Take the other night. Please.
I woke up thrashing about, having just nightmared that ET came back. At first, when I heard ET was coming back, I thought, great! The more Ernest Tubb, the better.
But no, it wasn't the legendary country singer still known as "The Daddy of 'Em All" who populated my dreamscape. It was that little extraterrestrial dude from the movie."I haven't been back to earth for 30 years," he said, "So I thought I'd drop down here and see what's going on. What's going on?"
I told him that although many people are hungry and unsheltered, many others are more concerned about the color of the cup of expensive coffee that they guzzle every day than that. I told him that one of our major political parties, facing an election in just one year, has as its two leading candidates a bloviating blowhard whose greatest accomplishment was being born rich, and another man of great accomplishment who nonetheless brags that he threw rocks at cars, padlocks at his friends, scissors at his mother, and caution to the wind, any time he discusses his earlier days.
ET's little brow wrinkled when I told him that America is obsessed with physical fitness, that people spend fortunes on gyms and workout gear, and then have the school bus stop every six feet, lest little Marmaduke or Agatha May be forced to walk further than that to be educated. He also shook his little head when I told him that most of us will leave Home Depot and go get in the car to drive to Office Depot a hundred yards away, wishing that someone could open a mega HomeOfficeDepot to make life easier.
He wanted to know why we blush, and censor the sight of a human body, unless that body is being shot 27 times or run through a log chipper as part of a popular TV series about zombie vampires.
E, as he likes to be called, prefers fruit juice boxes to coffee, but he is stunned that people wait all year long to consume pumpkin-flavored coffee that contains not one iota of pumpkin. "Why do you not just buy some canned pumpkin and put a teaspoon of that in your coffee, if it's so important that coffee taste like pumpkin?" he asked, and received no answer.
He was also puzzled that we have a coin worth one cent which costs the nation more than one cent to make, that people pose seeming questions ("What's up?" and "How ya doin'?") without expecting answers, and that very few of us can name their congressional representatives or 5 Supreme Court justices, but can identify the quarterback and coach of the New England Patriots.
But he was stunned when he saw people watching television ads for car dealers in which the claim is made that this company will sell you a Dodge for less than they paid for it from the factory, and will take that loss of money because they really, really like you!
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