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Wow! The psytrance scene tends to be feast or famine, but this is ridiculous! With New Year’s Eve falling on a blue moon and a Thursday night, there’s so many options for the weekend that it’s hard to know what to do. Good problem to have!
2009/2010 is also wrapping up a decade that was in so many ways the Awful Aughts: the dot-com crash, 9/11, the Patriot Act , eight years of Bush/Cheyney, two wars, FISA, the Wall Street meltdown …. bleah. Glad we’re done with it. And 2009 was tough. Like I wrote a year ago, we may have turned a corner, but there’s still a long way to go.
Then again, 2009 was also a great year in a lot of ways: getting started on Qworky and Computers, Freedom and Privacy; lots of focus on diversity (in conferences, open source projects, and activism); social nework activism with #p2 and Get FISA Right, and then watching the Sea of Green in Iran take things to another level; and much much more. At least for me, it feels like we’re going into 2010 on an up swing.
And the Awful Oughts had their upsides as well, both intellectually (computer science is a social science :-)) and even more importantly personally. In 2003 I wrote You shouldn’t exist/And you? a pair of personal ads-as-poems addressed to the universe. The universe answered and the next few years kicked off a wonderful virtuous cycle filled with incredible women, goddesses so amazing that by all rights they really shouldn’t exist. As I had so optimistically hoped, we did in fact get along pretty well. Is it any wonder I think I’m the luckiest person in the world?
When I think about how to make my world even better, I notice that In 2009, I didn’t spend anywhere near as much time hanging out with the goddesses I know — or my other close friends either.  That’s something to change going forward. So #1 on my new year’s resolutions is to spend more time and energy with people I really care about. Yeah, we’re all ridiculously busy and the logistics are challenging … still, my intuitions tell me that it’s worth the effort.
Five years ago, close to the midpoint of the decade, we saw Astral Projection on a blue moon.  The Tarot reading D did for me that night is really remarkable. The two of wands reversed covering me conveys my boredom at the time and need for a new direction. The two of swords at the heart of the matter spotlights my attempt “to maintain calm through your balanced rationality, which causes you to deny your intuitions.” The Page of Cups and the Queen of Swords symbolize women who continue to transform my world. And the final outcome is The Moon:
Aim to evoke a conscious desire to go further than intelligence – the understanding of that which is and decide to make a “leap” into pure and simply creativity. Intuition of faith – participation in the becoming of what is to be. Bring inner ecstasy back into your consciousness. Allow your intuitive powers to guide you – the change has come, even though it does not show.
Good advice — and many thanks to the goddesses Aphrodite, Eris, Artemis, Metis, Kali, as well as D and everybody else who’s reinforced it over the years since then. It hasn’t always been easy for me to take but I’m working on it 🙂
So tonight, and the rest of the weekend, I’ll be choosing desire over fear, trusting my intuition, trying not to analyze things too much, falling through the limitations of intelligence into pure and simple creativity, and bringing inner ecstasy back into my consciousness. And hopefully that’ll set the rhythm up for the entire year — and decade.
Happy new year, all, and here’s to a wondeful 2010 and a great decade. “Terrific Teens” has a certain ring to it, don’t you think?
jon
jon | 31-Dec-09 at 5:41 pm | Permalink
And Twitter played such a big role in 2009 for me, here are a few excerpts from the #bluemoon hash tag:
jon | 03-Jan-10 at 5:46 am | Permalink
On the spur of the moment, we decided to have New Year’s Eve dinner at Delfina and by showing up right as they opened, we managed to get one of the walk-in tables. Yay for living in the Castro 🙂 Then we took a nap, toasted midnight with champagne, and hung out at home for a while (with D once again reading my cards). At around 3:45 we headed out to see Goa Gil for a few hours. It was great. A lot of people came over after the Tantra party and so it was a great chance to start the new year with a lot of familiar faces.
We took it easy on Friday: a lot of reflecting for me on the tarot reading, another nap. After a nap, we headed to Oakland Friday night for Psyngularity along with a friend, meeting up with several others as well — including a brief appearance from Mistress Tea, from my story-in-progress The Anomaly and the Tentacles. w00t! The music was great, excellent sets by Witchdokta, Dr. Spook, Cortex, Huxflux, and Mubali. With great string art and visuals, a happy crowd mixing old-timers and new faces, and a very femme energy on the dance floor much of the time, it was a classic night. We got there early enough to enjoy the feeling of the nearly-empty dance floor as people came on. Things started getting seriously trippy at 1:30 or so, with the pure physicality of the dancing mixing with the psychedelic art music and vibe. My day of reflecting on the tarot reading and new year’s resolutions and goddesses and new years past and present all merged together … sometimes all you can say is “oooh!” We left at 6:30. For the last hour or so there were just a handful of us on the dance floor. “Sweet underground!” Spook said. Yeah really.
New Year’s Elevation on Saturday night got moved from the Gingerbread House to Kelly’s Mission Rock due to permitting problems, and Deborah decided to take a pass after hanging with friends watching videos all day. I wasn’t at all sure I’d be able to make it out, but hey, one of my other new year’s resolutions was to have more art, beauty, and fun in my life. So I spent the day sleeping, and got there just before midnight as the “trance” section was winding up and the “psy” section was kicking off, and guess what?
Another great night!
Spook, Cortex, Sausee, Nimerix … fantastic Geomagnetic.tv visuals, a good crowd, rave reviews for my rainbow earring that glows under black light, and a very happy vibe. Kelly’s Mission Rock doesn’t have a great rep as a venue — there have been sooooo many generic or mediocre parties there, and the crowd’s often very vanilla — but it has a lot of good features too, including a dance floor big enough that there’s ample space to cavort in the back (which I did) and space outside to hang out and talk and watch the water (which I did as well, hopefully sparking a new friendship in the process).
What a great way to start out the decade.
I heart psytrance.
Happy 2010!
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visualize this: After falling straight into deep sleep, you getting floating in the surroundings. You look around everyone and see your actual body at rest. The thought which you might possibly be dead tends to make you shudder, and you scream. You wake upward, your hands clammy, and also you realize you’re back with your bed. It was many a dream. Or appeared to be it?
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