Some People Call Me the Space Cowboy

Good people, the most wondrous of wonderful, funderful, magical things has happened to me! I was hit in the side by a dirty van while crossing the street and gravely injured. That's not the good part, but I'm getting to that—let's take the long way, shall we?

Of course, you may know that we at the commune traded our insurance benefits options for Red Bagel's home-built soap box derby cars, so the shattered bones in my pelvis, my broken arm, multiple lacerations, bruised face, and bent pinky toe couldn't seek professional care. It turns out the man who hit me with his filthy van had no insurance either, but he's making it up to me in another way—again, more later. I did the only thing I could do, seek out an Indian friend to nurse me back to health, ala the legend of the Lone Ranger. So I asked Batu, a guy who works in the commune building on a different floor, to help me, and he agreed, even though he said he's an East Indian not a Native American, which I could give two cents about. Batu loaned me his Canadian Prescriptions card for all the free Vicodin I could ever want and his home body cast kit. Needless to say, I'm doing much better now, still some internal bleeding, but that may have been there before. Let's get on to the van-smashing wonderful thing.

The man with the van is Dan Lopez, or "Space Dan" to his friends, a legion amongst which I now count myself. And they call him Space Dan for a very sound reason, not simply because he's frequently stoned out of his gourd, although that's why some of his lesser friends think they call him that. No, the fact is, my friends, Space Dan is building himself an actual rocketship. You didn't read me wrong—an actual rocketship. Space Dan has circumvented the bloated government beast and the bureaucratic red-tape nonsense and created his own private company for space exploration.

I profess I was a little skeptical myself when I heard, but when I drove to his home in Littleton, a neighboring community of freaks and weirdoes to Flatbush, New Jersey, I saw quite the impressive sign hanging over his garage. He dissuaded me from seeing his state-of-the-art rocketship within, not because he didn't trust me, but the main stockholders in Space Dan's Rocket Travel Ltd.—Mom and Dad Lopez—refused to let him show anyone due to the possibility of industrial espionage. I can understand that completely, ever since I got blitzed on Southern Comfort that one night last February and offered to sell Crotchet! Magazine all of the commune's trade secrets. Lucky for us they weren't interested in buying.

Oh, in my excitement, I haven't even told you the best part—I myself am going into space, and I'm going there for a price that's practically nothing! $350, a price which my wife describes as practically insane, but she's got a mouth on her that, that one. I have been given that special price because of my great injuries sustained when he hit me—and he wasn't drunk, he was just trying to grab some candy bars from the back of the van when I was struck, so he technically wasn't even at the wheel. Space Dan waived the greater fees of space gas, gantry-fixin', reupholstering the space vehicle, and the comeback fee. All that was left was the $350 local space license, which of course he couldn't do anything about. It's a price I'll gladly pay, as soon as my wife goes to sleep later this evening and leaves her purse unguarded.

Just think—as soon as I'm fully recovered from my crippling injuries, I, Rok Finger, will be blasted into the cosmos by a professional private sector space-faring company. It's a dream I've had since I was a small child, but hopefully everyone at Mission Control won't be talking chipmunks. Come to think of it, what was that dream about? Maybe I'll be hit by an analyst next week and can get that worked out for free, too.

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