T HE C ENACLE / A PRIL - The ElectroLounge

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layout of tents and RVs at BC, complete even with a colorful map
given out upon arrival, as well as the aforementioned tolerance of our
hosts, led to the festival-wide sale/trade/barter of many kinds of
things. Handmade wares including jewelry and clothing, all sorts of
food, and a lovely array of entheogenic products.
So I set up a blanket along a main walkway, and laid out the
same titles I’d brought to Burning Man many months before and
thousands of miles away. What I had to reckon with was that unlike
in Black Rock City, where everyone shared what they had and gave
their art away freely, the long-haired denizens of Phish tour are very
much commerce-minded. So I devised a scheme involving a little sign
which read “Books for a dollar. Free if you read aloud from one.”
This scheme seemed to work. Some people chose to transact
cash for books, but others cleared their throats and read out proudly.
I remember this experience and my first time at Burning Man as
very powerful times of learning about how many more possible
manners of exchange existed than I’d known previously.
There was one show on Saturday night, then another Sunday
afternoon, but the big event was the all-night show that began at
midnight on January 1, 2000. Despite dire warnings, the power grid
of the Western World did not go out. Phish came on stage and rocked
for more than six hours with little of a break. At the afternoon show
I broke my psychedelic fast of several weeks and swallowed about
seven hits of something good. Later on, there was even more, but
already by show’s end I was not in anything resembling a
conventionally functioning state. Black helicopters over the open-air
venue, likely TV news crews, were to my rapidly ascending mind
iniquitous government forces out to herd us all into cages. I made the
mistake of asking someone else what was going on, and when he said
he didn’t know this only confirmed my worst fears. I wondered if I
had really just been at a rock show, if Phish really existed. When I
ran into one of my traveling mates, I grabbed his shoulders tightly.
“Are you real?” I asked him. “Yes!” he smiled. “Am I?” I asked, more
desperately.
In the remaining hours before the midnight show I was writhing
in my tent in the deeps of this very powerful acid journey. Many,
many hits of pure West Coast liquid. I lost sense of what money was,
what written language meant, what time signified, nearly all things
save my name and where my tent was located in what now seemed
like an incoherent maze of people and camping digs. I went deep into
demons, and well beyond demons. I went to the Void, where no thing
is. I was no thing in the Void. It seemed inevitable that I would go
there. I feared ending up insane, among people lovely but who I
barely knew, hundreds of miles from Boston and what I called home
there.
One of my traveling partners had said to me, on his way to get
a close seat for the midnight show: “Follow the music. It will always
bring you home.” I remember around midnight hearing the ticktocking
of some big clock; I did not know it was midnight, but slowly
The Cenacle / 50 / December 2003