burning man

I got a little email which told me the name of my favorite art piece from last year’s Burning Man, which got some press, which led me find it on YouTube, which let me share it with you.

The spinning is powered by a number of bike stations around the structure, and the strobing is keyed to the drums, so it’s a group effort to make it happen. Sweet.

And some pyroporn:

Anyway, I’m in the Bay for a couple weeks. Insanely busy as always.

Speaking of such events, the Baby Blue Cherub remebers Chineese dinner.

I have a delightful memory from last summer, of Friday night at Burning Man, being out and about with two beautiful girls from Portland we met; real underground babes with dynamite style, impeccable festival pedigrees, and at least a decade’s worth of world traveling and other bohemia under their belts, all without ever showing taxable income. “Gone chicks,” an older generation of beat writer might say. I wrote about this obliquely before, but never told the story itself.

We’d met earlier in the week when they sheltered with us through a dust storm, and bonded over knuckle tats and their delicious lavender vodka cocktails, just a good honest click with the whole group, and so naturally it seemed we should all rendezvous and ramble the night together. Though the whole pack started out as one, the girls and I got separated from Mark and Zya fairly early — no worries, just the way things flow — and the three of us ended up making a great convivial loop of the grounds on foot over the course of the night, dance party to dance party to dance party and yon.

Somewhere around the 2-o-clock mark (geographic, not temporal) there was a hip hop stage going next to a geodesic dome that had been flipped or crushed by the windstorm during the day. A very post-apocalyptic scene. It was plastered with placards anticipating this summer’s Students For A Free Tibet actions: broken Olympic rings with the clever slogan “Games Over.” Presiding were a couple of young MCs doing an excellent job of riding the waves of psychedelic energy — something I’d never really experienced before: rap on drugs — bounding through some pre-set rhymes and inspired freestyles, beatboxing and bits of DJ noodling holding it all together. It was open-air and the dance floor had room to maneuver, which was fun. People were giving it full-throttle energy, and the MCs picked up on crowd antics as part of their flow. The lyrics that stick with me are a improvised riff about “my whole posse of unicorns” (in response to the appearance of some hot girls with unicorn hats) and a pre-written verse extolling the Northwest that had a great rhythmic return to the phrase “comfortable with ________” that concluded (cleverly) with “comfortable with the fact you can’t find it on a map.”

I was having a great time, just hanging with these new friends, being “the beautiful people” out on the town, feeling pretty and strong and free. I don’t tend to get too confused out there even under the most adverse (psilocybin) circumstances, and so sort of fell into a role of tour-guiding. They’d listen for some good sounds and I’d figure out how to get us there. We skimmed a few other places — some low-rent dub reggae art-car with a guy singing unimaginatively about getting fucked up; a couple rave palaces too full and dark and laser-ridden to really relax and get into — and eventually decided to stroll across the open playa gandering at the various artistic impossibilities and making witty repartee. “I trust this guy,” one of them said to the other, in reference to my guiding skills (and overall character, I like to think), and it made me feel pretty good.

On the other side we found the right spot to spend the heart of the evening, a large old-style rectangular red and white striped circus tent with two separate stages and a cavalcade of DJ stylings. By the feel of things, some of the people in the crowd knew who the performers were, were followers or fans from the real world, which lent a kind of nice familial vibe to the space. It was hot and steamy inside, and so I stripped off the top of my flight suit and tied it around my waist, which made the legs a bit baggy, but still workable. We all grooved around the scene in our own ways, moving back and forth between the heavy heated interior and the cool dry dance-party extension going on around the big open flap entrance.

Lots of good memories from that tent. There was a fantastic musical bridge which dove from a semi-ambient “sounds of space” moment though a single iteration of Willie Nelson singing “Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys” with plenty of reverb, drawing whoops and hollers from the crowd, and then right back into the bouncing dirty breakbeats that were the order of the evening. There was the guy who popped up on the second stage and started with a really hard/heavy Rammstein remix which the crowd was collectively unsure of for about a half a minute, but then gave into completely and started pogoing and punching the air for the next 15. There was the Strawberry Fields number that everyone seemed to know but me, the dashing couple who’d fashioned four of five foot tall giraffe hats (easy to spot one another on a crowded floor), the posse of heady dready asskickers in leather who weren’t afraid to breakdance in the dirt, beautiful people doing powerful things every which way you looked. I was all happening, as they say.

