Burn After Reading

I was amused recently by a comment by a friend who has just returned from his honeymoon, he went on Safari in Africa; I can only imagine what a mind blowing experience this was, having never been. It’s one of those things that is on my do list, I’ve eaten sushi off a naked woman in Prague, let carnivorous fish eat my feet in Cambodia and been doused head to toe in tomatoes in Bunol, but I’ve not as yet ticked safari off my list. My list gets longer as I get older and my ability to tick things off is inhibited by “life”. When catching up for a beer with my newly returned friend, he said to me, “you know what you realise when you get back from something like this? Everyday life is shit”. I’m inclined to agree.

Every minute is a gift, I passionately believe this. I don’t have it printed on a shirt or a mug, I hate that Chicken Soup for the Soul crap, in fact I went out of my way to prove it in a workplace once, surrounded by mugs that had happy-clapper axioms, I bought myself a hideous, decrepit looking skull one. This aside though, life is this great, wandering experience and I wonder then, why so many of us waste these wonderful gifts. I make no delusion that I work to live, I don’t know that I have it in me to be so passionate about anything that I could live to work. Unless it involved travel, perhaps then and only then, could I reassess that claim, but for the moment, I work to live. My biggest fear at the moment is that I’m not really living, or am I? I’ve spent the last three months clearing out the proverbial cobwebs, I feel a change looming and I want to be ready for it. I want to embrace it. I’m not clairvoyant, I don’t know what this change will look like, I don’t even know that I will see it coming, but I can feel it and I want to let it sweep me away. I’ve been waiting. Patiently.

I think somewhere at the turn of 2009 I decided that this year represented something symbolic for me, that it was my “Saturn Ascension” maybe it’s something to do with being 27 this September or maybe it’s just time to learn from mistakes and move forward. Whether my perspective has been influenced by some cosmic schism or just some mental shift, I’ve shaken things around a bit. I guess you could call it Fung Shui of the soul, but whatever it is, I plan on it being my conduit to change after getting a little lost somewhere in my mid twenties.

Lost or found, one thing I’ve always had to my credit though is knowing who I am. I’ve never known where I’m going, let’s not create the illusion that I’m anything other than a total airhead floater, I’ve been around plenty of people who know their path and are happy to commit to it, I’ve just never been one of them. In all honesty I doubt I ever will, but no matter how lost I’ve been, I’ve always known who I am at my core and not some social chameleon. I accepted long ago that sometimes I don’t fit in and I’ve come to embrace that as a blessing in disguise. I definitely get less eccentric the older I get, but I still manage to sit on the cusp of societies brands rather than in them.

A friend of mine just returned from Burning Man, one of the 20th/21st centuries most endearing experiments on social behaviours, communities, spirituality, commodities etc. I can’t really begin to imagine what it was like and I don’t know that she could really explain it either, “intense and emotional” were her words, but after 8 days in the desert, mind bending drugs and the general delirium of the event itself I imagine the experience kind of transcends words. Out of all her photos and recollections, I was particularly struck by the wooden temple, adorned with well wishes for those loved, lost and departed. It is burnt (as is the fashion) at the end of the event and all those wishes are taken with it. I like concept. I’ve always been more drawn to concepts, I’ve never really been able to take something as a whole experience, I always tend to walk away with a piece of it. A small concept from an inevitable whole. I wonder how I would have gone at Burning Man unable to comprehend a complete experience?

I guess the cynic in me is always left a little perplexed by such experiments, it also makes me wonder at what point in time hippies, bent out of their minds on hallucinogenic substances, developed an almost monopoly on these critical experiences of love, acceptance and inevitable communion. Why is an event like this a departure from the norm and why are these sorts of utopias only sustainable in our hearts and minds for such a limited time? Why are we so devoid of escape in the “shit” of everyday life? Where did we all become so lost and when will all our communal Saturn’s ascend?

Maybe I’m just in need of a stiff drink and need to stop crossing paths with so many bohemians. Truth be told my melancholy is probably the by-product of a wild envy at the fact this very minute I’m behind a desk, sober as a judge, contributing to corporate Australia while a pack of wild, boho, experimentalists are exploring the windmills of their minds. 