fight! fight! fight!

May 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.

bad moon on the rise

April 23, 008
Black Rockalypse

Last night I dreamed I got to go home, to my childhood home, to my parents’ house in Memphis where Dad and Grandaddy built a giant deck in the back yard. But it was the post-apocalypse, and mouth-breathing, overweight, screeching people-animals roamed the streets at night, devouring anyone who remained outdoors in the once-safe suburban enclaves. Something about a new strain of mad cow disease resulting from beef-fed beef … and the people who ate this mass-produced meat going mad with cannibalism.

Mom and Dad had resorted to voodoo to try to keep the cannibals away — and as night fell, we skittered around the deck, chanting incantations and offering up sacrifices of beheaded stuffed animals soaked in ketchup to try to appease the predators. At sundown, we barricaded ourselves indoors.

The next day, Mom tried to take me to school, in some type of tiny little electric car, over pothole-y gravelly roads peppered with food-stealing bandidos I had to fight off with an aluminum baseball bat as she drove. Mom waited for me outside the schoolhouse while I got in an argument with the teacher. Then, we watched in horror as her overtaxed, hard-earned automobile was flattened by a stretch limousine, which was owned by the preacher at the church next door.

Dressed pimpishly in an electric blue sharkskin Nehru suit, and flashing more gold chain than Mr. T, the preacherman waited for his driver to open the door and unfold a golden stepladder (the limo-saurus had monster-truck tires and suspension). Smiling in Kool Moe Dee sunglasses, the preacher insincerely apologized, citing his need for a parking space (the gravel lot was otherwise empty). Townspeople surrounded us, vibing us to the certainty that any protestations would be summarily dismissed with a wordless mob-style ass-whooping.

Mom and I had to walk home before the sun set, to get back to Dad and help with the nightly fat-zombie-be-gone voodoo rituals. We gave all our food away to the bandidos to avoid being murdered on the road.

no parking

Resistance is futile, but so is non-resistance

April 21, 008
Black Rockalypse

Ain’t no kale in armageddon.

So we’ve officially survived our first winter out here in the Black Rock Desert, and I’m here to tell you, ladies and gentlemen: I’m not sure what to tell you. About the way to feed yourself in this lifetime, anyway.

Back in San Francisco, I used to eat granola with kefir, soy lecithin granules, flaxseed meal, and goji berries for breakfast. Followed by a dropper-full of chlor-oxygen with a handful of raisins. And pills, the good kind: antioxidanty stuff like like kelp, N-Acetyl Cysteine, CoQ10, Acetyl L-Carnitine, Silymarin, and vitamin C. Mid-morning there would be kombucha, and lunch and dinner would involve mostly items grown on farms. Raised as I was on Hostess products and Jell-O and canned everything else, I moved to California in my 20s, took advantage of the bounty there, and slowly found my way to hippie-food nirvana.

On kitchen crew during Burning Man cleanup this past fall, 13 and Arwen and I squirreled away secret stashes: Julienned raw kale “cooked” overnight in a solution of sesame oil, live apple cider vinegar, and raw garlic. Beets grated together with the same solution, and ginger added as well. Smoothies with green supplements. Fancy nuts and berries.

Those delicacies are all long gone. Hopefully our crops will come in this summer, but that’s a potentially non-occurring then, and this is a very hungry now.

food porn

Question: How come the hard-core meatheads, the potato-and-pop-tart eaters, the fourth-helping bacon bitches out here have survived multiple chem trail poisonings and monkeypoxes without so much as a sneeze or a whimper? Why can they eat nothing but pancakes and instant oatmeal and still be chomping at the bit to pound T-stakes?

And why have I been the one to go down? I mean Every. Time. There’s. A. Flu. Me and the vegans and the candida people, we go down.

Is it because I ran out of turmeric, of which I used to take half a teaspoon every morning in hot water, in the hopes it would protect me from staph and MRSA? Well, I did survive almost cutting off my finger this past winter, without antibiotics or infection, in a makeshift triage unit in the desert in wintertime …

Is it because there’s no more apple cider vinegar, of which I had six bottles hidden away in my trailer? Back in the hyperworld, I’d follow up my turmeric with a bracing swig of Bragg’s live mothery goodness. Why? Hippocrates drank it; says so on the bottle.

(PS it’s hilarious when a certain someone out here would make fun of me during cleanup for drinking “apple splooge” … right before taking a pull from a bottle of Mad Dog 20/20 “Banana Red” flavor, or some other abomination of naturally-occuring substances. How long til the children in the backwoods and suburbs and ghettos of America think “red” is a fruit?)

Sure, where others needed coffee injections, a PBR, and a cigarette merely to throw back the covers, I used to spring out of bed like a used-car salesman. Fueled by kale and beets and kombucha and and yerba mate, I maintained the party alongside hardcore acidheads and white-powder freaks, and stayed up til sunrise with the best of them.

Indeed, even now that we abandoned fools under the Not-Dome are eating rice and beans on endless repeat (and sometimes only rice), we’re all weakened. Those who do the most complaining are the ones who used to make fun of us for eating rice and beans, back when we didn’t have to… but they’re also the powerhouse workers who can build greenhouses from sunup to sundown.

Whereas 13 and Arwen and I are barely able to lift our heads some days. Back shivers and psychic flashes and all-around ectoplasmic weird-outs abound for us three, even more so than before. Some of the hardier members of our tribe can’t fathom our physical weakness, and it tires us out to constantly assure them we’re not faking to get out of work. But we’ve started to keep our witchy assessments to ourselves. We joke that if this was the movie Minority Report, we’d be the three empaths in the pool. And Arwen’s the lead singer.

Those clouds are still up there, and we’re pretty sure there are two sets. The Not-Us and someone who doesn’t like them… or us. Still no sign of them on the ground. We’ve taken to doing “rain dances” to get them to appear, and DaveX even let us have a 5-gallon can of gasoline to pour on the playa floor and light on fire in the shape of a broken circle.

Nothing.

For now, we will keep furtively convening in my trailer to do yoga or qi gong videos before the batteries run out on my laptop and I have to re-charge it with the pedal-powered generator at the Black Rock Saloon. We will try to hold our heads up, to wish and pray for more shipments of fresh vegetables and turmeric and apple cider vinegar and vitamins from Rainbow Grocery. But honestly, I’m not sure I’m doing it right.

In the hyperworld, I left my old chemical-additive life, kitchen-wise, for a highly efficient diet with few carbs, all fresh veggies, fruits, nuts, probiotics, and lean protein. I made myself resistant to infection, maybe bird flu and stuff like that … but it’s worth pointing out that I turned my body into a race car, so to speak. And now I am literally a 98-pound weakling who has run out of fuel and must be trailered around.

And I could take my 20-foot-long, 2 1/2-ton, American-steel shitkicking 1979 Delta ‘88 Royale and crash it into a brick building and probably still drive away.

What if carbs and dairy buffer us against an industrial life? What if the preservatives and aberrant petroleum products and rendering-plant “natural flavors” in our food actually toxify us to the point where we can take the pain? What if, like the Dread Pirate Roberts in The Princess Bride, we as a society have “spent the past few years building up a resistance to iocaine powder”?

I’m just saying. I mean I’d personally rather eat kale but … please, enjoy the filth modern society crams down our uneducated throats. Have some white bread, pizza, sugary cereal, Sunny D, genetically-modified corn chips, hormone-injected beef, Little Debbie snack products, fish sticks, sodium-rich canned chili, French fries with mayonnaise, corn dogs, American cheese, and delicious, delicious Cheetos for me. It might save your life when the shit hits the fan.

Easy Rider: Serentypical

April 10, 008
Black Rockalypse

We watched Easy Rider last night, after a week of getting our new, fancy-schmancy sealed-up greenhouses ready for springtime planting. Picking out crops for our gardens, both cul-de-sac and communal. Speaking nicely to the seeds; asking our future food to develop strong root systems; playing classical music and The Sword for the “babies”, and — most importantly, to me — mixing dirt with my beloved, hard-won, still-sorta-frosted compost.

Getting ready.

