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1. Ordering a copy of the wonderful Mac Wellman’s book, “A Chronicle of the Madness of Small Worlds.” Each story details life on a different asteroid. Yay!

2. Getting tickets to see “1965UU,” the stage adaptation of one of these stories. Directed by Stephen Mellor, a longtime Wellman collaborator, and starring the inimitable Paul Lazar, it opens tonight and runs through October 4 at the Chocolate Factory in Long Island City, Queens. I went to a rehearsal earlier this week, and was utterly entranced by this alien world, which was more than two years in the making.

Lazar gets a little meshuggenah.

It has everything a girl could want: An underground society. “Inevitable fisticuffs.” Flatulence. “Clandestine polishing of a shameful sort.” And, at the quiet center of Wellman’s riotous rush of words, an obliquely beautiful attempt at understanding what it means to exist. Go.

3. Trying not to feel sad that you can’t draw as well as Mellor’s very young daughter, who sketched her interpretations of “1965UU” while attending an earlier rehearsal. Puts a critic to shame:

4. Enjoying Lazar’s thoughts on what it is like to hold the stage by himself for almost an hour (he does have an excellent, excellent supporting cast, but this is largely a monologue, and Lazar delivers the goods):

“It’s very challenging, to state the obvious,” he said, speaking in the factory’s homey little backstage/office area. “Ideally, you only hold it for a little while. And then it begins to hold you.”

Amen.