SCI FI STORY

One day a foolish young rube named Maybrie left work and as he was headed homestead he was pulled by an electric blue beam into a spaceship. The otherworldlians aboard explained to him in soothing tones that he would come to their superiorly advanced world, and he would be a lavishly pampered specimen for their culture to admire. They also told of a life-sustaining salve they had developed that renders its users immortal. It looked like things were made for Maybrie, but he thought of living forever and missing his loved ones back home. So he stole into the salvekeep and he stole the salve and he stole an escape pod and returned home.
Long story short, he put the salve on his nethers and his seed was preserved until an in vitro fertilization 3,000 years later and his son killed the president .. . OF EARTH!!!

I decided to wait patiently near his bedroom so that I could confront him directly as soon as he woke. While waiting, I was carefully constructing the verbal assault I would raze on his bleary-eyed, unsuspecting ass. This would be sweet. He eventually emerged and did not see me, but walked directly to the bathroom. No matter. After finishing his business there he returned back down the hallway and saw me sitting in the chair, but he was obviously not paying me much mind at the moment.
"s'up, man?" was all he had to say for himself.
"hey," I responded and was about to launch my tirade, but he went back in his room to dress. What's another couple minutes? Cold patience is but one of my many strengths.
He came back out a couple minutes later and, seeing me sitting in the same place, his eyes nearly jumped out of his head as he exclaimed, "Dude, is that a knife!?!"
"How astute, Dave. Yes, it most certainly is a knife."
"Are you okay .. I mean, you're not, I can see. .. what happend?"
"I'm sure you are quite surprised by this. You wouldn't have any idea how this knife got in my chest, would you?"
"What are you talking about?"
"I woke up this morning, and sensing something amiss, I looked down to find one of YOUR kitchen knives sticking out from between my ribs. Can you explain this?"
"You think I did it?"
"Well, there's no one else here, is there? I suppose the knife just wandered over and plunged itself into my breast of its own will, you dolt."
"I'm calling an ambulance."
"Don't forget to call the police so they can take your squirrelly ass away too, friend."
"I DIDN'T STAB YOU, MAN!"
"Did you stab me because you were angry with me?"
"NO!"
"So you admit that you did stab me."
"I didn't say that."
"Why are you being so defensive?"
"Why would I stab you?"
"Why didn't you pay the utility bill on time last month?"
"What the hell does that have to do with anything?"
"Oh, I don't know. Why don't you tell me?"
"You're nuts."
"You forget to pay the bill last month, I came down on you for being so irresponsible, and today I wake up with one of YOUR kitchen knives in my chest, allowing my lifesblood to slowly seep into and about my organs. I'll be dead soon. And for what, I ask you?"
"..."
"I guess I'm falling on deaf ears here, eh?"
"You're crazy, dude. Call an ambulance yourself. I'm leaving."
"Figures. Just run away from your responsibility. I must be the crazy one here, cause I'm the guy with a KNIFE STUCK IN HIS CHEST!!" I screamed after him as loudly as I could with a punctured lung. He was out the door well before I had finished my sentence.
He'd be back, though, and I was going to sit right in front of the door and wait for him. I knew he hadn't put the knife in me. I did that myself. But if he thinks I was going to just forget about the utility bill and let him live it down, he was wrong. Dead wrong.

I was at an optimistic point not too far back where things appeared to be looking up in exciting ways. Then it seemed things just started slipping backwards. With the innumerable fiascoes and humiliations I have recently encountered, I started really examining the contents of my palm, and it seemed that what kept getting placed there was an all too familiar end of a proverbial stick: the short end.
I thought that a good way to deal with all this shit would be to, in proper self-deprecating fashion, rename it the 'erik' end of the stick. I could start seeing it humorously again, and maybe even, if I was diligent about it, friends and colleagues would adopt the expression so that we could all have a good, cathartic laugh about our daily stressors--anything from the mundanely irksome to the death-of-a-dream cosmic injustice. I had more than enough evidence to present to the Proverbial Re-imagining Committee: everything from travel experiences (layovers, delayed/missed flights, and being 'randomly' checked for every single connection including the now industry-standard removal of shoes to check for plastic explosives thanks to one daring Miami-bound passenger. Mark my words: in the very near future a terrorist will smuggle explosives aboard a plane in his rectal cavity, Medellin-traffic-school style, and when that happens, I will never fly again), to smile straining family get-togethers that led to mounds of renewed isolationist agenda as well as outright nightmares ( On Xmas eve grandma introduces the family to her new friend that looks exactly like her recently deceased husband, my grandfather, and I am the only one that seems to notice or begins crying uncontrollably. I wake and go to wash up for supper (not dinner in the Midwest, but supper) only to realize I am still dreaming. I wake up and go to wash another couple times before the dream really ends. I am still uncertain as to whether I am awake or not.), to awkward, tragically comic social interactions, romantic or otherwise, that I won't really go in to because I can already feel the reader growing nauseous, and these have historically been my most nauseating difficulties to address.
So, I was going to call the stick's short end officially, indisputably mine. Then my roommate Dave got robbed and carjacked at gunpoint while delivering pizzas last week. He's okay. His car was found a few days later. I will no longer be submitting my proposal to the PRC. My new campaign is for the decidedly ambiguous and unsatisfyingly wimpy anti-motto: I suppose things could be better/worse for everyone.

Religion, being one of my several notorious hang-ups, and legoes, the stuff that medieval castles and space stations of legend are made of, make this site (compliments of JHP) really entertaining. I am particularly amused by the cable-guide-style rating system for the juicier Biblical vignettes.
The story of the tower of Babel has always interested me (have you skimmed it? Go ahead. . ) with its highly suspect claims about the variation and subsequent dissemination of language and the eerily curious observation God makes that, "Now nothing they plan to do will be beyond them." But a couple things about this story have always stuck in my craw. Why would He want to sabotage the unity of men? I thought that's what He was supposed to be keeping the devil from doing. And furthermore, why would He see it omnisciently fit to intervene and subvert the efforts of the towerers at all? He easily could have sat back on His bilious wondrousness and watched them fail without lifting an immaculate finger, right?
Did God step in because they would have succeeded if left unchecked? Were they on to something that would threaten His infallibility? Was God afraid of man? Maybe it was just a lesson about arrogant undertakings. Maybe God does fear and hate man. These casual meddlings of God's are not uncommon in the old testament, so maybe God was just bored again. Maybe, and I mean maybe, this is just a silly piece of Judeo-Christian mythology that I really shouldn't worry about. There. I knew I could find an answer I can live with.

it felt like a hammer had hit me in the chest, sternum-square and clear of intent, when you said those things to me. will you never speak to me again? what's happened?
well, i thought, this won't be so bad, 'cause it's not as if you live here. then i remembered that you do live here. you've lived here all along. then i remembered that i don't live here. i was just trying to steal your television set.
still. . .days later, the same dull ache in my chest.