On the eighth floor of the Reno Sands Charlie discovers the Reno Fiction contest in a free weekly

Holy Ghost Invasion Tour, August, 2006- Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Washington, Oregon and Weed, California.

On the eighth floor of the Reno Sands Charlie discovers the Reno Fiction contest in a free weekly- Reno’s finest literary minds bloviating on late night coffee shops, modern day cowboy romance and thrift shopping in 95 words or less. As Marcus and Ezra take turns reading each passage, we silently wonder what our lives would look like, crammed into our new bus, emotions sprayed all over concert halls from Nevada to Colorado to Oregon, condensed and succinct like a single page ripped from Homer’s Odyssey, building irresistibly towards a final, shattering conclusion.

We travel in Azziz’s short bus, except now it’s ours, every inch of gleaming white disabled-people-mobile available to cram all 11 of us in for this ride across deserts, mountains and interstates. We hit Winnemucca and barbeque with Dave and Mona, our saviors on the way to the East Coast in April, who are delighted to have us as intentional visitors this time, then wake to a predawn cell phone alarm symphony and glide off into the dark desert towards Salt Lake, to play for lunching Mormon stockbrokers before plowing on to Telluride.

In Boulder Spoonfed Tribe from Dallas ups the ante with batteries of percussion and armies of painted Day-Glo faces gleaming in black light. We respond by pouring it on for our home-away-from-hometown crowd, desperate to show that crazy lunatics who seek therapy in high volume public rituals don’t only come from Texas, we live in San Francisco too.

A year ago we discovered Crestone, Colorado, nestled at the foot of the Sangre de Christos in the middle of nowhere, and they discovered us, rocking out for a big crowd while a huge storm moved on in the distance. This year is even better- lighting crashes behind us as we hit ‘Mr. President’ for a crowd that seems to know the words, and ‘Snack Nation’ sounds like an anthem. We finish and the rain pours down but people still don’t leave, they stand and yell and demand more, and after an encore we sign autographs in the rain, knowing there are rockstars somewhere who never get to do this.

Our day off on tour is supposed to include frolicking in giant sand dunes, barbequing chicken and drinking beer. Instead we wash laundry in our fleabag motel, wait two hours for Buffalo burgers in Crestone, argue among all 11 of us about what to do and where to do it, then drive through the rain to a campsite near Cottonwood hotsprings, where we somehow start a wet fire, barbeque chicken, drink beer, watch Ghostbusters on David’s laptop, and try to sleep in leaky tents.

Our bus, all 25 feet or so of it, actually isn’t that bad for 11 people. Two or three spread out on the bed behind the back luggage box, a few on the side lounging on the luggage bench, two or three in the seats reading trashy novels or bonafide classics, one in the camping chair right up front and someone in the driver’s seat, and viola! Instant band. At night though, this isn’t the case. Our drive from Colorado to Ketchum is stiff necks, strained tempers and not much sleep, broken only by a river that invites us to jump in somewhere outside of Ketchum.

In Bozeman we play a converted old gas station that fills with cowboys, bikers and hippies. Who knew Montana was cool? But this is where it lies, the attraction of traveling around like we do, pouring our hearts out for strangers. No secrets here, and none from you either, we say, and mostly what we get is pure and unadulterated, a glimpse of places we would never get if we just rolled in, ordered buffalo wings and drove off. How else, for instance, could we be sitting outside a bar, waiting to play, while a battered pickup pulls up and out pops a graying cowboy who yells “Let’s get drunk, bitch!” at the top of his lungs. His wife, or girlfriend or whatever, stumbles out of the passenger door, giggling as they wobble on into the bar.

We plow on, seeing more road than local flavor. Twisp, Washington is gorgeous, but we only have time to stop in at the farmer’s market in the morning, fry up some eggs and sausage and hit the road, again. The Summer Meltdown, near Seattle, is a revelation: organized by the band Flowmotion, the beautiful setting and wide-open lineup beg the question- why are we wasting our time trying to play all these other festivals? Why not just organize our own?

Probably because we’re too busy driving. Or we don’t have it together like the guys in Flowmotion do. After our set we hang around in the beer garden hobnobbing with Critters Buggin and God knows who else until our drink tickets are gone (about an hour), and then pile back in the bus for yet another overnight drive, this time to Bend, Oregon. We miss out on most of Flowmotion’s extravagant set with Senegalese drummers and firedancers, and on an evening spent watching the meteors streak the sky, or dimly lit shenanigans that would have introduced us to new friends in strange tents around strange campfires.

