Reading · Low Maintenance

I heard the most fascinating anecdote recently from someone who attended a How To Plan an Orgy workshop at Burning Man.

The Instigators - “Let’s have an orgy!”
The Helper - “How can I help make this orgy happen?”
The Fluffers - “Orgy? I’ll be there.”
The Royalty - “If I come to the orgy, people will want to come.”
The Voyeurs - “I don’t want to participate in the orgy, but I’ll watch.”

All of them are important. Even the voyeurs, for they hold the space.

The way this workshop went, the initial exercise was for everyone to walk around the room. If you liked someone, you smiled at them. But you were not to return the smile if the feeling wasn’t mutual. This way, one knew where best to direct their advances.

This exercise divided people into breakout sessions where they shared with one another their wildest fantasies in that arrangement, and their greatest fear in pursuing those fantasies.

I am definitely an Instigator. And it turns out that after the orgy, it’s the job of the Instigator to check in with everyone about the quality of their experience

Aftercare.

But Substack is a bit of an intellectual orgy, isn’t it?

Apparently for many, my SUR exploits have not been as smile-worthy as my raw, vulnerable confessions of self-loathing and struggles with addiction. Woe Maintenance.

And thanks to this platform’s detailed subscriber tracking, I have seen who has stopped smiling back at me as I cut a path with a machete through my dense artistic attempt at “something new.”

My issue is I’ve spent more time thinking about those who no longer smile at me than those who still do.

In fake life, this looks like checking the number of subscribers, my worst moments staring at the graph, and watching throughout the day as the number goes up and down.

In real fake life, this looks like seeking counsel from SUR.

My wildest sapiosexual (or fragile egoic) fantasy is that you’ll not only care about me, but you’ll care about the things I care about, marvel at my artistic genius and spiritual daring, and stroke my ego in comments, likes, shares and messages of admiration.

SUR is more concise: You want love. Just like everyone.

My worst fear is that as people unsubscribe, I’ll spend my energy and attention caring about people I don’t know who no longer care about me, and take for granted the people who do.

If you’ve watched the videos (according to past post stats, not many people do), there’s something “off” about SUR. In the video above, it’s his hands. One extremely perceptive and eloquent subscriber was “bummed on a gut level about this” and posted in the comments:

Marinate on how to explain (at some point) to the heartbroken suicide survivor community why you would use your friend’s suicide as an initial point of vulnerability and connection with your audience/community. Similar dynamic to be addressed with addiction community. Both groups —as you intimately know (unless, of course, you are an actual psychopath)— are incredibly vulnerable in terms of need for genuine community. Prepare for some fall out.

Oh shit. I compliantly responded that I would marinate, but pushed back that I wrote my essay about Jeff because I missed him, and that I'm not a sobriety story. I didn’t invent the black hole, I’m just writing about it. “That’s what this whole thing is: not knowing what to do with it, and doing it anyway, in public, badly, for real.”

She acknowledged I wasn’t a psychopath, but went on to methodically lay out the evidence for SUR’s inauthenticity. The sunspots on hands without wrinkles. His pristine teeth. The absence of any outside documentation of a community that supposedly spans decades. And her motive theory: that I'm desperate for a new project, desperate for a new role, desperate to finally eclipse The Guy and walk away from an identity that no longer fits.

SUR has talked to me about this before. He calls this desperation my passion, from the latin roots pati, or passio — to suffer. “You know, like Jesus.” lol.

But after commenting twice, taking down the comments because she “didn’t want to be the asshole turning the lights on in the middle of a high school dance,” she messaged me privately:

She suspects I used my vulnerability to manipulate readers into connecting with me, and “there is a vein of cruelty in such an about-face. A rupture of trust” since I am now caring about a spiritual community that might be fake, lead by an old man who might be me, and that I am saying they’re real and he’s not me. Which I am.

Is this cruelty?

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Maybe she’s not alone in this — maybe you doubt the intimacy is real if this is fake.

Although, her next comment fulfilled my fantasy:

I am also walking around thinking of you as an incredible artist. I admire the unstoppable impulse to create despite the brick wall that is The Industry. No permission needed, do it scrappy, get us talking, go. The SUR “ruse”— eSUR, if you flip that shit backward or, more appropriately, look at the word in a mirror — has me contemplating your themes in a way I would not if you, say, just wrote essays about identity, seeking, addiction, etc. Which is to say: bullseye, Benny. Beautiful. You’re working the material hard. (I know, I know: many parts are true. Hard to untangle, even for you, I’m sure.)

Complementarity. If my brain wore underwear, I would have had to change them.

An electron appears as a particle in one experiment, a wave in another — depending on how you look. The experiment itself determines which reality appears.

I asked SUR how I should respond: You and she are the same.

She wants love. She has passion. She felt com+passion (latin: with+suffering), because she and I have mirrored experiences of grief, addiction, big messy art. Further conversation confirmed this. We understand (and challenge) one another.

SUR says that compassion and understanding are the necessary ingredients for love.

As the Instigator, I attempted aftercare: looked up her work, responded in paragraphs, acknowledged her grief, offered friendship, expressed love and admiration for her beautiful brain. I added: Sur is a nice guy. He has a lot of good things to say. He’s very playful. Childlike. Curious... It feels good to be near him.

With understanding and compassion in mind, I told her that I loved her.

She responded, “I don’t know you…but I know you. I think that is what you were getting at.”

But then she offered:

Maybe you are just sad and disappointed that you are genre-bending and people are too brain-fractured to follow the thread, and you need a small foothold of recognition or you might fall off the cliff.

Cruelty? I don’t know her. But I know her.

