Opening Session for DunCon

Beginnings are such fragile times.

DunCon is an event I’m running in Berkeley at the end of March. It’s half participant-led unconference, and half Duncan-curated experience. More info here, for those who are curious. (BTW, I’m seeking 2-3 people who’d be willing to help with ops and logistics in exchange for a free ticket; email at the address in the above link.)

In the past, I’ve written a decent amount about how to run events. The main bit of wisdom I have to impart is that, as event lead, pretty much your entire job is to ask-and-answer the question “do you know what you are doing, and why you are doing it?”

If you yourself have an answer to that question, and if you can cause your participants to also have an answer to that question, the event will go well. Assuming that there is an actual worthwhile Thing for you all to do, and that everybody knows what that Thing is, then they will proceed to … do the Thing!

And since they expected to do the Thing, and were trying to do the Thing (and since you presumably chose a Thing that was in fact actually achievable), they will come away from your event satisfied.

(If you’ve chosen a Thing that is only maybe achievable, I suggest that you reframe the thing that you’re actually asking participants to do as Trying To Achieve The Thing. Then they will be checking themselves against the standard of making a valid effort rather than against the standard of object-level success, which is often healthier and definitely happier.)

If you’re doing your job, this means that the stuff that happens right before everybody rolls up their sleeves and dives in—i.e. the prework before an event, or the opening session/orientation at the event—is crucial. The combination of you figuring out what the hell is even supposed to take place, plus you figuring out how to effectively convey that mood to everyone else, is >90% of the challenge.

Accordingly, I spent the past week or so hammering my vague goals and intuitions for DunCon into a concrete, specific opening session. I figured out (precisely) What We Should Be Doing And Why, and I turned that knowledge into A Bunch Of Things I Plan To Say And Do in the first two hours, and that’s what the rest of this essay is. I’m not spoiling all of opening session, because I do still want there to be some surprise, but the below is a good chunk of it. If you’re not sure whether DunCon is an event that interests you, this will let you answer that question! And separately, if you’re curious about How To Run Events More Generally, this essay provides a second illustrative example to go along with the one I previously wrote about.

(Not to be excessively cute, but: notice that I just gave my take on Why You Maybe Should Read This Essay. If neither of those reasons matches you, is there some other reason why you’re still here?)

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Ext: the spacious, well-lit courtyard of a beautiful hotel campus in Berkeley, CA. A single figure calls for the attention of the hundred-or-so people milling around, and begins without preamble.

This activity will take place in relative silence. Speak as necessary, but no more than you have to.

Sometimes, when a plane lands a little bit late, they will say something like “connections are tight; please remain seated unless you have a flight to catch, and let the people who are in a hurry go first.”

This instruction requires some amount of making it up, and some level of comfort with inaccuracy and imperfection, because you can’t, in fact, tell which people should take precedence over the others with any real certainty. Nevertheless, in practice, it mostly works.

This weekend, I will frequently identify some axis along which I want you to self-assort, and you will similarly be kind of making it up. For this first round, the people with flights to catch, the people who should move first, are the ones who feel most connected. You look around this group and you know a lot of people, you recognize many faces, you feel mostly at home. The people who should hang back are the ones who feel relatively less integrated.

Everyone take off your name badges and leave them where they are, to mark the seat you’ll return to once we’re done. Well-connected people: go find two people you do not know, and take them with you to some spot where the three of you can stand.

People who are left, raise your hands. The most-connected among those of you with hands raised: go find two people.

Who’s left? Okay, go find a trio with no one you know in it, and turn it into a quartet.

Remain silent, as is feasible. Look at each other. Study each other. Learn each other. Notice things about each other.

If you’re feeling comfortable and/or brave—note the “if”!—if you are feeling comfortable and/or brave, and not if you are not, offer up some part of your body for touch. Adopt a spirit of toddler-inquiry. Poke. Prod. Fiddle. Be unabashed. Maintain nonverbal communication—don’t anybody push any boundaries, here. Stay in the zone where everyone is comfortable, or at least comfortable with your level of discomfort. Notice that being the poker also requires some amount of bravery and comfort.

