INKED! Alien abduction in the desert

EDITOR’S NOTE: This column first ran April 30, 2005. A new INKED! will return next week.

It’s been just over four weeks since our new visitor came to stay, an alien with an oversized head, big dark eyes, no decipherable language, a voracious appetite and the ability to suck the will and energy from everything around it.

Perhaps the most disturbing characteristic of this Area 51 reject is its shape shifting. I thought its seemingly endless supply of green emissions and skull-piercing screams were bad enough, but the shape shifting, well, it does me in every time.

Just when I think this is a furry, cuddly ALF-type alien, all cocked eyebrows and one-liners, it morphs into some beat-red, distorted ugly little bugger that Ridley Scott could have directed bursting from John Hurt’s belly.


It’s long been the M.O. of the E.T. kind to kidnap wayward white trash from the comfort of their doublewides, where a life of Kools and grilled cheese are traded for a weekend getaway of rectal probes on the mother ship. But never have I known an alien to infiltrate so close to home.

Like the flying minochs sucking on the hull of the Millennium Falcon (Star Wars geeks let out a collective drool), this foreign body sucks on my wife almost 24/7, so much so I think it’s just about sucked her brain from her head. There’s proof. She’s lost the skill of verbal communication almost entirely.

She’s down to a few hundred monosyllabic cooing sounds a day, only stringing together complete sentences such as “I’m tired,” “What’s for dinner?” “Not ‘CSI’ again?” “Will you take the … alien?”

OK, she asks will I take the “baby,” but that’s the lack of sleep making her delirious. I’ve seen “Starman” with Jeff Bridges, “Fire in the Sky” with D.B. Sweeney. I’ve even seen “My Stepmother is an Alien” with Dan Akroyd (and I may be the only one).

So I know how this works. They slip their way into your world; make as if they need you, and really, you can’t live without them. It’s a parasitic relationship.

Still, they won’t get me. I’m the lone holdout. I’m like Ripley, standing alone and defiant against this aggressor on my previously normal way of life. My distant mining planet is Terra Buena Vista, my weapons of defense a keen mind and the ability to escape prolonged contact with the alien by way of obsessive yard tending and superfluous lawn watering.

Unfortunately, I seem to be the only one who has been able to keep my wits about me. This alien influence has cast its net far and wide, extending its mind-altering powers beyond our walls.

My mother, for instance, has gone from being this loud, brash ball of Aquanet and Camel smoke to being this loud, brash ball of doting, overbearing, hovering Aquanet and Camel smoke. My grandma, she just cries uncontrollably every time she sees it.

All I can do is continue to gather intelligence on the coming invasion. So far, from what I’ve been able to glean, this alien, going by the name of Riley Beth Brown, landed in Brawley at 4:49 p.m. March 31 and assumed the sex and gender identity of a female.

“She” weighed 8 pounds, 4 ounces and measured 20 inches at touchdown. In her four weeks of laying the groundwork for the eventual overthrow of the Earth, she’s approaching 10 pounds and 22 inches. She’s even brainwashed the dog, Katie, who stays by her side at all times and will fetch us Lassie-style if we stray too far from the symbiot.

It’s an invasion, I tell you. Will Smith can’t save the day this time. We’re too far gone, our interplanetary tracking devices on the permanent blink. The wife’s already talking about when to invite the next alien over for an extended stay. Just consider me your local H.G. Wells (or is it Orson?)