Worldly Encounters: A Friendly Extraterrestial Asks . . .

From the WordPress Daily Prompt from May 22.

“The friendly, English-speaking extraterrestrial you run into outside your house is asking you to recommend the one book, movie, or song that explains what humans are all about. What do you pick?”

Interesting prompt but I’m much more interested in knowing why the friendly extraterrestrial speaks English as opposed to any of the nearly 7,000 languages spoken by people on planet earth. Maybe the friendly extraterrestrial speaks all the languages but he speaks English to me because that’s my native language and the friendly extraterrestrial is not only friendly, but polite? Or, even more interesting is that maybe the FE (I’m tired of typing out “friendly extraterrestrial”) has a type of universal translator similar to the one used on Star Trek. Or maybe the FE’s ship – and by the way where is the FE’s ship parked because if I’m going to explain what humans are all about to a FE I want to see the inside of the ship before the FE realizes I’m full of crap and don’t know what I’m talking about and floats off (yes, I imagine this FE to be without legs and moving around by some method of silent flotation) to talk to someone else – doesn’t maybe have some type of universal translator technology similar to that seen on the TARDIS.

Given with the three options of books, movies and songs I chose books. But then I realized that the FE could, in fact, be scouting the planet for colonization and given their obviously advanced intelligence and technology (1) The ability to get here; 2) The ability to get here unnoticed; 3) The ability to blend in and move about unnoticed; 4) The universal translator; 5) Silent flotation), I know that unlike what we see in the movies and on TV, we wouldn’t stand a chance against them. I briefly wonder if I shouldn’t maybe try and do my part to save the human race, and the planet, by recommending something along the lines of Twilight, The DaVinci Code, the Miley Cyrus autobiography, Miles to Go, or anything by Ann Coulter or Rush Limbaugh. For what it’s worth, I ruled out Scientology: The Fundamentals of Thought because I thought these possibly not-so FE’s might have been sent by Xenu as the vanguard of the Galactic Confederacy and I didn’t want to take the risk of them thinking we know more than we actually do.

Faced with the possibility of global domination – and the reality that lacking any real survival skills I’d be one of the first to die in the apocalypse – I decided that ‘d go out with my honor and integrity intact by telling the truth. So after a (not-so-moderately) long and (not really) careful consideration, and after (not at all) weighing the merits and values of every book I’ve read in my life, I settled on John Steinbeck’s East of Eden.

“Why did you pick East of Eden?” the FE I just ran into outside my house asks in a tone that, in light of my new suspicions, I wouldn’t really describe as friendly, but maybe one that is impersonating friendliness which is masking the FE’s true motives of global conquest and enslavement and torture and death by methods too gruesome for me to detail here.

What to answer the FE? I don’t want to talk to this otherworld minion of evil any longer so I turn around and go back inside and shut the door in his. . . her. . . it’s body part that looks like it’s where a face should be and start watching a repeat of War of the Worlds (the one from 1953 with Gene Barry, not the Tom Cruise one). I don’t tell the once upon a time FE that I chose East of Eden because of its scope and passion, its timeless themes of good vs. evil, its portrayal of the pain of rejection and the universal desire to just be accepted and loved and that there isn’t a human on the face of the earth who can’t identify with it.