Engage another sense. Smell, or hearing. Probably not taste, but idk, sort it out amongst yourselves. Study. Study. Muse. Record. Remember. No words. Sense memory only. You are strangers meeting at an oasis. The first step is nobody killing each other. The second step is nobody scaring each other. The third step is both of those things feeling stable, like they can be relied upon. Everything else is built upon that foundation.

Be as vulnerable as feels genuinely reasonable to you. Close your eyes, perhaps. Turn your back, perhaps. Lean. Hug. Nothing is required. There are no wrong levels of trust and intimacy. Absolutely inviolable bubbles of personal space are allowed. No one else is capable of deciding what is okay for you, and no one here will try. That job is yours and yours alone. Find the point of closeness that is actually right, in silent negotiation that includes yourself as equal partner.

Now turn your attention inward. Find yourself. Notice things about yourself. Study your present state. It is a reflection of you-and-them, here-and-now. You have co-authored it. You were not in full control—nor were you without influence.

Turn your attention outward again. Notice that this moment will end soon—that I am about to end it, from the outside. Take down any last lingering notes. What do you want to carry away from this, if anything? If nothing, what is that like, and how were you able to tell?

Walk back to your original place. You can talk again, if you feel like it. You can remain silent, if you feel like it, but others will probably talk. The next instructions from me will come in two minutes and thirty seconds.

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“Life is action, and life is only good when action is a joy.”

Welcome to DunCon. DunCon will not all be like that. But parts of it will be like that. Other parts will be very different. This part is opening session!

I was able to go back in time and add this photo of opening session to the essay!

As you can see, we have a lovely little checklist of things to get through:

• Welcome

• The overall frame of this event

• The first ritual

• Schedule and logistics

• The second ritual

• A small set of suggestions from a person native to a culture somewhat different than your own

• The third ritual

…and we’ve already got through one, so hooray, on to the second.

Imagine that this…

…is a map of the population. We’ve got all sorts of people with all sorts of personalities, and all sorts of different strategies for navigating the world.

Over here…

…we have the population of Agor.

Agor is the land of Duncans. Not a place where I specifically am normal and unremarkable, exactly. It’s more a place where the way they do things makes sense to me. It’s a place where the things that seem obvious and clear and straightforward to me are generally understood, and taken for granted. It’s a place where I don’t get unpleasant cultural surprises, like discovering that someone has invented a toothbrush which rolls over and dumps the toothpaste on the bathroom counter and they’ve sold millions of them and nobody stopped them and somehow they haven’t been shot.

Agor is different from California in the same sort of way that Japan is different from California. It’s still within human variance, but the emphasis is different. The kids are taught different stuff. The institutions rest on a different set of assumptions. The language carves up the world a little differently.

This…

…is you all. You are a subset of the broader population, already pre-filtered and self-selected for some kind of minimum compatibility with Agori culture. When an Agori ambassador was like “y’all wanna come spend a weekend hanging out with me?” you said “yes.” There are some traits—like the ones represented by the dark red color, for instance—which aren’t present here, either because that type of person wasn’t interested in the first place, or because I didn’t let them come.

That being said, the mix of people present here is not the same as the mix in Agor.

Some of you present in this crowd would feel right at home in Agor, and others would not. Coming at it from the other side, some of you already live your lives in ways that support and encourage Agori equilibria, and others of you would tend to undermine and erode Agori society, just by being yourselves.

(That’s okay. You’re not supposed to be a citizen of Agor. This is not a test.)

You could think of this weekend as a sort of three-way flirtation. There’s you and your personal microculture. There’s the aggregate cultural mix of everyone here. And then there’s me, running the event, setting the tone and the frame, acting as a representative of Agor. This place is a way station, a liminal cultural space. If there were a literal Agor that you could emigrate to, and you were considering actually emigrating to it, attending something like this event would be one of the earliest steps. It’s a place to try on the fit, dip your toes into the water, get a sense of whether you like this whole deal, and whether you vibe with other people who also maybe like this whole deal.

