The Great Burn of 03 Part One: Crashing the Burning Gate Sitting down to this story, the first thought that comes to mind is this: All my friends are going mad. I have no illusions as to the why of this. They are gods among men in a culture which holds man and god alike to rigid & twisted consumer values. Yet despite all the false images & ideals being crammed down their infant throats, they remain beatific blossoming geniuses every one. Shunned for smudged credit & poor shopping practices, they shun the creditors and create instead. Penniless, they create and create and create until dead or exhausted and burn like moths blind with moon dreams and flying schemes. I could have told you Vincent, this world was never made for one as beautiful as you. Titus in an email blue like the movie wrangling, wrangling over all of this. Titus wants to fly, dreams he does. Dreams of leaving this world. Giant Titus with fragile heart, do not leave us, not now, not this decade or the next. Faded blue flower patterned ottoman and me, hunched in summer by wood stove hearth I read, grand piano at my back, stout old beams overhead, bear hug thick and comforting as grandpa's embrace, his kind old face. My face tightens now as teary-eyed I read Titus in my palm, see clear inside his rooster soul, his breaking, fraying heart. Do not float away, friend Titus. Brother. Not yet. With stylus like a painter's brush I dab the tiny canvas of the Palm VIIx. It is the revolution of this writer's work, the evolution from steno pads infinitum and hopeless transcription, from that to this. To typing while driving, while flying, while drinking or frying on Captain Cocktail's Mobile Living Room or Flash & Kennedy's great white Playa Whale. Or just here in this cozy mountain setting, obliged as I am to pour out this epic tale, all of it herein since frying my PC on a bad generator in the desert. Type. Type away, you serious green haired wizard. Toggle and type tween email and memo pad, tween Kettle One and peppermint tea, tween the story, the glory, the madness and me.   Kennedy and I arrived at the front gate of Black Rock City Friday night to the smell of burning tires. We'd been howling over the wind, singing along with 70s rock tunes on the radio since Reno, far too giddy with the excitement that proximity to Gerlach, Nevada now yearly brings, too high and silly to interpret the stink as anything other than burned brakes from the trailer ahead. But slowing to the gate brought the stench closer somehow. I tried to imagine the eco-conscious playa monkeys stoking a pile of bald Firestones somewhere upwind of the gate perhaps intended to dissuade ticketless skydivers gate-crashing under the cover of night. But I couldn't do it. The Burning Man volunteers, both the tenured and the hardcore newbies, are fanatical about the Leave No Trace motto, and although a lot of shit does burn out here in the course of the weeklong event, tires can't possibly be on the OK list. And as much as the desert rats that build this city embrace the Road Warrior ethic of growl, grunt and spit-on-the-normals, they, the DPW, are generally good people. "So where is this tire burn stench coming from?" I wondered. We'd noticed it way back, hell, perhaps as far back as Placerville, near Lake Tahoe. Placerville, old California gold mining territory, home to gold-haired coffee shop girls and Flash the white-bearded buccaneer and his 120-acre ranch haven of uberdogs and battle-weary happy pirates. Flash's ranch, the spindle on this scratchy record rogue romp of wage-less, passion-driven art built to burn. And so it was, I later discovered, that my muffler pipe had likely from the start seized upon the pervading pirate spirit, come loose beneath the Chevy and wound itself up like a cobra around the passenger rear axle and begun rubbing, and thus burning away, the right rear tire over 200 miles ago. It blew just inside the gate of Black Rock City. There had been some question in my mind (for weeks) as to how I was going to "get in" to the event this year. I put those words in quotes because after seven years of attendance and always as a participant, driving, creating, documenting, spitting fire, spinning tales, I am, always have been and likely always will be IN this event, albeit ever-so-under its skin in the tradition of its rogue kings, Flash the undisputed king of the Kings Rogue. I'm no Flash. But I am no spectator, either. I am Lord Duke, keeper of the sacred rolling shrine, one of Black Rock City's first art cars, here well before The Rule, back when we were just a few. Sometime in midsummer, my dear friend Sister Gwendolyn of Our Lady of Eternal Combustion (Houston chapter) pillaged the holy coffers to the tune of $125 and shot me a money order to that effect, the tune of half a burning admission ticket, as it were. Such brazen acts of Robin Hood-esque god-money redistribution (aka charity to the Gonzo Writers & Other Poor Dumb Poets fund) invariably set me to weeping. So I wept. And Jesus wept. And I took the money and ran, ran from Idyllweird in the south in one bold Gwendolyn-induced, damn-the-prozac,12-hour run to the Black Rock on August 9th, rather early for the event but just in time to get in the spirit of things with the whale and the galleon ship in an all-night tandem "swim" across the playa. I'll spare you the lengthy metaphor about diving off, about no-net freefalling and all that. They say half of life is just showing up. In this case, showing up did the trick. Friends opened their doors, lent a hand, hired me to do this and that (one of these this & that's being the transcription of every word of Harrod Blank's new documentary film, 145 minutes of people talking and talking and talking - a great gig both for the much-needed cash, the hang time with Harrod, and the fact that every artist featured in the film tells a mind-blowing tale of self-wrought, thoroughly inspiring creative destiny). Flash had assured me that I would be welcome with their team. But come Burn Time, driving up to the gate that Friday night, I still didn't know for sure if I'd be let in. Trust was a big factor. Just days earlier, I was convinced I'd be smuggled-in in someone's trunk. Now here we were, Tommy and me, pulling up to the gate in my loaded Chevy with one ticket between us. Trust. That and the Jedi Mind Trick. "These are not the droids you're looking for. You don't need to see our identification."   We were actually quite legit. We were Flash & Dana's crewmembers, each of us having either assisted in the building of, or now poised to install, the ornately-crafted alters commissioned for placement inside the Great Temple, the 65-foot tall Aztec-esque pedestal for this year's Man. But legitimacy without a ticket or the ever-popular "laminate" requires a kind of ABC triumvirate of successful sales skills: attitude, balls & conviction. Flash has all three and huge name recognition to boot. I was a fool to ever worry. What was actually being said then, several carloads ahead (I think our gang was seven or eight carloads strong), was far less complex or hypnotic than anything OB Wan would have conjured up. When asked by the young gate volunteers to justify the small parade of rogue droids running the gate with him, our fearless leader said simply, "Hey, Kid! I'm Flash!" [Tune in tomorrow or Tuesday for Part Two, as I work this coming week to tell the tale in full.] -RSM The Duke of Words To Burn   Click me for more Rants! ©2003 Rick McKinney ALL RIGHTS RESERVED