Asshole of the Century

Sunday, July 22, 2007

Skirting the Vortex

In early June, Melissa and I flew out to California, filled my dad’s 1998 Buick Regal with some of my grandfather’s oil paintings, hitched a U-Haul trailer to it filled with a few pieces of mismatched furniture along with several tubs of glassware and miscellaneous bric-a-brac, and drove the 2,300 miles from the coast of Orange County to the Northwest Side of Chicago.

We got started a little late in the day, around 11 AM, and stopped for dinner at a Mimi’s Cafe outside of Phoenix in a brand new suburb that was probably just a plot of sand and ocotillo 24 months ago. The restaurant had the most attentive service I’d ever seen, to the point where the wait staff were walking us to the bathroom and opening the door for us, trying to impress the management with their can-do attitude on a slow Wednesday night.

After dinner, we drove for a couple more hours, but then quickly tired of the increasingly mountainous night driving and decided to look for a motel, settling on a Comfort Inn in the town of Camp Verde. The town is an entry point to the Sedona area, a place that I had only vaguely heard about but which I guess is a big deal with the New Age crowd. Pamphlets at the hotel advertised “vortex tours”, in which enlightened tour guides would escort you around this apparently enchanted area for $250/person (I’m not sure if this price includes all the free trade coffee you can drink and all the macrobiotic granola bars you can stuff in your pocket, but you can bet I’d be looking for some freebies after spending that kind of coin).

Now, I realize that at the root of this “vortex” thing is a campaign to get urban folks in sensible climes to trek out to the rocky high desert and spend some money, sort of like those 19th Century ads trying to get homesteaders to leave established lives for their own piece of the High Plains, promising sweet black dirt where the humus smelled like flowers and the turnips grew to the size of a man’s head. I also figure that being just about anywhere outdoors can be a good thing, that a day on the rocky hills of Sedona, the beaches of Oregon, or the farms of Iowa would probably be a fun time with the right guide. So on one level, I’m all for this Sedona thing.

And then I thought, “What if these freaks in tie-dye are right, what if there is a strange energy there that I’ll never find in Chicago?” It almost made me want to take a one day detour, just to check it out. But lying there in my hotel room, looking forward to getting back to my own bed and my dog, I concluded, “Well, so what?”

I asked myself, “Is this natural energy going to be anywhere near as intense as when I saw the Avengers at the Beat Kitchen last summer, or match how I felt the first time I heard the new National CD?” I thought that the chances of this were pretty darn small, because from my experience the occult joys and fascinations of the spirit world are a lot less intense than the inventions and manipulations of modern man. Some guru can spend 30 years to supposedly learn how to move his mind outside of his body and travel the planet. Big fucking deal. I can get on a plane and be in China in 13 hours, and I’ll tell you that looking down on the icy expanses of Siberia from 36,000 feet is every bit as intense and spiritual as anything a guru can conjure.

For me, the most resonant places on our planet are at the intersection of nature and the will of man, be it a decaying steel plant being taken back by the birds and the bushes or a lakefront vista of the city on a winter’s night, smoke and light coming off it like sweat.

So Melissa and I got up early the next morning, took a quick swim in the motel pool after breakfast, loaded up the Buick, put a CD of some old 50’s rockabilly tunes in the car stereo, and bypassed Sedona at 65 miles and hour.