It was a year ago this week that I died and came back. Deep thanks to my #RenounCardiac teammates. I’ll post a series of images through this week to align with what happened. Since a number of the days are buried deep in my subconscious, I didn’t post in real time so this is the first time I am exploring all the feels.

I wrote this manifesto by the campfire on the last night of The Internet Archive’s annual camping trip in the California Redwood Forest. I didn’t nail it to the preverbial wooden doors so months later when I woke up from my slumber I was pleasantly surprised to find it tucked in a satchel I had in my car. Deep thanks to the Native American Rangers who pulled my car out of the Burning Man parking lot and delivered it fully packed with my gear. (And much appreciated what y’all are doing this year with the Burners in the rain! #BMan23). I can’t imagine they would have found me passed out from the arrhythmia if it had been raining too!

I’ve since learned so much. One of the details is that, obviously, the great builders of the decentralized/blockchain/cryptographic next Gen internet wouldn’t go camping together and make it easy for an outsider to follow along. #un-conference

Imagine what those Silicon Valley Web3 Famous types around the fire must have thought about the loud NY-er on the soap box.

More tomorrow as the waves of emotion find me on this annual gorgeous first week of football season…

I remember getting in the car with a few very interesting people I met at the last breakfast at camp….and just like last year, it took 3 day to recover as well as compose this next idea. The good news is that I have ideas again! Last year the road to Burning Man was open and I grabbed some beef jerky and wine at the “last stop” and rolled up to the human gate. It was exactly as Mad Max as the pictures but I hadn’t done much research so I was surprised when the loin cloth clad woman told me to get out of the car and lay down and make “sand angels”. As a Virgin, this is a requirement.

I was lucky to buy a ticket with a parking pass. Every day I get in my car and it taunts me. Inviting me back and reminding me where I parked all at once. I went straight to the passport office, got a map and walked straight through the Cricket, passed The Man and into the Temple. I wrote the name and address of the mother of my children on the wall of the Temple. I joined a sunset tour around the tower of one of the sculptures. I danced HARD at a party formed around a HipHop DJ in an Airstream. And then I got on a bus with a crew performing weddings.

It was getting dark and I wanted to belly up. My feet hurt a lot. Walking out beyond The Playa feels like some Moses experiential journey. I played congregant on the wedding bus for a couple ceremonies and then the bus emptied for the night. The very dark night.

Stumbling back towards ‘civilization’ I found a lit up sculpture every 50 yards or so. There were some amazingly generous camps where I was invited in for good conversation and some incredibly uninviting social gatherings. The social rules were mixed, confusing and I felt like I had been walking for a week. I hadn’t walked this far since the cartilage in my knee disappeared 10 years ago (knee replacement May 2016 helped get me back to my car that night!)

I remember walking into one camp where a circle of Millennials were having a seance. One of them jumped up to make it clear that it was a private party but asked, “are you walking out there?” as if I had broken another Burning Man Law. He implored upon me the gravity of the shitstorm I had gotten myself in to. I had no idea where I truly was. A wandering Jew in the desert at night? Wow. I really was supposed to be there. My walkabout was really happening!

He wrapped me in a string of LED Christmas Lights (which also miraculously made it home with me) and the next thing I remember is a kind bartender at an offshoot of a biker bar in Sacramento. I learned a lot from her about the “rules” and I think I found my car. I remember waking up pleasantly surprised to find a row of port-a-potties nearby and mimosas being served at a welcoming tent. Day 2 was better. I stayed close to the “streets” on the “map”. I sat in on discussions, listened to music, stretched in yoga classes and chatted up the locals about the medical-merry-go-round and the games I built with SindyXR to get patients off that ride.

Day 3 seemed good too as far as I remember but, at some point late that afternoon or early the next more my heart rate spiked and I was medi-vaked to RENOUN Cardiac.

The lengths I will go to avoid the pain of my #parentalienation situation are deep. It’s been 23 years when on September 8 two miraculous humans were pulled in to this world and a half a dozen birthdays this TwinDad has not been invited to share. Last year, driving across the country with Reuben Steiger, attending an UnConference of Futurists and then walking across the Nevada desert at Burning Man, in hindsight may have all just been a ruse to distract myself.

When I jolted back to life on the operating table my cardiac team burst into cheers. I don’t remember a thing. I had been out for days. My friends and family rushed to my bedside and was advised to expect the worst. By the end of next week we all headed to the nicest shithole casino in Reno to rest up. I don’t remember my time away.

