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The increasingly inaccurately-named blog of journalist and futurist Chris Taylor. Either the most sporadically brilliant amateur blog, the most brilliantly amateur sporadic blog, or the most amateur sporadic brilliance on the Web since 2001.
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Daily Blah FAQ
Who are you?
I'm the newly-appointed Future editor at Business 2.0 and the former San Francisco correspondent for Time Magazine.
Wow, so does this mean everything you write reflects Time Inc's opinion? Or do you perhaps have some sort of standard disclaimer to the effect that it doesn't?
Naturally, the opinions contained in this blog are not those of my employers. In fact, some opinions may be the polar opposite of my employers. Some may be the same, for all I know. Hey, it's not like I ask my employers their opinions about everything in the news, okay? Let's just say that if this were a Venn diagram with one circle marked "my opinions" and the other one marked "my employers' opinions", there would doubtless be some overlap. But neither I nor my employers are able to pinpoint exactly where that overlap is.
What is this Daily Blah thing?
An experiment for a column I wrote about blogging back in December 2001. All these years later, I haven't been able to kick the habit.
Do you write any other blogs, by chance? Could that have something to do with the fact that Daily Blah isn't always Daily?
Yes -- the Future Boy blog for Business 2.0. And yes. If you want true, editorially-mandated daily coverage from me, that's probably the best place to look.
Mister, you talk funny. Are you one of them furrners?
Why yes I am, as it happens. I was born, raised and educated in Great Britain. I've been living in the U.S. since 1996 and identify as British.
I say, old chap, you forgot the "u" in "colour."
No I didn't. I may identify as British, but I am also an American journalist writing for an American audience about mostly American issues. These two different sides of me are a constant source of tension. Nevertheless, Daily Blah will adhere to American English grammar and spelling.
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Daily Blah for... Monday, September 04, 2006
Back From Extremes
It's the little things, the dumb consumer things, that delight when you get back from the desert. Running water that doesn't involve propane. Couches that aren't covered in dust. Roads on which you're allowed to drive faster than five miles an hour. Drive-thrus and diners. Permanent structures. Impenetrable shelter from the elements. Flush toilets.
And yet when I awoke from my marathon post-drive nap, after that brief moment when the brain tries desperately to make sense where it is, I felt sorely disappointed to be back in my comfortable, classy, cozy San Francisco home. I longed for my dusty little tent, and the dusty tents and domes of the neighborhood that surrounded it. I longed to hear someone calling out the silly playa names of the people who made it home -- Smash and Not That Dave, Doctor Odd and Dixie, D Best and Chad Wow, to name but a few -- and I longed for more time. The Man couldn't have burned already, could he?
"It's only a week in the desert," read a popular button (or badge, in Brit-speak) on the playa this year. (Playa buttons are one of the Burners' favorite ways of poking fun at themselves, alongside the Piss Clear newspaper and random people with megaphones). Yes, it's only a week in the desert. But what a life-changing event that week invariably is. Cracked-out from lack of sleep though I may have been on the eight-hour drive home, my head and heart were bursting with memories of magic. By which I mean the ease and grace of genuine community; the rewards of sweaty survival work and constant Good Samaritanism; the unbreakable bonds forged in a fiery crucible.
After napping for a couple of hours in a coffee-free rest stop by a lake in the low Sierras, I was hailed by a conservative-looking older guy, drawn to the dust on my car and asking if I'd gone to Burning Man. "How did you guess?" I smiled.
"What is it, an art festival?"
"No shit, Sherlock," was the response suggested by the caffeine-deprived part of my brain. But I'd just gone through extensive retraining on the value of talking to strangers. Dutifully I dived into my head in search of lucidity. Anyone of any age, even Mr. Upright Middle America, is a potential Burner. He needed to understand.
Yes, I said, it's an art festival, but it's also an event that takes you out of your safe civilized life and makes you build a new one. It's a ridiculous party in the most extreme of environments, an attempt at decadence in the desert that, more often than not, actually works. He nodded, and asked for the website. Maybe next year he'll show up on Thursday in an RV, decked out in corporate logo-wear. And maybe the penny will drop and he'll show up the year after that, on Monday, wearing a utilikilt stuffed with dome-building tools and a silly grin.
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