Jose Canseco, my dad, and aliens.

This is a Minnesota Twins fan community. Jose Canseco was never a Minnesota Twin. I do not freakin’ care. You will read these words anyway, I promise you. Here’s why:

That is a dense tweet. That is a tweet so dense it could only come from the head that helped bounce a baseball over a damned wall turning a fly ball into a home-run like it was some magic trick performed in a casino with a bunch of tigers.

The point is there is a lot to unpack here, and believe you me I plan to unpack it all, but first I need to tell you a little story about how I spent my Christmas. Holidays in my family are a small thing. My parents are divorced and weird in-fighting keeps away the extended family on both sides. So once a year we get my parents in a house together and watch my mom politely tolerate my dad’s existence while my brother, sister and their significant others chat about whatever it is adults with lives chat about while I sit in the other room wishing I was at home looking at pictures of frogs on the internet.

While gorging myself on cheese I suddenly hear “..the aliens did it. You can’t deny it!” coming from the other room. The words just sort of pierced my subconscious, like in a movie where the only chatter you hear from the crowd is the pertinent chatter you are meant to hear. As if a shitty director was using shitty techniques to make his shitty movie using MY life as the set.

I tried to shrug it off. I’m a timid and conflict averse person with roughly zero backbone, but something inside me broke. I got up turned the corner and shouted “I DENY IT WAS ALIENS!” like that’s a normal thing to fucking do on Christmas.

We argued for hours, by the end of which the rest of my family wanted to kill us both. He had watched History’s Ancient Aliens and become completely and utterly immune to reason. You know Ancient Aliens, it was the one with the meme-guy.

So as a person who studies particle physics for funsies with a dad who has become absolutely batshit crazy loco, I think I needed to write about this dumb tweet by a dumb old baseball guy. It wasn’t the piece you wanted. It wasn’t the piece you needed, but it was the piece that I needed. (I feel obligated to say here that I love my dad and he’s awesome and no one has been more supportive of me and my writing even when I’ve spent my life basically only doing things to disappoint my parental units.)

So about that tweet. We’re gonna go bit by bit.

• “Aliens have been trying to teach us how to time travel”

Why? Why would they do this? If you’ve ever consumed literally any media that contains time travel, you have learned not to screw with time travel. It is a dangerous game! I’ve learned this. I had to kill myself in 25 Eds because of a messed up timeline, which was totally real and not fiction, you guys.

Did THEY tell Jose this? Is he the chosen one? What do they want him to do? Is Jose Canseco going to start flying around Oakland in a bodysuit while murdering folk like we’re in the Matrix?

• But first we need to change our body composition which we are not willing to do

This bit right here is almost deserving of its own article. First of all if there are any aliens out there just waiting to give some dumb human the ability to time travel, hey! Hi! I’m willing to change my “body composition” whatever in the actual hell that means. Can we not be carbon based? Or do we just need to like remove some organs? I have my gall bladder out. Does that count? Here’s the part where if I were a LESSER WRITER I would make the obvious joke about steroids and Canseco’s body composition. I won’t though, because I know what is really important. Aliens.

• We have tried with animals and it has failed

If an animal had the “body composition” to cast the alien time travel spell or whatever, would it? It’s still an animal. If my cat had both the ability and know how to time travel, I’m not even sure she would. She still doesn’t have thumbs. She still can’t get into the cupboard to get food. I have to do that! Do aliens lack fingers and they need humans to travel back in time and open the cupboards for them?

Did scientists inject body composition changing nanomachines into some sheep and they they just started freaking the hell out and blinking out of existence only to reappear 10 minutes ago? I’m sorry guys. Writing for you was fun, but my new dream job is to sit in a lab and turn farm animals into time lords under orders from the lizard men of Eta Carinae.

Something is afoot here, but I think it is starting to unravel.

In 1995 Carlos Martinez hit one homer. It would be the 25th and last of his career. Perhaps that dinger signaled something.

• 25 is the atomic number of manganese.
• Johan Gottlieb Gahn became the first to isolate an impure sample of Manganese in 1774.
• Also in 1774? Louis XVI of France takes the throne. He would be the last monarch of France after the French Revolution ended French aristocracy by guillotining everyone in sight like it was a carnival game.
• The American government has long been rumored to have had contact with aliens.
• America’s elite fear the revolution prophesied by the late Carlos Martinez’s (whose son is named JOSE by the way!) final dong and have hired aliens to teach Jose Canseco to time travel so he can fix the timeline and make sure Martinez only hits 24.

The aliens did it. You can not deny this.