fight! fight! fight!
Posted in Black Rockalypse, art fags on May 5, 2008 by summerburkesMay 5, 008
Black Rockalypse
Still no Not-Us. The “people” who brought us out here have forsaken us. We done been abandoned.
Not sure what the point is, or why the Not-Us are carrying on this way. Is it like when Moses wandered around the desert for 40 years with his people, ’til he finally went up to the mountain to think, made a little cannabis tea over a fire, etched some stone tablets, and manufactured a morale-boosting lie?
Except this time there’s no Moses. And maybe that in itself is the point. If humanity is going to advance to the next level of the game, we need to figure out a way to be mostly leaderless. Collectively socialist-democratic-libertarian, and individually self-reliant.
Out in the Not-Dome, we got that part down, okay? The fight this weekend proves it. So now what do we do?
—–
It’s getting a little Lord of the Flies up in here.
Well, not really. Power-grabs tend to be short-lived and ineffectual — anybody who tries gets shut down immediately. (Including certain erstwhile Dirt Rave leaders of the broken circle.) People have split into loose groups based on their interests or roles out here at camp, and there are “liaisons” (i.e., people who can negotiate without throwing punches) who talk to each other when concerns arise.
I just mean there are also jackasses among us, and we’re growing less and less patient with their antics. Don’t forget people are going crazy with the cameras out here under the Not-Dome, filming our daily activities as well as art-fag pieces, while others of us remain aboriginal about the whole concept … so this weekend we decided to throw a No-Filming Campout at Frog Pond.
And would you believe, after all the years we Dirt Rave workers have spent hammering home the point that nobody should be filmed without their permission, EVER … Not-Dome Jackass Number One secretly brought a camera to Frog Pond yesterday. And he climbed up in one of the trees and stealthily filmed tits.
Tits. Including mine. All zoom-lens heavy-breathing style. As creepy as they come.
That’s when a bunch of friends innocently skinny-dipping and barbecuing frogs (sorry, frogs, we needed the meat) became a Sleazy Thing. I feel guilty about being the one who spotted him, the one who hollered out to the tribe, like a prairie dog spotting a wolf … because that’s when [name redacted] shimmied up in the tree like a Viet Cong sniper and knocked Jack’s ass to the ground. Before Jack could even right himself, two of the other fellas drug him to his feet and tenderized his face to the point where there was more blood than flesh.
Jackass ran toward the road, and his three punishers moved to run after him, but were waylaid by other peacemakers, who could see Jack had had enough. This isn’t the old days of Bike Club-style DPW, after all, where if you fight one of us, you fight all of us …

kinda like this. Not advisable, then or now
Jack ran toward the other folks busying themselves collecting fallen casings at the gun range half a mile outside Frog, pleading through his bubbly bloody mouth-hole for some incoherent mercy or another … and that’s when THAT group half-circled him, not friendly-like, and Railroad cocked his shotgun and said, simply, “What, motherfucker?”
Yep. We ain’t got the group beatdowns no more but we still got that weird Vulcan mind-meld thing. Or maybe we all know instinctively if somebody’s running around solo out here with pulp for a face, there’s got to be a reason.
We haven’t seen Jackass since, but it’s only been 18 hours. Probably because he knows after his wounds are treated, he’ll be zip-tied to “the Cross” in front of the Black Rock for at least a couple workdays.
We put some shade over the Cross, of course. We’re not barbarians.
We’re sure he’s fine. We hope.
——
And now there’s a more organized conglomeration of individuals who administer justice on behalf of the group. We met and voted on it after breakfast today (rice and beans). If there were such a thing as exile, some of us would rather send the offending party home, as punishment for violating such a cut-and-dried rule of our tribe. But you can’t go home under the Not-Dome unless you yourself will it and ask the Not-Us, and the offending party might not want to go. And he might not even be able to leave until the Not-Us come back (if they do).
None of the rest of us want to go home, either, despite it all. Arwen’s psychic-chick back shivers are getting worse. Constant. Mine have progressed apace, too. We’ve both been sick in some way or another since we got here. But we don’t want to leave, hell NO.
Visions of bombed-out city streets plague us. Mothers running down the sidewalk carrying sick babies in their arms, and no hospital to go to. Rampant robbery, looting, lawlessness. Men gathering in basements to construct roadside explosives.
We just don’t know which directions the visions are coming from. Cityscapes look Western, but lit with a harsh orange gel, making it all khaki and dust and glare, the way the place we live now looks. Like a desert.
We also can’t tell if the visions take place in future here, or present there. We only know it has to do with oil and gasoline. We can’t see the people’s faces, to tell if they’re multiracial or decidedly Middle Eastern.
We think maybe that’s the point.
We won’t leave this place, no matter how sickly or beat-up we get … because we are completely uncertain there’s anything out there besides something worse than what’s in here.
Which is nothing but rice and beans, and hams and cameras, and the occasional beatdown.
———–
Maybe in the hyperworld, as Fitz pointed out, the lyrics to every Slayer song just came true in one shining and terrible moment. Maybe the doomsdayers were right about everything, and the whole shebang has banged. Or will soon bang.
I mean, Hitler happened. That was here. This lifetime. This planet. Us. We did that. Humans. We could do it again. We still do it, actually, all the time, on smaller-but-not-small scales, in more easily-ignored places where there’s no center of industry or desirable resource which would compel America go over and bomb the shit out of them to teach them to stop bombing each other. (?!)
THAT’S why we’re staying put. Out here, we might be bored to death and starving and tap-dancing on each others’ last nerves from the stress, but at least we’re safe. We’ve got supernatural forces on our side, and a fence to keep the (really) bad guys out.




















