Sunday, May 25, 2008

The Alien Next Door

I’m torn - I can’t decide between stories of Zakular cuteness, a recipe for tasty fritters linked up with the story of my fabulous (FABulus) weekend, or if I should just just spit out a story about extraterrestrial visitations.  But the first one is not challenging and will ultimately bore the three or four of you still poking under this dank flat rock in the forgotten sideyard of the internet; the second one would be premature as I’ve still got a picanik to attend tomorrow; and that leaves you with my old friend Bashar.  Hope you guys get along real good. 

THE ALIEN NEXT DOOR

It didn’t feel like the beginning of anything - much less, an era.  Maybe “era” is putting it too strongly, though.  Maybe “phase” is more like it.  Still, it didn’t feel much like the beginning of a phase, either.

It basically felt like a living room in Studio City, though now I suppose it’s called “Valley Village.” I drove through the area again not too long ago and all they changed was the name - unchanged were the ranks of residential streets with their regular geometry, four long blocks up and eight narrow ones across, separated by four-lane arteries and filled with tidy houses all possessed of their own modest universality, a breastpocket comprehensiveness to every hearth that rendered each one an archetype of what had once truly been an era, the midcentury boom that exploded the SF valley and similar infra-urbs throughout America - infill tracts, stucco-studded and driveway-cleft, each home a prepackaged dream come true and consequently a delight for drivers cruising the boulevards but a little spooky sometimes for a solitary pedestrian like myself as a kid.... In those streets, among those houses, I was never confident that I had any idea what my neighbors were up to - or, rather, I was absolutely sure each one of them hid a terrible secret that I’d be better off never knowing.  Everything looked too neat for them not to be hiding something.

It was in this world I grew up, and in it that my friend and fellow sentient Tanja gave me a call one night when I was home from college to see if I was open to checking out Bashar - she had two invites for a local event and thought it might be up my alley.

I asked the same question you’re probably asking now - Bashar?  Apparently there was a nebbishy guy who was getting a lot of attention as a channel, an entity through which another entity could perceive and communicate.  In this guy’s case it was a very distant alien being called “Bashar." He had a message or a perspective or a frequency or something that was said to be new and powerful.  He had a following.  These invites of Tanja’s had not been easy to come by. 

The event would be local; the cost, “reasonable.” How much?  Twenty.  Okay, I’m in.  And let me tell you something - back in the early ‘80s, a $20 was really worth something.  But I was committed - to the experience if nothing else.  Tanja came over that night in her little Civic and off we went to scope out the oracle. 

I can’t tell you a thing about what he said that night - some gobbledook, some Robert Heinlein, some Deepak Chopra - but the message was not what really stuck with me.  Neither was it the thin reedy voice nor the spasmodic facial tics that wracked the human intermediary’s face as he channeled.  Rather, it was the almost tangible feeling that reverberated in the room itself. 

Once again, this was the early ‘80s - Shirley McClaine was still mostly known for acting and dancing.  Crystals were for bedazzling, not for aura clarification.  Astral projection happened at planetariums.  Guys like Bashar were pretty few and far between, but they were rapidly getting a lot more popular.  The Bodhi Tree was coming into blossom and truly it was the dawning of a New Age - one might even say, the New Age.  When we walked into that unprepossessing living room, that typically inert ceremonial space built into every home in my dreamtract neighborhood, which is to say, just a regular living room in Studio City - when we opened that front door we found dozens of people sitting on a thicket of folding chairs and all the remaining floor space, somewhat subdued in dress and manner but chattering breathlessly, waiting, an undercurrent of anticipation crackling in the air.  Something was happening here, hidden amid the stultifying regularity of my immediate world. Or, it had been hidden, but I had stumbled into it. 

But that just begged the question - if I had uncovered this one secret, of disembodied space aliens preaching the doctrine of cosmic harmony, in one erstwhile unremarkable living room - what about the secrets that remained concealed?  After aliens, what next?