Green

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. I read that on the retro Alien movie poster that was displayed in the window of the Colonial Theatre as I walked past. If it’s on a movie poster, it must be true. HAH! I chuckled to myself. Alien invasions depicted in horror movies, or in sci-fi books, are usually bloody and terrifying or insidious and premeditated. I know it to be different. How? Well that’s a story for another story. But suffice it to say that the alien invasion that I know is occurring now - right now, in the real world, as we sit here chatting - is happening slowly, constantly and right under our noses. It’s neither bloody nor terrifying, but it is insidious and may or may not be premeditated.

We were invaded on the second night of the Perseids meteor shower in the year 2000. It wasn’t an invasion of armies of bloodthirsty beings in UFOs clamoring for the taste of human flesh, or millions of cosmic bugs intent of stinging people and itching them to death, or inter-dimensional hoarders seeking a more hospitable dimension in which to store their perishables…. On August 12th, a small particle made it all the way through the earth’s atmospheric layers without burning up and disintegrating, and slammed into the earth in Hudson Valley, New York. If you were driving on the Taconic Parkway at the time of the “incident”, you wouldn’t have heard it slam. You wouldn’t have heard anything except your radio tuned to Deep Tracks on Sirius radio, playing Deep Purple’s classic Highway Star so loudly that neighboring Connecticut could hear it, keeping you awake on the drive home. Even to a walker by - who’d be walking down the Taconic at 3am, unless your car happened to have broken down on your way home from a gig at Daryl’s House, up in Pawling - ok, not entirely impossible… even to a walker by, it would’ve only sounded like a pfffft or a pop in the grass over by the tree line, indistinguishable from the cricket chirps, night noises and stretching sounds that growing trees make. However, if you were the squirrel sitting at the base of the growing tree that the particle nearly hit, it would’ve sounded thunderous!

Maybe it wasn’t a “particle”, per se - it was more of a capsule. Initially, this projectile through space wasn’t particle-sized, it was larger - maybe basketball sized - with many mineral layers. Not for the voyage through space, but to protect the contents for when a planet would loom up in its path to terminate its journey. These layers would insulate the contents from incineration when piercing a planet’s atmospheric layers at high velocity. The outer layers were burnt off upon entry and the remaining casing was scorched and pitted. The capsule was unique on earth, but it wasn’t alone at its outset. Thousands of these basketball-sized pods were sent out in all directions, emanating from a single source hundreds of thousands of earth years ago, with no time frame, no restrictions and no worry of deteriorating in the vacuum of space. They were blasted out into the spatial void with the sole purpose of eventually meeting up with an obstruction - hopefully a planet - penetrating its atmosphere, ending its journey and starting its mission. The short game (and it is short if indeed hundreds of thousands of years is to be considered but a moment) was to deposit a single seed in the soil of a hospitable planet and have it germinate. The long game….. how can you possibly expect to unravel a long game when the short game has only just been presented to you? …and just because it’s a “short game”, doesn’t mean its description isn’t labyrinthine and complex. It just means….well, you’ll find out soon enough.