(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.

On the afternoon of September 21 a couple million humans shall storm Area 51, there to meet the alien. Or so they say. Initially, I thought I would be there now: mass public strangeness, that can be among the best, of the Stories. But eventually I realized that, like most everything in my life, it’s just not going to happen. But then decided—hey, that didn’t mean I couldn’t write about it. I mean, why not not go, but say I did? Inaugurate a new form of journalism: This Didn’t Happen; But It Might Have. So that’s, what this is. From time to time, until the day itself, September 21, I will inscribe here serial chapters of “I Am Alien,” the true-life non-fiction account of the quest for the alien. This, here, is the first.

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. The car was electric; now, so were we. That we were electric meant we could approach silently, with stealth; this was right and meet, as we were steaming across these badlands to greet the alien. And it is best not to come up on the alien in great noise. The same is true of the United States military, bristling with weapons, growling and in grump, determined to prevent the people from reaching the alien. But we would not be stopped. For we were not the people: we were press. And it is well known, throughout the many galaxies, that the press may go, where the people may not. We knew the alien understood this. Whether the military would grasp it: we would see.