Rock On

Quartz rocks. You may have seen them, up on the hillsides and below your shoes, during your walkabouts in and around the area you call home. But what is quartz, really? I mean, if it looks like a rock, acts like a rock, and rocks when you bump it with your toe, it stands to reason that what you have discovered is likely to be a rock, and not—as your inscrutable neighbor would have you believe—a source of Great Power during times of economic uncertainty.

Having spent considerable time and effort investigating similar phenomena, I found it excruciatingly easy to make the leap to quartz, and thence to other types of rock that refused to support my weight no matter how much I sniffed and dabbed at my eye. If there's one thing I learned from sandstone, it's that.

Another thing I learned is that common household appliances can be pressed into service for all manner of scientific experimentation, but that doesn't necessarily mean the manufacturer will honor the warranty. What it does mean is that the 2.4 GHz frequency your microwave oven uses to warm leftovers is the same frequency used by your wireless router to contact the suspicious object hovering above your cottage. Cheese, too, can be converted to its liquid form using either of these microwave sources, but quartz is not cheese, at least in the dietary sense. Unlike cheese, quartz oscillates in the presence of electromagnetic frequencies—which often results in humanlike speech—hence my particular interest in kitchen appliances.

As you might expect, this brings up the same question I asked in the third sentence, namely, what is quartz, really? I don't know, but I think it may be some sort of rock. Putting a chunk of it in the microwave didn't tell me anything, but that may have more to do with the extreme temperature of the fragment I held up to my ear after the explosion.

On the other hand, incommunicado quartz is mysterious quartz. Dumb as a rock? I wonder.

Crowning, Food, and Tea

During a recent panning expedition atop Pikes Peak, I was forced to reflect on the many tourists staggering about in thin air just before they burst, like balloons in a vacuum, through the doors of the train that waits at the end of the line. My aluminum expedition clothing generally has that effect on tourists, especially in bright sunlight.

Encouraged by their bursting, I decided to look around for inspiration of my own. My eye fell on the little town considerably below and slightly east-northeast of the summit, which slowed my inspiration on account of having to hike all the way down to retrieve my eye. If you've ever heard it said that inspiration is 9% polypropylene and 13% yerba mate, that's why.

After regaining my composure on a nearby rooftop, I burst into song. Taking into account my vantage point—still above but now slightly north-southwest of the little town of Manitou—my outburst came as no surprise. Had it come, instead, as a quavering falsetto, I would have been forced to consider it a sign that I wasn't meant for singing, but it didn't.

O Manitou
Oy Manitou
God shed her grace on thee
And crown thy brood
With healthful food
And pots of roibos tea.

In case you wonder what happened to the drum solo, I would simply indicate that, where weight is the consideration, a harmonica is always the better choice.

What Ails Manitou

Having been invited to contribute to the new citizen journalism venture you see here, I feel an obligation of sorts to come clean on my reasons—by which I mean agenda—for agreeing to such a thing in the first place. Ordinarily, receiving an invitation indicates a certain commonality of goals; it's tempting to assume that I'm sympathetic to the cause.

I am not. I don’t even live there. In fact, I avoid Manitou like the plague, having seen The Shining and one or two other films that made me laugh and cry at the same time. A long time ago, I got a typewriter because that's what Stephen King was using, but when I saw what happened to Jack Nicholson's character I decided to go back to the computer instead. It isn't smart to retype the same line over and over. That's what copy and paste is for.

Anyway, after reviewing the concerns and solutions outlined on the virtual pages here, I'm left with the same sense of déjà vu I experienced the second time I read this stuff, which may say something about memory loss, though I'm not exactly sure what because my hearing isn't what it used to be either. This brings me back to the point I was trying to make before, which was that hippies have taken over the town. As I recall, the same thing happened in the late sixties, the early seventies, and during the eighties-nineties timeframe, so it isn't difficult to imagine what might have allowed them to gain a foothold during the so-called double-zip-to-zip-eleven period, which may have set the stage for the current rash of sightings in the downtown area.

To be fair, hippies aren't the only problem facing the town right now, which is why everyone in Manitou Springs should be guillotined. This would not only avoid the political suicide that so often results from the appearance of favoritism, but would give Manitou the opportunity to start over with a fresh crop of eight-, six-, and four-legged inhabitants, none of whom would be likely to allow things to get out of control a second time.