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The human race had come to an end. That much was certain. Centuries of culture, ingenuity, and bloodshed were all gone. Erased. A mere fabrication of universal imagination.
This was the final campaign for V’ry Captain M’Tal and his crew. A definitive conquering point to his celebrated career. What he didn’t count on was the last stand from a band of beings left on a sloppy little planet called Earth.
M’Tal hated humans. They should have been eradicated by the V’ry onslaught. He would make these humans pay for surviving the V’ry genocide.
There was just one troubling aspect…the survivors weren’t human.
BelieveItTour blogger Joseph Mazzenga’s exciting new novella is available through Amazon and Whispers Publishing:
http://www.amazon.com/Invasion-of-Blood-ebook/dp/B005N0LRZ4/ref=cm_pdp_rev_itm_img_1
http://whispershome.com/science-fiction/invasion-of-blood/
 You might get more than a pot of gold when you find a leprechaun Yes! For all that is good, sweet and pure on this resource laden, teetering on our own destruction, beautiful, third celestial body from the sun, I believe. I believe in leprechauns. Come on, so do you. Don’t deny it.
I parked my truck on a Friday afternoon and it sat there for two days. On Monday, just in time for work, I placed the stiletto key into the ignition and “Pah-chukka-pah-chukka”. Nothing. Leprechauns at their best.
Now someone would argue that gremlins were at work, but nay, nay, thrice nay. Tis the small being hooked on the green we’re talking about. Rainbow? Gold? Bah. They are the world’s oldest practical jokers. Yes, someone could regale me again about ancient tales having these wee folks ply some sexy occupation dealing in shoe repair, but, in the end, the little buggers are silent pranksters. Foiling fools with bags of tricks well before Penn & Teller branded that sort of thing in Vegas. I know this since I’ve seen it with my own eyes. The evidence is damning.
Here are some headlines ripped from today’s news.
Senior citizen with forty cats wins lottery.
Kobe Bryant misses free throws. Lakers lose to Celtics.
End of rainbow discovered. Yields no gold. Story at 11.
Come on guys. It’s easy. Where did you leave your car keys? On the counter? No, you left them in the bedroom under piles of unwashed socks, but somehow they ended up on the counter. How does this happen? Leprechauns that’s how.
Think about it. Who always closes the screen door, so the dog can run full steam into it every day? He never learns, right? Wrong. The door was open. You went to start dinner and wham – dog with a waffle pattern on his nose when the door was suddenly closed.
Just like the new cement patio that has footprints, and that first scratch on your new car that never left the garage. Say it with me – Leprechauns.
The list goes on and on. You try to kiss your date and you burp. The soup you had in the microwave stayed 1.5 seconds too long and explodes. The houseplants suddenly haven’t been watered in seven days and I can’t even tell you how long your freezer has been cracked open. It all comes down to those mysterious, three foot, give or take, monsters that wish to make hay with our lives.
One even had the audacity to leave my blinker on for five miles. I won’t go into my college grades either. Leprechauns are out there and they are waiting to show the world that your fly has been open for a better part of the day.
To all those, Irish or not, have a pleasant and leprechaun-free St. Patrick’s Day.
 Are Nostradamus predictions for the future clear or out of focus? Believe It Tour explores this. I want to establish my opinion up front. If Michel de Nostredame, Nostradamus to most of us, were my neighbor, I would walk around the hedges I purposely overgrew and plug him one right in the jaw. The audacity. The reprehensible gall he showed by predicting a whole culture’s future from his couch. He was the prototypical armchair seer before traveling carnivals made it popular.
According to one particularly sagely Star Trek episode, “When a man is convinced he’s going to die tomorrow, he’ll probably find a way to make it happen.”
We buy it wholesale – all of the predictions and prophecies. With no scientific evidence, no hard line empirical theory, we boldly go where everyone so willingly wants to go. Panic and loss of faith soon follow.
Just to see how easy it is, let’s go over a few of the more popular predictions by Nostradamus.
