Ooh, there’s a good one. Yet another good one.
With newly expert fingers, I ease a long, sticky booger out of my left nostril in such a way as to keep the glue-like substance in one solid, removable mass. How many more could there possibly be up there? I’ve been cleaning my nose out on a regular basis since I left the Burning Man festival.
I look in the mirror and barely recognize myself.
The oven that is the Nevada desert has solidly baked every aspect of my groomed back-home self – twenty-five year old blue-eyed, shoulder-length brown-haired, 125 pound female. I’ve morphed into a crusty, blithering playa creature.
An alien creature that picks its sticky nose, rescues wandering wedgies liberally, has formerly healthy hair balled into grey clumps unrefined even by dreadlock standards, and has been covering its red, tearing corneas for the last week with goggles that insufficiently protect from the ever-raging dust storms.
This is just one of the many bodily-and-mentally devastating outcomes of the up-to-$280-a-ticket, week-off-from-work trip to a festival in the middle of nowhere.
And that socially unacceptable behavior all happens in public. In fact, preferably in public, since the primary thing the alien creatures that gather here once a year have in common is an exhibitionist streak that views self-_expression as art.
So, unless you have a fetish leaning towards public nose picking, why would you subject yourself to a nasty state of affairs that a bunch of scrubs call art?
But before I attempt to twist this on you, all free-love-New-age-hippie-style, and explain why getting down and dirty is so cleanly uplifting, let me continue with my honest streak. Burning Man – at 45,000 strong, 15 years long, the largest art festival/rave in the world - isn’t just a place for frequent hand-washers to avoid.
Be prepared to sleep an average of three to four hours a day-night. The music never stops. Using easily flattened, perpetually missing earplugs is like Thumbelina jousting Rambo. Oonst, oonst, oonst, will be the soundtrack to your dreams if you like oonst, oonst, oonst, or not.
But fukkit. If sleeping in spurtive off-hours amidst a twenty-four seven rager isn’t your idea of fun, it will become so, when you realize that the music has irrevocably entered your bloodstream and is forcing you to bob, weave, spin and slide, to every sound back in the real world from your neglected cat’s repeat meows for food, to the top 40 hits blasting from the SUV next to you at a red light. Although resisting the latter is suggested if you are, indeed driving at the time.
Another disturbing thing the absurd aliens camped out in the six-miles in diameter, prehistoric lake bed that they call the playa, do, is share everything. Which means lots of germs wandering from one set of cracked lips to another, to another, to another…
When the heat of the sun is at its highest- sometimes up to 120 degrees – they hole up naked in covered domes or quivering shade structures reminiscent of above-ground mole-holes, minus the security or privacy. And here is where they share things. Public hookahs, chipped plastic spoons, sloppy kisses, water bottles with mystery owners, tofu soaked through with melted cooler water, toilet paper rolls with edges browned hopefully by the sun…
But for some reason - perhaps from lightheadedness induced by sun and drugs, or maybe because of a positive energy that seems to quiver palpably over everything in your path – serendipitous things happen all too often to be random, in this sharing atmosphere.
‘The Playa Provides,’ was the repeat theme of everyone’s experience around me, and by Sunday, the truth in the statement became downright eerie in its consistency.
“Can I get anybody anything?” was the unrealistic offer of a particularly motherly member of our camp to a lounging group of late-afternoon burnouts.
“Sure, how about a burrito?” was an intentionally improbable response she got. In an environment where gifting is encouraged, but money is disallowed, a taco truck around the corner is as likely as George Bush rolling up on a tricycle to share a fatty over some liberal discourse. Well, maybe a little more likely, because two minutes later, Emma the motherly one returned, burrito in hand. Seems a passerby had seen her, and said, “Hey, I’ve got a burrito in here. Know anyone who might want it?”
And maybe a glowing art car rolling by and tossing me a lollipop right when my ecstasy roll kicked in and I was craving an oral fixation is a bit cliché, but things like this happened every five minutes on the playa.
And at night – sometimes down to 30 degrees – the aliens wrap themselves in furs – coats, blankets, leg warmers, even strips in their hair – and continue sharing. Drugs. Lots of them.
Ecstasy, MDA, 2CB, and 2CI for feel-good fur rubs and a loss of fear while balancing in the dark on the top of a geodesic dome. DMT and N2O (nitrous oxide) for lounging around camp giving and receiving massages. LSD and mushrooms for making the fact that it looks like you’re camped out on Mars that much more exciting. Xanax, Valium, Ambien for shutting out that music and enforcing much-needed sleep eventually. And of course marijuana, whose soothing, naturally enhancing effects will become as necessary as an oxygen tank to a scuba diver by the end of your trip. No pun intended.
Just make sure you divide those drugs up right. Everyone at camp found it funny when Jeff took his serotonin-enhancing vitamin pill H2CP at night, decided the E he thought he’d taken was bunk, but followed up next morning with his requisite vitamin only to find himself rolling mid-morning. Except for him. Usually mild-mannered and sage-like, he looked positively growly by the time he came down in time for sunset, a preferable drug-taking time.
So drug-induced mood swings are as frequent as the morally reprehensible things that happen on a regular basis. There are beaver-eating contests – and I’m not talking about the water-dwelling creature - the largest topless parade in the world, known as Critical Tits¸ and enough naked old dudes to make a horrified grape spontaneously shrink into a raisin.
I watched a four-some – three girls and a guy – take place seventy feet in the air at the top caged section of a steel beam swaying back and forth from a weighted pendulum at the base. This did not look safe, although they certainly appeared to be enjoying it.
