The Mimosa Effect 2

The good news is, I finally finished the big climax scene of the John Dresden story (and there was much rejoicing).  The downside is, I have more editing to look forward to.  And, since this time the final-pass editing slog will result in a novel (hopefully) ready to be sent out into the world (…trying not to think about that part overly much…), all of my frivolous little side projects, N&D included, will have to get shuffled to the back burner. 

To sum up – Nyx and Dozer will be on hiatus for a bit, as I juggle novel editing, landscaping/house stuff, prepping for my extended trip out west, and the usual madness of wedding & concert season getting into full swing.  Things look to be quieting down some time after the end of July, so the plan is to wrap up the Nyx & Dozer story in either August or September. 

In the meantime, the odd video or silly link might make the occasional random appearance, but the writerly part of the blog is officially on summer vacation.  (Heck, it was warm enough for July earlier this afternoon, so why not?)

Cheers all.  Until later.

When the ringing blindness cleared a little, I could hear shouting – muffled, like someone had wrapped my head in a pillow – and there was a distinct sensation of movement.  Took a few more fuzzy seconds for me to realize that I was being dragged.  Someone had their hands under my armpits, and was lugging me like a body needing disposal.  I finally found my voice to protest when we hit the stairs.

“Then get off your ass and move yourself.”  It was the girl – Nyx – sounding even more annoyed than usual.  “Or so help me, I will let you roll to the bottom.”

After a bit of awkward gymnastics – my sense of balance had apparently decided to take the rest of the day off – I managed to get to my feet, using the closest wall for support.   My vision was still mostly a blur.

“Where are we?”

“Back stairwell.  Come on, no time for loitering.”

I followed the dim, bobbing blob that I assumed must be Nyx down the stairs, leaning against the railing to keep myself upright. 

“What was that back there?”

“Flash grenade.”

I gathered from the ensuing grunts and curses, and the eventual screech of rusty hinges, that the door at the bottom of the stairs was not cooperating.   A dozen words danced in my throat, but never quite made it out – “You’re shitting me,” was on the top of the list.   Thing is, I hadn’t know her that long – maybe an hour or two, tops – but I got the impression that she didn’t kid.  Or exaggerate.  So.  Flash grenade.

“I take it Trev’s paranoia wasn’t completely unfounded, then.  Who the hell would want to hurt him, though?  He’s harmless.”

“Not him.  As for who tossed it, I didn’t wait around to ask.  But I have some ideas.  You wouldn’t happen to know how to hotwire one of these, would you?”

One of…   “What..?  No.”  No, I was pretty sure I didn’t know how to hotwire, period.  My vision had returned enough to tell that the blocky shapes around us were cars – must be the underground parking lot. 

“Damn,” Nyx said.  “Need to find an older model.  Before everything got all covered up and computerized.”

Since that made no sense to me, I tried another topic.  “Speaking of Trevor…”

“No idea.  He wasn’t anywhere to be seen when I showed up.  Ah…” This time her voice gained a note of satisfaction.  “There you are.  And you are a thing of beauty, aren’t you?”

I knew she wasn’t talking to me, and my clearing vision could see that the garage seemed unoccupied, aside from us.

“You talk to cars a lot?”

“Shut it.”  Nyx pulled something thin and wiry out of her pocket, and unfolded it like a telescoping fishing pole.  In a matter of seconds, she had the door open, and the panel off the car’s steering column.  Then she was contorting herself on the driver’s seat, doing something I couldn’t see – presumably something to do with wires.  There was a cough and a sputter, followed by the begrudging, phlegmy rumble of an engine starting.  It didn’t sound all that healthy, as engines go, but I had to admit she was right.  It was a thing of beauty.

“1969 Dodge Charger,”I said, impressed.  Not that I know thing one about cars.  But I had spent many a childhood afternoon cross-legged on the carpet in front of the TV, following the adventures of the Duke brothers with far more rapt attention than they deserved. 

“You getting in or what?”

Tempted as I was to try leaping into the passenger seat via the window, I had recovered enough to realize that first, my coordination was still of questionable reliability, and second, that the window was firmly shut.  I settled for yanking open the door and settling into the cracked leather seat.

“So is this the part where the car chase starts?”

Nyx grimaced.  “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.  Still – you might want to put your seatbelt on.”

