Being the anchorman for the UFOs

This is a recurring story where John imagines being the anchorman for aliens coming down in their UFOs and probing him for the job. Sometimes he also calls the job for being the prime minister for the Venusians. The story involves being fixed up in a Star Trek kind of way where the aliens would repair the small imperfections in his body.

Sections where this topic is referenced

UFOs potentially hiring John as the Venusian prime minister (RL10)

Although John goes through life mostly without thinking about UFOs, he gets them into his head periodically. It is the same problem he has with ghosts: He doesn’t believe in ghosts, but if he spends a long weekend in a house in Vermont that was built in 1760 there are times when ghosts present themselves (see RL2) and he has to acknowledge them whether he believes in them or not. You can’t prove a negative!

UFOs are not a problem as long as John is not thinking about them, but as soon as he plants that seed in his head, all of a sudden he is seeing things out of the corner of his eye that could be aliens that have come to probe him to see if he might be a good candidate for the human interlocutor between the Alien Super Race and the Earthlings, the prime minister of the New Earth Colony, the Venusian Chamberlain. They are still just learning about him and they are not going to come right out and say it, sit across a table and present John with a series of questions.

The aliens haven’t revealed anything about themselves except that they move quickly. They rattle John's windows when it is windy and they might be figuring out our world through John by watching him respond to stimuli. He doesn’t even know what he would be looking at because they could be ectoplasm in the form of a little green man in order to make him feel more secure, like that scene in Contact where Jodie Foster is talking to her dad.

John hearing the aliens while in the bathtub

A few nights ago John was in the bathtub at 3am and heard a repetitive slamming, like somebody was kicking his front door, which is not a sound he wanted in the middle of the night during a rainstorm. It was not the usual way that Community Service people would knock because they usually come in the mornings, and if somebody was going to kick down his front door they would probably do it more rhythmically.

John got out of the bathtub, put on his robe, laid his hands on the nearest Anti Human Weapon device, let’s call it a sword (see RL7), and went down the stairs. The French Doors in the back of his house were pushed open by a strong gust of wind even though they had been deadbolted because they are a shoddy concept and a bad idea. They should open into a vestibule and then there should be an American door to get out of that containment area.

The rain was pouring in, the doors were slamming in the wind, and John was standing there soaking wet in his bathrobe, heavily armed. He was all alone in the house and his first thought was: "Well, of course, the UFOs have come!" It always happens that way: The person comes out of the bathtub, they close the doors and do a security check of their home, but the aliens are already inside somehow, hiding in the oven or wherever they go.

Since then John hasn’t been able to sleep and he was walking around all night, looking in drawers. The aliens weren’t hostile, but they weren’t friendly either because then they would have been in a Community Service Patrol mode and come by during the day. John knows they can’t come by during the day because people would see them and take pictures of them, but they could come into John’s mind and say things other than the voices that are in his head already (see RW73), telling him to bake a cake (see RL10)!

John an Merlin continue to talk about how to pronounce Uranus and Merlin was still pissed about the Pluto thing. Just as Merlin said "Pluto", John was looking at a book called Plato - Totalitarian or Democrat by Thomas Landon Thorson, a name that is close to Merlin’s heart. John was slow-thinking for a connection between Plato and Pluto and he asked himself how he knows if anything was anything.

How the aliens are trying to get through to John

Merlin tried to put John at ease. If aliens were coming to him, they would understand that in order to get him to even pick up the phone they would have to come to him in a form he understands. Maybe they were priming the pump because those French Doors did not open themselves! There might be people in John’s home right now who can hear him and who are keeping him awake at night to get him into that tub. Is this their form of a job interview?

John is willing to consider any offers, but they would first have to talk about compensation! John doesn’t just want to be a mouthpiece, but he wants the opportunity to be individualistic in his work. He is not a company guy and if they want him to be the prime minister of Venus, he would need to have a certain amount of true autonomy. There should be a parliament with people from all over the world in a giant concert-hall-shaped place.

Because John is not sleeping much, the aliens don’t have a way to get into his dreams. Other ways would involve a keg beer or sometimes mushrooms, but John doesn’t take those anymore either. He doesn’t even accept LinkedIn invitations! They can't reach John by normal channels and it make sense that they are coming through the door in the middle of the night.

Those creepy girls who like John’s band also don’t just come up to him and ask him for a lock of his hair or touch his scrotum because most girls nowadays will pretend that sex has nothing to do with them being fans. Facebook is the new version of cupping balls gently, but there are so many people on Facebook that John doesn’t want to cup his balls, gently or otherwise. Merlin has deactivated his account and John has thought about it, but it is going to have an effect on his Kloud Score!

If John was being offered a Venusian position of some kind, they should ask for his wisdom by proxy. They should literally invent an entire Weltanschauung involving a parliament and so on. John has it all figured out and he is available for them! The reason why he talks about this openly at risk of sounding like a crazy person is that he wants them to know that he knows. He is here and he is not too rattled by it!

On the scale of potential human reactions to having aliens kick down their door in the middle of the night, going a few sleepless nights is pretty mellow. We are talking about running an entire fucking planet! John in his fucking bathrobe wandered around the house which is bristling with guns and swords, but he doesn't swish the air with a sword every time he goes around a corner, he just carries it in case. He hopes that it doesn’t last that long, but that they either tender a job offer or move on.

If the aliens want that Venus shit straightened out, they have to come here and find a way to reach John in the tub where he is literally eating cake, not the band. He is going to grab them by their ectoplasmic versions of their lapels and he is going to fucking shake their Venusian ass until they understand that John is the man they are hiring.

