As crazy as it sounds, one of the things I remember about living in Santa Cruz was the regularity of these military helicopters overhead. I remember back in 1989 seeing a direct correlation between the helicopters appearing and then my friends and I getting sick. It was amazing. I had been sick after I saw a few helicopters overhead and had mentioned it to a friend who also had just gotten sick. We got better, then a few months later, we saw the helicopters again. Several of them in formation circling the Santa Cruz skies. A few days later, everyone I knew was sick with the flu again...I have said for many years that there seemed to be a correlation between military helicopters flying over Santa Cruz and people in town getting sick.

That may sound really crazy but I had another thing happen in Santa Cruz that I will never forget, that has haunted me to this day. I checked out a radical book called Documents from the downtown Santa Cruz library. I took it on the street with me and read it on the mall during street performances. I also took it to Cabrillo College and read it aloud in class, showing how the FBI and CIA had conducted covert operations on peace activists, civil rights activists, feminists, etc.

At this same time period, there was this undercover cop assigned to me on the Mall, I swear. We called him BUN for Big Ugly Narc. He had long gray/white hair, and had this digital clock around his neck all the time and stood around looking like some old hippie, but it was clear this guy was a cop. As a matter of fact, one year at Halloween I went as BUN and everyone knew just who I was and roared with laughter. As BUN, I stood around lurking in corners taking notes all night like BUN does dressed like him. I used to have a part of every show on the Mall where we looked for BUN. BUN was always somewhere within earshot of my every show on the Mall, I would tell my crowd to look for him and we would always eventually spot him hiding in a nearby doorway, etc.

So, I gave the Documents book back the the library. And a few weeks later, I wanted to use it again and went to check it out. The Santa Cruz downtown library said they had never had such a book. We fought for some time over the book's existence, until I located an overdue slip on the book. I brought in an overdue slip with a call number from them to PROVE they DID have the book. They still denied the book existed, I demanded to talk to the person in charge. Eventually I was taken to the reference desk and told to wait there. I waited for a while, and lo and behold, who should walk out from the back room with the librarian, but BUN!! And they had the book in hand! And handed it to me!!! Now *that* was pretty weird!!!

So I do not know what in the hell is going on down there in Santa Cruz, but I swear there has seemed to be weird covert agent shit going on there that you would not expect in such a small town. I do not know if it is just covert government agents like living in SCruz so they just keep spying in that little town, but it always seemed amazing to me how much covert intelligence activity went on in SCruz for it being so small.