Being this close I decided to continue on the journey. Nearing the place I grew up in the forest of my youth a lady informed me that the gremlins had eaten my brake lights. Only the bottom bar. There was no stopping me now. There was dinner there waiting for me. They gave me so much food that I took leftovers to the city to give to my best friend and his future wife. We drank beer, visited a house I have never been from a bar I did not like to go, and they ate a late night snack before allowing me residence on their dirty floor. We gave it a surface wipe and laid sheets on the stained cushions. This was the cleanest I had seen the place in a while.

At the bar an old enemy from her perspective and an insignificant from mine shot cold stares that barely scratched the external share of my care. In a place called home one has an equal amount of friends as they do those who dislike them. Home has people that you like and do not like you. Home has people you do not like but they do. Home has people you care for and know. Home has people you know and do not care for. There may even be people you do not know and have not yet learned to care for yet. I have not seen them all. Of course I will probably be here for a while.

Soon, I will be traveling back to their domain for the holidays. I hope to see some of the fellow travelers during my stay. Before this can happen they burden me with the blessed memories. They show me where I have been and my hopes are that this will lend clues to where I am going. My habit is to drop off the map and resurface with bigger and better, bolder and brighter adventure for all who are willing to participate. I am ready. Are they?

We can never go backward. Ben Harper sings about missing the good ole days, but he is glad they are gone. I am not so sure how I feel about that. There are points in time, moments I wish I could relive. Not that I would change anything. Maybe a couple of things. No. None of it. Just relive it exactly the way it happened. We take for granted those things while they are in the present and long for them when they are past. We look forward to the future when we should be appreciating the right now. I am trying. Right now is always the hardest.

The internet went on the fritz. It is DSL and already slow anyway. Not this slow. Gremlins must have chewed the phone lines down the hill. The Whisps tattled in the ears of my neighbors to tie up the lines with cable television and long distance calls. None of them were calling me. My Netflix instant watch queue ran too slow to play. I could neither write nor twist wire, which is probably what they wanted me to do in the first place. So, I cleaned the refrigerator while it loaded. It needed doing.

It took all day to watch one episode of Stargate. I figured they might not like the direction the show is going, although this is absurd. It was the one where Daniel ascends into a ball of light with the faerie creature from the Buddhist world. They have always liked that race in the past. I did not know what was different about today. I switched my viewing pleasures to season 2 of Dollhouse. The same results occurred.

I tried to read, but they locked my book up in a detention center for criminal boys and made me indifferent to starting a new one. The other book I am trying to get into is just not very good. The pictures are pretty. The words are uninteresting.

I tried to eat. They gave me hiccups.

As a last resort I write this blog.

Hopefully this appeases their own appetites. The fae folk can be fickle vain creatures. Giving them the slightest attentions and they crave more. Remember what happened to Lady Cottingham. She was driven mad from a young age by the pixies leaping into her flower pressing book onward into adulthood.

They craft their ultimatums and elicit their demands in subtle tones that we sometimes cannot understand. When we do not comply they get jealous and angsty and devious rather than cunning. When we do they reward us with adventure or beauty or phone calls from lovers far away.

A man moves away from his wife and children to a house in the city with a roommate. He sees his daughter only once in a while, once a week, but a week for the man when concerned with his daughter is a while. A brother stops a midnight car with his broken face. The crazed driver was fired from the bar and the mother of the brother drives him crazy. Recklessly and fully wrecked she hopped the curb breaking his wrist and bruising his bruised spine. An uncle is dying. This may be his last christmas. A best friend cannot be with his best friend on his birthday. They like the guy she is dating, but unfortunately, this means she will not be dating him much longer.

These are the shooting stars. Where once they were held so high in the night, they have fallen back to earth.

The Wyld Women tribe performed for an audience within his head. They explored the grammatical similitude of sleeping cats and commas, the pause and the paws, a quick breath in an afternoon nap. They told me about the houses where witches meet, characters as much as any other sentient being in a story. Tales of soft erotica. How gnomes use trickery although they are condemned for doing so, only making their magic slyer. One preached doom and gloom, the foreboding nature of being a mother, helplessly watching your children grow older, become adults, leave the nest and form their own to perpetuate the cycle.

An audience of fellow women thumbed through their pages. They were startled initially by my male energy, but subsided into acceptance of that presence, returning to the words of the page. Eventually, they invited me to their table to sup Barley wine from goblets and talk about sweat lodges, the family, dating, flowers, and churches. No matter the religion, faeries like churches in the same way they like libraries and galleries. They offered to take me to some. The Wyld Women had colorful names like Indigo and Skye and Melon. They split from Articluation when it became the Ground Up. We laughed and pondered and argued with good nature. They vowed to meet with me once more and maybe even more after that.

“We will meet again,” they said, bowing their heads and taking leave of this feast in conversation. They had Hanukkah candles to dance around this night.

I spent the day taking things apart and putting them back together to install the new connector without a battery to shock me. To double my precautions I wore rubber gloves. Still this did not work. Either the splicing of the wires is not sound, the polarity is switched, or there is something wrong deeper into the circuit board. Damn those gremlins.

We talked about the Apocalypse, a topic for every Sundays discourse. Specifically, we planned ways to harness electricity using turbines in wide mouthed rain gutters made out of tin cans. They would be hooked to capacitors that fed into larger storage facilities that fed into the main sub station, which were gravity based weights hanging from the corners of a tall building. On the off season we could sell the energy back onto the grid. We thought of every weather condition and how to harness the energy of it. Solar panels could digest the sun, windmills coiled the power of moving air, the gutters were miniature hydroelectric dams running the filters to decontaminate the water for drinking. They told me there was a way to make energy out of things getting cold, but they would not tell me how so I did not believe them.

