Description

Using the "author-as-guinea-pig" approach, I Know Why the Aliens Don't Land! boldly goes were no book has gone before, answering with finality the only question that matters: "Why do butt-raping aliens refuse to land?"

Author's Commentary Track

When I was approached by Filament Books to do an exclusive ebook version of this, they told me I could add a new forward or afterward or make any changes I wanted to the text. Minor proofreading aside, I didn't want to change any dated material because for me personally this book as a time capsule. Also, I didn't want to put anything at the beginning that would spoil the journey and who gives a fuck about a new afterward?

With that in mind, and not wanting to release any material that may end up in the next book, I thought, Hey! Most DVD's have director's commentary tracks, why can't books have author's commentary tracks?

So here I am quietly revolutionizing the book industry with the first ever author's commentary track ….

Alone … dark room … speaking to the echo of his voice and the flickering wall shadow that answers back.

Jeremy: Hello, my name is Jeremy Vaeni and I wrote this fine book. I originally set out to write a series of New York stories based on…on… well, the stuff that became the Mr. Liberal Goes To New York section. The sequence of events just flowed so well in real life, like a natural narrative, that I thought it would make great material for a book. And then I figured if I'm going to write something autobiographical it would be disingenuous not to include the alien abduction stuff.

Shadow: Plus, that's your bread and butter.

Jeremy: Well, it would have been if anyone actually gave a shit about alien abductions anymore. I mean it's not as though joe public is clamoring for the next bland tale of bald gray-skinned munchkins milking the prostate while warning of some future natural catastrophe. But the abduction experience is a part of my life and so I thought I should share it --

Shadow: Because there's such high public demand for material about you --

Jeremy: -- Sorry?

Shadow: No, nothing.

Jeremy: I thought I should share it -- I know there's no demand for me, I'm just some guy. I'm saying if I'm writing a true account of my life I shouldn't exclude that part because -- whose commentary track is this?

Shadow: Getting hostile.

Jeremy: Sorry.

Shadow: Hostile.

Jeremy: I said sorry … So, yeah. Anyway, then I thought if I'm going to write a book with abductions in it it's got to be about that. I mean the abductions can't just be incidental. So I took a look at my UFO book collection to see what was missing. I didn't want to just write another baffling abduction account, because the whole subject had grown stale to me. And also I have a far greater imagination than is required for merely relating the same story other abductees have related, so why not put that to use?

Also, I was on the cusp of understanding the fundamental human dilemma: in terms of general mindset, humanity has gone from magical thinking to scientific materialism and are at the end of that rope with no significant change in the species. In other words, we've evolved out of an irrational superstitious gods-and-demons-control-everything way of thinking into a rational, everything-has-a-concrete-answer way of thinking.

Generally, I mean; certainly a kagillion people are still religiously fundamentalist in the world, who look at their religious texts as literal instructions, but they are either not educated properly or are choosing to ignore facts. The rational transcends the irrational. Okay, that's pretty clear. Yet and still, this great logical capacity of ours has not solved one fundamental internal human problem: hatred, jealousy, pride, greed, desire -- all of the things religion calls evil and science calls dysfunctional behavior have only changed names but they have not gone away.

So here we are going to Mars in the midst of war. Here we are wearing our crosses while punching out a guy at the local bar. Here we are drugging children and giving elderly men hard-ons instead of giving Africa a cure for AIDS. We still don't get it: the internal projects the external in spite of scientific progress. That the rational is more functional, better ordered than the irrational doesn't mean that rationality and by extension, science, can answer everything. We can build better houses than yesteryear but we still have it in us to blow them up -- and better weapons with which to do so. The desire to blow them up remains seeded in even the kindest and smartest of us.

Shadow: And you're saying that this progress has hit a dead end.

Jeremy: No, I'm saying we've latched onto logic as our modus operandi when what it really is is the ability to recognize and create symbolic and material order. Precisely because we are logical beings who believe logic to be the top tier of human consciousness, we cannot fathom translogic. We can understand it in logical terms, as a mental exercise, a debate, but the fact of it, the living from the translogical point-of-view is just a hypothetical. And yet, truth be known, translogic is the stream from which logic runs.

Truth hits the time stream and becomes fact or fiction. So, circling back here, now we're at a place where we must die to the logical, just as we previously died to the illogical. The other option is stagnation, which leads to atrophy and therefore extinction. I mean this is a grave point in human history; this is a genuine fork in the road for our species. One path is a dieback of the species; the other path is the cessation of thought. The destruction of the ego, the me, the individual personality is the next phase in human evolution if we grasp it. Ending thought is not impossible and it doesn't lead to mental retardation, as one might assume. I didn't know firsthand while writing this book exactly what it lead to but -- okay, okay, I'm getting ahead of myself.

Shadow: Save it for the sequel.

Jeremy: That sounds money-grubbing. I just wish I weren't so broke so it could also feel money grubbing. That was a joke.

Shadow: I'm not Norm. I don't laugh at your jokes.

