Burning Man, part 17

The same chaos reigns over at Crude Awaken­ing. I have been hear­ing stor­ies all week from Mills about her con­cerns with the safety of this pro­ject, so I am a little wary of stand­ing too close. Yes­ter­day, they were having trouble get­ting pres­sure into the 500 feet of pipe they will pour the pro­pane through. 

I can’t see a silver Sphinx any­where. Karen doesn’t think we’ll find it. My feet are sore. 

aethyrflux

doesn’t mind either way. So we find another vehicle to rest in for a while and gather ourselves. Rested, we decide to keep wan­der­ing. On my way off this truck, I am look­ing for a foot hold and can’t find one. Someone offers me a hand and I fool­ishly decide to take it rather than keep look­ing for the foothold. I come down too heav­ily on my bad leg and feel my sacrum and L5 go out of place as I land. It’s enorm­ously painful.

Walk­ing slowly will help but I really need a chiro­practor. We move slowly towards a large art car with a glow­ing sign: Mar­tini Agog. Per­haps a drink or two? Parked right next to that is the silver Sphinx bus. Whoo hoo! We climb aboard. Appar­ently, we were sup­posed to meet *next* to the bus not on it, but I didn’t know that at the time. From the open top deck of the bus, we watch the amaz­ing fire­works show before the oil der­rick burns. It’s lit­er­ally the best fire­works show I think I’ve ever seen and I’m includ­ing Sydney Har­bour 2000 in that. Mind you, Sydney Har­bour had a couple of three dimen­sional shapes. Per­haps it’s on par.

Then the der­rick starts to burn. I have never seen any­thing so enorm­ous as this fire­ball. I can’t help but think about how waste­ful it is. ”Green” Man, huh? Buying carbon cred­its to offset this is all well and good but this is still hugely prob­lem­atic. The travel of all the people here is too. And yet, oth­er­wise, how would they get to make this art state­ment about depend­ence on oil? Complicated.

Appar­ently there are four ”blev­vies” in this explo­sion. All I can see is an amaz­ing fire tor­nado at its center, spin­ning with a wild­ness of a sprite chained. 

I am swept with a wave of exhaus­tion and tell 

aethyrflux

I’m going down­stairs. He joins me and we find our way past the sump­tu­ous bar to the hidden back room, lined with deep red wall­pa­per and done up as a Moroc­can bed cham­ber. There are mat­tresses and cush­ions, a round table with spaces cut into it for drinks, people draped around. There is a water fea­ture, a little water­fall tum­bling down onto some smooth rocks against one wall and a little alcove at the back with a Ganesh figure in it.

I keep snooz­ing. The cap­tain of the Sphinx keeps coming in with his girl­friend all dressed in a white corset and tutu, black-framed glasses making her stern. ”No sleep­ing’ he says. ”Spank­ings all round if you sleep’ She admin­is­ters the spank­ings with glee.

We even­tu­ally leave the Crude Awaken­ing site and head, I think, back to camp, but it turns out the Sphinx plans to hang out at the Opu­lent Temple at 2 o’clock. I wait and wait for it to head home, since I can’t walk six whole playa blocks to 5 o’clock with my leg as it is. Luck­ily for me, aethyrflux works with Burn­ers without Bor­ders and he’s a darling. He props me up on a bean bag at a chill space and walks back to their camp at 3.30, gets me a wheel chair and then wheels me back to our camp at 5. 

Need­less to say, I got a few sur­prised looks when I got into the Vil­lage, but we sat around and talked a little longer and then I wheeled myself to the ham­mock again.