I'm doing something that I've always wanted to do - ride first class. After my first three weeks of living in Berkeley, I'm on a flight back to Seattle to play Festival of the Babes and to retrieve my cat and my car from Leschi. The seats in first class are comfortable, but the looks I get from the passengers who had to wait in line to board with the hundred or so others riding coach are not. As we take off, I see the ocean, feeling at first that I am flying out of Seattle until I notice the blanket of fog rolling in from the West.
Today is the Friday of the burn. This is the first year since I began five years ago that I have not been able to make it out to the playa. This is due, of all things, to starting a job. Not just a job -- a dream job. A job worthy enough of missing my annual religious romp in the desert. Timely, too, as the theme for Burning Man this year is the American Dream. Here I am, fulfilling my own mini-version, flying first class, having entered back into the workforce after two wonderful years of skirting by as an artist, a feat that my journeys to Burning Man helped me find the courage to do.
I came upon my first class seat accidentally, or due to my own problem with paying attention to detail. Two weeks after I had patted myself on the back for finding a $100 one-way ticket, it came to my attention that I had booked the wrong date. With only 1 week left before the busy labor day weekend, the only seats available were a first-class upgrade. Still, regardless of whether it be gift from the Universe or my own folly, I was riding first class and I might as well make the most of it with a stiff (really stiff!) Bacardi and Coke from the flight attendant whose name was, consequently, DJ.
This week, I have missed the playa, even though I can feel it everywhere. I saw the Rockstar Orphans off from Reno last weekend as they headed out in caravan from the Keystone Plaza. I felt as if I were their parent, sending them off to school. I didn't feel envious of my friends. Instead, I felt my sadness of missing out. But I also felt their excitement. I feel their sheer joy and growth and know that next year will be so much more that I have not taken for granted. Imagine, an entire year here and past at the blink of an eye. And yet, what a blink, like falling into another world after slapping the snooze button and then snapping stunningly awake. How many sides of myself have I created from setting my alarm only 20 minutes earlier?
In first class, they refer to you by name. Mr, Mrs, or in my case, Miss (a title it takes a taxi driver only 3 questions to guess). I decide to address the attendant by her first name, to show her that we were equals because I found her to be a human being and not a servant, but in trying to remember what drink I wanted to order, I forget. Oops.
I was hoping for, or expecting, actually, a sandwich, but instead the attendant just hands me fancier snacks. As I dip my cracker in the brie I reach to the seat in front of me and pull out the Air Safety Card, the one that tells you what to do in case of a crash or water landing. To my surprise, it was lined in gold. Just Kidding. Still, I wonder if first class passengers get to die first, or more comfortably.
'What most signifies to me the American Dream?', I ponder to myself as sit back to enjoy seat 3A, stirring my Bacardi and Coke in hopes that shifting the nearly clear liquid around will stir some more of the dark mixer that might be hiding at the bottom. The answer is, as always, at my finger tips - Ice. An American marvel. When did Americans get so obsessed with Ice? Was it with the emergence of soda pop, a liquid so putrid that it has to be nearly frozen to consume? Or does it signify the privilege of space and power, two things that one must have to house not only a refrigerator but also an adjoining ice box?
Once again, I find it funny that the Friday of the burn I am flying first class, the best seat in the house besides the cockpit -- but who wants that kind of responsibility? And is it the responsibility itself that brings most to a seat so low in numbers but high in class? And what right do I even have of being snide?
I'm riding first class, not only because of my missed detail, but because of my great grand-blah's of many generations who sacrificed their homes, pets, names, their loves, securities, religions and even lives, following an American Dream, so that I may shrug off a $120 mistake. And I give back the best I can, but I remain grateful that the door was even open and hope that the door remains open to the children of the woman who cleaned up after me in the bathroom.
It took three generations of dreaming to get to me. And because of my family's Dream and their fight to get there, their journey and their sacrifice, I have the comfort and freedom to look beyond and think of a new dream, one that does not rely on a hierarchy of the human race.
What I feel now is seat 3A, softening the ride to my home-not-home. I know now the mystery of a class one seat higher than the front, with a view of the cockpit and a seat-back with just slightly more space, bought by a set of green pages that mean nothing after passing a negative of 3 and three 000's. I know by this time next year, because of my power to dream, that I will find the opposite is also true.
