Message on postcard:

1. This is the story of the thing in the desert. It begins as the sun rises on the Alvord playa. It’s hot and dry. I’m saving water.
2. I’m in the van, working on my sketchbook. The dogs are hanging out outside, full of energy after eating breakfast. Then there’s a series of yips, and Skillet runs in with a bone.
3. “Great Scott!” I exclaim. Thanks to years of active participation in online paleoanthropology forums, I recognize the bone as soon as I see it. It’s a hominid femur, twenty to forty thousand years old.
4. I step out of the van and the dogs eagerly lead me to the site of their find. There in the sun-baked surface of the ancient, dry lakebed is the rest of a nearly complete skeleton.
5. But something is wrong. The skull has horns. My dogs have unearthed the unthinkable — a prehistoric race of demon people.
6. What’s more, the skeleton belonged to a demon-person who clearly had been laid to rest in some kind of ceremonial burial. He was surrounded by ritual artifacts. In his hand was a bouquet of paleobotanical fossil flowers. And on his finger, a ring.
7. I ignore my instincts. I remove the ring.
8. The skeleton’s head swivels, and a dusty voice creaks out . “DOOOOOOOD,” he said, “NOOOOOOOOO.” Behind me, Steens Mountain split in two.
9. At this point the dogs are seriously freaking out. Eagles are flying out of the mountain. Everything is rumbling. The skeleton is wiggling, big time.
10. And that’s when the smooth jazz kicks out, announcing Noam Chomsky’s arrival. He strides forth from the mountain.
11. “Noam,” I say, “This smooth jazz? I didn’t realize you were a David Sanborn fan. Also, I thought you lived in Boston, not an underground magma chamber.”
12. “Mike,” he says, “that demon skeleton was the linchpin of America’s two-party political system. Thanks to your discovery we can welcome in a new era of tolerance, fairness, and plurality.”
13. “Okay,” I said.

Message on postcard:
Hey dudes! What’s up! This is a postcard from my trip across eastern Oregon. The art here is inspired by a robot prostitute I met in an Old-West-style cowboy town. Whoring opportunities out here are not what they used to be, and rootin’-tootin’ saloons have trouble attracting and retaining lady talent. But robotics experts stepped up in a big way to hap satiate cowboy lust.

So I had saddled up for a drink in the small town of Murder Creek. I heard a clang as a lady sat beside me. She beeped and whistled. “Oh, hello,” I said.

“Howdy, stud,” she said. “Want to have a good … a good … SYSTEM ERROR!!!”

She wept oil tears. It was a hard life out here, I knew.

“What’s wrong?” I asked. The lady machine, whose name was Sexual Lotus Alpha Prime, explained her predicament. Her best hooker buddy, Sugar Hookup, had been dismantled by an angry cattle roper in a fit of rage.

“He had a Sawzall … when I got there, she was nothing more than component parts … there were transistors everywhere. The girls and I raised a ten thousand dollar bounty. Will you … will you find and kill Roper Dan?”

“Holy heck,” I said. “This shit is freaking bonkers. Hell no!”

I finished my drink and hit her power switch. “You might want to replace this unit, barkeep,” I advised. “Its simulation protocol is a bit heavy for us tourists.”

Message on postcard:
Hey Chris! Eastern Oregon is great. But you know what makes it better than great? A badass knife. I have been wanting a badass knife ever since the pig attack, when I was left high and dry without one. And then I found just such a knife on the ground at my friend Tom’s wedding. It was like a reverse wedding present from him to me. Every time I cut something up with my new knife, it will be a celebration of his marital bliss.

I have described this knife elsewhere, so I will skip over its official specs, except I do want to say that it has a neat etching of bighorn sheep, and the handle is made out of ivory that I choose to believe came from a dead pig’s tusks. Its major features are a blade, a handle, and its usefulness for cutting.

And cutting is what I have done with this knife. (Well, mostly I have used it for slicing if you want to get pedantic.) Apples taste better when eaten off its blade. And using it to cut tofu has allowed engineers to harness the energy of the knife’s designer spinning in his grave.

These days I carry my knife everywhere. You never know where pigs might be hiding.