compulse

In which our unlikely protagonist second-guesses the easy life.

This weekend I took a ride on the Mexican Bus—which, it occurs to me now, sounds like one of those humorously disgusting sex acts that people seem to bandy about more often than should be appropriate. (Last weekend, in fact, my friends and I coined “Indian Frisbee” during a game of 500 that ended abruptly when the frisbee landed in a puddle of orange liquid that looked vaguely like tikka masala. We never did come up with a suitably repulsive sexual analog for the phrase.) Thankfully, though, there were no Hot Carls or Donkey Punches last night—just a bunch of crazy folks shotgunning Pabst and flouting seat belt laws.

It’s been a while since I last pierced a beer can with a key, and the shenanigans were a painful (literally—my head still hurts) reminder of the crazy stuff that I used to do on a pretty regular basis. But afterward I came across some photographs by Tod Seelie that made the things I did in what I reluctantly refer to as my hay day pale in comparison. I felt that same sense of, uh, softcoreness as I read a piece in last month’s Harper’s in which Matthew Power describes his journey down the Mississippi River with a group of vagrant freegan anarchists.

That free-wheeling lifestyle is something that I’ve always found really fascinating but never actually imagined being able to handle. A friend of mine and I were having a light-hearted conversation about post-apocalyptic fetishism recently, and I admitted to occasionally having fantasized about a total societal meltdown and the resulting conditions that would require me to ride across the country on my bike with a shotgun strapped to my back—kind of like a nicer and slightly more hygiene-conscious version of the lone biker of the apocalypse from Raising Arizona. And I’m sure that this all sounds kind of silly coming from some dorky “design technologist” in San Francisco, but seriously: Watch some of the video documentation of events like Slaughterama or Minibikewinter and just try to tell me that there isn’t a part of you that yearns to joust on a tall bike cheered on by a throng of drunk kids.

I guess I just want to be part of something raw every once in a while. And while Burning Man scratches that itch to some degree, it would be nice to have something more local and frequent that didn’t require lugging a week’s worth of food and water along. I don’t know what that is, the kind of people I’d expect to meet there, or how drunk I’d have to be to actually enjoy it. But I think it would be worth doing.

If you’re coming to Yuri’s Night, flag me down and we’ll talk about how to make the best of the impending collapse of the global economy. Amon Tobin, John Tejada, Lusine, Christopher Willits, Deru, Tycho and Mr. Projectile will be there. It’s pretty much the antithesis of everything I’ve described here, but I don’t doubt that it’ll be a good time. And if not we can head out into the desert, build a makeshift ramp, and launch ourselves over a heap of burning garbage blasting AC/DC. Yeah, that’s the ticket.