birdsong5

An unconscious witch seeking personal power is a walking tornado of knives. Add on two teenage daughters and a potent local coven community, and it�s no wonder the Host is hiding.

The boy was staggering through the darkness of Goth-land, cranking power chords and adolescent screams from his stereo, trying to locate a h(e)aven amidst the chaotic detritus of three decades of both feminism and in-house Empowered Females.

To his credit, although being forced down the rabbit-hole at a tender age, with little guidance, he clung to his basic generous, kind spirit like the lifeline it was.

He was about sixteen then. I may have been the only male he�d bonded with in his life � an amazing indictment of American culture. He was rightly rebelling against his society, but there was no-one to show him how to channel his angst and libido in effective ways.

I did the little I could � mostly just hanging around, playing guitar, tossing the ball, some chit-chat. I recall at one point the five of us standing like a pentagram in the kitchen. It was kind of high-noon in the nuclear-family corral -- the one that's been converted into a fallout shelter.

Straight out, the boy asked me, with undisguised desperation: "What are my options?"

I said: �If I were your age again, living in this land, I would learn to speak Spanish, head south, and never look back.�

Needless to say it wasn�t long before, like his father many years prior, I was sent packing down the Road.

No home for the wicked, it seems.

Crow-Talker Wins the Lotto

During my final weeks in Corvallis I spent as much time as possible in the nearby forest. Autumn in the Pacific Coast Range means walks through velvet mosses and nests of fungi, groves of Douglas Fir, silent watching forests marshalling their voice.

One especially dismal morning, with my inner sun having reached some critical mass of eclipse, I drove to the local University forest and hiked up the mountain, looking for a little cave, a burrow, a natural spring � some spot where I could properly hunker and cogitate.

The mountainside had been cut, burned, or both. I wandered around, but there was nada. I crouched for an hour under an overturned tree that had left a little crater. But it was no good.

So I trudged back down the mountain, in a foul mood, feeling like a he-goat tied to a post in the desert, left to rot.

I joined to a Fire Road on my left and plodded along, walking through oatmeal atmosphere, the air thick as hell's gravity, the barren mountain on my left and a dense grove of fir and underbrush to my right.

I had no home or friends. I had virtually no money. Long ago I had left behind the securities of my former lives.

I was in chronic pain, and was in for far worse in the years ahead. I was living in the back of my truck in the driveway of three witches � a bargain with the Devil�s handmaids if ever one was. There was so much positive power in them, so much potential, but they insisted upon turning it ever to their control, upon Getting Their Way. The moment they abandoned their empowerment, miracles occurred. But mater and her nymphs refused to rise.

So down the Fire Road I went, and to top off my gloom, a crow shrieked in the grove to my right. He cawed a couple times as prologue, then directly set up a tremendous fucking screech-fest.

Lovely. Just what I needed.

Little prick.