159. Reflections

I’ve always liked grandmothers, so when I found that C.W. had assumed the shape of a SLOL and was sitting in my living room knitting, I couldn’t help smiling.

“Why the sweet little old lady shape?”

“Sit down child,” she said.

I did as she told me. Her hands flashed as the knitting needs clicked against one another. She didn’t say anything.

“Nice morning,” I said. “See we had some rain last night.

“All things come in their own time,” she said.

“Uh,” I said. “Want to give me a hint of what you’re up to.”

“Just reflecting,” she said. “You know what today is, don’t you?”

“Saturday?”

“It’s been 44years since we first took notice of you. The day you took your ‘giant step for mankind.’”

“The first moon landing?”

“We thought you were all so cute.”

“I suppose we were. It was a great day.”

“Well what the bloody hell happened?”

I almost spilled my coffee.

“Oh, excuse me,” she said. “I forgot where I was for a moment.”

As the modern mystery books say, I sat in stunned silence.

“It’s just that you have been such a burden to us all since that day.”

“Since that day?”

“We thought at the time that you had the capabilities to get past some of your shortcomings.”

“Shortcomings?”

“Pigmentation preoccupation and such.” Her fingers flashed with silent fury.

“I’m not sure I follow you.”

“You have such a capacity for love, on occasion,” she said. “Why when that little girl out in Colorado was murdered that time, the whole country went into mourning.”

“I seem to remember.”

She studied her knitting for a few seconds, then looked up at me. She spoke softly. “Then the whole country seems to stick its head up its ass and wonder why the lights went out.”

“Something troubling you?”

“Pigmentation preoccupation, like I said.”

“As in?”

“Why doesn’t it bother some people when a young man with black skin gets murdered for walking down the street not bothering a soul?”

“I don’t know.”

She stopped knitting. “Your species calls it, I believe, schizophrenia.”

“And what do you call it?”

“Just being assholes.”

“C.W.,” I said. “I think you may be having one of your cases of, what is it you call it, role warp?”

“Oh child,” she said and offered me a smile that would have melted hardened steel. “I’m just picking up bad habits from your species. You can be so sweet at times.”

“And?”

“And then you can be totally fu…”

“Shhh,” I interrupted her. “My wife may walk in at any time.”

“ … funny beyond belief at others. What’s wrong with you?”

In Grandma's day, a good dose of
Senna Leaf Tea in the spring
cleaned all that meanness
out of you kids. - C.W.Add caption

I sighed in relief. “Oh nothing.”

She smiled again and resumed her knitting. “Oh child, she said. Poor sweet child. You can make me so proud at times.”

“Yes?” She was beginning to make me feel warm inside.

“Then sometimes you make my ass crave a dip of snuff.”

156. Answers

Hello friends. Big Dope is taking a vacation this week and it gives me time to answer some of your mail.

Dear C.W.: My name is Stevie and I am nine years old. When I told my friend Benji that I didn’t want to marry a girl, he said that I would die and burn in some place called Hell for ever and ever. The Bible told him so. I told him the Bible also said that you have to give your money to the poor, so his daddy would be burning with me because he didn’t. He said that part was taken out of someplace called Contax. Can you tell me where this place is?

Dear Stevie: I think you mean “context” which, in your case is not a place but a state of mind. People like your friend use it in a process we call “faxilataturia” on Falloonia. It means to ignore anything that is inconvenient. It is contra-related to the process of “redolataturia” which means to ignore anything that is stupid and which you should use when your friend Benji tells you something.

Dear C.W.: I am a descendant of Thomas Wood Forrest. My family owns one of the largest real-estate brokerage firms in the United States.  I don’t want my country to expect me to pay for socialized medicine from my trust fund. How may I best go about stopping this evil idea?

Signed – Howie

Dear Howie: It is confusing to a visitor from another planet as to why some in your species distrust socialized medicine while they—almost joyfully it seems to me—embrace the notion of socialized housing. From government-backed housing loans to mortgage-interest deductions, your country subsidizes home ownership in a manner unheard of throughout the Galaxy. In fact, it is rare in the Cosmos to find a species that allows profits to be made from the provision of basic needs. But, more to your point, someone told me recently that one of your species’ primary religious documents mandates that the rich give their money to the poor. Why don’t you try that and perhaps health care will take care of itself?

Dear C.W.: My wife snores something awful. Do Falloonians snore? If so, is there a cure?
Signed – Desperate

Dear Desperate: To answer your first question, Fallonians do not snore. They do, however, as they grow older, tend to use the “rest and recharge” period to secretly discharge the buildup of noxious gasses from their digestive systems. I am told that in some of the older unit pairs, this occasionally results in violence, an otherwise rare occurrence on our planet. More to your point, I recommend that you simply rejoice, as you lie awake, in the fact that you are not a Ligeniatorian. The females of that species, on a certain night during their gestation period, invade the bodies of their spouses in order to incubate their eggs. Then they must find a new spouse. So, from a universal perspective, consider yourself damned lucky.

Dear Fans: Please forward your
letters to Big Dope for the next few days.
I will be "out of pocket." - C.W.

Dear C.W.: My Husband is a complete dope. He wanders around all day pretending to talk to an alien. I can’t depend upon him for anything. In addition, he snores at night and his feet smell awful. I am thinking about taking a baseball bat to him and his little buddy. I know that my people would not blame me but do you think there would be galactic repercussions?
Signed: Bare-Handed Momma

Dear, Dear. I must run now. Out of space. I’ll get back to you.