The person who suggested we view Easy Rider in the Crack Rock after our five millionth dinner of beans and rice had watched it 34 times in her life. She knew she was going to throw a wrench into our hive-mind. But most of us hadn’t seen the movie in a while, so …

… during the scene in the hippie commune, after the awkwardly silent tableau shot that pans across the faces of long-haired pinko commie freaks from 1969 — the scene where, after planting crops all day, the Jesus-figure guy leads his people in a prayer before dinner — we were dumbstruck. The Jesus-guy whispers, weightily, and so desperately as to make himself out of breath:

”We have planted our seeds. We ask that our efforts be worthy to produce simple food for simple taste. We ask that our efforts be rewarded. We thank you for the food we eat from other hands, that we may share it with our fellow man, and be even more generous when it is from our own. Thank you for a place to make a stand.”

Like whoa.

Our 175-person-strong crew has been stuck out here in a Not-Commune since October, mostly sober. Not-us have abandoned us. Under pressure, no pleasure. Eerie silence, looming violence… bloggers going bonkers … anyway yeah so. In the absence of any sort of mind-altering chemicals, little moments like this whisper-prayer in a classic countercultural biker-hippie movie … well, they resonate.

They resonate.

And THEN! Then a bit later. When Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper run across Jack Nicholson in the jail cell … the trio goes free and later shares a joint by a campfire. Nicholson’s silver-spoon young-lawyerdrunk character George Hanson “inhales” for the first time in his spoiled and square life. Dennis Hopper claims to see a weird configuration of lights in the sky — and then Nicholson nonchalantly says THIS:

”That was a U.F.O. beamin’ back atcha. Me and Eric Heisman went down to Mexico two weeks ago, and we seen 40 of ‘em flyin’ in formation. They got places all over the world now, ya know. They’ve been comin’ here ever since 1946, when the scientists first started bouncin’ radar beams offa the moon. And they have been livin’ and workin’ among us in mass quantities ever since. The government knows all about it.”

(takes puff of joint)

“They are people just like us. From within our own solar system. Except but their society is more highly evolved. I mean they don’t have no wars, they got no monetary system, they don’t have any leaders, because … each man is a leader. … Because of their technology, they are able to feed, clothe, house, and transport themselves equally and with no effort.”

(Awkward silence around onscreen campfire. Dennis Hopper mentions it’s a crackpot idea and asks why the aliens don’t reveal themselves to us and get it overwith. Nicholson says

“Why don’t they reveal themselves to us is because if they did, it would cause a general panic. Now I mean we still have leaders upon whom we rely for the release of this information. These leaders have decided to repress this information because of the tremendous shocks that it would cause to our antiquated systems. Now, the results of this has been that the Venutians have contacted people at all walks of life. All walks of life.”

(laughs as if it’s the most beautiful thing he’s ever heard)

“It would be a devastating blow to our antiquated systems,” he repeats. “So now Venutians are meeting with people in all walks of life, in an advisory capacity. For once, man will have a Godlike control over his own destiny. He will have a chance to transcend and to evolve with some equality for all.”

(pause)

Peter Fonda: ”How’s your joint, George?”

At this point, in the Black Rock Saloon in the smoky fireplace-dark, all of us are quieter than death. The room vibrates. We’re practically levitating.

I mean, we realize this scene is nothing more than New-Agey hippie palaver placed in the mouth of a fictional square. We realized Nicholson’s words re-hashed the standard plot for just about every Earth-based sci-fi story ever created … but still. We’re living it.

Maybe that collective imagination is a collective prophecy.

At any rate, Easy Rider makes me realize it’s all been done before.

All of it. Maybe even this.

Maybe there are more Not-Us in the world than we realize. Maybe Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson and Karen Black are Not-Us, just as Nixon and Cheney and Condoleezza Rice and the Bush family are Reptilians. Maybe the Not-Us are as eternal and multifaceted as Evil itself — sprinting through humanity in tandem with the dark forces, and gathering their own power, too.

Maybe, as war machines have evolved from rocks and sticks to remote-control planet-destroyers, “magic” has evolved from rain-dancing and potion-mixing into individualized holodeck spells and interdimensional force fields.

Maybe there are entire populations of desaparecidos stuck under boingy Not-Domes, freaking out because they’ve been roped into some sort of intergalactic reality TV show. Maybe all over the world, throughout time, poor dirtbag bastards just like us have been elected by a Not-Us Behind The Curtain to be given minimal food and shelter and a false sense of security and then set adrift to rot or prosper in another dimension. Forever. Perhaps we’re destined to make contact with other Not-Domes, the way our planet is destined to make contact with other planets. Just as soon as we deserve to.

Maybe, like Nicholson’s character said, the leaders know all about their nebulous Not-Us nemeses on the ground and in the clouds … Considering Rabbi’s return and all … maybe they’re quite able to get inside here if they want to, and they’re just toying with us, the way my dog Bruno catches rats and hucks them into the air and tries to play like puppies before he chomps down on their little skulls and throws his head back and swallows them whole.

Or maybe everything’s coming up roses, and Barton and crew will be back any day now, “in an advisory capacity,” bearing whiskey and steaks and bacon and new socks for everyone! (sigh)

EMP axis flip; the return of Rabbi

March 31, 008
Black Rockalypse

Okay. So this happened: Rabbi’s back.

Yes Rabbi, who was kidnapped, or whatever he was. Dressed in fancy Gore-Tex snow gear, unconscious, lying half-dead out on the Frog Pond side of the playa. Doyle and Natalie and Fitz found him while out patrolling on “Gunwatch” the other night. He returned — or was returned — wearing the Not-Suit he bore when he disappeared. The other Not-Suit is still missing.

Rabbi doesn’t remember anything but the vague image of a forest. Feels bad about it, and he’s been trying to rack his brain, but he says the last thing he recalls is running toward Dragnet right before he died.

His clothes smell like the redwoods to me, with overtones of science-y chemicals and cigar smoke. I used to live in the Russian River, and it’s been so long since I smelled anything but wet Black Rock playa dust, my nose sent my brain reeling with memories of West Sonoma County, or Mendocino, where Lark Camp is … I could detect that redwood-moss-sunshine-riverbank smell anywhere.

Personally, I think this means the goons have established (or simply dusted off) a war room at (or underneath) Bohemian Grove … but of course I’m wacky Summer, evangelical Christian baby turned adult armchair survivalist who fantasizes about the dark forces who run the world. But I’ve been right about a lot of things so far. I stand by my hunch … especially since Arwen’s got a sensitive nose too, and the same hunch.

How and why did Rabbi show back up? We don’t know. Nobody heard or saw anything. Between Gunwatch and the heat-seeking devices, Perimeter staff surveils the borders diligently … and since Dragnet’s accident, no news has been good news.

They (?) let Rabbi keep the suit so he could come back inside. We guess. Why? They know even with the suit, strangers trying to get in would die anyway. Only the Chosen can traverse the Not-Dome’s barrier. Ever the Gate/Perimeter soldier, Rabbi surmises the goons probably implanted a device inside him. It’s highly likely. Some sort of bio-engineered spy camera, maybe?

No X-Ray machines live on the Ranch, so after checking him out medically, we immediately allowed our more psychic types to lay hands on Rabbi to try to find out where the snooping-device might be. Arwen can see metal in people’s bodies — the first time she looked at my bare foot, she “saw” the titanium pin inside it, holding my hoof-bones together — and Arwen says there’s a tiny spherical object hidden behind his left eye. Obviously we can’t take it out, so Rabbi wears an eye patch now. All the time. Rabbi the pirate. Do the goons get audio? Who can say. Probably.

People have started to avoid Rabbi, to prevent saying anything security-breachy in his presence. So he and I hang out more than ever, because for months, people have been avoiding me, too … when they’re not flocking to me to try to send personal messages or dictate what I should say in this blog. I can’t talk to anyone, for any reason, without them being squicky about it, so I’ve been keeping to myself. Now I have a keeping-to-myself buddy.

The other night while listening to the Misfits on my laptop in my cold cold trailer, Rabbi discovered he hears music in color now. Pretty cool, right? So that’s the positive aspect of him being kidnapped by thugs working for the rich assholes who run the world and getting a foreign object inserted into his peeper. “Hybrid Moments” is mostly burnt-orange, apparently.

