Despite several contiguous days of not at all going to Burning Man for first one reason, and then another, and then yet still another, I finally managed to get on my way on Tuesday evening the weekend after it started. I had the help of one Fraser Gouert, a knowledgeable mechanic's son from Minneapolis. He didn't actually fix my car at all, I had to do that myself. After all, I crashed it. However, he did help me stay awake when I was driving and drove when I wasn't and as a result we arrived at Burning Man considerably sooner than either of us would have otherwise.
On the way I stopped at a Home Depot in Cheyenne and got myself some stuff. This stuff included 12 eight-foot hollow cylindrical metal posts (the kind they use for eight-foot chain-link fences) 200 feet of steel cable, ferrules, a bolt-cutter, a grommeting kit. and two 15x12 tan canvas drop-cloths.
We arrived around noonish on Thursday. I deposited Fraser with friends at the DPW (Department of Public Wonders) and NEVER SAW OR HEARD FROM HIM AGAIN. Neither has his family. If you have heard from Fraser Gouert, please e-mail ..... we interrupt this paranoid plea to bring you a Fraser alert. Fraser is alive and well, and e-mailed me. He stayed to clean up and was paid enough to buy a truck and get home. We now return you to your regularly scheduled paranoid plea ..... I hardly like to think. That statement is also good as a generalization.
I found space to camp at Enlightenment and 9:15. There I used the stuff I had gotten at Home Depot to make this tent. Using the fence-posts, I fashioned an octahedron structure, which I laced together with the steel cable. At the same time, I grommeted the canvas, and laced it to the corners of the 'hedron. I then ferruled the steel cable to itself to hold the structure in place using the bolt cutter as a crimper. This last was on the advice of the guy at the Cheyenne Home Depot (thanks, Guy!), where they didn't actually have a swaging tool the right size for the cable and ferrules I bought. And then I staked it down with re-bar. I didn't need to buy the re-bar in Cheyenne because I found it in the alley behind my apartment building the week before. Lucky me! The tent was breezy and cool in the heat of the day, and could probably sleep two or three people comfortably. But, it only slept me. Poor lonely me. Here it is again.
Having secured myself shelter, I set about taking in Burning Man. Wow. ummm......WOW! Let's see if I can come up with anything else to say about it. It's wonderful what a bunch of crazy-smart people can do when they put their minds to it. And it's nice to know there are this many people as crazy-smart as me, and probably many of them even crazier-smarter. It warms the cockles of my heart, whatever that means. For once I got the feeling that people weren't talking to me because I wasn't weird ENOUGH.
Can I actually describe it? If you are Jesse or Abra or Victor, you remember the "dance party" we went to where we juggled and there were lots of cool toys and fans and good music and we got really dehydrated. It was like four days of that, only with five hundred times as many people. And no fans.
Thursday was a pretty relaxed day for me. After putting up the tent, I wandered around looking for people I know, and not finding any of them, and fixing the computerized information system so they could find me if they had bothered, and teaching people how to use it while I was at it, and still not finding them, and them not finding me. So I just wandered around pretending all the stuff I saw was as interesting as discussing it with my friends would have been. By this time it was dark, so I mainly looked at the things glowing in the dark. They included the fabulous neon bird, and Camp Black Light. There was also a girl who had put neon glowy strands on her pants in the patterns of creases. She had three sets of them which alternated, creating an animation that
moved as she walked in exactly the way creases should. A photograph would not do it justice. On Sunday I stopped back by Camp Black Light to play with their glowy thingies, especially their amazing expanding/contracting sphere thing, (a sphere made out of glow-in-the dark plastic accordion-sticks) which is a blur in this picture.
Having my attempts at participation and fitting in largely thwarted on Thursday, I gave up and became the consummate tourist on Friday, taking all sorts of touristy pictures of The Camera-mobile, The Yellow Submarine, The Fire-Hydrant, The Man, The Man with different exposure, The Chapel, The Chapel from another angle, The Beetles from outer space, and The Plunger.
In the afternoon, I did the whole "rite of passage" thing with the seven ages of "The Man". I played the percussion truck. I liked the percussion truck. Wherever I saw it, moving or not, people were always playing it, and it sounded good. And then I played it some, and it sounded good. It was a pretty cool idea, and Burning Man turned it into a phenomenon, an unbroken, ever-changing improvised cacophony of rhythm and dissonance 24-hours a day for a whole week! I'd like an .mp3 of that! The 3-d maze was by far the best I've ever seen, and infinitely cooler than the piddly 2-d maze that they gave you a stamp for. Let's just say, you can't get through it just by following the right wall. Secret doors, rubber skulls, art all over the walls, and an instant community of lost and foolish maze-goers. Just like a Gabe, I found the exit almost immediately, but because I was all caught up in how it worked, I closed the door, and then couldn't get it open again for about twenty minutes.
