As the tensions of the morning's unwelcome interactions (and the interrogation of Keiner and the consumption of a Modafinil capsule) at Livermore start to fade under the steady wheels of the AMC, Jocasta feels some distance put between her and ... all that SANDMAN shit. As she gets closer to the City, coming up the 580 over Oakland on her way to the Bay Bridge and feels some semblance of normality begin to take root in her mind ... Jocasta swears she sees a no-fooling float-car from the cover of the Mansa album jetting through the air above West Oakland.

The float-car is moving southwest across the freeway, from Temescal/Berkeley to West Oakland. It's also losing altitude. The exit for West Oakland is coming up quick.

Jocasta makes her way off the freeway and onto the streets of West Oakland. Whatever passing familiarity Jo has with these neighborhoods, whether or not in her lost years she's ever come down to this part of town, I'm sure the scenery is still pretty shocking. Lots of burned out blocks, a lot of Brutalist housing complexes, a lot of human misery, and probably a side-eye or two as this white lady drives her sporty AMC through the streets. Jocasta lost sight of the UFO near the three Acorn housing projects on the east side of West Oakland.

As Jocasta drives through the neighborhood trying to figure out if what she just saw was hallucination, flashback, or real-ass Irruption, it also seems like she's slipping, almost effortlessly, into flâneuse mode.

So as the increasingly obsessed Jocasta scans the streets of West Oakland for some sort of sign of either a) the descending UFO or b) an occult set of symbols that will attempt to weave together what's happening with Mansa, History B, and the Black community in West Oakland, she begins to experience what can only be described as a mild set of LSD-like hallucinations. The crystalline-blue sky begins to reticulate into shards of what look and feel (and taste) like stained glass shards; the sensation almost feels like it's cutting Jocasta's tongue. The pollution-choked air of West Oakland sounds like a cacophony of out-of-tune brass instruments. The sound of horns honking in the streets leave trails like angry red war banners waving across the street. Jocasta is well and truly fucked up ... and synaesthetic.

And luckily that synaesthesia does something to the symbol-recognition corner of her brain, turning cigarette billboards and posters and cinema marquees into complex tastes and sounds that play across Jocasta's tongue and ears. And one of the things that this synaesthesia applying to symbols that Jocasta sees on the streets does is allow Jocasta to sense the correspondences between symbols as they appear and re-appear on the streets on a visceral, subconscious level. No longer does she need to apply the language or symbol centers of her brain to the interpretation of the signs; it's all pure sensory input now, on almost an animal level. This altered state is reminding Jocasta of her Lost Years and it becomes clear to Jocasta that on the streets, in the shop windows, on the billboards is a singular repeating pair of symbols, a pair that on the surface don't make much sense but have lodged in her brain like a trigger phrase out of MK-ULTRA mind control methodology ... a bucket and a spade.

A bucket and a spade? Yes. On this billboard for cigarettes, an upwardly mobile Black couple at the beach, enjoying their smooth menthol cigarettes with a suspiciously placed bucket and spade. A neighborhood bodega with a completely incongruous window display of beach attire and equipment: buckets and spades everywhere. Even a pair of neighborhood bars on adjoining blocks: the Bucket of Blood and the Ace of Spades. What does it mean? Jocasta cries out aloud in extremis, the synaesthesia peaking as she ends up in front of the Acorn projects. Two Black kids look at her from the pavement at the red light; the girl about Charley's age, the boy a few years older. She holds a wash pail, he holds a squeegee. Bucket and spade?

"Flying saucer? Lady, you're messed up," the girl says to her, smiling, but curious about this crazy/high white lady's drawing. "Cool drawing, though. What does it mean?"

The boy is a little cooler to Jocasta, but he can't stop eyeing the Javelin.

The boy immediately brightens up, and stands up tall looking at Jocasta. "Yeah, of course we are! It's gonna be far out!" The girl takes the picture Jo drew of her and her brother, and murmurs, politely, "Thank you" as she folds it up and tucks it in her overalls pocket.

The boy, about 11 or 12, says, "You like Mansa?" It seems like he's sized Jo up as some kind of weird rich Berkeley hippie interested in actual good music.

"He lives 'round the way," the brother says, vaguely nodding towards West Oakland proper, still Reacting at a Good level but evidently starting to get a wee bit suspicious. "You know they already signed to a record label, right?" This kid is actually really savvy, he thinks Jocasta is A&R!

The older kid takes the twenty and holds his hand out for more. As does his sister.

"You got it, lady," he says, tucking the bills into his jeans pocket. The girl looks up at the sky, and says, dreamily, "One day the skies are gonna be filled with flying saucers."

So at this point in Berkeley campus history, the main collection is still in the Doe Memorial Library, at the center of campus, right on the famous Sproul Plaza. As good a place to start would be the Ancient Near East section of the main collection; if need be, Jocasta can go to the rare books collection at the adjacent Bancroft Library, currently under renovation but there are still a few temporary reading rooms open in the annex.

Jocasta was right. The bucket and spade are notable ancient Mesopotamian symbols.

Bucket first: in many images of the Babylonian gods, some gods and demons are seen with a round-handled bucket or basket in their hands. It's called the banduddû. It's associated with collecting the bounty of the trees, with fruit collection, and some Biblical scholars believe, with the mythcycle that led to the Israelites' codification of the myth of the Tree of Knowledge. Since this symbol cycle is about cultivating orchards and thus feeding the masses, the banduddû is also seen as a regnal symbol. It is also seen corresponding with the ancient symbol of the beehive — more cultivation, more rulership.

The relationship to SANDMAN's study of esmology (which comes from the root for "bees") should not be ignored. The gods that are seen with the banduddû are quite often winged avian figures (called Apkallu), but the banduddû is also carried by the bull-figure/Anunnakku, Kusarikku, who we've noticed an affinity for in Mansa's Ikenga album art.

Spade next: the shovel is another symbol of cultivation and agriculture, but this time it's associated with a much bigger hitter in the pantheon: Marduk, the creator and authority god of Babylon. The shovel symbol is called a marru, and again it conveys the idea of authority, holy rulership, feeding the masses, and while it originates with another older agricultural deity, it also has been put in the hands of, you guessed it, Kusarikku again. And it's obvious that Kusarikku's origins as a demon spawned of Tiamat was softened in later Mesopotamian myth, he soon became a guardian, a sentinel, a protector of the doorways of the granary or the city. Again: plenty, protection, regal authority.

So, the symbolic set of through lines here are clear: feeding the hungry masses, giving them peace, security, full bellies, guarding the doorway. But here's the part that's making Jocasta break out in a cold sweat when she finishes her research: what the repeated appearance of that bucket and spade meme means isn't that the neighborhood is awaiting its savior in the form of Mansa, or the Anunnaki, or any kind of UFO coming down to magically turn Oaktown into an Afrofuturist utopia full of full granaries and bull-man protected gates. What this means, via the Anunnaki power of "retrocreation" is that in some sense, Kusarikku isn't on its way.

Steely and cool, Jo gathers up her xeroxes and notes and sketches and... heads back home to crash? Calls it in to Sophie?

The kid's little sister has gone home but he's still waiting, sitting on a stoop across from the Javelin, drinking a Coke.

"No ma'am. My sister had to go home but she didn't see none either."

"Martin." Still a little shifty, still a little suspicious but hey, he's $30 richer right now. "So I guess you ain't gonna try to sign the band, then? Did you go walk down to Dominoe?"

Martin sizes Jocasta up, one last time, folds the other $10 into the roll in his pocket. "You're all right, lady." A pause. "Jo. Thanks." He takes off down the street towards the Acorn projects.