——-

Electromagnetic pulses. EMPs. What do they feel like, physically? Because I’ve got a sweet announcement to make: All our cameras work now. Neener neener.

We guess this means when Rabbi brought Dragnet out to the 12-mile, the military — who were strangely absent except the narcs and an almost-cosmetic line of riot cops — must have triggered an EMP outside, in order to render the news cameras useless … and inside the Not-Dome, ours turned ON!

As yall might’ve guessed, we’re on lockdown, with no line out. But this is our ace in the hole. Thanks, military ace-holes! Now we’re filming everything. Not sure when we’ll release any footage, but production has begun.

Not-Dome TV, here we come.

This is the dawning of the Age of Illumination, and we’re armed with our generation’s #1 weapon: instant info. Whether it’s concentration camps secretly being built in America or celebrities exiting limousines without panties on, we’re there to catch it on the digital.

So we’ve been meeting and not-arguing for days on end now. About everything. With all the new developments, the rules have changed. Soon, planet Earth will know and see all aspects of our experiment. And we now assume the military knows everything. Here’s the rub: We never had anything to hide, really, and still don’t. We never asked for a battle.

None of us are getting too excited yet, though. Who knows if the devices holding the footage will even work between worlds. I mean, the cards and letters didn’t.

———

My compost bins are still frozen and worm-less, so I’ve embedded myself with the kitchen crew, straightening the Crack Rock bar and dining room during the day and gathering burnables for the fireplaces after lunch prep. Rabbi, formerly a perimeter demigod, has joined us, and is now chief controller of the Walk-In of the Apocalypse.

Why am I not strolling around observing and reporting, you might ask? Well, I do, a little bit every day, but … besides the fact that I can’t say much of anything due to security … observing without participating is a violation of our primary code of life. It wouldn’t work any better than the last time I knew better than to try it. And though I surround myself with mechanically-inclined people, my knowledge of such things only extends to the realm of fabric and collages.

Plus, I’m not dumb — I’m close to the food AND the heat.

———

The goons outside swept everyone off the road after the not-accident. Everyone. Period. Just us — no curious campers, no human-shield heroes in RVs, and no alleged Blackhawk employees in sight. It’s been a week and a half. They likely possess the missing Not-Suit. Everyone else who received a Not-Suit on the outside has camped in here for now, maybe indefinitely.

New clouds sit and linger above us and on the horizon above the Black Rock. Clouds we know there’s something behind, just like last fall. Not-Clouds.

The Not-Us still haven’t come back, but something tells me they’re up there. Only thing is, now, it seems there are two kinds of clouds. The “new” ones look the same … almost. They just don’t feel the same. It’s making some of us wonder if there’s more going on up there than we’re aware of down here. If there might be some supernatural element to our opposing forces on the ground.

Or maybe I’m talking more crazy-talk.

——

Luckily, spring is almost here and we can grow food. Luckily, we’ve still got a truckload of beans and rice and sauces and other minor sundries until then. We’ll get even more Survivor-skinny, just in time for bathing suit weather. 13 and Medack and I joke about filming our own Not-Dome fashion program called “Involuntary Anorexia Island.”

The roustabouts out here do their best to pretend not to be bored to death with what we feed them. They know when people bitch, it brings kitchen crew down worst of all. But food is a tender spot in the psyche, especially when a whole tribe of people are threatened with undeserved violence and possible extinction. No wonder we half-dozen dirtbags slinging hash are all so surly. No wonder one of us breaks down and cries during at least a few of the 21 meals we prepare each week.

All hatches are battened down, but the work cycle has been injected with renewed vigor, because things are being filmed now. Everyone’s the star of her or his own how-to reality-show-to-be. Everyone’s a specialist. Everyone’s helping each other out, and encouraging each other, and hamming it up for the camera. For the CAMERA! So weird. Before, our kind avoided cameras like aboriginals.

We still don’t allow cameras in the kitchen. Nothing to see. Eat your beans and rice and move along.

So what happened?

March 16, 008
Black Rockalypse

Something we already knew: The Not-Suits won’t let the wearer take them off outside the perimeter of the Not-Dome. Only the Bad Kids — the ones who were sent the Not-Suits as a gift in the hyperworld — can put them on and take them off beyond the border. (And the Not-Suits only function on the Black Rock Desert.)

Something we didn’t know, but found out with Dragnet: If the wearer of a Not-Suit is outside the Not-Dome, someone else in a Not-Suit can take the Not-Suit off for them.

Something we still don’t know: What actually happens when someone else in a Not-Suit takes off another’s Not-Suit outside the Not-Dome. For all we know, Dragnet could’ve incinerated “naturally,” internally, before the fake-medic guy brought out that cattle-prod-type thing.

We had no choice. We had to try it. He would’ve died of sepsis anyway.

He looked okay, lying there on the gurney for those three seconds after Rabbi got him undressed. Then one of the medic guys produced that weird stick from the back of his pants and touched it to the gurney, and everyone fried.

Maybe during those three seconds, Dragnet’s brain melted; maybe he was on the way to exploding; maybe he was dead already. Maybe that henchman acting on behalf of those assholes didn’t kill him.

Maybe only one of those medics was a plant. Maybe the other three were real medics. Along with Dragnet dying and Rabbi disappearing, three life-savers dead would be tragedy on top of tragedy.

—————-

Rabbi is still missing.

About 100 people showed up for the event. Rather, they stood fast — they’ve been camping here for ages — and received a few extra visitors. Eight — only eight — TV vans lined the road along with the RVs, too, behind an almost-cosmetic display of riot-geared Blackhawks and their Humvees bordering the 12-mile entrance to the Black Rock Desert off the 447 Highway in Nevada. Who knows how many of the news crews and cameras were fake …

After much planning and huddling, and many tearful hugs and kisses goodbye, Rabbi transported a now-unconscious Dragnet on a gurney to the meeting point beyond the Not-Dome’s border. We all watched from the flatbed inside, holding onto each other as if somehow that would help. To the outside world, the scenario must’ve looked like a ghost-gurney, materializing out of nowhere and shlepping itself along at a 45-degree angle, only to set itself down and have Dragnet appear on it when Rabbi removed his Not-Suit.

It had been a cold, snowy standoff all through the night and into that morning, with neither civilians nor goons budging from their lookouts. We “felt” the life-flight helicopter coming over the mountain before the military had even started to stir and mobilize.

Arwen, whom I’m convinced more and more every day is a true star child, comes down with back shivers every time she feels a disturbance in The Force. Especially when something bad is about to happen. (So do I now, but not nearly as intensely as she does.) As the helicopter appeared above the Calico Mountains, Arwen began twitching and convulsing so violently she fell to the ground and went into epileptic seizure — which she hadn’t done since she was six years old.

Inside the Not-Dome, 13 and C-Load and I held Arwen down and made repeated efforts to get my leather-encased knife in between her teeth before she bit her own tongue off. Outside the invisible barrier between us and Planet Earth, the helicopter landed on the gravel at the 12-mile, blowing tiny rocks and cold wind everywhere. Four medics poured out of the helicopter and ran toward Dragnet.

That’s when others among us noticed one of the medics taking out a cattle prod-type-looking thing from his ass crack … and just as they did the count to lift Dragnet off the ground to huck him inside the helicopter, he touched the stick to Dragnet’s chest.

All four medics — and Dragnet — were killed. Instantly.

I’m sure cattle-prod dude didn’t know THAT was going to happen.

Inside, we were screaming, thronging, all jumping from the flatbed at once, some still holding hands … running futilely toward the perimeter, which boi-oi-oinged us back when we flung ourselves against it, causing us to dogpile, painfully, atop each other in our upset. Some got up to charge our prison walls again, only to be pushed back, only to fall atop the rest of us again. Every set of eyes all glued to the same place. Every set of eyes but C-Load, 13, Arwen, and me.

ow, my heart, for them and for us

——–

Outside, they said, Rabbi turned to run toward the Not-Dome’s barrier. They could see him carrying the other Not-Suit, and … two military goons who sprung from a hidden spot in the back of the helicopter fired these guns with huge nets on them, which spread out on each side of the medics and Dragnet, and then retracted immediately as the helicopter took off. Others in Not-Suits standing watch a few feet away ran to Dragnet’s body, suited it up again, and pulled it back home before the “riot cops” in Humvees on the ground could harvest it along with their fake medics.