To that end, my contribution to the weekend is the Agori part. If we take this metaphor of colors, my job is to lay out green and blue and violet foods for you to taste, shine green and blue and violet lights on things, sometimes run around splashing green and blue and violet paint on things.

But you have not decided to emigrate to Agor. You have signed no contract. You do not have any obligation to eat violet foods, nor to engage in green conversation, nor to force yourself to like blue games. You are a taster, a sampler, a connoisseur, and your judgment and discernment remain intact and online.

What you have consented to, by being here at all, is being in the presence of blue and violet and green. You’ve agreed to let me offer you blue and violet and green. Whether or not you actually pick up any particular object, try on any particular hat, is a matter of free choice, and it is one of the central requirements of this event that there not be social pressure or a sense of compulsion within that frame. To the extent that you will choose to dance with Agori culture over the next sixty hours, that is intentionally meant to be a process of discovery. Some of you will try on one bit of the Agori way, find that it suits you, and want more. Others of you will pick and choose. Others of you will not engage with the Agori bits at all, and will simply let them be part of the background as you engage more with the stuff brought here by the other non-Agori participants.

All of that is welcome. If I offer you a hundred opportunities to cosplay as a citizen of Agor, your only job is to choose the number between 0 and 100, inclusive, that seems most likely to result in you having the time that you want to have. You are being asked only to be receptive to offers. You are not being asked to say “yes” to them.

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The First Ritual

Which brings us to the one and only bit of Agori culture that is not negotiable this weekend—the contract of the container itself. You can’t be on the soccer field unless you’re playing soccer, you can’t be on the stage unless you’re part of the performance, you can’t be on the road unless you’re willing to follow the rules of the road, and you can’t be at DunCon unless you’re willing to play the game I have just laid out.

It may seem a bit strange to formalize an agreement that basically boils down to “I will do what I want to do, and I will not do what I do not want to do.”

But alas, we of Agor have found that this is a skill which is atrophied in many humans, a part of your psychic body that is battered and broken and wounded and incomplete. We have found that it is best to be clear, and explicit, and emphatic, and so we come to the first ritual, the only ritual that everyone must partake in, in full common knowledge. When you encounter people later in the weekend, it will be in the context of knowing that both you and they have made this same agreement, and both you and they are here doing the same thing.

Once more, for emphasis: that thing that we are all here to do is to attend a buffet. To receive invitations. To be given chances to say “yes” and chances to say “no,” and to say “yes” and “no” as feels right to you.

To wit: somewhere nearby you will see a tray, containing sticks. Take a stick.

Look at the people around you. See that everyone you see is holding a stick. See that you yourself are seen. The commonality of the ritual does not change the act you are about to undertake, but it does do something to its edges. It firms up the boundaries, reduces the metaphorical quantum uncertainty. We are all present.

The ritual proceeds thus: first, think of all the other ways you might have spent this weekend, elsewhere. Where you would be if you had chosen not to come, what else you would be doing if you were not here right now.

Imagine that ‘putting all of that into the left end of the stick’ is somehow an action you can take, and do the thing you would do if you were to do so.

Second, think of all the ways you might not comply with the frame I have laid out. Think of all the things that would count as mistakes or defections, according to my definition of what we’re all here to do. Think of all of the things that would count as mistakes according to your sense of what you are here to do. Think of all of the paths you might walk down and, later, wish you had not—all the ways you’ve come out of previous events with regrets.

Imagine that ‘putting all of that into the right end of the stick’ is somehow an action you can take, and do the thing you would do if you were doing so.

Third, make the choice.

Say “no” to both of those classes, with finality. Bind yourself to the “yes” branch of possibility, via an act of will. Decide to participate in DunCon, in exactly the ways and to exactly the extent that feels right to you, in the moment, according to the best of your ability to discern, under a correctly weighted sum of all of your values. Feel what it feels like, in your experience, to make a decision, and when that feeling has reached a threshold you deem sufficient, snap your stick, and you will have become a part of DunCon.

