Contrary to what you might believe, when you start working the Google on "alien abductees" or just "extraterrestrials", you don't fall into a big roomy universe. Instead, you find yourself hunched over in a small airless world that probably smells like Fritos.

Yesterday, after a brutal day of looking at awful pencil drawings by abductees and patently rigged photographs, I got the uneasy feeling I could know everyone on the UFO-alien-Roswell circuit by name. Plus I saw the the same bewildered people, and rotten outer-space art, photo proofs, and those goddamned crop circles repeated unto eternity in various posts and websites. F'rinstance, in the extraterrestrial venues, the photograph above seems to be forever new and is always published as exciting actual proof of aliens: aliens among us, autopsied aliens, aliens who'll probe you, and aliens who come in peace. Actually it's a special movie effect, a head that floats bodiless in cyberspace, and at least it doesn't look slimy. Clammy, yes, but that's okay, and I really like its ears.

I did happen in on some unnerving 12 Step Groups though. There's the 12 Steps that will keep you from being abducted by teaching you to project a Christian white-light bubble around yourself. The drill's the same as with booze and dope: you admit you're powerless (over aliens), that your life has become unmanageable (what with the abductions), and you've come to believe that Jesus will protect you (from alien abductions) if he is sought, etc. Then there are the unfortunates whose parents somehow got knocked up by an alien, and wuddya know, had this big green kid. Eventually, due to social awkwardness and autistic habits, the offspring stumbles, as I did, into Adult Children of Alien Abductees. Same Twelves Steps, but instead of a generic higher power, they look to Diquad. There wasn't a picture of Diquad, but then there wouldn't be, would there?

Just my opinion, but the Adult Children of Alien Abductees seem like genuine Froot Loops. However, alien abductees do not. If anything, they exude a kind of mid-western Indiana-ish calm. One psychiatrist noted that they seemed oddly ordinary, if such a thing could be. Having lived in Iowa for six years, I know exactly what he meant. And, I remind myself, that most couples who "swing", ::wink:: wink::, also reside in the big blank prairie states.

Where little happens except the weather, and the population is stolid by nature, a vacuum seems to form, one that demands a high-pitched inner excitement. What might be cured by a crime wave or a good indie movie, instead converts to into peculiar longings. And it's such yearnings that can lead to sitting in rooms with other tattooed souls, praying to Diquad...or taking bondage photos of your wife wearing dog chains and a ball-gag.

So beware of boredom--especially the excruciating kind.