I read Chuck Atkin's Back From the Booth today about the meeting yesterday in the desert. I'm not sure the outcome is nearly as important as the experiment, a kind of group participation thing between journalers that just happened to fall together, Chuck Atkins and Steve Amaya carrying the ball, but other journalers and readers getting a kick out of it too, following the progress and participating, if only vicariously, if only perhaps with a phone call, in my case from a server lab at work. Made for a nice break in the day, something to look forward to. Maybe this is a variation on the collaborations some of the web rings sponsor, although I'm not sure how you plan one of these, I think they're just supposed to happen and, if you're very lucky, they do.

One note. I'd surfed back once or twice to look at Godfrey's site when I first read about the phone booth in Steve's (or maybe it was Chuck's) journal and I'd discovered the Liquor, Firearms and Slack Ring, but hadn't really understood that this phone booth gig started with other websters or I'd have pushed harder to talk with Steve or Chuck. I thought I was speaking with a wife or an aunt or a friend or another journaler who was taking her turn manning the phone while the others, tired after this long drive into the desert, were nearby getting stinking drunk while they set up tents out with the iguanas and the rattlesnakes and the fucking little green aliens in their flying saucers and she knew who I was talking about when I asked if the (two) journalers were present. "Right, you're call 30, thanks." Actually she was nicer than that, about my speed three drinks into a party, coherent, but not catching every detail.

The mission to hang it up, as I understood, was Steve and Chuck's invention and a separate venture altogether, but the descent upon the booth yesterday involved everyone: websters, slackers, journalers, jackanapes and rooty-toot-toots. I hadn't understood about the rooty-toot-toots.

I liked what I saw well enough on the Liquor, Firearms and Slack Ring, by the way, it has all the energy and attitude you'd expect from youngsters who have just popped out of the parental pouch and discovered the great outside world. Now they have to refine it and practice it and present it to see what the great outside world thinks of them. I'd met Kesey and knew one or two of the Pranksters a little bit (a very little bit) back in the early Rip Off Press days when we were all a lot younger if not quite as young as the crowd yesterday in the desert. They would have known back then what this phone booth was about, what it meant to meet in the desert with others who had travelled from a distance, whom you'd meet but this once. "Have some Kool Aid man, it's a new batch we've just mixed up on the bus."

I'd continue, but if "just out of the box" whippersnappers like Steve and Chuck were "old farts" in this here desert story, what would that make me, rooty-bleat-bleat?