Now a year later, this is being expressed by my loved ones as a bit insensitive of me 😋. As a man of a certain age and size I should have known better than to push my body that far. Whatever made my heart to race that fast it must have been super exciting; if anyone reading this was with me please reach out. The medical report says that a morbidly obese bipolar man presented himself at the Medical Tent and immediately went into arrest so he was medi-helicoptered out to the local hospital. A defibrillator was embedded in his chest cavity which will reset my heart back to a normal rhythm.

Every year during Burning Man RENOUN Hospital is sent lots of unidentified emergency patients. The code name is Antler and I was #72. As you can see from one of the last pictures I took before the incident, there were no pockets in my boxer shorts. My wallet was not on me. They charged my phone and when my Founder-Friend David Plaue called, they were able to open it and get word to my family. By the time I woke up with sunshine filling my room as it broke over the dry mountain range surrounding Reno, my amazing girlfriend was there.

A week after checking out we went back to the hospital for a checkup of the device (and me). I was tired and not myself; serene. Mike our Uber driver was a veteran of Burning Man and the surrounding geography. It looked like my understanding of Mars if there was water. After a successful checkup where the cardiologist warned that I might take a few months to get back up to speed, Mike drove us back out to get our car. The Native American Park Rangers are confronted with piles of twisted metal after they Burn the Man and the Temple with all the names written on the walls; mostly bikes.

They repacked my tarp&cot and towed all the abandoned cars in the parking lot to the local gas station. Even now, a year later, as I try to see this story through your eyes and I have heard it told in front of me from the dozens of you who followed along with love&concern for my wellbeing, I underestimate the magnitude of it all.

I lived in order to celebrate another birthday, one of the greatest days of my life, without the twins who made it special. For 14 consecutive years after 9/11 all our friends brought there kids to the same spot just north of Shakespeare’s Summer-stage in Central Park to celebrate raising families in the greatest city in the world. Every year it was the US Open finals and opening kickoff weekend for the Jets&Giants and yet we all came to the park. The weather was nice every time. We shared our stories about their first birthday party in 2001 back when we were the only ones who had kids. My parents were afraid to come into the city because it was only 5 days after over 3000 people had died in a plane attack downtown. We were all there. Thousands of people were on the Great Lawn that day smelling the grass, feeling the sun in a different way than ever before. Everyone kept rubbing the twins’ bald heads for continued courage to walk the streets and embrace our beloved city. To love America and each other deeper than we ever knew we could.

And we were committed to repeating that ritual until those friends brought spouses and became parents too. I threw that party after my wife and I split and even THEN some of her friends slipped in to join the children. We gathered on this day until my two teenagers refused to attend. And now I lived in order to celebrate their birthday without them.

It’s a wicked beautiful world we’re living in.

I believe everyone fits in the 16 boxes pioneered by Myers&Briggs. I believe every feeling falls along one of a dozen spectrums and I believe G_d is a woman. This morning she seems like a witchy, scorned ex who really doesn’t like me right now.

Celebrating my twins birthday for the 7th time alone last night was a dirty trick. Last year, after Burning Man, I was aware it was their 22nd birthday and I was still under a NY Supreme Court ordered 5 year ‘Do Not Contact’ by Judge Bloom, but my heart arrhythmia had distracted me. Once you experience the parenting “empty nest”, after the first few years of holidays you try to play the silver lining playbook: they are fine, they probably got great gifts from their rich friends and I am happily living an adult life. But yesterday was more difficult.

I leaned on my new job and refused calls from worried cohort and Facebook “memories”. But this court order will expire by their next birthday and maybe I will be able to send a well wishing text without further legal implications. Maybe 18 months from now they will accept a gift from me on Hanukkah or need something that only their real Dad can provide? But why did She let me live at Burning Man just to have to live one last holiday season without them?

For parents, once you add that birth story onto your recurring calendar, especially when it’s a high-risk birth in a Neo-natal Intensive Care Unit filled with anxious family, you deserve to celebrate! All the celebrations we threw were not just for them, they were for everyone raising kids near us because co-parenting chillins is the most challenging collab on this planet and the struggle is real

The wind is almost always at my back. My Best Man’s speech was titled, “Things always work out for ChuckieJabba” and I apply my Defensive Line coach’s addage regularly to my life: the path of most resistance is to the greatest reward. But yesterday was beyond. It was a trick played on me and those around me by a puppeteer pulling strings in too many violent directions. The last straw was my girl’s Dad, 86 years old and infirmed, had a violent episode and whipped my sad sack of a day into perspective. He and I wept over our coffee together this morning. We prayed to his patron Saint Gertrude together and leaned on science instead of religion.

As mean as G_d seems this morning, shout out goes to our medical teams helping us all live&die as gracefully as possible.

I had a rude awakening a year ago