Good Enough

From the Dairy of an Incarcerated Alien

The mind of a human shitbag is a shifting landscape of hope and fear—take Happy Julius Pipe. He’s the human whose mind I’m maze-running like an acid trip. There is so much fear in here. Shitloads of it. I guess this is typical for a human.

I am Kuf, the alien of Alien Idiom. I’m trapped (or possibly imprisoned) in Happy’s mind. Either way, it blows.

This month I battled a ski demon. I shit you not.

Happy was taking his kids on a trip while Renetta went on a bender with her girlfriends. R1 was on the brink of his teens and R2 was approaching double digits. The car trip to the mountain had a lot of “I swear to God I will turn this car around if you two don’t stop.” Fun.

Anyway, demons are everywhere in the human mind. They carve out comfortable homes in the hollow parts of wherever-the-fuck. This thing I faced was tall and blue with a white beard and a gold incisor—a bond villain on snow shoes. He must have mistaken me for another demon. I get that a lot.

“Good afternoon,” he said.

“Fuck off,” I said. “Do you know how to get out of here?” Human minds are generally feeble but hard to exit. I’ve been trying for a year now to leave Happy’s.

“Not my place to leave,” he says. And then, as if I gave a shit, he told me that Happy learned to ski when he was forty. It’s much more difficult to learn new things when you’re older he said. “And not only is he afraid he’ll fall and break his ass-”

“Let me stop you there,” I said. “Ass is a muscle. You can bruise or tear or strain or clinch it. You don’t break it.” I’m an interdimensional being, so I know things.

“Ass-breaks happen all the time,” the demon said. “Anyway, my job is to get him to worry about breaking it. Or that his kids might fall and he won’t be able to get them up. Or that he’ll forget their gloves or ski boots and mess up the whole experience. Humans are so worried about messing things up that they avoid them altogether.”

The more the ski demon spoke, the darker it got. The human mind should be colorful but fear grays it out. The demon seemed like a nice enough entity, but I couldn’t see ten feet in front of me and there was no way I could find my way out in the dark.

“Listen you big blue fuck,” I said. “You have it wrong. And while I’m sure that Happy appreciates you analyzing the risks of this skiing nonsense, he’s not going to forget anything. He has his gear and his kids’ gear so neatly organized that he is basically an advertisement for a Thule ski bag. He’s not going to do anything stupid and, besides, his kids are quite good. You forget that he put them in ski school since they were three. R1 is an excellent skier and R2 is good enough to make it down any slope. I think it’s time for you to take your snow cone and shove it up your peak.”

The demon paused. He wanted to say something insightful but just said, “there are risks”.

“That’s human life, blue. He has to take risks to get better. Happy is never going to be world class skier, but after a few years of putting in the effort, he can ski. His kids genuinely love it and Happy feels good because he gave his kids something he never had.”

The demon got smaller after listening to me. I see it all the time. He shrunk down to the size of a garden gnome. “Good day to you sir,” he said.

Did it go perfectly for Happy on the mountain? Of course not. R2’s boots were too small, so he complained for two runs until Happy rented him new ones. Happy fell on a black diamond slope, but managed to get himself up without tearing anything. On the second day his legs hurt so badly that he only did one run after lunch. But the net impact was positive.

Does he know that I talked away a demon that was stirring fear in him? No. As a general rule, humans have no idea the kinds of entities that fuck with them and that there are heroes, like me, that keep the space bright. Or maybe I had nothing to do with it and Happy faced his fear on his own. I’m just an alien trying to find his way home after all.

What’s interesting is that what makes a good experience for a human has more to do with the humans they do it with than the quality of the experience itself. For Happy, would the skiing have been better if the snow was fluffier or the trails perfect?

Probably. But what really made it memorable for Happy is that he shared it with his kids. There were falls and setbacks, but they left the mountain wanting to do it again— and they will.

Personally, I find the human experience strange.

On Xobtihs, interacting with others is strongly discouraged. In fact, our society is designed to avoid contact. We just follow our BIG DICKs—Basic Information Gadgets for Detailed Interactions with Content Kingdoms. They tell us what we want to do, like computers but more advanced.

One time, my BIG DICK lead me to a Mountain Kingdom—I can’t remember which one. I picked up some warm clothes at a nearby kiosk and hiked up to a chateau that overlooked long stretches of country. I battled no demons along the way and enjoyed the peace of a pristine visual landscape. I could see a frozen lake and surrounding trees covered with snow. I ate a sandwich out of a paper bag. It was beautiful.

But maybe I was lonely. Maybe it would have been nicer to say to someone, “would you look at that!”

I wonder what it would have been like if I had to hold others’ expectations on my shoulders like Happy holds his kids’ hopes and fears on his. Maybe I’d have demons too, or maybe there’d be an alien, like me, living in my mind-hole helping me with my shit.

I’ll give Happy credit. He’s not perfect, but he’s good enough to take his kids skiing. I guess that counts for something.

-Kuf

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I pop one off around the end of every month in the hopes that other humans might read it. Mostly, they don’t but maybe you will.