II

You can trace the first 20 or so years of my life by how we managed to plunder pretty much every part of the Alien’s technology and history. On my first birthday they managed to work out how the computer systems operated on the Alien craft, and so were able to download an amazing amount of perfectly useless Gibberish. Oh yeah, so somehow the official name of the Alien language was designated “Gibberish,” probably because it sounded so much like someone taking their index finger and going “bibbybibbybibby” against their lips. Pretty funny, until you start trying to really understand what the guy going “bibbybibbybibby” is trying to tell you, and then it’s not long before it gets frustrating as hell.

By the time I turned two, they’d found the other video you’ve probably seen which allowed us to start cracking the language, the one with Gordon Ramsay tearing some poor bastard a new asshole for not being able to properly poach an egg, only with the closed captioning equivalent of Gibberish rolling across the bottom of the screen instead of something truly incomprehensible, like French. How anyone managed to tie those symbols to the Alien going “bibbybibbybibby” I’ll never know, but not long after, right about the time I was potty training, they figured out what the Lonely Alien (this was what they were calling the Alien in the video by then – he wasn’t a mass murderer any more, since they’d figured out that the poor fuckers in the coffins all died from natural causes (and how they figured THAT out I’ll also never know)) was screaming at the dude in the park, and when they figured that out, they got a little bit creeped out. They spent a lot of time trying to figure out how he knew, and so far they don’t have a good answer, which is pretty much creeping the rest of us out:

“Send them back. Please. Send them back!”