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ENTRY 1
Not only have I been abducted, but my alien captor is a salesman that has sold me accidental pratfall-insurance with an exclusion clause stating that my coverage ceases the moment his ship exits Alpha Centauri. This salesman, the size of a compact car, was rather aggressive, had the head of a Pit Bull, four arms, five eyes, and through a translator plug stuck in my ear, spoke eloquently on the dangers of being left on an asteroid if I didn’t agree to sign and help fill his quota. He assures that my policy can be downloaded for viewing when its transmission arrives at Earth about 500 years from now. I complain about the obvious fact that I’ll have long since suffered catastrophic entropy. He tells me to stop complaining or he’ll crush me like a bug. His small ship looks like the inside of a hollowed out pomegranate. In the centre is what looks like a round wood globe the size of soccer ball, sitting on top of a wood pedestal. One of his four hands is always in contact with this wood globe that appears polished smooth from constant rubbing. The floor is like standing on soggy bed of cardboard. Suddenly the whole ship shudders, followed by a whizzing sound not unlike my grandfather falling asleep after exhausting himself watching sports. Then this salesman starts bragging that the Mother Ship we have docked with has the latest space warp dimension drive. In other words, despite travelling at lightspeed, no matter what spacetime I presently exist in upon boarding the Mothership, I can always be returned to the same spacetime upon disembarking. Also, I will be the only human with coverage for slips-and-falls on the planet, Doofus, an ice planet of no redeeming qualities. Now, there is the small matter of how I’m to pay for this policy, since all I have on me is a twenty. I’m told I had better come up with something more valuable than a colourful piece of plastic, or I’ll be sold as a terrarium pet whose only purpose will be to provide nutrients for the larger pet already in there. Oh I forgot to mention that these Pit Bull-headed alien insurance salesmen call themselves some inexplicable word that sounds like Calamine Lotion, but in fact conceptually translates into English as The Brady Bunch. Under the circumstances, this is of no comfort to me. Ironically my lot in life has improved somewhat because a couple of days ago I was still on Earth worrying about the consequences of testifying against an esteemed member of the Mafia, who had circumvented my assured police protection by convincing me that taking a ride in a nice limousine was preferable to discharging a 45 Magnum up my nose.
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ENTRY 2
What luck. When I was abducted from Earth, I had a cup of fruit cocktail in the pocket of my jacket. As I haven’t eaten for 24 hours, I remove it, delighted that I have something to eat. My salesman becomes very excited, starts slapping the wood globe with all his four hands, alarms go off, then he squats and pisses on the floor. Apparently Del Monte fruit cocktail is considered one of the most valuable commodities to be traded in the known universe. ENTRY 3 I have negotiated free rein aboard this Mothership as an honoured guest by promising to pay, if returned unharmed to my bachelor apartment in Canmore, Alberta, 15 gallons of Del Monte fruit cocktail. My salesman says he’s departing this Mothership and returning to his home planet, where he will use my Del Monte fruit cup to buy a new house and a fifteen-acre dog kennel. He informs me that arrangements have been made for another individual to take over my abduction. In the mean time, I should disembark his ship through the hatch into the Mothership, go down the hallway take the first elevator on my right, and descend to the storage deck to serve as ballast. ENTRY 4.1 It’s been an uneventful ten hours of serving as ballast in this cavernous storage area, the size of a sports arena. Its smooth steel floor is littered with used appliances, each the size of a garden shed. However, over the last few minutes from several paces away, a front-end loading clothes washer has with a beguiling sultry voice, suggested in a strangely persuasive way, “Come here you dirty little thing and let me give you the rinse cycle of your life.” Fortunately, before I make any rash decisions, the escort my Mothership hosts have assigned to me arrives trotting out of the elevator. He warns me not to give him any trouble because he’s not happy with his appearance. Apparently he’s a Shape-Shifter and to make me feel more at