Stirrings in the Aether

October 19

Work is so strange. Sometimes I’m totally overwhelmed with stuff to do, and other times it lulls and I find myself rearranging the shelves by the copier just to be doing something... But it certainly beats digging ditches, hmm?

Anyway. Lately I’ve been hearing a lot about Burning Man, the annual... gathering... of Bay Area artists (at least, it started that way) and dotcom gentry and other folk. They build a city from nothing on the largest flat place in America, conjure up a gift economy, and do... art, I guess. Information about the festival (? Is that what I should call it?) keeps turning up everywhere I look or listen-- I’ve seen it mentioned on web sites, read articles about it in magazines and newspapers, overheard strangers in cafés talking about it... in the course of a week I’ve gone from total ignorance about Burning Man to fairly-well-informed-in-an-indirect-way... and then tonight I found out that someone in my writing group goes to Burning Man, and has worked the Costco Soulmate Trading Outlet there for the past three years. It’s a pretty nifty operation-- they get people to fill out forms, take photos, and then match people up with their “soul mates” at Black Rock, people who could be lovers or friends or whatever... of course it costs nothing... It’s slightly tongue-in-cheek, sure, but they’re also very serious about it, about connections, and I appreciate that seriousness.

I love it when large groups of people do things that flaunt conventional, consensual standards of social conduct and reality. Burning Man appeals to that part of me, and to the performance artist in me, and the surrealist, and the poet... so perhaps I’ll go next year. I increasingly think that I will, alone or with friends... I can think of a few people I’d love to go with, but unfortunately I can’t easily contact them/steal them away... specifically a pair of unrelated red-headed poets, one of whom I’ve lost touch with, one of whom is far away and usually busy. But there are other possibilities...

Burning Man’s a long way off. I’ve got time to think it over. I’ve also had an urge to go to Prague, just because it’s supposed to be such a literary, poet-friendly place, and because it’s so cheap, but it’s also sort of a trendy pretentious-poet place to go these last several years, and joining the heard of black-wearing Pragueledites isn’t exactly what I want to do... It would just be nice to go to a place where people walk around outside, and the architecture is old and beautiful, without slotting neatly into a stereotype (which I fear I would fit rather well)...

You’d think my restlessness would have been satisfied by moving across the continent, wouldn’t you? And to a large extent it has been, but I’ve never traveled much, and I keep meeting people who have traveled much, and I’m envious... but then again, I also believe one should pay attention to one’s present surroundings, fully appreciate a good place while you’re in it, rather than always looking over the horizon... I guess I feel like life is very short in some ways, and very limited, but the world’s so full of stuff, all this stuff I want to do... I keep telling myself I’m young, but the months keep going faster... Well. I have a tendency to sit in my room typing, to sit in coffee shops and read, and while I enjoy those things very much, I also feel like I might be missing out on some stuff. So I’m trying, in a cliché, to get out more.

Get out more, but still write like a dervish whirls. And work full time. Hmm.

It seems I’m going to a Celtic music concert next month, oddly enough. I’ve been sort of passively interested in Celtic music for a while (comes from reading all that Charles de Lint, I guess), and I have a friend out here in CA who’s a big fan of such things, and we’re getting together for a show. It will be the first time I’ve ever met her in person-- she’s one of the few people I know exclusively from online-interactions that I’ve kept in more-or-less steady contact with. I’ve known her in that medium for... jeez... five years now. Wow. Time does go by, doesn’t it? So I’m looking forward to that very much, both the music and the meeting. My next couple of months look to be pretty full of fun and interesting stuff.

This weekend I’m going to buy furniture with my new housemates. Nesting impulses colliding with wandering impulses. Maybe I just feel this way today.

I love living with Scott. He cooks these great meals, with stuff like almond-stuffed olives and orange bell peppers in them, stuff I would never think to buy or prepare myself... What with running in the mornings and eating semi-healthy food sometimes, I might live a few months longer than I could have expected.

I love Jesse Reklaw’s Slow Wave... people send Jesse their dreams, and Jesse transforms them into comic strips, it’s so delightfully surreal... I keep hoping I’ll have a dream odd enough to send in.

Of course, I could make something up, and send that in. But that would sort’ve violate the integrity of the whole thing, and I don’t want to do that.

The writing group I’m in is odd. Every week that I’ve gone, new people have appeared, which is interesting, because I get to meet lots of people... but there’s no real core, except for Wes, the organizer/ringleader... some people come more regularly than others, but it’s definitely a crap shoot. It’s different, a looser structure than I’m accustomed to. But it’s fun, too, I get to drink coffee and badmouth John Updike and praise Tim O’Brien and talk about point-of-view and xterization. It isn’t the Midnight Writers, and it certainly isn’t Clarion, and I should stop expecting it to be either of those things, and take it for what it is: a pleasant gathering and potentially useful resource.

Still. I should nose around for SF writers in Santa Cruz. I’m not much of a ringleader, but it’s worth a try. There’s nothing to say I can’t be in multiple groups...

That’s the stuff that’s on my mind, lately-- along with Howard Waldrop stories, Joe Lansdale stories, Charles de Lint books, Bruce Sterling’s Viridian movement, the possible innocence of Gilles de Rais, the sacred Lakota rites, shammans (and that’s not a misspelling), the rules of English grammar, “woo woo goats,” poetry markets, the Hundred Year’s War, barter economies, polyamory, the nature of news groups, ballpoint vs. fountain pens, cloning endangered animals and bringing them to term in related non-endangered species, better-living-through-chemistry, Neo-Luddism, Miracle the White Buffalo Calf, the Milk Miracle...

This is what being a writer is to me, reading and learning and talking about all this stuff, and seeing how it makes a mosaic, seeing how it touches or fails to touch, seeing how it can join up and make stories that convey things I want very much to convey... it’s so exciting, life is so exciting! And all this stuff is so complicated, sometimes I doubt my ability to analyze, synthesize, and interpret but it’s so fun to try...

I love keeping this journal, it’s such a good outlet for stuff like this, I wouldn’t have written this otherwise, and by writing it I understand myself better, my life better, the things I want better.

I’m going to write some fiction now. G’night.