Sadz

Tomorrow is my son's birthday (23) and I have no idea what to get him. I can't get anything to him nearly in time, obv. He lives four hundred miles away. I don't think he's home anyway. He's an amazing kid. Still an undergraduate but he has a job (possibly an internship but I've lost track) and his employer sent him to MIT to give a presentation.

Three weeks later his brother has a birthday (25) and I have no idea what to get him either. And then a week after that, the younger one graduates from college, and his wife too, and I have no idea what to get them for graduation presents.

I feel out of touch with my boys. I had a chat with their mother the other day while completing the process of paying off the mortgage and quitting all claim to the house (in divorce, the simple solutions are best). Like me, she's followed up on our association with a private life that has its complications. But she's in close contact with them. Well, she's their mother. Still, I don't like feeling distant, while at the same time it's only natural for me, and am filling my time and attention with what's in front of me, as is ever my wont. So I shouldn't worry. Maybe I just don't like to perform poorly on obligations.

Several times we had our annual Furr Ball but there was none this year, the venue being lost and the friendship between the two men that put it together being over. One of those men is throwing an alternative party in June. He and his friends named their camp Dragon Ass, so they're having a Dragon Ass Ball. But I just can't get into it. The fact of a web page is one reason; the fact of vendors and selling t-shirts is another. It just seems sort of douche-y somehow.

As does Burning Man. The event continues to evolve, in no way for the better. I originally went in search of something, and I did find something, a lot of something. But little of what I found really required that particular event. The attraction of the event is an atmosphere that creates amazing possibilities and that could never exist at any other place and time. But that atmosphere is being lost as the controlling non-profit struggles with the non-profit aspects and draws ever-tighter control over its artists, and its "success" draws ever-growing populations of bros and bucket-listers that know nothing of art and openness and love. I went to Burning Man in search of something I gleaned from reading and research and from my first few visits, but whatever it is was already dying and today I can see that whatever it is I go in search of will not be found there. It's a great and mind-blowing event and worth the trouble just for that; but from some perspectives, in the modern parlance it has already jumped the shark.

It may be I am shifting direction. More inclined to create for creation's sake rather than for some external event and approbation. More inclined to help those around me than to just consume the perks of a broad social life. I don't know. But those are good things. We'll see.