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So it was, that a friend and I had had enough of our respective safe lives and annoying jobs, and both of us had heard of something coming to town that we'd only rarely heard about before; Survival Research Laboratories was its name, and we'd only heard about it by its cooler-than-thou reputation, where things blew up, exploded, attacked each other, and made noise; and so it was that we bought our tickets, endured some mild pejoratives from our significant others, and set off late on a Friday night to brave the corporatized and anonymous streets of downtown San Jose, and upon arriving, set off in a southerly direction towards the convention center, following the more extreme folks as we went; 
and the clumps of us started getting thicker, where we passed the occasional smell of weed on the wind, and then we passed ominous-looking and strategically-placed fire trucks, past an abandoned and boarded-up house on the edge of the lot, where we could see the tops of giant metal sculptures, and also the largest Tesla coil we'd ever seen, and we heard the faint sounds of rave music in the air, but still we kept walking, after being handed shiny coins with Bible quotations on them from some extremely concerned soul outside, reaching the entrance now, and entering a cavern of first-person shooters in the land of Native American ghosts, bio-sensitive light fixtures, art experiences inside shipping containers, 
suburbanites traveling outside their relatively narrow range of experience, women, men, and even children up past their bedtimes, electronic Virgin Marys amongst sunflowers, and the fusion of technology and art assaulting every corner; where we went through a narrow door into the heavy breathing throng, cameraphones coming up like weeds in summer, jockeying for position against other people for the front-row seat at "Six Flags Over Hell" (or, "Ghostly Scenes of Infernal Desecration"), where I can see at least one of the things our exhausted Christian out front might've been offended by: a lit upside-down cross; the waiting now, the frightened waiting as a man with a smoke machine in a child's wagon trundles around emitting smoke behind pictures of a gas station on fire, or a fiery plane crash; a high electronic whine coming from two guys in flame-retardant gear, perched high atop a wooden platform with stage lighting and laser pointers, and two massive jolts from the Tesla coil in the corner, and we're away into a place where it seems humans have gone extinct, a post-human place (say, in a Ray Bradbury story) where the machines continue onward, doing their work; where the machines have mated with each other, producing mutations of mechanized agriculture, transportation, and warfare; or, possibly, that this is what art is really like in the age of terrorism and marketed fear; but these distictions are moot for now as slowly, they start moving, crawling along the blacktop, spinning, waking up, snapping and jerking to life, and they're going even faster now as flames start appearing out of gas vents, reminding us of the pictures we saw of refinery fires in Kuwait, of living in an environment where the air bakes, the sky is dark and light from explosions miles away fills the air -- and suddenly, loud POP POP POP POP noises shake everyone to the bone, and a long phallic rusted metal behemoth comes to life, and starts wheeling itself around the living metal spectacle -- it's a mutation of a World War Two German V-1 buzzbomb, and it starts making a loud whirring whine that engulfs the city block, a large jet of flame extending over half the lot; a pitching machine, made out of a V8 engine mounted on spinning wheels, begins sending two-by-fours hurtling through other parts of the spectacle; a mechanized Baba Yaga hut lurches up on robotic metal feet, its three metal heads bobbing along in its hydraulic rhythm; an insect built out of combine harvester parts stretches its mandibles; the volcanic gas vents burst flame once more; and then, the huge Greek standing centaur that dominates the entire view comes to life, only to urinate from its red foil phallus directly onto the concrete -- but then it reaches up behind its horse head to grab massive foil orbs and hurl them downward into its pool of urine, where they break open and get set ablaze -- with more orbs, the statue sets itself on fire, immolating itself in a tower of cyclone flame, producing a column of smoke and fluttering ash that stretches up into the sky; some of the robots attack each other; and then everything starts burning now, the buzzbomb wheeling itself in front of things, whooshing and farting fire, and a compression gun aimed at the crowd now emits deafening noises but for our earplugs bought at Rite-Aid to start the night -- 
and then, things start to slow down, and the pitching machine is now halfheartedly throwing things at the flaming platform where the centaur once stood, but they partially disintegrate in midair; there are occasional listless bursts of fireworks going into the air from the upended, flaming Baba Yaga hut, on its side now; the Tesla coil still emits blasts of electricity; the buzzbomb has gotten caught in something now, but there's almost no point in getting free because there's really not much left to burn; the fire-jet hovercraft is quiet, and the gas jets aimed in the air burst fire at longer and longer intervals; the upside-down cross is no longer lit; the crowd applauds, and I'm marveling at it all, all this savage beauty I've just seen, except for two thoughts: we really need to get babysitting the next time these people roll around, assuming they can get permits again (since, contrary to her earlier pejorative outbursts, mammamer would really dig this), and so it is that my son, once he's old enough (maybe 8 or 9) would eat this stuff up, since he is a walking buzzbomb himself given to attacking life, running at full tilt, two-thousand-watt Tesla smile crackling to life, lighting up the room.
