Children waiting for the day they feel good
Happy birthday, happy birthday
And I feel the way that every child should
Sit and listen, sit and listen
–Gary Jules/Mad World
Picket lines and picket signs
Don’t punish me with brutality
Talk to me
So you can see
What’s going on
–Marvin Gaye/What’s Going On
Returning from a vacation is always challenging. Kind of a bummer. It’s always hard to get back into productive employee mode, even if you like your job, but some years it’s worse than others.
The year Mark and I went to Burning Man, 2001, was one of those years.
It is always weird coming back to the real world after Burning Man. A lot of Burners refer to it as coming back to the Default World. Not the real world, but…the one we’re sort of stuck with. The one that we inherited. Burning Man is a completely custom world, rebuilt every year. It is a wild, wild, mind-altering ride. When you spend a week where everybody lives in a sort of dream state made physical, it changes the way you view the world. It’s a lot like a hallucinogen. Even once you’re off the trip, your vision and memory still retain traces of what you saw and lived under the influence.
The week we returned from 2001 Burning Man, with the playa dust barely out of our hair, Mark got laid off from work.
Still reeling from the layoff, then came 9/11 and the whole country was turned upside down. The Default World, has never seemed more surreal than 2001. In a lot of ways, the Default World has still not recovered.
We went back to work yesterday.
I’m crossing my fingers.
The Default World still appears to be there.
We’ll see how the week goes.
Time keeps on slippin’, slippin’, slippin’
Into the future
–Steve Miller/Fly Like An Eagle
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