Worthless

See, exactly seven days from now I expect to have set up camp and be under-dressed and bicycling in the desert heat on the lookout either for free drinks or an active dance bar or both, my senses filled to reeling with other like-minded weirdos similarly under-dressed or set out in odd post-apocalyptic Mad Max attire or strange creative costumes or slowly driving in a daze as they seek out a campsite, the sun slowly dropping towards the dark razor's edge of a nameless Nevada mountain range in a perfectly deep blue sky. I find this just distracting enough I can't get a fucking thing done at my job.

The under-dressed part really isn't necessary to being a part of things, it's just my personal style. We all have our uniquities. I just made that word up. I expect to make up a lot of words out there in the creative maelstrom. Words and modes of living. BMan is a deeply spiritual experience for some people, the reason being once you drop your structures and your expectations and your inhibitions and your programming amongst an uncountable number of other people happily trying to do the same things in their own way, great windows open up by which you can look into your soul that simply wouldn't open before, and the trip can be life-changing. Yes, drugs can open those windows too, and some people use drugs out there, but not many, and they really ain't necessary. Not to mention there is a significant law enforcement presence: Federal officers of the BLM, the Pershing County Sheriff's office, the Washoe County Sheriff's office, and the Nevada Department of Investigations, to name a few. I also recall seeing some Tribal Police cars last year. All of these have overlapping concerns but needless to say, torching a spliff in public is a dumb idea.

My camera broke on the first day last year and it was a freeing experience. Leaves me with a conundrum: Leave the camera at home, or take it anyway for when I just have to have keepsake photographs? There is no shortage of pictures on the web, at Flickr and elsewhere. But they are rarely of the specific things or people that mattered to me. So, yeah, camera will go, the little one that fits in a pocket. Maybe it will break too.

Maybe you can't know the building level of excitement. It's impossible to grasp if you haven't been there or if the images and stories you find on the web don't interest you. I felt I got it just from web research, and once I got to know people I found I was more or less right. Maybe it attracts my long suppressed but deeply ingrained Berkeley hippie soul. For others it's about finding appreciative audiences and participants in their love of inventing vehicles and other mechanical contrivances. There is a lot of yin-yang flowers-and-fire sort of duality generating energy in this community, men who work with their hands to make machines and art and flame, and women who also make art and dance with the flame and share their beauty, and there are a thousand other archetypes besides, but this ancient coupling as between Vulcan and Venus seems most common and generates a huge amount of creative beauty and energy, just as you might expect.

Well, it's no wonder when you drive up to the gate, they hand you your packet and say, "Welcome home!"