They did a cursory autopsy in our makeshift infirmary before we craned Dragnet’s body up to the Tower of Silence the next day. The attack had turned him pitch black, both inside and out. Every cell. All organs and systems intact, just… black.

With all the dust and confusion, we couldn’t see what happened to Rabbi. We don’t know if he was inside that net, or if he got away. Or if they got him, and tried to take his Not-Suit off the desert in the helicopter and couldn’t do it so they threw him out onto the 447. Or if they did get the Not-Suit, and Dragnet’s suit too, and Rabbi … well, we don’t want to think about it. We’re just assuming he’s been abducted, and/or that the Not-Suit saved him somehow, or maybe he’s unconscious outside the perimeter. Maybe he’s crumpled in a heap somewhere in the Calicos and now he’s freezing to death … but we can see people in Not-Suits on the outside, and he’s nowhere to be seen.

So the goons might or might not be in possession of two Not-Suits — if they can figure out how to touch them, even, without dying.

That’s not good.

None of this is good.

And the Not-Us are still nowhere to be found.

This isn’t fun any more.

Quoth the raven: … (*insert last-laughing here)

March 13, 008
Black Rockalypse

We didn’t bury him. Per his requests, we built a Zoroastrian “Tower of Silence,” and craned Dragnet’s body to the top of it so the sun could bake it and the birds could eat it.

We all put in our “death requests” a couple meetings ago, outlining how we’d like to be disposed of in case our time on Earth came to an end within these Not-Walls.

Quite a number of inhabitants out here chose to go the Parsi way. We do compost, separate, and reuse just about everything, so it’s logical. And since the strangely horrifying ectoplasmic vibrations we collectively received moments after the raven incident, we all agreed the birds out here shouldn’t be hunted, ever again. So there’s no chance of cannibalism once-removed.

In general out on the Black Rock Desert, and way more so now … we all feel a palpably heightened sense of oneness with all that surrounds us, and what happens when we try to interfere with the experience of other living things without asking.

Blame it on all the open space. No walls to stop the flow.

——–

I love my dog Bruno. He is a handsome, 95-pound ball of fur and unconditional love who could kill things on my behalf. He is the only one I’m talking to at the moment.

Everyone else is in the Crack Rock, mourning Dragnet’s passing and Rabbi’s disappearance … processing things, dealing with Not-Us abandonment issues, and staying warm. Not me — I’m at my duct-taped laptop, vomiting into my stupid diary … most of which nobody can read, for security reasons, until this trial is over. My trailer is cold, but cozy.

Dragnet’s favorite method of fuel disposal. Don’t do this

——–

Looks like it might snow for a few days. Yeah, you’re thinking it, so I’ll say it: At least Dragnet’s body won’t start to stink. Hopefully the ravens will have their feast before it gets hot.

We’re still arguing about what to do with the bones. We like bones, but we also know some things are sacred.

Yall might be grossed out, but to us, it’s comforting to have Dragnet’s body over there, 50 feet in the air, way out by the Black Rock … the center of our universe, off to the side and out of our reach.

The Black Rock: our cold, dark, unforgiving Not-Sun.

Me, I decided on the Tower of Silence too. It gives me great pause to meditate on my eventual death, if my body is to be disposed of in this way. A Viking funeral pyre would be more metal, and theatrically to my liking — but that type of ceremony uses resources rather than giving them out.

When you know birds might eventually, literally peck out your eyes… every breath smells a lot sweeter. Every step feels lighter and heavier. All three elements of the universe within — mind, body, spirit — begin to separate and collaborate, rather than jumble together and ignore each other.

Ravens will swirl and dive, and feast on my flesh. But I’m still alive, for now, and I can feel everything, right down to the platelets.

The Four Rules of Gun Safety

March 12, 008
Black Rockalypse

The Four Rules of Gun Safety. Memorize them … or suffer the consequences.

1. ALL GUNS ARE LOADED. ALWAYS.

This HAS TO be your mindset when handling firearms. When someone hands you a gun and tells you it’s not loaded, politely check it anyway. Negligence can be fatal.

2. NEVER COVER ANYTHING WITH THE MUZZLE YOU DO NOT INTEND TO DESTROY.

If you’re not willing to take a human life, never point a gun at a person, whether you think it’s loaded or not. Never point a gun in the direction of your extremities, put it in your pants, gesticulate with it in your hand while at the range, or jokingly take aim at someone’s pet. A gun sitting at rest is safe; a gun in someone’s hands is capable of being discharged.

3. NEVER PUT YOUR FINGER ON THE TRIGGER UNTIL YOU ARE ABSOLUTELY READY TO FIRE.

Rule Three is the reason Dragnet shot himself in the shoulder. Getting all gangster, all Scully and Mulder, like he saw on TV. One of my pet peeves in life, seeing someone on TV or in a movie with their finger on the trigger, walking around like the death-bringing object in their hand is a toy… making out with a love interest while pointing a .38 Special at their head, finger ready to go… it gets me flinchier than a horror movie.

In real life, guns make people jumpy (duh), so please, for the love of Dragnet, hold your itchy finger straight against the side of the gun, directly above the trigger, until your sights are on the target and you are ready to fire.

no twirling it like a cowboy, either

4. BE SURE OF YOUR TARGET.

Be aware of your surroundings. Never assume anything. Know what it is you are about to destroy, what’s around it, and what’s behind it. Never shoot at anything you haven’t positively identified, and if you don’t know what you’re doing, PUT THE GUN DOWN AND WALK AWAY.

Dragnet R.I.P.

March 10, 008
Black Rockalypse

I write this with my heart in my mouth.

Dragnet was a darling crusty-hobo kid from rural Montana, who found train-hopping at the tender age of 14 after his father smacked him around one too many times. He liked to help me with the compost bins when he wasn’t playing around with electricity, and he didn’t even mind when we made fun of his crooked facial tattoos.

He was a good soldier for the DPW; a short court jester; a fearless boozer. He once almost drank a vodka with a dead scorpion in it on a dare (who could help trying, when the scorpion glowed so, under the blacklight at the DPW Ghetto)… until a sensitive hippie stopped him, much to our dismay. Hey, we’d never field-tested the digestive effects of scorpion corpses before. The irate hippie most likely proved a blessing in disguise, as Dragnet might’ve died then. Instead of Friday.

Hyperactive as hell by nature, and amazingly proficient at electronics, Dragnet never listened to other people when he was excited about something. He merely went for it. This is why he accidentally shocked himself while working with the electrocution overlords on the Ranch — more than once — and laughed about it.

This is also why he shot himself in the collarbone with a pistol. On accident. The wound turned septic, as you know.

Nobody has partaken any drugs or alcohol out here for quite some time, as supplies have been nil. But now that the playa is dry enough to be passable in some places, one prankster in a Not-Suit trucked in a pallet of Chartreuse — which we naturally drank all in one night at a Special Party we threw at the Ranch last Thursday.

Guns should never be brought out after a pallet of Chartreuse is distributed. Or handled by drunk people, especially non-gun-owning drunk people.

We have avoided accidents like this in the past, by the skin of our teeth. The owner of the gun Dragnet collared himself with is so distraught at being negligent that he’s exiled himself at the far side of the Not-Dome, right under Dragnet’s Parsi tower.

Everyone out here has a story of Dragnet’s kindness. Too many, too many.

He didn’t pass away because of the sepsis resulting from the gunshot wound. He passed away because the men in black helicopters and Jeeps who have been making our lives a living hell caused his death. Directly. Four of their own died, too.

More tomorrow. I gotta swallow my heart again before I choke on it.

Dragnet’s favorite band too … we played Age of Winters during the funeral party, from beginning to end

MAN DOWN

March 6, 008
Black Rockalypse

We have a seriously injured party.