124. Boredom

If there is anything worse than a bored teenager, it must be bored alien. What could be even worse? Try a bored alien who has taken the form of a bored teenager. I was trying to grade papers from a class I am teaching when who should show up but Tymber Elysibuth, the 16 year old high school student. She plopped on the couch and began tapping her feet to music that only existed in her head.

“I’m bored,” she said, as if I would have not guessed in a thousand years.

“C.W., I’m sort of busy right now.”

“Do you think Tymber is a sexy name?”

“I think you should go out for some exercise.”

“Haylee Addison’s dad says the government is taking away all of our guns.”

“That’s nice. Now why don’t you go walking?”

“Oh, puleeez. Can’t you hear? There is a hunter every ten feet out there. Duh. I would get to the edge of the woods before one shot me. Gross.”

“Maybe you could read a book.”

“Londin Colclasure studied in school that the world is only 6,000 years old.”

“Great,” I said. “Have you visited home lately?”

“Get real. It takes a hundred light years to get there.”

“So where did London ..”

“Londin! Gee, are you dumb, or what?”

“Where did Londin get her news?”

“Her teacher learned if from a man running for president.”

“Running for president? We just had an election.”

“He’s getting an early start, I suppose.”

Returning to my papers, I tried to ignore her.

“The world’s coming to an end,” she said.

“Great,” I said. “Hope it happens before I get these papers graded.”

“The U.N. has taken over our economy and is killing our economic system.”

“That’s nice,” I said. “Now who told you that?”

“Glen Beck.”

“And he is an economist?”

“No.”

“Historian?”

“Not really.”

“A political scientist?”

“No, A talk radio host.”

“Talk radio?”

“You know, the guys who are trying to protect our freedoms and restore our economy.”

“Some call it ‘hate’ radio” I said.

“Whatever.”

“So why don’t you go shopping?”

“What! And fight those crowds?”

“Never mind anyway,” I said. “The last five times I sent you for toilet paper, you picked the wrong brand.”

“Soffeeah Gabrielah says her daddy is going to take her out of school.”

“Can’t blame him,” I said, trying to make sense of a student’s effort to describe the pros and cons of public sector collective bargaining. “Any particular reason?”

“They won’t let us pray.”

“Oh? Do you want to pray?”

“Not really, but that’s not the point. “They are taking away our religious freedoms.”

“About time,” I said reading the explanation again a striving for some sign of coherence. “What freedoms?”

It would be so neat if I could just
text my thoughts without actually
having to think them. - C.W.

“Did you know that God hates fags?”

“C.W.! We don’t talk that way in this house.”

“See, you want to take away my freedom in my own home.”

“It’s not your home. And besides, you are an alien.”

“Did you know that the government is going to put all of our citizens in concentration camps and put the aliens in charge?”

111. Idiocies

There was no doubt that it wasn’t James Madison in my living room so I had to assume it was C.W. Why he chose this particular form would become obvious soon enough. With his powdered wig slightly askew, he was sitting at my desk thumbing my pocket edition of the U.S. Constitution and mumbling to himself.

 

“What’s cookin’ Satch?” I said.

“Imbecile,” he said.

“Well aren’t we touchy?”

“This thing,” he said, waving the Constitution at me. I noticed he the pages were crumpled, dog-earned, and covered with notes and underlines. “This thing is so short. I don’t remember that.”

“I thought you wanted it that way,” I said. Why not play along?

“I can find no provision for ‘aclona++snocry.’’’

“A- what?”

He thought for a second. “It’s serious crime on our planet.”

“And it is?

“Something of a cross between ‘knowingly uttering nonsense and scaring the children.”

“Examples?”

“Publicly stating that a female of your species physiologically disables her reproductive system after being beaten and violently impregnated against her will.”

“I see.”

“Or claiming that data showing increasingly warming temperatures around the globe are false because some mythical father-figure in the sky simply wouldn’t permit it.”

“Be careful with that one.”

“Stating that supply creates demand or that if you give all your riches to a few, much of it will magically trickle down to the remainder.”

“I see.”

“Or denials of the scientific processes of natural selection even after the Trogotherans dropped Charles Darwin off here in 1859 to explain it all.”

“And your point is?”

“That there no laws against this, as hard as we worked to produce such enlightenment?” He waved the Constitution at me.

“Laws against stupidity?”

“Laws against spreading it.”

“And on Falloonia?”

“On our planet, we take it quite seriously.”

“And the punishment is?”

He thought. “It would be your equivalent of Vacation Bible School as produced at Alcatraz.”

 

I shuddered. “Maybe you better check your Eighth Amendment there.”

“Levity is not appropriate when discussing this,” he said and he flourished the Constitution again.

“So what do you propose?”

“We would have the punishment fit the crime.”

“So, the ‘supply-siders’ might be given a batch of Facebook stock and forced to sell it?”

“Precisely.”

“And the ‘trickle-downers’ might be forced to live for a while at the bottom of the pile.”

If it should happen that the proposed
broom-handle remediation should
prove unsuitable to the task of
providing enlightenment to those of
the species who would aspire to
regulate the personal behavior of other
genders, a more enlightened approach
involving electrodes might suffice to
provide mental reformation. - Publius

“You are getting the picture.”

“And the ‘legitimate rape’ fellers?”

He straightened his wig, gave me a deliciously wicked wink, and began to lift himself off the floor with the handle of a broom that he had laid nearby.

“Glad you asked, Big Dope. Stand up and I will show you.”

“Uh, thanks Publius, I think I get the picture.”