The kids are dressed up in pieced together costumes, ringing my doorbell and asking for candy. And I’m upstairs, frankensteining a story I’ve been writing for about six months together into something more interesting. If aliens were to land in my neighborhood, they’d see us humans as a bizarrely creative bunch. This making and unmaking and making again, they’d say, what’s going on here? Is this some cultural game? And I’d say yes, because that might inspire them to interact with us by mimicking this making and unmaking and making again habit. Basically, it’d be like every alien-fish-out-of-water-movie they’ve made. ET. Mac and Me. Howard the Duck. Mork and Mindy. That last one’s a TV show, but you get it. Third Rock From the Sun. Even though we know it’s all fiction, I think if aliens landed in our neighborhood this is exactly how we’d secretly want them to act. Like the foreign exchange student trying to fit in. Anything else would appear to be an act of non-attempting-to-assimilate. Or aggression. Depending on if you vote Republican or Democrat. Or believe in nuclear proliferation.
