Memories of Mirth

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Honor Among Thieves

Back where I come from — meaning the planet Mars — copying someone else's creation was considered to be a serious crime. Especially if you then turned around and sold your copies as if they were the real McCoys. And copying others' creations probably would still be a crime on Mars if there were any Martians left out there. But most of them skedaddled before the great cataclysm.

I'll bet most Earthlings get tired of hearing the term "great cataclysm" and wonder just what the hell it was that destroyed all life on Mars. Well, it was Planet X (also called Nibiru) that turned our beautiful garden home into a big red marble. Take it or leave it, that's the awful truth. When the rogue planet Nibiru passed by Mars eons ago the resulting powerful gravity circuit hit our beautiful red, blue and green planet and it was all over for Mars before you knew it.

That's right, Mars once had water and vegetation and separate land masses and two polar ice caps, much like Earth. Now it just has a few old pyramids, the face of a dethroned Martian emperor, some specks of water ice and a lot of ancient salt, all covered in red dust. But if the "great cataclysm" had never happened, copycat businesses would still be illegal there.

But not on Earth.

I was well into my middle-age years on planet Earth when I finally realized that the American business ethic had changed during the latter 20th Century from entrepreneurial risk taking and hard work to the simple copying and reselling of whatever the competition had to offer. It was a lot easier for American businesses to simply wait until someone's patent had run out or to just steal someone else's idea by changing a tiny part of the original and then stamping out copies. By the 21st Century, corporate stealing was considered to be perfectly all right simply because everyone was doing it. It was called competitive edging.

Today, just about anything you eat or drink or drive or put on your back has been copied (stolen) by at least a dozen other manufacturers and sold at competitive prices. Cars, pants, candy bars, frozen foods, toys, you name it. Copycat products literally cover the Earth these days much like Sherwin-Williams paints whose own patents were, no doubt, copied (stolen) by other paint companies who couldn't come up with their own paint formulas or simply didn't want to waste any research and development money on doing so.

I mean, why do it yourself when someone else will do it for you for free and then you can legally steal it from them by either waiting for the patent to expire or just add a dab of this or take out a dab of that and — voila! — that stolen patent is now yours. You've claimed a share of that market by hardly lifting a finger or nudging a dormant brain cell or spending nearly as much money as the people you stole from. But, that's OK. It's just business.

And, if everyone's doing it, then it's perfectly all right. In fact, corporate stealing in America is so commonplace that fellow patent thieves in the USA consider it an honor to be in such swell company. After all, it's just business-as-usual. But it's still no way to run a planet.

And yet none of this really matters if Planet X robs Earth of all its copycats and copycat products in 2013 (that's right, not in 2012). Especially since good ol' Nibiru will eradicate two-thirds of us Earthlings and wipe out all the boundaries in the process. But I don't think any of that will matter to the Earthlings who are left alive. Earthlings, more than any other creatures in the solar system, love a free-for-all more than anything else. Brawling over the right to steal from one another in 2014 would simply be considered an honor.

Holiday from Hell

As a boy growing up in Appalachia in the mid-20th Century, I naturally loved Halloween. Every October I'd pretend that I'd never previously lived on Mars, where worship of the dead was punishable by two years of community service, usually as a street sweeper or a garbage collector, or something that would make most offenders feel like they'd been slapped in the face. Even on Mars no one stopped to think that the people who did these undignified jobs probably didn't like it that their life's work was considered punitive work by the rest of the planet. But that's life all over the Milky Way Galaxy. The most important things in life are the everyday things and the best people are those who do all the undignified and necessary jobs and nobody anywhere seems to get the picture.

