The Roll-O-Rooter Story
featuring Darren Stone
| When I was a kid
I used
to build forts.
Like any other kid, I suppose. I still believe the best place to spend one's day - one's life, maybe - is in a fort of his own making. All it takes is a couple chairs, some blankets, a cardboard box or two, and Presto! A safe, magical place only you know about. To the world, it may look like a pile of rubble. But that's the beauty of your little secret. Invisible to the unsuspecting. Private. Stealth. Ninja. And once inside your fort, the world outside becomes your mission of discovery. You are a ship on the ocean, a rocket in space. Not only do you have tickets to the biggest show ever, but that show is being performed at all angles around you! Sometimes you have to pin up the blankets; you never know what could be going on out there. Lights and colors and sounds. Wind and rain and wild animals and good guys and bad guys. And the occasional cry of a damsel and whiff of perfume. In this spirit of fort-mastery and world-discovery, I have acquired a 1995 GMC step van - a former Snap-On Tools truck - and begun the transformational process from diesel-aluminum box to Home, Sweet Home. The long and short of the deal is this: over the next three and a half years I'll sell everything I own - the house, the clutter - move into the step van, and live "on the road." What happens next is anybody's guess. * * * I was sitting on Facebook one day this past December of '09, and a message pops up from Mike, Ashley’s boyfriend. Mike is cool, and Ashley is drop-dead and cool, and Mike mentioned he wanted to go to some festival in Holland before he’s dead. He’s twenty. And he’s got Ashley. He ain’t dyin’ anytime soon, trust me. I chimed back that I would like to go to the Burning Man Festival in Black Rock, Nevada before I die. When I read what I had written, I could only guess some kid like Mike was reading it and asking, “Then why don’t you just go, old dude, and quit yappin’ about it?” There was a moment of clarity as I realized that yes, I could go to Burning Man if ever and when ever I darnt well pleased, and that was going to be this year, 2010, dammit. As the ideas for Burning Man consumed me and I, still a Burning Man Virgin, was already dreaming of the next year’s festival...and even the next, it occurred to me there was a life out there I wanted to live, but was no longer in my sight. No, I hadn’t become the corporate ladder-climber, but I had made too many trade-offs to earn my bi-weekly paycheck and support the noose of home ownership. I wasn’t wearing enough tie-dye, or playing enough electric bass. The things about life that make it mine – photography, music, writing, walking, wandering – all these things had been relegated to the farthest, backest burner on the stove. Shoot me now.
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