Postaday for May 22nd: Worldly Encounters. The friendly, English-speaking extraterrestrial you run into outside your house is asking you to recommend the one book, movie, or song that explains what humans are all about. What do you pick?
Book: Finnegan’s Wake. I have not read all of it and I am hoping that, like me, the alien will read a few pages and then toss it aside and decide the human race is too confusing to understand as a single entity. Heart and lungs, skin and bones. That’s more or less the only way we’re all the same, and any assertion to the contrary will sprout contradiction after contradiction.
For the most part, people are good, but there are a choice few who take advantage of this truth and exploit it for their own ends. I’d hate to have the alien read Harry Potter and decide we’re all courageous, only to have some coward steal his space ship and use to do donuts on the moon. Nor would I have the alien read The Stranger and find us all so disconnected and depressing that his plans to build a hyperspace bypass through our planet are accelerated out of indifference. And I would of course hate it if the alien read Dan Brown.
So I’d go to the book store and buy the book, and just so know one there would think I’m going to give it to extra terrestrial alien, I’d wear a sweater with patches on the elbows, make sure my goatee was grown out, and I’d stop by the coffee stand inside the bookstore itself and sigh at the quotidian menu and, seemingly reluctantly, order an espresso and frown when they served it and frown when I sipped it.
Back at my house I expect the alien would be sitting on my front porch, the beer I’d given him to drink while I was gone long since finished, his razor sharp stainless steel teeth slowly gnawing on the glass bottle. I’ll scowl at myself and think that I should have given him a beer in an aluminum can instead. But what’s done is done. I’ll park my car and set the parking break with a loud ratcheting sound. I’ll be prepared if the alien asks me why I set the parking break when my driveway is not very steep, or if he suggests that I install a few anti-gravity mag-lev inertia dampeners. And then when he doesn’t I’ll be a a bit disappointed because the argument I have ready is a really good one.
And he’ll see this on my face but not know what the frown means, because even though his quarter-inch photo-sensitive skin can read the variations in my body temperature to hundredth-of-a-degree accuracy, he will have no empathy gland, owing to a terrible space accident with an asteroid and joy-riding Melaplurx from Planet Gojaxicak. Hence the need for the book. Nevertheless he’ll ask me why there’s a centigrade temperature elevation in my risorius, platysma and depressor anguli oris.
And I’ll say, let me guess, you asked some asshat for the same thing you asked me, and he handed you Gray’s Anatomy?
And the alien will be a little bit confused, because, yes, someone did, and also because someone else handed him a Dr. Seuss book, and since my question to him rhymed, he would wonder if I was going to next tell him about my disdain for viridia ova atque perna.
The I would seize the moment! Thrust Finnegan’s Wake into his seven-fingered hands! All three of them! And I’d say, “This explains everything!” And then I’d go inside my house and eat some Doritos and play some Xbox.
And I bet you a thousand dollars we’d never hear from that alien again.
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