“But the photo is ultimately just dots on a page — only a shadow of an experience” – Page 156

I started reading “This is Burning Man” shortly after our departure from the playa and so far I have only reached page 156.  I can’t remember if I started reading in the car or once we got back but I was eager to understand my trepidation with my Burning Man Experience™.  I wasn’t unhappy with my experience but I didn’t exactly have what I would call a good time.  I had many experiences and many of them were amazing, frightening and Puzzle even died for one of them.  But I wanted to understand why my unease would not abate.

For the first 50 or so pages I was unsettled by Doherty’s writing style. After the first 50 pages it got much easier.  Once I reached the second section it’s been a breeze to get through. Around page 30 or so I realized that I had lost the bug to read, just read, anything I could.  I had a lot less in my life that I felt I needed to escape. I was also mad about some of the stuff I read in the book which I’ll explain later. So I took a break from reading.  I recently began reading again.

It was also only recently that I had, while reading this book and on the toilet of all the apt places, my first real longing to once again feel the playa crunch under my foot. I wanted to see, feel and love the that burning horizon and stifling dust again. It seemed to be a miracle at the time. It was like finally crossing your eyes well enough to seeing the god damn boat in that field of random dots after months of people telling you it was there. I was finally coming to terms with my Burning Man experience.

For at least two years prior to going I was inundated with stories and pictures of the big one in the desert. I fell in love with burning at t’fus and could not wait to make my trek to the playa. 2009 was the year.  Lots of ups and down, dome building and personal life crap just hammering on planning phase.  Loans, loose change, and stock sells all happened to make my BM experience the best it could be. I asked every burner, that I could pin down, about their burning man experience.  I asked for advice for everything from what to take to eat to how feasible fucking on the playa was.

Burners are extremely helpful but what I came to realize only later is they are also radically nostalgic about their Burning Man experience. I don’t blame them, I was nostalgic from the moment I realized there was only 3 days left on-playa. I’m sure that the nostalgia combined with some slightly compromised memories led to larger than life stories.  Even the pictures seemed incredibly larger than life. Despite my philosophies and ardent attempts to eliminate all expectations from my experience, expectations did leak their way in.

During the festival I tried not to examine my experiences.  I tried to live in the moment I was in and no other.  I missed my son a great deal but I tried to let go of all concerns that weren’t in those moments. So my observations and understanding came only later.  The trip home was long and it afforded me lots of time to process what had happened.

On the drive home my first impressions were centered around how I felt physically. I realized what kind of punishment I had put myself through and that I spent a lot of time just surviving. The playa is harsh, dehydrating and a mere scrap of shade made all the difference in the world in that burning sun and horrid dust storms. Food wasn’t hard to come by but it was hard to find food I wanted to eat. We camped with Poly Paradise and they had a really amazing kitchen. It could have been organized a bit better for food spread but there were complications. Uncle Bob did a great job considering what he had to work with. My nutrition wasn’t what it should have been and I take full responsibility for that. I stayed hydrated but there isn’t enough water in the world to remain hydrated.  On Thursday I stayed in the dome all day.;I didn’t care how hot it was. Puzzle brought me water and food but that was the day that the playa tried to kill me. Last year, as I understand it, was plagued by pretty bad dust storms.  We had at least one every day and on burn night they had to light the man during a 10 minute window then it was possible to see more than 2 feet.  I am not exaggerating that distance, I could not, at times, see out of the front of my gas mask much less the railing I was resting my feet on.

After I had processed my physical feelings I began to catalog and examine my experiences. I examined how I felt during the experience and how I felt then, afterward. I didn’t then nor now like the experience I had as a temple guardian. The radio guy didn’t show up so I had the radio for 6 hours, 3 of which I didn’t need to have it or even be at the temple, sunrise was beautiful but I was mad by the end of the double shift, very very mad that one of the organizing guardians didn’t show and I was given no instructions for the radio. It’s not something I’ll be doing again. There weren’t only bad memories at burning man though.  I remembered the guys who invited us into their swamp cooled shade structure in the middle of the day and the theme camp we took over the couchs of and harassed all passers by. The fiery dendrite and the amazingly gigantic Rubix Cube were amazing.

Burning Man was larger than life and it was an amazing experience I have a hard time describing but why was I unhappy?