Dragnet is down. Conscious, breathing, fading. We tried to fix him, but we can’t.

What started out as a .22 bullet wound to the collarbone-area has turned septic, to a life-threatening degree. There is no way we can take care of him here. We don’t have the medical equipment and we don’t have any “actual” surgical doctors, only a military nurse and two EMTs. Our antibiotics are running low and we’ve got a couple babies about to be born, so we can’t use them all.

We have to send him out.

Please meet us at the 12-mile entrance to the Black Rock Desert, one mile in from the highway, one hour after the sun comes up tomorrow morning.

This is the first transmission where I actually inform people there’s something going on — can you imagine the arguing-under-pressure meeting it took to allow me to get this post out? — and we’re all nervous about it, considering. All watchers along the 447, please create a human-shield line against the goons and their trucks, like you did last time, if you’re brave enough.

Nobody wants a Waco-type situation. We’re not in a cult. There’s no NAMBLA action here under the Not-Dome; no meth lab. We were BROUGHT here, and we’re not stockpiling anything bad, and we’re not a threat to anyone. In fact we haven’t been doing much of anything for the past couple months, as everyone’s been sick because of the random way the secret-powers-that-be keep poisoning us.

a slightly preferable scenario

We’re quite aware this is the great state of Nevada, where even babies carry shotguns — so if it seems like the Men in Black are going to fire in or around the direction of where a Not-Suit might be, you already know what happens. Don’t fire back at them. You’ve been warned.

On the other hand, if the intrepid patriot helpers in the other dimension might happen to designate a prankster to figure out how to disable the goons’ killing machines and deflate the tires of the Jeeps carrying the men firing on us, then we can’t stop them.

DO NOT shoot at helicopters. Do not kill anyone. Even if they try to kill people, don’t fire back. You never know where a Not-Suit might be. Yeah, I realize what this means, along with the cold and the snow and the miserably unfortunate deaths last time: it might be a thin crowd out there. Really, that’s your choice. But at least, send a Life Flight helicopter from Reno. We’re sort of begging you. We love Dragnet. Everyone loves Dragnet. There should still be a Dragnet in the world.

What we really want is for enough news crews to attend the meeting so everyone will play nice.

Our friend is dying.

Did you hear that, Not-Us? GODDAMMIT DID YOU. WHERE ARE YOU.

One hour after the sun comes over the mountain tomorrow morning. One hour exactly. Please send the Life Flight, and have it land on the gravel at the 12-mile exit. We will bring Dragnet out to you.

is there a doctor in the house?

No.

No, there isn’t.

That’s bad.

Please stand by.

Not-Us, paging Not-Us…

Feb. 19, 008
Black Rockalypse

Right wingers, methinks, have less faith in humanity than we do. They are the doomsday fantasy people, after all. Over here AND over there. Focused on how blameless they are for the end of time, they refuse to endorse anything practical to stop it. In fact, half of them are actively bringing it on, either through machinations toward greediness, overbreeding, or neglect.

Perhaps I’ve been watching too many of Ghost Dancer’s 9/11 documentary DVDs in a row. But what else is there to do when I’ve been sick for 3 months straight? And what else should we do but hibernate, surrounded by the same 200 people, trapped in a ghost-world, virtually ignored by the “elders” who brought us here, stalled by wintertime, wondering what the next step is?

No video equipment works. No cameras. We can’t get started on much besides documentation in writing of our whole process… most of which I’m not allowed to share yet.

happier times at cleanup’s DPW Talent Show … dust gets everywhere, no matter what, especially in all the night pictures

If this whole Not-Dome thing does open up its doors to television broadcast, I know everyone will watch it, because it’s so entirely unbelievable that an invisible group of latter-day Luddites have been invited to hearken back to pre-industrial-revolutionary tactics to teach the planet to be nicer to itself … and elite killers financed by world banks and/or big-time, government-sanctioned drug money all want us dead. Period.

We’ve been wondering if the Not-Us expected this much hostility from the private military forces of the U.S. Government. The real “evildoers,” born under the same sky that’s falling, are so pissed off at not being able to control this one thing, they’d rather just destroy it all. Here we are, battling snow and eternal flu and internal drama and crippling claustrophobia, trying to keep it together enough to enjoy this … miracle? … which proves there’s more to life (on this Earth or on other worlds) than meets the eye. And here they are, again, trying to cockblock everything.

We haven’t laid eyes on the Not-Us since January 25. Almost a month ago, and the last visit before that was 2 weeks prior. The Not-Us pretty much told everyone at the Way It Is Meeting they wouldn’t be around all that often … but Barton, if you’re reading this, come back and bring the others. We need guidance. We need to see your faces. We miss you. We’ll throw you a party.

I know I’m given to hyperbole at times, but I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to state that we’re all clamoring not to sink into the depths of despair. We even allotted two psych majors to be our counselors now — and they’re so much busier than the massage therapist in their daily duties that an open “support group” is starting up tonight after dinner.

Meanwhile, back to bed (cough cough) All my compost worms have died, anyway, so plywood scraps and leftover cardboard will now be burned to keep us warm.

Strolling between worlds

Feb. 12, 008
Black Rockalypse

I got to leave. I mean, not LEAVE leave, but to run around for a minute outside the gates. In the Not-Suit.

Yes, temporarily, I left the Not-Dome and walked around by the road. We all agreed that in order to avoid coveting and hoarding these trans-dimensional Not-Suits and potentially stealing them during a drunken rampage, that we could all sign up to suit up and go out for 1-hour increments, voyaging beyond the invisible barrier that separates us from the reality of life on Earth.

It’s hard to describe, and I won’t, because of gag orders and security tightness and all the rest of that hoo-ha … but putting on the Not-Suit feels like dying, in the most tranquil and serene way. Once you get inside it, it seems tailor-made to massage your skin and tell your brain to quieten down and just be part of the Earth. The observer driving your bio-body suit gets overrided by the spirit watching over it.

Okay, that sounds hippie as shit, but it’s the best way I can describe it without describing it, because I can’t. Sigh.

If you’re wondering how we decided on the one-hour increments, it’s because anything longer than that would potentially put us in jeopardy, for whatever nebulous but very real reasons … and we all signed a piece of paper before suiting up that we would willingly agree to be zip-tied to the “Cross” (lamplighter spire shored up for durability, fitted with an arm-holding cross-beam to make stocks out of it) in front of the Black Rock Saloon for a five-hour dunce shift around dinnertime.

(Yes, three people so far have decided that freedom for more than one hour is worth all of us hurling insults and unwanted personal items at them in front of our communal gathering place for hours on end. That in itself is pretty fun. Not rotten food though, that all goes to me, to the compost bins.)

So I took a walk toward the shoreline. Like a shopping cart in the Bayview district of San Francisco, the Not-Suit stopped at a certain point and wouldn’t let me go any further.

I like to think of Jesus like with giant eagles’ wings, and singin’ lead vocals for Lynyrd Skynyrd with like an angel band, and I’m in the front row and I’m hammered drunk…

I didn’t feel a thing crossing the border between worlds, either — I guess that’s the nature of the Not-Suit, to allow safe passage. Since the military isn’t allowing anyone onto the Black Rock Desert proper — the National Guard can’t stop the throngs from camping in the mucky soft shoulders of the 447, but they can quarantine the playa itself due to “hazardous weather conditions” or whatever their excuse is — I didn’t get to fraternize ghost-style with any families or couples or survivalists in RVs, I only got to observe them from the shoreline.

Still, it felt both crushingly sad and liberatingly happy to know that I was wearing alien technology … that I was part of an incomprehensible something more than just myself … that I was completely invisible … that as one of the lucky ones, I’d gotten a a cosmic backstage pass. Walking within yards of people who want to protect us at all costs, sight unseen — as well as people who want to kill us all … watching the latter trade cigarettes and loaf against their tanks and Jeeps and wait for nothing to happen kind of boiled my blood. Hired guns, all of them — probably sweet boys and girls, most of the Blackhawk-or-whoever military people they are. Just like the ones fighting in Iraq, they do the bidding of heartless Reptilians who don’t care whether they live or die.