John being fixed and hired as the anchorman by the UFOs (RL331)

John wants the UFOs to scan him, do a hard reboot into disc repair mode and fix all the fragments and bundles. The difference between asking the Genie to not ever get sick and going to the UFOs is that the UFOs will put you in the same tank that they put the guy in Starship Troopers in (actually: Luke Skywalker was put in the Bacta tank). You will not be unconscious because they will be asking you questions, they will get all this stuff out of there and then they will ask you what else you have. You get one shot at the UFOs to become their anchorman.

John's middle toes being too long

John's 4th toe, which you would call your ring toe, is too long. That is not just an aesthetic problem because it doesn’t fit in shoes and it has to bend if you don't have prescription shoes. John could go to some special store Downtown called Big Toe Box, but he doesn’t want to do that and being the anchorman for the UFOs will involve some walking. He would ask them to shorten his 4th toe on each side by the dimension of one knuckle. In fact, all three toes in the middle are a little bit long and articulate and he can grab things with them and do stuff with them.

The Jennifer Grey question is if the UFOs are going to screw up the part of John that continues to develop. That would make him a different person whom he didn’t want to be. You are trying to fix a nose that you think is problematic and it ends up having been your superpower the whole time. Nobody wants to drill, but people want a hole in the wall and Jennifer Grey would have been better off keeping her nose. On the after-picture she is a pretty lady and you wonder who is this, but on the before-picture she was distinctive. If John ratcheted his three long toes back he would be risking that his toe adversity has played some role in making him who he is.

John is a ”made” guy now who chips 10% up to Polly and 10% up to The Skipper (?). You could fix his toes and he would still not be losing that. He is not going to step out one day in a perfect size-12 shoe that he just got from Zappos for $25, not encounter uncomfortable toe-rubbing by the end of the day and suddenly not have any sympathy for the poor anymore.

There are some possible optional modifications that John will be honest about when talking to the UFOs. They would put him in the tank for their own benefits because it would make him a better anchorman, but if he on the other hand would start cutting to the bone and ask for a 32” (80 cm) waist, there might be an alarm going off because John would just be trying to be handsome.

John can no longer make a really solid fist because he broke his finger, not from when he was attacked that one time (see RL50, RL328), but the finger he broke when he punched the guy (see RL124). John doesn’t need to make fists that often, but still! Merlin has that same problem in a joint and it might be arthritis because he has never punched a person that he is aware of.

Speaking to the masses in the local language

These repairs will enable John to be a healthy interlocutor between the UFOs and the people. Like Milton (Cooper) he is going to defend the ways of UFO-to-man and vice versa. In order to perform that role, people of Earth have to feel sympathetic and think: ”This guy is one of us!” If John would show up with a weird super-light White Walker eye, a 32” (80 cm) waist and perfectly formed toes, people would see him as some kind of weird hybrid thing and the trust will go out of their relationship.

John is going to need to address a lot of people through some kind of future media. At some point he will have to make a space PowerPoint, he is going to be gesturing to underline a point, and you don’t want people distracted by his fucked-up fingers. John will be communicating to billions of people!

Being the anchorman will involve some kind of BabelFish that allows him to just speak naturally in all the world’s languages. It will not seem as though as he was being translated, but he will actually be speaking in the local vernacular, including analogies and phrases. It will all be included and it will get the tone right. Even the people on very remote islands in Indonesia are going to understand John speaking to them in their local way of speaking.

It might even be valuable to be able to code-switch within English. John saying ”Let’s not shit the bed here!” could get translated into grandma-English, in South Carolina vernacular he would say: ”Ah, bless their heart!” at appropriate moments and in other places he would say ”This is not acceptable!” The UFOs need a human anchorman to utilize that technology with John’s thoughts, words and gestures.

The question is at what point John will lose the sympathy and the feeling of fellowship with 7 billion of the world’s people. Representation matters! A lot of people in the world will think that he is just another guy on TV. What does an American musician have to say to them? They will be surprised that when John speaks Tagalog he will talk just like them and that is cool, but when you get over that surprise, on closer examination, they will think that his cuticles look really good and they will realize that John doesn’t work for a living.

Before it even comes to the question if the anchorman should be a dark-skinned man, how much of John’s physical manifestation will be filtered by the UFO technology? It has to still be John, otherwise they could just do a hologram that looks like Joe Everybody from Everywhere. They could just buy a Teddy Ruxpin that can emulate human speech and respond well to the alien’s APIs, or they could use Jodie Foster’s dad or Jodie Foster’s Army (JFA) or really anybody in an escape band (?). You could just have floating orbs, but they don’t want orbs, they want John.

John and Merlin talk about the implementation details of how John will show up to people, for example he could appear like Obi-Wan Kenobi with NTSC scanlines. In the process John imitates Star Wars characters with an Australian accent.

Can the UFOs fix psychological issues?

The ultimate question is what will be possible in terms of mental and emotional help. If the UFOs could remove John's feeling of dissatisfaction, inferiority, and failure, which they surely could as easily as they could remove a wart, would that be John’s Jennifer Grey’s nose and would he become unrecognizable and thereby not useful? Does that realization help him looking at those illnesses and struggles in a different light and see them as inextricable and intrinsic to him?

John could probably get away with removing a little bit of his fear of heights and maybe make him less angry when he picks up his bags at the airport or flies United (see TYFC), but if he wanted his first thought in the morning be anything other than: "Oh fuck! You fucked it up!” they are probably going to tell him: ”Suck it up and take more walks and try drinking more water!"

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