Time: two years after 9.11

The workday began in pitch-blackness.

Then the outlines of trees appeared in morning mist.

I worked at rebuilding houses alongside illegal aliens. Unlike me, they had cars, ID and cell phones in The Garden State where invaders from The Angry Red Planet traveled on the airwaves of NBC Radio in the 1930s and caused a panic attack among Americans.

One of them tried to exercise machismo over me. I pointed to the crucifix around his neck. Jesus was never an illegal and he paid his taxes, I said. They left me alone with my Tru-Temper ax and the tree stumps that had to be uprooted from the backyard.

Morning, said Mr. Kennedy, the resident next door. I shook the hand of a man who shook hands with the nation’s first space age president. He has a son who was part of the team on NASA’s Rover Project before he moved on to work for the Chinese.

Eventually, humans might become illegal aliens far, far from a weather-beaten Earth.

Think they’ll find life on Mars, I asked as a strange insect crawled inside an empty coffee cup. Who knows, replied a man who works as a school administrator.  He wanted to know where I was from. Like The Man In Black sang, I’ve been everywhere, man. This journal of my travels is like a star gone nova eons ago.

And so I begin reentry again.

                                      Chapter One: It was a dark and stormy night.

In the zero gravity of cyberspace, creative vision fires up as powerfully as The Red Eye of Jupiter. It fuses scattered memories into a phantom brain and makes true a childhood dream to live life like the sci-fi of a comic book. No more Waiting For Super Man. Today, I taught the future of history.