I did my best to follow her advice, as she floored it, first back, then a sharp arch forward, out of the parking spot and onto the exit ramp.

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I won’t bore you with the details of my other encounters (presuming someone finds this and reads it some day, and I’m not around to explain things – which is seeming far more likely now than it did a week ago).  Suffice to say that I left a trail of quietly snoozing bodies in my wake.  Not exactly playing it sneaky, I know, but I had this almost overwhelming feeling that I was running out of time.

I’ve never had so many unsavoury propositions in my life, as I did in those four blocks between the bridge and the dilapidated apartment complex that Dozer’s crazy friend called home.

As anticipated meetings go, this one blew away all the competition – quite literally.  Well, almost.  If I had been blown up five hours ago, I’d hardly be writing this now.   Don’t really know why I’m bothering, to tell the truth.  There are far more important things I should be doing.  Guess I’m not ready to face that yet.  It’s like, it’s too big to get my head around all at once.  Needed to take a moment, unwind, let off steam.  Needed to… I dunno, get away from the problem that is currently sitting in the other room. 

I thought he posed a quandary before.  Now I really have no idea what to do about him.  See, I thought it was all about getting the case back.  Finding out if this thing that I’ve been looking for since I was seven really exists.  But now that I know it might actually be real, it’s like…  I don’t want to know.  Because to tell the truth, I’ve known all along it was just a fantasy.   Like those people who are always on the verge of finishing their novel, their magnum opus, but never quite seem to get there.  They keep writing, and re-writing, and the pages pile up, but it never really goes anywhere.  Because it’s not about finishing it.  It’s about having something that’s yours alone, something into which you can escape when stuff gets bad.  And that’s not something people are willing to give up easily.  Least of all me, apparently.

Gotta go.  I think Dozer’s managed to mostly work himself free.  And I’m not ready to let him go just yet.

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She waited until I stopped laughing, watched as I wiped my eyes on my sleeve.

“I’m going to do you the courtesy,” she said, “of giving you fair warning.  I don’t like being laughed at.  Or lied to.”

“Sorry,” I said.  “Kind of an in-joke.   Seriously though – you want me to be straight with you, how about we make it a mutual exchange?  You already know my name.”

The first thing she’d said to me, after kicking the door open (or, for all I knew, blowing it open with some kind of mutant energy blast), was, “You must be Dozer.”

I’d responded the way you might expect, with more than a few words that would get bleeped on prime-time.  She’d ignored me, pushing the door closed behind her (or as near to closed as it could get, given its newly warped hinges), and tossing a black knapsack on the bed.  Which, given the size of the room, wasn’t as far from the door as you might expect.  It was kind of like a scaled-down version of  a cheap hotel room, minus the TV.  The knapsack landed in a heavy, dent-making kind of way that suggested it was heavier than it looked. 

Now we were both standing next to that bed, facing each other like boxers in a ring.  Despite the fact that I had at least three or four inches on her, I had no doubt that if it came down to a boxing match, she would most assuredly kick my ass out of the ring and down the street.

She narrowed her eyes, like she was trying to see the secret writing scribed on the inside of my skull.

“I’m Nyx,” she said.

“Goddess of sleep and dreams,” I said.  “Makes sense.  So, do you, like, really have super powers, or…”

“The case,” she said, without a trace of humour.  “From the safe. Where is it?”

“Why should I tell you?  For all I know, you’re one of the bad guys.”

“Is that really how you see the world? Good guys and bad guys, heroes and villains?  What are you, five?”

“Eighteen,” I said.  “Next month.”  No one ever seemed to believe me, when I said that.

“Too bad,” she said. 

“Why’s that?”

“Because if we get caught, we could both end up being tried as adults.”

I took a step back.  “Tried? For what?  Stealing some stupid box from an abandoned warehouse?  Christ, lady, you can have it back, if it’s that important.”

She shook her head.  “Not that.  well, yes, that too – eventually.  What I mean is…” She took a deep breath, let it out slowly, like she needed to steel herself for what she was going to say next.

“I need your help.”

I almost laughed again, then remembered what she’d said.  I swallowed it down, and managed a strangled, “You need what, now?”

“You heard me.  There’s something going on around here, and judging by the company you keep…”, jerking her head at Trevor’s snoring, peaceful form, “..I’m guessing you know something about it.”

If only she realized, how very little I really knew, about pretty much everything. 

