Long ago, on an island not too far away… This was last year, when I was kind of in the thick of it. I had just gotten my dialysis port in, but hadn’t yet run with it. Basically you have to heal for some weeks before you can begin treatment with peritoneal dialysis, so I had a tube coming out of my gut that made me very prone to infection. Usually when I go to driftwood I go for the whole time, and last year I was only able to go for like 36 hours. Basically one dock day, one night, and the morning after, and then I was on the ferry home.
One of the things that makes the island special is there’s basically nothing there. You bring in everything you need and pack out everything at the end. I wonder if that’s how the early days of burning man felt? Just like, throwing a cool party with your friends in a place that has nothing (well, there’s not nothing there, Jack has a pretty big solar array and a deck, and the all-important dock is there).
There is a alchemy to just coming together with a bunch of people like that, just to share space and time and sort of care for each other. Not in a ‘this guy needs a nurse’ kind of way (which given my trailing 12 months I also understand) but passing around snacks and sunscreen and shooting the shit all afternoon. Everybody brings their own grace notes to the thing, and there’s a beautiful music to it. Also there’s a lot of good music over the speakers.
Gonna throw up the film photos after this, and I have some things to say about those, too. I have been editing these for almost a year and need to let them out into the world. Perfect is the enemy of done, as they say.
