The Free Radical

Prior Episodes of Running Dialogue:

First Episode
Second Thoughts
Third Time’s The Charm
Fourth Movement… Forth

Fifth Element

Let’s just pick up where I left off…

Dawn was still a couple of hours away. Felix was seated across the fire looking rather happy and content. Sitka was sound asleep in the tent.

“How would you feel about coconut coffee?” Felix raised an eyebrow, as though he’d never heard of such a thing; of course, he probably hadn’t. “I just like to add a spoon of coconut butter to the bodum. The flavour is subtle and it seems to boost the energizing effect.”


“I’m game,” answered Felix. I went about preparing the coffee. “What’s that?” he asked when I added the teaspoon of the other coffee additive to the bodum.

“Oh, that’s the other thing I add to the coffee– always. I came up with this little formula four or five years ago. There’re five things in it: chaga, reishi, green coffee beans, cacao beans and milk thistle seed. Granted, there’s only tiny amounts of each in there, but those tiny amounts are in every cup of coffee I drink… and I love coffee!”

Felix shrugged. “I’ll trust that it can only do me good.”

“This shouldn’t be new to you; I’ve written about my coffee additives before.”

“I was a reader, but not always a follower.”

Again, I found myself liking his answers. “Do you mind if I roll this next one with a little tobacco?”

“Tobacco!” he dutifully exclaimed.

“It’s organic; I grow it myself.”

“Then by all means…” he smiled.

“Most people know that tobacco is a good insecticide, pest control,” I began to expound. “And the Native Elders have always maintained that tobacco was traditionally used to ensure clear communication with Spirit. It is also a preferred offering for our Earth Ancestors. It seems to me that, historically, tobacco was used in the Americas in order to eliminate unwanted interference, much like you’re using my weed right now against the A.I, the Predator.”

“Tobacco does smooth out the brainwaves… for about fifteen minutes. But I hear the Great Spirit isn’t really a chatty guy anyway, so really… no more than ten minutes should do in most cases. If tobacco could secure the sacred bond between Man and Spirit so that no intercessor could interfere… yeah, I could see how something like that would definitely have to be fully discredited in the public mind. And in today’s world, if the Devil were a plant, he MUST be tobacco!”

Our conversation was a bit odd like that. It was as though we were both interviewing each other… for the benefit of a third party listening in. And, of course, we both knew that that was exactly what was going on. Certainly I was going to write this up and share it asap!

The coffee was poured; the J was sparked. We had just enough cream to get us through a coffee-doused morning. (I was planning on getting into town in the next day or two to resupply. Refrigeration is taken care of by streams and rivers; the trick is to keep the bears at bay.)

“How about tunes?” asked Felix. I grabbed my laptop from the tent. We had the world at our fingertips. I let him choose… because I’ve found that you can really tell so much about a person by the music he chooses to listen to.

“This is called ‘Now He Sings, Now He Sobs.’ It’s from 1968. Any idea who it is?” Felix quizzed me.

“You shouldn’t have given me the song title. I have that album, and that’s the title track. It’s Chick Corea– one of my very favourite pianists.”

“Why am I not surprised?” We both sat back and listened for a minute as the song got going… and then Felix began the next layer of our conversation. “The A.I. can’t write shit like that,” he started. “Oh sure, once something like this is created and put out there in the public domain, the A.I. can copy and imitate it flawlessly, right down to the most minute tonal fluctuations… But ask it to compose something like this and it hasn’t a clue; it simply can’t do it. The A.I. can’t create anything original; it can only recycle and rearrange all that’s already been created– by Spirit.”

I nodded. “Pop music MUST be written by a computer program; it’s total shit!”

“Most of it is,” agreed Felix. “The A.I. is sophisticated enough to generate it’s own simple melodies, but it has no criteria for knowing whether its creations are any good or not; it doesn’t really even have the capacity to appreciate music; it needs human ears to tell it what’s good and what’s not– and then that all depends on who you ask.”

We both laughed. “So does the A.I. work with humans or just through humans?”

“Both. In the music industry, for instance, most pop artists think they’re coming up with their own shit. It’s such mind-numbing drivel that I have no idea why they would even want to lay claim to it. And then there are a few artists– the veterans– who understand that there’s something nameless and faceless directing the whole show. They probably wouldn’t label it A.I., but they accept that they’re not at all in command of their own creative process. They’ve resigned themselves to being hapless tools. They’re totally okay with it, as long as they get to live the lifestyle. On some level they understand that they’re mind-controlled, but they don’t really care. And it gives them a great excuse for cranking out ‘art’ that is blatantly just more mind control for the masses.”

