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Ranting into the Fire: Burning Man `02 The following 5000 words of gibberish comprise my most valiant and one might say successful attempt at writing about THE burning man festival. One might say. That one would not be me, however. Why? Because it is now January and the curtain came down on my sixth non-consecutive Burn (since 1995) just over four months ago. And looking back at this uncouth Augustus Gloop of "notes" saddens me to realize that DAMMIT! another Burning Man coyly sidestepped my attempts to capture him, in words of course. What is it about this gathering that makes it so hard to write about? I'll answer this question with a slice of Peter Boyle/Bill Murray dialogue from the underrated 80s B-movie "Where the Buffalo Roam." Murray: "Where've you been? Jesus, I thought you were dead."Boyle: "Hey, you don't write any postcards on the road to enlightenment, man." Right. There you have it. Straight from the words of a film about gonzo journalist Hunter Thompson. Burning Man is not a spectator sport, and though true gonzo journalism is writing about it as a participant AS IT HAPPENS, even gonzo scribbling is damn near impossible out there. Being inside IT and REALLY being there is to be shot out of a canon, to take that barrel roll over Niagara Falls, to free fall out into Nothing, and to do so daily. It is to walk with the kings, and to find out halfway across the desert when your canteen's empty and your lips cracked and dry, that there are no kings, just you and the 1-one millionth of the world's population who, for all intents and purposes, see the world as you do: with eyes open and Burning Goggles on. It is to ride the Great White Whale, to sail with Captain Cocktail, to BE your id for an hour or a day, for a week. And that's a hard headspace to write from, Jack. Dig it? I am Jack's heavy sigh of relief for letting go all attempts to put the Burn down in words. I give up. Here then are the random synaptic firings that DID make it through my fingers and on to paper, and a bunch of other words leading up to and out of the monkey ride through space that is.. or rather I think was, Burning Man 2002. -RSM
Dateline - Coaster commuter train from Oceanside to San Diego, August 24(?), Saturday Good tunes, good energy, a million dollar view as I ride the train to catch a plane to catch a caravan from Houston bound for Nevada's Black Rock Desert. Final destination: Burning Man. Swamis beach, the surfers sprinkled on the sea like bread crumbs on a pond. And along comes Mr. KILLER DUCKY! Eat the crumbs! Eat the surfers! Chomp chomp, quack quack. Solana Beach coming up. Recollections of the good old days, those high school daze at toilet paper (TP) Torrey Pines High, lunch time burrito runs to Roberto's and very often into overtime with Martin and Stricky and Herr Koooooker, the guy who, more than anyone, is to blame for my mad, beb b ofen year in Douy-ch-land. And now Del Mar and unbelievably Men at Work on the radio. Spooky. Mmm. I love Del Mar. Always will I suppose. Don't know why I ever left. Well, aside from the obvious financial impediments. Wow! Ugh. Hit hard with a major dose of nostalgia for a place more or less long forgotten on this troubled road of mine. Yet there it is, still there, still sooo fine. Cherry sweet sparkling Pacific, 14th street beach, the power station. Girls lying out on towels just below. A young boy dives into a wave, surfaces, throws up his hands in exultation. This is the land where I learned to drive a car, where Rubin Yorba taught me to pull the handbrake at 60 and cut the wheel, an insane teenage stunt that upon reflection I'm proud to say I did and lived. This is the land where I discovered girls, and oh my, were there girls at TP high. Girls like long tall Holiday Dapper (you can't make up a name like that) whose liaison with the gym teacher cost the latter his job. All the girls back then in the early 80s wearing those soft, silky high cut "dolphin" shorts, walking up to me on the grass quad whilst bands like "Barracho y Loco" played for us at lunch, a slight breeze flutters those crotch-riding dolphins and whoa! There it is! That's a pussy! Yep! Okay. Hungry now. Reality check. Palm pilot batteries about to croak. Time to get to the point. Just what was the point? Oh yeah. Riding the Amtrak to downtown SD to