It is a dark night in the little town of Ojai. Some say Ojai nights are darker than nights in other places not so far off, like Santa Paula or Taft. The people that say that were called things like Lloyd and Gerard, people who have sideburns and pointy heads, people who know a thing or two.

What accounts for this extra darkness? People like Lloyd and Gerard, people who knew a thing or two, suggest it is simply an extra lack of light. But there are other people, people called Susan and Colin and they have another theory. They said something that, if it’s true, could alter the way we Ojaiwegians see our dear little town forever.

There. That got your attention, didn’t it? And if it didn’t, it should have because this could happen in your town. Or your’s. Or your’s.

They said that the town itself was making it happen. And as they laid out the evidence, a Sure Certainty of the truth in what they were saying stole over my bones and nicked my marrow boldly, and with a straw.

(I could never prove a theft like that in court, of course – it’d be pointless to try. If your versus-person, your opponent, is a sworn Sure Certainty by your own admission, you will find you don’t have a leg to stand on, my friend. Neither of your legs can be stood on and you can’t borrow another one because the fascists won’t let you. But when you try to explain that the reason you don’t have any legs to stand on is because the Defendant, that smirking Sure Certainty bastard in the dock over there, sucked the living marrow from them with a straw (with a bloody straw for Chrissakes! I mean if you made it up noone would believe you) they will say that that doesn’t matter because the Defendant is a Sure Certainty.

And you will scream because Kafka was right. And if Kafka was right you will have no other recourse as a sane human being than to try to pluck out the eyes of the court-reporter. And that will get you a big hypodermic in the bum and a new career in the drooling sector as a certifiably insane person. The institution you spend the rest of your life in will no doubt have pleasant gardens and a nice OT but you will never get over the injustice of it. And you will weave all your baskets into the shape of Sure Certainty which you will stab time and time again with your plastic spoon. You will probably end up murdering your “designated companion” nurse and that’s just not cool.)

Anyway, what the other people said – the people called Susan and Colin who knew a different kind of thing or two – was this: The extra darkness was not caused by any mere extra lack of light. No. It was caused by rare dark-emitting diodes or DEDs and the acronym there is appropriately sinister.

For you see, the last people in a town that you would suspect of evil intent on a town-wide scale, would be the committee in charge of municipal traffic. The people called George and Ursula etc. That’s what makes their scheme so diabolical. By switching half the diodes in the traffic lights from LEDs to DEDs and by using a sophisticated system of cameras and switches, the committee are able to only switch traffic lights on when a pedestrian or a car approaches. The rest of the time the DEDs are on, beaming out blackness so black it would make coal look as pale as a Polo.

But why? Why would they do this, these Georges and Ursulas? They would do it so that they could see the stars better and when people in this town want to see the stars as better as all that, it can only mean one thing. They are astrologers. Astrologers have taken over the traffic-flow committee of Ojai City Council! Now, as every astrologer in the tri-counties has his or her own full page newspaper column, they are in a position to influence us all in ways we can barely discern as we race eagerly, dressing-gowns akimbo, to our driveways every morning to see what the paper tells us the stars have in store for our signs that day.

Big deal, I hear you say. Well, what if I also told you that 9 out of 10 registered members of the American Astrological and Asshead Association (AAA) were also members of the secretive Dot-To-Dot Enthusiasts And Temperance League? You may well suppose that anybody mad enough to join a dry join-the-dot league is just mad enough to join the stars whatever twisted vision they want and to pass that on to the people in daily astrology bulletins designed to shape the world to their crackpot ends.

How else would you explain our extraordinary – one might say astronomical – per-capita consumption of services in this town pertaining to: Reiki; and crystals; and Tarot; and Sacred Goddess classes; and Guardian Angel gifts and collectibles; and “Wisdom of Loving Your Colon With Tincture of Willow Leaf” Seminars; and The Cancer-Curing Powers of Hand-Beaten Tibetan Singing-Bowls Symposia?

All of which are run by guess who? Yes! The Astrologers! The daily horoscopes are full of advice to see your chakra-prober, your herbalist etc. The power-crazed AAAA are in it at every level and they’re making a mint (of the sort that isn’t a Polo but is still sweet), and attracting even more of their kind – people called Storm and Cloud who will tell you straight out that they moved to Ojai for the lack of light pollution and ability to see the stars. All of them, all of them with a dot-to-dastardly-dot book in their fringed bags and none of them with the decency to have anything more than a decaf twig-tea at a party.

How else do you explain all these things? I ask you. They are DEDening our lives, our brains and our critical abilities with their false horoscoping and their tea-leaf-reading mumbo-jumbo. Just the other day, I found myself buying a bottle of Zen water and a sachet of “spirit-nourishing” Bliss drink. It has to stop.

Meanwhile, it’s another dark night in Ojai…

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 7th, 2008 at 12:59 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.