Occupying the Outside

I got back to Los Angeles after two weeks in London where I literally wrote every damn day until at least midnight every night. The weird thing about writing is you end up with massive holes in your life - September 2010 is completely missing, because of the political drama I wrote about Freddie Laker. January is gone because I was working for Channel 4. April - completely fucked. June? In Scotland researching the mining industry. So I frequently end up with huge gaps where I've disappeared into my own weird little isolated writing world for 4-8 weeks, and I pop up again and find out that Egypt's gone into uprising, or Katrina's destroyed New Orleans, and I'm like WOW! SHIT! while everyone else is bemused by the fact I only just discovered we had a new President or something (I was exaggerating on that one: I did manage to stay abreast of a campaign I worked on).

So anyway. City of Angels. I arrived late on Saturday night after a loooong flight (Justin Bieber movie and four episodes of The Killing). I lined up, stinking of old lady farts from the flatulent Polish bird sat next to me for ten hours, and shuffled up to immigration for my customary crap photo and fingerprint check. The guy at the desk looked at me suspiciously (mohawks tend to make authorities suspicious) and then decided to question me for half an hour, drilling me on every detail of my life. Why was I a chef on boats? Why was I on a B1 visa in 2003? How long did I stay in Florida in 2004? It rattled me to my core, and reminded me of how fragile my time in America is, how dependent on some twat in immigration who might just be in a really bad mood one day, or not like my nose or something. They could decide to throw me out any second, and they wouldn't need a reason. For some reason, my seven years of going back and forth without question gave me complacency, made me feel a sense of entitlement - and the United States does not condone entitlement. You have to earn everything here, sell your soul, act grateful all the time. The only thing they can't take away from you is citizenship. Did you know that? Once an American, always one. I'd quite like my US passport, because I love this country as much as I loathe it. My run-in with USCIS, however, really shook me up, to the extent that I went to see a new immigration lawyer, some guy way out in Encino, first thing on Monday morning. It took me bloody ages to get there, and I later discovered it was because Obama was in town. I'd wondered why everyone was on the streets demonstrating. Yep, missed that one on the last two week blackout. I also completely missed the start of Occupation Wall Street - I discovered that from a bunch of grainy youtube vids featuring earnest, inarticulate teenagers.

I'm glad it's getting more mainstream media attention, because I was really put off by their website, bad videos of kids who had no idea why they were there, online comments like 'the streets of America will burn', and stupid shit like "let's go march on this street and look at the cars we'll never be able to afford which THE RICH own" - probably written by kids skiving off their 40k a year schools. That kind of stuff is alienating, destructive and harmful to the cause. I'm all for anarchy and causing trouble - hell, give me a law, and I have an almost pathological need to break it - but I do not want to join a protest which is a bunch of trustafarians in a park with a well meaning, but vague claim to be 'the 99%' and an inability to clearly state what their aims are. One, the 99%? I think the nutters in middle-America who still believe in big business and hawk American flags on their (soon to be repo-ed) house might not want you to represent them, because they're quite happy in cloud cuckoo-land. Two - the poor, the uninsured, the unacceptable sections of society existed well before Wall St got really dodgy and deregulated, and you didn't represent them then. They're still gonna be there when you middle classes get your credit lines up and running and your savings accounts rosy and flush. What then? Are you still gonna represent the other 80%? Or are you going to be too busy, say, campaigning for undocumented citizens' rights or watching Joey play baseball at his private school at the weekend? And what about the rest of the world, America? Nice to see you get a bit motivated, but you didn't seem too concerned until your comfort got affected, oh middle classes. It's OK, we're all selfish - we're human beings. But don't pat yourself on the back quite yet. Get yourself back on your feet and reserve a little bit of passion for someone else....

