Words’ End

Some helpful soul transcribed what-all Joe Cocker was singing at Woodstock. Helpful cat is helpful!

Don’t be drinking anything when you watch this, and oh, do watch it. Four-ish minutes.

[I started writing this yesterday but decided to sleep before finishing. A wise choice.]

It’s not even 10pm, and I’m already in bed in pursuit of enough sleep. A couple of days ago Mark and I talked about the concept of enough, for the most part agreeing that it was not a useful measure. When does the lovingest cat in the world (who happens to live with Mark) get enough love? What is enough contentment? How much time on the playa is enough? And so on. Since that conversation I’ve thought of two things to which I can usefully apply the modifier enough: food and sleep. My body definitely has a range of “enough” when it comes to nutrition, and lately I’m glad to say I’ve mostly stayed in that range. Likewise with sleep. Too much sleep, which makes me logy, happily doesn’t happen often. But before the trip I was underslept for weeks with only occasional breaks, and every such period takes a heavier toll than the one before it. One of the unmistakable signs of aging.

(Yes, I know I’m only 31. I said aging, not getting old, and this isn’t even a complaint: I’m just fascinated with the changes my body is patently undergoing.)

I got a surprisingly decent amount of sleep at Burning Man. The noise doesn’t bother my lucky brain, which can wander off into dreamland under most any conditions if it’s tired enough. And the weather between the Monday and Saturday dust storms was so mild that the tents didn’t get stifling until well after 9! Both of the times I’ve been to the playa before, the beating sun made it difficult to stay in the tents around 7:30.

Tuesday night was a night for wandering, though. I went out with some of my campmates, maybe a group of eight? We were – oh wait, do you know what the city looks like? Here, take a look at the map – we were camped at almost-9 o’clock and A, riiight around the round 9:00 Plaza. We went straight across the playa, past the Man, and to 3:00; that alone is a 5400-foot walk right there, just over a mile. We then proceeded to walk the diameter of the Esplanade all the way around clockwise, back to 9:00. There were sparkly and shiny things everywhere; many of those things were faces. We saw … actually, I don’t remember what-all we saw. I remember the feeling of it, but not the camps and installations themselves. Campmates, help in comments? :)

Around 8:30 I broke off with my friends and walked into a full-on techno-y disco, in an attempt to find Sean. Failed miserably at that, but did find two other friends – Rob and Sara(h?) – who had both made these gorgeous faux-fur coats rippling all over with LEDs sewn into them. Gorgeous.

Walked back into camp, recouped and realized that my evening was very much not over. So I got to wander the playa for a couple of hours with Dan. This was fantastic: Dan lives in San Francisco, and I don’t get to see him a whole lot; and the little time we’ve actually spent together is somehow always graced with an ease that I love. Plus, he has an incredible eye for visual composition.

We wandered through a small forest of skis, which surrounded a little meditation space with benches made of snowboards: a beautiful memorial to a skiing-and-snowboarding dude by his friends. And we found the balloons!

The balloons were surreal. There were three huge strings of them hanging more or less vertically in the air, lit up (it was nighttime, after all) – blue, green and red. The playa messes with your sense of geographical perspective at the best of times, and at night, slightly sleep deprived and giddy and not entirely sober, with all those lights around – well, we couldn’t really tell where the balloon strings met the earth. But toward them we went, and they turned out to not be very far away. Lucky us!

They were helium-filled balloons affixed to heavy-gauge kite string, with an LED taped to a small battery affixed under each balloon. They were twelve feet apart, and each string had hundreds of balloons, and more were being put on as we watched. They were so, so high up in the air – but you could catch the string and sort of walk it down with your hands; which is what people did, and we did too, and Dan even lay on the ground with some other folk who were passing them fire-brigade-style and laughing as though they’d been inhaling that helium. (They weren’t. It was just that fun.)

Why balloons, and why did we find them so fun, hanging out in the sky like that, 500 feet up in the air? For no better reason than people find horse races or museums or monster truck rallies or hiking in the woods fun. It was art we could play with. It was some of the best time I had on the playa this year.

After an almost three-week absence, I have not quite gotten my room back to an acceptable allergen level. This is a daily challenge even normally, no surprise considering I live with five cats and a dog. So the rest that my immune system had gotten and the full frontal assault upon my return from the desert to the humid state, and we’ve got fun times.

Today my Burner campmates and I, along with some hundreds of others, unloaded the two 53-foot containers whose rental our fearless container leader Cris Wagner organizes every year. They get loaded up with stuff people are taking to the playa two weeks before Burning Man, and unloaded two weeks after the event.

Everything comes back covered with the tenacious, alkaline playa dust, of course. I now have several bins of stuff to de-dust, launder and re-organize, plus a tent and an aerobed; I hope to deal with most of this tomorrow. Ah, the bliss of weekends when I can dedicate so many hours to a project.

On Monday 25 August, I drove the last westbound leg of my road trip, and entered Black Rock City, NV (just northeast of here, in the big white Black Rock desert). I drove in in a dust storm several hours long. It took me an hour or so to get from the ticket-check gates to the greeters’ station, and a good couple of hours more to get to my camp – visibility was that bad, and even though there was an endless caravan of arriving Burners all going 5mph or less, at some point everyone just stopped, got out of their vehicles and hung out for a while. Note to self: do not pack goggles on the Burning Truck. Seriously, bring them with.

