Guess who arrived yesterday without any prior knowledge by me.
No, guess.
OK, I’ll tell you.
Grandpa Flarttblarst.
One of SHORTY’s grandfathers. (We all have lots of grandfathers on Flamfoozy.)
He’s pretty cool. I’ve never met him before but pretty much everyone likes him. He’s about a thousand years old. Seriously, he is aged. SHORTY even commented on it to him when we met him at the airlock. He just laughed and said, “Kid, you’re only as old as you feel when you look real close in the mirror at those huge bags under your eyes and all the wrinkles all over your face and notice that all the wrinkles are there because you laughed your ass off for you whole life and didn’t get those wrinkles some reptiles get when they are in a bad mood forever no matter what.”
That shut SHORTY up for about two minutes while they were both laughing.
My problem is I don’t know why exactly he’s here. He’s “visiting”. Nothing has happened in the last two of your years that would suggest some “official” visit from The Authorities on the home planet; we’ve been straight on everything. Even paid taxes and did the latest census and everything. Grandpa Flarttblarst has never been connected to them anyway, as far as I know. Not that I would know. You know?
I just hope he’s not here because he has nowhere else to go. Not that there is anything wrong with that, it’s just that in the past, those kind of Visitors From Another Planet can tend to get cranky and cause Unnecessary Psychic Roughness. You know what I mean, they start running the Big Movie from 60 years ago and you are in it except you are a teenage moron who just committed some felony and is preparing to commit another one sometime later today or tomorrow at the very latest.
I hope he’s just here for a visit with no Additional Psychic Charge involved. Speaking of psychic charge. I noticed on my phone bill today that I paid fifteen bucks last month to call long distance to this city I have never heard of . When I called the phone company, they said it was no mistake.
I checked and it turns out my buddy on your planet who lives in the city where I have my Superb Mammal Telephone Service has a cell phone and the cell phone’s number is not in his city, it’s in this other city that it costs a quarter to call every time you dial it and his message machine answers it because he is too busy to answer his dang cell phone.
Where was I? Oh yes, psychic charge.
I hope the Ancient One is just here to visit and have fun. There is good and bad news. “Pops” (we call him “Pops” rather than Grandpa Flarttblarst because “Grandpa Flarttblarst” in our language takes too much effort) has some skills. He’s remodeled spacecraft himself personally. I’ve seen one of them and he did a real, real nice job on it.
On the other hand, he doesn’t seem on first impression to be overly concerned with the messes he makes, or more importantly, cleaning them up himself. He probably left that to one of his ex-wives for his whole life (so far, that is ) and isn’t thinking about changing.
The main thing I have noticed is that he makes everyone around him laugh. In my personal opinion, this is basically all he needs to do to earn his keep around here, so I'm hip to the Grandpa Flarttblarst Visit concept so far.
Pops is talking to Not Flargg right now about some anti-gravity improvement that he dreamed up, right after he finished breakfast and left his bowl and cup right where they were when he finished breakfast.
That will change, of course. SHORTY and I both can be bohemian, but we both know how to do the Female Cleanup. I don’t know if you have that on your planet; it’s where you clean everything up before females arrive. Even then, if you’re too bohemian, it looks bad when they actually do arrive.
We have a bunch of robots that do most of the cleaning up, anyway, so it shouldn’t be much of a problem as long as you can wade through any messes for as long as it takes for the robot to show up.
By the way, I think I mentioned we have another ship in orbit right now. Same kind as the one we live in. SHORTY is buying up a bunch of stuff on eBay to export back to our planet. He raised a few bucks from some venture capitalists somehow. He’s buying mostly bulk stuff, like pistol crossbows and swords and furniture and Sofa Sized Oil Paintings. He’s got this idea for Doll Houses From Around The Galaxy or some such.
Once he gets it full of stuff he’s going to send it back and make his fortune.
He says.
Hey, I’m all for it, myself. He's using all the money he is making selling his t-shirts and coffee cups to mammals on his website. Leave the dough on the host planet, I say. Who needs your stupid paper money anyway. Not us, I can tell you for an absolute certainty.
Winston and Sid are fine, but the Russkies took off about two months ago. They got that shuttle fixed and SHORTY said if they fixed it they could have it. I have no idea where they went.
L8R G8R,
TLC
funphone.com |
