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.