I made a sandwich, soup, and a salad. We looked at the moon and the blackness surrounding us because the stars were veiled by the clouds. I took a shower. I went to bed.

I paused in my articulation of the errands I ran from the ground up to check it out. The live-in resident, Nick, told me to come back later. They were not currently open right now. They would be later. I did. More people had arrived at the designated time, but the show was nowhere near beginning. I left again, not planning to return until I saw the bees.

Bees are one of the messengers of the fae. All pollinating creatures are. Butterflies will bring you to something beautiful or colorful or aesthetically pleasing, the wind will whisper sweet nothings in your ear, even the land based animals transporting seeds in the fur of their feet are their agents. Bees bring forth an activity. I followed it all the way to the hive. One of the traveling queens, who arrived here from Maine, told me a story about removing mountain tops for the sake of lights.

“We destroy the mountains because we are afraid of the dark.”

She used a large, twenty five foot, black and white banner to transport me to Appalachia, pronouncing it with a sharp third ‘a,’ with a fable about the true cost of coal.

“This was the land before colonization, the indigenous animals, plants, people and those that settled the area. With the onset of your Industrial Revolution, they removed the tribal people for corporate interests. They gathered mineral rights, digging under the farms and occasionally destroying our homesteads. They built large black smoky factories that choked us like the swomee swans.”

We were hurtling through time as she spoke.

“Present day operations leveled entire mountains for your growing electrical and war needs. The frogs were forced to work in labor camps that polluted the drinking water of their tadpoles.”

Technology replaced the workers with machines, propagating massive job losses in the surrounding communities that depended on the mines. These effects were underwhelmed by pharmaceutical displacements in the name of  oxycodone and vikatan administered in the same manner as opium on the Chinese railroads.

“You only need twelve people to take down a mountain,” she said. “The tadpoles, now grown with their own sets of legs, used those new appendages to follow the thousands of footprints to the bus station out of town. The foxes and rats paper wrenched your bureaucratic machines with regulations while the other animals sabotaged the equipment in our names. The final chapter has not yet been written. Hopefully, it will reveal the  future of land reclamation for our kind. Energy was once defined by how much one can do in a day and power is the amount done by a community.”

A gremlin arrived on her foot heels. He wore a priestly robe with wild fanatic eyes and garnered the forces of two devout apostles at his side. He was a bit more aggressive than simply painting pictures or telling stories. He demanded immediate action through unspeakable means that he dared not utter. “Do what you say,” he said, “do not say what you do.” Then he remarked with the devilish grin that gremlins own, “This machine costs 80 million dollars. I don’t care who you are, 80 mill is a lot of money.” He did not go into technique or ask for volunteers or specifically rally a time and date for the nefarious operation. He did not say sugar in the tank only attracts temporary flies. He did not suggest the use of bleach because it would actually kill them. He did not need to. I knew what he meant.

They wanted to hit them where it financially hurt. They discussed the two major reasons for not being an active agent in the war against “the mother earth fuckers.” One was breaking the law and going to jail. This never bothered me. I have always followed my own laws based upon a self morality. The other was death. I knew death was not the end. It happens to everyone. I am not afraid. My concern was stooping to the level of actions that you oppose to sanctify your cause. An indian in a teepee once told me that he owned a cell phone so he could have the same weapons as his enemies. The second speaker ended the segment with a quick wrap up of their message. “Fuck shit up. Destroy your reality. It is all bullshit anyway. Any questions?”

There were none. The final gremlin had a muse, which is odd for a gremlin to befriend. He stood in the park shouting poetry with a guitar he did not play. The blue meanies made him stop. He killed them in his mind. “You have to kill them in your mind first,” he gargled. Then, he stripped down naked and beat on drums he did not play either. Although noisy, the energy he directed onto them could save a hundred mountains from inevitable destruction.

I almost left, but the faeries stopped me. They told me I had not yet seen all of what they brought me here for. I stayed and was thankful. A group from Grand Junction joined the fray with a trumpet. It was not ska. It was not eighties crap. It was dreamy like fifties swing on the love boat. The frenzied crowd of fae folk that gathered created a drunken feeling slow motion mosh pit. More musicians stripped away their clothing and performed for the mass singing, “Holy Holy Holy” gypsy war songs with bent saws, bows, and washboards. The audience removed their own cloth masks to dance in the buff. The bodies glanced sweat from one to the other in an anarchistic circle of rhythm. Hair flung across the arena from the participants, among them, caught in the menage, were humans, the faeries and I. Normally, I see them from the corner of my eyes unless they make a spectacle like this. Here they played in plain sight, hidden only to those who do not know to look for them between those of this world and their own.

Custard could not figure out why the native peoples were so pissed off on that last stand. The night before they were singing, dancing, and playing drums.

The three gremlins chatted amongst themselves.

“I am going to remember not knowing you.”

“I am going to remember something that never happened.”

“And I will remember nothing.”

The faeries have sequestered me in the middle of the woods without much person to person human contact. This isolated cabin is a between place, a place that faeries dwell like the area that the creek becomes the land, the ocean becomes the shore, the treetop becomes the sky, the flower becomes the pollen, or for my own example the moment between one destination and another. They ran me from town to town with their carrots and sticks and slaps in the backside when I was stubborn to here. They are giving me guidance, but it is elusive.