Cat In An Alien X-Ray

The long pause after that sentence is getting to be insulting.

“… that an entire universe of wondrous entities hovers just outside the reach of our hearts and minds?”

And with the defunding of the NASA programs, they can just stay out there hovering undiscovered to their hearts’ content.

“Have you heard of astral projection, Louie?”

Her baby blue gaze leaves the heavens to finally focus again on my lowly self.

“Uh, yeah.” Hey. I am the quintessential dude on the street and the Strip, supposed to be a hip cat up on every new wrinkle in this old town. I need to step up to protect my rep. “I hear that some venues are using holograms of dead superstars like Elvis as tourist attractions. Boogie with Bogey. Get down with James Dean. Mambo with Marilyn.”

“Not holograms, Louie! You have such an impossibly material soul.”

“Holograms are not material. You cannot get more ethereal than being a projected image of yourself.”

“Actually, these crass entertainment technologies do touch on the magic of astral projection. I never need to leave my simple home here at the Circle Ritz—”

Hey! It is a penthouse. And you are the landlady’s prize trust fund baby. I decide to tell her a thing or two for making me sit here to get drenched in mystical mumbo-jumbo.

“I hear Miss Electra Lark,” I say, “has endowed an entire cat shelter to ensure you have ‘most favored nation’ status there should she exit for eternity before you do.”

Karma sighs. Yes. Like a dog. “That is a sweet but useless gesture. I am the result of a thousand reincarnations. My heart will go on.”

Apparently, the ditsy New Age brain too.

Karma is now subtly swaying as a deep purr vibrates her entire body to the ends of the long fine hairs in her ears.

I long to tell her that humans have clever battery-run devices to clear that clutter.

“Before many days are past,” Karma warns in her lowest, most annoying tone of superior knowledge, “you will see signs and portents in the Las Vegas night sky.”

Right, the Treasure Island curbside volcano spitting fake fire far into the dry desert air.

“You will face alien abduction.…”

“That already happened to me in Chicago, where the mob is an entire other species of lame.”

“You will dance with the dead down a ten-story mountain.…”

Manx, is this lady on another plane, probably a discontinued SST! Nobody measures mountains in stories, but in feet.

Karma condescends to slit open one peeper. “That is a metaphor, Louie.”