I was walking home from a friends house and I could not help but notice. That the back of the cathedral in downtown Oakland had this image projected on it.

I know what it is.

So after a long illness. that can only be described as a break from reality and a ” feeling that everything was dead” My good friend and former roommate L helped me to land a new job. Subsequently Saving my life and preventing me from becoming homeless.

Lets talk about L; I met L some time around 2017 while working for stereotypical San Francisco startup. You know the kind, a few smart engineers/phds and myself. working on a machine learning based signals intelligence cloud based platform utilizing deep neural networks to change the world by helping sales people sell things.

L was a perfect match fresh out of one of the standard silicon valley feeder schools. young Caucasian male, slightly emaciated. round glasses, tight jeans and appropriately naive and an occupant of what I have previously referred to as programmer pods.

Getting to know L over the next 3 years I found that he was a little bit different. He didn’t really like to do much work ( I want to be clear he is an incredibly talented programmer) he enjoyed spending the vast majority of his time making coffee, reading Tolstoy and self diagnosing himself with an abundance of questionable medical conditions. As you might expect L was eventually let go for not doing much work. The company was sold to a larger more well funded cloud based communications platform built on deep neural networks to ….. help sales people sell things…

And I lost my mind.

Anyways skipping ahead to today. L called and asked if I wanted to go out for a drive. In standard L fashion he showed up roughly 3 hrs late after I had already eaten and asked if I wanted to grab dinner. I didn’t . So on a whim we got on the high way and started driving.we stayed on the highway while chatting about largely nothing and as we ran into the Richmond San Rafel bridge L instructed me to get off the highway so we could avoid paying the toll and ending up at San Quinton.

point molate is dark, very dark and a largely abandoned former winery, military base and abandoned industrial area. It has no street lights and very few people at night time . We drove around. looking for a place to stop to sit around maybe look look at the bay and the , kvetch and head off to find something to eat.

Instead I found myself just driving further and further from the highway on deteriorating roads. After a few miles of driving through an abandoned former military housing some interesting old warehouses and a lot of barbed wire fences. We ran into a sign resembling the one bellow. at the base of a steep hill.

At the urging of L we continued to drive over the hill onto the other side of point molate. The drive was interesting. But unfortunately as we continued to drive we started to see strange black stars nailed to the trees. maybe one suspiciously occult black star every 3000 feet.

it was dark and I will admit to being a little worried. L insisted we keep driving. As we started to reach the peak of the the hill, I began to realize we had been driving for maybe 40 minutes on a twisty dilapidated road decorated with pentagrams in the middle of the night. and I got a little worried. As we began our decent. L ( not a bay area native) started to bring up the fact that there are known to be a few cults in the bay area,…and wondered allowed if the black stars were in any way related. Naturally around the next several corners we could see that we were headed towards a small minimally lit marina with what appeared to be small shacks and house boats… the perfect place for a black star idolizing and hopefully friendly Satan worshiping cult. Just as we arrived at the bottom of the hill we saw a sign labeled with the words ” black star” and a small goat with only a passing similarity to this guy.

about 1000 feet later we ran into a pen of live goats and at this point. I could only hope that the occupants of the animal sacrificing satan worshiping cult we had discovered at the end of a private road on an abandoned military base were friendly. As we passed the live goats. We found ourselves in a dimly lit parking lot with some rusty light heavy industrial equipment, and two empty mid 90s economy cars. The parking lot was separated from the marina and a another urt/shack by small embankment topped by a set of abandoned railroad tracks. At this point I parked the car so we could get out and stretch our legs smoke a ciggerte and decide what to do next.

Out of an abundance of caution and fear of whoever was living in the marina. I decided we should walk down the rail road tracks in the opposite direction of the potentially inhabited part of the marina. In the dark with really no good idea of where we were headed. On this side of point late you can see out into the bay but there is no lighting and I was sort of disappointed that there was nothing interesting to see. And then… we ran into this.