“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.

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mcGruff