The first visitations

Dec. 3, 007
Black Rockalypse

The gag order on telling stuff that’s happening inside the Not-Dome continues. As does my wondering about the ultimate futility of this blog. But hey, I’ll try to keep at it, until we freeze or starve to death.

Naaa, it’s not that bad. But it’s cold here. Snowing! And we’ve got no heaters in our double-wides. It’s become very apparent to many of us the reasoning behind nomadic tribespeople’s habit of sleeping all in the same room together. I’ve entertained slumber parties in my trailer more nights than I haven’t, since the weather’s dropped.

No orgies or anything sleazeoid like that. I’m aware of what you’ve all heard about what goes on at Burning Man … but the Creepy Sex People are a small subsect of that population, and this isn’t Burning Man, and we aren’t ticketholders. As for all our DPW / Gate / Perimeter / senior staff liberal-ness, the mass swapping of bodily fluids and seeing our friends naked and humping isn’t really our style. We know we have to live on top of each other every day, and we know what causes fights and awkwardnesses we can’t afford to invite into our already-tenuous grasps on reality.

this used to be my screensaver. Photo by Linda Dufurrena

It occurs to me I haven’t really explained what our visitations were like. It seems each of us were visited by a Not-Us after experiencing something that couldn’t possibly have happened in our “real” lives.

Most were visited in ways that maximized their willingness to listen to the invitation. A carrot dangling from a stick, some might say. But what a carrot, and what a stick.

13, who’s got serious dietary issues at the moment, came home to her bedroom in Oakland a couple nights after we left cleanup to find a lavish buffet filled with all kinds of things she’s not supposed to eat, including a giant cake from Safeway with frosting which tastes like lard. That’s her favorite. And champagne, chock full of sugar, which would normally make her insides do flips. As 13 chowed down on everything forbidden and delicious, her Not-Us emissary — a fierce redhead 40-something Amazon vixen-fox named Story — invited her with many of the same enticements Barton laid out before me.

C-Load received his invitation during a particularly intense game of Dungeons and Dragons Online, in which he got to slay the Red Dragon in such a way that made him all sweaty and dirty and out of breath and sore and about to have a heart attack when he was “returned” to his computer setup in his and 13’s warehouse. He swears he was right there, swinging his sword and wearing armor and everything … and showed us all the now-ripped T-shirt and pants he was wearing underneath the armor when he slew the beast.

Entropy, who’s been one o’ them computer whizzes since childhood, got his invite through a long series of radio transmissions and other cockamamie electronics malfunctions. Kinda like the “Sexy Back” incident I experienced during the storm cloud / electrical freakout when my batteries exploded and the mink collar of my groundscore-coat tried to kill me. But more protracted and intense.

Entropy had left cleanup already, but the way he explained it was that every single electronics device in his home and car freaked the hell out for a couple days, to where he took them all apart and strode them around everywhere in his already-cluttered-with-post-cleanup-crap domicile to try to get to the bottom of it, like Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters building a mountain out of dirt in his living room. And then, in a flurry of wires and magnets and components, they all reassembled by themselves and started to blare in concert. Dumbstruck, Entropy stood in the center of the gadget-tornado like a kid on Christmas morning. And then Story walked in and invited him.

Arwen, who prefers things to be understated, was simply visited by dancing spiders painted red. Years before, she’d befriended a dude who at the time was turning schizophrenic. For some reason she not only attracts these types, she also has a rare gift of enabling them to feel un-crazy … anyway, they went for a walk in the woods and he was ranting about something, and Arwen (a painter) had some paint and brushes in her backpack, and she distracted him into a higher state of sanity when they spent the day looking for spiders and trying to mark them each with a red dot, to see how many arachnids they could tag before sunset. (They got quite a few.)

So her visitation consisted of her looking down from her loft one morning to see one red-dot spider creep under the door, followed by another, and a couple more… until there was a synchronized conglomeration of red-dot spiders crawling around, making formations and spelling out words, like a football halftime cheerleading-and-band routine with the mute button on. And spiders instead of people.

As for me? Well…

Late one night about a week after I left the desert in the middle of what I thought to be a full-fledged delusional freakout, there was a knock on the door to my friend’s bedroom in Oakland where I was staying. I got out of bed to answer, and a letter slid underneath the door. And … the most incredible fireworks and laser show I’d ever seen in my life happened. Indoors. It just exploded from the paper when I opened it, and filled the whole room with light and warmth and amazingness and otherworldly sights and sounds.

It wasn’t my first light-show visitation, either.

Yeah, they know me. They know I like the sparkly.

Then — another knock, at my friend’s window this time. And there was my man Barton, whom I’d previously thought to be imaginary, sitting in the air outside the second-story storm windows. On a flying carpet nailed to a pallet.

He invited me outside, and I climbed on, dumbstruck, unable to resist. Unwilling to resist. (I mean it when I say the Not-Us exude this preternatural sense of calm and love … could be a trick, but so far I still have faith they’re not conning us. They’re the good guys.)

And Barton locked his arm through mine and took me up and up and up, to see the one thing I ever thought I could never possibly witness — something only astronauts and cosmonauts and space-tourists and very few other people have observed with naked eye:

The curvature of the Earth from space.

cuz this is my screensaver now, maybe that’s how he knew. So I said yes

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