“Hero number one,” she prompted.  “Ring a bell?”

It was hard to tell, with someone like Nyx, whether it was safer to pretend to know something, or not.  But before I had a chance to lie – or tell something like the truth – the front window shattered, and something black and oblong was rolling through the room.

“Down!” Nyx shouted, and we both sank to the floor, arms over our heads, just as the room exploded in a bright, blank nothingness.

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The whistles and choice words started up as soon as they spotted me. It’s hard to stay out of sight in a wasteland, where anything taller than a stop sign has been reduced to dust and rubble. They call that area between Redford St. and the Bridge “The Dump”, because that’s where everyone tosses their garbage – up to and including burned-out cars, shopping carts, and occasionally, bodies. The river shore stops being a winding stretch of manicured parks and beaches, and devolves into a steep, treacherous slope of gravel and industrial fill.

I don’t normally like doing my thing where other people can see me. Last thing I need is to end up on the front page of some tabloid, or become the next freak-show special on Fox news. Unfortunately, this time I didn’t have much choice.

There were five of them, all swimming in pants three sizes too big, bedecked with garlands of gold jewellery. Two of them had the requisite immaculate loose-fitting sports shirts, open to the navel. One was rocking the shirtless look, complete with shaved chest and oiled biceps, despite the fact that it felt like it might snow at any moment. The other two were bundled into the kind of puffy, shiny jackets only ever worn by 20-something chavs, and 60-plus grandmothers. They all had their heads shaved, all the better to see their impressive assortment of head and neck tattoos.

I think they were hoping that I would turn around and run. They looked like the types to enjoy a good chase before a kill. I gritted my teeth and kept walking, keeping my head up, eyes fixed ahead, as if I hadn’t even noticed them. Thing is, I have to be within a certain distance for my super-special pheromones to work their charm. About as far as a thug with arms like tree trunks can throw a bottle. They all had bottles of various sizes swinging from their hands, not even bothering with the usual half-hearted paper bag disguise.

Close enough meant I could smell their cologne, like a spike-heeled kick to the sinuses. Close enough meant that they could easily have pulled out any kind of weapon they liked, and thrown or shot them at me, to potentially deadly effect. I pushed the fear down, as far down as it would go. Adrenaline sours the poison, lessens its effect.

I don’t need the hand gestures, but some twisted little kid part of me does it anyway, because it’s, well, more fun. Like I could imagine I really have some kind of magical power.

These guys would remember me, whether I, or they, liked it or not. The little girl who turned into a witch before their eyes, black hair blowing in the breeze, the girl who, with a wave of her hands, put them all to sleep.

It’s always tempting, once they’re down, to keep going – take something from them, do something to them. I got by that way for a while, back when things were really bad – stealing cash, credit cards, cell phones, food. Each time, it felt like a part of me was getting dirtier, somewhere deep inside where I couldn’t reach to make it clean, to make it better. So I stopped. Not the stealing part, per se, at least not completely. But I made a rule for myself, that I would never do it to anyone who was helpless to stop me.

I left them with their wallets, and their Rolex watches, and their assortment of blades and brass knuckles. I did, however, take their guns. I know that throwing several handfuls of 9 mm’s into the river probably counts as littering, but I figured the folks upstairs might look the other way in this case.

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It wasn’t Trevor.  Although he did come crashing in a few minutes later, brandishing a taser like a sub-machine gun, shouting “Hands in the air!”  He might have temporarily been able to fool someone with that one, if his voice hadn’t cracked at the end.

The girl didn’t even turn around.  She just rolled her eyes, as if to say, not another one, then made this odd little flicking motion with her fingers.  Trev’s face got this funny, slightly puzzled look on it, and then he was crumpling to the floor.

“What the hell did you do that for?”  I said, before my brain caught up with me and I realized that she hadn’t actually done anything.

Then I remembered what had happened to Reeve, back at the warehouse.  One minute we’re goofing off, playing at being sneak thieves, thinking we’re alone, and then he falls over sideways, unconscious.   I thought at first that he’d fainted, but he hadn’t.  Just fallen asleep, suddenly, for no particular reason.  The kind of thing that usually happens to me.

I ran over to Trevor, to make sure he was okay.  He was curled up on the old brown indoor-outdoor carpet, snoring gently, the taser cradled against his chest like a teddy bear.

