First off, let me just acknowledge, I have dropped the ball with my mini sagas. It’s started with a few early call times last week, then a couple of nonstop days then a crippling case of strepp throat.  Now I am nine days in the hole, and barely getting back to full fighting strength. So today and tomorrow, I am going to make it up.  I’ll probably post date them, but they should show up just fine in RSS readers. I’m just not sure how much I’ll be able to get done. 

It is absolutely amazing to me how much this illness has laid me so low.  It knocked me right out. Most of the last week was spent languishing in bed, struggling to rest accepting that my throat at any time could burst and I would be dead. i also spent much of the week alternately sweating and shivering, both uncontrollably. 

Sickness is a brutal introspective time.  You’re all alone, unable to do anything, but think about your life.  I found myself panicking about money, and the fact I’m not working. I found myself thinking dark thoughts about my mortality, and plotting against my neighbors for their mournful lonely dog that would not shut up. I loathed myself for not being able to accomplish anything more than taking a shower, only be drenched again in sweat moments later.  

Last week was a little slice of hell, let me tell you. 

But I came to some conclusions in my wild fever dreams. 

1. I need to get my finances in order. My grip career is withering on the vine, partially from the climate of the business, but more from my lack of proper care. I need to hustle more. I love my job, and I am not working enough to sustain my rockstar lifestyle.  

2. Now is a great time to pare back the lifestyle expenses. It’s six months into the year, sweets and alcohol, I think I am kicking you back out of my life. I have some nice bottles of wine I may drink, but those are already purchased. I think of last year as one of my most powerful experiences of myself. Drinking has done me know good. 

3. And I have been feeling a bit doughy lately as well. Once I am well, it’s back to the gym, and back to minding my food intake properly. That lose it iphone app is fantastic. 

4. and then there is the matter of my writing. Damn I have a lot of work to do. I need some deadlines for myself, and some hard and fast rules. I want to be great at it. 

So I’ll get to those mini sagas. although just writing this last bit has worn me out. We’ll see what my mind can churn up today.

So I am a hipster, i know what’s happening.  I think of myself as someone “in the know.”  I pretty much assume I know all the venues for fun. I even have an old-timey mustache.

I know nothing. I am like a child. Thursday night, I had this moment of severe jaded perspective. It was as if I knew nothing about the social scene of my city. I felt like a tourist wandering my downtown. I discovered art walk. I know that countless of my friends have been going for years. I understand, it’s this thing that’s been a fixture of downtown for years and years. I really have no need to hear anyone’s “I told you so’s,” please. I get it.

I had been asked to do some lighting for some VIP tents and a street artist’s park for Citizen LA for this guy George that it seems all of my friends know, and I have never met. And then to the after-party, at a venue/loft downtown I’ve never been to. There were DJs I’d never seen, playing music I didn’t recognize…

I realized, in a moment of sublime face-palm: I am nowhere near as cool as I thought I was.

This is a good thing. It means I get to discover some new things. I can’t wait for Art Walk next month! I am also completely open to new things again! Bring me to the light.

I noticed two things that came out of our new White House. Both hold the secrets of the universe.  Both I think are steps in the right direction for arguably the most powerful man in the world.

The first is this photo.

Holy smokes!  Our president is sitting alongside a pirate, negotiating. It’s so simple. So weird. They staged the photo for a correspondents dinner. He was making a joke about negotiating with pirates. Brilliant. Playful.  Turns out that it’s Obama’s speech writer dressed as the pirate. I like that he just had that lying around somewhere.

Geeks.

The second is this video.

Now this shows the white house press secretary Robert Gibbs pretty upset about some phones going off during his press conference. While I am surprised at the rudeness of professional reporters leaving on their phones during a televised anything, I think that the way he handles this, with play is actually pretty cool.

Our government is, for the first time in my lifetime behaving like real people do, in business, with families, with friends. It is an exciting time.

My belief is that we will not win any friends in the world by trying to intimidate them. We will never get out of our financial mess by making people afraid. We will never solve all of our worlds problems by being serious and stern.

We must play to find the answer.

You know about nanotechnology, right? 

Tiny little robots. They have set functions. I had this memory/dream/inspiration about my cloud. It’s a personal nano-swarm. Millions and millions of bots, invisible to all but the best microvision.  Attuned to a specific individual, the swarm is the ultimate in personal care.

Some bots trim my hair, keeping it in the style I like. They epillate the areas I like clear, like my face, my back. Some exfoliate, massage and moisturize my skin, applying sunscreen when needed. There’s a whole crew that works keeping nails clean and tightly trimmed. They amazingly power themselves off the dead cells, turns out that for a microscopic nanovirus, that’s a lot of power.  When a bot reaches the end of it’s life-cylce it launches itself into the air, along with sweet odors, like old time cologne. 

