Aliens

I took Leonard to the movies this afternoon. We saw a film called The Living Universe, the sort of thing that there is probably quite a lot of on Netflix, but he needed to receive a treat because {long story}, and this was on, so we saw it. It was half an imagined interstellar search for life set a hundred and fifty years in the future, and half a series of segments of those unbearable whinnying old baseball-capped khakis-pantsed old men who have worked at NASA for forty years going on and on about how very certain they are that one day 'we' will travel to the stars and it will be the greatest thing 'we' have ever done. Even Len expressed afterwards the strong sensation of being mansplained at by these parts of the movie but he was entranced by the other strand (although it too was imagined, and presented, as dully as possible) and as the lights went up at the end this is what he wrote in the notebook from which it is not possible these days to separate him:



But I already knew that 'we' are not alone and indeed the aliens are already among us. They control the glove industry, for one thing, as I understood when I was in the supermarket the other day and I looked at the rubber glove department.



To really understand what I'm saying you have to look very closely at all the pictures on the boxes. That's what I 'm going to make you do right now.






Some of them are pictures of aliens' hands, inside humanoid rubber gloves, touching human food.
























Yep touching food.



Food
touching



I like these next ones the most


But you have to look closely at the picture.



Cognitively I understand this is supposed to be a picture of a person cleaning the blades of a venetian blind. Those blinds really do get dirty. But what the picture is, and I know this at the gut level, is a picture of the natural hand of the expat Earth-colonist alien, relaxing in zes apartment after taking off the uncomfortable humanoid food-touching body skin, feeling very comfortable but with a slight touch of wariness lest some intolerant knee-jerk of a NASA engineer should be spotted standing in the street outside of the apartment, staring up at this window for a glimpse of the unmasked alien face.