OOBEs and Aliens

Alien abductions might not be that alien.

New research making the rounds on the Internet claims that people can be “trained” to meet extraterrestrials while in a lucid dreaming state. How much credence you give such information depends on how long you’re able to suppress a giggle when you learn this study comes from the OOBE Research Center in Los Angeles.

OOBE, which sounds like a term a kid might use for something he fished out his nose or the chorus of a really bad ’80s rap song (Oo, Bebe Bebe), really means “out-of body experience.” As in, “I drank a bottle of tequila and had an OOBE.”

You know your crackpot scientific theory has really arrived when it has its own research center in L.A. I can only hope it’s not federally funded, like all those studies where researchers spend years watching kids sit on couches and stuff their mouths with potato chips before announcing that, wonder of wonders, inactivity and junk food make children fat.

Out-of-body experiences, according to the OOBEs at the OOBE Research Center, are just one part of a larger phenomenon called “the phase,” which includes lucid dreaming and astral projection. The OOBE prefers “phase” because the term has not been corrupted by, in the words of its website, “strange people with strange views on life.”

This might also explain why trash collectors prefer to be known as “sanitation engineers.”

Anyway, the OOBEs put volunteers into “lucid dream” training to show them how they can control the contents of their dreams. After only three days, volunteers were able to insert themselves into vivid situations where they met and traveled with aliens.

The bottom line, then, is that those stories of humans cruising along the Milky Way (not to mention the Snickers) with aliens in their late-model flying saucers are products of human imagination. I, for one, am glad they cleared that up.

Just for kicks, I decided to try a lucid dreaming/out-of-body/phase experiment for myself. So before bed one night, I drank some warm milk, watched “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” listened to Holst’s “The Planets,” and re-read my well-thumbed copy of “Alien Visitors and the Humans Who Love Them” until my eyes grew heavy.

Before I knew it, I was looking down at my slumbering body, passed out there on the couch. (Memo to self: Cut toenails.) I floated through the wall and checked out the kitchen, where I harassed the cats for a few minutes — they can’t see astral projections, but they can smell them (evidence suggests APs smell like a mix of dead rats and KFC original recipe) — and then drifted into the back yard. I thought it was safest there, as I was shielded from the prying eyes of any psychic neighbors who might wonder why my astral projection was naked. (Second memo to self: Be sure to wear clothes when travelling between states of consciousness.)

Despite the fact that it was nighttime, no aliens made themselves known, even when I drifted over to the new Chipotle, where half the city’s been hanging out. Depressed, I returned home to my body.

The next morning, I noticed a handful of political ads stuck to the front door that hadn’t been there the day before. Apparently, my subconscious mind doesn’t know the difference between “politician” and “alien.”

Or maybe they’re more alike than we think. Nobody believes what most people say about aliens, and nobody believes what most politicians say. One is a wild figment of the imagination, and the other says things that are. Furthermore, they both tend to disappear at approximately the same time: aliens right after Halloween, and politicians one week later.

Maybe they travel in the same mother ship, after all.


Originally published in 2011. 

Where are all the kids?

Originally published in 2014.

Dusk on a residential street. Lightning bugs pulse first here, then there. A lawn mower whirrs far in the distance as somebody races darkness, hoping to find not too many missed lines the next morning. Otherwise, quiet. Too quiet.

Where are all the kids?

It’s something I ask my wife more and more frequently on our evening walks. There are no kids. No kids catching lightning bugs. No kids playing hopscotch. No kids riding bicycles up and down driveways or wrestling in yards or turning cartwheels or.

Or anything.

I feel more and more like a character in a Ray Bradbury story, strolling down some woebegone street in a slice of small-town America that has been scooped up in its entirety and re-planted on Mars. Everything perfectly replicated — houses, garages, shrubs, roads and stop lights.

Everything but kids.

I know this city has children. I see buses filled with them on weekday afternoons during the school year. I see their photos in the paper and on friends’ Facebook pages. I see them in malls and restaurants.

