Five words.


Gosh, but it's great to be back home! My favorite five words in the alphabet. Wait... did I say something? Did someone just say something...?


Whoa, sorry, friends. I'm a little woozy after that hard landing the other day. Did I mention our landing was hard? Well, if I didn't (and I do believe I did), let me tell you... it was HARD. We more or less followed the re-entry instructions Urich found tucked under the navigation console (it was buried in coffee grounds and cigarette butts, but still readable). His angle of descent was a bit too steep, perhaps, and the second-hand Soyuz capsule heated to the traditional 450 degrees Kelvin. That was the first piece of difficulty. The second? No water landings with Russian spacecraft. We were forced to find open ground somewhere within walking distance of our long-term squat at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. (Why walking distance? No cab fare. And it's not like we've got the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln out there trawling for us.... even though we have not one but two Lincolns on board.)


So, down and down and down we went. Objects on the ground became larger and larger. I could see my own broken down car - a crispy 1989 Honda Civic - and Mitch Macaphee could even see a pair of cufflinks he lost last summer at one point. That's when it dawned on him that we were getting close... too close. Soon we could see even smaller objects... pinheads, protozoa, large molecules, smaller ones.... then, CRACK! We came to a kind of sudden stop. I think we all lost several inches in height - particularly Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who may have compacted one of his hip-gimbals. (He'll need to consult with Dr. Macaphee on that, no doubt.) My teeth seem to move around a lot more than they did last week. Oh, and the man-sized tuber has a greater specific gravity than he did before. (Mother... now I know why they call it CRACK.)


Okay, so Big Green (like master) is in the cold, cold ground - then what? Well, we did manage to land (by sheer good fortune... nothing to do with piloting skill, I can assure you) within walking distance of the Cheney Hammer Mill. Unfortunately, it wasn't easy limping distance, so it took the better part of an afternoon getting over there. (Lincoln and anti-Lincoln grousing all the way, of course.... If I have to come back there again!) In fact, it took us so bloody long that the local constables beat us to the door. So how, you may ask, were we able to run afoul of the law in such a short time on Earth? Well... our Soyuz capsule is apparently considered hazardous waste... not surprising, since it is chock full of noxious chemical substances and was found lying squashed like a cigarette butt in the middle of a beet field. We should have taken Mitch's advice and set the freaking thing on fire before we limped off into the sunset. Live and learn.


Live and learn? $4,000 for hazardous waste removal? W.t.f. - that's our entire take from this last few weeks, assuming Zenonian drachmas are still convertible to genuine U.S. currency. (That's assuming a lot, I will admit.) Easy come... easy go.

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