Everyone's an Illegal Alien to Me: Stay Out of My Head!

Before I am distracted and derailed by the present, I had some major themes to develop. First there’s my opinion on this whole immigration debate.

First, I don’t know if we can protect our borders even with the proper technology, though a wall would certainly decrease the success rate of those desperate to come north.

Second, we don’t have the means to deport all the people we ought to if we were going to enforce our laws.

The only rational solution is to let the people here stay and build the wall to keep new ones out. Anything less is ineffective. The alternative is the status quo, where we get a million new bodies each year from the south who become eligible for social services but, in their underground economy, often don’t pay taxes for those services. It’s a burden we can bear, but for me 300 million Americans is enough. Without the influx of immigrants in California, for instance, our birth rate would be zero.

All the half measures our politicians will employ to make it seem like something is being done will, of course, result in nothing but it will be very expensive and confusing and require thousands of new bureaucrats trained in discouraging forms, though bilingual, of course. In fact it would help if these new federal employees themselves crossed the border illegally to be employed by the federal government to deal with other illegals. I like the symmetry of that. And in doing so they’ll be doing “jobs Americans don’t want to do.” I hate that phrase, by the way. What are “jobs Americans don’t want to do?” I see citizens working at McDonald’s and Wal-Mart. I see them on road crews picking up trash and doing janitorial work. As for migrant agricultural workers, that’s a whole different ball of wax. Mexicans have nimble fingers and sturdy backs, and I would hate to see our fruit crushed by Iowa linebackers.

Still illegal immigration doesn’t concern me nearly as much as the illegal aliens who want to cross the border of my mind.

You know the type. You’re sitting at a bar, trying to watch a basketball game, and the guy next to you wants to talk about UFOs. You have a good seat, you don’t want to give it up, but neither do you want to let this crazed alien past the border of your brain, and here lies the danger. Don’t let them cross.

There are machine gun turrets and booby traps all along my brain’s border. The guy with the UFO obsession is not going to enter, period. He is fended off by ignoring him, which behaviorists call “extinguishing.” Else I become so vocal about the game he can’t talk. Else I spill a beer on him accidentally and he’s preoccupied with that. But he’s not going to get across the border.

Actually you’re all illegal aliens to me, all of you! I don’t want you in my brain!

Our neighbor, “I’m Not Creepy,” has tried to get into my brain but has no chance. Here are some of his recent antics.

I was gardening, which I can only do in little portions because of my back. I like to garden in quiet. Instead INC stood on his deck, drinking wine, literally screaming his philosophy of humanity at me. He would also say things like, “You’re a doctor and we ought to be in awe of doctors, but you’re a West Coast doctor and not ruined by third party payments like the doctors back east.” Once I told him that he could lower his volume; he did for one sentence and went back to the top of his lungs style. Later he knocked at my door with a sinister looking gray metal box. “I want to show you my collection,” he said. I feared it might be filled with human knuckle bones, and told him I didn’t feel like talking right then. He seemed perturbed by this, since in his world I only exist for him, as he has one of those minds that constantly seeks to cross the borders of other minds, because he has no borders and everything leaks in and out in his psychotic sieve.

Later that night he knocked urgently on our door and I let him in, whereupon he kneeled by Kathleen’s chair and went on a discourse about erysipelas, a disease with which I’m familiar, but his was a special case where the fever of erysipelas may have cured a lymphoma. He acted as if he were continuing a conversation from earlier but I couldn’t recall it and neither could Kathleen. He used our washer in our absence by creeping into the garage and left it with standing water, which he told me about. He won’t use it anymore, he said. Nor will he use the common recycling bin for his recyclables; he has to drive them into town himself. He’s probably afraid we’ll go through them. Now he may use the washer, but it is not cricket to go into someone else’s abode and fool around when they’re not there without permission. Last night he was yelling to me at my second story bathroom window about some conspiracy of the phone company. You get the picture; likely another manic-depressive narcissist.

We attract the mental, you know, it’s part of our magnetism. I think of my other gifts and why I have not taken commercial advantage of them, but the powers that be keep dumping mental patients in my lap, so perhaps this is my true destiny. But I won’t let them in my head. And for you, dear reader, to try to get into my head, fuhgedaboutit. If you’ve let me into your head, well don’t feel bad. I’m a good influence there and can help defend your borders.

CE