10 things I have have been up to since getting home. 

It’s been a few weeks.  I haven’t been blogging for the last week. I’ve been busy. I’m a bad blogger. So here’s what I have been busy with. The top things. 

1. Katie and Brian’s Wedding. Yeah, pretty much the best wedding I have been to.  It was incredible and inspiring. Just wow. See my previous post for details.

2. Went up to Benton Hot Springs with my friends Jerri and Ed. Benton is up near Bishop, you know on the way to Burning Man? Every time I pass through there, I think to myself, this is the most beautiful part of California. I’ve always wanted to visit. You know, I was right! It IS the most beautiful part of California! The hot springs were incredible. It was situated in between these huge mountains. The stars were so bright and the sky so open. I can’t wait to go back!

3. On this trip, Jerri, who is a real badass, brought her quad and dirt bike. Fuckin’ awesome! when I was thirteen or so, my dad bought my brother and I quads. I had forgotten how much fun speeding along in the dirt. I forgot the power of that. I left really thinking about buying one. Jerry had made her quad into an art car this year for the Burn. I am all about stealing people’s technology for Burning Man fun. And I hear that utility quads can pull a trailer…

4.  I’ve lost 15 pounds since July. The no sugar, no booze, and working my little tail off traveling all over the country has been paying off! I feel great!

5. I got this great program for my Mac, Delicious Library (http://www.delicious-monster.com/). It lets you scan in your media using the built in camera on your lappy. I have a pretty extensive book, comic, game and DVD collection. I tend to lend my things out. Books are best when they are shared. One of the great features of Delicious is that it lets you loan things to your contacts, giving you reminders when it’s due. It also gives you the option of selling your books on Amazon. Brilliant! I can’t wait to really get into it!

6. I’ve been working for my family’s business for the last week or so. I’ve been sorting through the little numbers for the little metal parts that we sell to keep industry alive in this country.  My grandmother started the company, Monarch Bearing,  in the 50s. It’s been in my life my whole life. That smell of industrial grease and steel. It always brings comfort to me. But this time, while counting oil seals and snap rings i saw art. I am going to make some jewelry from the parts. I kept visualizing these awesome designs. In the next few weeks I should have some pieces. 

7. Since being back in LA, I suddenly find that I have no time again. This is in stark contrast to how my life behaved in Baltimore, Black Rock City, and Denver. There I was busy, but I had nothing but time. I am really going to have to work on chilling a bit here. Nonstop.  Who am I kidding? I love it. 

8. This coming weekend is LA Decom and our party Saturday night Homecoming. (http://www.hipgenesis.com). I am really looking forward to this one. We haven’t officially thrown a party since The Winter Ball. That and as a high school student, I never made it to any of the dances. And lately, it seems like HG is doing school dances. Watch for the Sadie Hawkins Dance coming soon. 

9. I got Facebook spotted the other night. Some guy knew my name and said he saw me on Facebook. Then Y2 said he saw my picture as a Facebook ad! Kind of disturbing. The age of privacy is kind of dead, I guess. I don’t think any of that will discourage my Internet footprint.  There is much more to explore in my media creation experiment.  I think Internet famous is only 15 seconds of fame, anyway.

10. San Francisco Decom. Yeah. Going to that, too.  I miss the Playa. I am going to party the next few weekends. Who’s with me?

Earth and Robin picked me up early Saturday morning.  Having no sense of Colorado geography, I figured just picking me up on their way out of Boulder to Ft. Collins would be no problem. Turns out, yeah, about the same distance there as to Denver. But they are sweet and love me.  No Problem. They even brought me a sweet sweet bike (I’m kind of in love with it and will blow a bunch of money for one like it in LA)!

I really had no idea what I was getting into with the Tour de Fat. Thousands of people in bike and in crazy costumes. My playa casual wasn’t really cutting it for me. But wow, once we were on the streets of Ft. Collins with our horde of bikers rolling along both very slow and getting a good clip, I was in heaven. I really missed the riding bikes with all my friends part of Burning Man this year. I got my fix saturday morning. We had police escorts and closed roads. We had mobile music. We had great playa bikes. My bike had streamers. Awesome. 

The beer festival itself was also fun. We statyed there for a few hours, saw some of the acts, listened to the evangelizing about the wonders of bikes. They kept saying it is a bike festival with beer at it, not the other way around.  Some woman gave the New Belgium Brewery her car in exchange for a bike. They gave away bikes. It was a damn good time. 

But I wanted to ride bikes. 

Robin and I rode around Ft Collins a bit more. The city was alive with bikes everywhere. Signs asekd drivers to share the road and slow down. There were bike lanes everywhere. It was awesome. 

We drove back to Boulder figuring that I could take the bus back to Denver, or my friend Stacey could give me a ride back into the city.

We decided to ride cruiser bikes into downtown Boulder, most of us had no lights, and our batteries were playa dead. But the locals assured us that it would be no problem.  Before dinner, I was impressed with the bike paths and lanes everywhere in Boulder. But then after dinner the decision to ride to the boulder mini decompression party was made and we went on this wild and fast ride through the amazing bike path system of Boulder. We passed steams and rivers, went through tunnels at high speed and zoomed up the hills on the way out. We had this grand adventure. It was so beautiful and cool all night!

