Transmitting from the Mojave Wilderness in Joshua Tree, California, now is the time for Desert Oracle Radio, the voice of the desert.

Night has fallen on the desert. The time of night when we gather round our radios for story time.

We have always been suckers for story time.

That's about the only historical fact disputed by no one at all.

It is the greatest theater, the mystery of the darkness. The flicker and crackle of a fire.

The distant sounds of the breeze and the nightbirds.

In the round, as they say in show business,

and the song and dance trade.

I think the way they shut down live performance around the world for a year straight did the most psychic damage to us, for adults at least.

The billion or so kids who got a year-plus sensory deprivation sentence are forever changed.

In ways we will not begin to understand until the end of this decade

when the Hydrahead comes all the way up

for all of this I don't even have the option of seeing a public performance.

A honky-tunk band, live theater, a monster movie down of the multiplex, a baseball game,

a drunken wedding, a Sunday sermon.

Well, that was something that nod all year long at our very humanity.

Great changes were already in the works,

and we have been all too willing volunteers for these global scale experiments

in turning us all into pod people.

Destroying our remaining neighborhood businesses to the direct and immediate financial benefit

of a dozen or so technology companies that have just managed to take a much bigger bite out of our lives

trying to keep us shut off from the world around us,

...