Having said all this, I'm totally into the Occupation now the unions are getting involved, it's becoming more mainstream and representative, (yeah, I'm a sucker for Michael Moore, Susan Sarandon and Postal Workers) and that kind of earnest, youthful zeal is being taken up, and metamorphosing into something tangible, something we can all taste and recognize. To a beat-up cynic with recession war scars all over my twisted soul, being lectured at by the over-educated, under-employed and relatively life-unscathed just comes across as sanctimonious BS. That's probably my blatant ageism and it's definitely the massive chip I have on my shoulder against the wealthy middle classes who claim poverty, or continually profess not to be rich but seem to live these amazing lives which to a poor person - it looks like rich, dude. But there it is. We need really young passionate people to provide fire and passion and get the ball rolling - the rest of us are struggling daily with 18% APRs, car repos, jobs falling through and mortgage repayments, and I guess we're still shell shocked that this shit all happened, and doesn't seem to get better. I know dragging my ass through the Obama campaign when I was still reeling from an enormous medical bill for MRSA (uninsured) and losing every single freelance gig I had practically killed me, to the extent that it took me two years of intermittent homelessness and absolute hell before I was finally able to regain some kind of even keel in around March of this year (after I gave up my car for repossession, incidentally).

So we need the yoof for sure, but we also need age, experience and a wise, guiding hand to stop the Occupation toppling over into some kind of London-type riot, or simply becoming a bunch of kids banging bongos, eating pizza and posting on their twitter accounts. I kind of like riots, but the idea of white, middle class kids rollicking through New York throwing Kombucha bottles at McDonalds doesn't appeal. I think that's probably why most liberals were pretty unenthusiastic at the start, as Glenn Greenwald writes in Salon - and let's face it, naked chicks have their place in Burning Man, but on the streets of New York... I just don't want to see your tits, excited girl. It's not going to make me join your cause, it's going to make me think you're an exhibitionist fool and join the GOP.

Just kidding.

So now I'm pretty excited about this whole thing, although reservations still linger. When you've marched for a whole bunch of shit and seen anti-war movements spring up and be ignored by governments professing to be left wing, when you've had Hope and seen it crushed in the onslaught of a GOP which controls the House, when you've watched the horrendous Tea Party crawl out from under a rock and gain political traction, when you've tried in vain to get the media to cover issues like the DREAM act years before it had a chance of getting to the Senate - you have caution, and you have circumspection, and you don't want to join a movement only for it to turn into a bunch of sixteen year old anti-capitalists preaching to you about shit you already know, and joining forces with - I dunno, PETA, who are all fucking mad. (Disclaimer: I bought a second hand rabbit fur coat in London two weeks ago, and I am scared of being sprayed by animal activists who don't distinguish between new dead and old dead. Despite the shopkeeper's reassurances that the rabbit did not die in vain just for the coat, "it was eaten" she said, without irony - I still worry)

So I wonder what will happen now. The government and big business are so deeply intertwined that I personally can't see how you can untangle this mess without massively reforming a White House that's enormously corrupt, that condones Wall St and its excesses, and that feeds off them. I think governmental reform, transparency and bank regulation is the only way to safeguard our future. But then we're still taking for granted that once the enormous tasks of restoring the middle classes, taxing the rich, dismantling Big Corporations, and making government more accountable and transparent - once this is achieved, we kind of assume all the other problems: severe poverty, under-funded public schools, rising costs of healthcare, racism, global warming, communicable diseases, animal cruelty and morons who buy fur coats - are going to follow and become magically solved.

That's obviously not the case.

I can't help thinking that once the middle classes are OK again, they'll go back to being the complacent, selfish assholes that people are - and I include myself in that assumption. I'm fortunate in that being an alcoholic, neurotic mad person, if I lapse even for a second, my life collapses around me. It's pretty exhausting, always policing yourself and paying for minute lapses with minor tragedy and chaos. But in a sense it's pretty lucky, because it means I have to stay on the ball all the time. I don't get to be too complacent. Even on a good day I'm highly aware that I'm a deeply unpleasant person, which...

I forgot the point.

But now - now we're in a situation now where we're teetering on change, on some kind of revolution, and we can't be complacent, we have to be the best, we have to keep learning and evolving, and we have to resolve not to look back, because there was no golden era pre-crash, pre-banks, pre-Bush, pre-Obama, pre-Wall Street. Which means we still have the opportunity to make it happen.

