moon was gone, its surface material converted into some strange plasma that was bleeding into the sky and causing interference patterns similar to oil in water.
“Fuckers. Goddamn alien fuckers.”
I wondered what it would take to wake everyone up. How much does our world have to die before people put their foot down? Asshole aliens. I’d just as soon spit on one as look at it.
Not that the aliens were ugly, by any means. They were actually quite striking. A short one would be seven feet tall. Their skin was blue and their hair long and black. Their facial features were almost Native American looking, though thinner and with an elongated philtrum. They were wrinkled, and so even the children looked elderly. Their eyes were their most striking feature, yellow and self-illuminated, somewhat cat-like with deep, coal-black pupils in the center.
I looked back down and tried to see ahead of the bus. I noticed the environment was bright enough to see, even without the moonlight. The plasma in the sky seemed to illuminate the world so that it roughly appeared early-evening. I noticed a tall, thin figure in the distance, it appeared to be walking toward the bus along the roadside. An alien.
As the bus approached the alien, I could make out more and more details. It was wearing a brown leather vest, jeans and boots. Its head was lowered as it walked with long strides. It almost seemed to be concentrating on its own footsteps. I could tell from the dress and the way its hair was braided that it was not a Governor. Not that it mattered to me. They were all crazy. They were all assholes.
The bus quickly came upon the alien, as we were traveling at least 70 miles an hour, not to mention those long Goddamn strides those things take. As the alien passed by my window, it looked up. I was shocked. Our gazes locked and I felt hypnotized, connected. It was one of those held gazes where it feels as though both minds are meeting. A shock shot through my gut. I felt the ancientness in those eyes. The gaze lasted only briefly but it felt like minutes. I turned as the bus passed to watch the alien as it continued uninterrupted, once again looking down to the ground.
The clone put her arms around me, “We are almost there,” she assured me, with her German accent, “finally I will meet with Eva!”
The sky was dark and the air was cold and blue as I watched for Diamond Dave and the group of alien governors. Of course, the weather had been mostly the same since the aliens arrived, for they couldn’t survive here otherwise. They came and modified our weather to suit their own needs.
I guess it wasn’t as though they hadn’t been invited. NASA had decided to burn a message on a cd and sent it out on the Voyager Millenium Edition. Never underestimate the disastrous effects that can be produced by budget cuts. The message, which had originally been planned to be a welcoming in every known language and a collection of ’70s mellow favorites, actually turned out to be four short sentences incompetently monotoned by Pat Summeral: “Come on by Earth. We have plenty. PLENTY. And more.”
Who could resist?
A whirlwind of leaves swirled past the bay windows. I decided to wait outside and do some work on the barn.
The barn was falling apart, but it would still provide a good nest for the cats. Cats had a very hard time of it since the arrival of the aliens. All wildlife did. The aliens built settlements everywhere, annihilating practically every spotted owl refuge and caribou park on the planet. The mass displacement of wildlife made it more difficult for the domesticated variety.
I continued arranging the park benches and tarp in the barn to provide some cover for the cats. I found an old sofa and decided to use the foam from the cushions to make a nice nest for them. I was busy tearing the foam into strips when I heard a rumbling.
Thunder? Couldn’t be. The pattern was different… like…
I was shocked as a herd of elephants stampeded into the barn. Cats scattered everywhere. Most of them scampered up a single slat of wood onto the second floor of the barn. But the elephants followed. They were Indian elephants too. Fucking foreigners. “Fucking Indians!”
The elephants frothed at the mouth. I had severely angered them. But I knew they wouldn’t come near me, since I bore the mark of the aliens. I ran toward the elephants, first in circles, as they tried to avoid me. Eventually, one by one, they fled the barn, their trunks stiffened into the air, spewing foam.
“I hate Goddamn Indians.”
I straightened the barn out while the cats hid in the corner upstairs. I heard the dieseling death-throws of Diamond Dave’s car engine choking itself to a halt. Then the car doors. Three of them. Two alien governors had come with him.
I patted down some foam and rushed around front, into the yard.
“Helloooooo!”
“Hey, Dave.”
The alien governors looked at me with their emotionless yellow eyes as they sipped blue cheese dressing. I nodded at them with a wrinkled nose, unable to hide my disdain.
“So, what do you guys want,” I asked.
“I have a surprise for you,” Diamond Dave smiled.
I arched my brow, “Oh?”
Diamond Dave turned to the blue aliens who stood stoically behind him. Still emotionless, the aliens stepped aside to reveal a stunning naked blonde woman.
Diamond Dave looked at me and smiled, “We combined your dna with hers. It’s better than masturbation.”
The naked blonde giggled and ran toward the barn. The fat in her bottom rippled with each step. I looked at Diamond Dave, “Eva Habermann?!”
Diamond Dave smiled and nodded.
“Holy shit,” I ran as fast as I could to catch up with her, “I must touch her!”
The aliens guffawed, spewing blue cheese dressing all over Diamond Dave.
Fucking aliens. Just when you plan on killing them all, they give you such a gift.