Oopsie

I spent part of the afternoon and evening down at the shop repairing my electric loveseat.

(Note 1: It needs a name!)

(Note 2: It broke in the desert. I don't recall if I've told the story. Maybe part of it. I can't be bothered remembering or researching where I wrote what.)

I was successful in that it runs again. The fix I put into it may or may not be reliable over the long term. The seat needs a total redesign. There's much to do. I chose not to continue once it was dark and I was there all by myself. Set the alarm and left for home.

(Note 3: The rush is because we're having our kick-ass Decom party in two weeks and I want the crazy thing running and in top form. There's much else to do as well to set the place up. There will be several unique vehicles cruising around the back lot, the micromini playa we are putting together, and the Lighthouse, and the Colosseum, and two or three bars, and a DJ, and we hope about five hundred people.)

ANYway, I came home ('bout eight miles) and as I reached the end of the block before ours (these are long blocks, half a mile in length), a brightly lit rocket ship lumbered out of a driveway and went lurching up the road in front of me. It ran very poorly, but it had fins and a fuselage and was well lit up with rope lights along all the contours. A typical Mutant Vehicle, in other words. In my neighborhood. I went all whiskey tango foxtrot and pulled over to chat with the people in the driveway.

They were nicely dressed in a counter-cultural sort of way, batik dashikis or something, I don't really know, and there was a party in the back yard with some sort of groovin' music and lit candles. I stood there smiling while they chatted on and ignored me until I realized I knew one of them. She hadn't seen me yet. I waited, looking friendly, and then there was a pause and I said, "Hi, Nina!"

She was surprised and said hi and tried to figure out who I was. She is a media tech slash computer room person at the local grade school and has been since our kids were there, and she is also a neighbor, and we wave at each other regularly, so I thought it kind of odd that she forgot who I was. But I mentioned my wife, and the rest of it came back to her, and I sort of asked the crowd if that machine had been at Burning Man, because I was there, and I didn't remember it, and so on like that hoping someone would realize a) I was a fellow Burner and 2) I knew one at least of their guests and therefore 3) they could invite me in but NO, no one did.

I guess I shouldn't have expected it. They weren't a theme camp. They were a house in the suburbs. Way too much to expect them to be welcoming. This was not Black Rock City. This was fucking Orangevale.

So Nina said, Oh, you go to Burning Man? and I said, Yeah, we both do, and she said, Your wife goes too? and I said, Yeah, she does, and she said, Well, say hi to her for me, and I said Will do, and continued my way home.

And remembered that my wife's attendance at the Burn is a closely held secret so far as her school district employer is concerned. She is a media tech slash liberrian much like the woman I was talking to and she is quite certain if the media tech people and her employers in general find out she takes the second week of school off to go to that freakazoid hippie drug fest and naked dance party they will can her ass as soon as humanly possible. I don't know if that's true or not but I really shouldn't have said anything.

Oopsie!