But Why the Nerdy Triangles?

Not enough people would ever hear Bug Stu’s call, so he knew he needed to get inside the heads that he could, starting with Rhettie, shown on the left—first as a useful abstraction. Ambiguity lurks here, yes.

Episode 5 (7-8 minute read time)

“It’s not like people would ever hear me or want to listen.” -Bug Stu 2018

Stu figures that a few people here and there have seen Stralfs, their saucers, and have also heard Stu’s calls, but they’ve been afraid to be called crazy. So even though he’s a sci-fi fan, songs about flying saucers and shows about extraterrestrials or space travel often make him cry, for us, especially if they’re older productions.

What gets him is how close we were to recognizing the presence and influence of the Stralfs, for one. He gets a similar feeling when he thinks of the mostly overlooked thinkers that “seemed to have a little bug stew in them,” as he likes to say, quickly adding that “it’s the humor not the hubris” that’s amusing in the expression.

Sometimes it’s been songwriters, like Bernie Taupin. I mention Bernie Taupin because we’re on the subject of flying saucers. Bernie wrote a song for Elton John to sing called “I’ve Seen the Saucers.” He’s said to have been inspired by an early manipulator of human belief, at least in terms of the appropriation of extraterrestrials. For one, there’s the sadness of selfish or self-aggrandizing manipulation, but it also helped categorize Stralf sightings as mere hoaxes, according to Stu.

It’s not a well-known Bernie Taupin/Elton John song, and it’s not as well-produced as hits like “Goodbye, Yellow Brick Road,” which is another of Stu’s favorites, if you can call being consistently brought to tears an indication of a favorite. (I think it makes Stu feel sort of human, which is another complex issue, but I can’t digress.) It does have some wonky lyrical issues at two spots, in our opinions, but it’s kinda cool to think of it as a beautiful song in early-draft form, with Elton and Bernie being too busy to really polish it. A beautiful not-entirely-finished artifact—let’s say as part of a layered ballad about our lack of attention, especially to Stralfian influences and to deep stewardship, which requires a lot of authentic expansive wondering.

Here’s a YouTube video with the song and lyrics, set to an old sci-fi movie background. It may not the best way to hear the song due to the distracting video, but it’s probably more enjoyable than just hearing the song for the first time, if that’s the case for you, considering how we don’t typically appreciate a song so much our first time hearing it. (If you know them, please email Elton and Bernie and ask them to polish it up like the others for re-release.)

I almost got off track there

I just meant to reinforce the idea that we know people will dismiss us if we talk about talking to talking beetles or seeing aliens, as have others before us. So that’s why Stu decided he needed to get into the dreams of a girl named Rhettie, who happened to grow up or at least spend a lot of time in the three most important locations for the Stralfs’ operations, which are Newton County, Indiana; Lafayette, Indiana; and Chicago, Illinois.

Rhettie often sees things with an abstraction lens, even herself. She’s not really a triangle, of course, but the triangle represents a few important things about how she often sees life, reality, herself, and others. There’s the secure and protective base, the stable multi-purpose semi-permeable boundary, and a wide-open unmaterialized manifestation of her identity, partly because she’s not at all sure of how that should work.

And speaking of should, that’s probably her most meta interest, a meta mulling, Stu calls it. Stu noticed it early on, as she was gazing out across a pond several years ago. He couldn’t be sure what she was thinking, but because of the spot she was in at the time, and based on some conversations he’d snooped on, he decided it was at least likely that her mullings and his dreams could combine and morph into her dreams and then into reality—if she could find some help, of course.

It appears that she did find the help, potentially, in Wally, whom she met in Lafayette. They’re both Purdue grads, and that’s handy due to Purdue’s involvement with the space programs, which were largely driven by Stralfian interventions, unbeknownst to humans, as far as anyone has mentioned. As alumni, they give Purdue stuff a little more attention than they might otherwise, and this is all going require deep attention, and intention, on their part.

Wally, with an outlook similar to Rhettie’s, had recently discovered his own interest in should, thanks partly to his dad’s own ponderings and mullings. His dad is in his mid-sixties, so he grew up in the Sixties, and for the last few decades he’s been thinking of some counterfactuals in, or to, the life he’s lived. Wally’s dad is not doing real well right now due to early-onset dementia. But he did a lot of writing over the last twenty years or so, and Wally is incorporating his thoughts into his own, as he ponders his own meta mullings about should.