Ultimately we began to run low on water and energy; there was some other famous Freak Nasty party going round by rumor, the best DJ set of the night obviously wouldn’t start until at least 4am it was said, but we were all pretty much danced-out, and so found a little chillout spot to sit at for a bit. It was fairly overcrowded with sleeping kids, but still we found a few chairs, although we were forced to share our space with a highly opinionated (and highly soused) Englishman in a purple suit, who wanted to tell/condescend to us all about America. I didn’t take well to that, but restrained myself for the most part, and eventually he moved on, and we collected ourselves for the lengthy trudge back to their camp, where I dropped them off before putting myself to bed for the night.

It was a fabulous evening. I had a little crush on one of the girls naturally, but nothing came of that other than a bit of dancy flirting and few moments of harmonic resonation that slipped through my fingers. I still think about that, not because I’m too likely see this woman again, but because it’s a crystal-clear example of the sort of reluctance or avoidance I want to overcome. I don’t know what might have happened if I let that energy out rather than duckin’ and dodging it, probably not a lot, but I do know I missed them the next night, though this missing was in and of itself a truly valuable experience, and fit in perfectly with the alternate scene we had of Deep Playa and Townes Van Zant.

At the time — after being up through to Sunday morning dawn and opening the sunrise saloon with a jug of whiskey and amplified Waylon Jennings — I settled on a great old phrase from Virgil: Fortune Favors the Bold. That advice didn’t quite make the leap from theory to practice right away: my fall got off to a rocky start with second degree burns and turmoil/turnover at work leading into a winter without a true vacation. But it’s still there, and lately in heavy rotation as a personal axiom of living, getting more and more lived-out every day.

So, wherever they are, southeast Portland or southeast Asia, I hope those girls are still manifesting their own brand of eden. You’re an inspiration to us all.

Back to the Precious Present

This all ties in with the here and the now because of that increasingly lived-out quality of the Virgil quote. As my partner Matt likes to say (quoting Captain Kirk no less) “risk is our business.” Lately, I’ve been able to let go more and more of my half-grudgingly assumed role of conservative naysayer in my work, and as it tends to be this is a signal shift in my overall life as well. Things are popping.

This hasn’t been without significant external stimulus. I give huge credit to Julia for dragging me away from the office and down to Coachella on her charmed-life VIP wristband coattails. That got me out of the routine. I also give big ups to Andy “Bad Motherfucker” Smith for that weekend being a role-model of unrepentant and yet still entirely human/humane success. As I’ve expressed, I worry about my good fortune going to my head, hubris, turning into a power-mad douchebag, a corrupt monster unable or unwilling to make common cause with the little people. Seeing others who are able to self-consciously and admirably negotiate this life-position — being blessed with talent, strength, good looks, and a whole lotta luck — lends significant wind to my sails.

As a dear correspondent of mine (who also deserves some credit for my renaissance in mood) said recently, it’s a worthy thing to hold oneself to a Dylan-esque standard of perpetual “becoming.” History has no end, whether we’re talking national or personal, and illusions to the contrary likely obscure worthwhile or even vital truths. I’m not sure exactly how the movie of my life plays out from here. Where’s the template for self-made entrepreneurs who eschew the traditional trappings of success in favor of a countrified half/life and fixed-gear bikes? Hard to tell. I think this somehow relates to the whole growing up in my own way thing.

And so when I flash back to great memories of wild nights like that, I wonder. It’s not as though my experience is in any way literally unique — there are hundreds if not thousands of people out there doing exactly the same stuff as me, and orders of magnitude more with plenty of venn-diagram overlap — but it is the kind of thing that doesn’t really fit the mold. It seems I’m blessed and cursed with a life of exploration, a path part and parcel with being a self-starter and a hustler.

