Dude, Geckos.

Conversation between me and my stoner friend.

Stoner Friend: I'm totally diggin' geckos, man. Those little guys are so cool.

Me: Yeah. Geckos are pretty cool, I guess.

SF: Pretty cool? Dude, they do all kinds of cool stuff.

Me: Like what?

SF: Like, they crawl around. And they eat bugs.

Me: Yeah. I suppose that's pretty cool.

SF: But they do other stuff, too. Like when they see you, they stop crawling, and act like a leaf or a stick. And then when you try to touch them, they haul ass again.

Me: They are fast.

SF: Man, they're super fast.

Me: Definitely hard to catch.

SF: Yeah. But their little gecko brains don't understand things like boundaries and limitations. Sometimes they crawl right into a corner with no way to get out. And once they get trapped in a corner, you can touch them and pick them up and have fun with them. You can make jokes about insurance, or talk to them in what you think would be a gecko voice. My gecko voice sounds kind of like Marvin the Martian from the cartoons.

{Demonstrates gecko voice.}

SF: And the coolest thing about geckos is the way they look.

Me: What do you mean?

SF: They sort of have these pink and blue squiggly designs on their skin along their backs that look like veins or a map of the Amazon or something.

Me: The Amazon? That's funny.

SF: Dude . . . Amazon.

Me: Dude? . . . Dude . . .

SF: I know, man. My boy sent down the uber dank. I'm so chill.

Me: ???

SF: The weird thing is, the geckos that crawl on my porch are almost transparent. It's like they're either not done getting all their color, or they're not done turning completely invisible.

Me: Oh, I know what you mean. Some look kind of pinkish, but you can see their skeletons with a flashlight.

SF: 'Member that movie about the cute little extraterrestrial that got stranded on Earth and had to survive while a bunch of humans were trying to capture it?

Me: Yeah, I remember that one.

SF: It was great. I loved the scenes where the hero had to kill those mesomorphic retards in the jungle.

Me: Umm . . .

SF: And to help him in dangerous situations, he becomes completely transparent. You know, like you could kind of see his outline, but he was mostly invisible. Plus he had lasers and bombs and stuff to defeat the meat-heads. But his best defense was invisibility.

Me: Yeah. You know, I think you're confusing two diff--

SF: --Anyway, my theory is that geckos are baby ones.

Me: Baby ones?

SF: Baby aliens. We can still see them when they're small, because they haven't finished developing yet. But when they grow up . . . whoa man. Probably right now, all around us there are huge, 8 foot invisible geckos, crawling around, eating bugs.

Me: It might be time for an intervention.

SF: Hey, if you're a muscle-bound war monger and you ever find yourself in the jungle, watch out, my friend. The geckos are gonna get ya.

Me: I'll be careful.

SF: Man, I gotta get my snack on. Soon. I wonder what geckos taste like.