My rock (and welcome to it).

Hmmm. Looks like a good place to pound some stakes into the ground. No, sFshzenKlyrn, not that kind of steak. The pointy kind, typically made of wood. Wood. A hard, fibrous material that comes from large plants, like... like... Hey! Put the man-sized tuber down!!

Oh, hi. Jeezus christmas - this is like herding cats! Worse... herding cats on Neptune, except without that nice comforting methane atmosphere. Well, anyway... your various Big Green type amigos have taken a slight detour on our way back from Mars... very slight... about 25 light-years off course, thanks to president Lincoln, in point of fact. In a fit of uncontrollable curiosity, Lincoln navigated us over to the solar system of Cancri 55 in the constellation Cancer. Far off the beaten path, to be sure, and here we are on a very tight budget for this trip. (No petty cash... just a stack of pre-signed checks from our label, Loathsome Prick records, in a galaxy that only takes cash or plastic). So much for the Lincoln navigator. Oh, why... why couldn't Trevor James's Orgone Generating Device have brought back a ship's captain from the 19th century instead of this useless emanci-mother-fucking-pater of the slaves (and his evil twin)?

Hard question to answer, so don't even try. Anyway... finding ourselves in an unexplored solar system is bad enough, right? But then our cobbed together space craft (built from reconstituted playground equipment) started wobbling a bit, listing from side to side, etc. We asked Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to take over the helm while we repaired to the wardroom for afternoon refreshments... and Marvin, being a bit overwhelmed by such complex navigational controls, inadvertently brought us down on the third planet. Yes, the third planet.... the one we were warned specifically not to visit. (Actually, I just made that last bit up, so that the rest of this would make sense. It was really a whole lot more random and senseless than all that.) We slammed into the planet's rather unforgiving surface (that much is true), our engine room bursting into flame (bogus), triggering secondary explosions that threw us in all directions (exaggeration - actually, the toaster oven in the wardroom started smoking - some bagel crumbs, I believe - and we all ran out of there).

What was the third planet like? Well, arid. Barren. Lifeless. Those are a few words you could use to describe it. All of them totally inaccurate, of course. We put down in a suburban neighborhood of some kind. Yes, there's a Starbucks (or "four bucks," as it's more generally known). Yes, there's a Home Depot and a Wal*Mart. And yes, the trade union leaders are all in jail. If there's anything remarkably different about this world (as compared to our own home planet), I would have to say that it is that gravity thing. There is, in fact, gravity here on Cancri 55.3, but it's not your normal keep-you-down kind of mysterious force. Sometimes it lets you up about ten feet, leaves you there, moves you a bit to the right, etc. Very capricious. I can tell you, I find it quite unnerving... and Marvin is about ready to pack up his banjo and leave. (He sailed up into the troposphere for maybe a half-hour then landed in the Staples parking lot, where someone mistook him for a stamp vending machine. When he didn't spit out customized postage stamps, the disgruntled patron poured hot coffee into him.) Seems like Marvin always gets the shit end of the stick on these tours. That's why we love him.

Don't know how long we'll be staying here, but time will tell. I noticed a club or two in the center of town.... maybe we can work our way home. Don't like the sound of that, quite frankly, but... one does what one must. Marvin? Go into that dive and ask for a job - there's a good chap.