PP #48: Mortem Festivitatis
Project: Pioneer #48, August 13, 2024 Tuesday 9am
You can see it if you perch toward the top of a hill overlooking a music festival. That mass of synchronous humanity moving in unison to the rhythm like a beautiful school of fish. If you get caught up in the joyful excitement and move down to the stage, then look back at the crowd, you see the exuberant smiles. Joyful—that’s the word of the day.
Project: Pioneer is the live weekly reality journal of a couple and their small dog as they leave their ‘normal’ life in a luxury apartment for a new semi-off grid life in a small recreational vehicle. We cover prepping, politics, spirituality, afterlife, RV life, and personal finance. You can listen to the audio podcast version of this journal at Substack, Apple, Spotify, PocketCasts and others.
If you’ve been with us on this journey for the past year, you’ve seen a clear pattern. I whine all winter about being cooped up in the cold, and pine for the summer festival season and the beach. I love festivals—music, chili, art, pizza, doesn’t matter what kind of festival. They’re our humanity in a small space. It’s easy to feel the ebb and flow of emotion through the crowd at a festival. It’s contagious.
Festival season is now officially over (for me), and Giavana will get her husband back full-time. I’ll have to remember to ask her if that’s a good thing. She goes, but just not as relentlessly as I do. I love people watching at these events—a microcosm of society. I’m the guy sitting alone, comfortable and unbothered with my cooler and reading material, watching, watching.
Charlie is in that crowd, putting aside his recent cancer diagnosis for a day, and in fact feeling much better to be out in the open air, dancing, and surrounded by such joy.
June is in that crowd, thankful her boss finally agreed to a weekend off. Her kids stayed home to take care of the pets, urging her to go and enjoy herself with her partner.
Katelyn is in that crowd, finally feeling better since she and John lost the baby. She pulls him closer and whispers, “I think I’m finally ready to try again.”
Jack is out there too, finally able to push the pain of his lost promotion aside, the music uplifting him with new confidence to move on to a new company that will appreciate his work ethic. He vows to forego the luxury he thought defined him, instead seeking minimalism and the ability to escape his unhappy hamster-wheel go-go life far earlier than he ever thought possible. John is now FIRE.
Jesse is out there, pumping her bangled arms high into the air with the beat, thinking, “Bad freshman start be damned, I’m gonna slay this sophomore year.”
Dontrell is out there, grieving the recent loss of his father. He smiles when the band launches into Dad’s favorite song.
There is a blue one who can't accept
The green one for living with
A fat one tryin' to be a skinny one
Different strokes for different folks
And so on and so on and scooby-dooby-dooby
We got to live together
I am every day people—Sly and the Family Stone
They all dance like no one is watching on this hot summer day.
The most joyous crowds I’ve seen all summer, by far, were the ones at the Grateful Dead/Phish type bands. The message in the lyrics, the uplifting flow of the chord changes in this music, can’t help but make you feel good. Every face smiling, from the young hippies to the old hippies to the well-groomed manicured corporate weekend refugees in their neat slack shorts and Birkenstocks. All smiling and gyrating to the words, forgetting it all for a while. It is beautiful and uplifting in itself to behold. So many happy, joyful people it felt like a Kamala rally.
“Love will see you through”
“I will get by, I will survive”
"Remember that the only time is now"
“Well, the first days are the hardest days, don’t you worry anymore”
"I don't know, don't really care, let there be songs to fill the air"
“One way or another this darkness got to give.”
“Nothing left to do but smile, smile, smile.”
—Grateful Dead lyrics
I was at a festival in mid-July. This one focused on music with a bit of a harder edge. It was ridiculously hot, and people were drinking hard from early in the day. The mood seemed to grow a bit darker as the afternoon slid into evening. My mother called to say that Trump had been shot at. I prayed they wouldn’t say anything from the stage, and saw a few people holding up their phones to one another. Thankfully, it didn’t seem to have much effect. I think more than half the crowd was already in a funk due to this being the height of stress with Biden being urged to not run, and the Republican basically pronouncing they were on the way to a landslide win. It sure felt like it.
Into the night, it seemed to get rowdier, the excessive alcohol and heat taking its toll on the mass human psyche. Someone sitting near me fell and had some kind of heart issue, leading to a swarm of paramedics, family crying, and lots of drunken confusion. It didn’t feel good there anymore, so I left early.
A week later, Biden made his courageous decision and a ton of stress and fear seemed immediately displaced by joyful exuberance. The party and country quickly coalesced around Kamala, and once again people seemed excited and happy. We began hearing about our greatness and our potential instead of hateful, negative bile about everything under the sun. I could feel the difference at these big events I attended since then.
I worry about the future for all these outdoor activities we love. Our big campground wasn’t that busy this season. The intense heat and constant deluges of rain have surely kept people away. Same thing at some of these festivals. When vendors have to pay to sell their goods, and people stop showing up, they’ll stop being able to rent those spaces. The festivals, fairs, carnivals, concerts, camping won’t be possible because they won’t be profitable. Entire days of big festivals this year were wiped out by unending heavy rain. Huge sold out headline concerts were canceled.
They can pivot to using indoor spaces, to ensure it goes off despite the weather. That won’t work well, because most people (like me) only go because it’s a chance to enjoy the fresh air of the outdoors, not filthy recycled unhealthy air conditioning. This is what’s happening slowly, before our eyes. We’re gradually moving to a dystopian existence where everything is indoors (like Florida in summer). We need to fight for our planet, for our climate, and turn those away that mindlessly pillage and make the problem worse out of their own greed.
It’s the same with expensive beach vacations. Ours this summer (booked way back in December) was mostly rained out. We were lucky—the week prior it was so hot it was dangerous to be outside, certainly not comfortable. You couldn’t walk on the sand barefoot. I don’t think I’ll book that far in advance again, it’s too much of gamble for that much money. I’m sure most people are thinking the same. It could lead to the collapse of those economies, our country’s economy. It’s getting too expensive to continually have to rebuild those beaches as they’re wiped out by severe storm after severe storm. Insurers won’t cover the homes, a disaster in the making.
Sunday night I returned home late and exhausted from that last festival concert, and was in a hurry to get inside to the sleep cave, where my beautiful Giavana and little Pia waited in peaceful slumber. I caught myself at the door to our pioneer RV. Wait. Take a beat. Listen. I took a moment in the hammock, looking up through the tall, tall trees to the stars above and listened to another concert. The cicada chorus sang using alternating chords in surround sound. An owl hooted an occasional fill. Summer was slipping away, but all felt right in the world. The new, joyful exuberance of the Kamala candidacy gives hope that maybe we’ll all survive.
Soon we’ll have to relocate to a winter camp, but until then we plan to take advantage of this pioneer paradise as much as possible, meaning long walks through our woods, peaceful nights by the firepit, cookouts and meals at our picnic table. Maybe some light music over our White House RV outdoor sound system, before the main show begins, featuring The Fabulous Cicadas and Madame Hoot.
"Music is the divine way to tell beautiful, poetic things to the heart"—Pablo Casals
This pioneer journey continues…
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