Words’ End

[I started writing this yesterday but decided to sleep before finishing. A wise choice.]

It’s not even 10pm, and I’m already in bed in pursuit of enough sleep. A couple of days ago Mark and I talked about the concept of enough, for the most part agreeing that it was not a useful measure. When does the lovingest cat in the world (who happens to live with Mark) get enough love? What is enough contentment? How much time on the playa is enough? And so on. Since that conversation I’ve thought of two things to which I can usefully apply the modifier enough: food and sleep. My body definitely has a range of “enough” when it comes to nutrition, and lately I’m glad to say I’ve mostly stayed in that range. Likewise with sleep. Too much sleep, which makes me logy, happily doesn’t happen often. But before the trip I was underslept for weeks with only occasional breaks, and every such period takes a heavier toll than the one before it. One of the unmistakable signs of aging.

(Yes, I know I’m only 31. I said aging, not getting old, and this isn’t even a complaint: I’m just fascinated with the changes my body is patently undergoing.)

I got a surprisingly decent amount of sleep at Burning Man. The noise doesn’t bother my lucky brain, which can wander off into dreamland under most any conditions if it’s tired enough. And the weather between the Monday and Saturday dust storms was so mild that the tents didn’t get stifling until well after 9! Both of the times I’ve been to the playa before, the beating sun made it difficult to stay in the tents around 7:30.

Tuesday night was a night for wandering, though. I went out with some of my campmates, maybe a group of eight? We were – oh wait, do you know what the city looks like? Here, take a look at the map – we were camped at almost-9 o’clock and A, riiight around the round 9:00 Plaza. We went straight across the playa, past the Man, and to 3:00; that alone is a 5400-foot walk right there, just over a mile. We then proceeded to walk the diameter of the Esplanade all the way around clockwise, back to 9:00. There were sparkly and shiny things everywhere; many of those things were faces. We saw … actually, I don’t remember what-all we saw. I remember the feeling of it, but not the camps and installations themselves. Campmates, help in comments? :)

Around 8:30 I broke off with my friends and walked into a full-on techno-y disco, in an attempt to find Sean. Failed miserably at that, but did find two other friends – Rob and Sara(h?) – who had both made these gorgeous faux-fur coats rippling all over with LEDs sewn into them. Gorgeous.

Walked back into camp, recouped and realized that my evening was very much not over. So I got to wander the playa for a couple of hours with Dan. This was fantastic: Dan lives in San Francisco, and I don’t get to see him a whole lot; and the little time we’ve actually spent together is somehow always graced with an ease that I love. Plus, he has an incredible eye for visual composition.

We wandered through a small forest of skis, which surrounded a little meditation space with benches made of snowboards: a beautiful memorial to a skiing-and-snowboarding dude by his friends. And we found the balloons!

The balloons were surreal. There were three huge strings of them hanging more or less vertically in the air, lit up (it was nighttime, after all) – blue, green and red. The playa messes with your sense of geographical perspective at the best of times, and at night, slightly sleep deprived and giddy and not entirely sober, with all those lights around – well, we couldn’t really tell where the balloon strings met the earth. But toward them we went, and they turned out to not be very far away. Lucky us!

They were helium-filled balloons affixed to heavy-gauge kite string, with an LED taped to a small battery affixed under each balloon. They were twelve feet apart, and each string had hundreds of balloons, and more were being put on as we watched. They were so, so high up in the air – but you could catch the string and sort of walk it down with your hands; which is what people did, and we did too, and Dan even lay on the ground with some other folk who were passing them fire-brigade-style and laughing as though they’d been inhaling that helium. (They weren’t. It was just that fun.)

Why balloons, and why did we find them so fun, hanging out in the sky like that, 500 feet up in the air? For no better reason than people find horse races or museums or monster truck rallies or hiking in the woods fun. It was art we could play with. It was some of the best time I had on the playa this year.

After an almost three-week absence, I have not quite gotten my room back to an acceptable allergen level. This is a daily challenge even normally, no surprise considering I live with five cats and a dog. So the rest that my immune system had gotten and the full frontal assault upon my return from the desert to the humid state, and we’ve got fun times.

