Blanks

Jan. 22, 007
Black Rockalypse

Thank you everybody for making those care packages. It must’ve been some undertaking, receiving the lists from the crews as well as shopping for us personally, sticking everything in the right boxes, making sure we were provided with some measures of comfort and home … and a great deal of nutrition we’d been lacking, to the point of near starvation.

Thank you, thank you, thank you. Especially whoever went to Rainbow and bought the Gate our cases of kombucha. Luckily most everyone in the DPW still thinks it’s the grossest drink on the planet, so they won’t be stealing it from us. This from a cadre of dirtbags who get off on mixing terrible concoctions with which to play a game called ‘Don’t Smell It, Just Drink It.’

… and yippee, we got the supplies to make our own. Hallelujah, black tea, organic sugar, and that crazy ancient kombucha culture, perhaps the original alien life form on Earth

Many thanks for all the … what must’ve been notes and cards and letters and pictures from home … but all pages of paper came to us blank, save pre-existing product packaging and manual instructions. Likewise, anything you sent on digial and/or magnetic media is useless, just so you know, so for everyone who crafted CDs and cassettes and videos and microchips, they’re going straight to the landfill.

(That’s a lie. Of course the A/V nerds are already analyzing them to see if they can figure out how to extrapolate the messages sent to us. The Not-Us don’t seem to mind … I mean, that’s how to figure out “alien” technology, right? Or any type of technology. Get some of their stuff and tear it apart.)

Unrolling all those blank banners and opening our personal boxes to find empty sheets of paper carefully folded in empty envelopes, and blank mix tapes in unlabeled cases … heartbreaking. I don’t know which would’ve made us more homesick: to actually receive messages from our loved ones which prove we’re ultimately not alone, or to open a bunch of future fire-barrel kindling which proves we’re all alone in here.

——–

We’re still trying to process the fact that people have now given their lives in the name of our experiment. Some of us are taking it harder than others, of course … At any rate, the victims’ valor — as well as the valor of those standing beside and around them, but destined not to be hit by the ricocheting bullets — will never be forgotten.

We would’ve conducted a more pyro-spectacular memorial service, but we’re not of the mind to burn anything we should be saving.

——–

I’m not sure why the Not-Us made the Not-Dome possess some of the properties it does … but we’ve got a lot of good guesses. We’re not exactly pissed about it, either. Seems the smart way to handle things, for now. If we didn’t enjoy isolation from the modern world, including from our closest loved ones, we wouldn’t be seasonal workers for the Burning Man festival smack dab in the middle of nowhere in the first place.

And we’re aware that as long as we (well, our sources) have got money to exchange for goods, some will say this is not a fully self-sustaining society. But there is no such thing anymore, save maybe the Inuits or the San Bushmen … there are too many of us, and we live on top of each other, and we’ve all tasted the delights of the modern world too often to go back to wearing grass skirts and eating the same handful of nuts and berries every day and arguing over a found Coke bottle. Aren’t we?

Our community is growing itself intelligently. We’re building greenhouses now — much of the second trailer was packed with stuff to make greenhouses and kwonset huts with — and we’ll do the whole seasonal thing out here, preparing and hustling indoors in the winter, planting in spring, tending in summer, harvesting in fall.

And lest the black helicopter men think they can poison our food the way they poison us with their chem trails … most of our crops will be indoors and sealed tight.

Must plan for further entropy. Can’t rest. Chaos provides, if you can flow with it. This, above all, may be the very thing we’re meant to show the planet about survival.

That, and one other thing: Play, not necessity, is the mother of invention.

One thing we will burn today is the pallet of toilet paper those on the outside knew we needed for a certain purpose.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a flaming redneck soccer tournament to attend.