Goats eat everything -- including black holes, you know. I don't think humans here in Philadelphia quite appreciate the fact that this creature once saved their corner of the universe from extinction by eating that swirl whirlpool of a lack of matter like it was a piece of lettuce. Whenever I see one walking the streets, or even here -- briefly -- in this bar before it was ushered out by a rather supercilious bartender, I feel grateful.
"Is this how you play pool, human?" She moved the cue back and forth across the green felt like it was a broom, like it was a roomba auditioning as an orchestra conductor, and I moved in, put my hands on her shoulder, offered up one of those performative human laughs of politeness to all and sundry, and steered her away from the spotlight of the table.
“Why do all human variations on a bustling alien market always look like variations on what is called The Casbah? The rolling dreamline of clothesline shirts floating in the wind, but they are instead rugs and the city is Marrakech?”
I parked us at the jukebox and put on a cover of the singer-songwriter Bob Dylan (who had been a subject of a previous ‘daily creativity quotient’) by a woman named Odetta.
“Where are you from?”
Sometimes I'm in the mood, I wanna leave my lonesome home.
“Why do fireworks have to settle as fireworks when their ash and dust and the way each respectively falls could settle into buildings that people could live in?”
“With running water?”
“Of course. Why would we design it any other way?”
And sometimes I'm in the mood, I wanna hear my milk cow moan.
“Listen: I don't want to be rude, but you do realize that -- when you’re here on earth -- you can’t go around and wave a flag advertising the fact that you’re from another planet, right?”
Lord sometimes I'm in the mood, I wanna hit that highway road.
“But I thought humans only had two eyes.”
“They do.”
“Then why …?”
But then again, but then again, I said oh, I said oh, I said oh babe!
I'm in the mood for you.