Editor’s Note: Huge week at Refuge Farm. Work parties, trees falling, deck repairs. You know- the usual. Marlow has hovered patiently, perhaps because his trip back to Key West- or, “Key Weird,” has now assumed its place in memory. The Production Board claims to have stories on Wicked Bottom, the waggoner’s rest a mile or so away. And about the ten engagements the Armies fought over an otherwise shallow portion of the Rapidan River at Raccoon Ford down the farm lane. But one of the Daily production staff said “Enough. You can do that stuff about cannon-fire and naked poker when the spirit is on us. For now, how about the Space Invaders piece from Marlow?” Chairman Socotra sighed, thinking back decades to the first visit of the electronic game to the dirty Shirt Wardroom of USS Midway. And who played that insidious game nearly 24 x 7. But a story about living in a moving steel hotel a thousand miles from decent bar service is not what we confront this morning. Still, it is better than being at our local motel, the Sleepy Hollow establishment on Business 29 in town. The guests were not sleeping during the storm:
Nature gave us 9.35 inches of rain in twelve hours yesterday. “Biblical” is what the local paper used to characterize the flood. It shows no signs of backing off just yet. Accordingly, let’s take a trip with Marlow to Key Weird, and a respite from reality.
– Vic
Space Invaders Always Speak Jive
Author’s Note: Yes, readers, sorry but I am compelled to inflict this on share this with you. Key Weird infections like this are brief but virulent. Be patient, my isle seat predicate is brief as we in the Coastal Empire and the rest of you, wherever you were, were whisked away and tossed about by jive talking aliens last year.
-Marlow
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When I parked the car in 2001 at the end of a 1200-mile journey from Alexandria Virginia to our new Key West digs on base just west of the southernmost point, my hair was way longer than it was when I first reported for duty at the Naval Air Station as an Ensign intel puke nearly 30 years earlier. I had already learned how to be alone at home during those early strange days, handling household chores in the odd quiet in a series of empty homes since I became an empty nester ten years before and soon thereafter retired from the military.
I was about to become an invader at the earth’s first and only alien invasion landing site in the Florida Keys. It took me awhile before I could speak their language.
As an unmanned vessel, the coral island household had protocols for all scenarios and emerging conditions. 20 years later the word “protocol” instantly soured most of the country as we spooned extra pillows as if they were a bedfellow during the plague lockdowns. Here in the Empire, we awoke and bolted outdoors from our first quarantine with a start, as if from a dream. Once we returned to the streets, we found them mostly empty.
It was too quiet. There were no siren wails for days on end.
A once cram packed town with tourists looked deserted from our porches and car windows as we looked out on our unadorned city which had previously always been in a state of redecoration for some event, festival, exposition, or public park music concert. All this said we had become untethered from the prior world. Closed off.
What we were left with was so-called experts who spoke in an alien jibber jabber that was more akin to the wah wah wah wah wah speaking adults in the televised Peanuts cartoon shows.
We needed someone to translate their from-on-high series of sounds and mumbo jumbo that had no prior American standard English equivalent. It all sounded like audio mixes of clicks, rushing water, farts, whispers, and low-octave moaning and groaning with an occasional howler monkey hooting.
It was all so much Sanskrit except for their ever-changing advice — science is what their acolytes called it.
If language was the foundation of civilization, we had gone back to the tribal hunter gather period of the stone age. These experts thought that language played a distant second fiddle in this symphony. For them, the cornerstone of civilization wasn’t language. It was science. They embraced its ever-changing, goal post moving flow of dead ends and cul de sacs where no real persons lived or resided. We were slowly being bled by lockdown leeches in the name of “science.” (The use of quotations here is deliberate,)
They could have talked to us first before they start throwing BS math and stats problems at us.
100s of miles away, a series of hospital tent cities had been erected. Up close the newly space suit garbed medical folks looked 2001 Space Odyssey majestic and ominous. We missed this ominous early warning and indication.
They should have been more honest by saying what they knew, suspected, and most importantly didn’t know. Should have been simpler in their risk BS’ing and more comprehensive in the up and down sides of their professed solutions. They could have taught us their lingo and then listened to ours in response — a dialogue of understanding, risk analysis/assessment and acceptance, and real time modification. Not them forever telling the unchanging what’s we had to do.
Maybe it would have been harder this way initially but in the long run, we’d have reached and maintained a broad and deep consensus faster and longer. We both had to read and speak multiple alien lingos.
They also should have been more ready, willing, and able to say they didn’t really know much and should never have worst cased their conversations — since that type of talk is chilling to all but the select. They needed to do this to make sure we the people didn’t misinterpret.
Worst of all, from the get-go their media rich appearance of “smart” was ultra-bad. People are naturally afraid of smart. Just like they are of jive-talking alien invaders from outer space.
Instead of compromise or win-win, we got a lose-lose throat cram-down. Maybe, had they tried to get our buy-in, they could have said that “some assembly required” — in other words we’d work together on what was needed going forward. A non-zero-sum game would have been nice instead of their squirting their rancid
toothpaste out of their tubes on us and telling us to wire brush ourselves and those around us.
All that we got in return are motherless and fatherless children, widows, widowers and entire generation of developmentally stunted people to be.
Excuse us, stewardess, we speak jive . . .
Nearly five years into our Coastal Empire sojourn, we are Level 2 proficient in the Empire’s jive dialect. All the natives tell us “Why, aren’t you special.”
Copyright 2021 My Isle Seat
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