I just don’t see them outside. Not at dusk, not anytime.

When I mention this to other people, I always get the same answer. “Oh, when I was a kid, Mom pushed me out the door in the morning and only let me back in for lunch and dinner and when the streetlights came on. We didn’t sit in front of the TV all day or play video games or text on phones like kids these days.”

This is the answer no matter the age of the respondent, including people who were just kids themselves a few years ago, when older people said the same thing about their generation.

In my own youth, my sister and I played outside a lot, but I’m not fooling myself — I was never an outdoorsy-type. The big difference between summer and winter was that I could read a book on the porch in the summer instead of on the couch in the winter.

Still, we went outside. We set up Slip N’ Slides and got sunburned and played basketball and blew bubbles and built makeshift ramps for our bikes and just ran around.

Maybe parents don’t think it’s safe for kids to do that nowadays. Too many stories about too many creeps. Maybe in a lot of single-parent or two-income homes, kids have to come in early, even in the summer, and go to bed to get up before dawn the next day to be carted off to childcare. Maybe spontaneous play really has been replaced by more scripted scenarios — organized sports, playdates at the movies or crawling through plastic, yellow tubes that spill out into boxes of rubber balls at fast-food franchises.*

Or maybe kids really are content to stay indoors, even on beautiful early summer evenings, when dusk hangs in the air like a gauze curtain, and watch TV and play video games.

One house on our walking route, however, is like an oasis to my soul. There, kids are doing all the things that I expect to see kids do on a beautiful summer night. They’re skipping, yelling, playing catch, and doodling with chalk. They look dirty — the glorious kind of dirty that comes from lots of exercise and from finding worms in the drive after a hard rain, the wonderful kind of dirty that parents have to scrub off in the bathtub once the sun goes down.

But in the surrounding yards, nothing. Silence. The flickering of TV screens through picture windows, and uncaptured lightning bugs holding sway over all.

Where are all the kids?

*In 2022, I would add extreme heat to the list of reasons why children might not be outside as much. 

Zen and the Art of Car Maintenance

Originally published in October 2010: 

A flick of the wrist, three pumps, and it’s done.

Resetting the “check oil” light on my wife’s car is as simple as turning on the ignition (without starting the car) and depressing the accelerator three times. I do it after every oil change because either the technicians don’t know how, forget, or – in the words of that immortal scoundrel, Rhett Butler – don’t give a damn.

It doesn’t bother me, because resetting the oil light is one of just seven maintenance tasks I can perform on a car, and this is only if one stretches the definition of maintenance to include things like screwing on the gas cap after fueling.

I remember reading “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” many years ago and getting pretty into it, right up to the point where the author chides readers who operate motor vehicles without knowing how they work. My newly found inner calm went right out the window at that, along with my copy of the book.

America’s fascination with the automobile completely baffles me, as does its obsession with organized team sports. I see a car only in its most practical terms, as a means of conveyance and a place to store all the stuff that my wife would accidentally on purpose throw out if I brought into the house. This is why the backseat of my car has become a mini filing cabinet, home to mountains of paper that fade and yellow from the sun before being transferred to a more permanent home – the trunk.

Because I’ve been denied the gene that extends an aura of mystique to a hunk of steel, chrome and rubber, I’m a difficult customer in a dealership. The salesperson can yammer all day about a sleek chassis and clean lines, but all I’m likely to care about is the mileage and the radio. I have developed a little dog-and-pony show that involves kicking the tires, feigning interest in what lies under the hood, and asking about the flux capacitator, because the ability to travel through time is one of the few add-ons I would pay extra to receive.

Otherwise, cars don’t interest me much. I once went almost four years without changing the oil in a Chevy Nova. Every few months, I would just feed it a new can. That car cost me less money than any car since, and on all the others I’ve made a point to follow a more-or-less routine maintenance schedule. Coincidence or something more? You decide.

