Good news, Oregon: The fourth-wave spike of giant murderous aliens plaguing the state in the last couple months is finally starting to recede, and today the Portland area is moving from “extreme murderous alien” to simply “high murderous alien” on Gov. Kate Brown’s alien risk chart. Thousands of Oregonians are getting vaccinated against the aliens’ venom every day, and with fewer easy human targets, the aliens are beginning their slow exodus away from Earth. The government-mandated special bubble suits we all wear to protect us from being murdered—barring the aliens from locating us by scent—seem to have done their job, as Oregon had a relatively low murder-by-alien rate when compared to other states in the last year.

Anyway, all of this is to say: It’s time to get back to our normal, pre-murderous-alien lives, Portland!

Yesterday, I didn’t wear my bubble suit to the park, because as we all know, the aliens are allergic to grass and tend to avoid the great outdoors. Several people I passed by gave me dirty looks; one person even confronted me about it.

“The CDC says that once an alien smells one of us, they’ll just start attacking the whole area,” said one woman who was wearing two bubble suits. She looked ridiculous! “I really wish you’d be more considerate, even if you’ve been fully vaccinated. Not all of us have had a chance to yet.”

I didn’t catch what she said next—it was hard to hear over the sound of a 50-foot-tall alien knocking over yet another power line in the distance. 2021, am I right?!

But I’d heard enough. I sighed, rolled my eyes, and left the park, defeated by Portland’s liberal bubble, and by this woman’s liberal use of bubbles.

I tried complaining about this to my friends at one of our “socially bubbled” get-togethers, but they didn’t get it either.

“We’ve all been through a major trauma,” one friend, who works for the Oregon Health Authority (OHA) as an alien contact tracer, told me. “If people want to leave their bubble suits on a little longer than absolutely necessary while they get used to life after vaccination, I honestly think that’s the least of our concerns, you know?”

“I agree,” chimed in another friend. “And if you’re going to whine about not being able to move on from the alien invasion, why don’t you complain about the people who claim the aliens are 3-D holograms developed by Mark Zuckerberg? Or why don’t you talk about the policies that have forced people to leave their safely bubbled homes and risk an alien attack, because they have to earn a living for their families?”

That’s all anyone wants to talk about now, and I’m sick of it! It’s all mental health this, broken political system that. We need to focus on the real problem, and it’s this: I’ve been vaccinated against alien venom for 10 whole days, and I still can’t go get an Orange Julius at the mall without strapping on my bubble suit. To make matters worse, my favorite outdoor summer festivals have been canceled because the “medical experts” caution that a high concentration of human sweat could lure the giant killer aliens into the parks.

“Yes, we know the aliens are allergic to grass, so they do tend to avoid the parks where these festivals are held,” one OHA official admitted at a recent press conference. “But if we can avoid even one giant murderous alien rampage this summer, don’t you think it’s worth waiting just one more year, when we expect all the aliens will have returned to their home planet? Or at least a majority of them? Besides, the new alien variants don’t seem to suffer from grass allergies.”

It’s fear-mongering like this that makes me worry we’ll never get back to the way things used to be, before the aliens killed millions of people around the world and also destroyed the Big Pink building downtown. Killer alien deaths are down 10 percent from last month, and people are still frowning at me for refusing to wear a bubble suit—it’s almost like they don’t want the aliens to leave!

So I hope you’ll join me, my fellow Portlanders, in enjoying a bubble-free, hot, crowded summer together, and shaming anyone who refuses to do the same. Sure, the aliens could still come for us, and they could prey on the medically vulnerable people who are less immune to their venom. But sometimes the bubble suit makes me itchy, and I’ve decided that’s worse.