Fourth, give me the remnants of your cast-off possibilities.

Hey, look at that, everybody—we’re actually here. It’s happening. We’re inside of it, now. Can I get a “woooooo”?

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Schedule & logistics

Okay, so. Here’s how the schedule works. Stuff is online. That stuff might change, but obviously the more you change stuff right before a timeslot, the less likely people are to know what’s going on.

The official content window opens at 9AM. There’s a mainline Duncan talk at 10:30. Lunch is always at 1:30 and dinner is always at 7:00; for breakfast you’re on your own.

Every meal, including dinner tonight, will have an optional Additional Bonus Activity that you can participate in, if you don’t want to just grab some food and socialize. Nobody is required to do the Additional Bonus Activity; it’s just there for Agori flavor and extra adventure. Outside of scheduled Agor-flavored sessions, I will also occasionally interrupt what is happening, to give you a little bit of insight into Agor, and an opportunity to do as the Agori do. Some of these interruptions will be ten seconds long. Others may be as long as a few minutes. All of them are completely optional.

There’s only one non-renegade schedule block after dinner; official stuff ends at 9:10 PM. Quiet hours start at 11PM, and things should start trending toward quiet at 10. People are welcome to stay up as long as they like as long as they’re not disturbing others. If you are being disturbed, it is your job to object or complain or throw a soft object; it is the job of the people being complained at to gracefully accept their chastisement and apologize and change their behavior.

There are times that do not exist on the schedule, such as late night and early morning. This is on purpose. Does that mean you can’t plan stuff during those times? No! Not at all! 2am adventures are strongly encouraged, provided they are crafted to not-disturb people and not get the venue in trouble. But they are on-purpose not part of the Official Schedule because a renegade activity should be, y’know. Renegade. Figure out some other way to pass the word around. Use ciphers and secret handshakes, if you can.

You do not have to go to any event, but if you are going to an event, be there three minutes early. Things will start on time, and some events may be absolutely closed to latecomers, at the discretion of the host. Most places are default set up for 70-minute time blocks, although you can certainly do shorter or longer. Bayes Attic is the default space for thirty-minute things, and Bayes Ground is the default space for fifteen-minute things; if you’re looking to offer or consume shorter-form content that’s where you should start.

Venus is a room on the first floor of Building D. It is a small and intimate space, with room for five to ten people. Throughout this event, it is a place where people can go to be naked. It is a place where you should not go if you do not want to encounter naked people. It is a place where you may lean against one another, cuddle, and idly squeeze shoulders or calves. Alas, it is not a place where you may kiss, or fondle, or make love; if the energy is moving in that direction you must find out whether it can survive putting your clothes back on and changing contexts. Towels are required to sit on furniture in Venus.

This board (gestures) is the coordination point for announcements and schemes and plans and lost and found and networking and so on and so forth. It’s the meatspace version of the Discord channel that you’ve all been invited to.

This board (gestures) is something else. It’s the … graffiti board? Except I don’t want to anchor you on “graffiti” as its purpose or concept. This board is the Enduring Artifact of the weekend. It’s a canvas upon which people will leave ……… stuff. And at the end of the event, I will take a picture of it with my phone camera and that will be one of the top five mementos of this thing. I wonder what it will look like, then. (draws something on it)

There are nominally twenty-minute breaks between adjacent hours, like if an hour doesn’t border lunch or dinner or the start or end of the day then there’s a twenty-minute break by default, but people are welcome to ignore those and schedule through them. Similarly, you’re welcome to schedule stuff during mealtimes or even during mainline Duncan sessions—just know that you’ll be getting correspondingly fewer people joining in.

That’s it for now; I think it’s time for a ten-minute stretch break and then we’ll come back for the rest of the checklist. Do not be gone for longer than ten minutes unless you are doing so on purpose, or unless you’re ignoring this instruction.

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The Second Ritual

It is time for the second ritual.