This could be that opportunity, if it's played right.

That's pretty fucking cool.

I still refuse to wear hemp and bang bongos though.

Post Burning Man (Not Decompression)

I'm still struggling to write about Burning Man. It's probably the most difficult event I've ever tried to put into words. I have such an unusual job: turning real life into unearthly prose, or recreating the frailty and foibles of the human condition in a screenplay. And I'm schtumped by eight days in the desert which were incredible: both grounded in the suffering of what it is to be human, and somehow transcendent of it.

When I write screenplays, producers are always combing through the script, asking whether every action or word attributed to a character is truthful. It annoys me because we never lose the ability for change in life. A person never loses the potential to surprize themselves. I learned to detach and to walk away in Burning Man. I learned to acknowledge a fiery, burning emotion, without feeding it and creating drama. I learned that sometimes, for whatever reason, people put expectations upon you that are driven primarily by their own selfish needs (we're all selfish, it's just a part of being human) - and that you don't have to live up to these expectations if it's not true for you, if it's going to make you unhappy. You don't need to make a big deal about it. You simply set down your boundaries and move on, ignoring their reaction because you're confident you've dealt with the situation wisely and kindly.

The first expectation a friend put upon me was inviting herself along to Burning Man. I had not invited this friend, nor intimated I would like her to come - in fact, I had talked extensively of how happy I was to experience Burning Man alone, and to plunge into meeting strangers. And then she informed me that she was coming with me. This is a friend who has always been loving, generous and kind, and whom I owe a lot to. I was quite happy for her to go to Burning Man, but I didn't want her to come to Burning Man with me. Had I wanted her to come with me to Burning Man, I would have asked her, so I found her behavior odd, threatening and a little claustrophobic. I wanted to go to Burning Man without anyone "knowing" me, or transposing their image of me from the real world into this completely separate reality. Instead of telling my friend "Please come, but not with me" or maybe setting boundaries for ourselves, I felt anxious and trapped, held hostage by her self-invite. I felt like I owed it to her to swallow my annoyance. I was unable to articulate what I really felt.

In the end, the situation was resolved when my camp said they didn't have any room for one extra person. I don't think my friend quite understands that in the end, the camp made the call (because I was too cowardly to!) and she was welcome to have found her own way there without relying on me or my contacts. However, I still think she feels resentful towards me for "blocking" her Burning Man trip - or for being tacitly unwilling to let her come along on mine, as if I unconsciously manifested a too-full camp (I wonder if I did?!).

This was one of those situations where I knew in my heart that I needed those eight days in the desert to be eight days with Burners, not people from my separate work-reality, not people who brought dramas and issues onto the Playa that I wanted to leave behind for eight short days. I will return to Black Rock City next year, and again, there are very few people I would want in my camp for the same overtly selfish reason. I'm quite happy for my friends and acquaintances to go to Burning Man, but I don't want them to go with me, to camp with me, or to be in any way reliant on me.

This is because like most of us, in the real world, I spend a lot of time doing what other people want, being considerate of others feelings, tailoring my own behavior to suit the demands of others. I'm a nanny of broken people - losers are my specialty ; ) these are great qualities. But I did not want to put others first at Burning Man, to wake up and worry about whether X had fun last night, or feel anxious because Y wanted to spend time alone with me, or feel concerned that Z didn't get on with Y and so I should schedule in them before X.... Fuck that. I wanted to roam alone. I intuitively knew that my Burning Man experience must start off a solitary one, even if that sounded selfish and incomprehensible to those closest to me in my separate default-world reality. And it's not that Burning Man is selfish. Precisely the opposite. Burning Man is the most selfless experience I've had for a long time. It's about community and giving - but if you can't throw yourself into that community, and if you can't gift because someone is holding you back, it impedes your experience, impacts negatively upon your stay on the playa. I needed to not give to one or two people who were leaning on me, using me as a crutch because they didn't feel confident walking alone, so that I could give to many instead. Crutches are great, btw. But if both legs are working, you need to have the courage to leave your crutch at home.

