Burning Man Bound

Pink wig...check. Silver vinyl pants...check. Leopard print platform boots...check. Podbelt, platypus, goggles, respirator...check, check, check and check. I am nearly packed for the greatest participants-only show on Earth. Ten days of freedom and laughter and dust and music and bonding and bondage and things I have yet to even fathom that I'll probably never be able to fully describe, with 40,000 of the best friends I just met. Every cell in my body vibrates to the same manic song: in a mere 48 hours I will arrive at the Philadelphia Airport. In 72 hours I'll be standing on a dusty alkaline lakebed trying to help assemble a geodesic dome, bouncing slightly and grinning ear to ear while chanting, "I can't believe I'm really here!" enough times to make my campmates (even the other newbies) throw things at me. No running water, no cell phone, no internet, no parenting, just raw present-only experience, whatever shape it takes.

The only thing between me and the Man at this point is a mountain of minutiae - little details that keep real life running smoothly and keep the landing after the Burn from being too big a crash. Gotta get textbooks. Extra contacts. Take the cat to the kennel. Hug and tickle and read to my daughter before packing her off to her dad's for 2 weeks. Clean out the refrigerator, take out the trash, do all the dishes and whateverallelse it takes to prevent returning home to some sort of insect resort. Wrap up this godforsaken job once and for all. But my mind drifts always back to its images of playa and theme camps and stars in the desert and leaves me in grinny, giggle fits despite my best efforts to focus. If I can just make it to the plane on Friday evening, I'll have six uninterrupted hours of fantasizing about Burning Man, I tell myself. But to no avail. I just have to allow myself these brief reveries before my inner slavedriver cracks the whip again.

So this is it. I'll be back in 2 weeks, either with many stories or just so damn speechless all I'll be able to write here for days is "Oh. My. God." If I can I'll try to write something from the playa before I come back. Rumor has it there's a camp that provides a satellite Internet connection. I promise no coherency, or that I'll even find my way over there. But I'll do my best.

See you on the flipside...or on the edge...or wherever it is I turn up next. Over & out.

Because Life Can Never Be Lived Too Close To The Edge

You know, after awhile you get used to all the 15 hour days and penny pinching and nail biting and hand wringing and self flagellation and knocking over piles of dishes and unopened mail and you think, "hey, man, I'm bored! All the adrenaline used to key me up and I'd run around like a hamster on crack, but now I'm just tired and disaffected." And you realize that you've stomped the steel-toed boot of your insane schedule upon the brused and battered countenance of your poor endocrine system for just a tad too long and that it just might not survive the next harried and squishy tromp you semi-awarely impart upon it between gulps of yet another BK Veggie sandwich while talking on your cellphone (hands-free of course...you know, for safety) and driving somewhere to which you're once again fifteen minutes late. And you realize that things are never going to get any easier than this, that you'll never really save up "enough" money, you'll never really be caught up on your work, and that there's always going to be some justifiable excuse ostensibly holding you at arms length from your dream because rarely does the universe roll out the red carpet and the trumpets and hand you your dreams on a silver platter. And really, what fun would life be if it did? And all at once you unleash a few metric tons of pent up momentum and go, "fuck it, it's not getting any easier, cheaper, or more cosmically right, so it might as well be now."

Then you take one last squinty-eyed look down the abyss and you jump.

Which is how I wound up quitting my job.

No, I don't have any money saved. No, I don't have enough massage clients yet to support me and my daughter. But I do have the talent, the drive, the marketing savvy and enough healthy fear of holding down another full-time office job to propel me to success. I hope. I did decide to get a part time gig to help pay some of the bills until I have a more robust schedule. It was a tough choice, but by far the lesser of two evils compared to staying where I am. I have managed to maintain a shred of innocent faith that I won't need it for long. Eek! Sigh.

Who will I be without all this stress? Assuming, that is, that I don't manage to manufacture some other stress to replace it with. What does it mean to live a relaxed life doing what you love? There are all these unconscious beliefs woven through the choices I've made, ones about it being called work for a reason and a bunch of other very stoic German ideas about toil and strife and stuff. When you decide to go against the grain of your familial conditioning it's nothing short of terrifying. Your conscience screams that it will never work. The scenarios of failure and humiliation grow ever more elaborate as you march closer to the point of no return.

But in perspective, when you sit down and get real and stop holding a big distorted microphone to the naysaying voice of conscience, the worst that could happen is not so bad. The bills get a little behind. I get another job if it comes to it. I make a longer term plan. Oh well. Does that mean I fail forever? Not really. Just that I go back to the drawing board and look for another route. I could live with that. In comparison, the thought of getting up to come to this wretched job for any longer than the next four days makes me want to run and jump off the nearest abyss.

Big Gay Jim's Big Gay Media Circus

Of all the Mercury retrograde info shocks in the world, Governor McGreevy has come out of the closet. It’s all anyone is talking about here in Jersey. Anyone who says men don’t gossip was not in our break room moments after the big speech. I happened to catch a couple clips from his announcement in a Chinese takeout restaurant while I waited for my noodles last night. What really touched me was that he seemed to fully understand what a crossroads following your truth really is, and how difficult and rare and shiningly blissfully painful it is to step up and take the big leap off of life’s abyss with total faith that there’s some kind of cushion at the bottom, or at the very least that you won’t go "splat".

For anyone with half an ounce of respect for the daring reality-shattering, stomach-dropping, risk-everything-for-freedom personal choices we all make in hopes of a happier, jucier, more cosmically fulfilling existence, Jim made the boldest of all possible moves: he sacrificed everything for his truth. And I, for one, am 100% behind him (ahem). Of course, the cynics say that with the pending lawsuit from his former lover, his marriage and career were pretty much fucked anyway. But still, it takes giant, jangling brass balls to get up in front of the free world and admit you had an affair. With a guy, no less (we won’t even get into the now blatant hypocrisy of his opposition to gay marriage). It’s more than Clinton was capable of, and it wasn’t near this sordid.

But the poignant grace of a powerful man humbly stepping into his truth is thoroughly cheapened by the sheer self-absorbed audacity to ask his cuckolded wife to stand there impotently while he announced to the world that his marriage was a sham. The poor dear, it had to be the most humiliating day of her life. The tight and horrified fake smile of Mrs. McGreevy, who had apparently been listening to a bit too much Tammy Wynette as she swallowed her fourth Valium with a whiskey chaser right before the cameras rolled, said it all. The time has passed to stand by your man, honey. There’s nothing to salvage - his political career is over. He likes to fuck men. It’s time to buy Kleenex in bulk, attack the sofa with a ball bat, mourn the loss of your dreams and the work you put into his career, scrape what’s left of your dignity off the bottom of his shoe and try to move on. There is someone out there who will love you for no other reason than your simple radiance. If nothing else, use his bravery as an example. Follow your bliss. Learn that you deserve real love the way you want it. Find out who you are as a woman, plain and strong, outside the role of political trophy wife, and put your whole soul into being her. It takes a long time, but it is utterly worth it.