Dream at the top of your lungs

So it’s time to appease the digital mob…

The following will do absolutely no justice to the topic. At all. Should it sound enjoyable and should you find yourself lacking a sense of self preservation/modesty/etc. I invite you to join us in 48 weeks when we really go to burning man.

As you may have figured from my previous post or the following comments, Donut and I went to Burning Man this year as part of a two-man scouting team. What we found will surely fill volumes and can’t be described in a blog post. If you’d like to hear stories put a few drinks in either of us (or both for the duo show. Our specialty!) and we’ll talk your ear off with madcap adventures.

For those of you haven’t seen us since (and thus still have your ears) burning man is best described as a post-apocalyptic-bacchanalian-art-festival-and-mass-survivalist-crash-course. You go to the desert and you survive in all the best ways possible. The playa (the “city” is built in a dried up lake bed) has the final word on all actions and you just ride out life for a week with 45,000 of your newest friends. Yeah, 45,000+ people make the trek to Reno Nevada and then head 75 miles north up a one lane service road to go survive the crap out of a week. Google may help me with the issue of describing scale: Yeah, it’s on google maps.

Other factoids:

• No money. You barter/trade/gift for everything that isn’t ice or coffee (sold at center camp)
• No water/food/anything. You want it, you pack it in.
• No trash. If you brought it in and it didn’t pass through your body (or at least make a decent stop in your stomach for a while) you’re packing it back out.
• Fire… it’s a big deal.
• Art…. that sound you just heard was the echo from my mind blowing.
• Oh just google it if you’re interested; It’s time for a few pictures.

These pictures and many more are available on Flickr but here’s a few I liked enough to post again:

This… this is a happy night…

The only thing I bought the entire week:

Sometimes you’ve just gotta ride with Jabba…

Fire Duck! The duck that runs of FIRE.

This is the Fire Organ. Yes it plays music. You can see Prudence (the woman who shot Mal in Firefly) playing it in the background. She, and this Fire Organ are balls-out crazy.

How do you survive a sand storm? YOU BECOME THE SANDPEOPLE!! HUUUUA HAAA HUUUUUUAALRG!
(This is Donut and I showing off our survival gear… and being Sandpeople.)

Speaking of dust and sand: Your hair may take on an… elderly look while on the Playa.

Our intrepid crew. I would survive myself to death anywhere with these fine people.

The Man. He Burns. That’s over 200 feet of fire. When the final explosion went off it set up a 600′ tall mushroom cloud of awesome. It was physically warm where we were standing… over a quarter of a mile away.

Oh and if minds were not bent enough: check out this AMAZING spider walker that I snagged a video of. This thing has to be 12 feet tall and weigh a few tonns. It’s powered but a huge V8 and would take an AT-AT downTOWN any day of the week.

And so the sun sets on our adventure… (oh yeah, I went there.)

To set the scale: Those wings are made out of HUGE sheets of metal and the figure in the middle is a normal-sized human goddess dancer.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this rant: Nothing I can say in a blog post could come NEAR to describing what the Burning Man experience is other than yelling “EPIC” at the top of my lungs. (It is NOT a soCal hippy music fest. The next person who asks me “who’s playing” shall feel the full wrath of a blogger angered)

Should you care to push past my “EPIC!” outbursts, I’d be more than happy to share stories along with the never-ending pictures/video.

So all in all this year’s scouting mission went better than ever could have been expected. Next year: we’re doing this thing in full glory.

48 weeks till the Man burns!

Filed under: Amazing, Burning Man, Rants, Sleep Deprivation on September 26th, 2008