Strange things show up in the most familiar places.

The Mosman Park and Cottesloe Post. My local paper. Nothing strange about that. A weekly rag that prints stories about local elections, eulogies of prominent local figures, letters from concerned citizens, and a nice theatre section. A bit of normality in my house of horrors.

Until I looked at page one. An apparently crazy man is violently wrestled to the ground by police officers outside an alfresco diner, after apparently “walking in front of traffic and acting strangely”. The man was “strong and agile, and it took about 20 minutes for four officers to subdue him” He gave his address as “the moon aligned with the Coke machine on Planet Earth”. And when released from hospital, he “did somersaults down the road.”

I must say I raised an eyebrow. Does the alignment of the moon and earth cause Coke machines to turn into doorways into Otherspaces, from which men with inexplicable thought processes emerge? Is he an entropomancer gone over the edge?

Thats not all. I came upon an article about a young hooligan who reportedly, “had stolen a knife and threatened residents with it, broken into two flats, bitten three men and smashed a window.”

How many young knife-wielding theives go around biting people? Has to be something behind this…

Now I’ve noticed this, I’m seeing the mark of Unknown Armies everywhere. I must say, it makes the local neighbourhood look a lot different. The graffiti I pass every day “STOP VIETNAM” goes from witticism to occult significance. The old woman who stares at my mothers house all the time becomes even more sinister. And the sighting of a bus numbered 333 one drunken late Saturday night turns from optical illusion to dipsomantic vision…