The Diamond Island

Okay, so like what the dame Hek is going on?  I’ll tell you what’s going on, total craziness, that’s what’s happenin’ yo.

The brand new trans-triple headed crossroads warp core is installed and calibrated.  The whole honeycomb hideout resonates with the sound of the rhythms of the grave, from the ground up.  The cats might as well be staying on a gigantic spaceship of peace and love with catgrass on the house.  Even the catboxes are ghost free and soothing to the rump.

Took me and K a while to recover from “stunned” and then the disorientation hit.  That kind of strange contentment that comes from breaking free of a conflagration-fulmination into blue skies.  At first you think you’re hallucinating.  But it’s true, it’s true, it’s dame Hek true ahroo!

Back at the controls, I’m thinking about Ariadne’s thread.  Yeah, we all need a grounding out technique to keep us from getting lost.  But what if the minotaur needed a thread too?  You know, so he could keep from getting lost to the outside world?  What you say?!  Monsters with a guidemap to jack us?  Hek-yeah.

It’s a two way street, coming and going, departure, return.  Aum.

And that goes for the divine as well as us human losers on this patch of dirt.  The living spirit looks to us to try.  Judging by that haunted house labyrinth I think some journeys are a one time only limited time offer.

I have the sense of answering the living spirit’s own prayer here, that there is a seeing up at the heavens and beholding earth.  How many people ever get to go to the moon and look up in the sky to see themselves, their home suspended above from what was supposed to be above for so long in our imaginations?

I can see for miles and miles and miles and miles.

We are the aliens, landing at a Mount Olympus near you.  Do we bring messages of peace and advanced technology, or are we coming to invade?  Are we bound by the prime directive when visiting Saint Anthony’s cottage for a cup of tea?  Whose outside world manifestation are we anyway?  Boxes within boxes, elephants all the way down.

My policy is not to talk about work, but I believe this is a suitable exception.  I’m not one for following my rules off a cliff I suppose you might say.  Mr. Punch, being an intriguing rascal, appears to enjoy stirring things up.

So.  Not one to easily forget the discovery I made of Mr. Punch in an earlier post, I bided my time.  The passing of time elapsed, and an opportunity presented itself to me in the form of a talent show at work.

I didn’t immediately recognize it as such.  Many folks where I work recognize that I have certain leanings towards the creative performance.  So it wasn’t a surprise when I said randomly, “Sure, sign me up.  I don’t know what I’ll do, but whatever.”

The show approached, and all I could think of was doing some unformulated comedy routine.  Meanwhile, the other volunteers honed their ideas and practiced what they would share with the rest of us at the office.  Heartfelt duets, piano-violin duets, funny duets.

Me, I had nothing.  And from nothing comes something, or rather, Mr. Punch came along and said I should do a show for him.  The folks at the office would love it, and I would get a chance to actually run a show.

You see, I’ve been doing a lot of Internet reading about Mr. Punch.  Not just to search for clues, but because I found the whole concept fascinating.  Perhaps I might actually become a “professor” one day!  That’s a person who is a Punch and Judy performer, by the way.  It has roots in the old days, when professors weren’t merely academics but also people with mystical or showmanship skills.

Okay, I have no funds right now, having spent all my reserves moving out of the haunted house.  There’s no way I was going to actually be able to buy real props.  Not with two days to go before the big show, where I was getting the feeling I’d be standing up on stage like a frightened Andy Kaufman, except it wouldn’t be an act.

So, I pored over Punch and Judy scripts and made one of my own.  Well, in true rip-off street entertainer style I snatched up a bunch of ideas from other professors online.  I decided on Punch, Judy, and the Constable, with the Devil for a chaser.  Memorized some classic lines and that was that.

Next, a makeshift stage.  Obtained some tall, stiff cardstock and taped it together.  Large enough for me to sit behind and raise my hands above.  A bit wobbly—wouldn’t it be hilarious if it fell down during the performance?  Well, that’s show biz folks.  I’d run with it.  The great thing about Punch and Judy shows is they are designed to be totally improvised and mobile if the situation calls for it.

Finally, the puppets.  Again, ripping off pictures of Punch characters from the Internet and printing them out.  I traced the outlines onto a fresh piece of paper and exaggerated the lines a little to make them larger.  Then I colored the faces and cut them out.  Taking four brown paper lunch bags, I glue-sticked the faces on to the bottoms.  When the bags are folded, the faces “face” forward and have a little motive ability.

