intellectual properties

it’s the end of the world as we know it

we arrived at the little mining town (population: 26) on the river thursday night, put up camp and went to sleep, and when i woke up friday morning to a blue sky and sun coming through the leaves of trees through the mesh ceiling of my tent, i was genuinely happy. i can’t remember the last time i woke up happy, which is sort of sad, but i was so happy to feel happy i didn’t dwell on that too much.

the weekend went as well as it could have, no major SNAFUs although with the shift in timing it was much cooler and the nights were downright cold. the beach party wasn’t as crazy this year because the sun never really hit the sand and the river water was incredibly chilly, but on the upside we weren’t sweating buckets in 115 degree july heat again either. i slept a fair number of hours, although broken up into chunks of 3 or 4 instead of 8 straight, and danced to my heart’s content throughout the cycles of days and nights, in the middle of the night and at dawn and in the morning and in the glorious afternoon, feet endlessly shuffling in the dust. the dr. seuss party was certainly a highlight, the whimsy and creativity of my friends being utterly delightful, and even the manual labor activities like sorting through refuse seem fun when you’re surrounded by forest and friends.

we stayed an extra night after the sound was turned off and the party was dismantled and the ground cleaned and the truck loaded and everyone else hustled off back to the cities. the little mining town had reverted to it’s normal mode as a pit stop on the long winding highway up the canyon. gone were the brightly colored lights and decorations and hundreds of laughing humans and groundshaking speakers to satisfy the incessant dancers, and again there was just a quiet country road and the rush of the river and the trucks on the highway and the trains rattling through the canyon and the occasional bang of the screen door on the only game in town: the saloon. we had a quiet dinner and a few beers in the bar and talked to 3 hikers who’d come down off the nearby Pacific Crest Trail into town for some showers and food. 1400 miles they’d walked so far, from Canada on their way to Mexico. when asked what was the strangest creature/finding they’d come across all those days in the wilderness, they answered “Randy”, Randy being a true feral human who is somewhat of a legend on the PCT.

we went to bed early sunday night and slept and slept in the quiet darkness, snug in our sleeping bags, looking up at the stars. think it was important that we stayed another night, after all the dancing and sound and social activity and labor, to chill out and rest and really take a break. we had a lazy monday morning in the quiet little town and came home to oakland in the late afternoon, almost exactly 4 days after we’d left.

when we got back to the loft, before we’d even entered the building, our neighbor came out to report that someone had just attempted to rob him at a restaurant down the street (walked by and swiped his iPhone off the table while he was eating lunch, but was tackled on his way out), and had we read the news today? the stock market crashed! banks are collapsing! things are getting weird! the madness! and jay and i both just sort of said…..hm. that’s interesting. i feel fine.

so, yeah. it turns out that spending 4 days in the woods dancing and making fun with my friends relieved pretty much all of my symptoms. this is majorly relieving in that at the moment i am no longer worrying that i have some sort of neurological problem or other physical malady, but unnerving in that it would seem that i apparently just suffered what might be classified as a nervous breakdown at the age of almost 32. what i need to do about that remains to be seen and indeed some things need to be sorted out.

on the other hand, it also proves that all this tomfoolery is a worthwhile human endeavor and not a gigantic waste of time and energy, as some might think, and as i have often pondered. healthy doses of unreality and hedonistic escapism are increasingly important in today’s mad world, and i’m just not very good at being a hedon. some people who spend countless hours in front of the television watching NASCAR and the NFL might find what we do totally inane and silly; people search for their escape from the mundane and heavy realities of this world in many different ways (television, consumerism, fanatacism (sports, religion)); some are more productive than others, but i digress on that point. all i’m saying is that apparently i desperately needed to chill the fuck out and have some fun, and this past weekend provided that for me as nothing else has been able to in quite some time, including burning man. at the risk of being cheesy, that’s priceless.

Filed in autobiographical, events, me myself and i | Tagged with false profit, priceless | Comments (4)