the man...

i have been talking with ewa on and off about burning man, and why we need to go, and how incredible and fun and life altering it can be. in my quest to convince her (and i think i might have for september 2005) i sent her a link to an article by mark morford who is a web columnist for SFGate, which the home page for the Chronicle. I remember reading a when it came out a few years ago, and it totally incapsulated everything i remember about going to burning man (this year will mark my third abscence). . . reading it now gives me the chills and gets me excited, and already planning in my head everything i need do to get ready and thinking about what funky arty thing to do for our camp, and who should we invite, and. . . .well, i have a year and a half to plan. . .

check out the article here. some of my favorite parts:

"It not only defies you to capture its essence, it doesn't care one way or the other, because it's all about being in the moment and letting go and drilling down into what you think you know and realizing you've probably been wrong all along because look over there, isn't that a giant dusty red sailboat on wheels decorated like a giant serpent carrying writhing neo-pagan dancers and a single musician playing an electric cello backed by the beat of tribal drums? Why, yes it is.

Isn't that a 75-foot high golden lion being slowly pulled across the playa by 400 participants all sweating and cheering and yelling and laughing? Isn't that a two-story flower stuck in the ground, indicating the presence of a makeshift dance club? Isn't that a full-size horse skeleton half-sunk in the dust as if stranded by nomads, out in the middle of the desert, context-free? Yes."

and . . .

"and by the way it's not all potheads and Deadheads and Phish-heads and nouveau hippie New Age goofballs chanting about pot and patchouli and the Mother Goddess because then it would be annoying and reductive and wrong."

finally. . . .

"As one camper who rode up to the event with me commented when I told her it was my first time, she exclaimed to me how excited she was for me, for what I was about to see and feel and experience, and shaking her head in awe, struggling to find the right words, she finally said, "There is nothing else like this happening in our lifetime, anywhere on Earth."

Which may very well be an exaggeration. But somehow I don't think it is."

* * * * *

oh yeah - forgot to mention we went to a dubutante ball on saturday - black tie at the st. francis - very nice. a girl next to me commented it was the whitest event she had ever been too. she was right - ewa commented that there weren't a lot of immigrants in the mix. . . .it was fun none the less. except of course when the 18 year old kid bumped into my chair, took one look and said, 'oh, i'm sorry Sir' - i wanted to deck him. . . .

it a great time, something different, a tradition that is just high camp and grace.