I got to camp caked in dust, with my eyes burning and happy as happy could be. Hello, playa, I’d missed you.

The rest of the week proceeded to be gorgeous – only reasonably hot desert days and holy-gods-warm nights when I don’t think it got below 60 – right up until Saturday, when there was another half-a-day-long dust storm. By then I was exhausted and not a little strung out; emotions of all sorts are heightened at Burning Man, and this can be tiring. So I hid from the world for a while with great company of several people in succession. Lucky me – when I returned to Boston, I also returned to most of those people living within a five-mile radius of my house.

Right! I am once again falling into the trap of having so much to write that I don’t write anything. Bits and pieces are better than nothing. And so, bits and pieces.

In short: on Wednesday the 20th of last month I left home absurdly early and drove westward to Black Rock City, NV. I took a northerly route on the way there and went through Ohio, Duluth MN, Fargo ND, Billings MT, Custer National Forest, Yellowstone and Jackson Hole WY. I got to the burn in the afternoon on Monday the 25th, stayed in the desert until stupid-early in the morning on Monday the 1st, and got home around 4:30pm last Sunday the 7th. On the way home I went south to Las Vegas, and then drove through Albuquerque and Santa Fe NM, Tulsa OK, Little Rock AR, Memphis and Nashville and Knocksville TN, Pretty Everyplace PA and Sleepy Hollow, NY. I drove a total of 7,253.5 miles in my friend Molly’s little 2001 Honda Civic Something Just-Pre-Hybrid, which was a complete doll and got me an average of around 45mpg. I was gone nineteen days (Stephen King, where are you?) (The number 19 carries a huge significance in the Dark Tower series); my cats expressed their unequivocal disgruntlement, and are currently over it.

It was exhausting and exhilarating and exactly the cathartic road trip I wanted. I saw some friends I hadn’t seen for a long time, met new and fantastic people, had the best burn yet (of my meager three), and spent a lot of time thinking and singing, sometimes at the same time.

Neuromancer is a bitch to experience as an audio book if you’ve never read the paper copy before. When I told Mark (who gave me the audiobook for the road) about the difficulty I was having understanding anything that was going on, and mentioned it was my first pass through the novel, he looked downright sheepish. I am glad to report that, after several false starts, I did listen to it all the way through, and am now listening to the whole thing again. It is brilliant and well read.

It’s 11:18pm, and i’m sleepy. Many more thoughts on each of the above-mentioned places.

To hell with sleep. I now have an ungodly amount of pesto. Probably a couple of pounds of it (or a medium mixing bowl – pesto is heavy, what with the oil and all).

Oh, tasty tasty summer. And I’m just starting with the pesto. Watch out, world.

News in the past day or so: out-of-state couples will soon be able to marry in MA!!, as a 1913 state law originally aimed at interracial couples is repealed.

AND.

Jetpack.

I’d say we’re taking off, as a society.

Haven’t been updating, or not here anyway. Dealing with taxes and other emotionally loaded issues, as well as being super busy at work, participating in my village and preparing for Burning Man and its attendant road trip, have all kept me running around. You can see some of my life on Flickr. I suspect this – both the relative dearth of posting on Words’ End and the snippets viewable on Flickr – is going to continue for a while.

Today I went out on my bike for the first time in well over a year. Halleluiah for bike paths! I got past Arlington Center and out towards a football field – no idea how far that is from home, probably no more than four miles or so. Were it not getting dark fast (and had I had any water or food with me), I might’ve kept going – and will, soon, because oh gods that felt good.

Riding through swarms of insects out by Spy Pond in the dusk, though, maybe not so good. On the bright side, glasses double as mini eye shields!

On the way back, the ripening moon was peeking through the tree canopy straight ahead of and above me, along the path. And on ’til moonrise.

The lovely, warm evening ride gave me hope for dealing with the tax man tomorrow. Word to the wise: don’t be late filing your taxes. The penalties, they hurt.

At least one more ride this week. Next week I’d like to bike out to work.

Just under 7min long. Watch it. Worth it. What’s your dream for your society? What do you consider your society – like your friends and your family and your pets, an entity that gives you much, and for which you’re responsible? I want to know.

Barlow, by the way, is fantastic. I want to cook him dinner and ask him about the world.

Dream with me, oh, dream with me, and we’ll wake in better life / And until we rise with open eyes, good night, my love, good night / Yes, until some sun wakes everyone, good night, my love, good night. –Kris Delmhorst, Jeffrey Foucault and Peter Mulvey, “Lullaby 101″ off of Redbird

From NBC:

Exclusive Heroes Webisodes Coming Soon!

On July 14th, Heroes unleashes its first ever web series, “Going Postal.” The trilogy of online-only videos introduces us to Echo De Mille, a seemingly ordinary mailman with an extraordinary ability.

The three-part series is written and directed by the same creative team behind the award-winning TV show. Part one, “A Nifty Trick,” premieres Monday, July 14th, with new episodes rolling out on subsequent Mondays. Visitors to this year’s Comic Con, will get a sneak peak at the epic conclusion at the Heroes panel on Saturday, July 26th.

Here’s the trailer, if you’d like to see it. As usual these days, the links are to pretty processing-intensive pages.