Speaking of safety, the extent of disclaimers on the back of the Burning Man tickets are downright laughable. Basically, live at your own risk, be quite prepared for death, and don’t ask us to do anything about it.
I watched the metal basket of a seesaw the size of two telephone poles slam into the ground next to a girl’s head who’d slipped in the sand while pulling it back and forth with a rope. She jumped up and high-fived the equally shaken basket-rider before the ride resumed.
I bobbed along with trepidation on top of the double-decker ride my camp called The Squid – an uncertain conglomerate of pink, buoyant cloth tentacles encasing the hood and reaching onto the truck bed that, with sequined CDs and my lovably geeky friends’ leftover mechanical pieces was supposed to be a computer. The thing is, I never trusted the Black Rock Corporation’s – the organizing committee at Burning Man – DMV licensure of our art car to actually ensure that the top half wouldn’t break off when twenty-five people bounced on top of it to the sounds of reggaeton.
For one thing, I never even saw a black rock while I was there. How could I trust an organizing committee that named itself after something seemingly invisible?
But potential irresponsibility is on one hand of the safety spectrum. On the other is a deliberate, edgy, bold recklessness that borders on heightened awareness. See, Burning Man was founded as a party place to challenge your senses and test your abilities, all in the name of art.
And art, at its best, is the product of visionary minds that are willing to step outside the comfort zone of ordinary experience and raise the bar, ask questions, and alter traditional perspectives. The artist asks who, what, why, when, where, and comes out with an answer – or its deliberate antithesis - in the shape of something that can resonate with and speak to the common experience of other humanoids.
That is the ego-baring, soul-crushing, elevated responsibility of a true artist. And part of that challenge is at least broached at Burning Man by living outside your comfort zone, facing your fears, keeping your wits about you, even while potentially losing them, and coming out the other side alive.
Such a setting induces the self-introspection, norm-release and catharsis of a drug, even without any added chemicals. Being in desert conditions with no real rules, minimal protective measures, and a lack of modern-day conveniences is a trip in and of itself.
This is an ideal place to measure and determine your genetic propensity towards survival. As the sign near my camp proclaimed, ‘Vanilla types will be broken.’
The theme of Burning Man 2006 was The Future: Hope and Fear. The dominating question of this year was if there was more of the former or latter in the spirit of the 45,000 person assembly.
The answer, at the end, was unclear according to voting booths. Seemed there was a healthy dose of hope, alongside a formidable feeling of fear. So my own conclusion is, if you left Burning Man in more or less one piece, you will be all set if and when an apocalyptic ending to what’s left of our world occurs.
Nuclear holocaust? Bah! After thriving in that dust storm at forty degrees Farenheit while on three separate chemical combinations your psycho-pharmacologist PhD friend made you promise not to tell anyone government-related about? I think you’re gonna be fine.
Bird-flu outbreak? Bring it on! I gave mouthfuls of chocolate frosting as encouragement to thirty of my closest friends on camp break-down day, using, yes, of course, one chipped plastic spoon, before finishing off the bottle with my unwashed index finger. And I feel great, despite the fact that this admission has effectively isolated me from making out with, or indeed being touched with a ten-foot pole ever again by anyone I know who reads this. Point is, the immune system is pretty solid if you make it through that in one happy, healthy piece.
Big-brother government monitoring your every action? After one paranoid acid trip, you now know how to read and react to suspicious types. Sure, curling up in the corner of the art car hiding from federal agents only emerging to dispose of the rest of your acid in the two-inch deep evaporation pond behind your solar showers might not be the best way to deal, but now you know what not to do when faced with a real surveillance team in the future, right?
Sharing lots and lots of germs with strangers, plus surviving in extreme conditions, plus lots and lots of drugs, equals: enhanced Darwinian superiority. If you can get through that kind of setting, I think you have earned the right to be extremely optimistic about the future. Because bottom line is, no matter what happens, you know you’re going to make it!
Sure, I feel a little beat up. Even a daily diet of those H2CP vitamin pills isn’t stopping me from coming down a little, decompressing, in playa language, if you will.
My black furry top hat was gifted mysteriously to the playa. I lost my fur vest atop a three-bus art car designed to look like a cruise ship. I only have one of my thigh-high Dr. Seuss-striped purple and green socks. I’m missing a handful of hair after unraveling the colorful yarn woven into it. But I came home with a CD from my stilt-walking new playa best-friend – Dub Side of the Moon, a reggae remake of Pink Floyd -, lip gloss complete with Burning Man logo, Polaroids of the vast blue sky, a fur coat someone didn’t need, and enough magic memories to keep me happy in my old-age rocking chair onto infinity.
I’ve been putting Neosporin on my sensitive and irritated inner thighs, twice a day since I got home. But dutifully applying some cream is fully worth the experience of having climbed and slid back down a two-hundred foot tall bamboo structure reminiscent of a giant pine-cone, while high and barefoot, in a tutu.
And even if the newly weathered face looking back at me in the mirror is not up to Hollywood beauty standards, I think I’ll take these new smile lines around my eyes any day over protected skin that fails to relay beautiful life experiences.
I even like the glue-like substance persistently coming out of my nose a full week later, because it brings me back to the dust that brought us all together. Well that, and the fact that I’ve kind of secretly always liked picking my nose. Ah, the sense of accomplishment when you come back with a little buried treasure!
As those absurd aliens would say, ‘The Playa Provides.’