Why I Sulked

It started, I suppose, before my time, when firearms and motorcycles were banned in 1996, and reached its peak in 2004, the last time I went. That year, the preliminary literature, suddenly—astonishingly--promoted Burning Man as “kid friendly” despite the ever-present back of the ticket promise that YOU RISK SERIOUS INJURY OR DEATH BY ATTENDING BURNING MAN.[1] When we pulled in at midnight on Sunday, we endured a van-search—for stowaways—that’d make a narc wet his pants from envy. As the 2004 week ground on, I felt besieged by the so-called default world, the very thing we seek to escape.

For example, on Thursday, a woman woke me up at 9 am, not to share sex, food or drugs, but by talking on her satellite phone. I crawled out of my tent, eyebrows dusty, a little bleary, and beheld her there, wearing a terrycloth robe and slippers, sitting calmly in a cushioned Adirondack chair outside an impossibly shiny behemoth RV, a scene so suburban and blasé that for a moment I thought it was satiric performance art. But this woman kept chatting away like any oblivious tool with a cell phone in a strip mall café about how Neat It Is To Be Here. I was amused, then incredulous. After twenty minutes, I bailed, biking in to Center Camp to get ice before the heat really hit, where some massively uninformed kid offered me $20 for my place in line.[2] Later that night, the police made Jiffy Lube (a recurring Playa fixture renowned for supplying literally buckets of condoms and lubricant-packs to anyone—just grab a handful—as well as for the casual gay hook-up: Get In, Get Off, Get Out) tear down from its roof a giant wicker rendition of male-on-male sodomy. A mother-with-young-child had complained the sculpture was obscene. This is peculiar, because “community standards” govern these issues. By Black Rock City standards, sodomy--straight, gay, or otherwise--is barely a beige fiber in the tapestry.[3]

Had I witnessed the event, I no doubt would have suggested to Mommy, with deadpan concern, that she gather Jr. and juice boxes and flee back to suburbia, preferably before a roving Death Guild patrol kidnapped her and her child for a slow, Satanic sacrifice, under the kliegs in Thunderdome.

Sure, these are trifles, and I certainly had better options than sulking. I should’ve made a joke about the sat-phone to the woman then cooked her breakfast. I should’ve gifted my place in line to the uninformed kid. I should’ve simply ignored the fact that Jiffy Lube and/or Burning Man, LLC, didn’t tell the police to stick it, pun intended, regarding the wicker sodomy sculpture.

I concede the’04 festival had its moments. Like smoking salvia divinorum in a geodesic dome with carpets and pillows and candles and my friends Jens and Shalom watching out for me…(I’ll try to get to that later, but don’t fuck around with this stuff, not before talking to me or someone else who has been there...I’m still processing that trip, three years hence, truly terrifying, shamanic-level experience) and making ice cream at 2 pm on the Esplanade with Ben and Anita (who met at Burning Man in 2002 and are getting married this year--Congrats, kids!) and serving it up to every parched (and amazed and delighted) Playa person who emerged from the dust; finding Eli, a kindred spirit I only see at the Burn, who wasn’t apparent when I first turned up in his camp. Upon inquiry, a tripped-out dude in dusty black leather and dreads smiled and pointed to the van at the end of the shade structure. He spoke with a Brixton accent: “He’s in there—pop your head in and say hi.” The grin should have warned me. I slid back the door, and there was Eli, kneeling with a tiny video-camera, filming a guy shaving (what I assume was) his girlfriend’s pussy. Engrossed, neither of them even looked up. Eli, however, without missing a second of filming, glanced over from behind the viewfinder with one smiling eye: “Hey! Great to see you Gurn. I’ll be right out,” and he was, with a hug, a joint, an offer of DMT (which I declined, because of the salvia the night before)--and a copy of the video on a flash chip.

But despite the obvious link, to me Burning Man could be neither the purifying flame seen by the yoga-tarot chick nor the one I sought for myself. Indeed, I’d stayed away for over a thousand days, and intended to keep staying away, because even in Black Rock City, I could no longer see the edge of the envelope--my favorite place to be.

Next: Despite everything, a Return to the Burn.