Bend, Oregon is a wide open grassy meadow and gorgeous weather. Our final show of the tour hits the right high note and afterwards we rendevous with some donated biodiesel and head home, wary of anther all-night drive but ready, finally, to sleep at home. Everything is running smoothly when we glide into a rest stop in Weed, California, and that’s when the trouble starts. Most of us wake ourselves from a groggy slumber and wobble in to the gas station to use the rest room. The scraggly looking woman who mans the counter is just closing up- at 11:40- , and as Ezra, Charlie and Cal are on line for the men’s room, she fiddles with lights, flicking switches nervously and causing the whole atmosphere inside the store to bob and weave like a schooner in the high seas. Charlie hits the floor, his knees supporting him unsteadily and Cal and Ezra too gradually realize he’s not kidding around. Cal helps him to his feet, then into the bathroom, where he hits the deck again, this time his head hitting the steel guide rail on his way to the floor beside the toilet.

“Charlie! Hey buddy, come on” yells Cal, coaxing him up on the seat, where he balances precariously and eyes us nervously, unsure why we are at that moment peering into his eyes, our hands on his shoulders, our faces a mixture of concern, dismay, inexperience and fear.

Maya has had enough and announces loudly that she needs some fresh air. She makes it to the threshold of the door when she too hits the deck, fainting forward into the door handle, its cold steel scraping blood from her face and jarring her glasses loose as Todd springs into action and catches her before she hits the ground.

We’re now in crises mode. The attendant stands around, eying us with suspicion, these ingrateful customers, to come in at closing hour and summon paramedics like this. An ambulance arrives, someone has called 911, and we try and figure out the complexities of assigning coincidence to two of our number felled, abruptly and without discernible reason, at virtually the same moment.

The paramedics interrogate Charlie and Maya, both of them woozy but aware enough to refuse a ride in the ambulance to the emergency room. Cal notices a swastika on the overhead fan. Around the corner from the gas station a trio of overweight women in nightgowns hang out, watching us suspiciously. Eventually the paramedics and the local trooper leave, saying something about light fluctuations, gas fumes in the bus, spending all day in the eastern Oregon heat and sun while drinking nothing but beer, but the truth is they don’t know what’s going on. Neither do we. Back in the bus we posit theories of our lifestyle catching up to us, this maddening loop of freeway mileage punctuated by bouts of bashing our instruments into submission onstage and annihilating liquor supplies behind the scenes. We examine Charlie and Maya’s personal medical histories for clues.

Then we remember, from last July 4^th weekend in Mt. Shasta, about the stories of Lumurians- alien creatures from the lost continent of Atlantis who now reside deep inside Mt. Shasta. We decide the scenario is too perfect, too precise, to have a human rationale. Our new song “Holy Ghost Invasion” leads us into a perilous trail of thought- what if this were some of malevolent assault? An invasion of the spirit that sucked the strength out of Maya and Charlie’s knees as it sucked who knows what else from their brains?? Both Charlie and Maya, aside from the worrisome trait of being prone to jumping in tiny buses with ten other people and traveling all over the western United States with no sleep and little regard for their health, are healthy, intelligent people with no history of fainting spells or epilepsy. We imagine the abacus necessary to calculate the odds of both of them struck by this malignant, public malady at once, and decide it would occupy the western edge of Golden Gate Park.

Days later, Cal send us all an email- the result, clearly, of painstaking hours of research into the question that has been troubling us all and stealing hours of restfulness since we alighted back in San Francisco at 4 am that fateful night. The fog that surrounds that night, that rest stop, that service station attendant, remains, but the lights we are shining through it in our inexcorable quest for the truth of what happened to us there are growing stronger and penetrating deeper. We are beginning to uncover the lies and the dark mystery that haunts us. We will post Cal’s email here in full, in the interest of a full informed populace- surely our best defense again alien psychic tyranny. We do not have all the answers yet, but know this dear reader- the next time we travel north or south on I-5 in northern California, we’re going to bypass a rest stop in Weed.

