Running for the wall

Wow, it’s been an interesting several weeks. I don’t even remember my last post. I went to Burning Man, which was an intense experience on many levels. First, the place is just magical and intense to begin with. But things really started cooking for me when I ran into someone on Friday night who was from New Orleans. Since I don’t watch TV and was really incredibly busy for the weekend Katrina hit through the first part of the week, I didn’t get the news. It wasn’t until Friday that I heard, and i was in the middle of this giant art party in the desert. As Johnny LeFite told me the story of what was ACTUALLY happening, I fell apart. There I am at two in the morning in a playa bar called Whisky and Whores hosted by a camp of people largely from the Gulf region. It was intense. These people had come all the way from the bayou to the playa and all they had left were their sequined hats and fuzzy jackets.

And as Johnny unfolded the devistation and the clusterfuck of government ineptitude, i started trembling with anger, empathy and grief at the loss. I love New Orleans. Even though I only spent one night there (I’d made a detour from a work trip I was taking from Alabama to Dallas just to go), after a few hours I was asking where I could find work and a place to live. I was smitten immediately. So New Orleans is special to me.

Anyway, it was a traumatic, exhausting day as I tried to help organize a Burning Man response feeling incredibly guilty at the juxtoposition between being dancing carefree in the Nevada desert while so many people were dying and being displaced. And in the absence of any reliable news source out there, it felt like I was living in a bubble while chaos reigned in the entire country.

I got home and was relieved that things seemed relatively normal (gas prices and oil company profits rising commensurately, hm..) affected by this and the ensuing saturation of images I absorbed for the first time when I returned. It took about a week to get beyond the shock, anger and fear of global economic collapse kicked off by gas prices putting an intolerable strain on the economy. Hasn’t happened yet, but I really wonder if the economy can bear another blow to oil production (say, losing the war in Iraq and the second largest oil reserves falling into the hands of muslim extremists… how about civil war in Saudi Arabia? ‘nother Hurricane?) in the next couple years. Even so, the price of oil just continues to rise, which means the cost of everything is going to rise. That’s called inflation. Add into the mix that the supply of oil is only going to shrink from here on out, the total lack of any significant advances in petrolium-based alternative energy deployment, and a government rife with oil and defense executives and you have a recipe for economic disaster.

Here in San Francisco, we had our one or two days of the newspapers asking “are we ready for the Quake?” I stocked up on water but have slacked so far on putting an actual 72 hour kit together. Gonna do that this weekend, I think.

And today I launched a campaign to raise money for the production of my next web video for “Semper Fi”, a song inspired by my sister who’s been in the Marine Corps for something like 15 years or so. If you’re down with what I’m up to in the world, help me out, wouldja? It’s gonna cost $3500 to produce the video, and I need help.

http://www.ianrhett.com/semper_fi/

Thanks!