It gets tricky though when you realize that your quest to operate without a boss has led you to become a boss of sorts — when it’s not just you out there blazing trails and crashing through the bushes, but a whole gang of people counting on you to lead the right way.

The only way I know how to play this is to follow on that Virgil advice, to be bold and just do right. I’ve been hedging around the edges for long enough: the time to embrace this new challenge has come, and I’m on it. The charmed life continues — I sit here writing in balmy sunshine weather on my back porch couch bed sipping emergen-c in my underwear — and it feels inevitable that as things progress more people will become a part of the web, become in some way bound up in the things that I do. That’s the hardest, scariest, and therefore probably most important thing to accept and embrace.

Same goes for matters of the heart. You can’t get very far if you’re constantly second-guessing your own moral compass, worrying about hurting anyone else’s feelings. Self-confidence is the essence of all sex-appeal, and that means having a little faith for a change, a little more of that “I trust this guy” spirit towards the old self.

It’s the last day of summer, a summer of many scenes, travel, exploration, some hard yards. You learn things about yourself, things you didn’t even know you didn’t know, those fabled unknown unknowns.

You might come back from Mexico and discover from your roommates that you displayed a rather more zesty case of wedding-fever the other weekend than was previously known. It’s all second-hand knowledge because you honesty don’t remember yourself, and it sounds kind of tawdry, but making out with your friends’ ex-girlfriends is a staple of Portland culture, so it’s all good, right? Right.

One just like the other, Sin’s a Good Man’s Brother.

You might have your friends from Burning Man roll through, and go on and on about your square-ass work history over pre-dinner cocktails, and find out that the one you had an eye for already has a man back home. It’s all in the game, but would you have found this out if you handn’t had a burned-up hand and talked a bit more pretty? Might it have played differently, more like you’d hoped? The world may never know, but you try not to stress it. You resonated. That’s rare and true and more than enough.

It’s been two good years since I’ve felt clear like I’m starting to, back around the last time I returned to Brooklyn, post-Vagabender, starting up as a legitimate young man. I found myself a pretty nice girlfriend then, or maybe she found me (as has tended to be my m.o.), but regardless we had a pretty good thing for six months or so in Park Slope. The Belle do Mois. As has also tended to be my m.o., I got lured away by another bright sweet one, a real peach, and then I moved to the hills of California and didn’t come back, lost her too. I wonder in hindsight what was really behind that decision to run.

Back then, just after I’d settled in Brooklyn, I came home to Oregon for my man Dave’s wedding to the lovely Jessica, and in the drunken evening after my mom and I had a kind of heart to heart. She wanted to know whether I was afraid of commitment, how often I was drunk when I met these girls. You know, good honest questions from the most authoritative Woman in your life. I was already in the process of re-evaluating my attitudes towards relationships, fucking, love, etc, but I think that kind of got me to face up to some real truths about what I wanted, where I was going.

My boys and I like to kick around “the 35 to 55” as an abstract concept, and it feels like roughly the right target for starting a family, but life and love don’t really run on a logistical schedule. A plan is just a list of things that don’t happen. I’ve done enough spins around the block not to care about being celibate for six months or more, but there’s no denying I’m lonely, and also no denying I’m playing an active role in keeping myself this way.

It’s hard to say. I’ve never been particularly talented at fidelity, and I’ve not always been so good at being up front and honest about this. It’s a shortcoming. It’s something I think about in guilty and regretful ways. I came out here and stuck myself in the woods, away from distractions I said. Took myself right out of the game. You can’t fuck up if you don’t play, but you also can’t win, not to mention the fact that it’s boring as hell.

With the 20/20 vision time brings, it looks more and more like a retreat of sorts. In many human ways it was a big move forward — living with good friends is something that brings me huge growth and joy, and starting a company wouldn’t have been feasible if I weren’t here — but in terms of Love, the big question, it was a kind of Final Ramble off the scene. I’ve been out a few times since I moved out here — a picnic lunch, making out with young mothers — but nothing past second base or three dates. As has been pointed out, apparently I need to fly across the country to get laid.