Oh, boy, it's so easy for me to get off track whenever I think about Halloween. Let's face it, Halloween is a holiday for kids. I mean, it's a real blast for children to go door-to-door, begging for candy, when they absolutely know that they'll get it. And it used to be fun back in the 1950s and 1960s when you could soap somebody's car windows or rattle their living room windows with a handful of corn thrown way too hard or drop a pile of cow manure on someone's front porch and then set it on fire with lighter fluid just to watch the sorry homeowner race out of the house and stomp the flaming shit out with his best bedroom slippers. In the 21st Century that kind of tomfoolery will land you in juvenile hall. But, back in the 20th Century, that kind of stuff was considered to be nothing more than a bunch of "boys being boys". What stupid crap. A misdemeanor is a misdemeanor.

And now that the new millennium is here and kids, dressed up in expensive, store-bought costumes that make them feel like their favorite TV, movie and cartoon characters, are escorted by their parents and grandparents to pre-screened neighborhood houses for sugar-free treats, grown ups have taken over the real Halloween. They do this by over-decorating their front lawns with inflatable do-dads that vaguely resemble ghosts and goblins and witches. Then they dress themselves up like Mardi Gras fools and go to Halloween parties, where they forget that they're moms and dads, and act like rebellious souls who never heard of parenthood or responsibility. Nowadays it's the adults who show off their expensive, store-bought costumes in their never-ending quest for the attention they think they never got as kids. Then they get drunk and overeat and drive back home drunk and pay the sitter and then mezz out in front of the tube until three in the morning. What a day.

But nobody throws a Halloween party like a Latin Third-World country, where "the Church" really runs the show. Hell, the Day of the Dead celebration in even the tiniest, most obscure village in Central America beats Halloween hands down anywhere, any time.

But, still, no matter how you slice that piece of pumpkin pie, Halloween is still a creepy, nasty, dark-force-worshiping "anti-holiday" against which there ought to be a law.

Trust me. I'm from Mars.

Summer Food

Now that summer is almost over, I'm already missing summer food. I'm also reminded of one of the delightful aspects of growing up in middle-class America during the 1950s and 1960s. It makes me so glad that I'm an Earthling, as well as an American, this time around. These pleasant memories are about eating candy, food and ice cream in the summertime. Whoever invented ice cream is right up there, real high, on my list of great Earthlings. Along with the inventor of beer and pizza and milk chocolate. But I digress.

Summer food was, and still is, quite different than cold-weather food simply because most of it can be eaten outside. So, even if it's something as simple as a hamburger, which can be eaten any season of the year, you only get to eat a hamburger out-of-doors in the good ol' summertime without being stared at by your relatives and neighbors. Especially when it's cooked outside. Whoever invented the charcoal grill is right up there with the inventor of ice cream and all the rest.

But I've always been a little different than most Americans when it comes to eating red meat. I never liked the medium rare, juicy burgers or steaks than most male Earthlings just love to eat. I like my red meat grilled until it's brown, through-and-through. I guess I don't like being reminded that I'm eating something that once had four legs. I also like my fried chicken without the skin and I was lucky because that's the way I got it. Along with potato salad or macaroni salad and cole slaw, corn-on-the-cob and watermelon. Corn-on-the-cob and watermelon were two absolutely delightful summer experiences and they still are. And that's because, besides the wonderful taste and all the devil-may-care slobbers, all the mess goes on the ground or on the picnic table. No one in America seems to mind if a picnic table gets hogged up. Apparently, that's what a picnic table is for.

And don't even get me started about ice cream. As a little boy, the fact that an ice cream cone always melted faster than you could eat it on a hot summer day and began running down your neck and even down you arm meant nothing at all to me. Most of it went into my kid mouth and that was the important thing. Only grownups bothered to run toward you with a paper towel or a napkin and only a mother felt duty-bound to fetch a damp wash cloth for the inevitable clean-up. Soft ice cream sure melted faster than hand-dipped but it sure tasted better. Whoever invented soft ice cream should have been given the Congressional Medal of Honor, no matter what country or planet that person hailed from.