I picked some gypsum at the shoreline to bring it back with me into the Not-Dome.

It didn’t disintegrate into ash. I guess because it doesn’t have a heartbeat, like those poor kitties did. I put it in a kombucha bottle in my trailer, just to remind me there’s a whole world out there.

Oh yeah — and the narcs are camping on the 447, trying to be one of yall. Just so you know. They’ve left off the stupid Lower Haight-style furry hats and big pants thing and have put real-human-hair dreadlock extensions in their previously-short coifs, and now they’re rocking tie-dyes and worn-out Army pants (gee I wonder where they got those from).

They now hacky-sack. I wish I was kidding. Even if they weren’t narcs, they’d still be just about the most annoying people I’ve ever met.

Some of you out there know who they are. Freeze them out. Tell them their game is up, force them to leave … and if they don’t, ziptie them to a cross and throw stuff at them.

All white on the Western front

Feb. 8, 008
Black Rockalypse

Strange to be out here in winter. The moisture in the air when it snows makes the Black Rock Desert region seem even more like the edge of the Earth than it does when the Nevada summer is cooking us.

The sky’s always above legal limits of blueness on clear days, but when it’s overcast in winter, a white fog covers the tops of the Calico Mountains like a plain, flimsy petticoat. Drifts of snow sidewind along the playa like corkscrewy ghosts, dancing in the ever-blowing breeze (or gale-force wind, depending). Up above, surrounded by silvery-opaque, even-keel cloud-cover, the sun peeks through a gauze wedding veil, shining down dimly like an opal. It’s a desert whiteout of a different sort … more angelic and/or more foreboding than a dust storm, depending on the observer’s mood. And way butt-ass cold.

playa in winter. archival photos by Bacon and/or Ice

Strange to be in winter at all. As a GRIT (girl raised in the south) I’ve never hung out in temperatures below 30, really. A couple freak snowstorms in my Tennessee childhood and that’s it. I’m certainly not built for cold weather, and neither are many of us out here, but I’ll avoid complaining about it because I’ve already figured out from listening to others that that’s boring.

Since the boys installed three new wood-burning stoves in the Black Rock Saloon, thinner-blooded individuals like myself have abandoned our trailers for the most part and taken to sleeping on the floor, evacuation-center-style, all together and cutched up with our dogs. Hey, they’re heat sources too.

Art Row, on the Ranch

Another first: I find myself wishing I owned all white clothes, so I could blend into the ground and sky, which at times possesses no visible horizon, only white white white. Everything is dark against the vista. Helicopters and Humvees and B-52s look so much more ominous. Especially when they’re barrelling down straight for us and then — poof — they disappear in the Not-Dome and the snow swirls in mini-tornados on the trajectories the vehicles follow in the other dimension. (Snow devils?)

Strange to see this many people out here in winter, too — the civilians outside the Not-Dome lining the 447 highway. Just for us, and for their own curiosity, not seeing us but knowing we’re there. Not seeing anything much besides the white … but watching for us, staying vigilant on our behalf, and recording it all.

where’s the end?

Wish I was a fly on the wall

Feb. 6, 008
Black Rockalypse

Entrepreneurs crafting menacing hip-hop with the perfect booming beat in a New Jersey basement during a dirty snowstorm. Indie-rockers, bug-bitten and sad, pouring their hearts out on an unseasonably warm night in a cobbled-together studio with threadbare sofabeds and used shag carpet smelling of mold and feet. A ‘70s funk big band with sexy backup singers and all those trumpets, oozing libido and humid sensuality in a cramped, makeshift recording space in someone’s dingy apartment above a liquor store. A simple, painfully universal country tune made by cotton-picking good old boys in under five minutes at a storefront Southern hit factory during the Depression. A bouncy, happy, sloppy pop song recorded by three handsome punk rockers in a gargantuan zillion-track fortress under the watchful eyes of a manager, a publicist, a producer, an A&R rep, a studio engineer, a tour manager, two roadies, a caterer, and their girlfriends. An emotionally troubled hermit and his painfully shy best friend working out their demons on an 8-track in mom’s basement.

Creating art among other artists, in rooms specially made for creating art, with other artists close by, doing the same thing.

All mod cons. City streets. Underground clubs. Generator shows at the BART station. Bluegrass and reggae festivals in Golden Gate Park. Saxophone-tooting street performers in Union Square. Sunday afternoon punk shows at the Parkside. Thundering ragga-jungle warehouse-party all-nighters at the 5lowershop.

New World Music.

Sigh.

Early-grave angels like Jeff Buckley, calling the spirit in the tense moments immediately prior to creating a sound recording they know will make their fans see God

After dinner some nights, we like to sit around one of the [NEW!!!] three fireplaces in the Crack Rock … Anne Bonny plays harmonica, Metric plays guitar, and others take up washboards and sticks and wheel axles from junked cars, like how the Africans do it during the Cinco de Mayo parade in the Mission in San Francisco, except we’re hillbillies. We sing every song we know, and take turns, and have started to teach each other our favorites.

This is what people did when they used to talk to each other face to face. They ended up singing and banging on things.

We can’t help but miss modern technology, though. I mean, this lifestyle is the ultimate fantasy for many of us, but everyone knows the one about being careful what you wish for.

bliss picture

Fly Hot Springs and Geyser … sigh, arguably the most beautiful, man-made, drilling-snafu-birthed hot springs on Earth lies within binocular sight of the Not-Dome’s border, but not within reach … no trespassing anyway, as it’s on private land.

award-winning photo by Rodney Lough

Friday, a few intrepid polar bears ventured out to Trego — the sulfur-bubbly hot spring by the train tracks — to freeze their asses off and go for a dip in the boiling, sulfur-smelly water in the snow. The rest of us took a much-needed day off, and then Saturday and Sunday, we all tried to ignore our growing anxiety by engaging in a familial-bond-strengthening group activity. As usual, we found a strange amount of comfort in crash-course learning and/or laboring like indentured servants together.

Leaving off our individual daily projects, we spent a couple days catching the flatbed to the Ranch and dividing into three large “work weekend” crews: 1) brainstorming about space-saving, Mittleider-method community gardens for the cul-de-sacs; 2) tearing engines and cars apart and exploring various alternative fuels; and 3) assembling the new greenhouses and kwonset huts … inside one of kwonset huts (there’s a joke in there somewhere).

Of course I picked the gardening one, not only because it’s my new dilettante-ish field of interest, but also because I could sit in a chair and warm my cold, cold fingers under my big fur blanket all weekend and take notes. Then we had a kickass barbecue. (vegetarian, sigh)

To whom it may concern: Enough with this eco-friendly negative carbon footprint horseshit. It’s colder than Ann Coulter’s heart out here. Send firewood.

Know your rights

Jan. 31, 008
Black Rockalypse

KNOW YOUR RIGHTS
…Re-typed and posted without permission from the National Lawyers’ Guild, though I don’t think they’ll mind:

What rights do I have?

Whether or not you’re a citizen, you have these constitutional rights:

-The Right to Remain Silent. The Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution gives every person the right to remain silent in the face of questions posed by any police officer or government agent.

-The Right to be Free from “Unreasonable Searches and Seizures”. The Fourth Amendment is supposed to protect your privacy. Without a warrant, police or government agents are not allowed to search your home or office and you can refuse to let them in. Know, however, that it is easy for the government to monitor your e-mail, telephone calls, and conversations in your home, office, car or meeting place.

-The Right to Advocate for Change. The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects the rights of groups and individuals who advocate changes in laws, government practices, and even the form of government. However, the INS can target non-citizens for deportation because of their First Amendment activities, as long as it could deport them for other reasons.

CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS CANNOT BE SUSPENDED — EVEN DURING A STATE OF EMERGENCY OR WARTIME.

May 4, 1970: the Kent State Massacre really wasn’t all that long ago

What should I do if agents come to question me?

1. YOU DO NOT HAVE TO TALK TO THE POLICE, FBI, INS, OR ANY OTHER LAW ENFORCEMENT AGENT OR INVESTIGATOR.

You are not legally obligated to talk to anyone: on the street, at your home or office, if you’ve been arrested, or even if you’re in jail. If you are driving a motor vehicle, you are required to show your license and registration. Only a judge has the legal authority to order you to answer questions.