stow my bag in a locker, hop on a trolley south, walk into Tijuana, score some pills and the ever-famous Mexican blanket, the former to keep me from FREAKING out at the Man, the latter to keep me warm at night out there in the desert seeing as how every shred of outdoor gear I own is in my car in Houston TX and i, in utter defiance of the rules of BM, am going it alone. Anyway, so good to be in motion again. I suffer so when landlocked. I love the road. I come alive, begin to glow, gain unknown reserves of energy, all this when I stand up and begin to walk again. To the never-ending road trip story. Viva El Camino! - Dateline - Space, the fine-El Frontero Sade caressing my unusually calm mind with her magic liquid words, the moon rising in the east, pure fireball creme brule in the early night sky. Vegas. Adios San Diego and the weird energy of family. i say unusually calm because most people, including me most times, would be in absolute freakout mode right now barreling toward Vegas and the freak survival testing grounds of burning man beyond, barreling, hurtling, soaring at dreamtime speed, already making our descent having just moments and four sips of my vodka cran ago lifted off from Diego, anyone with less pure gonzo conviction wouldn't have even boarded this plane, as I did, with $15 to my name, no sleeping bag, no pillow, no tent, nada. And what will my 15 bucks buy me? Enough water for the week, maybe. The hell w/food. who needs it? I'm breaking all the rules of burning man, of the desert, and banking on the community and the whole spirit of get there and we'll do the rest. I mean, I'll do, too. Oh, yes. i'll write my fingers off and throw my back into any and all physical tasks that lie between us and pure ecstatic burning nirvana. Sade stings like a tattoo, sweet yesterday pain she sings right to my heart, and the pilot, channeling my giddy altitude irreverence, my nostalgic nocturne moon madness, soft tonight as a peach ripened, the pilot shimmies and jigs in his pilot seat, whipping the stick to and fro, and so goes the plane, dip left, dip right, and we sway and swagger like moon-drunk children with heads to the night sky twirling eyes up and watching the bats race insect-eating parabolas til disappointing dawn. Updrafts from hot desert earth to cool southwest sky. Now we are shrinking and the dazzled plateau of lights rowing up to meet us , then chirp go the tires and down comes the nose and nobody knows, said Jack, "nobody knows anything `cept the forlorn rags of growing old." I know. I know the strange joy of jumping off, of letting go. And so today I let go and falling felt better instantly. Somewhere on the way down I felt fear, and scrambled for purchase. I thought a lot about not boarding the plane, about waiting til the banks opened Monday, to go with money in hand instead of this. Free fall. Whoosh. The plane taxis in I deplane and am shuttled to baggage claim. Bag found, I wander the airport awhile awaiting the arrival of Ben and the whole of burning Houston. Then I decide to try calling Sears one last time. And the voice on the other end says everything the same until the end, the money shot, and badda-bing! The money has posted to my account! On a Saturday night of all things! Fantastic! YES! YES! I want to grab someone and hug them. Burn, burn verdammte fear! Burn again this year! ____________________________ Dateline - Tonopah, NV Ahh, Tonopah. You just don't see signs for Tonopah just anywhere at any given time. It takes effort and serious gonzo grit; major road miles to find yourself in that weird plane of dry cleaned existence that is Nevada. Conastoga Wagon-loads of early American and gold-stoned 49ers followed the wily Humboldt River into this place and went bat-crazy and died in droves, having never seen a river turn an acid yellow and disappear into the ground. Skeletons of their bison, their mules and horses, their husbands, wives, children, all littered this land 150 years ago. And despite the passage of time, you still have to be fucked, in the head, more or less, to come out here, to drive where no man was ever meant to so much as crawl. On the other hand, you've got Vegas. Vegas. There's a devil on my head and he's ready to spit fire from his nostrils. Three hours in the Vegas airport last night on the heels of a double Finlandia and cran on the empty plane from