the holy invasion

I figured out how to get onto the roof at work and went up there one morning witih a coworker to look at the skyline. We noticed a strange airplane flying low over the city. It seemed to have only one wing. Then we realized it was carrying a large payload that looked like a missile but turned out to be a large cargo helicopter, strapped to its underbelly. When the plane released the helicopter, it hovered over the building next to ours and landed. Dozens of people streamed out of it and spread out over the other building's roof. They figured out how to get over to our roof and started crowding around us, too. They appeared to be college fraternity brothers, all wearing matching tie-dye shirts with Christian slogans. My coworker was worried they were aliens and ran for the door to the stairs. I got the nerve to ask one of them who they were. They claimed to be a service club airlifted in from the east side to protest rising heating bills for all the poor residents of the West Village. There were hundreds of them---I could see helicopters landing on other roofs nearby and letting off even more of these boys. Before I could ask them another question, the helicopter morphed into an all-terrain land vehicle and kind of climbed over onto our roof. The group leader driving the land-helicopter turned on a megaphone and instructed everyone to head inside for a pizza party. I took a different stairwell and ended up at a study party where my friends from high school had apparently been waiting over ten years for me to show up.

not the best day to play hookie

I skipped work to meet my friends for lunch in the East Village and buy some new soccer cleats. Lunch was great, but unfortunately an alien from an alternate dimension was also shopping for some new cleats. It ripped through the space-time fabric of 9th street on a Tuesday afternoon. All anyone could see anywhere were these giant purplish tentacles, which started grabbing shoes and people who looked like they might be good at soccer (apparently this was also a recruiting trip). Luckily, I'm not such a hot player these days, and I escaped with my shoes and headed over to Troy, Michigan to meet my friend Steve for a drink. He took me to this members-only hipster bar on Big Beaver. No one seemed happy to see me. No one there seemed that happy to see anyone, actually. There was a walk-in clinic next door, so I decided to go get some alien-related injuries checked out while I was there and then head back to work to at least put in an appearance.

wherever you go, there you are

After a big night out on the Upper West Side, I decided to walk home along the Hudson as the sun came up. I ended up at the Frying Pan, which is a bar on an old boat docked on a pier in Chelsea. Turns out the Frying Pan was hiring. The owner offered me $4 an hour to work as a deckhand, scrubbing the decks and generally keeping the place clean. If I did a good job, she said, I could be promoted to bartender when they pulled up anchor and went south for the winter. Despite already having a job with more responsibility and somewhat higher pay, I took the position.

I ended up spending a lot of time alone in the boat, which is as old and creepy as old creepy boats can be. Sometimes I heard voices, and would roam from room to room chasing after them, only to find myself alone in the captain's quarters, scared shitless. So I started inviting my friends to hang out there during the off-hours. One day, everyone I know in New York was chilling out on the lower deck, eating peanutbutter-filled pretzels, when suddenly we were somewhere else and other people entirely.

We called ourselves the Earthlings, and we were a group of twenty-somethings who had been stranded on an island on a far away planet ever since our plane crashed there when we were eight. We were the only survivors. We killed some of the local alien animals and made ourselves some pretty kickass costumes. Mine had a monkey head for a hood that made me look like that wise old monkey dude in the Lion King. All day we would roam through the jungle, looking for food and playing at being jungle animals. At night, we built a huge campfire and told stories about our home planet. There was one guy who was quieter than the rest of us and ostensibly the leader, and he would usually spend the evenings alone out on the beach, staring at the stars. He was the only one of us who had never given up hope of being rescued. He was also kind of hot.

One night the rest of us were lazing around the fire, picking anteater bones out of our teeth, when the hot leader guy came running up all excited. With his big grizzly bear headdress and his face lit up by the flames, he was pretty impressive. "Come quick!" he shouted, and we all chased him down to the beach, where millions of stars were racing across the sky and plunking themselves down in the water. "It's a sign!" he told us, and jumped into the alien sea. We had spent the last fifteen odd years being terrified of that water, and it had kept us from swimming across to another island only a few yards away. But if this guy was going, I was going, too. We all jumped in and paddled over to the other coast.

Turns out it was New Hampshire, and we ended up in some WASPy coastal town where everyone had a North Face fleece and a spaniel. The locals gave us some funny looks, but they were too polite to say anything, so we ended up in some bookstore cafe drinking coffee and looking at all the dogs and their big floppy ears, trying to figure out what we were going to do next.

aliens, fires, the end of everything

It was the end of the world, aliens arriving by water in giant dragon-faced ships. We could see them from the beaches in L.A., coming in fast. Forest fires broke out spontaneously on the dried-out summer hills. It was hard to maneuver around the flames, even if we knew where to go.
We pretty much knew we were all going to die.