For Punch’s stick I used a cardboard tube from a paper towel roll.

I practiced the voices and the lines back and forth for an hour.  Slept on it.  And then the next day I’m at work ready to go!  We are talking a dirt cheap, bare bones, never been done before by me, on the fly show.  Boy I sure hope I don’t choke!

Mr. Punch came through.  I did the work, and he had my back when the time came for him to show up.  There’s something primordial about puppet shows, and archetypal characters on stage that has a strong life energy of its own.  The show was a big hit, with people laughing at the stupidity of the paper bag puppets talking in funny voices.  The interactivity really makes the audience implicit in the story, while still allowing them to be particpationists (it’s all rote responses right….right?!).  This is what genius is made of.

I didn’t think I would be able to run all three side characters in the five-minute time slot, but it all flowed beautifully.  Judy boggled at the audience larger than she could cook for, so she decided to call in delivery (the office was having a lunch afterwards of Chick-Fil-A).  The constable was suitably outraged at Punch’s misbehavior.  And when the Devil showed up there was a nice chill down the audience’s spine, at the same time a hope Punch would get his comeuppance this time!

I don’t know when I’ll get to do a Punch and Judy show again.  It’s a tremendous privilege for Mr. Punch to come along and give me even one opportunity in life.  I feel as if I’ve participated in an ancient, honorable tradition and made people happy.

And that’s the way you do it.

While the starship Snipe rests in dry dock, getting it’s superstructure and engine stress points repaired, I’m on some much needed psychic shore leave.  Still lots to do, in a generic survival kind of way.  K and I are moved  in to the new honeycomb hideout, and have physical object issues to work out with all of our stuff.  But the new place is welcoming us in and it’s as if we never left our beloved neighborhood before the haunted house jackup.

My mental brain calibrations return to a less terrified “all guns-blazing” mode.  And I go through the task of setting up my creative work center all over again.  I know I have chip-lights going off on projects all over the place.  The panic is part of the process, so it’s cool.  This is a good energy to have bugging me.  K and I go to a bookstore and buy some reading material.  At the end of the day, we just need to sit on the Puff Couch and read, with cats all together at peace loafing on the slack vibe.

Picked up this awesome huge volcano picture book for ten bucks.  I’ve been on a volcano kick for the last few weeks, imagining the explosive power and brilliant glow of molten earth.  I swear, bargain books have some of the best overlooked books ever.

I decide a good search on the internets would be to find out what happens when a person falls into lava.  I mean, what really happens?  As I type in “What happens when a” into the gooble-gobbler search box, it suggests “volcano erupts”, followed by “girl loses her virginity”.  Whoa, the things on people’s minds and the free form associations with nature shows.  What is going on in the collective unconscious that I’m picking up?

Turns out finding an answer to this person-in-lava question is harder than it looks.  I really have to search with the sensors to find a second hand story about a geologist who fell up to his waist in lava accidentally, and was pulled out quickly by a friend.  He suffered third degree burns and lived to walk again (with a hint that he’d lost the ability to have children, ouch).

Mind you, he was wearing one of those heat protection suits.  If I understand correctly, the difference in temperatures caused a thin layer of lava to cool around the body, absorbing heat from the outer layer of lava preventing the flesh from burning immediately.

I see a lot of speculation that a person would die almost immediately from the heat, probably float on top of the lava (density issues, like swimming in a salt-saturated body of water), and combust into huge amounts of smoke.  The flesh would shrivel up (the body’s liquids blasting out as steam) and probably explode (because of the fat), the bones charring straight to ash.

I learn about convection.  That’s when hot liquids or gases make currents that spread their heat into the environment.  Lava is so unbearably hot convection would burn you up before you reached it.  Never mind the poison gases and crippling ash emanating from it.  Wow, the force of nature contained within the molten earth is unbelievably sublime.

I’ve always been fond of volcanoes.  Part of me finds the vein of clues within Pele compelling.  But my current interest is spurred along the lines of some of the things my friends have been talking about.  Much as horses was a theme that was roaming the fields a few months ago, now it appears that volcanoes are the new symbol.

