Little Green Man from Mars: The Book

This is a promotional video for Michael Casher's sixth science fiction novel.

Lunatoid

Remembering my former life on Mars is always a bummer because being a Martian was so much nicer than being an Earthling. When I was from Mars I wasn't really little and green, you know. I was salmon-colored and stood 7 feet, 4 inches tall at age 75 (Earth Years), which is thirty-something by Earth standards. Martians didn't measure age in Martian years or any other years because we Martians lived in the present. For us, every day was today and every time was now.

However, I had expected to live to be 200 or more but when I was only 75 (Earth Years) Planet X (Nibiru) passed between Earth and Mars, destroying the planet Xerxes with its powerful gravitational pull and turning it into an asteroid belt. Nibiru's gravitational wake also caused such massive eruptions in the crust of our beautiful red, green and blue planet that the hot, molten core spewed out and evaporated our seas and rivers and lakes. When the steam finally cleared, there was only a trace of salt water flowing down the massive gorges that Earthlings call "canals". But they aren't "canals". They're breaches in our planet's crust caused by the transient proximity of the 10th planet Nibiru. Holes that tapped our molten core and turned Mars into a dusty red rock.

But I'm getting off the track, as usual. Whenever I can manage to remember myself as a seven-foot-four Martian who was still twenty years away from Martian mid-life, I usually get so mad that I'm currently this little "pink" man from Earth who's barely five-foot-eight, that I temporarily blow a fuse and forget what I'm doing. Hmmm. Now I remember.

It's bad enough that I'm an Earthling shrimp now instead of a towering Martian without having to be referred to as a "little green man from Mars". That's not my idea, as you are well aware. That's a stupid misconception of mid-20th Century Earthling thinking that Hollywood and the comic books made a bundle from by perpetuating that myth for payola. Crap, I'm getting off the track again.

OK. I'm getting back on track now. Yeah, it's bad enough that the Earthling vessel in which my immortal life essence currently dwells (a human being) is trying to parlay that "little green man" myth into mucho moola so he can buy recliners and ice cream and cigars and things like that for himself. But now the little opportunist has my "mythical" image inside a freaking moon. Yeah, instead of on Mars. Yeah. Now I'm some new kind of celestial body that only a disturbed mind could create. A "lunatoid" created by an independent lunatic. What's next?

Hell, I don't know which is worse. Being misrepresented by an ambitious lunatic for the comical amusement of blog readers or having your life activity reduced to being a moron from the moon who looks like he just loves to have his picture taken. Either way, I'm certainly no magnificent seven-foot-four Martian from the past anymore. Hell, I'd just rather be the little five-foot-eight indie author S. O. B. that I really am this time around. But, hell, no one seems to be happy with that scenario. So, I guess I'll just keep playing along for now.

Playing games for money sure beats the pants off wallowing in the past for nothing.

Easy New Years Resolutions

I often wondered why Earthlings liked to make New Years resolutions when they rarely stuck to them. It reminds me of when I was a boy and a practicing Roman Catholic and we were pressed to give up something for Lent, like candy or soda pop or swearing. Nobody could give up those things, so why did we pretend that we could?

American grownups were the only role models I had for making New Years resolutions and they didn't help me much as a kid. Men would often pretend to give up drinking as a New Years resolution, which meant not drinking whiskey and beer, and sometimes they'd say they were going to quit smoking. Of course, I never knew any grown up man who made good on promises like these. They were just as unrealistic as a teenager giving up potato chips for Lent. Get real.

Now that I'm a grown up man myself and well past my prime, I've gotten hip to the secret behind New Years resolutions. Not being Catholic anymore, I won't have to worry about Lent later this winter. But, if I did, the same secret would work for that as well. And here it is: simply vow to do something you'd naturally and easily do anyway or, if it involves not doing, then simply vow to not do something you would not do anyway.

I made a list of 10 Easy New Years Resolutions that will definitely work for me and maybe some of them will work for you as well.