Even candy seemed to be a lot more fun to eat during the summer months. Don't ask me why. Memories of my previous life on Mars would often surface as I ate candy in the summertime. Earth candy could be licked or sucked, like lollipops or root beer barrels, or chewed, like taffy and chocolate bars. Whereas, on Mars, everything — no matter what it was — was simply absorbed through the skin, just like nourishment on a lot of other, more highly-advanced planets. Chocolate candy was my favorite confection of all, and it still is. But, as a grown-up Earthling now with new-found grown-up tastes, I have developed a serious addiction to white Canada Mints (the peppermint ones) whenever I can find them. In the summertime they get soft and can be easily chewed. And they never melt in the sun or the heat and run down your face. But in the winter the house heat makes them hard as a rock so I only eat Canada mints between May and November. Idn't nat somepin'?

Yep, Earth can be a fun planet if you're fortunate enough to have enough to eat, which a lot of Earthlings don't. And it wasn't until I was a grown up on Earth that I discovered the sad fact that most Earthlings who have plenty to eat simply aren't willing to share it with those who don't. That kind of takes the fun out of eating as a grown-up Earthling. Hell, I'd gladly share my food, and even my candy and ice cream and Canada Mints, with those less fortunate than me. But I'm surrounded all the time by other Earthlings who always seem to have enough to eat.

Maybe we're supposed to actively seek out those who don't get enough to eat, no matter where they might live. Maybe that's one of the reasons for having enough food to eat. Maybe it's even the most important reason for having enough. But, most of us Earthlings are just so busy enjoying our great bounty that we simply aren't practiced enough to seek out and share our blessings with those who are less fortunate.

And that ought to be a lesson worth learning before we move on to the next planet.

Problem Solving 101

I didn’t need a college degree or to conduct a lot of research to find out how Earthlings solved most of their problems. As a former Martian with total recall I should have been prepared to see the horror stories I’d heard about planet Earth come to life. But I wasn’t prepared. I don’t think anyone could ever be completely prepared to watch and experience how people from planet Earth solved their personal and business problems, let alone any other problems they might have. The Earthling rule of thumb for problem solving was simple: Make your problems someone else’s problems and hope that will make them go away.

As a little boy on the elementary school playground I found out that making your problems someone else’s problems was actually quite easy, even though I didn’t have the inclination to do so. I always tried to solve my own problems first and then ask a grown up for help if that failed, like a good little former Martian. I never thought to pass the monkey that was on my kid back on to another kid. That wouldn’t be fair. But most other kids, and especially other boys, didn’t give a hoot about fairness. For example, if a boy was having a bad day because the teacher caught him cheating or stealing or something and he was bigger than you, he’d slug you in the school yard. After all, he had a problem and you had a face. Problem solved.

Later in life, as one of the many sorry souls who wound up commuting way too many miles to work, I discovered that most other motorists solved their problem of being late for work by tailgating the slower drivers who observed the speed limits and forcing them to either speed up or else pull over and let them go by. Problem solved. Except where interstates were available. Then the late-for-work crowd would just blow you off the highway as they flew past you at ninety miles per hour. Problem solved again.

As a consumer on planet Earth, I soon found out that the many defective products you’d buy were not accidental but totally intentional. It was a lot easier for manufacturers to pass on to consumers all the defective products that had slipped by quality control inspectors who were asleep on the job or where quality control didn’t exist at all because it was cheaper for the factory not to have to pay quality control inspectors (especially if they’re asleep at the wheel). It sure was a lot more cost-effective and efficient than tossing the defective products out and replacing them with products that passed the quality control inspections. Once again, problem solved.

I actually tried the Earthling system of problem solving once. I figured it was worth a try since solving your own problems or asking someone for help is certainly a lot more time consuming and expensive. So, one day when I was in a hurry to get to work but I just had to have a freshly-brewed cup of convenience store coffee on the way, I parked in a handicapped stall like an inconsiderate lout who didn’t care that a real handicapped person might need that parking stall. And, when I came out of the store and was ready to jump back in the car and tear off to work, my car wasn’t there. I saw it trailing behind a big yellow tow truck just exiting the parking lot.

