Monday, September 01, 2008

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 1950's and 1960's. 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 can 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 loved 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 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.

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 grownup 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.

Posted by Little Green Man at 11:14:11 | Permanent Link | Comments (0) |

Wednesday, August 06, 2008

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 others 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 wherever interstate travel was 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 7-Eleven 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 7-Eleven 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 7-Eleven 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.

Posted by Little Green Man at 09:33:05 | Permanent Link | Comments (0) |

Monday, July 14, 2008

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.

Posted by Little Green Man at 10:59:52 | Permanent Link | Comments (0) |

Sunday, June 01, 2008

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 red dusty 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.

Posted by Little Green Man at 11:42:44 | Permanent Link | Comments (0) |

Thursday, May 01, 2008

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. This was before I realized that men joined the army because they could not get along with other men 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 looked more like soldiers who didn’t give a damn about anyone or anything than trained sentinels guarding the royal bloodline. But at least they didn’t march.

Just when I though 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 a straight line 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. 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.

Hell, 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.

Posted by Little Green Man at 09:58:43 | Permanent Link | Comments (0) |

Saturday, April 05, 2008

Dump This?

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 has only one meaning, we call 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”. 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 fun to be able to just drop my dirty clothes in a pile on top of other dirty clothes and then skedaddle.

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 “a dump truck” 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”.

Posted by Little Green Man at 12:25:36 | Permanent Link | Comments (0) |

Sunday, March 16, 2008

A Man for No Seasons

Spring is not exactly my favorite season, even though most people who live in Earth’s temperate zones 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 seem to spend so much of their time hiding out someplace else other than where they’re supposed to be.

Posted by Little Green Man at 16:51:31 | Permanent Link | Comments (0) |

Tuesday, March 04, 2008

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 seven-year-old 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 never go to hell. Wherever that is.

Posted by Little Green Man at 19:11:35 | Permanent Link | Comments (0) |

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

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 grownups. I laughed at the poor dog, not realizing that it did not like me laughing at it one darned bit.

As a grown man, I saw a Canadian 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 bill 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 Canadian 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.

Posted by Little Green Man at 18:45:43 | Permanent Link | Comments (0) |

Saturday, February 02, 2008

“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 be slapped by an obstetrician as soon as he saw my ugly ass. 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 is not the autobiography of a 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.

Posted by Little Green Man at 13:52:39 | Permanent Link | Comments (0) |