Could it be that the Republican disintegration is also spelling doom for their army of self righteous haters? Wee!

When your project is reliant on gaining the support of women whose reproductive rights you would limit, whose access to birth control and sex education you would curtail, whose healthcare options you would decrease, whose civil liberties you would take away and whose children and husbands and brothers (and sisters and daughters and friends) you would send to war in Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Russia and wherever else you saw fit without actually understanding international relations, I don't feel bad for you.

Indeed, I think we've all had enough of the pity party. At least, all of us still able to form a coherent thought while suppressing that primal scream of anguish over the raging shit pile 8 years of W have wrought.

So, what were these numerous, yet singular, learnings? A sampling:

* We really do make our own reality. If you come out to Black Rock City and have a great experience (and that's “great” in the “impactful” sense, not the “party” sense), regardless of conditions, that's a powerful illustration.

* I now have a true appreciation of the structural utility and elegance of the ball bungee.

* In a raging dust storm, if you don't have a vehicle to retreat into, you might as well pull up chair, get a straw for your cup, and have a cocktail. You're not going to stay any cleaner in your tent anyway, so you might as well be “in it.”

* The raw unpleasantness that can permeate life on the Playa is a great tool for appreciating the simple pleasures of your life at home (yes, my default life is “home”). By the time you've decided to face the exodus, you don't mind spending how ever long it takes in your comfy car seat.

Those are all valuable, but after some time to reflect, I believe the most meaningful experience/lesson learned, the one that will make me pause next January to consider heading back to the Playa, is this: at it's best, the spirit of Burning Man is one of expansive generosity. It makes me smile to remember how I was kind of stressing out before the event about the money I was burning through, getting ready. I realize now that at least some of that investment was a kind of municipal contribution to Black Rock City. Like many, I over-packed for my own needs (and in anticipation of catastrophes that luckily didn't materialize), and instead found myself transferring that slack, that investment to my fellow citizens. Need extra ball bungees? Here's a dozen. Trying to build shade? I have extra tarps and rope you're welcome to. Having trouble getting your structure set up? Here, let me help.

How cool is it to have something as simple as attention, a hug, a beer, be a valued and appreciated gift? Yes, those things are often appreciated in the default world as well, but I submit that those gestures are amplified in a the commercial quiet of the Playa. Other gifts remind me of the broad definition of “treasure” we have when we're kids. One of my valued treasures from this year is a beautiful polished stone that I was given in return for helping a couple register their camp at Playa Info. I'll think about how nice they were, and what a sweet gesture of gratitude the stone is, every time I look at it. What a gift.

More to follow...

This is a bit of a nostalgia piece for me. Oh, to be back in those halcyon days of the early 90s, when the War on (some) Drugs was one of my top civil liberties concerns. I guess it's sort of like looking back from a "South Park" reality, to a time when the world thought "Beevis and Butthead" was the height of offensive television. Almost cute, really.

The London Bridge Hotel is agreeably situated in Southwark, a block from the Southwark Cathedral and the Thames. Just returned from a worshipful dinner at the temple that is Wagamamma. In a neighborhood full of pub food and snooby up-market eateries, it attracts long lines of young and old willing to wait tens of minutes to eat noodles. I'm surprised it hasn't hopped The Pond to the States.

I love the mix of old (and ancient) with contemporary trendiness that's everywhere here. For instance while viewed in isolation, the London Eye is a bit of an abomination, when you're standing in Westminster with Parliament, the Abbey and Big Ben in the foreground, the contrast it presents somehow elevates the historical grandness. The view of all that as you ascend out of the Westminster Underground is breathtaking. Yesterday I got to enjoy that view both in daylight and by night. Fantastic.

Note to the Vatican: You want true sin? Here you go: Lying to women is a sin. Pathological hypocrisy is a sin. Half a billion dollars in pedophilia lawsuit payouts is a sin. Homophobia is a sin. Hiding those golden vaginas is a sin. And creating new sins in a strange attempt to stay relevant as your church withers and struggles and falters in the new and spiritually hungry but religiously mistrustful world, that's surely a sin.

No, wait. Check that. That's not a sin at all. It's actually just a sad, inexcusable joke.

As usual, Mark Morford hits the nail on the head. Easter has fallen off my calendar radar during my many years of liberation from The Church, and folks like Matt keep me from ever feeling nostalgic. Mazel Tov.

Even the dolphins are friendly and helpful down NZed way...

Anyhow, I arrived at this train of thought while considering, once again, what kind of creative writing I really want to pursue. For some time now, I've been trying to fashion myself into a writer of genre fiction. However, I haven't been working very hard at it, of late. So, when I was reading an article this AM about a writer of personal essay, I started wondering.

That wasn't enough to send me into the "how does a life of meaning matter" by itself. As I was considering the relative merits and recipes for success the two kinds of writing represented, I realized that I am most attracted to personal essay because, to me, it represents the most authentic type of writing I could do. That's appealing, since I'm a firm believer that the only thing I'm really good at is being myself.

Even that wasn't enough to toss me into existential meanderings. What finally did it was the answer to the question: why aren't you writing essays, then? Really, the question could have easily used "anything" in place of "essays" and had the same response. Because writing requires you to believe you have something worth saying. That, to me, could be one of the most fundamental challenges any writer faces.

I have journals and electronic documents full of partially finished essays, thoughts, ideas, and repeated commitments to really knuckle down and write something this time. Even as I type this, I'm tempted to save it as a draft that "I'll get back to," knowing good and well that likely won't happen. So I'm going to stop here and commit this to the blogosphere, hoping it will be the first of many entries about this and related or unrelated topics. Think of it as an experiment in non self-editing. At least there's some words on a "page" here. That's something.

Everyone wants to work at Google. It’s a money machine with a stock price bouncing around $700. The employees are brilliant and free organic meals are served every day.

Blech. That would be Fortune's Wendy Tanaka, planting a wet sloppy one on Eric & Company.

But just when I might be drawn into a swirling pit of despair, Fake Steve is there to pull me back from the edge. A tidbit:

Worse yet the article goes on to portray Google as a place where kids sit in meetings answering email on laptops instead of paying attention and where everyone has such a severe case of Attention Deficit Disorder that "there are no two-year plans. Its product road maps look ahead only four or five months at most. And, Mr. Schmidt says, the only plans `anybody believes in go through the end of this quarter.'"

No long-range planning? Really? Cool! It's a whole new paradigm! Get Chris Anderson from Wired on the phone right away. Or Scoble. There's a book in this for sure. Radical Velocity: How Google Succeeds Without Planning. Or this one: Totally Random: How to Accelerate Your Business Using Pure, Dumb Luck.

Ahhh....