1. Start balancing your checkbook
2. Start holding the door open for others, especially women and children.
3. Start coming to a complete stop at Stop signs.
4. Start treating others the way you'd like them to treat you.
5. Start wrapping your used gum in its own foil instead of spitting it out in the parking lot.
6. Stop saying "vis á vis".
7. Stop using the "f" word in every single sentence.
8. Stop tailgating the poor bastard in front of you because he obeys the speed limit and you don't.
9. Stop getting drunk and running naked through the back yard.
10. Stop getting drunk and running naked through the front yard.

Why make the new year hard on yourself if you don't have to?

Holiday Greetings from a Former Martian

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Memories of Mars

As a little kid growing up in Appalachia, I was fascinated by dirt, loved playing in dirt, even without the nifty, little, all-metal toy dump trucks I used to have. The dirt alone was enough to engage me in hour after hour of spring, summer and early fall fun. And that was because the Pennsylvania Appalachian Mountains were — and still are — so green and fertile and damp with dew and summer rain that finding dirt anywhere was rare. Wonderful, dry, sandy dirt was a rare commodity, indeed, during my childhood. Usually, it was filled to the brim with something green and growing.

Pennsylvania dirt was black and rich and incredibly fertile. It would grow anything. I swear, if you lost a quarter in that rich loamy soil in the back yard and you found your twenty-five cents later that summer it would be two dimes and a nickel. Of course, I missed the red planet Mars, my real home, and would have gladly settled for finding twenty-five shiny, new, reddish, coppery pennies instead of silver coins.

I realized at an early age that I was stuck here on Earth and in backward Appalachia, for some unknown reason, a prisoner on a greedy world with an arrested culture where up is down and black is white. Where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, a rule that is carved in stone, not written in the dirt. That’s why so many bad people get rich so easily here on Earth and why so many good people work for them, in turn, for pennies.

But even the touch and feel of red metal in your hands, if only for a few minutes, isn’t worth living that kind of preordained life. Still, even to this day, I love sitting right down in the dry dirt on a hot summer day and sifting the dusty earth through my fingers, holding it up to the wind and letting it scatter as it trickles to the ground between them. Pretending it is red Martian soil instead.

I suppose I could have moved to Georgia where the soil is nice and red. But I’m not all that crazy about peaches and pecans. And a person can only drink so much Coca-Cola.

Besides, missing one home is already bad enough.

In Like Lint

So, what took the celestial powers-that-be so damn long to send me to Earth? After all, Cydonia was already under several feet of red dust by the time I made my appearance in Appalachia, only to have my butt slapped by an obstetrician as soon as he saw my ugly face. I hated Earth right off the bat but I also knew I was here for the duration.

Years later, when I saw a rerun of a really stupid spy-spoof movie in the 1960s called “In Like Flint”, I realized that I had entered Earth almost as comically as the James Coburn character entered whatever is was that he was supposed to infiltrate but much, much slower. My own mission would not include espionage, assassination and the blowing up of evil people and places. My own “Mission to Earth” would be much more subtle and covert. I would be a living witness to the real story about the third planet from the Sun. What I did with what I saw and learned would take an entire lifetime and how and when I chose to apply the resulting wisdom would be entirely up to me. I would enter Earth culture as slowly as the accumulation of cotton fuzz on the average belly button.

In like lint.

But this isn't the autobiography of a misplaced, hopelessly lost, little green man from Mars. Recounting the days of my roller-coaster life here on Earth would be like reading to you from the dictionary. Yeah, that dry. As dry as Cydonia dust.

So, this blog will be a random selection of my thoughts about Earth, the solar system, the Milky Way Galaxy and the entire universe as I randomly recall them. And that’s about the best any little green man can do when surrounded by the waste products of several millennia of Earthling civilizations as they built up and decayed.

So, let’s just make the best of it, then.

I am the "Little Green Man from Mars".

In the Earth year 1951 I was sent to the third planet from the Sun on a special "Mission to Earth". I was a dead Martian long before that, killed in the last cataclysm that decimated what was left of our beautiful red planet. You got it, I was a dead Martian and a lost soul with the rest of my immortal life on hold in Limbo, if you will, awaiting my fate.

I was reincarnated on Earth as a boy in the Appalachian Mountains of central Pennsylvania. At first, I didn't know that I'd been duped by the celestial powers-that-be. But, when I looked around at "dumb-ass hick, redneck America", I knew, at first glance, that I'd been had.