From wax to waneI'm time traveling it seems. Mercury retrograde is a perfect carrier to re-visit psychic locations of the past, re-animate memories and court the benign and occasionally not-so-benign spirits of other times. Last night I hooked up with my soul fixer and good buddy from the halcyon days of the dot com era, Marv. We stepped into
Qool, where
DJ Chloe Harris was spinning sigils of circular magic. Qool is an ongoing electronic music party run by the irrepressible Jondi and Spesh for well over a decade. The portal had moved though.
We managed to track it just south of Market to the legendary End Up, a one time bastion of hardcore gay culture during the peak of SF's wild and free, pre-AIDS, orgy of permission. The End Up of course had one of those tongue in, er cheek names for that time, if you get my drift. Dealing the ravages of promiscuous sex, the gay crowd became more mono y mano and relocated to the Castro. The End Up, like other SOMA clubs became home to the next wave of pleasure seekers; The ravers. Once the parties ended, ecstasy soaked trippers would pile into The End Up. They were open 24 hours and even if they stopped selling alcohol, the party was still on to the break of dawn,
I checked into my past and the beats and grooves hadn't changed a bit. The cellular memory kicked in and I was flooded with images of that era and how everything seemed possible for about 18 months, the sweet spot being mid-1998 to 2000. It was just before the arch-mage of voodoo economics raised the interest rates repeatedly and brought the dot.com era to its knees in just a few short weeks. Like a guy at a bar that had just been sucker punched on his way out, the populace stumbled and staggered for a while, trying to find their car or something resembling it. Too bad they ran into that guy hawking "cheap" houses like fake rolexes just down the street, but thats another story.
That time was filled with the best electronic music, the easiest cash, the coolest technology and the most eager start-ups. It was the next incarnation of the American dream. We were going to innovate and have a great fucking time while we were doing it. Companies all tried to ape Hewlett-Packard as quickly as possible, offering all kinds of perks to get the best and brightest young minds able to make code dance like faeries on the head of a silicon chip. Free beer on Fridays, off sites at Bocce Ball courts, snacks and goodies in the kitchen that would make a fourteen-year-old drool; gummy bears, sodas, pastries in the mornings and lots of very strong coffee. And then there were the parties. Every week, there was at least 2-3 new companies wheeling out dubious product, half-baked at times, just so they could spend their IPO money and show their board a really good time. They always had the hottest DJs, free booze, free food, sometimes even shuttle service.
We were all incredibly naive. It was all one, fucking, massive distraction. While we were dreaming of ways to make the technology do cooler and cooler things, the likes of Salomon, Bear Stearns, Goldman Sachs and Lehman were quietly drilling down into the core of the dot.com boom and sucking the best parts of it right out of its marrow. They were the ones that brought all the companies to the NASDAQ. They ran their IPOs and they made a shitload of money. And guess what? They got out. Greedspan raised the interest rates and in April of 2000, the whole thing crashed, like a poorly written program, filled with all kinds of errors. It was a planned demolition.
Qool used to take place at 111 Minna, which at one point was really nothing more than just an empty art space; high ceilings, walls and a bar. But over the years it got more and more upscale. The "weekly" Qool events, always on Wednesdays, always just after work and not at 3AM, would be flooded by dot commers up from the digital gulch. The place thumped with a sexy urgency bouncing with chilled cocktails and smokin' rooves. Jondi and Spesh managed to keep the party rolling until well past 911. Money was loose and people were a lot less stressed.
111 Minna is like a temple of remembrance now, storing the past, where a few random beads of sweat that didn't evaporate into the mists of time, rest on the ceiling, walls and floor, an invisible fresco of memory and lives during a much more carefree era. Everything seems to drain into The End Up; gay culture, bleary-eyed-ravers and the final remnants of the dot.com boom. The party hasn't stopped yet, though it is getting noticeably smaller and smaller.
I offered up the best case scenario that I could from an inner level in my last post from yesterday. Anon liked it but commented on how the financial crisis is really much more of a functional problem. I completely agree. The biggest challenge that I suppose most people in this country face more than any other is the trance of cognitive dissonance. The world around is much the same as it was but there are glaring details that we gloss over if our brains choose to look for something else. The markers of memory, iconic symbols like McDonalds or Starbucks or Safeway are almost always there, but if you look closer you'll see places with going out of business signs and empty shop windows proliferating at a viral rate. The world is changing and not in a good way. The paradigm of bubbles has popped and their isn't anything left based on that old model to exploit unless its some freakish cap and trade shell game, or unfortunately water. There's no more money to loan under the old system. The ability to repay the creditors is mathematically impossible. It truly is the end capitalism as we know it and maybe thats not such a bad thing. The real challenge is what is going to replace the old system? What new magic pill will "they" have us swallow? How long will people have to starve before they accept the "new new deal" under any circumstances? As I have seen it, the challenge is and has been for a while, not a disparity of wealth between the classes, but resources and I cite "resources" in this case as hyper-dimensional technologies, quantum field energy and a whole host of radical sciences that is so far ahead of the public view that it would make your head spin like Linda Blair in "The Exorcist." The likelihood is that they won't play nice and give up the goods since that is really an even bigger piece of leverage than the debt itself, so we're going to have to figure it out on our own.
The first thing you have to murder like an unrepentant serial thief is the idea that someone will come in and save the day. They won't. Once you've taken care of that dirty business, there are plenty of aspects that reflect where we can turn to in order to discover where the greatest sources of power can emanate from. Look to the outer planets. Pluto in Capricorn is ruthless and enduring. Understand it. Know it. Get tougher. Goats will eat just about anything. Expand your diet and palette. This is survival of the hungriest. Neptune in Pisces gives you deeper access to profound levels of spiritual understanding, forgiveness and love. It melts barriers and dissolves separation. We have an opportunity to really key into oneness in a very real way, not just some wish fulfilling projection through New Age spectacles. People are suffering. Chiron in Pisces is a reminder of that suffering. Lastly Uranus in Aries is the wild card. It can push us to be wildly creative, inventive and unpredictable when its rightly aligned. When its not, we see its shadow in the London riots, where as a result they will now employ biometric facial recognition scanning for the upcoming Olympics and beyond. More chaos of course leads to more "security." But that's the shadow side. Uranus in Aries is jet fuel for the awakened mind.
How all of this shakes out, how people, react, respond, organize, unite, crumble, fall, fail, fly, however it unfolds you will know that you are in the final stages of this Earth story and this dimension as we have known it. Soon, we will get to write the next novel installment and I promise you, it will be an epic for the ages no matter how it turns out.