This brings us back to the book.  When I read the book the first time I began to realize that the Burning Man in the book, the kind of burn that we all felt in our hearts when we became burners, was not the Burning Man I had attended.  That Burning Man had random fires and amazing acts of momentary art.  The one I attended was patrolled by cops on 4 wheelers with shotguns and frowned coloring too far outside the lines. The burn that people, me included, wanted their first Burning Man to be was the one where Jim Mason planted the “Forest of Death” and the drive by field was still active. Sadly the Burning Man of ‘96 was buried under the legal obligations of the organization to provide a safe environment. At first, I felt cheated. I felt like the memories my friends had and the memories I had were betrayed.  The dogma of Burning Man was alive but the reality had died before any of my friends came along to kick the expired equine.

So I stopped reading the book.  I was angry in an odd sort of way so I wanted to put it to rest and revisit it later.

Time passed, and 6 months down the road I began looking back at Burning Man stripped of my expectations. I began to see the value in my experiences and I began to relive them with greater nostalgia that I could muster for months prior. I began looking for burn gear still seeped in playa. I started reading the book again as well.

I got to almost the end of the first section: reading of the schism and then on to the first part of section two. It was then that I knew then that my experience was tainted by expectations. Expectations I wasn’t even aware I had. Expectations generated from my friend’s nostalgia; the exuberance of the veterans had carried my imagination will or otherwise. It was through reading about the Burning Man that no longer existed that I began to understand that *the* Burning Man Experience, even the burner experience as a whole, is a combination of two things: a radical nostalgia for amazing experiences (these experiments in arts and community) from the past and a need to reconstruction those experiments in an attempt to reach a personal utopia. We want to live in, for and about those moments of amazement and wonder. We rerun these burn experiments every year to find the perfect alchemy that creates these amazing experiences and intensify them.  Part of that experiment is passing on those experiences in stories and pictures to as many people as we can.

But stories and pictures are ultimately dots, nostalgic memory and binary data. Merely reconstructed shadows of experiences passed. We just have to take what we already have and build upon it so we can grow closer to our personal utopia.

-

mcGruff

Here is a comic I posted for r-e that I forgot to post here.  Enjoy.

Transformus 2011!

Being a good little meme sheep I jumped on the formspring bandwagon as it found its way through my social circle. I will post the responses here if the question asked is something I feel passionate enough about to wax on. If you want to ask a question or give me something to write about go here: http://www.formspring.me/puzzle0807

Q: What’s wrong with today’s society? A little open-ended, I know, but you said you wanted to write…

A: People don’t think for themselves. We are spoon feed all kinds of information that is incomplete or just plain wrong and we aren’t taught to think critically about any of it. There is this unwillingness for people to stop and question ANYTHING about what they believe or why they believe it. You see it in relationship structures, in eating choices, in politics, but most harmful is the inability we have as a society to critically think about religion.

Dependence on religion is the single most harmful example of a lack of critical thinking skills. I am an atheist, but I am also anti-theistic. I really believe that dependence on a hysterical emotional vision that relies on schizophrenic discourse to the exclusion of all other logic to be harmful to the individual and on our society.

I came from a place where I wanted that hysterical dependence very much and tried to make it work for me because the idea of getting comforted by something larger than me, having that responsibility taken off my shoulders, was appealing. Why wouldn’t it be? Sadly, it’s just not true and no matter of trying to convince myself otherwise made it possible to turn a blind eye to the logical fallacies and control mechanisms inherent in all religions.

Like our ancestors before us, the ones who created the myths to explain bits of the world they just couldn’t understand, there will always be bits of the universe we don’t fully understand, but none of them are supernatural. I see and hear people say things like “let go and let god” or “it’s all part of god’s plan” and I cringe in frustration. There is no one out there who is going to deal with your shit for you and the sooner you take the reins and do it yourself the more likely that it will find resolution through something other than entropy.

Beyond the wars and violence that can be attributed to religious fervor, it’s destructive to our society because it keeps us from moving forward. Myths were created out of a deep lack of experience in our natural world. As we have moved through history we have gained so much information, so much perspective that we have explanations for the phenomena that our ancestors saw as magic and yet still we have this refusal to let go of those outdated traditions in the face of a real constantly developing understanding of the way the world works.

Outside of science, there is also a refusal to release the control that religion has on us as a society in relation to our accepted moral code. We have allowed a work of fiction to help us create legislation and inform our ideas of what is ‘acceptable’ for us as a society.

(This is the shortest version of this answer. I am thinking and writing more about this, so thanks to whomever asked it. )

Q: Do you ever wonder if your version of poly is more similar to serial (or overlapping) monogamy than polyamory?

A: No.