Among my other maintenance knowledge is the ability to change windshield wipers and add new washer fluid – in most cases. I say “most” because sometimes the maze of tubes, hoses, wires and such beneath the hood is nearly hypnotic, and I can lose my concentration staring into it, like little Rikki Tikki Tavi being mesmerized by the undulating cobra in that “Jungle Book” story by Kipling.

(Kipling always reminds me of an old cartoon showing a nerdy guy holding a book of the author’s work sitting next to a beautiful woman who looks at him archly and says something like, “You naughty boy, I never kipple on the first date.”)

If I keep my wits about me, I can usually figure out where to put the wiper fluid, just as I can usually decipher the arcane arrows on the arm of the windshield wiper that release the old blade and show how the new one snaps into place.

In this endeavor, I have a perfect track record of always changing blades in the middle of a torrential downpour or a snowstorm, an extra challenge that ups the ante on my stress level considerably.

This is where I could really use that copy of “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.” Maybe I should buy a new one and keep it in the trunk.

chris.schillig@yahoo.com

Memories of a 'muscle-seller'

I was talking over the weekend with a former co-worker who made an intriguing observation: Short-order cooking was one of the hardest jobs he’s ever had.

I thought about that for awhile. He and I worked together at Ponderosa Steakhouse decades ago, when Alliance had fewer restaurants, especially of the chain variety. With limited choices for steak along State Street, customers often ended up in one of two places: Bonanza on the west side, Ponderosa on the east.

Consequently, both restaurants were busy. At Ponderosa, it wasn’t uncommon to have a line of customers stretching from the cash register to the sidewalk outside.

Cooking shifts were marked by intense heat and cramped space. Above our heads fluttered a line of handwritten slips for T-bones, porterhouses, ribeyes and a handful of other cuts, all ordered to various degrees of doneness. (Medium rare, by the way, is meat the way nature intended. Other donenesses are either too bloody or too scorched.)

Ours was sweaty work with a quick turnaround. Customers had to have their meals delivered 12 minutes after they ordered it. Otherwise, they would gobble up too many profits from the all-you-could-eat salad buffet, sending the bean counters’ heads spinning.

I don’t disagree that short-order cooking is hard, but it is also satisfying in a way that almost no other job I’ve had since has been. This is because no matter how hot and sticky the shift, when it was over, it was really over.

I never went home agonizing that I’d ruined somebody’s meal. If I did, it was fixed on the spot with a new steak or a refund.

I never went home concerned about the next day. Somebody else was responsible for ordering food and supplies and creating the schedule. Those were their worries, not mine.

I never went home feeling like I needed to practice. Short-order cooking can be overwhelming, with hundreds of dollars of meat sizzling away at one time, but the mechanics are simple — flip, turn, flip, remove — with just enough nuance to keep it interesting.

As one moves further along in a career, regardless of the field, a consequence is a dwindling sense of freedom at the end of the day. When I was in sales, I was constantly agonizing over the next presentation, an occupational hazard of the profession. As a teacher, I’m always pondering lessons to improve and papers to grade. Even in the summer, when teachers allegedly work less – although I’ve seldom met such creatures, as most of us are still schlepping away at one job or another in the warm-weather months – I can’t turn it completely off.

From such standpoints, then, short-order cooking was one of the easiest jobs I’ve ever had. Not that I could still do it physically today, in my mid-50s, with the same reckless abandon.

Barbara Ehrenreich demonstrated this in “Nickel and Dimed,” the chronicle of her attempt to wind back the clock in middle age and work for both the same wages and at the same level of physicality as many in the hospitality industry.

She describes her brief waitressing experience as “the perfect storm” of filled tables and demanding customers, the particulars of the shift “lost in the fog of war.” She eventually walks out of a job in the middle of a shift, feeling “an overwhelming dank sense of failure.”

Another American writer, Jack London, reached a similar conclusion earlier in the 20thcentury when he wrote about “the colossal edifice of society,” with laborers at the bottom, offering “muscle, and muscle alone, to sell,” and “brain sellers” at the top. In the middle was a vast population of merchants, politicians and representatives of the people, selling footwear, manhood and trust, respectively.