“Sorry,” the girl said.  “Force of habit.”

I turned back, looking at her more closely this time.  My first impression had been, well, confusing, to say the least.  She hadn’t looked like much through the door’s peephole – just some chick, looking down, so I couldn’t properly see her face.  I’d figured maybe it was one of Trev’s less than scrupulous neighbours.  Then I was landing on my ass, thrown back as the door slammed open, and she was standing over me.  I hadn’t unlocked the door.  And I had to figure, by the size and build of her, that she hadn’t just used brute strength to kick it off its hinges. 

But all of that kind of fell by the wayside when that part of me that isn’t my brain kicked in.  Whatever angry, scared knee-jerk thing I’d been about to say never made it out.  Reeve would’ve laughed his ass off, to see me struck speechless.  Literally, in this case. 

She still didn’t look even remotely familiar.   But there was something about her that was bugging me, and it wasn’t just the fact that she was simultaneously incredibly hot, and easily as scary as that Terminator chick from the third movie.

Then I got it.  It was the smell, faint and sweet, like a hint of perfume. 

“It was you,” I said.  “At the warehouse.”  We hadn’t been alone after all.  And deep down, I’d know that – I’d just put it off to my usual over-active sense of paranoia.

The girl grinned, flashing all her teeth like a predator.  “And you,” she said, “are the one who broke into my safe.  Care to tell me what it was you found?  And what you did with it?”

“If it’s your safe,” I countered, “shouldn’t you know what was in it?”

She shrugged.  “Maybe.  Maybe not.”

“Hold on,” I said.  “How come you didn’t pull that Sandman trick on me?”

She grimaced.  “I tried.  You seem to be the only person in this damned city that it doesn’t work on.”

I couldn’t help it.  I started laughing, like it was the funniest thing I’d ever heard.  And once I got going, it was hard to stop.  She just stared at me, probably wondering if I shared Trevor’s tenuous grasp on reality.  And I gotta say, at that point, I was starting to wonder the same thing.

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You know when you hear someone on the radio, or chat with them online, and then one day you finally meet them in person, out in the real world, and they’re nothing like you expected?

My entire day has been like that.  I’d been building the whole thing up in my head, like a movie that keeps ramping up towards the big climax scene, so it was kind of inevitable that the actual event would end up being a disappointment.  Like every ending to ever M. Night Shyamalan movie since Unbreakable. 

Except that it wasn’t.  Instead of an anticlimax, I found myself stepping through the looking glass into some fusion between the Twilight Zone and a Philip K. Dick novel.   It started to feel like I was on a fairytale quest, complete with enigmatic strangers and a host of obstacles to overcome.

I decided to get an early start, arrive at the rendezvous sight well ahead of time.  Get a look at my mystery contact before he spotted me, maybe cultivate that coveted element of surprise.

Right off the bat, someone started following me, the moment I stepped out of the door.  So much for keeping my location a secret.  Ditching stalkers is something that I’ve gotten pretty good at over the years, but this time the tail was persistent – and good.  I never did see their face, or even enough of them to tell if it was a guy or a girl.  They always kept enough people between them and me that I couldn’t bring my special talent into play – not without knocking out half a dozen pedestrians and getting myself noticed.  Eventually I managed to lose them in the crowd, once I got to the Market.  Plenty of stalls and booths to duck behind, small things to knock over, hanging things to jostle – all the usual misdirection props at my disposal. 

My destination was one of those giant, bland subsidized apartment buildings that stick up like bad teeth smack dab in the middle of the dingiest – and scariest – part of town.  A neighbourhood (if you can call it that) that makes the slums between Dalhousie and the waterfront look like an up-scale subdivision. 

As if it weren’t bad enough, entering the mutant freak zone alone, without any weapon except the one in my head, there was a bridge between me and my goal.  And as we all know, every fairytale bridge has its troll – or in this case, a whole pack of them.

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I think I’ve figured out who HeroNo1 is.  Had a lot of time to think, hanging out in Trev’s hovel.  Would’ve thought he’d be a pack-rat, have walls covered in newspaper clippings, sort of deal.  But the place is practically empty, and the walls are bare.  There’s a bed, and a microwave, and some dishes in a rubbermaid container next to the sink, and an old-fashioned radio, and that’s about it. 

