One Burner Cherry, Popped

I am sitting in the public library in Reno, Nevada. My typing is horrible because I haven't touched a keyboard in nearly two weeks. The library is decorated in lush plants and fountains, in wild contrast to the dusty wasteland I called home for the past week. Right now green is still the most beautiful color in the world and water is a precious substance. I have two hours before I can check in to my hotel room at the Golden Phoenix casino. I'd rather not waste my time & money playing slots for the next two hours, so I figured I'd sit here & try to make some sense of all this while it's still fresh. Reading a screen is impossibly surreal, though, and it makes it very difficult.

I still walk very slowly. I'd be run over by half a million easterners at the rate I move right now. But I guess I'm to tired & relaxed to be able to rush forward to anywhere. When it's hot, all you're doing is destroying yourself anyway. I could get used to this. Except probably not really. It's too damn dry here and at some point you have to go home and pay bills and do laundry. Time is moving at an oddly slow pace as well. Somehow I moved through three stories of the Nevada art gallery in an hour. There wasn't that much in there, but it seems like if time is gonna be this distorted, I ought to at least be on something.

So. Burning Man. What can I say? Wow. Fuckin' ay. W00t! And all that sort of thing. I didn't really understand how big it was until I got there. Miles and miles of city that just rises out of the dust and then, a week later, vanishes. If you ever marveled at the temporary nature of it all, it would still knock your fucking socks off. I mean, there are permanent towns smaller than this. At night it looks like Vegas. All flashing lights and loud music and unbelievable costumes and free drinks and all night parties in strange venues like Hookahdome and Edge of the Universe and Siberia and Spike's Vampire Bar.

I didn't really see the man burn, I was behind people on stilts. It was night, the sky was glowy with fire. At some point the man fell. I know because his head vanished from my view and there was a loud crash. Then I wandered around and looked at art. Words do it a horrible injustice.

I didn't get to experience near as much as I wanted to. I felt more like a resident. I cooked and cleaned and wandered a bit and rode my bike to center camp for ice and rode to the post office to mail a letter. It was sort of like...living in a city of 35,000 people. My big participatory moment was running for Miss Black Rock City, which isn't near as mundane as it sounds. First of all, plenty of men ran in the pageant. The only criteria was that your name begin with "Miss". I was Miss Shugenah. The preliminaries involved doing tasks assigned by various camps, like identifying car parts, doing blowjob shots of whiskey, inflating the most condoms in a given period, and whipping your partner most convincingly. I didn't quite make it to the finals because some of my co-contestants earned their points rather surreptitiously (but hell, what pageant is fair?!). For the record, I earned all of mine honestly. But I did get to be an alternate, so I would have been a finalist if someone hadn't shown up (which is more common than you'd guess out on the playa - we're all like moths amidst a thousand flames out there & it's easy to get distracted & never show up to your commitment). Alas, everyone did show up. But it was fun & I won a plane ride over the city, which I never actually got to take. Oh well...playa time (a euphimism for chronological unreliability).

The more I write, the more I get all tangled up in my thoughts as I try to present this experience. It's nothing like I expected, almost indescribable, except that I'll keep trying to describe it anyway. I'm sad. I miss it. Indoors and cleanliness and flourescent lighting is wierd. My hair no longer feels like straw. I am wearing more than sparkly underwear for the first time in awhile. Waistbands feel wierd. Every time I see a dust-covered car drive down the streets of Reno I smile. I'm already planning for next year. Next year will be the year. We won't catch colds so we'll be able to go out & explore more. I have a sense of how to operate on that strange planet now. I'll definitely have to practice staying up all night...

You'd think that a week of mind altering chemicals and dust and glitter and community would bring out the best in folks. Mostly though it just brings out the us in us. I was me. Maybe moreso, magnified by the above mentioned cocktail. There is simultaneously far more and far less to assimilate than I expected. Above all, life simply goes on.

Tomorrow I go home & go back to school and start figuring out how to drum up an income as a massage therapist. But I'm not quite ready to put the mantle of responsibility on yet. I'm going to go check into my room, pop open a dust-covered beer and read a book and just revel in the silence awhile. Except that the 24 hour ambient trance music blares on in my head.

More to come as I find my brain & re-assimilate into the "real world".