Soon, I’ll be making some requests of you (or maybe it makes more sense to think of them as suggestions). Ways to orient your body and mind and—for lack of a better term—soul, to both get more out of the weekend for yourself and also be more likely to catch the ball I’m trying to toss to you.

The second ritual is a way to soften the ground for those requests. If a personal trainer were going to ask you to flex a certain muscle, it sure would be nice if they helped you locate that muscle, first—pointed it out to you, and gave you some clues for how to go about flexing it, how to know if you were in fact flexing it.

There is a certain way of being present, awake, aware, and attentive that I want you to be able to summon, or step into at will. Some of you are in this mode a lot, and will find all of this very easy and straightforward. Others may have never been in this mode at all, and may find it tricky to enter. Ideally, whether this is new or familiar, you will be in this mode more over the next 60 hours than you typically are, in your typical weekend.

You may abandon the ritual at any time, if you choose to. If you have not so chosen, close your eyes now.

Picture the scene around you, in as much detail as you can, as if the lights went out only a fraction of a second ago and the afterimage is still burned into your vision.

Try to actually summon some kind of visual mental image, regardless of whether you usually do visual imagery or not.

See if you can remember the shapes, the lines, the colors. Sketch out what you would see, if you opened your eyes, and trace your eyes around the imagined landscape.

Observe the nature of this imagined landscape. See whether it is flat or has depth, whether it is bright or dim, sketchy or filled-in, detailed or glossy. What is it like, when you are inside your own head, trying to visualize something?

Now choose some object that you are confident is real, some object whose location you remember, something you will be able to see as soon as you open your eyes. One single object, and focus your imaginary attention on the shadow version of it that lives inside of your head. Study it. Fill the hallucination with as much detail as you can. Color. Texture. Light and shadow.

In a moment, I will ask you to take a deep breath and open your eyes. When you do, I would like you to focus your attention on the differences between the mental object and the perceptual one. I would like you to juxtapose your visualization with your vision, and see how your brain shifts as the faucet of real-time information gets turned back on.

Take a deep breath. Open your eyes.

Do you notice anything about this object that was not in your imagining? If so, snap your fingers, or tap your finger against your knee, or some other concrete signal of record.

Keep looking. Keep noticing. Tap each time you find something new.

Don’t try to hold it all in your head. Just keep noticing. It’s fine if you notice something twice. Let the detail flow through you. Witness it. Keep tapping, keep snapping.

Take another deep breath. Expand your attention by five or ten degrees, taking in ten percent more of the world around that single object. Snap or tap every time you notice yourself noticing something. Let it wash over you. See if you can do something that fits with the instruction “sinking into it,” as if into a warm and pleasant bath.

Look toward the table. See the chocolate through the glass. Notice it.

Somebody should lift the glass. Everybody else should watch.

Break off a piece of the chocolate. Smell it. Do not do anything with the smell. Don’t try to exert your brain in any particular fashion. Just be with it. Receive. Drift.

Put the chocolate into your mouth. Do not chew. Wait, and listen, and attend to the detail. Snap your fingers if you feel like it. Don’t if you don’t. Don’t hold on to anything. Just perceive. Be a conduit for the experience. If you run out of chocolate, take more.

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.

And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes—
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one's hands—
There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.

Widen your focus. Take in all of yourself. It may help to close your eyes. Perceive. Experience. Notice. Be surrounded by detail.

Take a deep breath. Notice what that’s like.

Take another. Take another.

Take your time coming back. Slowly, back out of 4k resolution, back to 720p. Let the details blur, let the boundaries reemerge. Let the words and concepts back in, let reality settle back down into manageable chunks.

The second ritual is complete.

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A small set of suggestions from a person native to a culture somewhat different than your own

Part of why we’re here is that I want to save everybody.

Part of why I do the things that I do is that I believe there really actually is a better equilibrium—a different culture, a better way to live, a way that works and is scalable and sustainable and while it’s not without its own problems they are different problems, better problems. I don’t just think Agor is better for Duncans, I think Agor is better for you. I’ve scattered little bits of Agori soil in front of all sorts of people across all sorts of contexts, and seen them flower and flourish as a result.