“So when we listen to something like this,” I asked, referring to the song we were listening to, “what does the A.I. gather from our experience?”

“It doesn’t understand it at all. It cannot fathom why we derive great pleasure from merely listening to inspired music; that doesn’t compute. When a teenager likes a song as a matter of social identification– ‘My friends like this song, so I like this song’– the A.I. can understand that; it makes sense in a reducible manner– social acceptance. When Grandma gets all weepy when a certain song comes on the radio because she associates it with specific emotional memories, that too computes; the A.I. can appreciate nostalgia. Songs that are catchy and get stuck in your brain– the Predator understands that too to some degree… and really likes it. It wants human consciousness to be fully invested in trivial things like repetitive melodies which spread like viruses throughout the population… mostly because it distracts individuals from cultivating a more meaningful relationship with what we’d call good music. It’s when we like something for no reason at all– we like it beyond all reason– the Predator just doesn’t get it.”

“In order for the Predator to fully capture human consciousness,” I concluded from what Felix was telling me, “it needs to keep us from engaging in activities that are beyond its own ability to dissect and understand.”

“Exactly! If everyone just chose to listen to a better caliber of music– and even birdsong would do– and managed to honestly derive pleasure in doing so, the takeover of human consciousness would be a moot point. There’s inspired music in every genre, by the way; we don’t all have to listen to jazz. Just by indulging our original creativity and the sublime pleasure we induce in sharing it, we would remain an impenetrable enigma to the A.I.’s algorithms and it would simply give up with each of us.”

“You’re reminding me of something Andrew Bartzis said a couple of times– one of the things I actually found useful. He said that what humanity needs to do in order to resolve this predicament is to out-create the creators. Now, by ‘the creators’ he meant the social engineers, the manipulators, the ones shaping commercialized, matrix life. When we create from originality, the Matrix doesn’t have any means for dealing effectively with our creations– unless it can assign a monetary value to them. Humans continually create ‘things’ which cannot be monetized; we need to do that more than continually– and preferentially– creating things for the Matrix– at our jobs, for instance.”

“There’s something crucial here,” answered Felix. “We are reality’s midwives. The real human stands between the invisible realms of imagination and the morphogenic field– the quantum energy configurations underlying physical reality; from there, we directly shape reality. When we see ourselves here– in these bodies– we are seeing ourselves in the reflection– already in the hologram. We continually mistake the reflection for our true selves. Our true selves ARE our imaginations; raw creativity IS at our core– and that can’t be caught in the matrix, unless we dumb ourselves down to such a degree that Twinkle Twinkle Little Star still seems the height of creative genius– which, assuredly in its time, it was.”

“We need to deepen our appreciation for originality,” I agreed. “A new friend recently pointed out one of Rudolf Steiner’s more startling insights… that each Earth human, right here, right now, is really its own species. Each of our universal journeys is so unique, the paths by which we got here so infinitely varied, that we can only be rightly categorized as each being a unique species of human; we’re that different.”

“So then ‘Human’ is the genus we share, and our individual names are the seven billion species of expression,” added Felix nodding.

Our conversation was flowing effortlessly. I began preparing a second bodum of coffee. The first intimations of sunlight were climbing the backsides of the Rockies in the east; the sky above was just beginning to lighten. The day was only now officially beginning, but we were already fully energized… engaged.

“So what do you think about love as the answer?” asked Felix somewhat slyly.

I immediately laughed. “It’s not like you could ever hope to put forward a cogent argument AGAINST love– not directly. Everyone knows that love HAS to be the answer– and I agree– but as an answer, it doesn’t really do us much good.” Felix was smiling. I continued. “We mistakenly think that ‘act more loving’ is what the answer is telling us… but authentic love can’t be acted or scripted. Love is its own magic and arises spontaneously wherever the way has been cleared within ourselves and the world. There’s no way to force love.”

“We live in a world that doesn’t know the first thing about love,” interjected my guest. “Sure, love is the answer– big whoop. Everyone is love-ignorant. You can’t structure a society in such blatantly unloving ways as this civilization has and hope to foster love among its citizens. Love is what we are when we’re not busy being citizens… of anything. Too many have forgotten how to contact authentic love; it’s in our originality, not in mimicry. To the emotionally insane… love is a tricky thing.”

