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.
seems to matter. It was a lead story on NBC and PBS evening news, I’m certain, and my morning newspaper is chock full of nuts waiting in long lines at 6:00 a.m. for the doors to swing open on the cultural utopia that is Best Buy. Just doing their patriotic duty, as defined by our commander-in-chief. It’s not really just about fighting and dying… They also serve who borrow and spend, right? Float the economy for Dubya. Fight a short, sweet, victorious war for Dubya. (Hurry up… only 14 months to go.) Still the pavlovian networks pump out the pabulum, and if you don’t listen too closely it can almost seem like things are just as right as they need to be. War is over (if you want it), NPR – just don’t report on the sucker and it will go away. 
in aid we gave to the murderous Siad Barre regime in the 1980s that tore the country apart, nor would I expect them to talk about how our 1992-3 “humanitarian” intervention mostly managed to get a bunch of Somalis killed. But they could have brought up what happened earlier this year, when we supported Ethiopia’s invasion both diplomatically and militarily (mostly with air power). Yet another mess we’ve gotten someone into, and yet even this very recent involvement was not worthy of a single reference on NPR’s radio broadcast (though, to be fair, there is a brief review of history on their Web posting, for those who bother to check). This should be encouraging to those in the White House and Congress who supported the Iraq war. So long as we perpetuate this fantasy that we are all about helping people – Iraqis, Somalis, Cambodians – we will continue to become embroiled in these endless conflicts that bleed both invader and invaded dry, and benefit only war profiteers and geostrategic power players. 
Damn… dropped a hammer around here someplace. Now what the fuck happened to it? Marvin (my personal robot assistant)? Have you….? Wait, there it is on the ceiling, right where I dropped it. Sheesh.
direction than that which would have brought us back to our beloved Cheney Hammer Mill on dear old earth.
tree? (His fondest ambition, word of honor.) Anyway, by the time we woke up, we were in the general vicinity of Cancri 55 – a feat most earth-bound scientists would think unthinkable (if such a thing is… even… thinkable…) but which we managed to pull off because the laws of physics do not generally apply… so long as we’re in the presence of our sit-in guitarist sFshzenKlyrn, we seem to be covered by some sort of general exemption. (Don’t ask me to explain the laws of physics…. it could take all night.) In any case, there we were, in the midst of the only fully articulated solar system generally known by humankind outside of the one they themselves occupy. It was a sobering moment. We stood before the viewing port in awe, taking in this clutch of new worlds, waiting to be explored.