Mixtape 345 • Waking Up
Start your day right with the righteous alarm clock that is Annabelle Chairlegs.
Start your day right with the righteous alarm clock that is Annabelle Chairlegs.

This cover of “Everybody's Gotta Learn Sometime” (from Beck) takes me back to the Datsun’s backseat, waiting for my mom to finish some errands while the Korgis’ original version gently pipes out from the AM radio. Turns out I did forget my hat at the station, and it’s sitting in Katie’s desk, but I forgot to make arrangements to pick it up tonight.
Part of what will be known as the Great Australian Psychedelic Expansion, Bananagun is more incense and lava lamps than strobes and smoke machines.

A soft Texas breeze ruffled the grass along the banks of Belton Lake. Why not Lake Belton? wondered the hydrologist. Behind the trees, the aviator finished securing the paragliders. They had arrived with two, but would be leaving with three, which added a true twist to the logistics. Across the water, the sounds of Jamaican country music could clearly be heard coming from a raucous campsite. They were about 300 feet away, and had not been part of the plan. But if there were to be witnesses, then let them be the inebriated type.

The archivist’s breath misted in the freezing vault as gloved hands lifted the metal canister off the shelf. Getting to Greenland had not been trivial, driving the snowcats to Nuuk undetected had been a challenge, and breaking into the Katuaq Cultural Centre’s secret collection room, dug out of the permafrost, could be described as difficult. Now, locating the footage was close to impossible, given the hundreds of linear meters of shelving that were visible. The producer unspooled the first few feet off the reel, peering up through the film to the overhead light. The muffled sound of Persian hip-hop could be heard from the theater above. Maybe it was not so impossible.

I have never been so uncomfortable, thought the hacker as they strained to match the wires in the fusebox, their head inches from one of the combine’s many potentially lethal harvesting blades. The lookout’s shadow was barely visible against the hangar door. Straining to clip the blue wire into the scanner, they heard a soft call and nearly lost an ear before remembering their uncomfortable position.