>OK people our Weed Spirit episode is starting to get freakier. please pass this on to any band members I missed, esp Charlie.

seems we had the name "Lumerians" slightly wrong, our friends are more commonly known as "Lemurians" although there is a bit on the web about Mt. Shasta's "Lumerians" as well.

here are several sites that connect Lemurian folklore with the swastika symbol. As background, it seems new age philosopy calls one of the early stages of spiritual/human evolution as the "lemurian" stage. Also lots of references to a lost contienent "Lumeria" that perished Atlantis style. Plenty online about Shasta's own "Lemurians" too. Do text searches for "swastika" and "Lumerian" on each page, if you dare.
http://laluni.helloyou.ws/netnews/bk/fire/fire1080.html
http://www.kheper.net/topics/Theosophy/root_races.html
http://www.assatashakur.org/forum/showthread.php?t=3113

this page presents a connection to our Alien Supermen, once masters of Atlantis, now living inside the earth, and Hitler/Nazism etc
http://www.think-aboutit.com/aliens/galactic_war_III.htm
The last world war was not simply a war fought between the Allies and the Axis or Democracy and Despotism. It was a war fought between Science and Magic, and science won. It was also the planetary battlefield of Galactic War III, when alien civilizations sponsoring the Nazis and alien civilizations sponsoring the Americans fought once again for control of planet Earth ...... while using its unsuspecting armies as pawns in their interstellar conflict. It is a well documented publicized fact that Hitler often went into trances and spoke to his military commanders. His chair press officer, Dr. Dietrich testified his belief that Hitler was possessed by demons. Hitler told his High Command his belief in the Superman who had ruled the planet in the times of Atlantis and Thule, and after the war of the gods that led to the fall of Atlantis the Superman, who were the Masters of the World, had gone underground. Hitler said he took his orders for the Nazi conquest from the Superman who lived inside the Earth. In a conversation with, Governor Rausching, a man who tried to tell the Nazi Leader of the great difficulty of genetically creating a new species, Hitler replied "The New Man is living among us now! He is here! Isn't that I enough for you? I will tell you a secret. I have seen the New Man. He is intrepid and cruel. I was afraid of him!

this site even connects Lemurian swastika to, guess who, THOR! maybe he seeks retribution for our constant desecration of Him and his mighty KNOB (or his "monads" perhaps?! see below!)
http://www.users.bigpond.com/phdaley/prometheus_myth_and_a_little_exe.htm
The second level is the introduction of mind into ancient man in the Lemurian Phase about eighteen million years ago.The Swastika is a very old symbol of Evolutionary Force and Fire; it is also Thor's Hammer by which" sparks" were struck at the "Fiat Create"in the diaspora of the monads.It can be seen as a symbol of the Fire of "Manas," Mind being the instrument of Creation and Evolution.

Also I noticed that the outside arms of the swastika on the ceiling tile looked sort of backwards to me. sure enough:
http://www.think-aboutit.com/aliens/galactic_war_III.htm
The Nazis had even taken the swastika, the Lemurian symbol for the Four Primary Forces of the Universes, and turned it around BACKWARDS to represent the miss-use of the 4 forces... the dark side of nature...black magic. For white magic is nothing more than the positive spiritual application of the psychic sciences aligned with spiritual Ascended Masters of light.

I left Eric Siems (Shasta promoter) a message, we'll see if he calls me. Here is the best Shasta related Lemurian narrative I found

http://www.siskiyous.edu/shasta/fol/lem/index.htm

The Origin of the Lemurian Legend

Perhaps the most popular example of Mount Shasta lore, and a legend involving the first claim by non-Native Americans for a spiritual connection with the mountain, concerns the mystical brotherhood believed to roam through jeweled corridors deep inside the mountain. According to Miesse, "In the mid-19th Century paleontologists coined the term "Lemuria" to describe a hypothetical continent, bridging the Indian Ocean, which would have explained the migration of lemurs from Madagascar to India. Lemuria was a continent which submerged and was no longer to be seen. By the late 19th Century occult theories had developed, mostly through the theosophists, that the people of this lost continent of Lemuria were highly advanced beings. The location of the folklore 'Lemuria' changed over time to include much of the Pacific Ocean. In the 1880s a Siskiyou County, California, resident named Frederick Spencer Oliver wrote A Dweller on Two Plants, or, the Dividing of the Way which described a secret city inside of Mount Shasta, and in passing mentioned Lemuria. Edgar Lucian Larkin, a writer and astronomer, wrote in 1913 an article in which he reviewed the Oliver book. In 1925 a writer by the name of Selvius wrote "Descendants of Lemuria: A Description of an Ancient Cult in America" which was published in the Mystic Triangle , Aug., 1925 and which was entirely about the mystic Lemurian village at Mount Shasta. Selvius reported that Larkin had seen the Lemurian village through a telescope. In 1931 Wisar Spenle Cerve published a widely read book entitled Lemuria: The Lost Continent of the Pacific in which the Selvius material appeared in a slightly elaborated fashion. The Lemuria-Mount Shasta legend has developed into one of Mount Shasta's most prominent legends" (1993; 136).

