In a creek whose waters come from the melting glacier atop Mt. Shasta in Northern California stir the spirits of lost people: Modoc Indians massacred in the early twentieth century and also of Shasta Indians and a smaller band of Yahi who once moved through the redwood forests there.
My name is Emris Murdis. I’ve come from a town in South Oregon some fifty miles from where I sit at this moment, next to the creek and farther from a band of high dancing hooligans who come together every year in this region known as the Pacific Northwest that inspires many tales of mystery which originate from the volcanic energies beneath this earth where I now sit. There are many things I might say about what will happen this weekend but I’ll only say this: we dance in the forest to wake the spirits. What may come afterward is yet to be seen but I can assure you we’re doing work here: each step down to meet the earth fueled by music and light breaks apart long sleeping germs of deceased microorganisms leading deeper into earth where slumber of ancient creatures awake at every dervish of our festival. I am not telling a mistruth and you shall feel the quake when you least expect. What shall result when you feel the affects of spirits disturbed in their deepest slumber to a world unbridled in its pursuit of the material? That, my listener, I cannot convey. It is a world asunder blackened by nightsky darker than ever seen. Your chance to leave this condition is at your fingertips now. How shall you choose?
When I was but a boy lumbering in an empty lot with army men given me by a dead uncle called Fister, I buried all the soldiers up to their necks and pummeled them with jelly beans that had begun melting in the heat of that august day. I told the soldiers their punishment for giving up their freedom to kill is a sweet colored bomb from my pocket. Then they were released. I never touched a soldier again.
But we here at this festival, the Autonomous Mutant Festival, as we have named it, have given up on all things in favor of the time of our lives. That time is almost complete; this creek carries away the vast store of the dance.
