burning dreams

originally posted at tribe.net on 17 Aug, 2008

IT’S ABOUT THAT TIME OF AUGUST in San Francisco again. I can feel it in my bones here at the Flying Buffalo Ranch. The fog and wind swirl around the cracking branches of an ancient lemon tree behind my aqua green Behavioral Pit here in the City of Saint Francis, the Savior Saint, our City of Sanctuary.

The trip to Black Rock City was my annual respite from the realities of waking up day in and day out of what we Burners describe as “The Default World”. Sure, living in what most Americans who exist in the profit and wealth driven pisshole of consumeristic society describe as “Sodom in the North” isn’t a bad place to spend the remaining eleven months of the year away from from our weeklong utopia in the Freak Kingdom but even so, San Francisco is still a large city. Life here means dealing with the same wretched realities of uban existence as our friends and cousins everywhere else in the United States…noise, congestion, rudeness and many, many forms of crime and nastiness—the side effects of confining seven hundred and fifty thousand brutish primates into a patch of land surrounded by salt water on three sides.

I’ve been to the playa as a short time participant eight times since 1999-I call myself a short time participant due to the fact that I’m not one of the crusty “Feral People” who spend months prior to and following the event in the desert building and dismantling the city’s infrastructure. I’ve never spent more than nine consecutive days on in Black Rock City. Even so, each three to six day plunge into the joyous mayhem of that semi-primitive temporary desert metropolis left me with the memory of profound experiences that kept me starry eyed and babbling…and making preparations year round for each return trip to Nevada.

No wonder I have dreams about the Burning Man Festival all year round.

My friends Joe and Greg were with me in my last Burning Man Dream and one of the details that has stayed with me from this REM experience from a week and a half or so ago is that the Burning man Festival was now housed in a gigantic stadium. The monsterous structure was decorated with every variety of blinking, pulsating lights you could think of and was still situated just off of highway 34 on the Black Rock Desert, but it was still a goddamned football stadium. When I woke up that morning, I wondered if the association with what was once the high point of every summer for me in my dreams with something as dull and mainstream as professional football was a reflection of the rapid growth of the event. Even though the population of Black Rock City was in the mid to high twenty thousands during my first visit in 1999, the number of participants reached close to forty thousand (if not over that number) on Saturday of my last trip to Burning Man in 2006.

That’s almost doubled. My perception in 2006 was that fifteen thousand more wild eyed drug addled alcoholic lunatic misfits, whether they be tattooed and pierced red state rejects or frat boys named Chad and Olly makes a BIG DIFFERENCE in the vibe of the city. It seemed to me that during the Friday and Saturday before the burn in ’06, there wasn’t anywhere on the playa one could go without being within twenty five yards of another human being. My girlfriend at the time and i found it difficult to find a spot to share an intimate moment that year on the open playa outside the crescent of the city, something that was relatively easy to do during 1999 and 2000.

This is not to say that I’m one of those old hairy groaners who complain in gruff tones about what the Burning Man Festival Used to Be. I love standing in Black Rock City and watching the DPW parade work its way around the playa and I love sitting behind the microphone at Radio Free Burning Man and providing the twisted, eclectic soundtrack to that strange procession even more. Maybe its just that over the past two trips to and from Nevada that the long three to seven hour lines waiting to get in and out of the event have become just too much for me to deal with.

Last year, my ex and I went camping with a small group of burners at a big state park just south of Mt Shasta and were speeding down I-5 back towards San Francisco and the Default World in a matter of minutes.

I’m probably not going to come back to Burning Man this summer. That will make it two years in a row I will have been someplace other than Black Rock City Nevada following eight consecutive years of annually refreshing my spirit, soul and creative energy on the playa. Julia Blib Blib was a major factor in my decision not to buy tickets to the event in 2008—we’d probably had either gone camping again or stayed home on the coming Labor Day weekend if we were still living together. Julia made the last two trips with me to the playa in 2005 and ’06 but the twenty hour odyssey from camp to driveway the last time was too much for her and she vowed “enough was enough” At any rate, I have mixed feelings about not being on the playa for a second year in succession—a large part of my identity, energy and heartfelt love was invested into being a Burner and now it seems like that is all going to change, maybe forever.

But those odd Burning Man dreams still keep coming from time to time, and that’s what makes me wonder.

Do I NEED to spend most of each year thinking about and preparing for a short term experience in a dusty, wind swept community where openness and radical freedom of expression are the norm seeking my spiritual and creative renewal—or can I somehow find a way to live out my own special version of the Burning Man Festival right here in San Francisco?

Time will tell.

Meanwhile, the wind is still whining through the branches of our lemon tree behind the Behavioral Pit. The apples and pears will be ready at just about the time the Freak Caravan begins to creep its stoned, glassy eyed way through Wadsworth, Nixon and Empire on the 447 day and night on that last fine weekend of August.

I’ll probably be here alone in the Default World wishing I was there.