Diego. Good stuff, that vodka and cran, especially fine vodka. However, hammering down a quick buzz like that, then being subjected to two hundred or so long minutes of futuristic video bombardment ala downtown Blade Runner minus the cool dripping alleys and cold, black marble zones of mental respite.. where was i? Oh, yeah. Bad idea. A quick buzz and a long laggard laze in the neon haze of the Vegas airport. Ben talks about the trucker on the CB as having a huge "linear amp" such that he can broadcast his weird brand of trucker gibberish for a hundred miles in any direction. Ben says a friend of his had such an amp in, of all things, a Geo Metro, that he would pull up to Ben's house and Ben's toaster would start to hum. "Anything with more than a foot of wire" Ben says, "would become a receiver for this thing." Yes, precisely my problem at the Vegas airport. My problem with most of the civilized world. In my head, there must be at least a thousand feet of wire. And THEY know this. That's why they broadcast their shit straight at me. And fine vodka worsens the deal. It cranks the volume ALL the way up. By midnight last night I was totally wrecked. At last Ben arrived and the Houston caravan arrived. ____________________________ Dateline - Fallon, Nevada Extreme turbulence already, and we haven't even left the ground. Just ran into my X in the Wal-Mart parking lot. Thirty thousand people, everyone said. You'll never run into her in a crowd of 30,000 people. Right. Tell me another one. When you travel in small social circles, you can be in a city of a million and still it's like being stuffed in a boxcar with 100 of your x-best friends. Fallon, Nevada. An innocuous little Nowhereville that of late has gained some semblance of fame as being the last stop for grub and gear on the final stretch to Burning Man. And here, of all places, I run into her. Extreme turbulence, and we haven't even touched down on the playa. Help. I've Fallon and I can't get up. ____________________________ Dateline - Many Miles North of Nixon, NV My feathers are flames.. flying against the wind. Fireproof jump suit twenty pockets Italian sandals, burned out cig in my gonzo cigaretten spitze. Cruising feeling high, riding low on the lam from the things of man, from THAT world out there, that world of passive entertainment, of Wal-Mart Blockbuster nutbusting a-creative nothin, cruisin in The Eternal Camper with Tracy of Houston. Tracy's scarred and rust scoured Buick hearse, Tracy with all the morbid curiosity of Crispin Glover poking dead nude blondes in film noir style. Burning Man ahead, just 60 or so miles now. You can feel the energy, the pulse of the great beast breathing, coursing across land like blood and fire ants at a country picnic pig slaughter. Road ahead straight as an athlete's spine, blue ice glacial face of Pymramid lake smiles a thousand blue sun smiles, lips of dust dry mummies, five o'clock sagebrush shadow. The truck in front of us lags and Tracy tense taps time to the tombstone stereo beat of perfect plugged in burn sound, distortion, machination, heat, the beat, and Tracy tap dances the accelerator. "YOu bitch!" she shouts when a little blah-blah silver pseudo Ford takes the lead, passes the truck on a blind curve, and I'm thinking all of a sudden that I'd kinda like to live to see the man burn this year, and jigsaw mirror-slice recycled death life leaps ahead, and we're off, out ahead again free and clear and answering the call with 8-cylinder conviction, bolting upright in the noonday desert sun, jolting, toward black rock and the future history of the legendary self-made burning woman-man. ____________________________ Dateline - Black Rock City Welcome to the Island of Purity. Out here on the perimeter there are no tourists. Moby. Are u ready to die 4 art Flash? Tell the tale. How do I tell this tale? This has to be the weirdest tale ever untold. Untold by me anyway. Slept like a rock last night. Black rock. Mummy bag. Jules in bed with Tom, Tom the power tramp, heroic. And Flash this morning in bed with three girls. I've got Venus envy. So Jules doesn't need her bag, lends it to me. Smells good inside. Smells like a girl. My recollection of the smell of girl is dim these days. K, my X, in art car camp. Me out here in the deep unknown. Okay, I admit it. I'm blue, blue as propane flame at its source. In a