Today my Burner campmates and I, along with some hundreds of others, unloaded the two 53-foot containers whose rental our fearless container leader Cris Wagner organizes every year. They get loaded up with stuff people are taking to the playa two weeks before Burning Man, and unloaded two weeks after the event.

Everything comes back covered with the tenacious, alkaline playa dust, of course. I now have several bins of stuff to de-dust, launder and re-organize, plus a tent and an aerobed; I hope to deal with most of this tomorrow. Ah, the bliss of weekends when I can dedicate so many hours to a project.

On Monday 25 August, I drove the last westbound leg of my road trip, and entered Black Rock City, NV (just northeast of here, in the big white Black Rock desert). I drove in in a dust storm several hours long. It took me an hour or so to get from the ticket-check gates to the greeters’ station, and a good couple of hours more to get to my camp – visibility was that bad, and even though there was an endless caravan of arriving Burners all going 5mph or less, at some point everyone just stopped, got out of their vehicles and hung out for a while. Note to self: do not pack goggles on the Burning Truck. Seriously, bring them with.

I got to camp caked in dust, with my eyes burning and happy as happy could be. Hello, playa, I’d missed you.

The rest of the week proceeded to be gorgeous – only reasonably hot desert days and holy-gods-warm nights when I don’t think it got below 60 – right up until Saturday, when there was another half-a-day-long dust storm. By then I was exhausted and not a little strung out; emotions of all sorts are heightened at Burning Man, and this can be tiring. So I hid from the world for a while with great company of several people in succession. Lucky me – when I returned to Boston, I also returned to most of those people living within a five-mile radius of my house.

If you are a several-years-old laptop by Dell, I don’t want to talk to you.

If you are a major, Major University Press, can you please explain to me how it is that getting an academic journal sent to my workplace will result in my getting billed the institutional-subscription price, unless I am a professor? In other words: faculty can get a journal sent to them at their university, that’s ok, and they can pay at the individual-subscription rate. But if you’re a staff member, *UP assumes that your copy of their publication will be sent to an institutional library and then displayed there. So they charge you the institutional price.

…

While I was writing this and simultaneously on phone hold with the (very patient) customer service rep for *UP, she came back to tell me she’d received the OK to send the thing to my workplace but charge me just as if I were one person. Which I am. So all this works out! But why did it take twenty minutes?

I said don’t talk to me, laptop.

Right! I am once again falling into the trap of having so much to write that I don’t write anything. Bits and pieces are better than nothing. And so, bits and pieces.

In short: on Wednesday the 20th of last month I left home absurdly early and drove westward to Black Rock City, NV. I took a northerly route on the way there and went through Ohio, Duluth MN, Fargo ND, Billings MT, Custer National Forest, Yellowstone and Jackson Hole WY. I got to the burn in the afternoon on Monday the 25th, stayed in the desert until stupid-early in the morning on Monday the 1st, and got home around 4:30pm last Sunday the 7th. On the way home I went south to Las Vegas, and then drove through Albuquerque and Santa Fe NM, Tulsa OK, Little Rock AR, Memphis and Nashville and Knocksville TN, Pretty Everyplace PA and Sleepy Hollow, NY. I drove a total of 7,253.5 miles in my friend Molly’s little 2001 Honda Civic Something Just-Pre-Hybrid, which was a complete doll and got me an average of around 45mpg. I was gone nineteen days (Stephen King, where are you?) (The number 19 carries a huge significance in the Dark Tower series); my cats expressed their unequivocal disgruntlement, and are currently over it.

It was exhausting and exhilarating and exactly the cathartic road trip I wanted. I saw some friends I hadn’t seen for a long time, met new and fantastic people, had the best burn yet (of my meager three), and spent a lot of time thinking and singing, sometimes at the same time.

Neuromancer is a bitch to experience as an audio book if you’ve never read the paper copy before. When I told Mark (who gave me the audiobook for the road) about the difficulty I was having understanding anything that was going on, and mentioned it was my first pass through the novel, he looked downright sheepish. I am glad to report that, after several false starts, I did listen to it all the way through, and am now listening to the whole thing again. It is brilliant and well read.

It’s 11:18pm, and i’m sleepy. Many more thoughts on each of the above-mentioned places.