Jeremy: Fine. Where am I? Right. With this book I was on the cusp of knowing all this great stuff intellectually, even if I hadn't yet experienced it. So I wanted to relate my opus in terms of psychological loops. We live our lives in patterns within patterns. I used me to illustrate that, culminating in the giant Nickelodeon chapter, which transcended and included the material from other chapters. I had to pop the bubble on everyday normalcy before I could delve into the alien waters beneath the surface. I had in mind Norman Mailer's novel, Why Are We In Vietnam? where he doesn't even mention 'Nam until the conclusion. At least I think that's what happens. I dunno…I never read it. Is that shallow?

Shadow: Of course.

Jeremy: That's how you know it's true! So yeah, that's what I did. The only other thing that isn't self-evident is I capitalized certain words and bolded certain words, italicized, etc. in the hopes that some nerd somewhere would read it and figure there was a hidden code. I sort of had Robert Anton Wilson in mind here, his Cosmic Trigger series, which I have read. His books claim to be mind expansion devices. He is a wise man but a bit of a trickster too. I liked the whole idea of that so I stole it. My version probably just looks like the unibomber wrote it though. Oh well. Another lesson in failure.

Shadow: I'm still stuck on why there would have to be a dieback of the species just because we don't get some concept.

Jeremy: It's not some concept. It's actual and it's contrary to everything we've ever been taught or experienced. All enlightenment is is the cessation of thought. Thought is the brain -- brain cells. The brain uses its senses to form a coherent image of the world and acts from this image. Everything you think and do comes from this image. Beyond the image is the real. You must dissolve the image for the real to blossom.

Shadow: You're telling us that the brain has to stop controlling its cells for this undefined thing you're essentially calling "God" or "Truth" to act.

Jeremy: Yes! That's our free will choice: To live the point-of-view of God or to live the point-of-view of self, which is the brain. That's the trick of a sentient brain as opposed to the instinct of an animal or vegetable brain. The difference between humans and everything else on earth isn't that we're logical.

Ants and bees build logical structures all the time -- they just don't know they're doing it. They don't have a choice; they are trapped in instinct like a video game character trapped in programming. Humans have the ability to recognize deeper levels of meaning and deeper levels of reality if we choose to do so. Ultimately, though, this seeing deeper levels is still part of the programming. It's a function of the higher human brain. We can and must step completely out of this altogether. We must transcend the brain. That is our finest secret: that we can do this. We can transcend our own matter.

Shadow: By eliminating thought.

Jeremy: You guessed 'er, Chester. And so now why the dieback? Why extinction as the alternative? Because what is important about life isn't you or me. The individual personalities called "you" and "me" don't exist, right? That's what we're talking about here. They are creations of the brain. So let's not pretend there is anything sacred about you or me. What is sacred, if you will, is the expansion of consciousness and ultimately the manifestation of fully aware God consciousness through matter.

On earth, humans are that matter through which God may blossom into full Self-awareness. But we don't do this because we create this psychological entity called "I", which, in its very existence, blocks out the true nature of being. Earth already has insect, plant, and animal consciousness. If humans are differentiated from these but refuse to move on from them then we might as well go back to being apes. That's just consequence. The good news is that we are so logically fine-tuned that enough people may be able to see the truth of this. Even though there are still old school zealots out there fucking up the joint, there may be enough people who will see that what I'm talking about is a fact and the comprehension of that fact will destroy their programming.

That is the beauty of logic: It demands that when a higher order in any field of expertise is discovered, we must apply that new order, thereby transcending or even totally discarding the old order -- even if the field is called, being human, and even if the higher order means kicking logic off its own throne. The next book will be that switch. I'm going to flesh everything out, define it, and prove everything I'm saying. Higher order is on the way.

Shadow: Prove it?

Jeremy: Yip. Strong words, right? We shall see. This book, I hope, was entertaining and sort of acted as a mind expansion device. An eye-opener for a nation drowning in pop culture. The next book, which may be my last, at least where this stuff is concerned, will be the mind blower. The very reading of it will be an act of meditation. I'm not saying this to puff myself up --I don't matter in any of this. This stuff is real and it is going to come out next book.

Shadow: Okay but we're talking about this book. Commentary track, remember? Revolutionizing the industry?

Jeremy: What? Oh yeah, right … riiiiight. Well let's see, what else might a reader want to know?

Shadow: What does your family think?

Jeremy: Good question. My immediate family has read it and a couple of cousins, two aunts and an uncle on my dad's side. No one else in my family knows it exists. They'd probably think I was nuts. Funny enough I asked my dad why he hasn't had me committed. He said, "Because I want to see where this is going." He was joking, of course. My sister had a curious response to it. She said, "I knew you were into this stuff as a kid but I didn't think you believed it." She now denies ever having had her own multiple UFO sightings and fears for my sanity. This makes zero sense to me. She remembered her UFO sightings up until she read my book and now she draws a blank? Bullshit. I love her dearly but she's lying. It's understandable; no one wants to be related to the undiagnosed crazy guy.