But that culture is a thousand interconnected things. I can’t transplant them one at a time. There are critical dependencies. And I can’t exactly say something like “just be more blue,” because some of you are already blue, and need the green and the violet, and others of you are yellow or orange and don’t even know what blue looks like, or how to find it.

So my suggestions may not land. They may not make sense. They’re designed to be the most likely to work for the largest number of people, and you yourself are a specific individual. If I were to speak directly to you, one-on-one, I wouldn’t have suggestions at all until I’d done a good chunk of listening, first.

Alas: there is only one of me, and there are a hundred of you, and “scattershot” is realistically the least bad option. Try to receive these gentle suggestions in the spirit of looking for the grain of useful truth within, translating them into something that makes sense in your own language.

My first suggestion is that you not tranquilize and anesthetize yourself.

By “tranquilize and anesthetize,” I mean any reflexive motion that you make away from a symptom, without attending to the root cause. You notice that you are bored, so you take out your phone. You notice that you are not expecting to get anything that you want out of this conversation, so you give up on the next however-many minutes of interaction and just go through the motions.

Much of life is lived on autopilot, and that is right and good. Our autopilots are there for a reason. They deserve our eternal gratitude.

But—says the boy from Agor—I look around, and I see too many lives lived, not on autopilot, but on novocaine drip. Not the smoothness of flow state, of invigorated aliveness, but the smoothness of someone who’s taken the edge off their own experience, sanded down the corners of their selves.

Concretely, how can you go about not-tranquilizing yourself? I don’t know. Every person is different.

But a place you could start is being unplugged by default for the next 60 hours, only engaging with screens in short bursts, for specific purposes.

This may be boring. This may be painful. This may be straightforwardly worse than the alternative. Those are experiences worth dancing with, to see whether they can lead you to a different sort of solution.

Another thing you could try is giving yourself permission to say, out loud, “something is bothering me,” or if something is happening that you don’t want to interrupt, to at least say it out loud in your own head. To explicitly notice it, flinching toward rather than flinching away.

A third thing you could try is, when you notice that something is bothering you, you do not actually move to solve it, but rather to study it (which usually requires letting it continue to happen).

I cannot promise that the results of living unanesthetized will be better, but they’ll almost certainly be more. And from an Agori perspective, more is better more often than not.

My second suggestion is that you synthesize.

That you build, on purpose. That you plug things into other things. That you actively seek connections between the various experiences you will have over the next 60 hours, or invent connections for yourself. That you ask yourself cool thought-provoking questions like “okay, but what if the monkey chant tomorrow morning were in fact intended to be a direct sequel to the basic netmaking technique session tonight? In the world where Sophie and Keenan were actually in cahoots, what the fuck are they building, and what’s Part III?”

That you take something away with you, something that you cobbled together yourself, or at least left yourself open to discovering. That you attend to the roots and tendrils of what happens to you over the coming two and a half days, and make some actual effort to settle those roots and tendrils into the soil of the rest of your life, planting something that can grow beyond the weekend, not leaving this event as a disconnected island. That you pull the rest of your life into this event—that you let your larger context shape and impact this smaller container, and let what happens here ripple out into what happens over the next week, the next month, the next year, rather than treating it like an island. That you think about where in your life there is space, slack, room for flexibility and possibility, the chance to start a brand-new snowball rolling down a brand-new hill. That you make an effort to see the individual trees of DunCon as a forest, and that you do something with that forest.

If all you get out of this weekend is entertainment, I’ll take it. But from the Agori perspective, there’s something sad about the idea of exiting this container on the exact same trajectory you had coming in. In a way, that almost means it didn’t happen, wasn’t real. The boy from Agor wants to remind you that you can choose to make things matter, and that he thinks doing so is probably more awesome than the alternative.

My third suggestion is that you embrace non-sequitur, and narrative incoherence.

This may seem contradictory with the previous suggestion, but the previous suggestion is about what you do with what’s outside of you, and this suggestion is about what you do with yourself. DunCon is an opportunity to explore, and exploration is often improved by wandering.