I do think that at many points over the last seven-ish years I have wondered if I was being true to what I really wanted from my relationships, as that kind of gut checking remains important to me. I have wondered if it would just be easier to accept the lumped on expections of monogamy than to continue to have to talk through every freaking aspect of my relationship choices, but as I talked through them and learned where my desires and boundaries met I have to talk about them less. I have wondered if I am ever going to have another relationship outside the one I have now, but that mostly comes from a lack of self-esteem and my occasional deisre to throw myself tiny pity parties.

My version of poly: I think that in the most general of terms my relationships are and will be poly because I am not willing to agree to limit myself to only one sexual or emotionally connected relationship just to maintain that relationship. That is for me the base difference between the expectation of a mono relationship and that of a poly one.

After a long period of time where I willing entered into relationships formed on a basis of control based agreements I now understand that those boundaries result in a loss, not a gain for me.

In my current relationship with Robert I have had the opportunity to pratice having the kind of relationship I idealized, one that is based in mutal interest and respect and nothing else. No more vetoes or condom compacts or permission (asked or granted). The only person who is going to be able to say ‘no’ to my choices is me and I don’t want to ever go back to any other system.

Q: Have you considered trying a little porn?

A: Actually, yes. The longer I am unemployed the harder I think about the reality of that happening. I have a friend who is a porn star and conversations with her got me to thinking about why I can’t imagine actually doing it.

It boils down to a philosophical understanding versus an emotional reaction. On the philosopical side, I support porn as an industry, I like porn, amateur porn especially, I even can see the act of doing porn as empowering. On the emotional side, the idea of taking my clothes off and having to put myself up to judgement based only on my physical self to be entirely, hysterically, overwhelmingly frightening.

Like most women I have been brainwashed by media and culture and my family to believe that only women who are tiny, skinny, and perfect are beautiful and should be in porn (or in a tank top or a dress or out at all). Fatty or BBW porn is seen as a deviant sexual behavior and subject to the ridicule of the general population.

Overall, I consider myself to be intelligent, hell even enlightened, and mostly able to recognize bad patterning in my thoughts and in my actions. I can recognize the self-esteem and rejection issues I have as bad patterning and more often than not I fake it til I make it and attempt to not let my internal insanity effect my experiences. I can recognize my sex life as healthy and freaking fantastic, I can recognize that I am desired by those outside me, I can recognize that I am not inherently unattractive. Unfortunately all of the logic in the world doesn’t apply when the more emotional parts of my personality take the reigns and I look at myself in the mirror only able to pick myself apart.

My ego in those areas is fragile and I tend to guard it. It’s been a journey for me over the last several years to find a positive place with my body image. I don’t diet anymore, I try not to let the negative mantras cycle, I have found a realistic body size where I am comfortable most of the time and I recognize that no matter how much weight I loose, I will never be a skinny girl. However, in all this I have never gotten to a place where I really find myself attractive consistantly enough to be able to enjoy photos of myself fully clothed, much less without my clothes on

Q: “The one constant in all your dysfunctional relationships is you.” How does this quote apply to you?

A: At some point in the last 5 years or so I stopped attempting to find my validation externally and started focusing inward so that my validation was dependant on no one but me. I never plan to be completely free of the desire for the external validation; there is worth in the opinions of those I trust and respect, but it has resulted in my ability to see the amount of dysfunction I added to my relationships because I relied too heavily on my relationships to feel validated.

I can recognize that I also have tended to continue in relationships far past their point of usefulness. If the relationship ceases to grow and develop as time progresses then likely its not worth continuing in and changing or exiting gracefully means the difference between burning piles of belongings and being friends and meaning it.

To this date, I have not been very good at keeping my exes as friends, but I have reached at least a resolution with all of them that left me without regret.

Certainly I will say that my current relationship with Robert is a direct result of the awareness I have of HOW dysfunctional I have been in relationships past, because I am very careful not to repeat those patterns in this relationship.

Occasionally I am still passive-aggressive, I still allow my imagination to get the best of me and I still really want to run for the hills, but now those occasions are fewer and they cause a dissonance in my own head.

Many thanks to fellow playa asshole and all around fantastic bit of Doomin Gloom for passing this along. Go see her at PlayaBound.

Climategate. It sounds like yet another buzz word to join the ranks of those used by global warming activists to inspire fear in the hearts and tap the wallets of the population. The big difference- Climategate is a buzz word you should be paying attention to. This scandal doesn’t involve oil spills or SUV’s or waste dumping, it involves the science of the ‘global warming crisis’ and the scientific community that supports the ‘truth’ that man-made climate change is a real and active threat to our quality of life on this blue rock.

