The Poisonous Joke

Spoiler: There is only the mention of a joke here, not an actual joke.

I didn't have many friends in school, but I remember one friend who, after all these years, is still tortured in his mind by what happened one day by the hall lockers.

He was a nice person at heart, I know this because he hung out with me at lunchtime. It was late fall when he found himself also hanging out with the popular kids.

One day I was walking through the hall and he had his back to me. One of the popular kids saw me coming and made a joke about me. My friend, because he was so nice, under peer pressure, laughed at the joke.

The popular joker kid looked at me and said hi to me. My friend turned around in horror and saw me walking by. I didn't look at him. I just kept walking. We never spoke again.

Gradually over time he forgot the incident, but every time he saw me, he would have negative feelings, which by now he forgot was his guilt.

He eventually came to despise me because I triggered negative feelings in him, which were actually his own fault.

Hanging out with the popular crowd, he began to mock me and continue to become ever more popular.

From time-to-time he remembers me, and takes another drink of Whiskey. He died. The end.

Lucid Dreaming

There is a threshold between being consciously awake and dreaming in sleep which actually has more substance than being just a paper-thin barrier. The point where you are aware that you are dreaming just before waking up.

I was able to for the first time, force myself to stay in the dream and take control of how I moved and manipulate the things in the environment. Not very well, however.

In my typical dreams, I am merely presented with objects or people that are composites of memories, based on whatever chemical process happens to be occurring in my brain.

This time, however, I suddenly became consciously aware that I was in a store that specialized in holiday decorations, in particular, Halloween. I think the original process intended to evoke fear, but I picked up what turned out to be a very poorly made rubber Frankenstein mask.

The store turned out to be closed at the time and I was confronted by employees, but then I became aware they were actually lip-synced to a podcast to which I was earlier listening when  I fell asleep. They were out of context with the situation my brain was processing, which emboldened me further to take control.

I raised my arms toward an open skylight in the store and floated up to the roof. I was out of their reach. I raised my arms again, toward the sky over the rooftops, and there I was, flying at will, over short buildings, and around taller ones. People below me were saying "Look at that asshole!" "What a dick!" Like they were jealous. It made me smile.

Then I suddenly became aware of my breathing. I tried to resist going toward what looked like a big wall, or super-sized television screen that was flickering and snowy. Then it disappeared and all that remained was the darkness of the inside of my eyelids. I was awake.

For a second afterward, I tried to slip back under the barrier and almost did. After a moment I had no choice but to open my eyes.

I hope I can do that again. I was drinking small doses of coffee and listening to podcasts before falling asleep. Somewhere in there is the safety harness of conscious awareness I can cling to as I descend into dreamland.

The Withering

We first started receiving the signals a few years ago. We were going to finally witness the return to our planet of the Ancient Astronauts everyone was talking about.

I used to laugh every time I saw the show about Ancient Aliens on the History Channel of all places. I thought it was a huge hoax or conspiracy theory, but now we can get live video from the approaching armada of space ships, populated by human-like people.

There were all kinds of reports in the media about the human volunteers who left long ago, and are now returning after countless generations of progeny born in the vast darkness of space.

The first ship was coming down on a plateau outside of Lima, Peru. I won the lottery to stand in the front row when they opened the door and the first of them walked out to touch their home soil again for the first time in eons.

A large vessel slowly lowered through the clouds above, barely displacing them. No sound of rockets or any engines, the massive thing touched down. Barely audible was the sound of it's weight settling into the sand. Something deep under the soil made a loud cracking sound in a deep tone like an iceberg calving away from a glacier.

At first everyone panicked. Standing up from their folding chairs, and listening for another sign of danger, but none came.

Through my binoculars I could see where the doors are. Luckily I brought a tripod with me so my hands wouldn't get tired. I suddenly had the urge to snack. Staring through my tripod-mounted binoculars, I was able to tear open and eat a bag of Funyuns.

The doors slid open and the cameras began flashing and clicking uncontrollably. Through my temporary blindness from the camera flashes, I could see some figures emerge from the ship. They were human. They were definitely bipedal.

As they approached I started hearing groans and screams from the journalists. I started to feel dizzy myself and my nose started bleeding. We were being exposed to something that these aliens who were once human didn't realize would be harmful to planet dwellers protected under the Van Allen Belt.

They had evolved in the harshness of space. The generations that survived were immune to cosmic rays at every wavelength. But we were not. I came to this realization as I lay on the ground, staring at the sky, while my brain cooked from being exposed to these people.