According to Zanger, Frederick Spencer Oliver was a Yrekan teen who claimed that his hand began to uncontrollably write a manuscript dictated to him by Phylos, a Lemurian spirit (1993). Meisse points out that Oliver's novel of spiritual fiction is "The single most important source of Mount Shasta's esoteric legends. The book contains the first published references linking Mt. Shasta to: 1) a mystical brotherhood; 2) a tunnel entrance to a secret city inside Mount Shasta; 3) Lemuria; 4) the concept of "I AM"; 5) "channeling" of ethreal spirits; 6)a panther surprise" (1993; 143). The author claims to have written most of the novel within sight of Mount Shasta, and autobiographical telling of the story from Phylos the Thibetan's point of view is an interesting twist. We have included a few pages of text from the novel , including the reference to the mystic brotherhood that lives amid "the walls, polished as by jewelers, though excavated by giants; floors carpeted with long, fleecy gray fabric that looked like fur, but was a mineral product; ledges intersected by the builders, and in their wonderful polish exhibiting veinings of gold, of silver, of green copper ores, and maculations of precious stones." (Oliver 1905; 248).

In 1908, Adelia H. Taffinder wrote an article, " A Fragment of the Ancient Continent of Lemuria ," for the Atlantic Monthly. In her article she links the concept of Lemuria to California, and Meisse proposses that the article, "with its Theosophical teachings and extension of the Lemurian Myth to California, may have been part of the research material involved in the creation of the Mount Shasta Lemurian Myth as presented by Selvius in 1925 and Creve in 1931" (1993; 147).

Selvius' 1925 two-page article, "Decendants of Lemuria" is, according to Meisse, "the singlemost inportant document in the establishment of the modern Mt. Shasta-Lemurian myth," so we have included Selvius' full-text article . Selvius claims that Professor Edgar Lucian Larkin viewed the Lemurian site on Mount Shasta using his telescope: "Even no less a careful investigator and scientist than Prof. Edgar Lucin Larkin, for many years director of Mount Lowe Observatory, said in newspaper and magazine articles that he had seen, on many occasions, the great temple of this mystic village, while gazing through a long-distance telescope."

Although Selvius' article is the most historically interesting, Wishar Spenle Cerve's 1931 Lemuria: The Lost Continent of the Pacific is, according to Meisse, "responsible for the legend's widespread popularity" (1993; 146). Perhaps most intriging is Meisse's speculation that "it appears from the similarity of material that "Selvius" and "Cerve" were one and the same person" (1993; 145). Further muddying the waters is Edward Stul's worth claim that "Wishar Spenly Cerve" is really a letter-for-letter pseudonym for "Harve Spencer Lewis," first Imperator of the Rosicrucian Order of North and South America. Still, it is Cerve's book, published by the Ancient Mystical Order Rosae Crucis, that has provided the popular description of the Lemurians as "tall, graceful, and agile," and as visitors that "would come to one of the smaller towns and trade nuggets and gold dust for some modern commodities" (250).

The idea of a lost continent (and the subsequent existence of Lemurians on Mount Shasta), quickly became widely known, though perhaps not so widely believed. In 1939, Mount Shasta botanist William Cooke was in a Cincinati library when he was asked if he "knew anything about the LeMurians." A few months later, in a Mount Shasta Herald article called " Lights on Mt. Shasta: Evidences Discounted ," Cooke questions the legend that Larkin could have used a telescope to see any structures on Mount Shasta. About a year later, in another Herald article, titled " Wm. Bridge Cooke Discusses 'Lost Continent' Book ," Cooke questioned the possibility of a Lemuria or Mu (1941).

Today the belief that Lemurians inhabit the mountain is still very popular, and anyone visiting the local bookstores will likely be suprised by the plethora of texts on the subject.

http://www.answers.com/topic/lemuria-continent
Lemuria and Mount Shasta

In 1894 , Frederick Spencer Oliver published A Dweller on Two Planets , which claimed that survivors from a sunken continent called Lemuria were living in or on Mount Shasta in northern California . The Lemurians lived in a complex of tunnels beneath the mountain and occasionally were seen walking the surface dressed in white robes.

This belief has been repeated by such individuals as the cultist Guy Warren Ballard in the 1930s who formed the I AM Foundation . It is also repeated by followers of the Ascended Masters and the Great White Brotherhood . This list includes such organizations as Bridge to Freedom, Summit Lighthouse, Church Universal and Triumphant , Temple of the Presence, and Hearts Center.