Until tonight, I hadn’t watched the news in months.

After work, I ducked into a bar to have something to eat and drink. A veggie burger and Maker’s Mark on the rocks, if you must know.

Unfortunately, a TV set was mounted over the bar directly across from me. I had little choice but to watch Hardball with Chris Matthews. Fortunately, the sound was off. Still, I had to endure the sloppily written subtitles that scrolled without comfortable rhythm across the screen. Apparently, there’s a dearth of employees at MSNBC who can type quickly and accurately. Maybe I’ll apply for the job. I mean, we all know what each talking head is going to say anyway, so there’s no real need to transcribe what they’ve said. Their opinions can simply be summarized ahead of time.

Anyway, Matthews was interviewing Capt. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, the hero-pilot who landed his plane in the Hudson River back in January after it collided with a flock of Canada geese. Sully was hawking a book, extending his fifteen minutes, as one does after saving the lives of every passenger and crew member on a doomed flight.

The next segment had something to do with Hillary Clinton’s popularity and remarks she made about not running for president again. And the segment after that had something to do with Wall Street and golden handshakes. Or golden showers. I’m not quite sure because my food had arrived.

The next time I looked up at the TV there was a fat guy hosting a show called The Mr. Ed Show.

Shit, no, I have that wrong. It was called the Ed Show. No “Mr.”

Anyway, that’s when things got weird.

I learned from Mr. Ed that a six-year-old boy named Falcon had climbed into a balloon-like flying saucer his father made and was swept into the Colorado sky. The local sheriff, the subtitles told me, had seen something fall from the soaring craft. Then, miraculously, Falcon was found safe in his family’s home.

Mr. Ed proceeded to interview a hideously ugly Florida woman via satellite. She knew the family, having starred with them on some insipid reality TV show called Wife Swap. Fortunately for Mr. Ed, the woman is a psychic. Finally, I thought, a guest with some real insight.

I was able to crack the subtitle code enough to figure out that Falcon’s family believes in extraterrestrials, and that young Falcon is allowed to swear in the house. Mr. Ed asked the psychic if she thought the whole balloon fiasco was a publicity stunt. This had me confused. She’s a fucking psychic, I thought. Just ask her if the balloon fiasco was a publicity stunt. After all, she would know.

I asked the guy next to me to give me a gentle shove, just to make sure I wasn’t in some bourbon-fueled waking dream. Then I looked in the other direction to make sure I wasn’t sitting next to John Lithgow on an airplane and looking out the window at a monster on the wing. What I saw, though, was a group of young professionals doing lemon-drop shots and toasting their misspent lives.

At that point I had to settle my tab and head to a short-story reading event at a local coffee shop. There, things got weirder. One of the stories was Woody Allen’s “The Kugelmass Episode,” about a guy called Kugelmass who, with the help of a guy called The Great Persky, is transported into Madame Bovary to have an affair with Emma. The Great Persky, in Allen’s story, is also able to take Emma out of Flaubert’s novel and deposit her in New York City.

As soon as the short-story reading ended I made a beeline for my car and headed home, but not before thinking about heading back to the bar for more to drink.

I thought maybe, after several more glasses of Maker’s Mark, the magic TV would show me footage of Falcon’s family climbing into a homemade spaceship and soaring into the Colorado sky to search for extraterrestrials. Then maybe they’d fall from their ill-designed craft and plummet toward the terrestrial ground below, only to be saved at the last minute by our hero, Sully, who would save the day by swooping into the Colorado sky, picking them up in his magic airplane, and delivering them to their new home in Area 51, where they would begin shooting a new reality show called The Falcon and the Glowman.

Meanwhile, I thought, the psychic will almost certainly replace Mr. Ed on MSNBC. And at that point I can start watching the news again. The psychic will be able to tell us if Hillary will challenge President Obama in a democratic primary in 2012, whether she’ll win, and whether she’ll defeat Sarah Palin in the general election.

We’ll also know, once and for all, if Palin can, in fact, see Russia from her house. If she can, she’ll definitely get her own show. Probably on FOX News. Or maybe she and the Florida psychic will have a show together. Or maybe she and the psychic will star on Wife Swap. And maybe we’ll finally find out who gave birth to Trig. Or maybe nobody did. And maybe Falcon’s family knows something we don’t.

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