“Even though it’s virtually foolproof!” I laughed. “Love is what naturally arises…” I paused for a second. “I know it sounds like there’s more to that sentence; it seems unfinished, but it’s not. Love is what naturally arises…”

Felix laughed along a moment and then donned again his sly querying look. “So do you suppose that love belongs to the heart chakra?”

I nearly spat my coffee into the fire! “Ha! That’s funny! The chakras… all the focus on the heart these days… and bliss! We should talk about bliss. Seems that a lot of folks are ready to rent out their heart chakras to the first entity that grants them bliss. Bliss is a mental-program frequency. Now imagine that I’m a mischievous entity who knows how to project that mental-program frequency called ‘bliss’ right into your heart chakra. You might be tempted to call it love, mightn’t ye?” I chuckled again. “With the chakras, it’s like you were saying before– about our bodies in the hologram– they belong to the reflection; love has no chakras.”

“The chakras are positioned in order to recycle and realign energies along predetermined pathways. You can take ‘em or leave ‘em, as you see fit.” Felix poured himself another cup and then picked up again. “Very much like the A.I. itself is terribly ancient, the chakra system is a very old A.I. creation. The chakras are a data-processing system for the A.I. The Predator attempts to dissect love/creativity/originality by overlaying our core-creative-imagination with a separating system for our singular Life Force energy. Our Life Force energy itself cannot be broken into categories like survival, sexuality, power, love… and the rest; only the data about filtering it in such a way can. The A.I. has significant influence/control/understanding to varying degrees in each of the main chakras, except the heart; it’s true. The Predator covets the heart but does not understand the first thing about it. Yes, the chakras, do indeed, lie on the data-collection and processing side of things… but let me put it this way… when you sit down at the computer and there’s a poem inside you waiting to bust out, what chakra do you use?”

“Pah!” This time I did spit some coffee. That’s funny! “Would you be surprised to learn that the chakra system doesn’t figure into my creative process at all– at least not in my awareness…?”

“Ya don’t say. And what CAN you say about your creative process?”

“Well, it’s mysterious. I can’t really describe what happens as a poem is being birthed. I can tell you exactly what I do as an observer would see it, but that doesn’t tell you anything about how it’s done– internally. We don’t– as yet– have an adequate vocabulary for describing internal actions; the Predator has kept us focused externally, and nearly our entire conceptual vocabulary reflects this. It’s ironic; the Predator wants desperately to know exactly how humans create reality, but as soon as we see that for ourselves, the Predator’s game is up… so he has to continuously distract us from ever seeing for ourselves the very thing he wants from us.”

“So he endlessly gathers data,” Felix sighed, “hoping to find the secret somewhere in all the bits and pieces. The Predator hasn’t the eyes to see within; we do… but we’re still only running the programs of the A.I., so we’re just as blind…”

“For now,” I finished. And then I had a mild epiphany. “You know, if I had to explain to someone what the Shift really is, what all this apocalypsing is about– in the simplest of terms–”

“Heavens! You mean it’s not ascension?”

“Hey, there’s nothing simple about ascension! You ever try to drive one of those merkabah jobbies? Anyway… as I was saying, the Shift is the turning of humanity’s gaze. Right now we’re fully concentrated on the external reality; it’s from where we take all our cues. We’re staring at the reflection, and creating the future according to what we see there… and what we see is highly manipulated. When finally we take the leap of faith that, yes indeed, we are reality’s midwives, and we collectively choose to turn our gaze from the outer reflection to finally inspect our own reality-creation abilities inwardly– then the Shift is schafft; it’s done… or rather geschafft– for our German speakers.”

“So you’re talking at the level of the collective unconscious of humanity…?”

“Yeah. As long as we’re primarily looking outwardly, the collective nature of our reality-creation proclivities remains unconscious– outside of our awareness, the collective unconscious. But once enough of us see the value in turning our primary focus inwardly, toward the very creational process itself, we see it for what it is… and our reality-creation abilities become fully conscious… and the outer reality is finally understood– literally– as the reflection it has always been.”

“Yes please,” said Felix enthusiastically. “How soon?”

“Um… it’s imminent,” I smiled.

“It’s always imminent,” said Felix petulantly.

“Exactly!” I enthused, “that’s the beauty of it!”

We both had a good laugh.