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[1] Thank the lawyers, most of whom know such a disclaimer is actually pretty worthless. There have been several deaths and many more injuries at Burning Man over the years, but earlier attendees understood that the Black Rock Desert is dangerous just to hang around in, all by yourself, before you add several thousand libertines toting firearms, explosives, motorcycles, flamethrowers, ultra-light aircraft, and an equally impressive arsenal of drugs and alcohol. It’s ostensibly an arts festival, sure, but that label never came close to covering it.

In any event, lawsuits are no longer unthinkable, and now Burning Man exists as a relatively new (about 15 years in most states) type of entity dreamt up by the corporate lawyers, the Limited Liability Company. I can create one for you, too, if you ask nice.

[2] Burning Man, recall, is a gift economy, so offering money for anything is not only verboten, it’s rube-level ignorant and crass. These writings assume you know the basics. If you need a primer on the event, go here, and for my own first impression, here.

[3] In other words, in a community where public nakedness, sex, bondage, etc., are commonplace, U.S. Supreme Court cases ensure the sculpture could not possibly be deemed “obscene”— thus it’s protected under the free expression clause of the First Amendment. Jiffy Lube had every right to tell those cops to fuck off, like they did in 2001.

I'm Not Going

I left her house in the shaggy hills of Eugene, Oregon, and flew on my bike downtown, sated by opium, hashish, and sex, but I vaguely recalled I had a meet set up--

And then I was in the W.O.W. Hall, watching Les Claypool for the “gee, I think I’ll throw it in the street” sum of $5. In retrospect, the reason it was $5 was probably because Les wasn’t playing bass. The box office guys sure didn’t let on, and I’m assuming they knew. Indeed, unless you already knew Claypool was making a movie spoofing the post-Dead/Phish jam-band scene, you were pissed off like me ‘cause Les wasn’t even apparently on stage. You know, the skinny, big-hat weird-beard bastard thumping away on the Thunderbroom in the look most known from his animated rendition in the opening credits to South Park.

Naw, I learned later instead he was there, in a convincing fat suit and overalls, with long hippie hair, gold-rim glasses, a Trey-on-heroin beard and playing drums for chrissakes. It was a little different from what I expected, but these expectations were formed mostly slamming about a deep-mud mosh-pit as Primus headlined Lollapalooza, maybe 1992, at Riverport in a driving rain-

But I think of Les today, partly because I feel he still owes me a fin (okay, $10--I had a date) but mostly, because as part of his ripping on the whole jam band scene, he sang a little tune entitled Are You Goin’ to Burning Man?

As the fat drummer sang on, I caught him smirking at the three generations of hippie-freakers-by-the-speakers, whirling away with no apparent sense of irony. But I stood stock still, like Entwistle amidst the chaos of The Who, and finally understood the whole show was a put-on.

Burning Man, to me—and apparently, to Claypool—had become a joke.

Next: Why.

A Logical Response to Despair

I've finally faced up to it. Political blogging is a wank. Hell, activism in general is sheer unadulterated wankery. I’ve blogged. I’ve called and written Congress, repeatedly, not only my “own representatives,” but most of them, including the morally bankrupt-jellyfish Nancy Pelosi, war-mongering Hillary Clinton, and habeus corpus-hatin' Gordon Smith. I protested the Iraq war, before it began, in Hyde Park in February, 2003, with a million-plus pissed off Brits. I protested in the states, multiple times. I’ve functioned as videographer and Legal Observer at protests on federal land and was meticulously filmed, from three feet away, by our “justice” department, you know, the one that can imprison you for no reason whatsoever and torture you to death without telling a soul, not even your mother (read the article; the WaPo headline is quite misleading)--

Needless to add, I filmed the DOJ guy filming me.

Not a fucking thing has changed. The occupations and torture and new wars and fixed elections and propaganda media and gutting of the middle class and the inexorable economic extermination of the lower classes continues at increasingly breakneck speed.

Trust me kids, though I’ve passed the Bar Exam in three states and drafted amici briefs to the U.S. Supreme Court, and billed thousands of hours at one to three hundred dollars for each--I’ve worked alongside ex-cons in ditches, legal and illegal aliens in the vineyards, and plain ol’ poor folk framing houses on a non-union job. I’ve seen it up close. The nonrich, that is, both the poor and the middle class, have been purposefully dealt a brutal series of blows in recent years.