They self replicate. 

There are the cell herders inside my body as well, working to keep blood flowing properly, by cleansing my circulatory system of plaque the same way they clear my teeth. There are even certain troubleshooter teams who patrol my body regularly, searching for disease or irregular growth,  and then handlling most problems before they become problems.  I haven’t been “sick” in as long as I remember. The great thing, too is that they are dialed into the vast store of knowledge of all nanoswarms.  If they don’t know how to fix the problem, they figure it right out. 

Then there are the rebuilders. We call them Dozers. As cells wear out, there are swarms that get right to work reconditioning organs so seamlessly and gradually, nobody ever notices.  My report says that my heart has been optimized and replaced three times over. 

Once, there were great tales told of machines rebelling against man. There were countless stories of robots tearing us limb from limb. 

Yeah, never happened. Number one reason? 

I love my nano swarm and with it I’ll live forever.

I’m going to tell you a myth. We have limited language for this, and I am only beginning to unpack it. I’ve been getting some pretty heavy dream downloads, and I am still interpreting it. Words in <brackets> are not to be taken literally. 

There was this place, the closest word for it in our language is a <cemetery>.  But more specificity it is this place where <souls> come to rest. It’s a place where great, heroic souls pause before returning. It’s not on earth. It exists in a reality alongside our own. It has been there for as long as there has been time.

I have <inherited> <management> of this place, more specifically a wardenship. Unfortunately, the last wardens really <fucked> up the works. They put souls to rest haphazardly. They lost the paperwork. They put souls all over the place. It got to be way overcrowded and frustrating. After a few hundred years, the souls at rest started wandering. Many wandered back here, to earth, to occupy human bodies once again. 

While many of them are great <heroes of heaven>, some too are real <dicks>.  Some can exist alongside souls here. Others are going to control and overpower the earthbound souls they occupy.  Also, the spirits of these heroes are <amnesiac>. We’ve all forgotten who we are. 

There’s no getting the genie back in the bottle, so to speak. These genies are here to stay. But what I can do is gather the great ones. It’s a trick of remembering.  Somehow it falls on me to guide us to remember our true <purpose>. There is also something to sending the darker ones to whence they came. 

Okay. That was one dream the other day, like I said. Still trying to unpack it. 

Take a look around. Find the heroes.

It’s another hot day in Los Angeles. 

It’s been a while since I’ve written in this format. I’ve fallen out of touch, at least the way I was writing. I’ve been taking on a more playful writing tone. The mini sagas have been great, and I plan to keep them up.  But there has been this change, this fundimental change in the way I am seeing the world. 

I am drifting away from me as I knew myself.  Not like some bad change. It’s not some existential crisis. I just feel as though I am existing in two or seven places at once. I keep getting these dreamlike flashes of future selves and flooded cities. I’m often awoken from dreams into other dreams. 

Everything that is happening seems to have happened before. Not like a history repeating kind of way. Rather, I am remembering the future as the past. Time is dilating.  The internal clock is spinning at a different rate altogether. 

Don’t worry about money. Economy as you know it is going to completely transform in the next few years. Remember how different the world was before you were connected to the internet?  Before personal communication technology. Before  cable TV existed. Yeah, like that level of change. The end of work for fiefdoms. We are talking an age of plenty. It’s coming. I can see it coming in around the edges.  

And it will be a messy and chaotic time. Hold onto your butts.

Keeping the great unwashed masses out of the Do Lab backstage area was a full time job for Bryan. While shouting “Get off my lawn!” he would gleefully spray down any concert goers who forced their way too close to the DJ booth. It’s a dirty job and all that.
Coachella 09 Day 2, originally uploaded by ericspaceman.

They met as children, in an airport and they played together for a full fifteen minutes. Their parents were both waiting for different flights going
to other sides of the country. As little kids, they fell in love. On that crowded field, twenty years later they danced and fell again.

Coachella 09 Day 2, originally uploaded by ericspaceman.

Our secret weapon is profound and perfect. We have countless operaties around the world ready to strike at a moment’s notice. It is large and small, and can be weilded by every man woman and child on Earth. Our moment is now. This is our time. Our weapon is love.

So it is really beautiful today, the clouds are rolling in on the horizon. Cold winds blew us around all day yesterday. The installation is really coming together. It’s huge. We are doing these amazing towers of pallets, this 30 ft. aerial rig,  two stages, giant vegetables. It’s inspiring to be able to work on this kind of project again. 

It got very cold last night, after a long and humid day. When I first landed around 11, by the time I had finished setting up my tent I was drenched in sweat. At around midnight I had to quit work because I was too cold. So, coachella comers, keep in mind your warmth when you arrive during the hot day. 

I should have some panoramics up tonight!