There’s the aspect of psychological force building up in the deep depths and erupting forth (violently, with tremendous force).  There’s also the part that relates to creative process, with the ejected contents providing new land to live upon and plants to grow in.  And there’s also the facet to personality, having a charisma that is intense and awesome in scope, much as a fountain of magma can draw attention.

In the external world it can stand for events that overwhelm us with their gigantic power.  The popular image of human sacrifice to volcanoes comes into play.  Human being marries deity in the literal sense, ka-fwoosh.  Taken down a notch it can be any personal tragedy or self-sacrifice that traumatizes the soul.

What happens when a person falls into lava psychologically?  Destruction of the ego, of the self-image.  The raw truth of one’s innermost interior being burns the consciousness to the crisp.  You might recover from a brief contact, but with a deep scar.  Total psychic immolation would mean you descend into darkness and only a greater, living spirit power can draw you back from the depths.  But this is getting into scary stuff, where the real possibility exists your pieces of the psyche (ashes) will remain at an elemental level.

Elemental as in, if you reduce all the biological processes to chemical processes, what you are left with at the foundation of all life is dirt.  That is, matter.

Out of matter come shapes, and one of the most fundamental is the stone.  When the lava has cooled you are left with rock, which chips, breaks and is worn into shapes.  The stone has been a symbol of the deepest self for a long time.  But we’re talking geologic time here when it comes to natural processes (even though lava itself can cool within a human being’s lifetime).  A person might have to endure a time of unconscious cooling and shaping before assuming a proper psychological shape.

Which is an emerging from the unknown.  Then, one day, a person finds you and goes, “Wow, what a cool stone.” and puts you in a pocket to take you home.  It’s as if the human image of ourselves is something that happens to us, appears to come from the outside, when that body has been formed from dirt itself in a much longer and mysterious process, moving up the chain from matter to chemical to biological to psychological once more.

I’m staring at the volcanoes and listening for the clues, just for the Hek of it.  Past the awesome force and cyclic transmutation, at the emptiness of nothing from which all that heat-matter and liquid-matter is spilling forth from.

What happens when a person falls into lava?  The unnecessary stuff burns away and you’re left with you.

K and I moved a veritable buttload of George Carlin micronized “stuff” for the last ten days.  Detaching all cables, ectoplasmic ghost tentacles, and gravitational psychic suctoids has been a real pleasure I can tell you.  Tractor beaming it out of the haunted house while the ghosts gnash their teeth and scream and cry, Wild Thangs style, “oh please oh please don’t go we’ll eat you up we smash you so”, is an exercise in self-pyro-flagellation.

How many twisted ankles, auto-inject splinters, cloudy day sunburns, phantom mosquito bites, miniature cuts, blunt skin scratches, smooshed toe blister, achy-breaky muscles hit points you got?  Well, looks like K and I ain’t down and out yet, though wow what a slow ride, take it beastly.

But the alcohol saints have been keeping us in plenty of in-between meal snacks.  A little muscle relaxant goes a long way in keeping the insanity people and android soul creamulators away.  I’m using my soulsword on full power, banishing those demonoid phenomenons from Chucky doll’s foul orifice (which one?).  Maybe the alcohol saints are loving the spectacle.  Who will challenge McCoy in THIS day and age, eh?  Luck of the Irish I suppose, with a heap of K’s fatalistic viking plunge ahead with all-out Excalburt whammo.

The animals are all over the place right now.  Last night while driving home a load in the trans-dimensional hatchback Micro-blue, a deer with horns crossed the street.  During the day there’s tons of hawks everywhere, looking for munchy mouseguts or delicious bird nuggets.  If you can’t see them, you can sure hear them screeching like the cartoon in Hawk The Slayer!

Driving through traffic on the way to the store for the umpteenth time to get lightbulbs, or cleanser, or any number of post-haunted house tidy-up you can’t remember because your brain is on auto-pilot, I heard the baying of a goat.  It’s a freaking two road with two lanes each multi-hyperspace bypass full of droids in cars, for Goodness sake.  It must have been in somebody’s vehicle, but I didn’t see any vehicles but four doors and minivans.  Chaos!

On UFO Girl Hill, the rabbits were playing with each other, jumping and prancing about while munching on the rarified fairy grass that surrounds the hill.  Chippie was maneuvering about, collecting seeds.  And huge yellow damsel-fly like bug was waiting for us on the door handle.  Can you dig it?  BUG city.  As in bugging out and calling it even, bugging out and losing your marbles, bugging off because this house for dwarfs and dimensional shamblers just ain’t got it for us no more.