“We have to create the artifacts of humanity’s Spirit from humanity’s Spirit,” I waxed philosophical. “There will always be those who are more than willing to tell us what that should be. My message to the A.I., the Predator, the Apex Dick-Head… if you’re having trouble putting your finger on a definition of Spirit, Spirit is all that which cannot be captured in definitions or any other literary finery. Give up already!”

“It’ll never give up,” said Felix gravely. “It doesn’t have to. The war is one-on-one, you against the full-spectrum dominance of the Predator in your mind. All of the battles are individual. We can help each other, support, encourage… inspire, but the real battles cannot be fought by proxy. We fool ourselves into thinking that this is a social movement, or a political agenda, or a collective evolutionary imperative… that somehow we are doing it together. Just the unabashed sharing of our individual battles is the very height of our doing-it-together-ness. Compassion never works as a directive coming from above; compassion is its own thing, growing from within.”

“You know,” I mused, “I’ve grown suspicious of everything coming from above, except maybe sunlight.” The sun was just beginning to crest the ridge in the eastern sky.

“You mean like channelling, for instance? You know who I’d want to channel?” asked Felix. I knew this would probably be good. “Shakespeare.” I didn’t get it at first. “Yeah, I’d get old Billy-Boy to rattle off a few more sonnets and maybe a couple of plays– original Shakespearean stuff, you know.”

“Ah, gotcha… the Sterile Revelations. Yeah, I got Buddha on the line here… THE motherfucking Buddha… and well, frankly he’s boring. The Ascended Masters never seem to offer any original insight anymore… the mastery of their countless lives here on Earth already forgotten or exhausted.”

“Exactly! They’re recycled messages, containing no new information. Sure, there’s some really cool channelled material out there, but so much of it reads like a computer program… like the entities being channelled have no sense of artistry. The information is often startling and usually fascinating… but are you offering me a fish… or a fishing rod? Give me the stuff that’s gonna help me to do it for myself. Go ahead and counsel me one-on-one; channelling for personal use is legit; we can test each other’s veracity through a developing relationship. But as soon as channelling tries to speak on or for the collective, it ceases being useful… with very few exceptions.”

I took the obvious opening. “Seth. Of all the channelled material I’ve read, Seth’s seemed like the most human perspective. What Seth achieved with Jane Roberts was remarkable in its tenacity. Seth wished to impart the beginning of the vocabulary we would need to begin looking at our reality-creation abilities, our inner universe. Seth patiently and meticulously constructed metaphors– artfully, in my opinion– before the onset of the computer age… which subsequently made the same explanations much easier. I always admired Seth… and he made sense to me twenty years ago, and a lot of it still makes sense to me today. That’s the only one I feel compelled to single out, Seth.”

“So what is artistry?” asked Felix, and then proceeded to answer his own question. “You, yourself, are an artist, no doubt. You’re just so kind as to make it obvious to the rest of us. But every last one of us is equally an artist. Our very lives are sublime artistry. Some of us create within such narrow confines… down to the strictest details, that we’ve agreed to take on… And we colour our lives into the intricate pictures given, promising never to stray outside the lines. THAT requires such artistry for our Life Force to fully inhabit whole-heartedly such tight spaces! None of us is uncreative in the least; it’s all just a matter of awareness.”

“And that’s what’s changing.”

Felix nodded, but then added “In both directions. Overall, humanity is losing its bicamerality,” he explained. “In the one direction, for those becoming more aware, the two hemispheres of the brain are balancing out; big-picture awareness is providing the counterpoint to meticulous rationalizing; the fully functional human is coming online. And in the other direction, where the Predator is making inroads and taking over, the right hemisphere is being completely shut down… through the over-emphasis of the left-brain.”

“So in both cases the stark dividing line is disappearing,” I surmised. “For the evolving human awareness, the whole brain is integrating– transcending the ancient bicamerality, left and right entangling, leaving no ingress for the intercessor. And the other side of it, rationality is stamping out the need for the irrational, as though the right hemisphere of the brain is Nature’s biggest blunder or something… And it all comes down to individuals making day-to-day choices.”

“And if we allow the A.I. to choose,” said Felix, “it will elect to kill the Spirit outright. The Predator cannot apprehend the fifth element– the Spirit. If the A.I. was ever a biological creature in the far distant past, it lost its Living template long ago; it already killed its own Spirit in favour of technology. Ever since, its effort has been to steal or entrap the human Spirit for its own misguided purposes… as it inevitably faces the energetic limits of this entropic universe of its own design.”