“Shoes and trust and honor had a way of renewing themselves. They were imperishable stocks,” wrote London. “Muscle, on the other hand, did not renew.” He was disillusioned early in life by his attempts to scale the tower of capitalism through physical work alone (a common lament even today) and eventually turned to study. And then to socialism. Coincidentally, Ehrenreich, too, is a socialist.

I’m still mired in capitalism, myself, having experienced no London-like epiphany from my few years as a muscle seller.

All I can say is that I respect the hell out of all people who make their living through physical labor. If one small fringe benefit is to turn off thoughts of the workday from one shift to the next, then nobody should begrudge them.

My guess, however, is most workers don’t have that luxury, that plenty of other concerns rise to the forefront. My recollections of a carefree life as a so-called muscle seller likely stem from my age at the time. The biggest concern I had in my late teens was filling the gas tank and having money left over for concert tickets.

That cloud over the grill is more than just smoke and heat. Some of it is the haze of nostalgia.

Reach Chris at chris.schillig@yahoo.com. On Twitter: @cschillig.

Tarzan: The New Adventures

 This beauty showed up on my doorstep earlier this week, and what a fun volume it is. 

Edgar Rice Burroughs Tarzan: The New Adventures Volume 1 (Dark Horse) delivers exactly what the title promises — new stories of ERB's most famous creation, but definitely in the style of what has come before. 

The book offers the first two stories from the strip's continuity, previously available only to subscribers of ERB's website. Both are written by Roy Thomas, legendary scribe and editor for Marvel and DC Comics. The first story is illustrated by Thomas Grindberg, and the second by Benito Gallego. 

Since both are meant to replicate the charm of the full-color Sunday comics pages of yore, the pacing may surprise readers who expected a more traditional comic book. Most pages feature a succinct recap of what happened in the previous installment, a couple panels that advance the story incrementally, and a final panel with a cliffhanger or foreshadowing of the next chapter. 

Thomas does a good job of keeping the story rolling within these constraints, but I do wonder how readers found the pacing when seeing only one installment every week or even less frequently (Thomas notes in the intro that he and Grindberg struggled to keep to a schedule). 

The first story is a pretty typical lost-civilization plot that Tarzan has been involved in plenty of times in either the original novels or the many comics, movies, and TV shows that followed. Thomas gives Tarzan's mate, Jane, more to do than just getting kidnapped (a standard part of many Tarzan tales), although an abduction is central to this story, as well. 

Much of the first storyline appears to be checking off familiar beats of a Tarzan tale. Tantor the elephant? Check. Nkima the monkey? Check. Crocodiles, savage brutes, beautiful women pining away for the ape man from their thrones? Check, check, and check. 

And who can blame Thomas? Those are the aspects of ERB's storytelling that made Tarzan immensely popular in the pulps and continued to hold the character in good stead for most of the twentieth century. 

Grindberg lushly illustrates the proceedings in a style reminiscent of the great Tarzan artists of the past. The back cover of the book mentions Hal Foster, J. Allen St. John, Frank Frazetta, and John Buscema. Grindberg pays homage to all of them with expansive panels of jungle vegetation, the ruins of lost cities, and action action action. It's all intoxicating to experience. 

If the story gets a little cumbersome near the end with two lost civilizations, La of Opar, half-human brutes, and a Jane/Helen of Troy lookalike twist, it hardly matters because it's all so beautifully rendered and told with such sincerity.  

It's the second story where Thomas stretches creatively, giving readers a mash-up of Tarzan and the Leopard Men and Monster Men, the latter being a lesser-known ERB novel that does not feature Tarzan. Body horror and Tarzan don't generally mix, which is what makes this story fresher and more interesting than the first. 

Benito Gallego's artwork, while less flashy than Grindberg's, is nonetheless easier to follow in this format. His Tarzan owes a lot to the Buscema version from Marvel's 1970s series, but since that's one of the best of the comic-book Tarzans, it's fine. He does a good job of bringing to life the gorilleopard, the obligatory weird science experiment, which terrorizes the nearby village. 

