Saturday:

Well it's the day before The Burn.  This is reputed to be the most festive day of this festival, as after The Burn most people report being burnt.  Or so I'm told.  So I guess things don't get much more going than this.   And going things are:  everything and everyone is lit up and meandering, and making noise.  Last night I had the unique experience of rave hopping, going from one dance enclosure to the next.  Some were bustling, others were empty as restaurants going out of business.  The big thing at Burning Mann is "interactivity", so pretty much all installations depend on audience participation, and there are only so many participants on hand.  Anyone with an installation of their own is home tending it, so you get lots and lots of elaborate installations just waiting for someone to come use it.  I keep flashing on that image of a retail store going out of business.

Thankfully my installation doesn't directly depend on anyone using it:  I can go on making good underground radio whether anyone's listening or not.  It's enough when someone comes by and comments on how crazy or offensive something we were doing was.  Or how someone was driving in the other night and scanned their radio dial for radio, and came on us first, and we were talking on the mic over the playa phone conversations, and they said how surreal it was against the backdrop of the night lights during their long 5mph drive into Black Rock City. 

My project is complete.  The radio station is for the most part self-sufficient, which means I don't have to constantly scramble around to get someone to talk on the microphone, and I don't have to encourage people to do more of something when I like what they're doing.  They just keep doing it.  It's figured itself out, and goes on as long as someone is awake, and, in my opinion, it's some of the best radio I've ever heard.  We very rarely get lazy and just play a record all the way through, and we very rarely aren't talking over all the music we play.   My philosophy is:  Who gives a shit about music, lets hear people.  Every day I go to sleep thinking what a good day of radio it was.   [As I type this someone is playing their favorite Tori Amos song and singing harmonies on the microphone.]  

Now a rogue storm is coming in over the playa, and people are screaming over the microphone "Run for your lives!".  I'm going to take a break for a second to watch the inevitably amazing storm.  The air is suddenly cool, and the dust is approaching like a fog or a flood or a tornado.

So, what does Burning Mann mean to me, part whatever:

Burning Mann is about producing something unspeakably elaborate in a place absolutely inappropriate for the project, and then destroying it.   And I have no idea why, but it will be incredibly satisfying just trashing this radio station, now that it works and could go on working forever.  Burn the fucker.   And it will be satisfying trashing our camp.  I don't know why, but I get a shiver just thinking about destroying all this.  It's a deep deep thing, and I doubt someone could feel it if they hadn't worked a hundred hours punch drunk from the sun and constantly battling this and that bodily rebellion and exhaustion.  And for absolutely no other reason but to declare it within your ability to do it.  You can always find the guy building things, because he's carrying the hammer or whatever and walking between the gawkers with tunnelvision, and even when he sits down he's not resting.  Man vs. Desert, but I don't feel like it's a completely adversarial thing.   Man and Desert are working in tandem, with man playing with the desert like a rock climber does a mountain.  I'd think of a better analogy than that, but there are things I'd rather do out here than think of good analogies.  

It's 20 minutes later, and I just got back from a romp in the wind, and had a good bounce on a big old trampoline.  The wind and dust were raging over me, and I slowly got rid of my inhibitions and got into the trampoline bouncing, and then a kid, maybe 13 years old, got on the trampoline with me.  At first I was annoyed, but then I started seeing that he could teach me so much, the way he unabashedly loved the whole trampoline experience, and was letting out unselfconscious hoots and yelps, and dancing around.   At first I felt strange, being as I was so completely inside my own mind, and with my computer belly, but then he showed me the way and I let loose and managed to have a little fun.  As Malcolm put it, he showed me not my inner child, but my inner village idiot, which is so much of what Burning Man is about.

So now my projects are finished, done, and just in time for a weekend of madness.  Now I can experience the partying as it should be experienced:   full of the satisfaction of having finished a project.  That feeling that no drug can give you, and that nothing but creation can provide.

So maybe someday I'll write something in this journal other than my narrow experience.

One final thought:  we are doing some strange ass shit out here.  We're camping in a fucking desert, for a week, some longer.    That right there is unusual enough, even without all the people walking around naked, or the tree fountains, or the bicycle polo on the playa, or the gazublions of other goofy things out here.  And I now understand that deep hug that I always see Burning Mann veterans exchange:  it's that old war buddy thing.  You know the hell out of each other, that essence that exists outside style, social graces, and what job you have.  We know each other's essences.  No matter how hard we may have fought against it, we have each been forced to be absolutely ourselves, and everybody knows it. 

Saturday, 4:23 pm playa time.