It started Friday night, on the threshold of the Santa Clarita Valley. Mentor wrote a fine blog entry about a previous evening with the eponymous community band along The Old Road. Spell the setting "primitive": the road, the lighting, though not the venue. Now we were a block or two away, or what would pass for blocks among the foothills that had solemnly sat still whilst over the decades suburbia writhed and grabbed just to the north.

The setting was a "Shakespeare" fest at a place called Rivedal. I was imagining a Renaissance Fair type milieu. No, a childhood visit to Jungle Land in the other outlying valley over half a century ago, with its flies and wretched lion tamer act, seemed relatively a candidate for a New York Times Sunday Magazine ad. The stage at Rivedal, with its ladders and, if one blew out a few neurons imagining, turrets, seemed Shakespearean but otherwise the setting was open, brushy and dusty. A settling tropical front put a leonine roil of a cumulus cloud to our right, though.

Our first half featured such as Royal "Fireweed" (ha ha) Music (Disney should have activated the Stoned Ranger), Praetorius and the ultimate tribute to the era speaking of Disney, a medley of Zimmer themes to Pirates Of The Caribbean. I could have had an insect which suggested a micro Mantis named after me but it violated the sanctity of the music I could barely keep up with and was summarily dispatched.

The next day I decided to make my Castaic bus run, but from the transit hub. Technology was about to summarily dispatch your scribe. I noticed a big change in Santa Clarita come July 1: the traffic lights have much longer cycles. Saturday it was 1:42 and I needed a green arrow to make my turn to park at the Hyatt and make the 1:45 bus departure.

But the primary light for McBean stayed green---and green---and angrily I took the red arrow and just made it to the bus to also deposit forty cents for a poor fellow who begged me he'd made the first sixty.

As the bus further waited at all these long lights, hey, I was aboard, but at all the intersections I saw "photo enforced". Ulp, expect a certain piece of mail soon? Crybaby wanted to text mentor for possible reassurance but the cell holder was empty! Yes, I'd put the phone on Bossa's other front seat because it had fallen out twice, and Gent was in such a hurry don't you remember. Oddly, mentor sent a query about my day to a side phone sitting at home. An ultimate "at a remove"!

Getting back from the day at the lake I saw the intersection did not have a sign or a camera visible. On the cell was a voice message; the fellow with whom I rode to Rivedal had fallen on the steps that night and found out he had a fracture in his hand. Tech lashed as we are flesh and blood are we, after all.

And that was my day, mentor.