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Burning Man 2008 -- Comments · Sep 7, 11:16 AM

“The map does not define final and absolute territories. …things that were supposed to be there aren’t, and other things have mysteriously appeared.”
— The Map And Guide, a preliminary note to the reader.

It’s now or, likely, never.

I left the playa last Tuesday after tearing down our camp. Irish, Mariah, Andy, Darryl, and I stopped by Pyramid Lake for a quick dip and several hours of relaxing. I won’t mention the getting stuck in the sand part, a predicament from which a very casual and friendly woman rescued us, but I did painfully tweak my back cliff jumping from twenty or thirty feet. Next time I’m going to make sure I know what I’m doing, but the injury immobilized me and gave me my excuse to hang at Hagey’s in Sparks through the end of the week—I moved my flight to Friday morning. So I’ve had almost a week of nothing to do. Tomorrow I go back to work to deal with a rather complex situation. If I’m going to write about my burn this year, it’s now or never.

First, here are some pictures from Pyramid Lake:

I had a terrific burn—that’s the take-away, but Burning Man is a hard thing to share, ok? At one time, I was describing it as Mardi Gra on Mars in the year 3001. Another time it was Mad Max meets Dr. Seuss in Las Vegas. Most people have been through an experience that is hard to really communicate, e.g. deadly combat, religious conversion, or childbirth and parenting. Injecting that idea early in conversations with you strange people who aren’t burners helps. It’s also possible to scope the event like this:

“Burning man is 50,000 people converging for a week. They create Black Rock City on a dry lake bed several hours north of Reno, Nevada. They play, party, drink, dance, eat, talk, and do art together. Everyone is expected to participate, express, and be self-reliant.”
— me, paraphrasing myself.

Alternatively,

“The common perception of Burning Man is that a bunch of drunken revelers descend on the Nevada desert, walk on stilts, ride freaky bicycles, put up incomprehensible art and act like they can alter civilization into some sort of anarchist’s Utopia.”
— the first, and ironically rather accurate, paragraph of this amazon review of Beyond Black Rock

I haven’t touched on the personal, spiritual, technical, logistical, or emotional parts. For that, there are documentation videos and books, as well as various online resources, e.g. burningman.com. With apologies for the previous sentence fragment, here are some of the commercial products available:

I plan on buying one or two of them, as much to support the artists as to revel in the content. Here are a few more pictures I took:

On the left, you see the typical “Fuck Your Day” attitude of Jub Jub, an awesome theme camp on the Esplanade at 3:15, featuring the Wheel of Jubstice, which you must spin and obey in order to drink at the bar. They have people who sit on a couch with a megaphone used to harass passers-by. I have a “Fuck Your Rave” sticker from them. Did I mention awesome?

On the right you see the robot heart bus connected to the glowing fur bus that changes colors and the giant flaming disco duck (only at Burning Man, right?) to form a silly dance party ex-nihilo on the open playa. See youtube videos #1 and #2. I totally make a cameo appearance in the second video!

More later.

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