Confest Round Up

My last week has been completely absorbed by Confest.

(If you are easily alarmed by pictures of naked people or at work, I wouldn’t recommend google imaging it.)

Held in Moulamein, NSW, it was about 400km there, and another 400km back. It is a simply ridiculous festival – all about sharing, creativity, and tolerance. What this means is that basically anything can happen. An open farmland becomes a tent city. A noticeboard is erected and workshops are spontaneously created and listed a mere day or so ahead of time. Other facilities are planned ahead in advance by the organisers, most of which were pretty awesome.

There is the “Silent Disco” – a huge tent with flashing lasers, disco balls, and three DJs doing sets all at once. You put on headphones on entry and switch radio channels to decide which DJ you’d like to dance to. I flipped out here trying to work out who I was dancing with.

There is the Steam Tent – basically a sauna – where people are transformed into silhouettes. Crusher Gangee and I started a barbershop quartet with two such silhouettes, which was awesome. I never did find out what they looked like.

There is the outdoor Hot Tub, heated by wood. It was there I finally got to perform the fabled Naked Hot Tub Trilingual Wingman Manoeuvre* (with Crusher Gangee again, using his Spanish on a girl, my Japanese on her friend and our Chinese between ourselves). Nothing really came of this, but that hardly matters when you’re pulling off ludicrous plays like that!!!

And of course there is the Gypsy Kitchen, a tent filled with cooking facilities and volunteers, where anybody can bring their food and cook it. Usually if you offer to clean up for people or something they’ll share their leftovers with you. (Usually you don’t even have to bother with such a gesture, but I did find myself cleaning the entire giant sink of assorted stranger’s dishes for about 30-45 minutes one morning unprompted out of sheer Warm and Fuzzy Gratitude.)

Me, seen with two people, having a great time

See, those are the staples. Those are the things you go in expecting. As for everything else … well, everything besides the things you go in expecting consist of completely unexpected things! It stands to reason!

I was planning to go up with friends, but people either didn’t get back to me or cancelled (for legit reasons) so I almost didn’t go. Then I suddenly remembered

that I actually really wanted to go, grabbed myself my first Couchsurfer and gave her a lift up instead. Later I found a couple mates up there anyway and that was great. Until then, me and my new Brazilian friend TurtleGirl just rolled with it and hung out with basically anybody who seemed interesting at the time.

There was a dude who declared his life mission was to put smiles on people’s faces. After meeting me and talking for less than a minute, he challenged me to a 400m sprint. I immediately accepted and nearly died. Then we approached random people and encouraged them to laugh with us … by telling them they should and then laughing hysterically and jumping around like fools. Worked every time! (At this stage we were sober, I promise!)

There was this beautiful Turkish girl who came out of nowhere, leant over me while I was lying on my back on the ground, and fed me cake. I still do not any the faintest clue why this happened. She also fed me chocolate and a cookie and blew glitter at my face on three other completely random occasions. She told me her name soon enough but as soon as I tried to learn anything more each time she gave me this rather nervous look and said, “Baby, I cannot be in the same place for too long” … and then pretty much vanished before my eyes.

There was either a bunch of people with african drums, or guitars, at pretty much every major gathering of people. These guys would just show up when they felt like, and anyone else who felt like joining them by singing or dancing or playing anything else just did. I was one of them, jamming with Marcello (my flute). This was pretty well received actually. LOADS of fun. I haven’t played in front of people really for a very long time.

From 8am Friday to midnight between Sunday and Monday, I literally slept 5 hours in total. This came to a close mid-jam late Sunday night, when I actually fell asleep while playing.

Oh, and everyone hugged everyone. A good way to start a conversation was to simply walk up and hug whoever you felt like. At one point I got caught up in what was possibly a 60-person hug. (Hard to tell but it could easily have been way more than that.) Another time a number of us stalked the grounds, devouring stray innocents in our Mega Hug …

Yet another time we invented the Flower Hug, which we decided was a wonderful way to start the day, but required a 5th person. We invited an elderly passer-by to join us, and it wasn’t long before he began reciting poetry at us from within the hug for no discernible reason whatsoever. I will never be able to do this thing justice. His eyes were so passionate they looked like they might simply burst into tears at any moment. His prose was just beautiful and the delivery made it impossible to tell whether he was improvising or reciting a cherished piece.

It seemed to focus an awful lot on a pineapple for some reason.

It involved a narrative that featured a lot of suggestive imagery and a variety of different groups arriving and doing various things to the pineapple.

It felt extraordinarily meaningful, but I could not make any sense of it whatsoever, or remember a single damned word of it.

It went on FOREVER. Frankly, I wouldn’t have minded if it had kept going. It’s so hard to describe but I couldn’t believe it was happening.

You may recall that in my List of Challenges I have one that suggests I should Spread Good Will. Believe me when I say I’ve got some ideas bubbling away for this one now >=]

For four days I was surrounded by hippies who shared everything without asking for anything just because it made them happy to do so. It became so easy to feel safe, relax, and trust everyone around me. I started feeling like the majority of people are good, and that I didn’t have to worry so much about the bad ones. The difference between this festival and the “Real World” is that level of trust. Somebody just has to take the first step and spread that good will. Might as well be me.

***

Typically, my car started having problems days before I left, just as I started offering people lifts up to this thing. So between running around getting my car in good shape and running around getting to Confest/getting ready for Confest … I officially blew my bank balance all the way down to mere triple figures. We’re going to see some very careful treading from now on! I’ve been looking at very easy part-time jobs ($100-$200/week would seriously be enough for me at the moment), but so far am not too sure what my options are. Probably delivering something or work in a factory, I dunno. Actually it might be kinda cool to work in the market or something?

Thing is, I’ve made a lot of great strides towards figuring out how I want to live my life and who I want to be in the past month. This progress has only been possible because of the utter freedom from obligation and the total absence of any overbearingly narrow-minded authority. I guess I’m a little apprehensive about working for money again for fear of throwing away time again. I was not dealing with it well back then.

There’s obviously a balance to be found – I guess if I think of the past 30 days as an exercise in “Being Kind To Myself” then it is probably about time to move on. I mean, after I dieted in January and got myself down to nearly 77kg, I haven’t given it all that much thought. I didn’t get all 10kg I lost back – rather I just kind of bobbed back up to 79-80kg and I’ve stayed there ever since. The good habits have mostly remained – equilibrium has been attained.

It’s probably silly to stress about the possibility of making myself stressed.

*Which has claimed first place over my previous favourite move, the Trilingual Eavesdropper, which I more successfully pulled off while paying for petrol sometime last year