Nastro predicted that the world was going to end in 1994. No, wait it was 2000. No, wait again it was 2012. Clearly, there is no classic clairvoyance cluttering our futures here. Still you know there was someone, somewhere taking all of his or her cash out of an ATM at 11:59 pm, December 31, 1999. Presently, Hollywood and the rest of the world are mired in 2012 hysteria. Even the Mayan descendants are waving their arms in disgust over this. The 2012 frenzy isn’t Mayan, it’s Western and, cut it out, it’s embarrassing.
Nastro was also purported to have predicted 9/11. This isn’t only embarrassing, but it’s absolutely shameful. People who lack the ability to reason that this was an act of a few truly evil inhabitants of the world rather than divination from days past should fall upon their prediction swords.
Oh, but it was written that two rocks would be at war. Let’s be sure we’re clear here that the 16th century was replete with myth and legend. If Nastro had visions of jets and buildings so alien to his culture he might have snapped altogether.
The Big N went down on paper predicting the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Okay, maybe the description of a lightning bolt hitting a great man was stretched a bit. What people never mention is that the rest of the prediction states that Tuscany would be overrun by pestilence. Overrun by olives or vineyards? Okay, I can buy that, but pestilence? However, the last time I looked Tuscany was still pumping out great vistas and greater food without any indication of pestilence on the way.
Nastro also forecast the demise of poor Princess Diana. Her death was to deliver a people from his or her own hopelessness. I have no idea what this means in the least. It was a senseless death and the Brits never did a bad thing to me.
My good friend even prognosticated Katrina destroying the great city of New Orleans…along with Reims. What the heck does Reims have to do with Katrina, hurricanes, or New Orleans? I even had to look where Reims was actually located – France.
My point to this entire rant is that we, as a culture, will bend ‘predictions’ to fit our future. This is fueled by lack of faith that we can better ourselves and lack of will to actually do so.
Here are some of my predictions for the future. Mark them down.
1. If we don’t stop our fuel-wasting way of life, global warming will get worse.
2. The Middle East will need to stop shooting at each other in order to have peace.
3. Prince Charles will never see the crown – ever.
4. In the future, baseball will be even more boring.
5. Someday Jay Leno will be funny again.
6. Aliens will one day land and confess that they built the pyramids and would like to have their knickknacks on Easter Island back.
7. Cancer will be cured…so will HIV for that matter.
8. The Buffalo Bills will never win the Superbowl – ever.
9. Chocolate will be banned in the free world.
10. Joe Mazzenga will leave his job to become a full-fledged author.
Mark it down…
 What lies beyond Earth and inside
of Pandora's box? He’s the Albert Einstein of our time. Even more blasphemous, Albert’s superior in many ways. His deformed atrophied body, the shell of a normal man, houses perhaps the greatest mind in the short history of the Homo sapien.
There he is: Stephen Hawking, astrophysicist and genius. In all of his brilliance he’s making a profound statement. He’s saying that we should think twice before attempting to talk to other life forms in the heavens. In fact, his tone is extremely wary in this area.
To this day, we’re still enamored with what lies “out there.” It secretly drives our probing into space. Like children looking to please their parents, we try to do the right thing and be peaceable by sending out songs from the Beatles. We talk in mathematics, the language of the universe. Our clunky machines sail aimlessly to the outer rim with the hopes of our Whoville-type society telling someone, or some thing, that we are here. Yes, we are here.
As we explore, Hawking just sits – compact and scrunched by ALS. His statement about communicating with others in the vast universe is akin to “do not open Pandora’s box”. Anyone else would only garner a nod, a snicker, or a snort of contempt. However, Stephen Hawking is someone we actually stop and listen to. What is he afraid of? What can that supercomputer of a mind really be thinking?
Most humans have no idea that the Earth is a very noisy planet. Our televisions and radio waves, to say nothing of our cell phones and communication arrays, spill an untold amount of static into the galaxy. Even if we wanted to remain quiet and heed Hawking’s warning, we are far too late. Like noisy neighbors having a beer bash well into the wee hours, we have been chattering away for far too many decades.
SETI Institute literally scans the cosmos in search of a hiccup or a cough, anything that denotes sentient life. Our mining for gold has turned up very few specks of evidence, yet we continue to listen.
