Burning Man, part 1

I arrived Monday night. I didn’t find a lift. Instead my sweet, ded­ic­ated, delight­ful part­ner drove me to Nevada, dropped me off and drove BACK to the South Bay. 

Inside, I went to Media Mecca to register, but it was after 6pm and every­one had left for the day. Worse, no one there had heard of ”journ­al­ist camp”. I went to find 

sig­ni­fier

at Techno Ghetto and see if I could camp with them just for the night until I found out what was going on but it turned out even better than that: a fant­astic woman from his camp named Mills said ”stay with us’

Turned out Mills was one of the Flam­ing Lotus Girls and Techno Ghetto was part of Illu­min­a­tion Vil­lage. In the end, this was the most serendip­it­ous of pos­sible out­comes because every­one in the camp was amaz­ing. The can-do women’s energy, the sexy gor­geous strong per­son­al­it­ies and people, the lovely men who work and play with them, all con­trib­uted to daily joy.

It also meant I had awe­some access to Jess and Brandi from the Mechabolic pro­ject and the people run­ning Swarm and later amaz­ing moments, all based out of Illu­min­a­tion Village.

For now, though, I was exhausted and decided to snooze a little before the lunar eclipse I knew was due for 2.30am.

Just as my alarm was going off, I hear shout­ing and people run­ning. I snooze on… someone comes racing through the camp yelling ”the Man is on fire’ I should get up, I think, grog­gily. I get dressed and sure enough, someone has set fire to the Man, five days early. The moon is an intense red as the eclipse con­tin­ues. Havoc reigns. The energy is crazy. For the rest of the week, dis­cus­sions about his motives, the sub­vers­ive­ness of the act, the rumours that You­Tube had video of it that night will swirl around. ”Where were you when the Man burned on Monday?” will become a ques­tion as per­tin­ent for this group as a cer­tain day in 1963 was for a pre­vi­ous generation.