Bonus points, too, for an unconventional ending that offers redemption and not just punishment. It was a surprise to read. 

A second volume of these website comics is scheduled for later this year. Based on how much I enjoyed this one, I look forward to more new tales starring everybody's favorite jungle lord. 

Bigfoot is the monster for our time

Bigfoot is having a moment in northeast Ohio.

Last month, the Small Town Monsters production company announced Monster Fest in downtown Canton for June 2023. While Bigfoot may share the billing with UFOs and ghosts, everybody knows the big, hairy guy is the real star.

Small Town Monsters has been making bank with Bigfoot since 2015 when company owner Seth Breedlove released “Minerva Monster.” The film explored a branch of the creature’s family tree that sprouted in Paris Township.

Since then, Breedlove has continued to document Bigfoot and other cryptids with several more films. Another will debut next June 3 during Monster Fest, according to a Canton Repository story.

Look, I love me a good Bigfoot yarn, something regular readers of this column know. If you grew up semi-rural in the 1970s, like I did, with a few trees somewhere on your property that an overactive imagination could stretch into a bonafide forest, then Bigfoot was as much a part of your formative years as corduroy pants and transistor radios.

Back then, I lapped up pseudo-scientific junk about giant man-apes like it was manna from hirsute heaven. I still have my dog-eared copy of “The Mysterious Monsters,” a tie-in to a corny movie that made the drive-in circuit in the mid-1970s.

Written by Robert and Frances Guenette, the book covers the holy trinity – Yeti, Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot him/itself. The first two intrigued me, but let’s be honest, I wasn’t going to the Himalayas or Scotland anytime soon (still haven’t). However, I did romp around in the woods, and it was just possible that a rogue Bigfoot was cagey enough to elude the razor-sharp senses and infallible tracking skills of my eight-year-old self.

As a kid, I played on a swing set that abutted a track of trees no self-respecting monster would have bothered to haunt, but I was certain a Bigfoot lived there, or at least visited on weekends. So powerful was this daydream that I used to practice drills, leaping off the swing and running for the house to see if I was fast enough to elude any Bigfoot that might lumber my way, looking for a scrawny kid to use as a combination Slim Jim and toothpick.

(I don’t know how fast was “fast enough,” but I must have convinced myself that I had a decent chance of survival because I kept going back to the swings.)

My Bigfoot obsession reached its apex with a two-part episode of “The Six Million Dollar Man,” where bionic Steve Austin (Lee Majors) met the creature, played by Andre the Giant. Another encounter later in the series crossed over with “The Bionic Woman” so that Lindsay Wagner could get in on the fun. The Marvel Cinematic Universe has nothing on this epic story of a robotic Bigfoot protecting an underground colony of space aliens while an earthquake looms. (Can you hear my eyes rolling?)

Anyway, over the years I left my obsession with Bigfoot behind, even when others didn’t. An area operation in the ’90s put a new wrinkle on the Bigfoot legend by trying to convince people that many Bigfoot encounters were traumatizing enough to spark amnesia, meaning it was possible to see Bigfoot but suppress the memory. So maybe we’ve all encountered one!

It’s this kind of wonkiness that has Bigfoot perfectly positioned for a contemporary comeback. Today, folks believe all sorts of bogus conspiracy theories without a shred of evidence. Large hominids living undetected in North America and elsewhere – despite infrared technology, an absence of bodies and scat, and every camper and hunter carrying a cellphone with a camera – seem quaint compared to PizzaGate, replacement theory and Italian satellites that change votes for Joe Biden. (Where’s Steve Austin when we need him?)

Some people just want to believe in something – anything! – so badly that they’ll do it despite (or maybe because of) a lack of evidence. Not for nothing is “confirmation bias” the psychological phenomenon of the 21st century.