They’re trying to kill us off, using some sort of Darwinian-eugenic phantasmagoria of twisted logic. The uber-wealthy have decided that the 7 -soon-to-be- 9 billion humans on the planet are simply too many, and the gears are being placed to grind that down to 2 billion or so, and probably by the end of the century. 

Abbie Hoffmann, before his final overdose, wrote simply: "It's too late. We can't win, they've gotten too powerful." But I was 26 when he committed suicide, kicking ass in law school and preparing to Dominate my Profession like some kool-aid drinking freak-yuppie protégé of the bond-trader/masters of the universe from The Bonfire of the Vanities. I thought Abbie was just ill, misguided and tired. But now I’m forced to consider that maybe the old Yippie was right at the end. Or even, all along.

Heh. Aren’t I just a little bundle of dew-washed joy? I could be wrong about the lot of this, of course, but that’s my call after taking a good look around these last few years.

So the burning question should be obvious:

How long before the hammer really comes down?

Time to live for the moment, folks. You can fight, you can flee, or you can continue to do fuck-all until the cuffs cinch ‘round your wrists and the noose about your neck. Time to wax orgiastic or at least philosophic on the meaning of life and celebrate, hard, in these last moments before Death, capital “D” Death, the Death of what makes us human. Time to Get It On, in every sense of the word, with the Man, with each other, and absolutely with the Lunatics in the Asylum. Time to reconnect with that vital essence that is everywhere at once, time and distance irrelevant, constant, alive, and reassuring. Time to heed my mystic, who threw two tarot arrangements, both of which indicated The Tower as the primary card.

The Tower, yeah. At the time, I had no idea what she was really getting at, but I was distracted. She sat on her bedroom floor and lay cards from the Aleister Crowley deck in a Celtic Cross between her spread bare legs, translucent lycra Danskin still damp from 90 minutes of hot yoga, glancing up as she turned each card, almost gasping when she ended a second time with what she called “the motherfucker of all cards”, The Tower. She lay back on a pillow, lips pouting over a fat spliff. She told me I had a Dresden-sized conflagration of change in my immediate future. She fired up, held the smoke, and extended it to me. "I sprinkled a bit of opium in this" she said, exhaling. "I hope you don't mind."

She was trying to seduce me, of course. And it was about bloody time.

That encounter aside, I don’t buy into mysticism, specifically. But I do believe some people have access, and tarot opens the window for some of them. This chick was plugged in. Somehow, her words rang true.

What the fuck am I babbling about? I’m not sure, exactly. But I am certain I seek a conflagration, one of apocalyptic proportion. Time to Burn It Up. Time to Burn It Down.

And from the ashes the Phoenix arises, or some such shit, right?

Perhaps I've made it too obvious where I'm headed with this. More, soon.

Well, shucks.

Out of curiosity, I just googled this blog and it turned up on a list of recommendations.

In 2005.

On New Year's Eve.

We don't know what this may imply about her state of mind, but still, someone named aIMEE linked to me in a comment at Americablog, and had a nice summation. If you really want to see the text, click on Comments and scroll down about halfway in the Haloscan window, where she says I write "[a]cerbic, profane rants with great stories and links."

It's obscure, sure, but what the hell. We take what we can get, eh?

I don't know who aIMEE is, but I bow to thee, nearly two years late. It was enough to get me to write again.

A'ight, then.
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WARNING/GUARANTEE

To borrow from the late Frank Zappa, these writings contain material that a truly free society would neither fear nor repress. Furthermore, reading this stuff is guaranteed not to condemn you to eternal fire and torment with pointy sticks and whatnot in Hell.

For reasons explained below, I’m axing the political commentary for now, but you can still find it in the archives.

It turns out that after two years of trying to ignore it, the fever is still on me and I still have things to say. So I’m firing up the computers again, and I intend to produce at least a few good bits before fall.

And, as always, these are works of fiction, full of lies and made up facts. But then, anything conveyed by mere language is fiction, innit?