90th Aftermath

It's the Tuesday after the 90th, and even with having taken Monday off (all departments did), I still feel utterly exhausted. It's the kind of exhaustion that saps you mentally, physically, socially… little is left afterwards. I know that everyone worked so hard to make the event a smash, and that it was, but even now I still feel as if I need to take a vacation (which is hard to do).

I planned to take this day off as well, but at the moment I'm sitting in the office making this blog entry. Around 8:30 AM I heard a lot of grinding above the roof of my bedroom, and it turned out that Randall and Dan were working on the plumbing upstairs. For those unaware, I live in the "Belltower" which is at the bottom of Crafts III and houses a lot of the plumbing for the visitor's bathroom, which is directly above.

I ended up waking up to Randall and Dan asking me to vacate the area, as apparently there was a very nasty accident just waiting to happen with a lot of sewage that was backed up just above my head. It's 1:00PM now, and last I checked there were no "oh ****" moments yet, to not be too blunt about it. But it wasn't very comforting to have my Paolo Soleri What If? book, a hardcover of all the work of Richard Deibenkorn, and my copy of the Annotated Oxford NRSV Bible right underneath the "troublesome" area.

Karma would have it, I guess—or just sheer irony, because I'm sure I didn't do "anything to deserve this", hah—that I was meant to move to another, much more comfortable and less leaky housing room (East Crescent 3), but had given that week up to a workshopper who needed an apartment for one week right before she planned to leave. That same week I find a scorpion, a stinkbug, a centipede in the room (which I didn't get to kill and is still somewhere in the walls), along with the usual host of cockroaches, and backed up sewage to top it off. Needless to say, the artist loft-style romance of the belltower is pretty much lost on me at this point.

But there is a big sigh of relief. Now that the 90th is done, things may come a bit back to normal. I realize that my recuperation will have to be a gradual, as I certainly can't spend time in my bedroom when it is no longer a comfortable area for me. It can be hard to find privacy in an arcology-style complex. Usually only one's own personal room is guaranteed privacy—every where else is pretty much fair game for socializing. And with the alumni staying their time here, it was quite difficult to actually find some quiet time in all the hectic scheduling.

The 90th was a bash though. Beyond all the business, the stress and the near-burnout, it was a huge success. Probably the biggest success was Saturday night, as we had the special treat of having Flam Chen come and perform out of the goodness of their hearts. The best way to describe Flam Chen would be to call them a miniature Cirque Du Soleil with less money and more fire. They're a circus/fire-twirling/art performance troupe based in Tucson, and they developed a relationship with the Arcosantians here when they performed for Paolo's 80th. For them, as I hear, it was a defining performance that they count as a major aesthetic influence for them now, and so coming back for Paolo's 90th was a coming to full circle for them. Of course, I took pictures, but I will be saving those for a subsequent blog post, as they deserve their own attention. But it's been great to hang out with them. You can typically separate Flam Chen from Arcosantians just by appearance. It's neat to see a mix of construction-type characters, with overalls or tanktops going one way, usually with a shovel in hand, and then a group of dreadlocked, pierced, tattooed characters going the other way, usually with firestaffs or hoola hoops (or any object they can get their hands on, in which case is usually being balanced on their chins).

Of course, being a huge Cirque du Soleil fan, this was a treat for me. Flam Chen is not just from the same stock as Cirque, they are more or less partners, and they, at least I've heard, are on speaking terms with Guy Laliberté, who founded the French Canadian circus troupe decades ago. Being surrounded by such personalities with that amount of creativity and skill, as well as welcoming them as friends and guests (and not tourists) was an absolute treat. In fact, many will be offering workshops to the Arcosanti residents in their skills, so it's likely I will get some good Power Riser practice and possible learn some Poi.

So much went into the 90th though. In a later entry I will catalogue all that I personally did, with pictures—the 90th T-Shirts being one thing worth mentioning (again, pictures).

But for now, I still have to detox, and there is money from sold T-Shirts that must be counted. At least you can all be content that I'm writing again. Be ready for lots of Photobucket links. ;)