As a pup I always enjoyed those old science fiction movies, especially the ones where little green men come down from Mars. They were strangely like the little pink people who raised me. (My owners were not yet aware that I could understand their language, let alone follow the plot of a movie, albeit, a simplistic, formulaic plot with gaping holes and ludicrous twists that strained even my canine credulity.) Of course, in my mind, they weren’t little green men. They were little green dogs -sometimes cats.

Even then I was wondering what it meant to be an “alien”. In those movies, of course, it meant that you were from outer space but I couldn’t help thinking that there were plenty of aliens already around. Why did they have to go to outer space just to find an alien?

I mean, it didn’t take long for me to figure out that humans could not understand things that were obvious to me. They couldn’t even understand me. No matter how I barked or panted or licked or wagged my tail, all they knew was that I was happy to see them. I was happy to see them, of course, but I was also telling them things like the calorie conversion rates between dog food and human food. They never got that.

I realized that I was some sort of alien to them in the sense that they simply couldn’t understand me. In fact I was more alien to them than those little green men they liked to depict in movies. Those extraterrestrial aliens might have been green, but they were usually humanoid with hands and feet and eyes and usually a mouth. They’d use those little Martian mouths to speak English. The Martians were talking to the humans. I was talking to their landing gear.