6 posts tagged “burning man”

Some time back on another blog I did a number of “10 years ago” posts detailing what I was doing at this time, approximate or exact, in 1996 and 1997 and etc.  Those posts were fun and better yet they were valuable but I stopped because reminiscing publicly like that carries a certain risk of inundation.  Those years were fertile and pivotal ones for me, but most of all they were active as hell.  Even I could barely keep track of myself at the time.  (I suppose if I’d been keeping at least a paper journal then it would have helped but I didn’t start that until late 2001.)

This marks a resumption of those posts, which in turn marks a special occasion: tomorrow, September 2, it’s been 10 years since I met Angela.  That meeting was in a way the culmination of much of the activity of the preceding years; it seems now that so much of what I did served to nudge me towards that one little point in time, being at that particular place under those particular circumstances at that particular moment.  Cattle in a chute is how my mind’s eye sees it.  Maybe I’m romanticizing or self-mythologizing or whatever you call it; wouldn’t be the first time I've done that. 

What I do know is if I’ve ever had an hour that changed everything that was to come after, it was on that Thursday afternoon in the Blue Light District, Black Rock City, Nevada, USA.  I think it was about 2:30 but don’t quote me on that.  Maybe Angela noted it in her journal.  She was always the more meticulous of the two of us.

On the face of it, the importance of that meeting is pretty simply explained: leaving California and coming to Austin has been the single biggest influence on my life in the decade that’s followed.  Next to writing and Quakerism, Austin (and the conditions I’ve lived under here) is the only factor that’s mattered this whole time.  And I would have never come to Austin if I hadn’t met Angela.  Two plus two always adds up to four.

Not that I necessarily had a clue as to that meeting’s watershed status when it happened.  It barely rated mention in the next day’s morning pages, the closest thing I kept to a journal then – there were so many other things, heavy-duty things in my little sphere of existence, going on that same day and the ones right before it.  It wouldn’t be until nine months later that I went back and reconstructed that day and its circumstances in full, devoting an entire entry of my new blog to it, and nine months is plenty of time for romanticizing and self-mythologizing to creep in. 

At the time and immediately afterwards, Angela’s appearance seemed like a head-spinning combination of the absurdly random and heavy-handedly miraculous: if I hadn’t offered her my apartment to stay in while I was already on the playa, she’d never have needed to come to my camp to return the key.  If she’d come on that errand a day or even a few hours sooner or for that matter later, presuming I’d even been there I would almost certainly have blown her off or maybe her me.  (Never mind how, I just know: one or both of us would have looked the other over briefly before making a mental checkmark - “Ah, nice but not for me, not with so many other fish on the playa” or something like that.)  If while lounging with Tom Morgan and Lynn Adesko in their camp 100 feet away, discussing old Led Zeppelin records, I’d ignored the sudden, urgent intuitive prompting to for no discernible reason whatsoever return to mine right this very moment, I’d have missed her completely - she’d have just left the key under one of my big brass candlesticks and I’m pretty sure I would have never heeded the note she planned to leave with it inviting me to her camp way the hell on the other side of BRC.

And so on.  What I’m trying to get at here is that us meeting at all, let alone exactly when and where we did, was the culmination of an unlikely series of events in a chain so fragile that any little deviation would have destroyed it completely.  “A series of coincidences on the order of winning the Irish Sweepstakes” is how I believe Stephen King once put it.  That's certainly what it felt like then.

And still does, to a degree.  Yet it happened, it did, and nothing’s been the same since.  I’m guessing such stories aren’t exactly unique in the history of love, but it’s the only time anything like it has ever happened to me.

That'll probably remain the case too.  You’re lucky if that kind of love, that seems-like-fate coming together, that resulting complete alteration of your life’s course, happens to you even once in your life.  That’s what I’m thinking about ten years minus one day later.  That’s why I’m dragging out the hoary old “ten years ago” meme once more.

What gets to me is that I forgot about this anniversary until last Friday, and when I remembered I was afraid it was already past.  A little record-delving settled that but it’s been on my mind ever since.  Can it really have been ten years? is one major question;  What does it mean now? is the other.  Neither really has a satisfactory answer at the moment.

Not that they necessarily need to.  Given all that’s happened since, it’s likely enough to just remember the date, and by remembering honor it.

