Prospector with a Lop-sided Mustache Who Can Think of Nothing to Say

Yep. Looks like Miss Fortune (or is that mis-fortune?) has finally decided to smile on poor ol’ Larry the Prospector with the Lop-sided Mustache. But, as is evident to one and all, airborne Larry is at a loss for words — all he seems able to manage to emit is but one miniscule punctuation mark.

If you knew a bit of Larry’s long and storied trajectory to this particular point in time, however, you might better understand why the old coot’s unable to enunciate.

We can begin with that dry and dusty mid-summer midnight of 1947, when luck-shunned Larry — a stringy Santa Fee teenager with just a rock hammer, a Coleman lamp, and high hopes — was tapping on assorted sandstone croppings ringing Roswell Air Field. Before dawn had chased away the inky depths of that star-sprinkled night, the hapless adolescent had been subjected to observation, abduction, transport, genetic sampling, mind-meld, seduction by what he presumed to be a fairly feminine octopod covered in slime, anal probe (surprisingly gentle, by the way), a light snack of some spongy green goop with ruby-red crunchies, and near instantaneous fluency in Olmec, Babylonian, Brooklyn street rap, and Aramaic. Y’know, the entire extraterrestrial ‘works’.

After that eventful episode, young Larry couldn’t stop talking. He babbled broad and wide to anybody that would listen, ending up in appearances on 17 morning talk shows and in 136 newspapers around the globe (as well as marquee listing at 23 consecutive Area 51 UFOlogy Conventions) over the years. But popular media interest in his tale has diminished considerably in recent decades, pushed aside by the likes of all those other alien life forms: Pamela & Tommy, pawn stars, Ozzie, bounty hunters, Kardashians, gator wrestlers, Bieber, and assorted Spears-Nolte-Lohan-Gibson train wrecks. Since the 1980s, the now reclusive and aging ore-hunter has been once again crawling over the rocks and rills of his native New Mexico in search of riches (or at least a nice sterling belt buckle now and then).

In recent decades, there have been the occasional high-spots — or perhaps just ‘middling-spots’ — in Larry’s prospecting pastime. Like the time he unearthed two entire crates of Fruit by the Foot that were a mere 27 months beyond their sell-by date, and, best of all, his favorite watermelon-berry-blast favor, no less! Or how about the intact IGA shopping cart that came up out of the sand and gravel still holding someone’s long forgotten embroidered black Harley-Davidson Softtail baseball cap? You’d be quite surprised by the sheer number of matching orange plastic Sunny D pull-tab jug caps Larry’s collection of curiosities now contains. And let’s not forget the array of cigarette and cigarillo butts in white, ivory, tan, ochre, brown, charcoal, and sage green — not a single one of them mass-manufactured, for our peripatetic prospector only collects those of the hand-rolled variety.

Now jump to the present day, and see Larry jump for joy as he has unearthed this wonderfully sparkly chunk of silvery-white metallic ore that he is certain must be a massive platinum nugget of great value. Unfortunately, the rock that Larry is hoisting is instead laced with a remarkably pure seam of uranium, and within months the guy with the lop-sided mustache will be glowing like his alien captors of 65 years past.