I’m writing this by candlelight, since there’s no electricity, and he’s covered all the windows.  I’m still not entirely sure why I followed him here.  Guess I was a little spooked, after my near brush with almost becoming roadkill.  At least the bathroom is stocked with toilet paper.  The guy’s got some priorities.  Although I didn’t seen any sign of a toothbrush (might explain the breath).  I’m wondering if ol’ Trev is living exclusively off take-out pizza, given the pile of old pizza boxes in the corner. 

I feel kinda like a dork for not figuring it out sooner, actually.  He’s been making headlines for months now.  Not Trev – the guy who plays Superman.  Not Tom Welling, or  Brandon Routh, or Christopher Reeve back from the dead, I mean the new guy.  There’s always a new guy playing Superman.  Just like there will always be a new guy playing Doctor Who, or Robin Hood, or Sherlock Holmes.  Some things just stick in the public psyche.  I was remembering something he said in an interview – the new guy – about Superman being the number one hero of our time.  The epitome of superheroes, the pinnacle, lonely god, kind of thing.  There’s rumours going around that the guy is becoming a little overly attached to his role.  Like he’s starting to believe he really is Superman, and not just some actor.  I say, he doesn’t have enough bruises and scars to be a real hero.  Unless he is nigh-invulnerable, which I highly doubt.  I mean, since when does Superman drive around in a van?

I think someone’s knocking at the door.  Sounds like Trev’s secret knock, but it’s hard to be sure, it was kind of complicated.  Back in a mo.  Just hope he’s wrong about the men in black.  Because the day  heroes start employing henchmen to do their dirty work, is the day you know things are starting to go  very badly.

Today’s journal entry was written by candlelight, in honour of Earth Hour.

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This whole paranoia thing is starting to wear thin, and I’ve only been at it for a couple of days.  I couldn’t stay at the apartment last night.  Every time I jumped at some stray noise, Zoë would look at me like I was clearly going insane – either that, or I’d turned into some kind of crack-head junkie.  Sleep was out of the question.   Couldn’t go to the police, not with a whacked out story like that.  Hell, I wouldn’t believe me. 

So here I sit, in a dingy west-side hotel room, looking out at the neon sign flashing me from the roof of the strip joint across the street.   I brought the phone and the laptop, but I’ve been avoiding turning them on.  Stupid, I know.  I’m pretty sure the phone doesn’t need to be turned on for them to track it.  I’d have to yank the batteries, disable the computer’s wireless connection – make both machines essentially useless, dead weight.   Not that the phone’s much good right now.  Who would I call?

–

Had a bad moment there, when someone knocked on the door.  Turned out to be the janitor, wanting to know if he could come in to fix the light in the bathroom.  I couldn’t help hovering around him the whole time he was here, wondering if he was some kind of plant, sent to keep an eye on me.  Sounds totally moronic now, in hind sight.  After he’d left, I decided I was being a little over-the-top in the suspicion department.  I took a chance and ordered a pizza (under an assumed name, of course, ditto the hotel room). 

The laptop didn’t explode when I opened it.  I got online fine.  Nothing seems to be acting buggy, no weird clicks on the phone.  Although I don’t know if it does that on cell phones, anyhow.  There were two messages waiting for me (yeah, I’m that popular).  Zoë, reminding me the rent was due at the end of the month (in case I was planning on high-tailing it out of the country), and one from some anonymous Hotmail account.  Would have nuked it as spam, except that the header read: “CASEY CARLYSLE: READ THIS!”  All caps – always the sign of a sane, stable individual.   Not many people know my full name; fewer still have my email address.  It’s hard work, staying under the radar in the digital age, but I thought I’d mostly managed it.  Until now. 

The message managed to be both short and to the point, and maddeningly vague.  It said: “I’ve got your boy.  You want answers, meet us at”… followed by what looked like a meaningless string of numbers.  As I stared at it, trying to figure it out (too long to be co-ordinates, definitely not a phone number), the numbers flickered, then morphed into what looked like some kind of machine code, before resolving into a time, date and address.  I’ve never seen script like that embedded in an email before – unless you count cheesy eighties sci-fi movies.  I grabbed the courtesy hotel notepad from the bedside table and scribbled down the info, in case the next step had it turning back into gibberish.  I finished just in time to see my screen go blank. 

