LERI NEW YEAR'S
Crazy Fingers:
"If there is any day which could be considered a Leri Holiday which has grown to be the most special of our Holidays, than it is the New Year celebration. These celebrations have all taken on mythic importance to those that have gone and those who have heard the stories. Anything can happen at the New Year's Fleshmeets--one can meet the woman of one's dreams, wedding engagements announced, new friends are met who may have travelled great distances. Some Leris whom I love dearly I can only see once a year, at these gatherings which have now even been planned for the next three years. (Or so the rumours say.)"Annie:
"Renewal, rededication, meeting for the first time or again, communion. All that neat stuff, those rituals that keep communities strong and healthy."Scruff:
"The annual gathering of the tribe. A critical component of culture and community. Affirmation of continuity... Exhausting. Enlightening. Incredible. Chaos."Erica:
"i think they're kinda like family reunions--you get to see a lot of people you haven't seen in months or years or ever and party with them and revel in a deep sense of community, belonging and togetherness. they're like '90's-style be-ins!"jeffn:
"The NY party gives everyone the opportunity to be part of the family."Crazy Fingers:
"I visited strange places I'd never been, put names to faces and faces to names, fell in love, lit a cigar thus making a commitment, scrambled through a house for any liquid carrying ethyl alcohol for a certain Usenet pharmacology guru to toss down his throat, ate lunch with Bob Mould, played with children of various ages, laughed, sang, danced, drummed, hugged, cuddled, learned, taught, thought, talked, and even managed to sleep once or twice."Annie:
"Hoo boy! My first fleshmeet was the legendary NM 'meet, which I also hosted. People warned me. They were wrong. I had the time of my life! Forty leri's, give or take, showed up and ate chili and enchiladas and drove up to the top of Sandia Crest in the snow.....it was wonderful, and truly epic. It was also when I knew I was in the right place, so to speak. I'd only been online for a couple of months at the time, and leri was the first list I'd been on. Or heard of, for that matter."Nozzle:
"The first real gathering I went to was the New Years in New Mexico. Kyra and Darin drove in from Iowa, and stopped in Colorado to pick up Justin, so I got to meet all of them first, and just fell in love. What lovely people to have as a first impresssion!!! Paul and I threw our own New Years party, so we drove down the next day. Paul and Deb were good friends, and he was familiar with most of the Iowa bunch, so that helped me feel not so rootless. However, I was very happy to feel that I could make my own connections, and get by on sheer charm. I felt like I really clicked with Heath and Scotto, Kyra, Wendy Cown, Darin and Mike Gourlay, almost instantly. One impression I had was of overwhelming chaos, and of having walked into a situation that I assumed was as new to everyone else as it was to me, but there was already a heavy web of unspoken connection between people (namely Darin-Kyra-Justin, Scotto-Deb-Heath, Wendy-Mike-Tate). So I felt like there was a lot going on that I didn't have the full script, and there was a sense of exclusion and secrecy, from the beginning. Some of this had to do with the fact that Paul and I had missed the big zoom the night before. Some of it had to do with the fact that leri was (in my view) sorting itself out into an unspoken hierarchy of hipness. The inner circle had privileged information, knew all of each other, and did creative and over-the-top things. The less cool tended to be those physically less appealing, who were, in general, fans of the creators, and not necessarily creators themselves. Ah well."rez:
"as i write this, it has been about two and a half years since the Leri-list passed its first cryptically jubilant pings; about two years since the first group excursion across more than 1000 miles to fleshmeet fellows. and now, most firmly in my mind, it has been just about one year since almost 40 lerilanders converged on alberquerque new mexico to celebrate each other's presence and the coming of the new year [or the passing of the old one, depending on your perspective... ;) ]. this several-week period was for me one of the most intense periods of my life, in terms of human connection and warmth, exploration of new possibilities, and spiritual epiphany. many of these people had never fleshmet the others; they travelled from as far as England on the knowledge alone that this was the Leri NewYearsFleshMeet."during that time, several of us realized that the scope and importance of what Leri was becoming and had been was both far vaster and also infinitely more intimate than we had previously suspected. the sheer connective intensity was literally [for me] reality-shifting; and yet the reality being shifted was confined to the glorious swells and washes of expression contained within Leri, an e-list of maybe 200 [at the time] participants. in new mexico itself, i for one remember vividly having a constant feeling that -- my god, if only the rest of Leri could be here, if only they could gnow this thing! i realized at the time that eventually everyone who was headed to us would find us, and we they; kindred spirits and soulmates tend to have a gravity of their own which transcends the paper-mache fabrications of most of our modern 'culture'. but i also realized that, essentially, that time and that place was just for us. i have [as do most who were there] a photograph of the lot of us bunched up together, and this photograph freezes in time for me the image of an extremely beautiful, fragile and yet resilient shared reality.
"things that i normally took for granted -- eating, listening to music, burning this or that incense, mulling over this or that thing, even pacing ;) -- took on a new vibrancy and vitality when i realized that through fleshmeets we were creating fused spaces of alchemedia in which ambient context became 90% of a new synergy of communication! nowhere was this more overwhelming to me than it was at the 93-94 newmexico newyears. during that week in deb's, cosmic bob's and annie's houses, i found myself in a constant wash of impressions, emotions, barely-englishable hunches and half-communications... many times during that week i would simply have to get up and take a brisk walk around the area outside alone -- the humming buzzing resonance of so many wills in congress became agitating in its intensity! i now know that others apparently did the same. we were nuts. we had no idea what we were getting ourselves into! well, as much as we ever had: that it was tremendous, and that we were bound to be there, together.
"now, a year later, what remains most fully after that fact is that the virtual connection is the barest of hints at what is possible when a resonant group of Wills in Congress forms. such a thing almost has a mind of its own. or, if not, it certainly has momentum and inertia, as we found in albequerque while trying to get this group of people to either move en masse or split up and walk to eat! each meal took 4 hours to 'complete,' from initial suggestion to return to the group's current nexus. during most of those days, those early early hours of this new horizon, we could only manage to get one or two things done per day! hopefully a meal, maybe a walk to a local store. and this was even when we did split up! 8)
"but inevitably, as night fell, we would gravitate back together. logistics sometimes made it hard to get everyone in one place at once [& here i remember the frustration at the size of annie's warm living room versus the group size & yet her inability to leave her son unattended]. but when we came together, chaos was our playground! and chaos eyed us warily and said, 'uh-oh... am I ready for this?!' :)
"i guess we were ready; as ready as we had to be to survive and draw passion from that time. and, really, that period was the barest of cultivations. it was a massively synergetic time, yes, but these mysteries had been latent in Leri -- like delicately resilient seeds bursting at the seams -- for it to discover. and this had really been there from the start, from that first chaotic zoom with darin and myself and scotto and fizzgig [!!], 'the voice of reason in a funny face,' plumbing the depths with light-stix, 'lizards lizards lizards' and locked-door revelations."