THE NATURAL STRANGER :: BOOK 2, "MAD DOG in a SILVER FOG" :: CHAPTER 1, EPISODE 7

 

GONE FISHIN'!

  

"Cycling's off again," Mike hums last week, just as I'd secured our Costazuelan reservations. "Hippies coming through Alice in bursts. Thought it might be strong electromagnetic interference, being under power lines when there were those experiments out in the Zone, do you remember?... nuclear pulse tests, knocking systems all out of joint? Dead sheep, up in the Skull Valley? Interesting, but no readings like that here. We've broken compilation language down to machine code, a whole lot of ones and zeroes, bits... we don't have a pattern yet but maybe shadows of patterns. Wheels turning all the time in bedrock, here..."

Bedrock's more than Graceland to Suelan juvies - it's the term techies, Trekkies and Honeymooners use to describe the lowest physical configurations of chips... mostly silicon atomics. Bedrock also, I gather, applies to perturbances of Ralph and Alice as they might intimate Fred and Wilma. The Kramdens input serially by strains of zero/one bits or, in the case of Alice, analog waves like fields of glyphs washing serially over television screens. In the Zone, the first question was formation... would analog bursts occur at rim or center, exploding outward like a silver omphale in hollow pyramids... box o' Black Cat fireworks... or condensing into icon fields of hot rocks. "Maybe somebody ought to conduct blood sacrifices over the Kramdens," Mike suggests. "Decent victims this time... Haig, maybe, for Ralph and, I don't know... for Alice? R. D. Laing? Angela?"

"Leave alone my lawyers," I object.

"Well you know how the Cambodians handled their attorneys!" Mike's a vitalist in his own mind... a few years back with T. rambling on 'bout Rome he exploded... interrupting, attributing decline to priesthoods gone soft, sacrificing dogs instead of wolves on Lupercalian altars. And he has a point there! T. tells me later, out of earshot...

"Your denaturizer's fallen off," I'd replied. Influencing cigars explode when I reach Alamogordo, extracting Wally Martyn's genetic paving.

At the top of San Francisco's highest mountain (really just one of a few big hills), is a Big Cross and, as our renegade Ralph Kramden turned his bus upwards, black smoke billowed out, as if proclaiming the election of Antipope. "End of the line," the driver said, turning his laboring vehicle into the parking lot, shutting the engine down and pocketing the keys. "Connecting bus be round in..." and he looked at his watch, "six minutes or so.

"Just wanted you to know the union sold us out. Had our raise postponed again, you know they don't mean to part with a nickel. I've put in my time, and this place is the trap for working people, won't see any of us able to live here, by and by. So I'm off... gone fishin'. Down to Enseñada where the big ones are."

 

EVIDENCE for the DEFENSE

 

"After a moment of attentive listening I thought I understood don Juan's recommendation to watch for the holes between the sounds. The pattern of noises had spaces in between sounds! For example, specific whistles of birds were timed and had pauses in between them, and so had all the other sounds I was perceiving... the fact of the matter was that the timing of each sound was a unit in the overall pattern of sounds. Thus the spaces or pauses in between sounds were, if I paid attention to them, holes in a structure."

 

- Carlos Castaneda, "A Separate Reality"

 

TOMORROW:

"TRICIA'S WEDDING!"

Dance with wolves in Roman history, religion and culture...

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