Couple in the next room, bound to win a prize. They’ve been going at it all night long. No, seriously – they’re playing some kind of video game in there, and I think they may just be on the verge of winning a trophy. Believe it.

Why am I reciting 36-year-old Paul Simon lyrics? Well, that story’s seldom told. I am just a poor boy… No, no, wait. There is a reason (and not one that turns out to be yet another P.S. song). Seems the planet we have landed on (third planet in the Cancri 55 system) is home to a race that’s real big on sixties acoustic folk-rock music. Of course, they think it’s all new – smoking hot platters ripping up the airwaves, straight from planet Earth. That’s ’cause Cancri 55 is 41 light years from Earth, and… well… those transmissions are just reaching them now, having crossed the trackless void of space these last four decades. Now revolution is in the air, my friends, and so is the Lovin’ Spoonful. All these Cancrites are wearing cheap leather headbands, big buckles, and fringy boots. There’s a lava lamp in every window. It’s… well… weird and unnerving, but who am I to criticize.

So what does this have to do with Big Green? What the hell, haven’t you been kept current on our last few dispatches? Marvin (my personal robot assistant)!!! Did you forget to file my column? Damn your eyes! File this week’s column twice, my good man, and be quick about it. Sheesh – hard to get good robot help up here (even if you import it). Where was I? Oh, yeah. Help. We’re stranded on this odd suburban planet, obsessed with yesteryear (or is it yester-light-year?), and what the hell, we’ve just got to earn our keep. Now before you ask, we did try to send Marvin, the man-sized tuber, and both Lincolns out to find day jobs. No luck. What about sFshzenKlyrn? Well…. he’s kind of casual, relying as he does principally on an internal fusion reactor like most celestial bodies of his class. (Not particularly class-conscious as a rule, our extraterrestrial friend does enjoy certain existential advantages over us mere mammals.) So we’re left to our own devices, as it were. I mean, what would you do? Huh?

Well… I was hoping you might have a suggestion there. Anyway, we’re brushing up on our sixties numbers. Matt seems to think we can pass ourselves off as The Cowsills or Dukes of the Stratosphere. (What’s that? They weren’t really a sixties band? So convincing….) Hence my efforts at total recall, bringing back all those songs I listened to as a wan lad. Here’s how we figure it….

1. Learn some sixties numbers. What the hell, we’ve all had to play them at some point. Why not play them for extraterrestrials?
2. Tuck in a few numbers that haven’t yet arrived here from Earth. Say we’re, I don’t know, the Rolling Stones. We can start playing tunes from Exile on Main Street and they’ll think we invented sliced bread.
3. Cash in and buy spacecraft parts. Frankly, this is the whole point. We need to get our asses home.

Okay… if this totally doesn’t work, it was Lincoln’s idea – agreed? Good. He got us here in the first place, if you’ll recall. Back to rehearsal. What’s next? Red Rubber Ball? Oh, Christ! This place is a freaking nightmare! You, down there on Earth! Find a really, really long extension ladder someplace and prop it up in the general vicinity of the constellation Cancer. Do us a favor.

Hmmm. Looks like a good place to pound some stakes into the ground. No, sFshzenKlyrn, not that kind of steak. The pointy kind, typically made of wood. Wood. A hard, fibrous material that comes from large plants, like… like… Hey! Put the man-sized tuber down!!

Oh, hi. Jeezus christmas – this is like herding cats! Worse… herding cats on Neptune, except without that nice comforting methane atmosphere. Well, anyway… your various Big Green type amigos have taken a slight detour on our way back from Mars… very slight… about 25 light-years off course, thanks to president Lincoln, in point of fact. In a fit of uncontrollable curiosity, Lincoln navigated us over to the solar system of Cancri 55 in the constellation Cancer. Far off the beaten path, to be sure, and here we are on a very tight budget for this trip. (No petty cash… just a stack of pre-signed checks from our label, Loathsome Prick records, in a galaxy that only takes cash or plastic). So much for the Lincoln navigator. Oh, why… why couldn’t Trevor James’s Orgone Generating Device have brought back a ship’s captain from the 19th century instead of this useless emanci-mother-fucking-pater of the slaves (and his evil twin)?

Hard question to answer, so don’t even try. Anyway… finding ourselves in an unexplored solar system is bad enough, right? But then our cobbed together space craft (built from reconstituted playground equipment) started wobbling a bit, listing from side to side, etc. We asked Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to take over the helm while we repaired to the wardroom for afternoon refreshments… and Marvin, being a bit overwhelmed by such complex navigational controls, inadvertently brought us down on the third planet. Yes, the third planet…. the one we were warned specifically not to visit. (Actually, I just made that last bit up, so that the rest of this would make sense. It was really a whole lot more random and senseless than all that.) We slammed into the planet’s rather unforgiving surface (that much is true), our engine room bursting into flame (bogus), triggering secondary explosions that threw us in all directions (exaggeration – actually, the toaster oven in the wardroom started smoking – some bagel crumbs, I believe – and we all ran out of there).

What was the third planet like? Well, arid. Barren. Lifeless. Those are a few words you could use to describe it. All of them totally inaccurate, of course. We put down in a suburban neighborhood of some kind. Yes, there’s a Starbucks (or “four bucks,” as it’s more generally known). Yes, there’s a Home Depot and a Wal*Mart. And yes, the trade union leaders are all in jail. If there’s anything remarkably different about this world (as compared to our own home planet), I would have to say that it is that gravity thing. There is, in fact, gravity here on Cancri 55.3, but it’s not your normal keep-you-down kind of mysterious force. Sometimes it lets you up about ten feet, leaves you there, moves you a bit to the right, etc. Very capricious. I can tell you, I find it quite unnerving… and Marvin is about ready to pack up his banjo and leave. (He sailed up into the troposphere for maybe a half-hour then landed in the Staples parking lot, where someone mistook him for a stamp vending machine. When he didn’t spit out customized postage stamps, the disgruntled patron poured hot coffee into him.) Seems like Marvin always gets the shit end of the stick on these tours. That’s why we love him.

Don’t know how long we’ll be staying here, but time will tell. I noticed a club or two in the center of town…. maybe we can work our way home. Don’t like the sound of that, quite frankly, but… one does what one must. Marvin? Go into that dive and ask for a job – there’s a good chap.