The players:

Pica pica nuttalli (lyrics, vocals, and erratic evasive movements)

The intelligence behind this site is an individual woman with a fairly mundane Bay Area life; the various characters are either possessions of hers or amorphous local spirits. Astute readers can probably navigate the various rhetorical shifts without too much trouble, but if there's trouble, feel free to drop the author a line: username jbfergus, domain sdf.lonestar.org. For rigorous analysis of different types of ambiguity, you'll have to consult others.

about the players:

The narrator, or the author, is 25, fairly secretive, working on a novel and involved in a massive government plot to improve the lives of the downtrodden at the expense of the well-off, but we can't talk about that here. The site of this work is San Jose, California, to which she commutes from Palo Alto, where she lives. You can learn more about her education here.

Pica is the author's avian alter ego: a magpie, endemic to California, through an accident of birth was raised in the magpie-less Midwest and spent long years of childhood longing for the American West and European cities. Like all magpies, she is garrulous, flighty, ostentatious, impatient, fairly sociable although nervous around strangers, and inclined to romantic constancy. Unlike most magpies, she does not eat animals. Of course she talks to tigers.

Guitar is a blue 80s Cannondale road bike with a transplanted lavender fork, after a terrible accident involving Pica, the Laptop and a diabolical bag of clothes resulted in grave damage to all parties this spring and the destruction of the old fork. It is not the equal of the immortal black Cannondale frankenbike salvaged from the basement of Pica's Chicago apartment building, but it is stalwart, reasonably fast, and strongly bonded to its rider. We call it "Guitar" because of its resemblance to "Bike," Pica's childhood guitar, a blue 90s Ibanez with a floating tremolo (if you don't know what this is, be glad) and a similar index of physical inconvenience.