I asked my father recently what he really feels is going on. Am I schizo? Am I alone in this? After all, he's the one who remembered and told me that childhood experience of feeling a presence in the house and hearing me screaming from my room. He remembers my wanting him to buy me a copy of Communion because the alien face on the cover looked familiar. How many people in our family have to have these experiences before they see not just random acts of weirdness but a pattern of it? He told me in all seriousness that he does think something is going on but the family is in denial. Nobody wants to believe this is happening, but until scientists can prove otherwise, he believes I'm being abducted by aliens.

Shadow: What about your mother?

Jeremy: My mother remembers more now about that Vermont UFO incident than I do. She places the sighting in New Hampshire and says I remember it being Vermont because we were on our way there, but it was actually somewhere along the mountainous New Hampshire/Vermont border. Interestingly, I have further anecdotal evidence that I saw what I say I saw. I've done a slew of radio interviews to promote this book. I did two with Vermont radio stations. During the first, a man called in to say that he saw the same object I described, except it was round not oval. This may be, because when I saw it, it was tilted on its axis hovering in the air. When he saw it, it was flying horizontally over his house. Perhaps it looked oval because of the angle.

Anyway, I kept waiting for the punch line but he was serious. He saw this thing in the mid-eighties just like me. He also remarked that it was weird that all of Vermont didn't see it because it was so bright. You'd think, he said, it would have been camouflaged but it was just this blatant, luminous green. I wish I'd thought of that point myself! Prior to the second Vermont radio program, I mailed the DJ a sketch of the object. She showed it to a friend of hers who had seen a UFO in the 80's in Vermont. He told her, "Yep. That's what I saw exactly." And then I learned from two other radio show hosts that Vermont was a hotbed of UFO activity in the early to mid eighties. So are we all insane? Are we all liars? Did my power of suggestion create their memories? Come on.

Shadow: And the other family members? What do they think?

Jeremy: I don't know. They haven't said and I haven't asked. I'm sure the crudeness of the humor was enough for some of them to put the book down and politely not speak about it. But I don't know. It's weird that none of them even sent an obligatory email saying, "Nice work," you know, even if what they mean is, "It sucks." There is another factor, too, which is that some of my and my sister's friends read it and think the alien stuff is a joke or a metaphor. I do joke around a lot but everything in that book is true except the study on Generation X's use of the word "whatever" and the article about catchphrases.

Shadow: Which were wildly accurate observations, by the way.

Jeremy: Thanks. You're starting to sound like me now.

Shadow: When in Rome … What about the normal stories, like about your dad or Nickelodeon? How did Crouching Beavis, Hidden Butthead feel? Or does she even know you wrote about her?

Jeremy: My dad was fine with the alcoholism rant. He understands that that's how I felt at the time. I don't think he secretly harbors resentment or anything. My mom loves the book, which is kooky to me because it's not her style of humor at all. So I'm glad about that. Even though my sister thinks I'm nuts, she basically liked the book. She really likes my humor. I don't think she appreciated the New Age-ish ramblings on consciousness and she definitely didn't like the concept of the fake Q & A between Norm and I. A lot of people asked me who Norm is … he's not real, folks.

Shadow: Neither am I.

Jeremy: Right. Kara will LOVE this commentary …. hehe …. But yeah … she thinks it's disingenuous to bounce arguments off a fake character because there's really no opposition. Creating opposition wasn't my intent. It's just a Socratic dialogue that becomes part of the plot of the book. I wanted this book to be a mind opener not just for the reader, for the author too. The Norm character gets integrated back into me, which sets up for the sequel, which sets up for the rest of my life. As to the Nickelodeon chapter, a few friends from the ol' MTV Networks have read it, but I'm not even a blip on the screen to the powers-that-be there, so they haven't read it. Crouching Beavis, Hidden Butthead read it and liked it and agreed with my assessment of our strange trip to Florida. I was shocked. I thought she'd be pissed, but she admitted to me that that's the way it happened and she has no idea why she acted that way. She made me swear to god, promise up and down, I would not write anything about her in any future book ever again. Needless to say that discussion will be the first chapter of the sequel.

Shadow: How can you write a sequel to an autobiography 27 years in the making just a few years after writing it?

Jeremy: All I can tell you is every chapter in this book has been followed up by significant, or at least interesting, subsequent events. It is quite unreal that I could have enough material to follow this up in such a short period of time without fabricating anything. It is quite real that I do. My only conflict is that the meat of the next book is so important, I'm hesitant to do it as a sequel. But it's hard to ignore the flood of events that would serve a sequel well.

Shadow: When can we expect to read that?

Jeremy: The second I write it. Definitely before 2012.

Shadow: What does that mean? Is that a joke?

Jeremy: No. I really will write it before then.

Shadow: You know this author's commentary track thing kind of sucks.

Jeremy: No, it's revolutionary.

Shadow: But it sounds like an advertisement for your next book!

Jeremy: Yeah, that's what I meant.

Shadow: There's nothing revolutionary about that!

Jeremy: Oh … well … whichever answer makes it sound revolutionary … or … at least not like an afterward…that's the one I mean. Thanks for reading. And you're welcome.

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