Spacemen to the left of me. Spacemen to the right of me. Spacemen above my head. And beneath my soles? Astroturf. That’s right… astroturf.
Welcome back, Big Green-ites, to a world turned upside-down. Well, not upside-down exactly… probably more like 180 degrees clockwise, with a slight southward dip on the “y” axis. Either way, things are not what they used to be. This neighborhood has gone downhill fast. Jeebus christmas – just three weeks after the first spaceship arrived and we’re practically the only people in this village who were born on the planet Earth. (All except Big Zamboola, of course, who was born on… on… well, on himself, because he is, in fact, himself a planet… or planetoid.) Those strange, lawn-obsessed space people have brought their interstellar modular homes to our sleepy little town and set up their own community superimposed over ours. WTF!
You know, it wouldn’t be so bad to have all of these new neighbors if they had taken up residence the normal way: the way we got here… find an empty house and squat. No, that wasn’t good enough for them. They had to bring their own houses. And before you say anything, no, I don’t have a “problem” with space people. In fact, some of my best friends are from far beyond the confines of our little solar system. Did I mention Big Zamboola? I did. Okay. Well, there’s also sFshzenKlyrn, our perpetual sit-in guitarist. He, of course, is from the planet Zenon in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a galaxy far, far, away. sFshzenKlyrn and I go way back, so you can’t say I don’t like space people, even if they do keep me up all night with their smelly lawn mowers and their noisy stellar infrarometers running incessantly over the same measurements. (Ooooooh, I hate them, I hate them!) Don’t listen to Mr. Subliminal. I love those dang space people, I really do. (RRRRrrrrrr)
Not that there aren’t remedies open to us. Sure, I know – we’ve been squatters here at the Cheney Hammer Mill for more than six years. And yes, we have run afoul of the law one, two, or perhaps a dozen or more times. But we do have some items in the plus column. For instance, Marvin (my personal 
robot assistant) did serve with distinction in the local constabulary. And we have, in fact, generated a little bit of economic activity in the area with the occasional payout we receive from our new corporate label, Loathsome Prick Records, which has been willing to advance us a bit on our upcoming release (still in the mixing stage – arrrrrghhh). Yeah, we help keep the pizza joint and the pub in business, so that’s probably worth an ordinance or two from city hall about unauthorized extraterrestrial housing and landscaping. (Turns out, it isn’t even real grass. It’s like a freaking lawn toupee, man!) So one would expect a little cooperation from the authorities, eh?
Well, if one were to expect that… one would most certainly be mistaken. When we made our way over to city hall, we couldn’t help but notice the flawless green carpet of newly installed lawn on either side of the walkway. And the mayor has a strange unearthly glow about him. Don’t know about you, but I think the fix is in.
The first problem is one experts, talking heads, journalists, psychologists, etc., will be grappling with on television and in print for years to come. The second is a bit simpler: mail order, gun shops, and Wal*Mart. Obviously if you haven’t yet killed anyone or committed a serious crime but are, in fact, dead set on annihilating a whole building full of people, it’s not so hard to procure military-grade weapons designed to mow down as many folks as possible in the least amount of time. And you can even buy your ammo within easy walking distance of campus in Virginia and elsewhere in our bullet-headed nation.
cowardly on this topic. I’ve heard some tepid discussion thus far of re-regulating assault weapons, but it seems like you can only hear that kind of talk when it’s balanced out by some right-wing nut job who wants to arm ALL students so that they can shoot back. (I’m not making this up. Hey dumbshit – Cho was an armed student.) And while boneheads on CNN and Fox debate the merits of facilitating schoolhouse shootouts, over in Iraq incidents like Virginia Tech happen on a daily basis. It’s hard to imagine how soul-crushing that must be.
Whoa – that didn’t take long. Is it Saturday already? Guess those orgone energy waves have an affect on your sense of time. As Dylan once sang, now things just keep getting uglier, and I have no sense of tiiiiiime…..
Next thing I knew, something hit me square on the back of the head. Youch! Everything went black (actually, it was kind of a midnight blue, really, with orange and yellow sparkles – very nice). Not sure how long I was out, but when I came to, I had a headache and something Mitch Macaphee calls “frontier accent syndrome” – a dreaded disorder that people in the mad scientist community have been grappling with for nigh onto a hundred ‘yar. Dag nabbed syndrome makes yuh talk like a gall dorn character actor at least every other sentence that festers outa’ yer gob. (I have a particularly strange variant that appears to incorporate some elements of archaic British slang… most curious… dash it all….) Mitch and others tell me that I was struck by the hull of the bouncing ship driven by our turf-obsessed space invaders – apparently the fucker busted through the roof and into my private study… and dang near knocked my fool head off. (Haw…)
upstate village. (Quiet though it may be, there is a lot of sewage that runs through this place – just ask the DEC… if you can catch them not hunting…) Though my head was, well, a bit more dented than before (dag nab it!), our little experiment appeared to be a success. But as you know… appearances can be deceiving. Within the next couple of days, similar mysterious space ships had appeared in the courtyards of many of our neighbors. Lawns were soon sprouting up all around us…. green, carpet-like landscaping. It was terrifying!