I have a kid named Cadence, who’s a little bit under the age of two. Sometimes, Cadence will just … let food fall directly out of their mouth. There’s no sense that they’re supposed to keep on chewing and swallowing, no weird slavish allegiance to coherence and consistency.

Once, I was at an event not unlike this one, and I was having a terrible time, and I went back to my room in silent protest, boycotting the planned events of the evening. And then there was a moment when I realized that I wanted to go back, and I was tempted to not do so—to stay in my room, commit to the sadness, because if I went back, then something about … the original pain not being real? A boss who says if you’re sick on Monday you’d better not be at work on Tuesday, because if you feel better enough on Tuesday you weren’t really sick on Monday.

Fuck that boss. Escape the sunk cost fallacy. Leave with the abruptness of a cat who has decided he has somewhere else to be. Let others do the same—don’t take it personally if someone raises a hand and says “leaving orbit.” Nod and wave and wish them well upon their way. This is a skill. For some of us, it will not be easy. We should try anyway.

My fourth suggestion is that you begin this very hour.

That you don’t wait. That you take thirty seconds now, once I stop talking, to look within and figure out something that you want, something that you can get in the next ninety minutes, as we all head off into the first schedule slot and then onward to dinner.

What hungers lie within you, and which of them are you interested in trying to feed, and which of them could you feed, at least a little bit, and how?

It’s a question of matching ambition to available resources, of deliberately choosing a scope at which success is under your control. Navigate between the Scylla of this is too small, it’s too trivial, it’s not even worth wanting, I’m embarrassed, and the Charybdis of but that takes months, the stars would have to align, I don’t know if I have enough buy-in from other people.

Just fuckin’ do it. Locate an achievable worthwhile victory of any magnitude within the first two hours of DunCon, so that you remember what it feels like to seize something on purpose, and will feel the affordance do more of it if you want.

Thus ends the advice. Are there questions that people want to ask, before we get to the third ritual, and then on to the rest of the weekend?

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The Third Ritual

This is a ritual to ward against cynicism. Not skepticism, not realism, not sober clear-eyed assessment, but specifically the sort of aloof, superior, disengaged, anti-magic sentiment that grinds away at our capacity for delight, reverence, and transformation even when those things are wholly compatible with truth. It is a turning-toward, a making-real, a deliberate act of imbuing meaning into that which is fundamentally meaningless, because meaning is at least a little bit a choice, and something we can create via an act of will. The cynical view says that spells don’t work and New Year’s resolutions always fail, and that view is right almost—almost!—all of the time.

But it’s in precisely those rare and fragile moments of surprise, when things don’t go the way they always do, when someone declares that things are going to be different and six months later they actually are—that’s where the rainbows live. That’s where the gold is hidden. That is the door to Narnia and the bridge to Terabithia, the magic of placebos and rites of passage and self-fulfilling prophecies, and those of you who wish to may join me in this third ritual, which is about striking toward that narrow slice of possibility. Even though we might fail. Even though it might not work. Because in the world where none of us make it out, it’s still better—somehow—to be covered with the bruises and scratches of failed escape attempts than to be pre-resigned to a fate you do not want and against which you will not struggle.

I long for the kiss of oil upon my forehead
and the whispers of a secret, sacred rite.
To feel my heart race to the pace of an ancient chant
To stomp my feet upon the skulls of centuries, pour out in screams my soul.

I want to drink the god’s elixir and be swept away on waves of madness.
To drag the shaman’s knife across my palm,
drip my blood into the holy bowl and one day see upon my skin the scar of my father,
my grandfather,
my brother, my uncle.
Even my worst enemy—to be bound together by a single story,
united by that narrow flag of taut and tender flesh,
once torn and now eternal tied.

To be tried, tested, taken and told
Set by steady hands upon a path of meaning
and met by smiling faces at its end, belonging.

In the bowl you will find a wooden coin. Reach out. Take it…

[Here ends the teaser. For the rest, come to DunCon.]

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