Burning Man, Ho!
Last night, with golden light fading over Oakland, I had the privilege of shutting the back door of Comfort and Joy's supply truck and announcing that it was packed and ready for the long haul to Black Rock City. I only wish I could say the same for myself.

Since Sunday my life has revolved principally around packing bins and vehicles and transporting their contents to various locations in San Francisco and the East Bay. Sunday night Jeremy and I packed up all of our personal stuff and had some of it ferried to a staging area by another camp member, Kitten. Monday I picked up my DJ gear that was being repaired, loaded the Scion B from City Car Share with a couple hundred more pounds of speakers, stands, turntables, and DJ coffins, and took all that to the same staging area. Then, on Tuesday, I helped load a van with items from the staging area and take them across the Bay to Oakland, where they would be loaded for the last time onto our 27 foot Penske truck. By the time I slammed that back door shut last night at roughly 8.00 PM (the earliest the truck has been loaded in the entire history of Comfort and Joy), I was exhausted. My left elbow ached, as did my knees, and I could feel the strain in my thighs from all the up-and-down motion of climbing into and out of cargo bays with heavy loads.

With the major camp chores accomplished and the truck now underway to BRC, there are a few minor material tasks to be taken care of at the personal level - wrapping reflective foil tape on my beater bike, a trip to Walgreens for personal toiletries, a last scouring of the apartment for whatever might have been overlooked in the explosion of clothes, costumes, and personal effects onto the bed during Sunday night's packing. Left out of this is the major chore of dealing with my mental baggage.

I wish I could say that I was excited and looking forward to Burning Man. Instead, what I feel is an ambiguous apprehension, not of anything specific (though I can already see the evolution of potential personality conflicts among the members of our camp), but just a low-level existential anxiety about the Burning Man experience itself.

As I've both implied and stated in other posts, I view Burning Man as an annual ritual event akin to Mardi Gras or Carneval, something that marks the passing of a year and is also the celebration of hedonism before moving into the season of Lent. This exists in a very real sense for me, since immediately upon my return I'll be starting a new job, and a period in which I expect that much of the indulgence I've afforded myself recently will be sacrificed for industry and committed focus. Though I can find ways to justify Burning Man as a hedonistic escapade, it is this very aspect of it, and its relation to my own life and achievements, that gives arise to my deepest misgivings.

There are two very negative ways in which Burning Man can be viewed. One is that it's sex-and-drugs in the desert for the bourgeoisie, and this aspect of it has been plainly evident to me since I first moved to San Francisco and began meeting Burners. I recall, for example, going several years ago to a meeting of Burners who wanted my friend Scooter help them make a sign. At this meeting was an older, genteel man who was part of a group that rode their BMW motorcycles to BRC every year, and treated every person who arrived on a BMW to a fresh steak dinner. I can't really think of anything that exemplifies the worst ostentation you'll find at Burning Man any better. So much of Burning Man seems to be about this cool thing I have, or this group's crazy set-up, or other ways in which money can be used to flaunt the very harsh reality of the Black Rock Desert.

The second negative way in which Burning Man can be viewed is that it's essentially a science-fiction convention on a massive scale, where the dweebs, nerds, dorks, and other social and economic outcasts come to feel like "somebody" for a short period, and, maybe, get laid. Freed from the shackles of conventional society, these people at last have an opportunity to shine.

Common to both these groups, and many others who attend Burning Man, is the way in which BRC serves a focus for the distallation of very basic and primal aspects of the self. Years ago a friend of mine was telling me about his experiences with founding a commune in Tennessee that went very, very bad. When I asked him what happened he said "when you take people away from civilization, all the things holding their anti-social tendencies in check are removed. At that point, you get to see what's driving people at a very basic level, and it often isn't very pretty." While this friend and I share a misanthropic view of humanity in general, I believe that this principle holds true for the Burning Man experience as well. Whether you are a bourgeois or a geek, what you have in common at Burning Man is that you no longer have to answer to the same system of authority as you do in the "real world," you are given license to manifest whatever it is that you have to suppress (and repress) in the course of normal life. The result, often, is not very pretty, whether it's a display of material excess every bit as offensive as a Hummer, or a display of personal excess that would make Hunter S. Thompson hide his eyes.

This is the aspect of Burning Man that frightens me and fills me with apprehension, that aspect that on Friday night last year sent me in search of quiet, de-populated regions. At a party with a bunch of young (early twenties) furry kids this past weekend I made a comment that there were some very dark things to be found at Burning Man, and one kid challenged me by saying "well, I can't think of anything dark that I probably wouldn't enjoy." I wish I had the ability to summon up that level of naivete.

So, the question is, in which camp do I place myself, the bourgious or the geek? Both, of course, and that is what bothers me on the personal level. Certainly my ability to attend the event and make my self comfortable there, and even put on some display, is a function of my income level, modest as it may be by San Francisco standards. And, of course, I'm every bit as much a geek and social misfit as other attendees. The work I do has no real meaning, and, in most cases, I am the most marginal of contributors to whatever effort is being undertaken. I go to Burning Man because I, like everyone else, want to feel like I'm somebody for a while, that I'm contributing to something real, and that this all has meaning.

The part that's bothersome is that my normal life is so mundane and unfulfilling that I need something like Burning Man to restore my sense of self (or to obliterate it, as the case may be). It would be nice if I reached a point in my life where I felt like I didn't need Burning Man, or I could just regard it as I would attending a concert or going to another city on vacation - an opportunity for diversion and pleasure, rather than as a means for finding a self that I then hide and nurture until it is given the chance to manifest again a year later.

As appropriate for a New Year's festival, I do have some resolutions, or at least aspirations. As with last year, I hope that Burning Man will enable me to widen my circle of associations, though this year my hope is that they are more intellectually, or creatively, substantial. This year, with the promise of a new, well-paying, steady job, I hope to spend more time working on defining the paths leading onward for what is clearly a crossroads in my life. And so, I also hope that next year I might be looking forward to Burning Man not as an opportunity to realize myself, but rather as a time when I can extend, and enjoy, what I have made of myself over the past year, or perhaps discard it entirely as yet another thing that has helped me grow, but is no longer necessary for my self-actualization.

This will likely be my last post until I return. If I don't see you on the playa, I'll hope to see you when I get back.