We stayed at the Decom for a bit. I connected with some of my Boulder friends from the Burn and Astral Headwash. A real brief visit though, because we were back on bikes in a quick second. We took a slightly different route, a bit more uphill, but it was incredible. By the time we all got back to Earth and Robin’s we were pretty exhausted. 

But what an adventure.  I really missed my bike gang parties at Black Rock City this year. I think I need to hook up with an LA group that does cruiser rides. 

Tonight we begin the wrapping process for the Cedia Convention. I miss home. I am happy to start wrapping up here. We will be working through the night.

I remember as a kid, before I flew anywhere. Flying was this luxury that businessmen got to do. It used to be something really special.

Today, jet flight has far outmatched rail and sea and zepplin for personal transportation over long distances. In the process, it has lost it’s glamour. Now we are shuffled around from line to line. We are told to show our papers at least 4 times each flight. They make us remove our shoes and pour out our water. They sell us a space for our bag and a dry box lunch.

It’s lost it’s soul. Like so many things in our modern world, it needs a breakthrough. It needs something beyond what we can imagine from where we are standing. Air travel needs a miracle.

I have a ton of lame-ass excuses. I’ve been working. I haven’t felt like it. I’ve been too busy. I was up all night chatting with friends on the internets and phone. Tribe has been down and I am too lazy to update all that stuff. 

Whatever. I haven’t been writing. It annoys me and I always feel less myself, (and less a man) when I am A.W.O.B. (Absent without blog). 

Done apologizing. 

I flew into Baltimore on the top of a huge thunderstorm. Who’d have thought that flying to work for the Do Lab would be a break from work in LA. As I got onto the plane, I breathed a sigh of relief. The UR Votes Count thing that I was working on for the weeks before this job had been really stressing me out. Once I got on that plane, there really was nothing I could do about that (and to Adam, Art and Eric H’s credit, they haven’t called me once about the project). I was on a red eye. Two hours of fitful sleep. Tops. 

I arrived and dickered with the schmarmbag rental car agent. Of course, i got put in the phattest ride they had. A Town and Country minivan. A godsdamned bimbobox. It was pretty banged up and a powder blue that was sure to pull the soccer moms of the Maryland suburbs. First things I do when I get out of that rental car lot is get lost. I lead myself on a tour of the roughest neighborhoods of Baltimore.  But you know how it is when you haven’t slept. It’s not even me driving. It an autopilot. Some other guy. I miss the hotel, when I turn around I find a whole foods and a starfucks. Civilization. Baltimore suddenly aint so bad when I have a grande triple soy latte in my hands. I even have time for a shower. 

I meet up with Jedi and Tristan in the lobby and we go to work.  We measure three, four times. We lay out giant squash and onions. I spend the day pounding metal into earth. I feel like a blacksmith. I find my rhythm. I hit my toes with the hammer.  We work until 10pm, when the Hulk Hogan biker clone locks us in. But the hardest work, the figuring out part, is done. It’s gonna be great. 

I return to the Raddison. And my huge hotel room. My bed is a king and either side has it’s own control for softness. It’s epic. Free Internets, a plus. USA Today at the door when I wake up. A great AC. I decide pretty quick that I am going to skip All Points West in NJ. I may as well kick it here. It’s pretty cool. 

The next day we are in at 10 am, right when they will let us in, after they have run the horses on the Pimlico racetrack. Today we finish the onion frames. We have the right tools. We have the right lift. It’s going really well. Then we realize that we are missing the key part of the Lumies that make them look so cool! So I am off to meet Y2 halfway between the other crew and us. The Do Lab has another team doing a much bigger installation at the All Points West festival. I have an opportunity to drive some more across the great state of Maryland. And then Delaware, to visit where my debt us kept. It’s a fun trip. I get back after nine and we decide to do one last day. There’s not much left. 

The last day we get up the Lumies, without having to pound in a ton of stakes or lay down guy wires, which is the hardest part of that. They go up instantly and they look perfect. Everything goes so smoothly. And just as we are wrapping up our day, the storm comes. We go and catch a movie. The Mummy 3. It was terrible. Painful terrible. 

The next day we go down to check the structures in the wind and end up going to the Inner Harbor, we mix with the tourists and anime cosplayers. It’s a surreal day. Strangely, the day among the toursts exhausts me more than working at full speed! We go back and check the lighting of the site. It looks amazing. 

Today was the first day of the Virgin Mobile Festival. I gotta say, it was a just okay kind of festival. The festivals we go to back in LA are so much better. Coachella, so much bigger and brighter. LIB, a dreamland compared to this. I am spoiled. But I am going to honest when I stumbled upon The Swell Season from the movie Once. I was so pleasantly surprised! They were so charming and cute! As an encore the two of them jumped down into the audience and did a little irish sing-a-long. It was so wonderful. I’ve been listening to that Once sountrack so much I knew the words to every song. Its been a while since that happened. Duffy and Underworld were also pretty amazing. I got some pretty cool pictures of the Foo Fighters. I also gotto hang out with some east coasters! My friend Kathy who I never get to see came out for the show with a couple of friends. And I got to hang out with Stryk, a great guy who I met through Wolfie. Overall it was a great day. 

 

Tomorrow is the last day of the festival and we will start breaking down as soon as Trent Reznor lays down his blood soaked guitar. I still don’t know the details of my return flight. I should probably figure that out soon.

I also need to meet Richard Branson and find out where he is camping at Burning Man.