funk. Guess I ain't over that woman girl. But that's no secret. Haven't seen her since I left her last December. Natural shock this time, I guess. Top of the mornin, to ya. Top o the whale. I sit up here on top of the big dick, the Moby Dick, a compressed oxygen tank laid lengthwise before me, supporting my legs beneath my knees where I sit here, thighs raised just enough to give me the proper platform on which to type and see this little palm screen. ____________________________ Dateline - The Weird Ass Desert Here on the fringes of the fringe Sheepy and I peddle across a vast ocean of cracked earthen skin. Veering toward the mountains in search of the sacred spring, we thrash our way through sagebrush and over the railroad tracks to a copse of trees where two figures stand pacing, half-naked. They wave. As we approach we notice they are men, two men, one black, one white. "If they're gay," says The Sheepster, "I'm not going to talk to them." As it turned out, they are beyond gay. Approaching closer, the grim and weird reality of this scene comes into focus. The white boy comes out to greet us. He says they got kicked out their camp at The Man because of their chickens. They don't look like burners. It is then that I notice the black man tearing the feathers from a chicken. The white boy says something about really enjoying the tree and would we like to join their little ritual. Ritual? Chickens? What sort of ugly fucked up fringe of the fringe freakazoid weirdness is going on here? Scott says thank you, declines their invitation. I can see the invisible thought bubble in the dusty cartoon air above his head. He's saying, "And please don't rape us." But I think by now that's a moot point, and my eyes scan the scene further, taking in the blood-soaked limbs of a downed cottonwood tree. Later, The Sheepster points out the fact that the two young men were putting on their clothing on our approach, having previously been naked. Just them, the tree and the chicken. Out here on the perimeter there are no rules; out here strange young men fuck chickens, then chop of their heads, pluck them, smear the blood on their bodies, then fuck one another, just for good measure. Out here the man glows a rather queer shade of blue. Anything is possible in the desert. [Author's note: I smell a critical rat. I can foresee how this is going to be taken all wrong, that somehow someone in the Burning Man Royal Family will get a hold of this and have a bird (no pun intended) over my writing about chicken-fuckers and hardly touching on the beautiful aspects of the Burn. Well, what can I say? The weird, the heavy, the shocking, these are the things that get written about. The fun things get experienced BY ME, and thus rarely written about as I am not one who recollects well. I write in the moment. In the now. Okay, back to the show. I think at this point in the story I'm done writing about degenerates. Now instead the writing itself degenerates.. into the random notes and observations of a man having fun...:)]
Dateline - The Belly of the Whale Craziness. I am Jonah. I am Ghephetto, Pinocchio, Pan. And Flash is the man. The women flock to him. Tom calls to him over the walkie talkie, "El Capitan!" The belly of the whale is filling up. Eager fish, these. Who knows. Everybody always wants to know what I'm doing, many of them why. But there's no explaining this. Not logically. Not in any LSD comprehensible sense. Now Jules asks what the hell I'm doing. Some kinda sacrilege I guess. So I move to flash's cockpit, eager to have the space to actually write about something other than the everyone asking me what I'm doing. Gets a little boring, I admit. Just waiting now for Flash to oust me. Flash who just gave me a hit of ecstasy! Good man. I was shopping around for some. Twenty bucks, I was told. I couldn't believe it! Getting high, in the psychedelic LSD sense of the word, got a lot more expensive since my days of eating acid and wandering the redwood forest out behind Humboldt U., my alma mata. Tommy built one helluva whale, and I fulfilled an albeit small but profound piece of the whole by giving the whale his skin. I feel a sense of pride for Tommy and his crew, for all of us, even me, as the burning populous oohs and ahhs at the Biggest Dick on the Playa. ____________________________ Dateline - Captain Cocktail's Mobile Living