My lesson was that, if you want to solve your problems using the Earthling method of problem solving, you’d better have a certain knack for it. Otherwise, someone in authority just might hand your problem back to you tenfold. From there on out, I solved all my problems the good old Martian way.

Editor's Note 6-4-13: None of the Little Green Man from Mars posts are autobiographical tales about Michael Casher. For example, Michael Casher never parked illegally in a handicapped stall in his entire life and would never do anything like that. Little Green Man is a fictitious character with a fictitious name and his life and times are fictional. For more information, read the sidebar texts. Thank you.

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.

Proof of Life

So, before I was an Earthling living in the Pennsylvania Appalachians, I was a little green man living on the planet Mars and I have almost total recall of that past life. One of the things I remember about Mars and other Martians is that we weren’t green, of course. That was a figment of imaginative and rather diminished Earthling minds. We Martians were of several racial origins and none of them were green. Or red or black or yellow, for that matter. And I won’t tell you what colors we were or what we looked like, depending on our race and national origin, of course. That’s right, Mars was made up of many nations and cultures. We weren’t just one big happy green family roaming a dusty red planet in search of food and water. But I will tell you one thing. We Martians believed in life on other planets. We even believed in life on Earth, even though none of us had ever been there to see it for ourselves.

But now that I live on Earth in my Martian afterlife, as a full-blooded Earthling, I am shocked and bewildered by the fact that, until very recently, most Earthlings didn’t believe in life on other planets. For eons, most people on Earth thought the stars were just there for them to look at and could not possibly be suns with other planets encircling them. Planets with other people on them. But Earthlings did believe in ghosts.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered as a boy that my fellow Earthlings believed that the spirits of the dead lived on in spooky old houses and missing ships and graveyards and things like that. Right here on Earth. They also believed in every kind of thing that went bump in the night that you could possibly imagine. Like goblins and gremlins and demons and poltergeists and so on. But they didn’t believe in little green men or women from Mars, or even in Martians who were sand-colored or salmon-colored and who stood well over seven feet tall on the average. But there I go, giving away privileged information that is reserved for the next time around for most Earth folks. At least the ones who will actually make it to the afterlife.

But the biggest shock for me was finding out that grown-up Earthlings, even parents and school teachers and doctors and nurses and such, believed in a creature called the Devil who made everything go wrong for them and for the entire world. A major bad guy, if you will, who has nothing better to do than to mess with Earthlings on a daily basis. Earth people never gave a thought to the notion that most of their woes were actually caused by the wrong choices made by themselves and other Earthlings. Hmmm.

But then, why should I have been so surprised to find out that out? During most of my short Earthling life my fellow Earthlings blamed the Devil, an unseen being whose existence has never been proven, for everything that was bad while never pausing to consider that it would be an incredible waste of space if Earth was the only inhabited planet in the universe. So, seeing is not the biggest requirement for belief in anything on planet Earth. The biggest requirement for proof of life seems to be the collective need for a scapegoat. And Earthlings already have theirs.

Men Marching

Originally hailing from the planet Mars, many things about Earth life and Earthlings struck me as being quite odd, if not totally absurd. One of the totally absurd things about Earthlings, and one of the things I have never gotten used to, is their insatiable desire to march.

As a boy watching black-and-white war moves on television I thought it was funny and stupid whenever they showed soldiers at basic training or anywhere else marching in straight lines. That was before I realized that men joined the army because they couldn't get along with other people and that basic training was more or less a place for them to work out these interpersonal issues. Somewhere along the way they’d also learn to shoot a rifle and obey orders from a higher-up.

But nobody beat the German army for stupid marching. The “goose-step” looked not only ridiculous and unmilitary, it looked downright uncomfortable. But, then, Hitler loved his boys and he liked to see them do what they were told, even if they looked more like a chorus line than a bunch of trained soldiers.

