I'm going.

On Friday I was efficiently accomplishing office things, like I always do, when Speed (a crazy tour guide friend who some of you may recognize from the films "The Cruise" or "Waking Life") came in and was like "I'm going out West!"
"Where to?" I said.
"To Burning Man!"

I should have known. The first time we met we realized that we'd been in the same place at the same time (watching our mutual friend Paradox's Mystic Circus burlesque at the Emerald City stage last year, which turned into literally the best dance party I have ever experienced. We broke the stage.) before we had ever met.

I love that kind of story and I miss traveling around all the time. When I was in college I would buy these student packs of 5 plane tickets to anywhere, good for a year, and just hop around to see my folks, my old friends, and crazy-ass places I had never been to before. Once I took a Greyhound bus by myself from New York to Seattle, and lied to my folks so they wouldn't worry.

These days I hesitate to take the G train to Brooklyn if it's really hot out, or after 10 p.m.

It's symptomatic of a general city-living jadedness I'm realizing I have acquired inadvertantly. By putting up an unassailable, unfriendly front, I've lost a lot of the spontaneity and delight I used to take in coincidences, strangers, chances.

Also I think it will be fun.
So I'm going to Burning Man on Wednesday the 28th and coming back after Labor Day. I have to figure out some undersea accessories now (at which I am a pro, thanks to the Mermaid Parade.)

going to Junior's!

for a surprise birthday dinner for Johanna, a lovely & talented girl. Sources say it's "like Howard Johnson's, except for the cheesecake." But others are looking forward to it, although if I could really have anything to eat at all right now, it would be takeout chinese with green peppers and tofu and garlic eggplant. Oh, thinking about it only makes it worse.