Oh
my gosh wrestling is fun, and the Northern boys are really giving it
their all: but it's hard to be half hearted on a trampoline.
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Chris asks me if I'd spend 10 minutes digging. I say sure, but I know I'm going back to painting my beloved toilets with Natalie afterwards.
I
go to join the guys - a team of 4 working to fill in a trench.
It's mid afternoon and rather hot in the desert, and there's a lot of
dust that needs to be shifted to fill that space. It's also booty short
day.
So the first thing visitors to the festival see is a row of us shifting dust and flashing flesh. People shout encouragement and ask when our calendar will be out as they drive past.
Goku welcomes newcomers 'to Nowhere, the festival of the working class', and you can see a flicker of concern pass across the hippies' faces when they think that maybe they've signed up for a week of digging holes rsather than hedonism. Naturally, we don't reassure them.
So the first thing visitors to the festival see is a row of us shifting dust and flashing flesh. People shout encouragement and ask when our calendar will be out as they drive past.
Goku welcomes newcomers 'to Nowhere, the festival of the working class', and you can see a flicker of concern pass across the hippies' faces when they think that maybe they've signed up for a week of digging holes rsather than hedonism. Naturally, we don't reassure them.
The
hole never seems to be full and we're stuck into the repetition of
digging now, with our hands doing the action despite the blisters
coming. I'm getting tired, and these guys were digging long before I
came to help out. The sun pounds down, but we don't want to leave the
job undone so we count off. Just fifty shovelfuls more. Another fifty.
Another.
And eventually, the hole is filled and we have saved at least
two hippies from breaking themselves falling down holes. We are working
class heroes, we tell each other, and are rewarded with a cold beer and
an extra helping of tomatoes at dinner.
__________________________
We're drinking martini on top of the toolshed, but becuase I'm up there with French contingent, olives are provided.
__________________________
I touch Raven's arm and ask where he got his scars, stupidly not remembering that it might be a painful question. He tells me about
getting run over in Thailand, being broken and unconscious for weeks and
his mum choosing to leave him there in the country he loved rather than
fly him back to Ireland. And he tells me about his healing and the care
he had from friends and strangers there, showing me a bracelet made of
tiny knots in single strand cotton thread. Each one is a day his friend fasted and
prayed for him.
It's a personal story he told me
and I feel like I pried. I joke he's a cyborg now (though technically he
is). He smiles and chats but there seems to be sadness under there.
I think about robots and taking
on someone else's pain selflessly. Would machines do that for us? I remember the eastern art which is
all over the place, and draw a golden robot on a lotus.
For an hour I'm lost in sepia
markers and watercolour, and people tell me what I'm doing is good.
Normally my art is private, because who would be interested to see it? But here they can look if the want, and apparently they do. Raven likes it so I
cut it out of my sketchbook and give it to him.
A funny sort of gift; feels like it was never really mine
anyway. A product of the dust.
I like to think of it on his wall in Ireland, a piece of me in a place I've never been.
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"Those are the most beautiful toilets we've
ever had. They're like us - pretty on the outside, but underneath
seriously fucked up."
__________________________
There's a bearded cowboy sat on the living room art car I like the look of, so I climb on up and pounce on him. He seems happy about that, and he's in
assless chaps and goes by 'assless chaps' as a name, so that's easy. On
his other side is the Weimar styled cabaret host I spent the early evening appreciating. who regaled us with his
opus 'baby shark' earlier.
Balloons fly over us, tethered to the car and buffeted into our faces by the wind.
Arkem starts up 'balls in my face, balls in my
face' and the rhythm is like a nursery rhyme or a train.. Balls in my
face, I join in, and we chant it out over the dark desert filled with
revellers like stumbling glow worms.
Balls in my face all over the place running out of space it's a disgrace all these balls in my balls in my balls in my face
__________________________
I'm dressed as a fusion of
warriors from across the world, in a chain mail bikini with my body painted in
blue swirls like Celtic woad, my face in moko, my hair in a Mohican. This is how I want to look.
___________________________
SCARING IS CARING
__________________________
Nicholas Immaculate, resident camp king of decor, is having difficulty with his headpiece - it won't adhere because of the heat, and he can't possibly be seen without something dramatic on his head. To avoid having an undecorated head, he asks me if I'll do his face paint as I 'am the only one he'll trust with it', concerned about being attacked by floral hippy designs.
I am insanely flattered, but also nervous, because this man has taste.
He sits on the floor and I paint his head in candy neon stripes and swirls - he enjoys the feeling of the brush on his head and we talk about his house and boyfriend and upcoming moves.
__________________________
I'm drinking cappuccino made by Martin outside his camp's cottage, discussing alternative financial methods for government funding beyond the issuing of bonds. Martin is trying earnestly to stop making coffee for people, but cannot say no to a pretty young man.
_________________________
I didn't know Joey, but I fucking hope that if I go before my friends, they write my name on everyone, drink to me, and insist that my favourite song gets played 3 times in every set.
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