It’s a different world from Brooklyn, for sure, but the truth is I don’t apply myself. I’m not really “out there.” I have to give myself the freedom to make mistakes again, and I have to work on being more forward. It’s not really my nature to be aggressive or competitive when it comes to the ladies. Like I said, my m.o. is often to let them come to me, which doesn’t really work so well in these parts, and probably isn’t all that mature either.

I wonder about the times when I’m very drunk, superego peeled more or less all the way back, and this reverses itself. The other week’s wedding fever is probably a good example, and thinking back a couple years again I remember the first or second weekend I was back in Bklyn, going out on the town, really hitting the scene. That’s the last time I have blank spots in my memory. I left my jacket somewhere, made some questionable 2am phone calls that were only known because of outgoing call-tracking, etc.

Frank told me at the time I was like a Great Dane in heat, which is probably accurate and kind of funny, if not the most flattering image. I feel some unspecified shame around this area, but the truth is that this is how I’ve found Love in the past: going for it with gusto. So what do I have to do to get the cop out of my head without drinking myself blind? That appears to be the $64,000 question.

Life comes in waves, and patterns have a way of recurring. Not quite history repeating, but there are echos, resonance, familiar contours to the road. No moment is the same. There is no stillness. And yet, I feel like I’ve been here before.

Out at Burning Man, one afternoon I had a bunch of our neighbors over, interesting wild people a few years my senior, and was kind of bird-dogging this 30-something conversation about love and sex and relationships. When it came to my piece I was short and sweet, talking about being a romantic, a three-week wonder, looking for something true and being frustrated because “there’s nothing you can really do to go find love, no action you can take.”

“That’s not true,” my neighbor said. “The most important thing you can do is make sure you are at 100%, with yourself, with what you’re doing. That’s how you find love.”

It seems like good advice. I took it to heart. Out there on my journey of spiritual cleansing, riding the dusty back-roads of Saturday night, head full of acid under a heavy moon and Johnny Cash and Bobby Dylan on the boombox singing about the Girl From the North Country, I realized just how much I wanted love in my life again.

It’s obvious, yeah, but in my experience revelations are always obvious when you say them out loud. What makes them revelations is that they stick. They arc from idea to belief. They spawn new habits of action, as the Philosopher might say.

Anyway, that’s about all the navel-gazing I’ve got for the day. It’s a beautiful Saturday. I’m going to wrap up my hand, go out and enjoy the Equinox.

I’m back in the saddle. Audentes ortuna juvat. Fortune favors the bold. That’s Virgil, bitches. Old school.

I’m going to write something good and gonzo exploring the Burning Man experience this year, but that’s not done yet. I will start tomorrow, as gonzo works best if it’s written fresh and hot, but for now I need to wind down and get another good night’s sleep.

Suffice to say, my attitude about the universe is a whole lot better now than it was two weeks ago. There were some dark moments out there — getting in the groove was hard, frought with weakness and defeat, and exodus was fucking brutal — but the experience was high, heady, fun and most of all enlightening and empowering. As I said, I feel spiritually cleansed. It turned me on enough to believe in the “next year” dream of really organizing a big expedition, being a camp leader. More on that later.

Getting back into civilization was a long hard run, and the Default World is unquestionably weird, but while playa eyes and a clean spirit do throw our shadows into harsher relief, it’s only because they bring a lot of positive light to the situation.

Indeed, it’s been nothing but aces since we made the gate. Our Pyramid Lake dirt-nap saved lives. The waitress at the Iron Skillet was a queen. I turned $1 to $40 in the penny slot. Swimming in the Trinity was divinity. Kellymundo deep-cleaned the house while we were gone. Moamar will ride again. I got my passport in the mail. The Girth’s would-be lady friend called him back. With the exception of my business partners being stuck in a glass house on the beach in the middle of Huricaine Henriette, everything’s coming up Cabeçon.

Just a quick note that I’m back in the default world. Spiritually cleansed and a little crispy. All is well.

More soon.

UPDATE: Scott at North Bay Auto says all Moamar needed was a tune-up. Given the experience of a sudden loss of power, I’ll have to see it to believe it, but he’s the man on this, and it’s good fucking news to me!