(This is the second installment in the serial true-life tale "I Am Alien," recounting the sojourn to the September 20, 2019 hoedown at Area 51, there to meet the alien. Installment one went up here August 12.)

Now having received the blessing of The English Patient, things were calmer, here in the car.

Neither Al nor I had ever really believed this mission to be wise, or even sane. We’d more or less bulled one another into it, until suddenly we were actually doing it. But why? That was the nagging question. Nagging worse than those scolds in The Taming Of The Shrew, or even Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. Because when you burn in a fire, what you really want to do is lie in bed. Not that sleep will often come, but maybe at some point it will, and then life will be okay. Because you will be in oblivion. Driving 900 miles across some of the most hellish terrain in all creation to join a bunch of brainleaks at Area 51 who are going to charge like those people in Zulu to try to make the alien come out: that is pretty much the opposite, of lying in bed. But now that The English Patient had vouchsafed upon us a visitation, there could be no doubt: it was right, that we got out of bed.