Room Some weird chick from Amsterdam, loves me loves me not. I sure can pick em, sometimes you got it, sometimes you DONT. It's Friday. And I'm so far off the mark its sick. But what the hell. There's always tomorrow, sat, the night of the burn. God that Dutch blonde was sweet in proportion zero. She made a point of kissing every girl she could find, every man, Ben even, right in front of Mary! Random acts of kissing. But no kisses for Ricky. I hold this up in my mind against the events of last year's Art Car Fest, and I want to cry. ____________________________ Funny thought just now.. K asks me to open a jar of pickles and my first thought is this: now that I no longer get sex from her, as the relationship is over, are not my duties as jar-lid opener etc, over? ____________________________ Dateline - Ecstacy The Viking landing craft of the Texas art car gang. Very excellent. Fire breathing everything, the purple of the pupating moth butterfly mobile and we're towed by iron maiden, the king wanting to go home, but he's stickin it out., colors, so many colors, and sunshine smiles and the fire blows. [From here on out thing really degenerate, thanks in part to psychedelic drugs (only the night of the Burn) but mostly.. well, just because! The next 300 or so words I leave AS IS as the imagery will be recognized by those who were present, and come to think of it who the else am I writing for, anyway? Mind you also that I was clumsilly (sic) typing into a palm pilot keyboard while the maelstrom of magical burlesque celebration churned all around me on the decks of the Mobile Living Room and other vehicles.] Captail cockayiyal, his new high bridge, the jolly roger and the burning man flag, the mutated titanium barbQ, the portapottys fashioned after the heads of easter, island, mark the devil with his purple glow tube nose ring, noah on the water bug, dave who did the endo off the iron maiden boat.. now riding the sea horse with no name, cuz in the desert you can't rememer your name, horse with no name, , tracy dancing away the last hours of her big burning bday, , these are the boys of baustere frommel., purpole little dash lights all over the maiden like the one I splurged and bought on route to bisbee in 96 with florence with the ants eating her alive in her vw and the hot desert nitght cooking us both, a morning nap atop the mattress atop the w
Tish with her fturkey feather wings, , tracy with her cnady necklace, doctor electicity throwing lightening bolts across the night skty and the m, dr megavolt i mean. cog hugs rya and me and says I lov you guys, so glad your my family, just as said it the other day, and we agreed that one makes their own famliy and this is ours!! torches into thenight, and this year so many colorful crafts this year ringing the man the ocean theme and all thoos beaaful ships, galleons sailing and tommy's big dick white in the night, eyes red, copps on the chasse! sheepy looking so regalo with his crown and shammy like a turban he said he would chuck the crown inthe fire, be done with it all, done with burning man, boring man as he called it earlir today, and there is certainly an elemen tof truth to that, but mostly it is, like in all life, for lack of our own initiative, enthuusaiskm!!!! tesla coil,i, burn funnels the love operation desert snügqle reb blinky light ryas back ____________________________ Dateline - Live Atop Y2Kaka: The Final Ride (for now anyway) Riding high in the scrap metal cockpit crows nest of the apocalyptic city on wheels that is the brainchild and pop rivet reflection of creator Raul. Pure chaos and propane canon silver streak on the playa sky. But all is not well up here in the wild skies of New Greece. God Zeus Raul has got the blues. For today he must give his baby away. Some Rumplestiltskin arrangement with the Burning Man elite. "I don't have anymore space in my house. Y2kaka belongs to the playa. I think I am done. They know my reputation. I'll move to Italy." Raul's eyes are little globe-shaped fish tanks full of tears. A few escape and nestle in his goldfish-orange jumpsuit. Another Burn has passed. Check out The Burning Man Page Postscript Reno: the AfterBurn Coming soon! [ Check back & watch for this link to become active to read about the weird fallout in Reno in the wake of Burning Man `02.]
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