If you are contacted, tell the agent you want to consult an attorney. They should stop trying to question you once you say this. You do not have to already have a lawyer. Remember to get the name, agency, and telephone number of any investigator who calls or visits you, and call the NLG, or a criminal or immigration lawyer, before deciding whether to answer questions.

2. YOU CAN SAY NO!

If the police, FBI, INS or anyone else tries to enter your home without a warrant, say, “I will not talk to you until I consult an attorney.” Many people are afraid that if they refuse to cooperate, it will appear as if they have something to hide, or think that they can educate the police. Don’t be fooled. Talking to the FBI can be very dangerous. You can never tell how a seemingly harmless bit of information might be used to hurt you or someone else.

The FBI is not just trying to find “terrorists”, but is gathering information on immigrants and activists who have done nothing wrong. And keep in mind that even though they are allowed to — and do — lie to you, lying to a federal agent is a crime. The safest things to say are “I am going to remain silent”, “I want to speak to my lawyer”, and “I do not consent to a search.”

3. YOU DO NOT HAVE TO LET POLICE OR OTHER LAW ENFORCEMENT AGENTS INTO YOUR HOME OR OFFICE UNLESS THEY HAVE A WARRANT.

Demand to see the warrant. If they have a search warrant, you cannot stop them from entering and searching, but you should still tell them that you do not consent to a search. This will limit the search to what is specified in the warrant. If they ask you to give them documents, your computer, or anything else, look to see if the item is listed in the warrant. If it is not, do not consent to them taking it without talking to a lawyer.

An arrest warrant does not allow them to search your home or office unless you consent to that. Say “I do not consent to a search.” Do not answer any questions. Call the NLG or a criminal lawyer.

4. IF YOU ARE STOPPED ON THE STREET, ASK IF YOU ARE FREE TO GO.

If you are stopped by the police, ask them why. Remember, they are allowed to lie to you. Ask “Am I free to go?” If they say yes, walk away. Legally, you do not have to give your name unless they suspect you of a crime, but it may be expedient to do so — however, be aware that police/ agents may be carrying a list of deportable aliens, and that giving a false name could be a crime.

If you are not free to go, you are being detained, but this does not necessarily mean you will be arrested. They are entitled to frisk you. A frisk is a pat down on the outside of your clothing. Do not consent to any further search. But if they continue, or in some other way violate your rights, stay calm and don’t physically resist police or agents. You will only be hurt and arrested. Stick to “I don’t consent, I want to speak to my lawyer.” and call a lawyer at your first opportunity. You do not have to answer questions if you are detained or even if you are arrested.

5. ANYTHING YOU SAY TO THE POLICE, FBI, INS, ETC. CAN BE USED AGAINST YOU AND OTHERS.

They may pressure you by saying it’s unpatriotic not to answer, or that people with nothing to hide would talk. Remember, however, that even innocent people who have done nothing wrong may say things that the government will use against them or others. That is why the right not to talk is a fundamental right under our Constitution.

Repeat “I want to talk to my lawyer” to any officer who questions you.

-What if the FBI threatens me with a grand jury subpoena?

It is common for the FBI to threaten you with a subpoena to get you to talk to them. Don’t be intimidated. This is frequently an empty threat, and if they are going to subpoena you, they will do so anyway.

Receiving a subpoena to testify before a grand jury doesn’t mean that you are suspected of a crime. And you may have legal grounds to quash the subpoena or to refuse to answer questions before the grand jury. If you do receive a subpoena, call the NLG or a criminal lawyer.

-How should I respond to threatening letters or calls?

If your home or office is broken into, or threats have been made against you, your organization, or someone you work with, share this information with everyone affected. Take immediate steps to increase personal and office security. You should discuss with your group and with a lawyer whether and how to report such incidents to the police and the advisability of taking other legal action.

If you decide to make a police report, do not do so without a lawyer present. See the contact information on the front for numbers you can call if you receive threats. If you suspect government agents are monitoring you, or are harassing you, report this to the NLG.

-What if I am under 18?

Minors too have the right to remain silent; you do not have to talk to the police, probation officers, or school officials. If you are detained at a community detention facility or Juvenile Hall, you normally must be released to a parent or guardian. If charges are filed against you, you have the right to have a lawyer appointed to represent you at no cost.

Your rights at school: Public school students have the First Amendment right to politically organize at school by passing out leaflets, holding meetings, publishing independent newspapers, etc., just so long as those activities do not disrupt classes. Students can be suspended or expelled from school only if they violate the law or disrupt school activities. You have the right to a hearing, with your parents and an attorney present, before being suspended or expelled.

Students can have their backpacks and lockers searched by school officials at school if they have “reasonable suspicion” that you are involved in criminal activity, carrying drugs, weapons, etc. Reasonable suspicion means they have to have a specific reason, but in reality, doesn’t give you much protection. Do not consent to the police or school officials searching your property, but do not physically resist or you may face criminal charges.

Students can now be stopped and questioned by school officials at school even without reasonable suspicion. If you are not in class, you can be stopped and questioned as to where you are going and why, but they should not stop and question you for engaging in legally protected political activity or because of your ethnicity or religion.

-What if I am not a citizen?

1. CARRY WITH YOU THE NAME AND NUMBER OF AN IMMIGRATION ATTORNEY WHO WILL TAKE YOUR CALLS.

If you are a legal permanent resident, you should carry your green card as well. Navigating the immigration system by yourself is extremely difficult. INS will not explain your options to you. You do not have to reveal your immigration status or answer any other questions. As soon as you encounter an INS agent, call your attorney. If you can’t do it right away, keep trying.

2. KNOW AND ASSERT YOUR RIGHTS!

INS will not do it for you. Currently, all non-citizens have the following rights, regardless of your immigration status:

a. You have the right to speak to an attorney before answering any questions or signing any documents. You have the right to call an attorney or your family if you are detained and you have the right to be visited by an attorney in detention. You have the right to have your attorney with you at immigration hearings with INS. You do not, however, have the right to a government-appointed attorney, so you must hire one or find someone who will represent you for free.

b. If you are arrested or detained, the INS must decide in 48 hours whether to put you into immigration proceedings and whether to keep you in custody or to release you on bond. Under a new regulation issued on September 17, 2001, the INS has an “additional reasonable period of time” in the event of “an emergency or other extraordinary circumstance” to make the decisions whether to keep you or release you. Make sure your attorney talks to national immigration rights organizations if this is the reason INS is keeping you in detention.

c. You have the right to request release from detention even if INS hasn’t said why it wants to deport you. In most cases you have the right to request release from detention by paying a bond if necessary, or to request a bond hearing before an immigration judge.

d. In most cases, you have the right to a hearing before an immigration judge to determine whether you have violated the immigration laws. If you have criminal convictions, were picked up by INS when you came into the U.S., or have been ordered deported in the past, you must talk to an attorney about whether you have this right and what other legal alternatives you might have.

IF YOU DO NOT DEMAND THESE RIGHTS OR IF YOU SIGN DOCUMENTS WAIVING YOUR RIGHTS, THE INS MAY DEPORT YOU BEFORE YOU SEE EITHER AN ATTORNEY OR A JUDGE.

Leaving the U.S. in this way may have serious consequences for your ability to later enter or to gain legal immigration status in the U.S. However, the immigration laws are complex and many changes are being proposed in response to September 11, so the above information may change. You must consult an immigration specialist attorney to know your rights.

3. TALK TO AN IMMIGRATION LAWYER BEFORE LEAVING THE U.S.

Some non-citizens may be barred from coming back to the U.S., perhaps permanently. This includes some lawful permanent residents and applicants for green cards.

4. IF YOU ARE A FOREIGN NATIONAL ARRESTED IN THE U.S., YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO CALL YOUR CONSULATE or to have the police inform the consulate of your arrest. The police must allow your consul to visit or speak with you. Your consul might assist you in finding a lawyer or offer other help, such as contacting your family. You also have the right to refuse help from your consulate.