Still, K and I have gotten a few walkies in around the magic lake.  Bats everywhere eating the bugs buzzing our skulls.  We found their lair, and its a perfect spot.  Heating and cooling all in one, water, bugs, all the whole nine yards.  These bats are batty batty batty!  They are getting down, they are rocking the mike, they are eating their faces full of bugs!  Eat them all up yum, dudes and dudettes, we’ll keep walkin’ on and bring ya the summer BBQ livin’ is easy howlaroo.

The cats have been transfered, and are taking the new honeycomb hideout well.  The lack of haunted house doom agrees with them, and how!  New bed, new rest, deep sleep.  I dreamt K and I had climbed out of a sewer-cave, ancient forgotten waterway with a sack full of dimaonds.  Everyone was wanting to know how we did it, where we were.

Xtine, you’ve been showing us that you know who the great actresses are.  You’ve gone up and down the line, and truthfully, I didn’t realize how wise and talented some of these women were.  How much they have earned our respect for the choices they have made.

Reminds me of a film I haven’t seen in a while.  The great and noble feminine soul swallowing up the harsh light of raging societal oppression.

But I think there’s something you aren’t owning up to.  Or maybe it just seems like that because your mantra-like meditation IS the owning up to it.  This becoming, a recitation of the mighty to lend you strength as you work it out.

What I mean is, realize it:  You are right with those women this very moment, in the cantina, talking about the DEAL.  Yeah, some of them are digging up some pretty amazing psychic roots or growing amazing spiritual tomatoes.  That stuff feeds us, it gets into the psychological food chain of the people.

I’m talking about the richness that comes from a mutual, shared creative space where different skill levels can discourse about what is going on.  There isn’t a hierarchy here, but a circular field where everybody’s tending their own plot.  You have every right to speak with them about what it is you are doing.

Heroines are there to show us yes, you can do it too.  The source of genius is in all of us.  We are all called and all are chosen, those who answer that call.  You are not alone Hek-sistah.  You walk the same halls and accessways as these magnificent women, one with all of them.  As you speak with your true voice they are spoken of with respect.

Never underestimate pink.

(I sure would like to be a fly on the wall during those ding dang darn conversations.  Because in that bytch-power cantina, the bar is always open and flowing with great cocktails and delicious snacks.  That’s the battleship bandwidth they’re packing that Xtine mentions, Saturnalia afternoon style.  These women are in the howse, goin’ for what’s theirs, yo.)

Much as the urgency of the monster puzzle in the haunted house is motivating me, this space needs variety.  There ought to be rest stops along the way where one can enjoy a Stuckey’s hot dog and coffee, ogle the souvenir vending machine for cool prizes, and use the facilities to restore zero storage.

The way in which our Property Party dominated system is throwing money at the socialized corporations of the anti-free market got me thinking about a certain toy I used to play with.  I still have this thing, and it still works!

The game is called Chutes Away!  It’s a contraption consisting of a wind-up mechanism base, a pretend-airplane control panel and view port, an overhang with a model rescue plane with a mechanism for carrying rescue chutes, and a wide rotating disc with holes representing the landscape and emergencies in need of help.

You turn on the mechanism, the disc rotates, and you look through the view port.  Using the controls, you move the plane back and forth along the path of the disc and drop chutes in holes.  When the mechanism winds down, you are presumably out of fuel and have to leave and land somewhere.  Score is kept by the number of chutes you land successfully in the holes.

The chutes are plastic, with a metal weight on the end, so they drop pretty quick.  The holes have raised edges and taper to a point downwards, so if you get a solid hit the chute may bounce a little but will be directed to a rest at the bottom.

The disc is nicely illustrated with various scenes of disaster in need of help.  A car lies stuck in a collapsed wooden bridge with people waving for help, a crashed helicopter crew signal for your attention, a sinking boat’s passengers wave at you, and so on.

I thought this was the coolest thing ever when I saw it in the store, so I pestered my folks into getting it.  But they got back at me.  My folks called the game “Bucks Away!” and would laugh at me while I played rescue pilot.  The idea was that it was a waste of money and the secret joke behind the game was I was really throwing money away with every chute released.  Just as buying the game had been a throw-away.

