Ruminations on 2012

Nov. 13, 007
Black Rockalypse

So is 2012 the End of All Things, or … or what?

My friend Anna Swan thinks the year 2012 will NOT be the End of All Things — instead, it will bring about the true advent of the Age of Aquarius. A time when all will be illuminated, she says — nothing can be hidden, and everyone will know everything about everyone else.

The Age of Light. Sounds like pinko hippie prophecy, but if all goes according to Anna’s plan, it’ll be fun to watch. Not everybody’s going to notice when it happens. It’ll creep up on the stupid and the corrupt, and make the rest of us laugh and laugh.

Imagine: Politicians with little flea-sized cameras swarming them in their offices. Each flea-camera attached to a different television news channel or sleazy paparazzo. Audio-video equipment paired with the latest in bio-mechanical surveillance-pest engineering. The meek shall inherit the Earth when the powerful and shady have no more shade in which to hide.

Websites like Rapleaf.com and others give weight to the idea that soon, nothing will be secret at all. So maybe celebrities — with photographs of them doing random things like eating or picking up kids from school — are the sacrificial lambs of all Western society. They’re leading by example … getting us used to the idea that soon, someone might very well be watching us at all times.

Same as Burning Man ennables ritual without dogma, celebrity brings its user status without deity. Everything the famous and photographed do is translated into the physical realm, the 2-D realm, and if they possess no substance underneath their genetically superior bio-body suits, they fall apart easily. If they do find their spirit and separate that from their physical bodies — and all the wealth and privilege and lack of privacy which accompanies their self-industry — then they tend to shine.

That was my experience with my petses, anyway. I wonder what they’re doing right now. I miss some of them very much.

(ITEM! Botox makes people look really weird and erases all emotion from their face, which is the opposite of how my face works. Also! Cheek implants are the most disgusting idea ever. Once you’ve seen someone sporting them in real life, they even look batshit insane in photographs. And THEY — okay, SHE — looked at ME weird when I wore my clown nose around at Burning Man. Or had huge bruises all over my legs. At least I got mine on accident.)

The clouds over the Not-Dome have been looking like this lately. I took this picture a few days before we left the Black Rock after cleanup. I wonder if the Not-Us were testing the Not-Dome then?

So we’re supposed to make a television program out here, or a series of programs, when the other invitees finally arrive. I’m of the school that Not-Dome TV could be an entire channel, 24-hour style, like Current TV. Of course loads of artists on the Gate and DPW crews are slavering to be on the preliminary planning committee for the show(s). Further proof that celebrity is everything in this Fd-up society. Not even saying I’m not guilty of the same thing sometimes — who isn’t, who’s an artist — but yeesh. Too many cunts in the kitchen, as my friend Silent But Violent would say.

I’d like to think part of the reason we were chosen to be the “roustabouts for the possible last hurrah of Planet Earth” was because we’ve learned how to get along with each other, even when we don’t. The more self-important a person is, the more likely they are to become easily offended. The more easily offended a person is, the more likely the tribe will grow sick of their buillshit and push them out. And nobody wants to be pushed out — we have too much fun.

For example, on tour with Cyclecide in ‘04, someone taped a piece of cardboard which read COMPLAINT DEPARTMENT to the RV bathroom door. Whenever an errant Bike Rodeo clown ate all of ___’s chips or left ___’s copy of Hell’s Angels back at the Couples’ Hotel in Lincoln, Nebraska … rather than pitching a fit and/or stewing in a vat of repressed anger, ___ would simply stride into the COMPLAINT DEPARTMENT, close the door, scream a list of grievances and/or a tirade of epithets at the top of his or her lungs, and exit the bathroom with a smile, to the laughter of the group. We never fought bitterly — only in tiny spurts.

But out in the Not-Dome, this television thing has got people scratching and biting each other like cats and dogs. Not everyone, but enough people to make it disturbing. It’s ugly, the way some folks are grandstanding and fighting for power and ass-kissing to a puke-tastic degree. We’ll get through it, though. We always do.

(I’m not on the TV crew, btw. I like my composting job. Playing with dirt and worms and trash suits me just fine.)