As promised from the previous entry:

October 4, 1999

Walking down the street today in the Piedmont Ave. area, on my lunch break I saw a dead TV that someone had left out on the sidewalk and thought Damn, why couldn’t I have seen that last Friday instead.  At Tracey’s birthday shoot Saturday there was only one target TV and we definitely could have used at least another, nothing making my little spirit fill with glee like the sight and sound of a slug punching through a virgin CRT.  The TV that we did have lasted for a couple of firing sessions before the tube and the casing too were completely wasted.  That was fun.  I liked the shaving cream cans too, spouting noxious white stuff while spinning around on the already-littered ground, leaving trails of goo as evidence that some demented minds had been at work for the next party of shooters to find.

Y’see, we like targets that are a little more imaginative – and representational – than regular old paper bulls-eyes or silhouettes.  Cans of bad beer that gout foam; stuffed animals that just beg for a good shotgun blast to the head; watermelons that split open and spew red guts – it’s all grist for the mill.  This time I went with the folks up to public lands way the hell north in Napa County where we couldn’t do any harm to anyone but ourselves and we blow holes in all the aforementioned targets and a few other ones besides that I won’t detail on the internet.  Tracey was fresh off her breakup with Dodger and was blasting away with the PPK that Dodger, formerly loving boyfriend that he was, had given her for her birthday; Sandi her usual elegant shooting self, Jennifer Lopez-style, with her father’s .old 38; Argyre shooting anything he could borrow from others; Foo with various shotguns and Paul’s assault rifle, dressed in a Folsom Street outfit of matching leather cap and jockstrap and not much else; Paul A____ himself giggling insanely at each new desecration of some poor something on the range.  I capped off 3 boxes of ammo for my .45 – fucking expensive, that stuff – and today I feel a whole hell of a lot better for it.  As Tracey and Sandi agreed about during a pause when the range went cold, there’s nothing like the feel of a gun jumping in your hands to help deal with a bad breakup.

The last time I went camping in the desert with burners was six and a half years ago on the annual Newmoonie trip.  Newmoonie was originally conceived in 1998 by Tracey as a spinoff from Burning Man for our crowd to escape the Labor Day masses and enjoy the run of the Black Rock under the thin light of the new moon in July, but it quickly blossomed out of control and for 2001 was relocated much further out to Two Cow playa near Austin, NV.  Even so we had about 200 people in the camp that year.

New Moonie 2001

I rented a Montero and drove out from Texas - still the only time I've ever been behind the wheel of an SUV - to join up with Sandi and her friend Anita and, eventually, Mang.  We learned that the Moss Shelter Wing is a pretty good ready-made shade structure for the playa as long as the winds don't kick up big-time.  Fortunately they didn't.

Mang and Anita in our camp

Sandi and Anita were in a bellydance troupe back in SF and had a performance in a few weeks so they got in some moves on the playa.

Sandi practicing

Anita practicing

Practicing together

Anita being Scary Spice

Matt was doing his Playa Fairy thing that year, donning his wings and biking around camp to camp to spread Fairy cheer.  Here he's approaching Argyre trying to set up his camp.  As I recall at that moment he needed a lot of cheer.

New Moonie - Playa Fairy

Of course a burner trip is no good unless you pile into the nearby hot springs.  Two Cow as a pretty nice one for being so out of the way - this is one of two tubs, IIRC.

New Moonie - Two Cow hot springs

Sandi and I were driving back to Austin (TX) together and decided to strike camp a day early and have a more leisurely trip.  The hammer in my hand is because I'm just about to start taking out the rebar anchoring the shelter wing into the ground.

Sandi and me at our camp

It was a great weekend, though mostly what I remember is not being able to breathe much either at night (sleep apnea) or in the day (altitude and wind).  I've only been camping once since then and it was a miserable experience that taught me I could no longer go anywhere without my CPAP machine.  Kinda sucks but I'm glad my last real camping expedition was a good one.

Courtesy of Scalzi.  Ten and three more to grow on.

1. Been told by Susan Sontag that Joseph Conrad was a genius but I wasn’t.
2. Been rescued from being yelled at by irate motor-boater by Steven Tyler.
3. Helped a friend pour fish emulsion in the college administration building's central HVAC intake.
4. Been on a firing line blasting away with a .45 at mid-size propane tanks (full) for targets.
5. Had sex (briefly) standing in the middle of the intersection of 16th and Illinois, San Francisco.
   
