One summer afternoon, Professor Cairn led us into the basement of the music archives of San Narciso Community College. There stood the horn -- the one muted horn whose image would haunt us throughout the quest it instigated . "Find the horn! The horn is truth!" he trumpeted, before plugging in his virtual reality glove, never to return again.

Hard-driven for some answers to the enigma of the horn, we hit the 10 Freeway . Little did we know how its echoes would reverberate around us -- nor how much they always had. Glancing back for a final farewell to our beloved San Narciso Community College (commonly called "Pomona College"), we almost caught a view of nearby mountains, nearly hidden by smog .

Clutching our tome, The Crying of Lot 49, we sought out the life behind the inanimate words. In a panicky moment, we were forced into the exit lane by a Paranoid Bros. Trucking rig and forced off the freeway into Diamond Bar, one of many sidetracks to come.

Frantically scanning the map , our eyes locked upon General Dynamics and we felt compelled to track it down. Powers higher than ours would have us believe that the building on site was that of the Navy Seas Systems Command, but we knew it to be a system of another kind.

Our stomachs demanded that we stop for food. Across from General Dynamics, nestled next to the Aerospace Workers' Union, was a tiny bar and grill . The porn store next door further tempted our appetites, but we were seekers undeterred as we cried "Trust in nothing!" and pulled up near a set of railroad tracks to hang a U back to the freeway.

Our eyes fell upon an old cemetery, and being paranoids, we took a look . Later, back in San Narciso, talking to a Mr. Thoth from Pilgrim Place Retirement home, we learned that this community of graves had been relocated several decades back to make room for the junction of the 10 and 57.

Winging our way back onto the 10, we headed for LA, turning up the radio to bop to the Paranoid's latest hit on KSPC, 88.7. Starving, we visited our favorite haunt, the Genghis Cohen Restaurant .

Satiated in body but not in mind, we circled back home, turning off at Lake Inverarity, only a couple-three miles from school . Taking Foothill east, we grabbed a copy of the Claremont Courier at the old Claremont School House, once famous for its spacious hall, once a site for many an auction.

Reading that a play was happening in an hour, we cruised by Pilgrim Place to pick up Mr. Thoth, but an excessively peaceful nurse told us he'd been shipped down the road to Hill Haven Convalescent Home, over on Indian Hill and the 10. Failed by another U.S. male, we concluded it was a waste of time to worry about paranoid fantasies and realities, so up Mt. Baldy road we drove, looking down on the linear circuit board pattern of San Narciso.

As we pulled up onto the top of Padua Hills and rushing into the old enclosed arena theater, the lights dimmed and from the distance, a single horn note resonated across the valley.

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