The Russians loved to march even more than the Germans and they did it a lot longer than the Germans did. The Russians even took stupid marching to the level of art when they did the German goose-step in super slow motion while guarding a sacred military statue. Then they even looked more ridiculous than the Palace Guards at Buckingham Palace in London, who look more like over-dressed snobs who don’t give a damn about anyone or anything than trained sentinels guarding the royal bloodline. But at least they don’t march.

I tell a lie. Actually, the Palace Guards do march, but only in festive parades, not while they're working. Which makes them look almost as odd as a pack of Shriners to a former Martian like me, who wouldn't march in a straight line anywhere, even if I had to. Just when I thought that nobody could top the Shriners for insane marching, here came the Mummers Parade from Philadelphia one day and my kid world was never the same. A Mummer looked like a human peacock with nowhere to go so I figured they decided to march in straight lines together to wherever it was they thought they had to go. Like lemmings rushing in droves toward the cliffs. But at least they didn't play bagpipes.

Just when I thought marching couldn’t get any more ridiculous I happened to see a St. Patrick’s Day parade on TV one day. Now there was some weird marching. Men in plaid skirts playing bagpipes, marching in straight lines behind a single man wearing a plaid skirt and a hat that looked like road kill. But he wasn’t playing a bagpipe. He carried a big metal baton and strutted like he owned the world. And, let’s face it, the bagpipe might have been OK to make “music” with before mankind invented brass and wood instruments, but now they look and sound like something that should be hunted instead of played.

And later I discovered that you didn’t have to be in the military to march around. If you liked to just wear jeans and a T-shirt and didn’t mind standing elbow-to-elbow with other people, and you had no problem using Job Johnnies for a couple of days instead of a regular bathroom, and you didn’t care that all your marching might get you is a day in the slammer, you could always grab a picket sign and march on Washington, DC. After you got arrested you'd get a free baloney sandwich. And you didn’t have to be anyone in particular and you didn’t have to march in a straight line or any kind of line at all. You could just stand there and holler if you wanted to.

But maybe civilian marching is the stupidest marching of all. At least the soldiers get snappy uniforms and three squares a day and money at the end of the month. And free vehicles to drive with free gasoline in them. And that’s enough to make just about anyone go marching off to war these days.

Dumping

Growing up in Appalachia was more than a little confusing for someone like me, who had a complete memory of a previous life on Mars. One of the most confusing things about living on Earth, especially in America, and especially in the Pennsylvania Appalachian Mountains, was the odd use of certain words. They call this type of language “slang” on Earth. On Mars, where every word had only one meaning, we called it “using the wrong word”.

One word in particular caused me the most confusion from age seven until age forty-seven, when I finally realized that there is simply no rhyme or reason to Earthling behavior and that the best thing to do was to simply “go with the flow” and enjoy life as much as possible. A pretty tall order when you don’t really know what people are saying or what the hell is really going on. Anyway, the most confusing word I heard back then was the word “dump”.

As a boy I was fascinated by the big, noisy tri-axle trucks that hauled coal all over most of the Allegheny Plateau. They were called “dump trucks”. OK. But then I was confused when I found out that they didn’t take the coal to “the dump”. No. That’s where people took their garbage. That was before recycling and refuse pickup became the law and the responsible thing to do. And way before the omnipresent Dempster Dumpmaster that people simply called “the dumpster”. But they weren’t to be confused with the place in the black-and-white war movies that I watched on TV every chance I got, the place where the army guys stored all their ammunition. That was “the ammo dump”. Hmmm.

When I was a teenager kids would often get sad and they called that being “down in the dumps”. But whenever I got that way the other kids told me not to “dump my problems” on them. Some of the saddest girls in high school were the “dumpy-looking girls”, girls who were not considered to be attractive, even though they were usually the friendliest and the smartest. They were the last resort as dates for boys whenever their girlfriends would “dump them”. Man, high school was just as confusing as life at home. For example, I didn’t really understand it when I was told to “dump my dirty clothes” into the laundry basket. But, it was nice to be able to just drop my dirty clothes in a pile on top of other dirty clothes and then skedaddle. That's back when most mothers stayed at home and liked being moms and doing mom things.