6. Dated three women who have since published chick-lit books.
7. Stood less than 50 yards away from the big guy at Burning Man the year the explosives inside all went up at once.  With my back to it, dammit, guarding the perimeter.  (Somewhat related: Paul Addis, he who prematurely ignited The Man last year, was also on the firing line in #4.)
8. Nearly drowned in San Francisco Bay twice.  OK, the first time was actually Stinson Beach, but close enough.
9. Had hot yak-butter tea in the house of the chief innkeeper in Manang, Nepal.
10. Been removed from the bus by the Austin Police and questioned as a suspected weenie-wagger.  (My fly was open and I didn't know it).
11. Ridden to West Point in a car with Edward Teller, who fell asleep in the back seat while a friend and I discussed abortion (who on campus was getting one and who wasn't) in the front.
12. Gotten on a plane by myself to London at 16 when I'd never even been to Philadelphia 30 miles away alone before.
13. Come close to burning my house down at 15 trying to recreate a flamethrower with a turkey baster.
    

It’s the week before the week before Labor Day, which means that in several sectors of my little cyber-world the chatter is about nothing but Burning Man.  Who’s going, how they’re getting there (something that naturally requires a lot of attention for those living in Texas), where they’re camping, what their art projects are, etc. etc.  And as is the case with anything that’s been going on in its present incarnation for 16 years (while this is B-man’s 21st actual anniversary, it didn’t move to the Black Rock Desert until 1991), there’s also a good amount of been-there-done-that commentary from people who no longer go.  Like me.

Why?  An estimated 45,000 attendees this year might have something to do with it.  That’d keep me away even if I still had only the 6-hr. drive over the mountains as when I was in Oakland.

Nevertheless, I’d like to drop in just to witness the full-scale greening of Burning Man.  Like pretty much every other part of up-to-the-minute culture during this last year, the event has caught the enviro-bug in a big way.  According to a writeup on the Worldchanging site, “2007 is the year of The Green Man: recognizing our place in the ecosystem and creating a sustainable future.”  The article goes on to list an impressive number of things put in place to make this so, including rideshares out to the playa, burning biodiesel in event generators, and reducing the power load of The Man itself by 50%.  It’s a long way from just burning a big pile of crap on Sunday night and driving away from the charred remains the next day, which is what most were doing as late as 1996.

Not that a certain level of environmental consciousness is something entirely new to Burning Man.  The organization founded its own watchdog group the Earth Guardians in 1998 and got a recycling program off the ground (ha ha, pun intended) the following year.  (Disclosure: I was one of the first few dozen EG recruits, and I credit the Leave No Trace training they gave me in August '98, along with my own trip to Nepal a few months later, for planting the seed of the low-consuming/low-impact lifestyle I do my best to lead now.)  Burners being generally flexible thinkers, the LNT mindset was pretty well entrenched in the community mind by 2000; if you really want to make the world a more livable place, where better to start than with your campsite?  And so on.  But this year sounds like a real step up.  Several, maybe.

Earth Guardians coined the term MOOP, or Matter Out of Place.  Back then there was a huge problem with people dumping all kinds of bottles and cloth items and almost everything else in the portapotties, so the phrase “Don’t put your MOOP in with your poop!” had its heyday.  (Personally I think “If it didn’t come from your body, don’t leave it in the potty” is a lot catchier.)  By now moop is a noun rather than an acronym and firmly entrenched in burner-speak.  It’s by our words that ye shall know us, hopefully rather than our residue.

Lunch yesterday with my burner friends in from Montreal, Evan (aka Mr. Bad) and Michelle (aka Maj) and their littlun Amita June (aka The Heartmelter) who very kindly postponed her delayed-nap fussiness until the meal was done.  When I’m around a kid like this – just the right age, post-lump but pre-verbal – I start to wonder if staying childless is all it’s cracked up to be.

Amita June and mom in the Pit

We went to the Clay Pit.  Of course!  Having guests helped me appreciate what a lovely interior the restaurant has, something I’ve forgotten after going there so long.  Amita had the lassi, which I’m embarrassed to say I’ve never tried.  Lassi is one of those things by which you can single-handedly rate an Indian restaurant, like tom kha at a Thai place or bulgoki at a Korean.  On the baby scale, the Clay Pit’s apparently rated a 4.5 (out of 5) in the white-mustache category.

Evan and Maj are living la vida geeka up there in the north, contracting with the company in LA that bought their online travel business awhile ago and preparing to buy their own house.  La vida has been very good to them, if by no other evidence than they were staying at the Driskill.  They made it through the Big Internet Bust with tailfeathers mostly intact, too.  These are some pretty savvy people.

And dad on the street

We talked as much as an hour would permit, and then they were off back to the hotel.  They dropped me off on campus and as their rental sped off I could hear both parents singing “The Wheels On the Bus” with all their spirit.  From 30 feet away, with the windows closed.   That is one well-loved kid.

That was also one too-brief visit.  Chalk up one more reason to look forward to next year.