None of which should keep anybody from enjoying next year’s Monster Fest. Maybe Bigfoot himself will even make a guest appearance. And if you spot a zipper running up his back — well, just chalk it up to evolution. It’s as plausible an explanation as anything else.

Reach Chris at chris.schillig@yahoo.com. On Twitter: @cschillig

Revisiting the ‘Man Without a Country’

This column was first published in July 2021. 

Edward Everett Hale almost did it.

The eighteenth-century minister and writer almost achieved literary immortality with his short story, “The Man Without a Country.”

There was a time, according to a piece by Alexander Zaitchik in the Los Angeles Review of Books, when Hale’s tale was ubiquitous in American public education — a patriotic flag-waver perfect for the Fourth of July.

Army Lt. Philip Nolan, the story’s titular character, swears allegiance to Aaron Burr — of the famous Hamilton/Burr pistol duel — and is tried for treason. At the trial, Nolan renounces his country: “D--n the United States! I wish I may never hear of the United States again!” (“Damn” being such strong language in 1863, especially when used against one’s nation, that it was partially obscured.)

Like a character in an O. Henry short story or a Twilight Zone episode, the judge grants Nolan’s request. He is sentenced to live out his life on a series of ships at sea, where officers, sailors and guests are never to mention the United States or tell him news of his former country. He is forbidden to see maps or receive updates on its citizens, including his family.

He becomes … dum dum dum … the Man Without a Country.

(Spoiler alert: The next two paragraphs reveal the ending of a 158-year-old story.)

Predictably, at least by jaded twenty-first-century standards, Nolan has a complete change of heart. Fifty-six years on a boat will do that to a guy. On his deathbed and still at sea, he displays a self-made map of the U.S., complete with educated guesses about which territories have become states. The captain reneges on the judge’s long-ago order and tells Nolan news of the nation, including as much as he can recall about the Civil War, which Nolan missed completely.

An hour later, Nolan is dead, but not before tucking into a nearby Bible his request for an epitaph: “He loved his country as no other man has loved her; but no man deserved less at her hands.”

For obvious reasons, the story is a good choice to teach a particular type of patriotism that advocates never questioning one’s superiors or criticizing authority. The Man Without a Country learns to value his nation above all.

One can see how the story would have appealed to certain audiences during two world wars and their aftermaths, when belief in American exceptionalism was at its zenith, and also how the story would have fallen out of favor in the decades since, when the nation has had to interrogate its shortcomings.

But the story’s obscurity is a shame, because beneath its jingoism and obvious moralizing are complexities that deserve exploration.

The story’s narrator, a younger man, attempts to have Nolan pardoned, yet can find nobody in the government who even remembers the man’s name, let alone his crime. “They pretended there was no such man, and never was such a man. They will say so at the Department now!” the narrator writes. “Perhaps they do not know. It will not be the first thing in the service of which the Department appears to know nothing!”

The story further hints that Nolan’s trial was performative in nature — “to while away the monotony of the summer” — and that other conspirators, perhaps those of higher rank or from better families, escaped punishment. Or, as the narrator puts it, “The big flies escaped — rightly for all I know.”

The appropriateness of Hale’s sentence, both its excessive length and his country-club prison aboard a boat, is worthy of discussion, as is the reality of scapegoating and the advantages of wealth, power and rank.

These topics need not be debated to the exclusion of a larger moral — the importance of loyalty to one’s country — but alongside it. The story makes a point to call out the likes of “every Bragg and Beauregard who broke a soldier’s oath two years ago, and of every Maury and Barron who broke a sailor’s,” references to U.S. Army and Navy leaders in the South who renounced their country and joined the Confederacy.

In a modern era that has forgotten the honorable, vital role that protest played in forming our nation, and where too many of our friends and neighbors are willing to turn a blind eye to the flying of the Confederate flag or the insurrectionists that stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, maybe “The Man Without a Country” is more worthy of a literary reevaluation this Independence Day than ever before.


chris.schillig@yahoo.com

@cschillig on Twitter