So I pulled out the game once more and pretended to be the TARP’s ace pilot.  I would be dropping public funds right into the waiting chimneys of insolvent banks throughout the land.  Kind of like Santa Claus.

Unfortunately there was a technical difficulty.  The chute drop was a bit stuck – I had to really use the lever hard to release them.  A lot of the bailout money went right into the drink or the woods, and I was only able to save three banks from having to paper over their losses until the magical day of recovery.

Bucks away!

I’m wearing a pale orange sweatshirt my aunt Duke got me a while back.  It’s finally getting broken in and acquiring that soft, lived in sensation when you wear it.  Sewn into the chest are the words “The Fool”, along with a reproduction of the classic tarot fool and his dog from the Waite deck.

I’m feeling it.  Roaming too and fro among the halls and rooms of a strange and haunted house of many critters and creatures, all seeking shelter from the daylight, hoping for a room or creaky floorboard to call their own.

A cool, rainy breeze blows on my face as I stand at a window on the end of a crooked hallway.  Took some doing to lift that cracked windowpane and prop it up with a broken chair leg.  Earlier this morning it snowed a little, with snowflakes so fragile they splat into water as soon as they hit the windowpane or your face.  Now it’s a drifty, chilly mist and a cloudy day.

I like rainy days, they always cheer me up.  Not just because they remind me of my old stomping grounds in Portland, Oregon, but because they drive people indoors and quiet them down.  Even the spirits and the ani-mani-mals tend to be calmer and more reserved.  When the rain falls hard enough to make a sound, it’s a pleasant renewal I feel all throughout.

My old 1980 ghetto blaster, still working, plays me a steady tape of old eighties hits.  Right now, it’s blasting out When In Rome’s “The Promise”, which when combined with the airy, ethereal misty rain and cold air that smells so strongly of spring, I can hardly contain my excitement.

I’m thinking of two things.  The first, that if holes in my heart that I thought couldn’t be made well suddenly heal, one after the other, then what kind of person am I that this should happen to me?  How down was I in the depths that I needed several miracles to happen?  Mind you, it’s not a return to things as they were before; it’s a closure — a completion that makes one whole again.

The other thing is a continuation of seeing my friends and noticing a little more than I saw before.  Another friend of mine dropped by on the line to tell me she enjoys my writings on this blog.  My eyes couldn’t leave the huge wolf pup she was holding (she was doing wolf preserve stuff).  I thought that was her dog!

As we chatted, I was blown away how much I didn’t know about her, and how talented and intense she is.  A brilliant, polished gemstone of a woman surrounded by loveliness and living her own self-decided passionate interest.  She was just dropping by, but I was ready to stand on my head after my mind was blown.

Letting the ghost-wind blow it’s thoughts through me.

K and I loaded up the chuck wagon full of yummy organic burgers and buns, homemade pickles, and a slab of onions and lettuces.  She grabbed the lager medicine and I seized on the cider muscle relaxant.  Then we rode on over to the folk’s ranch and got a charcoal grill going.  Hek-yeah, it’s burgerin’ time!

The day was in the high sixties, sunny, and no snow.  Perfect weather for an outdoors shindig and rap session with the clan.  The weekend had been a huge quest of doom which had made us a little unavailable on main and auxiliary power to the rest of the world.  I’ll write about that later.  For now, tasty food, delicious frosty beverages, and good company gossiping and chitchatting like a bunch of crows.  And crow does like a tasty snack with a little jibber-jabber.

While doing the burger meditation I had a chance to think about the change in the weather.  I smell spring, I feel it in my bones.  It just wants to burst forward like a spring coiled giant squid tentacle and seize the morsel of the now.  I can hardly contain myself at the excitement.  Spring within, spring without, all in balance.

Crazy dream time again.  Wandering through the streets of my haunted house existence and spending time with alter-ego manifestations of my friends.  In this case, the detached observer who wanders in and out of scenes like a fool with no ties to one thing or the other.

I wake up to the sound of those popping Droll Dumplings.  Just about ready to serve I imagine.  K and I are just about ready to watch Crocodile Dundee.  She hasn’t seen it yet.  What better tasty treat than a bowl of properly cooked droll dumpling popcorn?  Whoo and hoo, its movie time in the Honeycomb Hindout and there’s munchies galore!

