So, next Thursday I will be heading to The Phoenix Festival in beautiful Klickitat, WA. Phoenix Fest is a four day long outdoor rave/festival/camping trip/freakshow organized by some guys I used to know. I’m going with a bunch of friends, including Kim — who will be riding shotgun in the Honda with me. I fully intend to get my freak on, and in fact I’m already plotting outrageous outfits (Hmm: my “I love my pussy” shirt with the red starry skirt with the silver cowgirl boots? Yes. Then the bright orange polar fleece pants with a red backless shirt, and my purple hairy legwarmers? Check. Pony falls? Oh hell yes.) and packing the ridiculous accoutrements like a 3-foot-diameter pink pillow and perhaps even my inflatable buddha. Yes, I am going to watch, observe, and write (see below), but I’m also going to get buckwild.

The ultimate irony? One of Phoenix Fest’s organizers accused me, in 1998, of intentionally not covering his raves in Lotus. (His conspiracy theory had something to do with the fact that, since I tried to avoid nepotistic coverage, I was intentionally preventing his most fantastic parties from being reviewed. In other words, I was supposedly letting my journalistic ethics get in the way of his promotions.) I was aghast and had to explain that, thanks to a slow publishing cycle, you usually wouldn’t see reviews of events in the magazine until two months after they’d happened — and that, in fact, someone had included one of his events in an upcoming scene report. It just hadn’t been printed yet. It was an uncomfortable moment, making it clear that my role of “editor” had eclipsed my role of “friend” in the eyes of the organizer. And now I’m heading to Phoenix Fest with the intent of writing a typically snarky profile of it for The Weekly. Funny how things work out, eh?