Holiday Beach, Texas - The coastal bend of Texas is usually warm and balmy this time of year, a good time to walk on the beach or hang out and listen to the old-timers swap stories (mostly lies) down at Rockport harbor.

This is normally the time of year the weather-gods offer a fleeting apology for the blistering-hot and insanely humid summer.

But this year is not normal.

The weather is making me feel more like I’m living somewhere in the remote, windy, snow-encrusted mountains of some bizarre Kazakhstan-world - twisted and surreal, a place that has never seen the sun or inhaled the delicate, extortionate scent of a breeze blowing in over dead fish and Texas coastal salt water.

I sit here in my Life is a Beach tee-shirt, Hawaiian shorts and sandals, confused, alone, cold and forsaken.

The Beach Boys 8-track playing in the background keeps taunting me. Is my mind being numbed, shrunken and perverted by the bone-chilling 37 degrees outside - or have the the Wilson brothers, Mike Love and Al Jardine replaced any reference to cars (GTO, Little Duece Coupe, 409) with the words “snow plow?”

Faced with the threat of hypothermia, a life-time of failure flashes before my eyes. Failure to yield right-of-way. Failure to communicate. Failure to “pump up the volume” in my hair.

What if? What if things were different? What if my life had been different? What if I had been born intelligent instead of rather slow and dull-witted? Or dull and slow-witted. Whatever.

And since I’m writing this for Our Strange World - What if I was a Space Alien??!?

Yes sir. That’s the ticket. If I were a Space Alien I could do some pretty awesome things:

I could send old Battle-Star Galactica scripts to Michael Cohen and and have him publish them at All News Web as being true events. Wait - what? Somebody’s already doing that? Darn it.

I could create crop circles that look like W.C. Fields. Godfrey Daniels!

I could mess with earthlings calendars; convince them the carved-in-rock calendar of some old died-out race is really accurate and predicts their imminent doom. Oh - that’s been done too? Dammit just how gullible are these earthlings?

I could flash funny lights in the sky and synchronize them to Ramones songs. Well, the funny lights in the sky part is not new - but imagine them pulsating to I Wanna Be Sedated! Gabba Gabba Hey!

I could chase earthlings down dark alleys while shouting, “I Am The Garbage-Pail Kid From Planet Gross!”

I don’t think I’d abduct earthlings and anal probe them - sorry Whitley, that’s a little too weird, even for me, and it’s probably illegal - but I would force them to watch old episodes of Absolutely Fabulous. That’s the closest thing to an anal probe I can think of.

I could crash one of my cheaply-made - probably a Yugo-Class craft - in the desert and have some old Sears mannequins in the pilot’s seats. I know that’s been done before but it still freaks out earthlings and I could demand a percentage from the books and tv movies that would follow.

I could steal all the earthlings minerals, organs, blood and mucus and trade it to the Xxarrzzaans for past seasons of Curb Your Enthusiasm on DVD.

At night I could enter earthlings homes and dance naked around the stair-master machines.

I could call Coast to Coast AM and convince George Noory that I have photo evidence that Tanya Harding sexually assaulted Bigfoot inside Mel’s hole. Wait - what? That’s been done already? How about a Chupacabra being sexually assaulted by Rush Limbaugh?

Hot-dam! Being an alien would be most excellent indeed, but I see clearly I need to go work on some fresh alien ideas.

Also, I probably should go turn the heat on and put on some warm clothes. Later earthlings. -Dean Terry