Stu says Rhettie and Wally’s meeting each other “is clearly a serendipitous convergence”, or just “a Convergence” with the capital C. Between the two of them, says Stu, the necessary plays could be produced to effectively expose the Stralfs and their emigration plans for us humans. In fact, says Stu, it is their ongoing work that plays a big role in the Stralfs’ annual STAY/NO STAY conference as will be held again this coming Sunday.

As you might have read in Episode 4, the Stralfs’ conference is about assessing 2021 in terms of their mission, which is to make us so miserable that we want to leave and go to their secretly crappy planet, led by one of the space boys or girls (i.e., Elon Musk), unaware of the Stralfian influences. There’s been a decades-long preparation for this, starting with the Apollo programs, for raising our comfort levels. Still, some years are bad news for creatures that like bad news, so the Stralfs are meeting to decide on 2021, and what it meant for their future probability of success.

Here’s the Thing

The meaning of some events in 2021 isn’t clear right away, so the first several weeks of 2022 actually impact the interpretation. A few good things have happened lately, for humans and for Earth (since the Stralfs are likely to wreck this planet too if they take over). One of the most dangerous things that Stralfs have to consider is detection. Up to this point, what few reports there might have been about Stralfs haven’t been taken seriously, which they’ve come to expect and are dependent on, since their camouflage techniques aren’t fool proof.

However, the Stralfs always fear our digging too deeply into the histories of certain key locations where there’s been a lot of Stralf activity. One of their fairly recent scares was in 2012 when Everglades of the North was released. As an aside, that year happened to be the beginning of my Vow of Ignorance. Now that I think about it, maybe it was Stu that was guiding some subconscious mullings of mine then, because without that Vow of Ignorance, which has been sort of suspended since 2014, I might not have noticed the Stralfs, or Stu, myself.

Anyway, several trends seemed to be going counter to Stralfian plans around that time, and the new attention to the old Beaver Lake area was the most unexpected and unwelcome development. Would common entries about small weird smelly things that made moaning and mumbling sounds show up in old journals? Would the dots be connected?

Daniel Kahneman’s book from the early 2000’s had made the Stralfs back off due to some complicated tactical impacts. The later food movement brought other obstacles that still persist. The 2008 Crash was directionally correct but was indeterminate, in terms of coalescing a credible emigration movement. The unexpected setbacks of the 2000’s justified anticipated year-to-year extensions of the 2014 deadline, however when Everglades of the North came out, the Stralfs considered evacuating before detection reached a critical likelihood.

But nothing happened. No dots were connected in any serious way. New economic distractions multiplied. So the Stralfs moved on more quickly to Plan F, which we’ll detail out here later. You know how stories are supposed to have their ups and downs according to Hero’s Journey formulations? Well, this had those.

Stu thinks the Stralfian evaluation of 2021 will be unsettling for them. Several things have gone their way over the last few years, but a few potentially derailing developments (remember those D’s) look to be bad news for creatures that like bad news. One of the developments is that another completely unexpected documentary about their headquarters area (among other things) was completed. The significance wasn’t actually known in 2021, but in early 2022 it clearly has derailing detection potential. The film is by Jackie Spinner, and it has just been picked up by WTTW in Chicago. (I didn’t see any entries yet on a quick Google search).

Several Convergences happened around the Lafayette area in 2021, and some are embodied in these episodes. The determining factor at the conference, according to Stu, will be how the Stralfs see the work of Rhettie and Wally progressing. Their histories and synergistic syntheses create an existential threat to not only the Stralfs’ plans but their survival here. You might wonder why they don’t derail the productions that Rhettie and Wally are developing.

The Stralfs are in a difficult position now, due to the defection of an early scout whom Stu refers to as Stralphie. We’re at our limit for today, so I’ll go just a little further down that path tomorrow, if at all possible. (This is where the significance of 1920 comes in, in case you read yesterday’s title and were wondering. Titles and subject lines don’t guide me as well as they should, I admit.)

Thanks for reading.

Tim