The second person with unreasonable expectations was a man I knew from LA. I had been extremely close to this man for a few weeks - he was another casualty, a bird with a broken wing I picked up and nursed - but I was becoming increasingly alienated from him due to his self-destructive tendencies, and his curious blindness to the needs and wants of those around him. This man suffered from "center of the universe" syndrome. He was a queen of misery, the protagonist in a perpetual, pathetic tragedy. His ego, his pain, his suffering, his victimhood, dominated everything and everyone around him, and prevented him from seeing the hurtful affects of his behavior and words on others. He had a vicious, self-loathing streak I probably tolerated back in LA more than I should.

I wanted him to come to Burning Man initially because he epitomized someone who needed it: he was a man who had literally lost all hope, whose self-hatred was actually palpable. You stand close to this guy, and you feel the hate coming off him in waves. It sucker-punches you, and you instinctively want to take the pain away - and then you realize that just makes it worse. His hate actually feeds off attention, off others' desire to help and to soothe. Acknowledging and pandering to his pain actually enabled him to manifest it even more, and generate more negative attention, in a self-destructive, self-perpetuating cycle.

I thought Burning Man would teach him self-reliance and radical acceptance and community - the most important elements he seemed to lack in his private, selfish, self-constructed hellworld where the population was One. Naively, I thought this man would respect my need and desire to "roam alone", and be generous and undemanding of me, because I had spent so much time in LA treading carefully around his broken feelings. When it became obvious that this wasn't the case, and that Man had expectations I did not and could not fulfill, that Man had either not listened to what I said, or was blithely ignoring it and instead shrieking "bitch!" because I refused to change my plans for him, I had to walk away - from the situation, and eventually, from our friendship and acquaintance.

My experience with him was extremely unpleasant, but it taught me a lot about not reacting. As a fiery, passionate Aries, non-reaction is something I will struggle with for the rest of my life, with varying degrees of success.

And so I am back in London, still reeling from Black Rock City. Your heart and your mind and your soul is cracked wide open in Burning Man, and one of the challenges of reintegrating into regular society is trying to maintain this openness, while adopting the necessary shield you need to move and function in the default world, because the default world doesn't understand or appreciate - perhaps a better thing to say is that it regards with suspicion - what fuels us on the Playa. It takes a lot of time and care to sink back in - and then I was thrust into London 36 hours after getting home.

I feel like I spent the last ten days plastering a big, fake smile on my face, my soul shrieking in pain as I sat through meetings, avoided drunk people dressed in Primark animal costumes at Bestival, striving to maintain some semblance of functionality when all I wanted to do was lock myself away in a cabin, alone with my dog and nature, and slowly slide back into life gently.

Thanks to Jimmy and Sophie for looking after me in Dalston, introducing me to the best kebabs in England and making me laugh and find color in a shockingly gray world, and thanks to Tristan and Thomas for early morning philosophy rants and long talks about love and emotion and polyamory, and what jealousy and possession means. These are huge issues for me post-BM, as I've never dated a man who hasn't 'cheated' or 'strayed' or 'lied to me', and I strive now to comprehend whether this is evidence of my unreasonable expectations, whether I need to think about connecting to people in a different way, whether I want a traditional monogamous relationship, or whether questioning monogamy is actually the result of disappointment and disillusionment and a loss of faith. So many questions. Lots of time. Deliberately choosing solitude and reflection right now feels healthy and appropriate. I'm not in the space for sharing, and that's perfectly OK.

This weekend I'm on deadline for a pilot episode outline. I can't wait to fly back home to California and get out of London. I'm obviously here for a reason, but I'm craving my dog, my yoga, my best mate, and my Angeleno Burners.

I love you Burners. Thank you for opening my eyes on the Playa, Camp Jackpot.

Default World

Back from Burning Man. Flew to London barely 36 hours after I landed back in LA. The default world will never look the same again. I'm a Burner.