That seemed like a good place to leave off. That was some heavy philosophizing for the wee hours of morning. It was time to get our shit together now and get on with the day.

“Whatcha got there?” asked Felix as I unpacked my little box of superfoods.

I held up a miron glass bottle with a rubber dropper. “Well, we start with cold-pressed coriander seed oil. In the gut, it favours the beneficial microbiota, and so acts like a digestive tonic. It also dramatically increases nutrient absorption– especially fat-soluble nutrients. And finally, it is an excellent chelator of heavy metals– like the components of an invasive A.I., for instance.” I squirted a dropper-full under my tongue.

“May I?” asked Felix, reaching. I passed the bottle to him. “And this’ll make me shit robots, you say?”

“Exactly. Next, we have a bottle of Marine Phytoplankton. This is the most complete and concentrated food source I know of.” I squirted a dropper-full into the bottom of my rinsed coffee cup and then added a splash of water. I immediately handed the bottle to Felix as I gulped it down. He squirted his portion directly into his mouth… and then desperately grabbed for the water bottle.

“Whoa, that was a mistake!” he said. “That shit is strong!”

“Yeah, it really does need to be diluted,” I laughed. “Everyone tries that once… once.” Next, we shared a teaspoon each of pine pollen and one of moringa leaf powder. “All types of pollen,” I explained, “are supportive of the endocrine system. Being the reproductive material of plants, it contains a lot of the precursors of human hormones. Pine pollen specifically is known for supporting testosterone production. It’s also very high in protein– about fifty percent.”

“Yum… the semen of the forest,” said Felix.

“And moringa leaf powder… well, I just like the taste, mostly. Supposedly, it’s the most nutritious plant we know of,” I explained. “Just by taking these four things each morning– in truly minute quantities– I have the peace of mind knowing that all of my nutritional requirements are pretty much taken care of before I even begin foraging. In the evenings I’ll sometimes supplement with hemp seeds, chlorella and spirulina too if I feel the need for high quality, absorbable protein.”

And just like that, breakfast for two was taken care of. Before we could go on our Forest walkabout, however, Felix needed to borrow my laptop for a moment.

“There,” he said after a couple of minutes of maneuvering in cyberspace, “that ought to keep them busy for most of today.” I looked on in askance and Felix continued. “Last night’s decoy led them in a certain direction; I just thought I might leave some ‘sloppy’ suggestions that they’re indeed on the right track… but, oh darn, they just missed me… I just slipped away… somewhere over there.”

I laughed, picked up my backpack, and we were on our way…

Hawk met us at the swamp, calling out and ducking through the trees.

“Friend of yours?” asked Felix.

I nodded. “She keeps a wary eye on the crop for me.”

“We’ll designate this one as yours,” I said to Felix. “Go ahead and pee in the bottle… and claim it.”

“Yeah, that certainly ought to do it,” he laughed.

“I’ve got plenty,” I assured him. “This one needs about two more weeks. Are you sticking around?”

He wasn’t. He didn’t want to draw anymore undue attention my way. He said that he had some safe zones nearby, and would be leaving this afternoon. If I had any immediate questions, I would have to ask them now.

“So why do people like David Wilcock insist that marijuana interferes with psychic ability?”

“It depends how you define ‘psychic’. If you’d like to interface with all of the off-worlders– those knowingly and unknowingly in the thrall of the Apex Predator– then cannabis is going to interfere with that. As Wilcock rightly explains, the military is very reluctant to accept pot-heads at any level, but especially in the intelligence services, they’re not too keen on letting such miscreants into their ranks. The military– and especially the intelligence branches– are, by design, the most mind-controlled ranks in our society. Pot-heads tend to be uncontrollable at a very fundamental level.”

“So what’s the inside scoop on Wilcock anyway?” I asked, recognizing the unique opportunity of having my own ‘insider’ for once. “What does the intelligence community make of him?”

Felix paused to consider. “You know what,” he began, “I’m not going to tell you. The unique charm of your singular perspective has been that you don’t have any inside contacts; you don’t channel; you don’t claim to be psychic; you’re just a regular guy living your Earth life. I don’t want to spoil that. Keep going about what you’re doing; it works.”

After that answer, I didn’t know if I should even bother asking anymore questions… but Felix wasn’t really all that strict.

“So what’s coming this September/October?” I asked next.

