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It’s nearly 11 o’clock at night. I’m safely in bed, tucked away in a hotel room thousands of miles away from Mason, or Jaime, or Horace, or anything to do with The Lust Experience. I’ve got some crappy cable news on the television, and Toronto’s neon buildings shining through my window, and with a 9-day work trip ahead of me I’ve got more than enough to keep me occupied. But there’s a feeling that won’t go away; a gnawing that things aren’t okay, and are about to become even less so.
A sense of unease.
I couldn’t quite put my finger on the right word at first — thanks, @thebuz — and when I try to pin down the reason why the best I can come up with is a sense of being utterly out of control. Spinning away in directions unknown without a north star to guide me, or earth beneath my feet to ground me. There’s no doubt a reason I first heard that warning call the other day as “you are not in control”, instead of the creator-inferring “we.“ In a world like this, we begin to expect our biggest fears to come leaping out at us from the shadows and the dark.
But even taking all of that into account, this lull seems different. Perhaps it’s just the sheer disorientating accumulation of it all. Friends have turned out to have secret second lives; others have disappeared for reasons unknown; and the basic concepts of reality and fiction have flipped and flipped and then flipped again, turning themselves inside out into one giant Möbius strip of madness. Everything that gives us comfort and consistency has been methodically stripped away, until we’re left with nothing but air to grasp at.
Then there’s the violence. It’s easy to keep violence at arm’s length, to crack jokes from afar when somebody we don’t like gets their perceived comeuppance like a bad movie villain. But that’s a very different situation when horrifying things happen to people you’ve met, that you’ve talked to, that you’ve invited into your home. Those interactions change you, flipping the switch from fiction to reality yet again. And while there’s also the chance that those moments were just more lies stacked upon lies stacked upon lies, there’s a constant there, too. It’s undeniable and unavoidable, and that constant is emotional truth — because the experiences we have define our respective realities, no matter who may be pulling strings behind the scenes.
All moorings of comfort, safety, and stability torn away, we’re left with nothing but pure logistical boundaries — a collective sense of what a production like this could realistically pull off given the constraints of resources and time. And yet even that last limitation has fallen away, with elaborate, simultaneous events and @coryphella’s constant cacophony of calls, coming with such insistence that we have no option other than to sit back and admit that the only person that really could pull any of this off would be someone with an unhealthy, single-minded obsession. A person that would never stop, and never let go, and the sheer dogged persistence of Mason Silver rips away the last shred of what we think we know and what we take comfort in, until we are just left shivering in the dark.
We’ve reached a point where there simply are no boundaries, and no borders. Running into Mason Silver in Toronto tomorrow would be no more surprising than running into a colleague, because anything has become possible. And that means absolutely anything could be coming tomorrow, when a handful of our community members walk into meetings with persons unknown.
We’ve claimed a desire to be “immersed”, and to not be able to tell the line between reality and fantasy. Now we are here, and there is no understanding what is coming next, or how we will be able to face it when it does reveal itself. We’ll have to make our choices when those moments come, and in those choices we will reveal who we are to ourselves, and to each other. But until then, all we can do is wait.
With that unease.
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I have now read this three times and I don’t feel better. Thanks Bryan. Again. 🙂 for being so helpful. Travis is at some prison teaching Shakespeare tonight and this house is too damn quiet, so I needed something to get anxious about.
Back in the beginning of Lust, before Red Door and Sean & Buz became mods, I commented on how it felt like we were just here, being watched, with no contacts with…anyone. I found it VERY unnerving. Then @the-creators came in and we had mods, and a way to talk to them. And…meh. I was disappointed, because the thing that had the potential to keep me on edge was gone. Now we’re back there.
Something about the last text from Darren felt wrong – “I am so fucking sorry” – like we wouldn’t hear from him again? Like he’d gotten me in trouble? Something about y’all’s meeting tomorrow night feels REALLY wrong.
A couple of things keep going through my head (and apologies to people whose ideas these originally were – I don’t remember who posted or when):
The idea that WE are the assets that were sold to the investors
The idea that we can’t leave the experience, even if we try
The only way out is throughAre we alone until the end of this?
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The Lust Experience is like Willy Wonka’s factory. You can’t go back. You have to go forward to go back. I feel good about it. It’s like freedom from freedom. I’m not into bondage or anything like that, but I totally understand the mindset of people who are. Freedom lies, paradoxically, in giving control to another, and that’s what this is. Isn’t that what we all want? It’s terrifying, and the only way for it to not be terrifying is to go through the terror and fear to the other side. I’m not even at the fear stage yet, but I’m looking forward to it. So I for one am excited to find out what happens tomorrow. I feel like it’s going to be a game changer. Sorry, I’m rambling and not making much sense. Haven’t been sleeping well. Hard to think.
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Freedom lies, paradoxically, in giving control to another, and that’s what this is.
Sorry, I just now read this while trying to figure out where last night’s FB quote came from. I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s true for all of us, across the board, because I really only know what’s true for me, but…yes. This is most *definitely* true for me, because it’s freedom from myself. Both admitting it and actually *doing* it are among the most difficult things for me to do, probably for any of us to do.
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I was thinking of the immortal words of Socrates when he said…
“I drank what?”
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