"to the gathering...."

From the first map point, we're sent to yet another, this time a parking lot beneath the freeway, south of Market. We park, traffic rumbling overhead in the darkness. Confused, hard to know if this is the right spot. Scanning the space, spot a Uhaul in the distance, figures moving towards it. Could that be it? Sure enough, people are clambering into the back of the truck, lightly searched for alcohol. We hand over our pass, jump in, sit down backs to the wall with a few dozen strangers. Crammed uncomfortably tight, the door rolls down, and we're locked in, together, a cargo of willing bodies and open faces. The racial & ethnic mixture is amazing, as good a cross-section of humanity as you might ask for, at least in the teen to thirties bracket. There's an aura of nervous anticipation, maybe a tinge of paranoia too. The truck revs, shakes, rumbles along, heading...somewhere. No windows, just a bulb overhead. Here we are with a bunch of people we never met before, riding on an act of trust, driven by somebody we don't know, no idea of how far we're going, and exactly what we're going to find at the other end. Looking around, checking each other out: some surrealistic version of high school field trip. Or are we allowing ourselves to be abducted (images of Nazi cattlecars flicker in the shadows)...Perfect set-up. How do we know the truck won't open up over the edge of a cliff, or unload us into the parking lot of the local Police Precinct? What kind of strange new game is this? People begin to cut jokes, laugh and make friends--what a way to break the ice! Some 15 minutes worth of ass-grinding bumps later, we hear a deep throbbing in the distance, gradually getting louder over the engine's hum. The truck comes to a full stop...Relief, anticipation, taste of danger. Door slides up and open, and before us a landscape of dock cranes silhouetted against the night sky, chunks of broken concrete, docking structures, stretches of water glistening with reflected moonlight and pockmarked by pilings. Directly ahead, the shell of an enormous warehouse, its thousand windowpanes busted, and through them, rainbow rays stream out; and from the same invisible source, tidal waves of boxing housebeats, a sonic tractor beam drawing us into its mysterious maw.Threading between mud-puddles and rubble, into the hangar, a giant sheet of black plastic hangs before us, and now we're immersed in a warm dark oceanic womb of flesh-shaking bass. Step around the edge of the plastic, and the first view is a circular screen overhead, image of a white X-figure (X for unknown? Ectasy? New mutants? Xtianity? X marks the spot...?), followed by another fluorescent image of stick figures with arms linked, forming a circle. Meanwhile, mandalas of archaic historical vistas interwoven with atomic-genetic textures flower and explode against a far wall...and the sound is a shamanic seizure, propulsive permutating machine pulses, a dionysian din punctured with ecstatic screams, shouts and whistles, the mass of revellers still barely visible as a sea of arms waving from the surface of some dark ameoboid collective organism, silhouettes of bodies contorting, gyrating, bouncing, fingers tracing echoes of kaleidoscopic nonsense mudras, pairs and trios dancing arm in arm, coral reefs of racial-gender meltdown submerged under gelatinous waves of bass vibration, non-verbal communion in gestalt of atmosphere, sound, altered state and freeform motion, no center, just a divine brownian motion of bodies coagulating into knots and clumps and then dissoving and reconfiguring, small groups huddle and cuddle in ecstasy puppy piles, hard to tell where one body begins and the other ends as hands touch hearts meld fingers caress eyes and lips and hair and hearts and breaths dissolve, we're all just organelles in one single fluid fiercely pulsating heart cell, a world so deep in the present it's outside of time, our cell membrane nothing but a telepathic sense of shared intent, of destined conspiratorial unity with people you've never seen before and may never see again..and somehow you KNOW this, you know it in your bones, even though it's your first, or nearly first, time. Like the first time you fell in love, like something you had been waiting your whole life to find, something so fundamentally yet inexpressibly RIGHT: