"Balllllllllllzaq"

Don't ask me why tunes from The Music Man are running through my head. Probably from catching a glimpse of an ugly woman on television I then associated with the old dame in the movie who enjoys, really enjoys, saying that, and it was off to the synapsis races. I wonder if anyone will truly ever understand the human mind. Probably not. The only people who become unbiased experts at things are ones far enough away from them to preclude dumb mistakes, sort of like asking cat owners about cats and expecting the truth.

Aliens. If and when we meet up with a spacefaring race of super-tech folks they'll be able to clue us in. Probably from afar once they get to know us. And it'll be none of this Captain Cook and the Islanders jibberjabby because we're already hi-tech and will be capable of appreciating someone a millenium or so ahead of us. That's part of the problem with the moslems, you know. No-tech never gets along with tech because the thought processes are just too different. Like old people trying to program VCR's. Go to anyone's grandma's house and one thing you can be sure of is the clock on the VCR blinking. Moslems are the human equivalent.

But aliens, not Mexicans but people who'd be almost as strange, would probably find us to be sort of neat in the way your brother's kids are neat. Cool for a while but let someone else deal with them on a daily basis. Our minds have unlimited potential, and we spend more resources worshipping an invisible man that lives in the clouds than we do on space travel, or curing cancer, or even the common cold for chrissake. Imagine us making it to Mars in the next two decades or so, people going there, not stupid machines that get stuck in a 6" ditch. I mean how embarassing is that. So we get there and holy crap, there IS life, but it's been driven underground, and it's intelligent life to boot, just maybe stuck in the Middle Ages like we were because the Popes threatened to kill anyone who figured out that the earth revolved around the sun and all.

So we find these people and it's too cool for words. Then we discover that they worship old shoes that need re-heeling and it blows the whole gig to hell. Maybe it bothers us so much because they remind us of us and we write them off as space niggers and find ways to prove they don't have souls, because to us things without souls are fair game to fuck with.

What would be even worse though, is if they had no gods or demons. Sure, they couldn't stay stranded in the Middle Ages without something holding them back, but perhaps the catastrophe of having to leave the surface really screwed things to the nines and they can barely squeek out a living so hi-tech became impossible. Living like animals and the first thing to go is religion so they're friendly, sort of, but never had the time to keep up with the deity deal. We'd then have to convert them, of course, but that's too much of a nightmare to get into without being piss ass drunk and I'm not.

Sadly, there are no little Martian dudes, and if Enrico Fermi was right there are no Alpha Centauri visitors heading this way either. The universe is nearly 13 billion years old. We've been here 6 billion. That means older star systems would have a frickin 7 billion year head start on us, so where are they. And please, none of this mutilating cows in Nebraska, or diagrams configured in corn fields as examples of extraterrestrial visitations. The enormous energy's needed to travel this far precludes space dudes from stopping by just too fuck with old Elsie or ruin farmer Gray's crop. If they ARE out there, then they are so far away, other end of the universe far away, that they've not found the time to scoot on over for a parlay. This also means that there's not a whole lot of them, too. To be an earthlike planet means just the right distance from a star, and having just the right sized moon, and staying away from nasty ass meteors crashing down one after another to make things unpleasant. Far too many variables to make life as we know it happen on a regular basis, and since we haven't even heard from them via radio waves, it's doubtful we'll be meeting them in the next few hundred years or so.

And that sucks because we'll never learn all about ourselves until someone else comes along. I'll never figure out why Ballllllllzaq hits me out of the blue, and why I sometimes walk into a room and don't know why. It's good that I at least understand women, but that's only because I'm not one. So until aliens come along to say, shit dude, no way, here's the real deal, we'll have to work on making chimps smarter. We could do it, too. The right animal husbandry coupled with cloning and the like, and 100 years from now we'd have monkeys as smart as that brother in law you hate.

Thanks for listening, but it's time to scoot because Lisa is pacing and prowling and she usually does that when I'm writing because I've told her maybe seven million times that it breaks my concentration, but it's okay because I understand women. If you're not paying attention to them for x-amount of time...this varies according to hair color...then life as we know it ceases to exist and things must change.