When I finally made it to adulthood I was still confused by the many uses of this particular word. Whenever one company would buy another company, they would often do “a computer dump” over the weekend to complete the merger. And you’d sometimes read in the paper where investors on Wall Street were going to “dump their stock” because it was worthless. But I knew they weren’t loading the stocks into “dump trucks” and taking them to “the local dump”. No. I’d finally gotten past those definitions of the word “dump” fairly unscathed. But, every now and then, I’d find myself living in an apartment or a town I didn’t really care for. My first apartment was nothing but “a dump”. But, then again, the town it was in was also “a dump”.

Hell, I could sit here all day and write more about this unusual American slang word but I ate a really big breakfast this morning and now I gotta go “take a dump”.

A Man for No Seasons

Spring is not exactly my favorite season, even though most people who live in Earth’s temperate zone seem to look forward to it each year. To me, spring is just another season and, except for seeing the crocuses come up in April and smelling the lilacs in May, its arrival means very little to yours truly. Spring is really nothing more than the designated time for putting away the snow shovel and the rock salt and replacing them with a lawn mower and a weed trimmer. Big-ass deal.

I like summer but only when it gets so hot that the grass slows down its crazy growing schedule and the hedges and bushes don’t need trimmed every damn week or so. But then it’s so damn hot that all you can really do is just sit in a chair in front of a big fan and drink cold beer. And it seems that no one wants you to do that. I could never figure that out.

Then, when fall comes around and you don’t have to mow the grass or fire up the weed whacker as often, it’s suddenly time to haul out the rake and the wheelbarrow or a big tarp or giant garbage bags in order to gather up and haul away all the damn fallen leaves. And everyone thinks you should want to do that. Go figure.

All in all, living on Earth seems to be a cyclic adventure of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. No wonder so many men on this planet spend so much of their time hiding. For most of us, it makes perfect sense for us to be someplace we're not supposed to be when everyone else expects us to be where we're supposed to be. It's simply a matter of survival.

It’s All in the Wrist

Living on Earth certainly has its pros and cons. One of the “thumbs up” is eating pizza. Whoever invented pizza should have gone straight to heaven. But, since there is no heaven, that person will just have to settle for another planet with better weather.

One of the “thumbs down” about living on Earth is that Earthlings have a tendency to say the stupidest things, things that are backwards from what they really mean to say. For example, a lot of people will tell you that they “could care less” about something when, in fact, they should be saying that they “couldn’t care less” about it. That means that they care so little about it that they couldn’t possibly care any less about it. Knowing that, they will still say it the wrong way.

And that brings me to another “thumbs down” about Earth. Even when they’re wrong and they know they’re wrong, Earthlings don’t care. Right or wrong means very little to them. And, even as a little boy in Appalachia, that struck me as pretty damn strange.

And yet, I can always think of more “thumbs up” reasons for liking life on Earth. One of them is drinking beer. Whoever invented beer will certainly never go to hell. Wherever that is.

Animals Do Fall Down

As a boy, I once saw a dog fall down as it rounded a downtown corner way too fast one summer day. Its toenails were too long and there simply wasn’t enough “toe tread” on the sidewalk. I was shocked. I thought only kids fell down and then only in front of grown ups. I laughed at the poor dog, not realizing that it did not like me laughing at it, not one damn bit.

As a grown man, I saw a Canada goose fall down one summer day. It, too, was walking way too fast and it tripped over a clump of grass. The poor goose’s beak rammed right into the soft dirt and it momentarily stuck there.

While I had laughed at the dog who fell down, I had only sympathy for the Canada goose. And that’s only because forty years or so had intervened between those two incidents. Enough time to fall down myself, dozens of times, so that I would never laugh again at anyone or anything that fell down in plain sight of another living creature.

Not exactly an earth-shattering revelation. But I finally learned that it’s the little things that happen on planet Earth that really matter.

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.