A guest rant from Todd: Burning Man Virgin Rant

Ok 3rd time is the charm right? The reason you are not reading my first or second drafts of a burning man is because they were too negative. After reading them I would ask, "why does this person even go?" they just don't "get it". Let me splain...

I finally went to Black Rock City this year after the last couple of years of not quite getting there. I ended up being camp mates with Dan, due to my S.O. bailing and you know about the Dan & Catherine haps. This turned out to be a cool thing and I won't go into the geeky details but we built stuff packed for bear and probably added 4tons of weight to the Playa including SUV & Trailer. Look for a future rant on why I hate RVs at burning man but at the same time think school busses are cool.

Ok going to keep this short so that it gets done. You guys have been lucky enough to miss out on many of my snide comments (i.e. Lockheed not understanding the metric system etc etc.) because I decided not to write any until I finished this. anyhow ... While we planned on a 7hr trip, our desert dreadnought got us there in a little less than 6 with trying to hard. We passed many colorful bman vehicles on the way and I was tempted many times to honk and do something lame like give a "thumbs up" sign or something like that. Being in a brand new yuppie SUV and also being a burning virgin (hmmm nawww won't go there) kept me from doing so, as I didn't want to start this adventure with newbie faux pas. Dan and I did get a chance a rehash some storytelling arguments we have and continue to refine what we think would be a "good" community to live in. The conversation got me all primed to visit this desert nirvana, this mythical city that arises out of the playa once a year for a week only to disappear again.

We pass through Gurlach and can see the City from there. Initial disappointment is that Todd was expecting to be in the DEEP desert where I might have to slay one of the annoying neighbors and live off their corpse until an escape expedition could be mounted. This seemed more like a bunch of people setting up tents on the beach next to the beach town..long sigh.but the excitement builds as this is Black Rock City and it's huge! Over a mile in Diameter (Got the GPS cords to prove it) and it's only Monday night!!

Ok so my reality soaked brain starts to collide with this para reality of Burning Man. It's 50 degrees and dropping with a light 25mph breezes and there is this naked guy getting his pecker sandblasted off walking down the road with out a care in the world! We creep our assault vehicle to what looks like good camp location (note: Dan actually selected this place based on his previous experience and it turned out to be quite correct despite protest from Todd that the location was on a street called Uranus!) . Now Dan is a handy guy and a good thing to as it was now getting dark and the winds had kicked up to 35mph and gusting!! I am quite impressed with this parachute tent design and we amazingly set up the structure with very little trouble in what I would consider quite adverse conditions. We did get help from one of our neighbors "Chris" who has a really nice art car covered in blackboard paint that allows you to write with chalk on it. We unload critical stuff from the trailer to the new domicile set up some chairs and catch our breath(whew). It's rather amazing that it's now blowing 40mph outside and it's quite pleasant inside with only a thin layer of silk between the storm and us. We fireup the BBQ (radiant heat) and bake some chicken enchiladas for dinner. The tent does some interesting bending & flexing and Dan stars to use words like inversion so we add an extra stay to the windward point of the structure. Having eaten and now feeling safe and warm but really too tired to explore we decide to call it a night. The feeling is much akin to that when I was little and it was Christmas eve....

(I promise to continue the rant but I seem to be rambling more than I should so I guess I'll break this up)

-T

Sunday, October 17th, 1999 todd@notreality.com