Hiç kimse gelecek.

Nobody will come.

About a month and a half ago, I was leaving the Memorial Union as the Bloomington Shuttle was disgorging her Indianapolis-inbound, travel-weary passengers onto the lenai near the entrance to the IU Credit Union. One woman caught my attention; of course, it was because I could easily envision wearing her tanned scalp on my shaved head; her reddish-blonde hair shimmered in the late winter sunlight. No, she looked incredibly familiar, and I was utterly transfixed. Girl, I said in my head, where you be from, uh? No, she wasn't one of my Bloomington friends, and since I know only four people in Indiana who live outside the Republic, I ruled Indiana out as well. That could mean only one thing.

She was from the mothership.

It took me ages to screw my courage up to approach her. Those of you who know me might be surprised at just how shy I can be sometimes. Visions of her screaming "Rape!" at the top of her lungs was what really did it. But eventually, I couldn't loiter any longer without the hotel staff thinking I was casing the joint. So I went over to her and punched her in the neck and ran. Haha, no. I walked up to her and immediately began to stammer like a moron.

Duhhhhh... I think I know you... not from here... home in Maine... I have this extra chromosome...

She shot a taser-dart directly into my left nipple and began to hose my face down with chemical sprays of East German origin. When I blacked out from the pain, she used her bitch-boots to crush my testes whilst shrieking "Down with cow demons and snake spirits!"

Actually, she turned and smiled and when I mentioned I was from Maine, she perked up dramatically. "Bangor, right?", she said. "We went to Bangor High School together. I'm Class of 1999." And she was right: now I totally remembered her! She even lived in my 'hood! I hadn't seen her in seven years, but there she was, and there I was, and we were grayer, wiser, and (I can't speak for her on this one) needing desperately to poop. We talked for a half hour, and then her brother, who came out here to the corn to teach, picked her up. It was a good time; well, once I regained consciousness and washed my face.

I've been out here, in my own little world, for almost two whole years. Nobody I know from my other worlds--Turkey, Maine, North Carolina, New Jersey--has come to the corn to see me.

< in the distance, softly, Izhak Perlman begins to tune a hummingbird-sized violin >

Not that I care. In fact, I'd probably cut you real bad if you did come. I'm just stating a fact, that's all. Take it as you will, insolent bastards.

This coming Tuesday, the planets will align and humpback whales in the Atlantic will give birth to two-headed calves; it'll be my 25th birthday. To celebrate my nativity, the government of Canada will be starting their annual harp-seal pup cull on the northern pack-ice. No, I am not making this up. 25 candles on my cake, 4,000 dead baby seals. It's like some sort of cosmic joke. I am going to write Ottowa and demand that, as sacrifice, they provide me with my own seal-club. I won't use it...

On seals.

In other "news that makes the scrambled eggs in your belly do the fandango", a diner at a Wendy's chain somewhere godforsaken was enjoying her chili when lo, she found that in her mouth was a human finger. She did what any one of us would have done: bleached it and kept it as a grisly souvenir. And by "any one of us" I mean "I." No, she projectile-vomited through her eye-sockets, of course. The question is: how did it get there? As alert Life in the Corn devotee Keith pointed out, Wendy's chili is made on-site with unusable (broken, I hope) hamburgers. Wouldn't someone have, uh, reported a missing digit? Was it a cruel joke? Was there dirt under the fingernail? Well, it's all moot, anyway. She's going to get an out-of-court settlement that will ensure her easy access to the finest doublewide money can buy and a snoot full of Columbia's finest. Life, and the world, is a vampire.

My father, yet another alert Life in the Corn disciple, called me last night to tell me that he had a really great time at Sam's Club on a recent excursion. Why, you ask? Other than the fact that you can buy Thousand Island dressing in an industrial steel-drum? No, my dad just had a hip replacement (the future looms grimly for me) and he got to use one of the fun motorized handicapped carts. "The best part", he said, "was when you backed up and it made that beeping noise like when a truck is backing up." Now you all can have a better idea of how it is that I came to be like I am. Genetics don't only determine eye color, y'know.

On Tuesday afternoon, I parked my car in the X-Lot (out at the frikkin' stadium) and took the shuttle onto campus. The bus was Calcutta-full: visions of turning on CNN and you hearing about a minibus going over a ravine in India because it had 2,418 people in and on it swam lazily before me. I, luckily, had a seat, and when the bus got more crowded, I moved my bag to my lap and waited for a coed to seat him/herself next to me. Now, at this point the bus had easily thirty more people than it should have had on it, and yet:

Nobody would sit next to me.

I motioned and spoke to two people and told them that they could sit, but they preferred (their eyes told all) to being pressed up against three other people so hard that their pores began to aspirate together. One girl got pregnant accidentally. And yet, still, nobody would sit.

It might be the beard, combined as it was with the crescent-and-star patch on my bag. But hey, if I were going to detonate something on that bus, proximity to me isn't going to matter: they'll still bury you in a Matchbox car. I didn't smell. My breath was citrusy fresh. What gives?

And, could it have been the necklace of human eyelids I was wearing?

I remain, as ever,

Dom