excerpt from Print annual: no. 4 The Extra Earth Analog

          Well if you want to know what happened I’ll tell you, but prepare to be underwhelmed. See, I’m the type that always fantasized about alien abduction. Mine was sure to be the best thing that ever happened to me. I imagined beings arriving with little chefs hats on, presenting a smorgasbord of celestial foods. The dishes did not appear appetizing, but they tasted delectable. They’d stop and wave a hand over each plate, stating their names. One was called ‘Bakta Dung,’ and I told them, “I don’t know what a Bakta is, but I do not wish to eat its fecal matter.” Yet I sampled it and found it to be the greatest dish of all. I had another vision of creatures gliding down in golden pyramids. They had the deepest, darkest eyes—absolute love beacons—and flesh like the gleam of the sun against water. One wore a turban and whisked me away on an antlered space horse to what would become our oasis d’amore. But, as to my actual abduction, these beings didn’t appear to be three-dimensional at all. They may as well have been cardboard cut-outs. They had a metallic sheen to their flesh and smelled of balls or raw sewage. They held my interest initially, saying they’d written man’s genetic code, that it was the first time they had visited Earth since meeting Eisenhower back in ’54. But their discourse turned sour quickly, as they referred to mankind as “their greatest failed experiment,” as they tore down our innovations. They said the cell phone was invented just so we could annoy one another, that body scanners at airports were unzipping our DNA, that the whole cloning thing left them greatly amused. They stated that they’d endowed us with the pineal gland so we could log onto the spirit world but we’d destroyed it with fluoride. They accused us of putting lithium in water, and I was like “I don’t think that’s true.” We’d basically reduced ourselves to Homo Habilis, they said. Then they started getting real New-Agey, talking about deep trance meditation, the sacred vowels used to invoke the seven immortal gods of the universe. Pan flutes sounded in the distance. They said we drank Jaguar and shot desmorphine when we could be imbibing ayahuasca, had we not destroyed the Amazon. Violet flame invocation was mentioned, binaural beats—how a blade of grass is like a telephone line to Mother Earth. I nearly puked on that note. They spoke of hypnotherapy, of “duality” in a way I couldn’t understand—I told them “just sell me your beads or whatever and get out of my face, hippies.” So they sent me home. It was ridiculous—I’d dreamed of escaping with such beings all my life, but these came off as pedantic schoolmarms. I expected a death-defying ride on the Matterhorn, but ended up with a trip to someone’s eccentric Aunt Connie’s place. I’ll never look at the stars in the same light again.

The Horsehead Nebula (located south of the star Alnitak, which is farthest east on Orion's Belt, part of the much larger Orion Molecular Cloud Complex).