At the end of November some very industrious hacker gained access to the servers at  Britain’s Climate Research Unit (CRU), University of East Anglia (UEA), claimed 4,662 emails and other documents, zipped them into a neat little file and released them to the world. So what? Why is this such a big deal? These are scientists, their methods and results should be scientific, what could they possibly have to be worried about? Well, if you ignore the sniping about their contemporaries (which many in the world of academia are like to do) what you have is startling statements from the top scientists in this very lucrative field about their methods for data collection and the use of that data in creating the big scary global warming crisis we are all supposed to be changing our lives and spending our money to prevent.

The following quotes are pulled from Tony Hake’s article “ClimateGate- Climate center’s server hacked revealing documents and emails” via Examiner.com, but they are not a single source. Just enter “Climategate” into your favorite search engine and start reading.

What is so damning? Because they contain emails like these:

From Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado:

“The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.”

From Phil Jones, chief of the Hadley Climate Research Unit:

“The skeptics seem to be building up a head of steam here! …  The IPCC comes in for a lot of stick. Leave it to you to delete as appropriate! Cheers Phil
PS I’m getting hassled by a couple of people to release the CRU station temperature data. Don’t any of you three tell anybody that the UK has a Freedom of Information Act !”

Some emails condemn ‘nay-sayers’, those who have brought forward questions about the validity of the data and the way it has been presented. Presenting alternatives to global warming is apparently an unwelcome addition to this scientific discourse and it should leave all of us wondering why. If a scientific theory, especially one presented as fact and heavily funded by public resources, is presented those presenting should welcome all ‘nay-sayers’ and be ready to answer the questions with raw data supporting their theories.

Other allegations of sub-standard peer review practices, manipulation and suppression of data to support the warming increase, violations under the Freedom of Information Act and issues with the administration of the overall organization have arisen from what was contained within the emails.

In response to the hack, RealClimate.org, “Climate science from climate scientists”,  released a statement that did not refute the emails or their authenticity, but simply reminded the readers that hacking into an email system is both unethical and illegal and thus they would not be directly answering what they called “cherry-picked… out-of-context” one liners. They make the attempt to write off this leaked information as “a peek into how scientists actually interact”  and that the “noise-generating components of the blogosphere” are only seeking to discredit these polite and competitive scientists who “find the best approximations of the truth” for our own noise making agendas.

In the words of Penn & Teller : BULLSHIT. This is science, not liberal arts, words like “trick”, “hide” and “remove data” shouldn’t be part of the discussion. The world should be asking more than just “Did you write this?” we should be saying “Prove to me your theory is valid without removing, changing or altering the raw data.”

The statement from RealClimate.Org goes on to say:

More interesting is what is not contained in the emails. There is no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research, no grand plan to ‘get rid of the MWP’, no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no ‘marching orders’ from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords. The truly paranoid will put this down to the hackers also being in on the plot though.

From what has been reported and what I have personally read, they are correct. There is no outlined conspiracy or admissions of a hoax and sadly no messages from their socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords with marching orders to lead the public into a mass hysteria of global proportions. Funny thing is most of the global media coverage isn’t claiming that this is the last nail in the coffin of global warming, but more a question of whether there may be a huge tumor growing inside it.

Could it be that we have been baffled by bullshit for years resulting in continued government regulation and massive increases in government programs that have a direct effect on what we drive, what we eat,where we live and what other, possibly more relevant programs, get funded with our tax dollars.

While climate scientists clamor to spin this as nothing more than conspiracy theory and interoffice discourse, the global community should stop charging forward and re-examine the facts that have been presented about man-made climate change. If the theory is correct then the climate scientists have nothing to fear from close public scrutiny of their methods and data. Sadly, in this country media converage since the hack was discovered has been more concerned with Tiger’s hair pulling than where the global warming movement may be headed.

To their credit, UEA has launched an indpendent investigation into the CRU to be headed by Sir Muir Russell, former Vice Chancellor at the University of Glasgow. Russel has no ties in the climate community and has done no research on climate change. They will be looking into data tampering, peer-review practices, Freedom of Information Act compliance and the administration by Dr. Phil Jones, head of CRU, who has recently stepped down until the completion of Russell’s inquiry.

The UN International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reported on December 4th that they would be doing their own investigation.

Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, head of the ICCP said,

“We certainly don’t want to brush anything under the carpet. This is a serious issue and we will certainly look into it in detail.”

Pachauri was initially dismissive of any allegations of wrong-doing or tampering.  Hardly surprising given that the CRU’s research was primary to the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report  in 2007 which is currently considered the most authoritative report on climate change.

Pachauri is obviously a quick study. Apparently Pachauri’s detailed investigation took only three days to review all 4,662 emails and documents, as well as look into the CRU and their administration.CNN.com reports this morning that Pachauri is again dismissing the allegations essentially parroting RealClimate.org’s stance that this is just scientists letting off steam:

“Well, I can tell you, privately when I talk to my friends, I use language much worse than that. This was purely private communications between friends, between, colleagues, they were letting off steam. I think we should see it as nothing more than that.”

So much for not sweeping it under the rug.  Once again there is no on-point refutation of the allegations. Pachauri goes on to say that there is no possibility that the Fourth Assessment Report could include incorrect or misleading data because there are too many checks and balances and that he would use CRU’s data in the future as their research has always been “totally above board”. Lucky for the UN that Pachauri is capable enough to resolve this issue just prior to the beginning of the Copenhagen summit.

The Copenhagen climate summit, a 14 day global warming support party thrown by Pachauri and the UN, began on December 7th and it’s first action was to release a multi-country editorial published in 56 newspapers in 45 countries and in 20 languages full of doomsday fear mongering decrying “climate change will ravage our planet and with it our prosperity and security” unless we take wide-spread and vastly expensive action immediately. Note that it does not say ‘might ravage’, but ‘will ravage’ and assures our impending destruction at our own greenhouse gas producing hands.

What do they say is the absolute necessity- the mobilization of $10 BILLION by 2012. While it would be a proposed global effort, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs stated,

“The United States will pay its fair share of that amount and other countries will make substantial commitments as well.”

Sadly, there was no mention on what exactly ‘our fair share’ would entail, but given our current deficit, a 10% national unemployment rate and our recent policy of borrowing from China to bail us out, our fair share of $10 BILLION would seem a poor plan if we are not facing certain doom from rising temperatures.

Thankfully, the UN Officals have already said that without legislation passing in the US (read: cap and trade) the proposed treaty is unlikely to make it off the ground. President Obama will be making an apperance at the summit at the end of the event and I would guess it will be more of the same from this administration, absolutely nothing will result from it.

So where does this leave our little blue planet? As Phillip Ellis Jackson from Intellectual Conservative put it:

So what if reducing our dependence on fossil fuels doesn’t really impact the climate the way we originally thought? It makes the air cleaner. And besides, going green is the more responsible way to act anyway. Is a Western lifestyle with its reliance on big houses, big cars, fast food, and red meat good for us anyway? Wouldn’t we all be better off if we changed our ways? Okay, sure, maybe the sun and the natural cycles of the Earth have more to do with the planet’s climate than SUVs and factories, but being overweight can kill you. You need to change for the sake of the planet, and your own good.

He has a point, but it doesn’t get climate scientists off the hook. Pachauri’s investigation may be complete, but Russell’s is just beginning and is likely to take much longer due to there being some reported dilligence by UEA. If it does finally come out that man-made climate change isn’t the horror we have been lead to believe then reducing fossil fuel dependance, reducing greenhouse gas emmissions by developing nations and out other planet killing habits stop being emergencies that allow leglislation and billion dollar government payouts and become like all good hippie movements- social and grassroots rather than hellfire and damnation.

RadicalExclusion.com will continue to follow Climategate and report back here.

“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!” – Jack Kerouac

It started with a card and a group of people who love me enough to send me to the desert. Inside was that ticket. I had the actual bit of paper in my hand in December 2008 and it sat on my shelf and mocked me for almost a year. The ticket I gifted to my eventual travelling partner in crime didnt come until the next spring. The conversation that happened not long after resulted in our decision to pack up my car and drive across the country, go to Burning Man and drive home all in the span of two weeks.

Not long after we decided that rather than buy a new tent we would build a geodesic dome as a playa house. Neither of us had ever done any kind of construction like this before but after much research and a whole bunch of faith in our ability to pull it off we started on a dome and a cover. In less than a year, we planned and saved for a cross country trip, I bought a car worthy to get us there and back, we built a 2V geodesic dome  and we figured out how to survive and party in an environment that has some pretty high standards. It was an adventure, it was a job and it was a fantastic experience.

I am going to try and tell the story. mcGruff is going to tell his story here as well.