When I re-booted, not only was the message gone, but the email program had stopped working, and the internal modem seemed to be fried.  There was a new notepad file sitting on my desktop, that opened as soon as I moused over it.   It read: “Sorry.  Will explain later.”

Who the hell is this guy?  And what does he mean, “your boy”?  Not “the guy you’re looking for”, or a name.  It’s like he assumed we were in a relationship.  If he means who I think he means.  Which is ridiculous, considering we’ve never met face-to-face.  Dozer probably doesn’t even know I exist.  But this guy does.  I don’t know why I’m so sure it’s a guy, but for some reason the whole thing has loser geek hacking from the safety of his mom’s basement written all over it.  Either that, or he’s one of those truly crazy people, who spend all their time creating websites to show that there really are aliens living on the moon, and they’ve already infiltrated our earth government.  Either way, it can’t be a good thing.

Oh, and the time?  Tomorrow night, exactly 24 hours from when I first opened the email.  As if he knew exactly when I’d find it.  Or maybe I really have lost it, and I’m imagining all of this.  Either way, I’ve got 24 hours to try and prepare for a situation where everything aside from the geographical location is a completely unknown entity.  I’d say wish me luck, but aside from the fact that you’d have to be reading this long after the fact, I don’t want to jinx it.

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There will be two Chronicles posts close together this week (Tues/Wed. Thurs.*), then we’ll be skipping ahead to next Wed. (author doin’ the road trip thing this weekend). After that things should be back on schedule.

Flash forward to two days ago. I made the mistake of going for a walk, on a sunny day, alone. It’s not that sunlight triggers it, so much as sunny days make me happy. The brightness and heat tickle my hind-brain and tell me I should be basking on a rock somewhere, forgetting the cares of the world.

Worse still, I went walking on East street, when the Saturday farmer’s market was in full swing. In my defence, I had every intention of getting into something dangerous. The East street market is a pickpocket’s dream come true, even in January, when the produce mostly consists of used books, bad folk art and home-made pies. It may be bereft of tourists this time of year, but little old ladies, soccer moms and clueless hipsters abound. Then there’s the local B&E ring who like to use market days as a convenient distraction.

Usually Saturdays on East street were good for at least one innocent-plus-thug encounter, and the ensuing rescue by an anonymous stranger – which, up to that point, I’d always managed without either the perpetrator or the rescuee ever getting a good look at my face.

But on that day, the neighbourhood seemed to have signed some universal peace treaty. I didn’t see so much as a heated argument break out. I should have taken all the excessively mellow vibes as a warning sign, but I didn’t. One minute I was watching the light turn green, then something caught my eye – a bird, maybe – and I was looking up into this deep blue sky, whisps of cloud like coffee foam swirled across it, turning into a slow-motion whirlpool.

Next thing I know, I’m sitting in a parking lot somewhere, back to a wall, head between my knees, someone talking a mile a minute beside me. My ears were ringing, like they do after a loud thunderclap, and for some reason I was thinking that there should be broken glass everywhere, and people running, but the parking lot is empty except for me, some parked cars, and Trevor.

Trevor was looking, if possible, even more squirrelly than ever – hair stuck out every which way like he made a habit of trying to pull it out of his head, hands in constant motion, eyes trying to look everywhere at once. He hadn’t lost the shoulder twitch.

Trev used to hang with us back in the day, before the last of his marbles skittered free. It started with him following us around like a kid brother, probably because we were the only ones who didn’t tell him to get lost. He always had a camera with him. Even the other AV geeks thought he was a weirdo. It was his idea to bring the video camera along, the first time we jumped off the Kitchitaw Bridge.

One summer Trev went off to join Greenpeace. See the world from the point of view of a whaling-boat-ramming Zodiac, kind of deal. We never saw him again. At least, not the Trevor we knew. We thought he’d come back a long-haired, vegan hippie freak with a steady smoking habit. Instead, what came back was this crazy, wild-eyed conspiracy nut claiming to be Trevor, who seemed to have forgotten how to shave or wash. No one knows what happened to him out on the open ocean, or if he even made it to the local Greenpeace headquarters, for that matter. Nothing he’s said since that fateful return has made any more sense than a dog barking.

Now here he was, sitting beside me, talking about black helicopters and tooth implants, like I’d been listening all along.

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*March 17 update: Long gig tonight; next installment will be up by Thurs. p.m.