What is Stephen Hawking afraid of? Klingons, The Borg, Wraiths, or Minbari? My humble opinion tells me it may be something subtler. My judgment, my heart, tells me that Hawking simply feels the “children” are not ready for what we might find or what might find us. In our egocentric way, we fancy ourselves as the Universe’s perfect computers, the ultimate machines, guided by an organic computer whose limit we have yet to realize, but is that really the case? Are we really at the top of the intellectual food chain?
What if there is something more out there? What if there is something so superior, we would be reduced to mere shadows that stretched under the feet of cosmic gods? What if these gods were not benevolent?
What does a wild animal imagine when a rope is flung around its feet and a cloth is thrown over its head? I don’t think we ever really want to know, but we might be able to relate if our efforts at communicating go awry. Our benevolent and fuzzy images of Ewoks or Yoda would be gone and replaced by something quite different. The current hierarchy in our world and in the universe would be irreversibility changed. Our innocence and a whole lot more would leave us forever.
I have a feeling Stephen Hawking already knows what might be in store for us and I fear he may be correct.
 Is the monster under your bed or in your energy drink? Monster: ugly terrifying being, ugly person, huge thing.
Let’s get one thing straight. We love a good monster. We love everything about monsters. We love monster movies. We love the terror they bring and we love the fun. We’ve written and rewritten their legends. All media now has a hand in the marketing and sexing up of all creatures in the woods, in our closets and under our beds.
Monsters. The word has evolved over the centuries. What was once the unexplainable on our corporeal plane, reaching from the darkest forests of our minds, now is sitting, literally under our nose all dressed in puffy blue, pink, or raspberry fur.
We have monster trucks, monster houses, monster lyrics, and monster energy drinks. We play Monster Mini Golf, install monster cable, and digest monster gulf shrimp. It’s all monster – all of the time. It’s no longer bloodcurdling, but it’s still larger than life. If you want a supersized drink, you monster-size it. You pull a fakie and go for monster air. Even our reality shows have gone monster. You’ve had your fair share of MonsterQuest, well get ready for River Monsters – not just trout, but monster trout. Last, but not least, you don’t want to forget that Believe It Tour even has their own monster world.
It all begs to ask the question – Where did this fascination with monsters come from? What happened to cowering at all of those noises in the night? Perhaps it starts with our children. We no longer regale them with tales of sinister shadows around a campfire. Those fables have been replaced with such bedtime stories as Glad Monster, Sad Monster, and Frank Was a Monster, Who Wanted To Dance. And of course, what person still doesn’t remember the happiest monster haven on the planet – Sesame Street, replete with one Cookie Monster gone vegetarian.
Where have our monsters gone? Is there something out there that will bring back the unexpected? Are we forever caught in a web of monster fishing, monster eating, and monster car sales? It’s probably a matter of numbers. Humans were once outnumbered even if it was in their own minds. Now we are the usurpers. Monsters simply have nowhere to live…
Vampires, werewolves, ghosts, spirits and myths of old. Like the American bison, these folklores have begun to disappear as our towers stretch to the sky, and our mind’s shrink within ourselves. The modern age shuffles through our lives and these stories are relegated to white noise.
What happens when a Native American burial ground meets the blade of a 6,000 pound bulldozer? Where does a spirit roam when the 40-acre wood is turned into a shopping mall complex? However, you do hear the sensational on occasion. A hotel whose 50th floor is haunted. A house whose doors continue to open and close. A werewolf roaming about in New Hampshire, Michigan, or Wisconsin is reported, but one has yet to heed the howl from atop the Prudential Building in Boston.
Hunters seek out the answers, bravely venturing out into the night with equipment of science. They invade a creature’s woods, breaking into a spirit’s home. All in the name of proof. All in the name of answers. Searching for something that’s tangible. We want to touch it, smell it, or hear it.
The great irony is that almost from the start of understanding, we are fed the stories of the world around us, below us, and above us. The vast majority of us are paranormally blind. Our bulldozing lives have eroded our faith in anything that can’t be touched, bought off of the internet, or rationalized with a hot latte in hand.
