The thread title refers to both this first post and the song, much of this insight is not exclusively my own but I wanted to tie some things together and bring some ideas which are rarely connected, at least outwardly, back to the foreground.

Like Hooker w/a Penis - and Ænema - (before I encourage more people to think of this as another merely humorous song) there is far more name-dropping (products/patents and persons) on this song than any of their others, as usual it is plainly significant to the song and highly disdainful. I think "gyroscopes and infra-red, won't help..." is a key line and the whole thing about his pen, his reliance on blotter (which overpowers him, again showing his incompetence) to see things from an external vantage -- all of it has to do with the atrophy of our inherent functions; being our imagination, insight, foresight, memory, basic refreshment, day-to-day 'health', or being able to walk comfortably on the ground...

On the same note there is "his" frenzied astonishment over -- responded to with our total dismissal of -- those things that become visible when some of our latent faculties are aroused, allowing us to recognize the danger of our trajectory, our lack of self-control, our spiritual or "angelic", or even psychic/unconscious counterparts. E.g. others, aliens.

Even "E.T." (in this case with the appeal of the falsely-confident / not-entirely-serious tone that the use of interjected expletives conveys) is a popular cliché and there-by yet another lazy way of communicating, in this case about a presence vividly (whether-or-not delusionally-)percieved on a much more personal level than the narrator is initially prepared to describe, and only in terms of grandeur is he ready to put his story into a tone of importance, both dire and ridiculously melodramatic at that, even suggesting his own murder.

For some of the many other name droppings not alluded to in the above, especially those in the song's first two rants: he describes almost every detail with some reference, borrowed turn of phrase, or novelty-piece of vocabulary, sometimes misused, often failing to communicate any clear image. Just try to picture that alien without looking up pictures of Mez Rossellini, L. Ron Hubbard, or recalling to your mind Jackie's boyish face... and even, no -especially- after that, just try to assemble a clear mental picture.

At least once he even states his own words as lying beyond his comprehension, and repeatedly he states that their words / his realizations are beyond recollection.

Finally, for anyone looking for "layers", or wanting something "more" personal from the song aside from commentary on our modern condition or the sometimes alienating(a-hem) topics of extra-terrestrials and psychedelics, take the birth/death connections of this song via "Shit the bed" (interpretable as "to die") and the theory that alien abductions are actually traumatic, infant-stage or even birth-time memories which resurface and are simply misrecognized.

Just for fun (think: devil-doll), I'll tie this interpretation into the possibly unpopular correlations with Stinkfist -- the loss of all sensation, or in this case meaning, due to fixation; fixation with modern/pop-culture referents and 'stimulating' word-use as, in both cases, the narrator takes us someplace strange and discomforting. "take my hand ...if you will:"




This was fun to write, if it made for choppy reading, well, that’s partly how I relate to the song, and the pace here was meant to demonstrate how exaggerated language risks becoming psycho-babble.

I may clean this up to a degree (unless someone quotes me, blocking the Edit option) and I will likely add more in a later post in order to address more of the song, or to work-out and simplify some of the above.