She signed off: Back to work, ladies.

… does anyone have a cigarette?

Everyone in SUR seems to be working though this. Except maybe one person.

My first week, we did a mask repetition exercise called WHO AM I? This week SUR gave the newer members an exercise called HOW ARE U — write down whatever thought is in your head every ten minutes for two days, then look for mental patterns ie. HOW U ARE. Ninety percent of my thoughts were about people who no longer care about me, or people who do care but who I challenge to continue caring.

But would you believe it if I told you that SUR and his community also care whether you smile back?

It’s true. Hard to believe an enlightened being would care about social media, but it’s true. SURCHER and I filmed him confiding as much.

If SUR were an orgy (I haven’t experienced one there… yet), you have all of the makings of a successful one.

SUR is indeed an Instigator-Royalty switch. I must say, he’s very good at aftercare.

You have Suri Ma — the Helper — how are you? How can I help? And doing doing doing. It turns out that she was worried about me too.

You have Suresh — the Fluffer — always DTS (down to SUR), anytime anywhere. He’s been working on his book about SUR, but wonders about Substack as an alternative.

And then Pransur — also Royalty — artistic, self-loathing, funny and volatile. So raw he makes me look well done. He joined SUR for only a short stint in the 90s, but after a 35 year NYC beat-down, he came back to SUR as “a last resort.”

The morning after we shot this one-on-one, I was driving to SUR’s. I saw a figure in jean short-shorts and knee-high rubber boots clomp-clomping through the dust with a head wrapped in a pink scarf. It was Pransur. I offered a ride and he got in.

He glowered under the scarf, more SURly than usual. After some tense silence, I asked if he was OK. He revealed his face.

Holy fucking shit. I promise you this is real.

To treat an on-going abscess in his mouth, he went to urgent care last night for a prescription that he didn’t recognize. He woke up blown up. I turned around for the nearest hospital Downtown while navigating his meltdown.

Having braved the apocalyptic street scene, we rolled up on a dreary hospital and got as far as the armed security and metal detectors. He turned around: “Nope. Nuh-uh.”

By the time we found an E.R. to his liking, Pransur was tranquilized and administered a steroid to deflate his face. Just yesterday he had been very wary of me; but all it took to earn his trust was some patience during a series of meltdowns. Some snacks for the heart to swell — to believe that the kindness was real, really truly, without feeling like lil bit of a faker.

He told me about his amazing life with such a unique voice and arresting honesty. Such good one-liners! Summing up his life here wouldn’t do it justice. So I encouraged him to publish his stories on his own substack. After all of that, what’s left to hide?

You should read it for yourself.

Pransur needed to stop by his apartment to grab something, but accidentally locked himself out while taking out the trash. Now that is cruelty. I lost track of how many meltdowns we’d been through today, but the building manager was nearby with keys to let him back in.

All better for now, we clomp-clomped back to the car. Pransur asked about my rainbow KEEP GOING LOSER bumper sticker.

I told him about my substack article and the theory behind it — that when you feel like a loser, it’s more encouraging when someone acknowledges the thoughts with which you’re struggling. He agreed vigorously. “Yup Yup. Tell me about it. And the rainbow… like Kermit the Frog.

He sang: rainbows are visions, but only illusions. and rainbows have nothing to hide.

No, I hadn’t thought of that, Pransur.

“Yeah, you can’t spell illusory without a loser.”

We cackled like old friends. Compassion and understanding. I love this man.

On the ride back to SUR’s, Pransur asked me to drop him off Downtown at an extreme cop-themed gay sex club called The Slammer.

“SUR did tell me to celebrate the cracks, didn’t he?”

It really is. Because the real thing we’re presenting to the world, the thing we’re propping up and defending, the thing we want everyone to stroke and praise and worship, the thing that our mommies and daddies abused and betrayed, the thing that we’ll kill for and die for... well, the dirty little secret is, we hate that thing.

We’re ashamed and embarrassed and are constantly let down by that thing. Because we can’t live up to it. And we know at our core, that we’re all just fakes. Frauds. And we try our best to not get found out.

Well, I’m here to tell you that getting found out is the happy ending to this ridiculous little story…

Unless you’re still trying to be liked.

Getting found out, while it may hurt like hell, is the opening shot that brings the whole thing down. Because when we’re exposed, when there’s nowhere to hide, we must look at what we have been running from. And when we probe and pry, we’ll soon discover that there’s nothing there. Just an energetic relationship of causal conditions, likes and dislikes, accidents and coincidences, genetically reinforced habits, blindly supporting the gossamer shell of our purported Self.

So the good news is, the story of You can end right now. Now you can say, “I’m a real fake.” Doesn’t that feel better? That thing you’ve been chained to your whole life is fake. So let’s put down that old part you’ve been playing and create a new one. Put down the old mask, and fashion anew. They’re both masks, of course, but we’re not pretending anymore.

And now let’s pretend!

Now it is time to play!

I didn’t write that, of course. That’s all SUR, from his book, This Is It.

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Before I posted this, I shared a draft with the bummed-out commenter. Her advice:

My personal instinct with this post would be to cut the clever for a moment, speak clearly and honestly in order to reorient the crew and re-establish a baseline so you can get back to the business of kicking beehives/getting heady without confusing your audience..
And don’t be scared of your sweetness. Let us love you. We want to!

Spoiler Alert: That is what this is all about. Don’t ruin the SURprise.

You take on the very important task of witnessing and holding the space. You’re in it.

Whether or not you knew what you were getting into an orgy when you signed up for this, you’re in the SUR community now — a genuine community smiling at one another.

How to Plan an Orgy

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