By Jim Hagarty
2016
I am a bit of an insomniac, not an uncommon condition for an older person. I do nothing to help myself, of course, drinking a coffee every evening and gorging myself on sugar-laced peanut butter at midnight.
The other bad habit I have is surfing the Internet till all hours. Apparently, the average person needs at least one hour of “non-screen” wind-down time before bed if he wants a good sleep. To heck with that, say I. I watch TV shows on my iPhone after I go to bed.
Being retired, my nighthawkishness is not the cause of much trouble. It just means I drag myself around the next day.
But surfing the Internet late at night – till 4:30 a.m. today, for example – I get bored with the news sites and music videos and start to drift off into what for me should be forbidden territory. I start looking at wacky videos of the strange things NASA cameras are supposedly finding on Mars. When that gets tiring, I start watching videos of UFO’s, evidence of aliens on Earth and even of time travellers.
This is all junk food for the brain but for someone like me, who has an overactive imagination to begin with, it’s almost deadly. There I sit alone in almost complete darkness in my kitchen in the middle of the night, watching videos of aliens. And, wouldn’t you know it, quite a coincidence I realize, but just at those same moments an alien decides to drop into my kitchen and creep up behind me, causing me to look behind me now and then to make sure I am safe.
But like the ice cream lover who can’t stop till the container is empty, I keep on clicking and keep on scaring the bejeepers out of myself and you know this is serious because I was trained to never use a word like bejeepers.
So when I read yesterday’s story in the legitimate press that a Chinese astronaut, returning to Earth from a mission and still in space, suddenly heard someone knocking on his door, my reaction was Double BEJEEPERS!
The poor guy had no choice but to look out the small porthole window of his spacecraft to see if there was a scary monster or just a door-to-door salesman outside. Maybe a religious nut. All scary monsters, now that I think of it.
The astronaut’s eyes detected no visitors and yet the door knocking continued. Aliens are crafty that way. You never actually see the ones in my kitchen either.
Holy kee-wrap, thinks me. There you are, stuck alone in a spacecraft with not enough room to scratch your knees, and someone apparently wants to join you.
The knocking has never been fully explained by space experts although I am sure they’re sure no aliens were involved in the making of this horror show.
And while I am prepared to accept their educated opinions, whatever they are, I wonder if they have ever sat up all night watching videos of the stuff they are finding on Mars.
The only word that suits this situation is “Yikes”.
I know a quarter of a million people have already signed up to be among the first crew of humans to set foot on the Red Planet some day soon (and probably, intentionally, never come back). I will not go unless they put a sign on the outside of the spacecraft door which says, “No Solicitors or Aliens.”
And if there is no peanut butter on Mars, though I am pretty sure there is given everything else that is being discovered there, there will also be no Jim Hagarty.
Why be freaked out millions of miles from home when I can get that feeling any night in my own darned kitchen?