The rights outlined above apply to non-citizens who are inside the United States. Foreign nationals at the border (air or land) who are seeking to enter the United States are subject to additional restrictions and do not have all the same rights.

-What if I wear black trenchcoats and listen to heavy metal and openly complain about things?

You’re fucked. Might as well turn yourself in at once, and let the taxpayers’ hard-earned money go toward more productive things like capturing Osama bin Laden.

(okay so I made the last part up. Surely they’ve found Osama by now. Right?)

Sugar on my tongue

Jan. 30, 008
Black Rockalypse

No matter how level-headed you are, sometimes you just have to think things suck. It’s part of the brain chemistry.

When you’re all up in a tiny community with which you’ve surrounded yourself, whether you believe it’s a gathering of well-above-average humans or not, sometimes you want fresh air. Fresh meat. I’m never going to get that again, not until at least 2012 anyway, if the Not-Us have it right.

There are some of us under the Not-Dome who’ve been transported here with their significant others, now people with whom they will be sharing the rest of their foreseeable lives. There are others of us who, despite all efforts to pollyanna cheerfulness, have grown hostile to the fact we exist within a microscopic gene pool, and the adult-swim partners we chose for ourselves are, for whatever reason, on the outside world instead of in here with us.

Roustabouts, festival workers, and circus performers like us have a laughable habit of pairing up like Noah’s Ark. “Married for the season,” the carnies traditionally call it — an event celebrated by the temporarily-happy couple taking a single revolution together in the ferris wheel as the community watches from the midway below.

It’s easier that way. Too much work to be done to fight and pine over matters of the heart. As of now, just about everyone under the Not-Dome is coupled up. Even most of the sadsacks who left their significant others behind in the hyperworld to be transported out here have re-upped with new keep-the-bed-warm-in-winter partners.

Not me. Even though it’s against all the training rules, my 95-pound farm dog is the only male who sleeps in my bed now.

he’d be my only other choice, but only because he’s just slightly more unreal than you, J

After a coon’s age of injury and lonesomeness, for a mere couple of weeks, I got to taste love so hot and sweet it made me feel like my skin was going to fall off. The taste still burns my mouth, and a heavy invisible angel is sitting on my chest cavity, refusing to move. But love and I live in two different, intraversible places.

I know he didn’t abandon me. I know he’s out there in the hyperworld, feeling the same way. I know it. I even thought I saw him among the RVs camping at the shoreline along the 447, among our supporters … It must’ve been him, with people crowded around him, enchanted as usual … but I’m not sure.

I feel like a widow, staying pure for my beloved. Except he’s not in heaven, he’s on Earth, and I’m somewhere in between. And never the twain shall meet.

I want to wrap myself around him again. I want to watch him get ready in the morning. Little things like brushing his teeth or checking his eyebrows for strays in the mirror … not in a stalker way, but like the scene in Klute when you can tell Jane Fonda’s in love with Donald Sutherland when the camera sees her stare at his big strong veiny hand touching produce at the market.

I am used to being alone. Sometimes for long stretches. But only when love has died. Not when it’s just on the other side of oblivion, perhaps a literal stone’s throw away from me, across an insurmountable — interdimensional — divide.

Love is alive and well, and I can’t touch it.

It’s not that I’m saving myself. I’m not stupid enough to have that much hope.

I just gave myself away already. There’s nothing left but to lie down with the dogs.

Not-Suits: Don’t F w/ dem

Jan. 25, 2008
Black Rockalypse

We learned something new at the meeting last night.

A crew has been experimenting with the properties of the Not-Suits we’ve got here under the Not-Dome now. I might tell more about how and why we got those, just as soon as we decide it’s been long enough to tell.

Anyway, someone found a new litter of feral kittens in one of the abandoned trailers on the Ranch, and the Not-Suits egghead science-nerd committee have been doing field tests and experiments with the kitties, since there are no other live animals anywhere save our own personal pets, egg-laying chickens, and my compost worms.

One member of the crew — I won’t say whom, because they’re still devastated, on a charming level, so I’ll respect their privacy — tried on the Not-Suit and walked it outside the Not-Dome’s perimeter to the Black Rock hyperworld. Unbeknownst, of course, to the now-dwindling military presence and still-strong gathering of curious onlookers camped at the shorelines.

(Catchup for the new reader: Nobody could see the crewmember because the Not-Suits allow their users to cross in between our boi-oi-oing protective border and the hyperworld, where we still don’t know what’s going on. At all. That’s why nobody else has volunteered to leave. Because when you volunteer to leave, you never ever get to come back. We don’t know if the whole planet is as-was before we were transported out to the Black Rock Desert under this Not-Dome, or if it’s all gone to shit in a way we’ve all only actively fantasized about since high school.)

It’s hard to get into the specifics of the kitty story without feeling like I’m giving future serial killers a chubby. Let’s just say that 1) this one kitten the Not-Suit-wearer was carrying kinda got dead and charred to blackness the minute it passed through the Not-Dome. And 2) the kitten who walked behind the Not-Suit wearer out beyond the border actually passed through it without a hitch … proving our already-proved theory that animals can traverse the border unharmed.

Then the Not-Suit wearer, out in the hyperworld and not even thinking, picked up the kitty and ZAP! Charred blackness.

Traumatized and weeping, the crewmember quickly retreated to the holding cell and disrobed. More kittens who were allowed to run around at the border WITHOUT anyone in a Not-Suit touching them came back into the Not-Dome without trouble. (A couple ran off into the hyperworld, where they will freeze to death if nobody camping around the Black Rock picks them up soon. Hint.)

cat-haters make your own jokes

And rocks and sticks and bottles and cans carried by the Not-Suit-wearer cross between worlds unharmed as well. Which we already knew, and everyone’s probably guessed, as it’s been quite apparent since the day we got our shipment of supplies and those people lost their lives … that anyone wearing a Not-Suit can drive a vehicle between worlds.

Question: Why can animals and inanimate objects cross the barrier, but humans can’t? Something about self-awareness, maybe? … Is it interlinked with the fact that the vehicle depends on the driver, not weight or speed or might or weaponry? Is the Not-Suit a science-defying, interdimensional version of a backstage pass?

So the crew was explaining all this at the meeting and wondering aloud about the properties of the Not-Dome. I raised my hand and stood up and said that maybe the Not-Dome was somehow made of … death. Or the next life, or whatever you want to call it. That on the outside, from where the Blackhawk goons and Not-Dome supporters sit, they see nothing, where in fact there’s all of us and a bunch of stuff. Like ghosts. And if you turn the Not-Dome inside out — if you put death into where life is — then it’s like a black hole for what Chinese people and hippies call “chi.”

The Not-Suit literally sucks the life force out of whatever living thing touches it. Like when two magnets are stuck together and you pull them apart and flip one over and all of a sudden they can’t stand each other. Except the opposite, to where death can slide by death and life by life, but when you turn death inside out … then … uh … you know. Right? … Maybe? …

And there was a protracted awkward silence, and the Not-Suits crew onstage kind of looked at each other like “yeeeeah, she’s been eating paint chips again.” So then I shut my trap, but the meeting came to a finish quite soon after that.

I am buzzkill; hear me blather.

I might be right-brain-retarded, to the point where I walk around with my head tilted to one side from the emptiness in the lefty science half of my head. And I may not be calling things by the specific names the Not-Suits crew know how to use … but I don’t think I’m wrong, necessarily.

Do you?

Recommended setlist

…for spending all day studying hydroponics and permaculture and imagining a creepy new planet where we have to grow back everything we destroyed (albums to be enjoyed in this order):

Lush - Spooky

Natacha Atlas - Best of Natacha Atlas

Secret Chiefs 3 - Book M

Melvins - Houdini

The Sword - Age of Winters (no way to leave this off any setlist)

Sleepytime Gorilla Museum - Grand Opening And Closing

Broadcast - Haha Sound

Man … or Astroman? - Project Infinity

Scott Biram - Graveyard Shift

Clinic - Walking With Thee

Polvo - Cor-Crane Secret

“Bend or Break” = off-kilter Chapel Hill opus; makes me want to smash things