I can’t think of a headline big enough for this, since The Onion already used ‘HOLY FUCKING SHIT’

Oct. 21, 007
Back in the Black Rock — forever, I guess

I fell asleep on Arwen’s couch in Oakland, with my dog Bruno beside me on the floor.

We woke up in the Black Rock Desert.

Arwen’s trailer is right next to mine in the same cul-de-sac, and 13’s on the other side of me. My double-wide is amazing, as promised.

Barton said that for housing, at least for now, they’d “make” the invitees a neighborhood of double-wides — the most perfect modular homes we could imagine in our individual mind’s eyes. And that’s what I have. Disco ball? Check. Books, photos, CDs, speakers? Check. All the personal belongings I wanted to keep here with me? Check. Just as Barton said. All the crap I didn’t need, that I was going to jettison anyway, isn’t here. I’m not sure if the unwanted crap is back at home or if it’s just disappeared so my housemates wouldn’t have to clean it out of the garage. I’m not sure how this is all happening.

I’m not sure of anything at this point.

All I know is I’m glad I’m not nuts.

I was right … they WERE watching us

All the shit that went down this summer that made me think I was going bananas … and then the post-cleanup visitations … well, it turns out other people had their own visitations too. They didn’t all get visited by Barton — there are others.

Those of us who were out at Burning Man this year saw the weird weather-phenomena type shit together, and commented on it, but by the time the visitations started, I was already holed up at my non-Burning-friend’s house, isolated away from the world, consciously ignoring everyone and everything but my writing projects that needed attention. And trying to pretend in this blog that I wasn’t getting cosmically fucked with on a massive scale.

Meanwhile, all over Oakland and the City and Minneapolis and New Orleans and wherever, the other invitees were gathering in small clumps to process their imagined insanity. No, I had one too, dude. Yeah, they look human, but they’re not. No, I saw the lights, and the writing in the sky, inside my house. They came to me in the middle of the day, so it couldn’t have been a dream. No, you haven’t been dosed, unless we all have, with some new weird government drug where they can turn your doses on and off like a switch and make us all imagine the same thing.

Which, of course, is still just as much of a possibile reality as what’s going on now.

Which is a little hard to explain.

I’m just excited that some of the new-school DPW people — some of whom I disdainfully call the “Mohawk Replicants” when I’m feeling cranky — are not here. The narcs aren’t here, nor is the alien. Many original and beloved DPW assholes have arrived, and live around me. (Oh no. Also: YES!) They’re the legendary, radical-self-reliance giants who helped build and clean up the City in the beginning, when it was Pedal Camp’s job. All those men and women who came before, on whom the Mohawk Replicants’ pattern of behavior is based.

Many Rangers are here too, and Emergency Services folks, and a good amount of people I don’t know, who I’m sure have specialties of their own. We counted 200 trailers, and according to Barton, another shipment of invitees should be along in the coming weeks.

Forgive me … I’ll try to process as fast as I can. I’ll have to, now, I guess, since I’m apparently the one in charge of telling what’s going on in here — weird, I said “in here” but you can’t physically see the dome / force field / whatever — to all yall out there.

ME! Me. Yikes. I don’t know why I’m the one with this job. I wish they would make Larry Harvey do it. He’s the talker. But this isn’t Burning Man. Barton said they wanted me because I’m non-biased. Non-affiliated with the Burning Organization. Not liable to put a Burning Spin on everything, or to churn out media-friendly Burning Newspeak.

And I’m ambivalent. Almost to the point of don’t give a shit, sometimes. A constant B student, borderline slacker, no-real-job-having hobo-dilettante Bike Rodeo clown. Who can’t even explain this in a linear way yet (sorry, it’s kind of intense).

So why me? God bless America. I’m not cut out for it. This … thing is much bigger than Burning Man, or anything else I should speak for. It just takes place on the same land, with a lot of the same people building it.

Who knows, maybe they just want me to do this job because I type fast, and there’s too much work to be done. I only get to blog for an hour or two a day before I need to go back to chopping vegetables and re-sorting Exodus food. (I picked commissary for now.) This isn’t Barton’s rule — this is just how it’s done in the desert. No sitting around.

I might never get to see my best friend again. Or talk to my parents, either.

Yeah. I can’t think about that right now. At least they let Bruno come with me. I’d probably be freaking out if he wasn’t here chewing on his favorite bone on the shag carpet at the foot of my bed.

My Heroin Bed, I jokingly call it. The Most Comfortable Bed in the World made it too. Thank goodness. At least I feel at home.

We only had a week to decide. All of us. I’m not sure how many were invited versus how many actually made the jump and came … but from the conversations I’ve had in the cul-de-sac thus far this brisk October morning on the Black Rock Desert in Nevada, most of us did not hesitate to say yes. As one Ranger pointed out, some of us have been waiting for this our whole lives.

The Borg — that’s slang for Burning Man senior staff — were some of the first to talk to each other about the visitations they’d had. Of course. I mean they had to jump right back into work when they got home from the Black Rock, so they were already postulating about the weather phenomena and the narcs and everything else.

When their invitations came, the Borg decided not to wait to go to sleep on Sunday night and wake up here on Monday morning like the rest of us … they all high-tailed it to Gerlach a few days ago, under the guise of coming to check out the Solar project at the ranch … but really, they were scrambling to do all they could to get ready to enter the … the uh … I really don’t want to call it “The Dome.” Especially because you can’t see it, if it really is there. I’m going to have to think of something else to call it.

Most of us just spent wistful final-weekend time wherever we were, and went to sleep on Sunday night after fitful tossing and turning, and hit REM phase, and woke up immediately in the pre-dawn hours to run out of our double-wides onto the flat Earth and get a big whiff of the high desert alkali air … buzzing around to see who our neighbors were and chattering in the cold …

Who put this stuff here? Where did this neighborhood come from? Who are they?

In other words, WHAT THE FUCK?

I mean, we’re all freaked out, but we’re also excited. (She says in the understatement of the year.)

Okay, so I’m sending the transmission. I don’t get the Internet or anything out here in the desert. Absolutely no contact with the outside world — that’s one of the stipulations we were fully made aware of, though nobody’s sure why. Security reasons or … who knows. Anyway the WordPress prompts come up when I click on Firefox, and I can link to my stuff and Web addresses I’ve memorized, and apparently the Flickr account works enough to let me upload photos. Cameras don’t function out here now — I tried — but I insisted blog postings need pictures, so Barton said I could post images already in my computer. Photos I’ve already taken.

for the love of the Stinkin’ Linkin, will everyone please fix New Orleans now

Last night was the heaviest goodnight I’ve ever said. Mainly because I didn’t say it to hardly anyone. But that was the best way to do it.

More tomorrow.