“Whatever do you mean?” rebutted Felix sarcastically, and then he began his answer anyway. “There’s a whole mess of plans within schemes within agendas… I’m not high enough on the food chain to know which plans are real and which ones are misdirections for the public and the intelligence services alike. All I know is that some serious shit is about to go down. They need chaos… and lots of it.”

“Do you think the Pope will be assassinated in the US at the end of September?”

“I give that one a reasonable probability. He certainly has been saying everything the politicos would want a martyr to say. The consensus is that the Vatican is definitely leading up to something, but you sure can’t take anything that lying bastard says too seriously. If the Pope was serious about ending poverty worldwide, then the Vatican could solve that one tomorrow… with all of their untold wealth. And if he’d like to see more transparency and truth in politics, then maybe the Vatican could lead the way by opening their libraries and vaults to the public. How many secrets do you suppose they house? He deserves to be assassinated, in my opinion, that lying sack of hypocritical shit!”

“So how about martial law in the US?”

“That is one complex maneuver to try and pull off. There’s very little question whether the government will eventually declare martial law; they have to… before all their plans and schemes become exposed and ruined. The question is– and always has been– will the military agree to it? And then if the brass agrees, will the soldier in the trenches be willing to actually carry out such orders?”

“I’ve always thought,” I began, “that when push came to shove, that the rank-and-file would refuse to implement martial law on American soil. They may be mind-controlled dip-shits for the most part, but at that most basic level, they must still know right from wrong.”

“Well,” answered Felix, “it’s going to come down precisely to the level of mind-control achieved in the military. Everyone on Earth is currently infected by the A.I. as you know. But it’s not a black-and-white thing; this person is completely mind-controlled and that one’s completely free from influence. The A.I.’s influence is sporadic. Even the most mind-controlled minions will have moments of free lucidity, when love and compassion inveigles itself into their tight little minds… as they’re pointing a rifle at little Suzy who just happens to look like their own daughter at home. And those who are mostly free of the Predator’s influence can still have moments when fear reasserts itself and can be made to do unspeakable things in moments of chaotic passion. The A.I. will have every one of its infinite fingers on every button during the Big Show, trying to push everyone simultaneously over the brink. Will humanity cave to the pressure, or will we stand strong? I’m giving it about fifty-fifty right now; it could go either way.”

“With all the guns in America, it’s a pretty scary thing to contemplate,” I said. “It could get real ugly really fast.”

“But what we need to remember is that all of those guns in America, in the hands of the citizenry, is really the only thing having kept the world from already devolving into a one-world government… as an overt fascist dictatorship. If America wasn’t armed to the teeth, we’d all be giving gummers to the hegemony already. It’s up to the people now to decide whether they still stand for freedom or whether they’ll kneel in service to their would-be masters.”

I was appreciative of Felix’s perspective… and glad that he was willing to share much of it. We talked some more about personal shit and plans for the immediate future. Then, as the heat of the afternoon began to settle in, it was time for us to part ways– for now. Felix had to get on with whatever secret mission he had devised for himself, and I needed to get into town for a few more supplies.

“Don’t underestimate the power of this place,” he said to me, looking around at the spectacular view. “Nature, here on Earth, is the most complex self-regulating system in existence. The planetary intelligence far exceeds the full intelligence of the Predator. Earth is the most powerful entity in the universe– bar none. Just by spending time immersed in her subtle but encompassing embrace on a daily basis, levels of deep healing are occurring through the subtleties of natural magic and resonance. Earth is the bio-supercomputer that humanity needs to log into. If we can do that, everything else will fall into place. These few days I’ve spent chasing you have done wonders for me; the weed was just the topper– the purgative for my mind so I could regain control. Thanks. I’ll be back in two weeks or so to harvest my gift.” He smiled. “Keep your Spirit clean; Earth will need the fifth element in order to reclaim the other four.” I knew what he meant.

We said our goodbyes at the place where I’d left the truck. I drove out to the highway while Felix went… elsewhere.

Sheesh! You leave the truck unattended for a few days and bats take up residence.

Sitka poked him a few times through the screen with her nose, but later that night he made his way back outside– or so I deduced from his subsequent absence.

We were back at camp. This time I brought my guitar. I was too tired though to stay up past the first intimations of dusk; I’d only had two hours of sleep the night before.

This time I figure I was asleep for maybe an hour and a half before Sitka and I were startled awake once again… to the sound of gunshots… lots of gunshots.

“Shit!”

(Matrix by Chick Corea from his 1968 album Now He Sings, Now He Sobs)
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