Of all the things I didn't get pictures of that I wish I had (my flash memory on my digital camera crapped out on me, and I ran down the batteries trying to fix it), the Mausoleum is my greatest regret. I have no idea if Indonesian cannibals ever built temples of bone, but just imagine they did, and then imagine you wanted to make your own, but you were a vegetarian, so you made yours out of plywood. There were little cubes of leftover wood you could write the names of departed loved-ones. And there were no stupid "Barney the Dinosaur" ones. You couldn't help but respect the place. I played my ABS Digeridoo there for a bit, in a respectful way, and headed back to camp for my afternoon siesta.
In the evening I moseyed on over to the Emerald City where there were BIG BRIGHT-GREEN LASER MACHINES. They were projecting rosettes and waves and stuff on the mountains 9 MILES AWAY! And, sometimes they just let the lasers run in a big broad pattern in which you could see the chaotic patterns of the dust blowing around the desert, and it was one of the most mesmerisingly beautiful sights I've ever seen. I watched it for hours. And then I went home to bed.
Saturday, I helped make and got some natural sunscreen made of St. John's wort, oil, and wax. I traded a copy of my CD for juice. Blue Gold, Texas Toast, Amps, Watts, Power, you know what I'm talking about...Electricity, in the form of three AA batteries at the hardware store. With these I was able to take a few more pictures. Out on the playa there were Giant Billowing Cloths. I then moseyed over to center camp where I participated in the noonish juggle, though mainly on the sidelines. I have a great picture of a naked stick juggler, but I didn't want to disturb her juggling to ask permission, and then I could not locate her afterwards to ask permission, so I'm not going to put it up on the web. Then I was recruited by the CostCo soulmate trading outlet employees to sing "you light up my life" to the procession of lamplighters as they went past. I think I did ok, considering I was guessing the melody from what the tone-deaf people around me were singing.
Come dark, I figured out what was going on at this one camp that had seemed unimpressive during the day. This guy had a propeller set up with little lights all along the blades that changed color often enough to make a spinning windmill pattern. I would just like to say that if anyone wants to make one of those into a computer monitor, I'd love to help.
I then wandered over to Thunderdome, where the pre-fight show was thumb wrestling. Just the fact that we built Thunderdome, but use it for thumb-wrestling comes about as close to everything good about America as anything I've ever seen. After that, I didn't even bother to stay to see the fight. I had seen thumb-wrestling at Thunderdome. Then I went and saw Doctor Megavolt vs. The Subjugator vs. Insecto, which, although not quite as cool as it might have been, was Pretty darn cool.
At 10 or so, they burned the man. Man, did they burn the man. I mean, yeah sure, they danced around the man juggling fire in every conceivable way interminably before hand, but when they burned the man, THEY BURNED THE MAN. Not that the fire-juggling wasn't impressive and all, but it got the fickle audience impatient, and being in the middle of an impatient crowd shouting, "Burn! Burn! Burn!" is not entirely a pleasant experience, unless you're a closet homopyromaniac. And then, when the flaming figure finally collapsed into a heap of burning rubble, and the impatient crowd, throwing caution to the winds, surged forward toward the bonfire, I couldn't imagine this ending in anything but flesh-searing disaster. But, for the first time in my whole life a crowd proved itself to be smarter than mere group-dynamics, and somehow it worked out. I HAVE NO CLUE HOW WE DID IT, but we managed NOT to all die horribly pushed into the pyre by the hands of the people behind us straining to see. Maybe it was just TOO DAMN HOT! Maybe, if those concert promoters in the 80s had simply heated up the doors to 10000 degrees centigrade, dozens of die-hard fans would be alive to day.
In a gesture of solidarity I threw on the pyre some horrible cheap sandals that had worn away sizable portions of my ankles on Friday. Then, I wove my way out of the crowd, gleefully skipping across the playa in my stocking feet, able to RUN for the first time in days, and grateful of it when people who couldn't see me in the dark started shooting fireworks in my general direction. I ran over to the Emerald City to try one last time to find people I knew, and dance until I was exhausted, and as usual, found no one.
Sunday was a pretty relaxed day again. I meant to stop by the camp of good memes, but it had been torn down. I took down my camp, located the two guys from Mankato who had crashed their car in Utah, and who were to be my companions on the long drive back to Minnesota. If you know me, you should probably also know Lee Weston. Like many people I know, he's a pretty cool person in his spare time, jonesin' for an opportunity to do something worthwhile with his life, but working well below his capabilities in the meantime. Specifically, he'd like to write AI for massive online RPGs. I wish him luck.
I guess I have a few closing thoughts on Burning Man. The consensus among people I talked to was this was a bit of an off year for Burning Man. It was a dry year, so there was more dust than usual, and a lot of people came to Burning Man just be seen or get high and have lots of sex. Not that those things aren't an integral part of Burning Man, but if they become all that people go there for, then that sort of defeats the purpose. Part of the point of it all was to create something sustainable and community-based, to prove that humans are capable of being smarter and better at living than bacteria. To prove that things built up from the grassroots, with little or no controls imposed from above don't have to turn into ugly disasters. The tragedy of the great alternative cultural movements of the sixties was that they all fell apart (or at least passed out of popular culture) sooner or later. To me Burning Man is our generation's attempt to do them one better, and I still have a hope that we will succeed. We will see what happens next year.
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