It’s not that our belief has been taken away suddenly. No, it’s been decades of cultural modernization that have worn our shores of spirituality to nothing more than hard, cold rock. Unfeeling and unhindered by the dark or the light.
A spirit simply doesn’t walk through our capes and classic cottages any more. The ethereal has no place in the pool of the local YMCA. Sasquatch cannot compete with the local Stop n Gas. Werewolves are just children’s stories that are long past their expiration date. Those who don’t walk our corporeal plane simply don’t exist.
Or do they? Maybe, just maybe, our senses, just like our instincts, have been dulled by the drive-thrus more than anyone will care to admit. Maybe the other dimension is still here, but the HDTV and Wii are blocking it?
Our edifying development has grown a nictitating membrane. A third eyelid that blocks out the very edges of our imagination. Faith doesn’t require a leap anymore; it demands to be shot out of a canon. More and more, it needs to be surgically removed just to find it within ourselves.
Even ancient folklore has been made sexier, more seductive, more palatable. What once was terrifying is now tame and marketed. Vampires with teen angst dance amongst werewolves who can barely shave. These were not the creatures that petrified whole villages and whose legend spread across continents like a primordial virus.
Ghosts and spirits that may walk among us are now cold drafts of an open window or the bent reflections of a fading sun. Our logical minds twist the very wind that blows out the candle of our mind’s eye. Where does this leave us? Some would say we are modernized, efficient beings doing what we do best – living within ourselves. However, I have to wonder if our inner child isn’t truly bereft of fantasy and the fantastic. For all that we are or may be, we may be truly blind.
“I believe.”
It was circa 1972 when I heard my father say that for the first time. As a kid, I would watch the very British television show, UFO, with my dad and when the moment struck he would utter those two words. This was the fuel for my fantasies. If my father could believe that we were not alone in the universe then what chance did a six year old have in denying that train of thought?
What came next seemed only natural. Being a comic book hound, super heroes that lived on Earth suddenly became humans reaching for the stars.
Everyday before school, I’d pass a large photograph of Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Buzz Aldrin. They sat in their bulky space suits and held their helmets as if they were just coming back from battle. The moon sat like a throne behind them, gray and silver. Majestic.
I would stay awake until the sun came up, dreaming that we were being watched by some benevolent race, maybe even being chuckled at like parents who watch over their children at the playground. Still the years rolled on. My love for sci-fi grew as my dreams for “out there” spread into my every day life.
Then it happened. It was a hot summer night (aren’t they all) and I was out in the backyard embracing the inky black that was night. The sky was indigo against the tree line and I was just like any other teen soaking in his summer vacation – savoring my freedom from the rigors of high school and all that entailed.
Unexpectedly, a blood-red streak flew through the sky. It wasn’t the 4th of July and this streak made no sound. It wasn’t linear in its arc. Rather, it streaked at a series of 50 to 70 degree angles. It also moved at a fantastic rate. At the risk of sounding Star Wars-ian, the streak and the three others that followed were not random, but very precise. Meteorites? Maybe, but these were heading up into the atmosphere, not downward. It all happened in less than 10 seconds. There was no fanfare. No portentous musical prelude. Just the event itself, barren and devoid of any magnified salutation.
I never reported the occurrence. I wasn’t even sure that what I saw wasn’t my version of a “weather balloon.” Still, decades have passed and I continue to look to the sky. It doesn’t have to be the oppressive heat of summer or the paralyzing cold of winter. I always count the stars until I’m bored. It gives the vastness of space before me even more scope.
We can’t comprehend what we can’t touch. Tangible is our personal universe. Quantum physics puts other beings and mirror images of what we are in other dimensions. These aren’t concepts for the faint of heart. Yoda would tell us, “stagnant you have become,” as we occupy our thoughts with little league, PTO meetings, and identity crisis when our best pair of jeans don’t fit anymore. I went outside again tonight on the first real spring-like evening of the year. The red streaks have never appeared again and chances are they probably never will.
Somewhere, out there, second star to the right and straight on till morning…I still believe.
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