Yapping from the playa

Notes on burning man

I started this post about two weeks ago and saved it in my drafts, where it’s sat and glared at me. Now It’s been a month since I’ve been back from Black Rock City. I don’t know why I’m waffling so much over writing about my first Burning Man experience. It all feels a bit cliched somehow, but it was still sublime.

I felt relatively prepared going in, having been to regional burns and done a good amount of research. Multiple trustworthy sources had told me to ready myself to be mindblown, which I did my best to prepare for.

And I was still mindblown!

When I try to describe Burning Man, the first thing that comes to mind is the scale: it’s huge! Critical, the annual Seattle regional burn, hosts around 1200 people and feels like a lively village town. Black Rock City was 50 times that, literally. I watched a metropolis be built from scratch on an ancient dry lakebed, experienced the thriving city for a week, and watched the same structures be torn down, leaving behind (hopefully) nothing but dust. Every time I paused to look around I was filled with awe by the feats of engineering and craftiness that went into the place, and I felt very grateful to be a part of it all.

Here are some highlights of my burn, in no particular order, often without any photographic evidence because you gotta live in the moment:

• I helped to create a miniature trash fence art installation on the bar top at MOOP Map (a BM Org camp that publishes data on MOOP aka Matter out of place aka garbage) on my last night on playa.

  

• Dancing on the tables at Spanky’s wine bar, wearing a massive tortilla snuggie and feeding people tortillas

• Hanging out while my partner DJed a chill party at her camp

  

• An incredible aerial experience with ropes where my campmate tied me in the ‘marionette’. I was like a puppet and a puppeteer at the same time. I also got to do some megaphone marketing.

  

• Hanging out on Metaheart (a big metal sculpture that spins) before the temple burn while playing a tin whistle ( a tiny metal recorder flute.) Then a humongous dust storm hit and I camped out nearby watching everyone trek back to the city. I do wish I had documented this apocalyptic scene.

It feels weird to try to come up with any original opinion about burning man when so much has already been written. I think I had an overall positive and relatively mild burn: I don’t feel fundamentally different, but I’m glad I went!

I’m reading Private Citizens by Tony Tulathimutte at the moment and loving the wry roasts of Stanford grads living in the Bay Area. After this I’m going to read Ilium which features both a futuristic Trojan War and Burning Man, but on Mars (sign me up.)