Good morning listeners, as ever this is Lemuel Huppe at Desert Waves with our morning show. I don’t know about you listeners but I’ve been very busy recently. In fact our whole little town has been busy seeing in the New Year with everything that entails. The New Year is a big deal for our town. Every year on the evening of the 31st of December the whole town, old and young, walks to the top of Red Rock for our traditional celebration. The walk is silent, lit only by hurricane lamps, and when we get to the top we each drink from the waters of the Red Pool, find a comfortable place to sit or lie down, turn down the lamps, and we wait. On the top of the Rock it can be difficult to judge the passage of time but eventually the grey cats come and walk among us. Usually, depending on the past year, we only see one or maybe two of them when they come to the town but on the eve of the New Year they all join us on the summit and whisper to some of us, showing us visions of what is to come in the next 12 months. Then when they have retreated back to the caves we all gather round those who saw visions, and one by one they speak them out loud and a scribe records them. This is very important for later in the festivities listeners.

After we’re done on the top of the rock we all go back down to the town and have a huge party until dawn. A large bonfire is lit, and then we burn the prophecies, to symbolise the fact that we cannot change them but only act as keepers and pass the knowledge on to those who need it most. This year one of the cats whispered to me listeners. I will tell you what it said after our first music break.

Music break: Wonderwall; Enter Sandman

So listeners I was going to describe my vision to you. I was lying down and looking up towards the sky, focussing on Sirius, bathing in the cold light of the moon, and I became aware that one of the cats had approached me. It whispered in my ear, I don’t remember what it said of course, no one ever does, but it’s words granted me a vision. I was sitting at the mixing desk shuffling my tarot cards and absent-mindedly pulling one from the top every now and then. Every card I pulled was the same card, The World, but from a different deck every time. The same card, but different every time. The World represents completion, something that has finally come to an end. In the vision I laid the cards out in front of me, one by one, each representing a different possible world that could be created depending on the choices made by those that hold fate in their hands.

Music break: Landslide; These Boots Are Made For Walking

Talking of things being the same but different Castor has submitted another poem to the station.

A time has come when worlds despair;
When unseen forces clash by night,
And each new revelation seems
A horror plucked from feverish dreams
Suffused with eery reddish light
That kindles ash and stains the air. We've come so far with patched-up hearts
And discount souls bought secondhand.
Too far to reconcile with death-
I'll curse it with my final breath.
Let Gods and agents raze the land
We'll build anew from broken parts.

Castor, I hope you keep submitting poems while you can. You’re words are being heard in desert communities all over the world, what a way to be remembered.

Music break: Baby Got Back; Lovely Day

Coming to you live from the streets of LA, it’s Star Watch. This is a very sad episode of SW guys. I’m having to report the death of Hollywood heart-throb Dimitri Anders, taken from us far too soon. I’m hearing reports that he was fatally shot on the set of his most recent movie Dominoes. A crazed gunman apparently broke onto the set and started randomly firing, hitting Dimitri, and a bunch of other cast members, leaving him dying in the arms of Lucy MacDonald, herself back from the dead after a publicity stunt at a charity benefit in New York. My deepest sympathies go out to Dimitri’s family and friends. The brightest lights burn the shortest, you will always be with us in our hearts.

Music break: Girl, You'll Be A Woman Soon; Black Hole Sun

January is this time of year where it’s important to reassess your goals and look at them from a new perspective. People often describe the cycle of life as a circle, things are always coming round again and again, but what if it’s more like a helix? From one perspective it looks like we’re going round in circles, treading the same path over and over, but a small shift and you can see the route is the same but different every cycle. Instead we’re constantly heading upwards to a higher level of being.

Music break: '97 Bonnie & Clyde; 99 Luftballons

It looks like a lot of you are interested in hearing more about the grey cats that dwell in the caves by the Red Rock. Well I don’t know much of the history but I can share what little I do know. After all many of our little communities are built around something most people would call ‘strange’. Many of you have written in with your stories. Stories of dead forests where the trees, grey and leafless, moan when the moon is dark. Stories of underground lakes where ancient creatures still dwell. Stories of towers that stretch up and up into the sky, reaching as high as the stars. We build communities around these places because we recognise their importance, that they must be maintained and protected from those that would misuse them.

I do not know how long the cats have lived here, but I do know that there has been a settlement of some sort or another here since man first walked on this continent. Our town is surrounded by ruins, left by the people who have come and gone before us. The town as it is today was mostly built in the 1930s around some older 19th century buildings, but there has been a steady amount of improvement and modernisation. Anyway, there are about a dozen cats at the moment but in the past there have been as few as 5 and as many as 30! It’s traditional for each ‘household’ in the town to look after the cats for at least one month a year. This usually involves taking food to the entrance of the caves everyday for them, or hosting a cat in their house if one is visiting the town. It’s actually my turn next month! Like I said I don’t know much about the history of the cats, for that you’d have to talk to the oldest member of our little community, Macy, who knows everything there is to know about the settlements history. In fact, I think I will pop by her house after the show and see what I can learn from her.

Music break: The Man Who Sold the World; Satellite of Love