home, his superiors, (much to his apparent protests); have designated him to morph into what looks like a Shetland pony. His name, translated into English, sounds like Rubberbabybuggybumper. I’ll call him Mr. Ed. He tells me that, for security purposes I should stick close to him when we ascend to the Strip-Mall deck, as apparently their ship has several aggressive automatic floor cleaners that would likely mistake me for a rodent from the planet Caligula. I ask why they think a Shetland pony will make me feel at home. “My shape idea,” he says, “comes from an Earthly news feed called Walt Disney.” I recommend Mr. Ed’s superiors try a much more reliable newsfeed called the Playboy Channel. Mr. Ed says, “Fine,” and I end up with a disconcerting four-headed apparition with the head of Hugh Hefner amongst three blond heads wearing one big smoking jacket, speaking at the same time with Hugh’s voice. I tell Mr. Ed that the Shetland pony will be fine. ENTRY 4.2 We emerge from the freight elevator on to the so-called Strip Mall deck and Mr. Ed announces, “And now, until further instructions, we loiter.” This deck is laid out like an indoor mall, but all the shops seem to be florists that sell only ferns and rubber-tree plants. Mr. Ed trots me over to a berm running down the centre of the mall and tells me to sit. Shuffling in both directions are enough ferns and rubber tree plants to cover a forest floor, and I soon realize that the plants are the shoppers themselves. I ask Mr. Ed what’s going on. He turns his horse head to me and says, “It’s busier than usual. 50% clearance sales on nitrogen and free classes on dealing with the heartbreak of aphids.” ENTRY 4.3 While loitering on the Strip-Mall berm, Mr. Ed has tells me why other humans have been abducted and then probed. This was not done for scientific reasons. All abductions can be traced back to a single bi-pedal marsupial that arrived from the planet Used-Cars in the Triangulum galaxy in search of the ignition key to his robot-lover. His friends, the night before his marriage to said robot, carried out the practical joke of taking and hiding this key on planet Earth. There is a happy ending though, because a proctologist found the key, when recovering his wedding ring from the small intestine of a potato farmer in Idaho. With this evidence the farmer recounted his I-got-probed-by-a-kangaroo-in-a-space-suit story to a rapt audience at the annual pig fair. There has been much hullabaloo over the years that the US air force is hiding in a Nevada desert hanger—a crashed flying saucer. Are they hiding from the public, coveted evidence proving that intelligent life (other than our own esteemed intelligence) exists in the universe? I ask if Mr. Ed if he knows anything about this. “Well, yes and no,” he replies, in a voice that I now realize reminds me of Barney Rubble. “Yes, if you consider the individual on board as being smart because he made it all the way to Earth. No, when you consider, that after a heavy night of drinking, he forgot to put pants on, took his boss’s light-speed saucer, which looked nothing like his subatomic pulse-drive equivalent of a Toyota Corolla, then flash missed his entire solar system by 100 thousand light years. The punishment for this kind of behaviour,” he adds, “is that no one will come get you.” “Toyota Corolla, you’re familiar with that car?” “Yeah, when I was a student, I wrote poetry about alien technologies. Would you like to hear one?” To be cordial, I say yes, though there is always great risk in allowing a stranger to read you his or her poetry. “Oh the irony,” Mr. Ed begins, “Of carbon based life forms, creating technology, to burn the remnants of other Carbon Based Lifeforms. The life of others, live again in the flames of technology, burning like the sun, the sun that burns again…” I should have accepted that front-end washer’s invitation to put me through a rinse cycle, when Mr. Ed stops and says, “Time for lunch and a nap.” SIDE NOTE TO ENTRY 4.3 Concerning my reference to Barney Rubble. He was the height-challenged side-kick to the taller star, Fred Flintstone, of the show aptly called The Flintstones, (there was more than one of them.) For some of you youngsters who are not familiar with this delightful animated series, please know that the rumours perpetrated by Creationists, that the Flintstones is an animated documentary showing how cave men could live with dinosaurs, is not true. However, depicting caveman as individuals who had not yet invented pants is true. |
AuthorJack van Brunschot CategoriesArchives |
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