The phone rings again, and I can tell this is going to be one of those random encounter calls.  Whoa, total surprise from the depths.  It’s my old time cousin from the way back machine days, trying to put the clues on his puzzle board together.  Can I lend him a hand?  Sure can!  The memory banks are loaded to the gills with relevant material.

I can’t help but think something significant has happened again.

If miracle #1 gets me back in touch with who I was, and miracle #2 gets me back in touch with the time before I was what I was, then what if a third miracle returns me to the feeling of the time before that?  My cousin and I walked in states of consciousness that belong to the deepest parts of my known being.

I’m going back in time and seeing things that I had never imagined I would witness.  All the way back to the beforelife?  The arrow is pointing in a direction I refuse to ignore now.  Just have to pull back on the bow.

My cousin talks about a time in a spooky haunted house I was living in with my folks at one time.  He came to visit.  I’d forgotten it, but when he describes it to me, the memory comes back to me like lightning.  An isolated farmhouse, wind blowing and trees scratching at the walls of the house.  The tingle of scary ghosts devouring all sense of space in the room you’re sleeping in.

There are all sorts of things I remember being scared to death about during that time as a young pouchling.  The Blue Meanies of Yellow Submarine, for example.  My cousin had a Blue Meanie jacket and he wasn’t scared at all.  Me, though, my folks’ cardboard cutout they got from a movie theater, well that kept me from sleep many a night.

BACK OFF BOOGALOO!

My cousin was scared of that house and its eerie inhabitants.  I got into the excitement of his fear as we stayed awake at night talking like crazy, but I also remember thinking cool, there’s ghosts out there and I like them.  The spooks and the specters, the ghosts and the goblins.  I’ve been walking this haunted house at least since the day I was born, and before that?  I can hardly fathom.

I hold the images of these memories in my mind and wait to see what happens.

Then, it occurs to me, what about the ghosts around me that scare people or make them nervous?  Have I been freaking people out or making them uncomfortable by not being responsible for my own specters?  I sense a windy monster at the window looking at me, rattling chains and blowing moans with perhaps a bit too much glee.  Now, needless to say not everyone is scared of this Missus Mooty Mire wind-breaking goblin thingee (Hexe would just blow her into the oven, and Xtine would sit her down for hard core tea and biscuits, for example).  But it’s a matter of being responsible for the sake of those who don’t have script immunity.

I have guests in the haunted house who need attending to. The spookiness and the odd happenings continue. Weird sounds (what was that sound of someone landing in the wall?), strange smells (who’s cooking?), and sudden movements (the faucet turned itself on again). The floor warps and curls in odd places. K and I can hardly maintain a sense of propriety in the face of it all. But it doesn’t scare me, and that’s such a natural but unexpected feeling. It scared me so bad I couldn’t sleep before. Now I accept it as normal, that supernatural occurrences are a part of life.

And then my friends. I never knew I had so many. I scarce know what to make of it, because for so long I’ve been a jerk out of touch with myself. I’ve been displaced from my nature and didn’t even know it. My friends have faults, and so do I, so I hesitate to call this a massive hug session. It’s as if I see people in a darker shade, with the light coming from an unknown source. I know we will all make mistakes again. Somehow, it’s okay because I’m seeing in a different way that I can’t quite explain. Almost as if the mistakes and the screw ups lead to better things and I can’t wait for the discomfort, because that’s where the life is.

I let a good friend read my book. She read it so fast I was surprised. Lots of great suggestions from her. I really trust her instincts, so it’s nice to feel that I’m on the right track with my craft. And my editor asked to see the whole thing, which took me by surprise. She’s so unpredictable I can hardly comprehend what she’ll say. Not as if I have a lot of work to do, because I do.

The cover sketches are proving difficult – I’d forgotten how hard it can be to get tools to behave, and I’m still working out the rust of ages. Plus, I am considering the idea of illustrations to go with the book, one for each chapter. My editor has some really mind-bending ideas!

Oh yeah, back to the haunted house. All the ghosts and monsters have been coming up to me with requests. Suddenly I find myself having to find solutions to supernatural problems I hardly expected. And the killer bees are getting active again, despite the winter season. Yes, the year is in full effect and I’m the one who has to come up with ideas and work out the real world maneuvers.

Oh crumbs, here they come!