"I like the idea of looking up and seeing the whole cosmos," Lorelei said. "The planets, the stars, just dancing around up there. That's what I want to make happen."
"Yes," I nodded. "What we do with the ceiling will be crucial."
Lorelei, Carl, and I are a small part of a larger group that's planning something. An event so audacious that just thinking about what we're trying to do takes my breath away. The ceiling will be an issue.
Tonight, however, we were at Driftwood, a nautically themed bar that, if you squint right, does look something like the interior of an old tall ship. It's very dark, spartan, and has so much wood that you can smell it. Carl and Lorelei were drinking beers, while I ordered a Native Tongue (gin, cucumber, cilantro, lemon, sparkling wine). Driftwood has a small cocktail menu, but the bartenders mix them well and they're all $9 — a combination that is increasingly rare.
Lorelei has been in San Francisco 14 years, and thinks that we're all still a bunch of hippies. "Look," she says, "if you didn't move to San Francisco for a job, if you came here because you wanted to be in San Francisco, then deep down you're kind of a hippie, and we should all accept that."
I get a pass. I never particularly wanted to live here, and no one's more surprised than me at the long, slow seduction that San Francisco has put me through over the last eight years.
These days a lot of people I know think that I have the magic key to special events and parties, but I've got nothing on Lorelei and Carl. They have access to incredible things that I've never even heard of. "Have you been to such-and-such?" they ask casually. No — I didn't know it existed. "Oh," they say. "Well, they made a waterslide in the abandoned sewer tunnels. It was so much fun."
I bet.
Lorelei and Carl met at an event thrown by someone who lives far up in the wilderness of Mendocino County. The friend had called Carl before he began the five-hour drive up. "I need you to pick up two women and 50 pounds of meat," she said.
"Absolutely," he told her. Lorelei was one of the three.
They bonded on the drive up, and now they share things to do. "He's learned that if I text him, 'Be at this place at this time,' he needs to do it," Lorelei says. "He's changed plans on first dates, told them, 'Oh, we need to go do this now. I don't know what it is.'"
Perhaps I should be jealous, but I do okay — and the truth is that I don't do better because I'm fairly solitary. As a writer, I actually do spend most of my time writing alone. It's a choice.
When the music isn't too loud, Driftwood is a fantastic chill space, easy to slip into and talk. We've managed to find space on an anomalous red couch — how does this belong on a ship? — and are feeling good.
The conversation turns to boundary-pushing art. We want to create an erotic environment that avoids appearing like just one more goddamn sex party, thus boring half the people who come. But the danger in doing something novel is that people don't always understand everyone's boundaries. How do we keep participants safe?
It's a conflict that everyone who's tried to do something like this understands well. At 2013's Burning Man I brought a homemade surrealist game that I thought would be mildly interesting, but instead was (somehow) so powerful that it frequently left people in tears. Was that a sign of artistic success, or that something had gone horribly wrong, or just that I was an asshole?
Most people in this community have given me a free pass on things like that because, hey, "artist" — but Lorelei agrees with me that we have a responsibility as human beings, too. It's just hard to figure out where those lines are. If you think you've figured it out, I guarantee you you're going to hurt someone unnecessarily.
I order a Blood and Sand (scotch, cherry herring, orange juice, sweet vermouth) and we talk about the joy of smash rooms: places where you get to swing a baseball bat or throw rocks at computers and TVs and the technological artifacts of modern life. It creates a massive catharsis, one you never even knew you needed. Perhaps not unlike looking up and unexpectedly seeing the planets dance on the ceiling. We hope.
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