The mailman often has to come up our long dirt driveway to deliver things that I've ordered. One day he asked, "Are those flags meant to keep away evil spirits?" I replied that they were.

As it turns out, he knows a lot about arcane things like ley and dragon lines and the folks that write books about them like John Michell and Alfred Watkins. In fact, he said that he went to study with some of these fellows in England in the late 1970s. He told me that most of the people in the town of Glastonbury (a spot where ley lines, Arthurian, and Biblical myth collide) didn't take kindly to the longhairs invading their spot.* They just wanted to drink their cider in peace. Then we talked about Stonehenge for a while like it was the most normal thing in the world to be chatting about on a Wednesday afternoon.

He also knows a lot about dudes like Captain Beefheart, Roky Erikson, and the Clarence White-era Byrds. He's pretty cool.

*(See the "Glastonbury Fayre" documentary for evidence of said invasion; notable for providing Nicholas Roeg with his first photography credit, and ripping performances by Terry Reid, Fairport Convention, and Traffic, among others).