Mon, 20 Aug 2007 19:54:28 -0700The twentieth of the month, and nothing yet written! I must grow old: Lounging around on the grass in Menlo Park last week at an engineering picnic, as we waited for the early shuttle to scoot our Mai-Tai'd and sunscreened asses back to San Francisco, a guy I used to take the Berkeley shuttle with commented that, of course time speeds up as we age: each new second of your life is a smaller fraction of the total. I'd never thought of it quite like that, but there you have it: Why Time Flies [Faster]. And also, perhaps there's been radio silence due to the old standbys: Fear of redundancy (I'm still madly in love with my city); busyness (see below). I dreamed, the other night, up at a B&B with a king-sized bed and a giant pink duvet in Fairfax (Marin), that, for a hypnagogically-sensible set of reasons, I had to leave not only my apartment, but SF. And in my dream, Caesar, my new PM, was carrying out armfuls of orange things (I could tell they were my possessions from the color), telling me I had to leave, as I lay curled up into a ball on my bed, sobbing pitifully. Really, for some reason, apparently I'm terrified that something will force me to leave. Maybe I'm projecting: Having been burnt by boys in the past, and feeling about this city the way I have about a couple of them in my time, I'm afraid of being left. Or maybe it's just cyclically hormonal. Whatever it is, it's got its hooks in me: Saturday morning, on my way to yoga, as I piloted the candy-red Jetta Zipcar back down through Marin, and came in view of the sunlit, positively coruscating bay, dotted with sailboats; the indistinct yet unmistakable outline of the city; the carpet of summer fog benevolently rolling in from the the mouth of the Pacific to my right; and, best, the twin, iconic, rust-colored pylons of the Golden Gate -- as this vista suddenly came into view, the Flaming Lips which I'd been blasting broke into chorus: "It overtakes me," they sang; my heart all but caught in my throat; I gasped. (I somehow can't fathom that, if it exists, it can possibly last. Aren't things of beauty on this scale of necessity ephemeral? Why do I fear losing it?) My other predominant irrational sentiment of late has been another kind of fear, but this one born out of a fear of novelty: After the past two years of intending to go, not preparing, and succumbing to inertia and the dauntingness of the venture at the last minute, I'm finally going to Burning Man. And all the work I should have been doing for the last month is now upon me, and I've been freaking out, stressed like I haven't been since the end of Q2 last year, and merely because I don't know, really know, what I'm getting myself into. But isn't (my more rational, now-less-hormonal voice chimes in in counterpoint) that a prerequisite to awesomeness of a certain scale? The things whose preparations have been the most trying in this past year (backpacking, to a minor degree; going off to Thailand, to a more major one) have also been, in their realizations, its highpoints. Having now covered the basics (my new tent from REI is on its way; a kind dude at Valencia Cyclery got my beater road bike in Burner shape, gratis, on Sunday), I can now focus on digging through the neglected bins of thrift-store dresses I've accrued throughout my teens, and, somehow, find fewer and fewer opportunities to wear in this, the dotage of my adolescence. Because they were made to be taken to the playa. Now, if only I can balance work with mad preparations over the next four days ... |