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Go Karts of the Gods

an exercise in futility by

Michael Kurland

They’re here now!

Sorry, didn’t mean to startle you. But it’s hard not to get excited when speaking of the greatest metaphysical revelation since herb tea. Let me start again—

They’re here now!

I guess I just can’t hold it in. Because it’s true! They are among us still. Some of us, anyway.

They never left!

The man peering over your shoulder right now as you read these words — or woman, if it happens to be a woman, and it can be a woman, whatever you may have been told — may be an alien from outer space! They’re here still, watching us, teaching us, learning from us, guiding us, eating — but that’s another part of the story.

It all started — well, I don’t know when it all started, but I first came to know of it in late July, 1982. It was a Thursday. I was staring at some obscure wall decorations at one of the major archeological sites in the Eastern United States, the uptown platform of the West Side IRT 23^rd Street station, when the curious, somehow almost obscene, words and illustrations formed a pattern in my mind and it all came together. I understood.

Why me? You may well ask. Perhaps just a chance alignment of space and time — which we now know are aspects of the same thing, except that one goes from side to side, and the other goes up and down and stops at the mezzanine even if you didn’t push the button for the mezzanine, which can be very annoying — perhaps it was predestination, perhaps I’m just better than you are; who can say? But ours is not to reason why, ours is to seek the truth and prepare ourselves.

Hello seekers!

Are you ready to accept the GREAT NEWS?

There are aliens amongst us!!!

If you know just how and where to look, you can find them, observe them, learn from them, emulate them. But you must seek them out. They won’t come to you. Not you.

I am here to aid you — to guide you along the path to true understanding (which I call Outer Directed Inner Seeking Yearningness, or ODISY).

The clues, the hints, the milestones on this path to Alien Enlightenment will at first seem fragmentary, unclear, murky, contradictory, even idiotic — I know they did to me. But as you get deeper and deeper into the practice of Yearningness, and pass from stage to stage on the road to ODISY, it will all become clear and meaningful. Each word, which may have made no sense to you when you began, will lose its confusion and become clear and totally grabfig.

The key to understanding any sentence or word that you, with your primitive, pre-ODISY understanding, fail to comprehend, is to stare at it and keep repeating over and over, “Niagra Falls, Niagra Falls,” until the word that you thought made no sense shimmers before your eyes and you attain a new height of clarity. And, in time, you will; I did.

Of course your old friends will have trouble comprehending you as you speak these new truths. They may say nasty things about your behavior, your new frabish, your sanity. They may urge you to come to your “senses.” Reply to them, “Ha, ha!” Say to them, “Ho, ho!” Tell them that it is their primitive senses that lack the ability to see the truth; their shortsighted unwillingness to pay for the instruction that would open their eyes. For enlightenment doesn’t come cheaply. But then neither neither do SUVs, or plasma TVs, or members of the opposite sex. Even members of the same sex can be pretty expensive, which seems somehow unfair. But I digress.

Of course you’ll want to verify for yourself that what I’m telling you is true is true is true is, er, true. Good for you. You’re no sap. I’ll tell you just what to look for. Once you know the signs, it all becomes horribly, frighteningly, clear.

First: Look for things that couldn’t have been built by people. If people couldn’t have built them, someone else must have! See? It really sticks out when it’s pointed out to you, doesn’t it?

Second: Look for things that weren’t built for people. Things that human beings were never meant to wear, or use, or sit on, or lie on, or drive, or eat, or apply to various parts of their bodies. If the thing doesn’t fit you — who does it fit? Once you start looking, you’ll be surprised at how many things you find that were clearly designed to be used by another race.

Consider the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Why is it leaning? Would you build a building that leans like that? Why doesn’t it fall over? Oh, I know scientists have answers to these questions, but who told them? Someone, or some thing, that doesn’t want them to know the truth? Yes, it’s good for dropping cannon balls off, but this is an urge that most humans manage to suppress.

The Leaning Tower of Pisa is not a tower at all. It is an intergalactic signpost. J.D. (Jimboy) Davisson, professor of physics at Partial College and Dental Academy in Woodward, Oklahoma, has computed on the P.C.D.A. in W.O. billing machine that a line drawn along the center of the axis of the tower, and extending

parabolically (according to the formula

)

comes back to earth right in the middle of Paramus, New Jersey. Coincidence?

They are trying to tell us something. Are we wise enough to listen?

If ten men worked for a week, they couldn’t build the Great Pyramid at Giza,

or the Golden Gate Bridge, or the Panama Canal, or Paris, France, or the Antarctic Ocean. Not even if they wore warm clothes.

Have you ever bounced on a go kart? Why is it spelled “kart”? Does the alien alphabet lack the letter “c”? Riding karts is so uncomfortable it’s a sport. Could it be that for some alien creatures from somewhere else, they are a sensible means of transportation? Some creatures that like to bounce?

I have in my collection a pair of sandals with tire treads on the bottoms. Could they be for strange beings with wheels on their feet?

Who was meant to ride on bus seats? What sort of beings would be comfortable on the plastic chairs at airports? Where are they from? Where are they going? And do they have special discount fares?

Who was meant to wear boxer shorts?

There is a stainless steel arch in St. Louis, Missouri, six hundred and thirty feet tall, which wasn’t there a hundred years ago. Can it be a coincidence that a line drawn perpendicular to this arch through its center will leave the Earth?

I have in my collection a can of soda with no nutrients useful to the human body.

The most popular children’s television program stars an eight-foot-tall chicken. Who wants our children to think that eight-foot-tall chickens are their friends?

What about those ball point pens that write under butter but not on paper? Who lives under butter?

Makes you think, doesn’t it?

Or, take the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco. Why are they starting to build pyramids again? Did you know that a great circle line drawn to connect the Transamerica Pyramid and the Great Pyramid at Giza passes right through the Leaning Tower of Pisa? And yet it goes nowhere near Paramus, New Jersey. What does this mean?

I have in my collection a porcelain teacup with a handle too small to admit a human forefinger. Do eight-foot chickens drink tea?

Next time you’re in a restaurant, see if there is a third, unmarked, door between the men’s room and the women’s room. Who uses these unmarked doors? Do these restaurants serve chicken?

There is a library in Dayton, Ohio, which has no books on herpitology.

There is no one named Ambrose in the Berkeley, California telephone directory.

And what about Ogallala, Nebraska?

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Not to be reprinted or distributed without permission of the author.