Strange Radiation Archive
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Aug 23 06: on days and nights in the desert
Hi. I’m not dead.
All kinds of stuff going on at the moment about which you either know already or you’re happier not. On top of it all, I’m prepping as fast as I can to go spend a week in the desert at the art-in known as Burning Man. I catch a plane on Saturday morning—which is the day after my birthday—and spend two nights with Mom and then I get swept up in a twin-engine Cessna Art Plane, with eyes painted on and all suchlike, and spend seven days in an alternate reality. An alternate reality in the form of a temporary town of 30,000 people that springs up in the middle of an alkali flat in Nevada. My beloved cousin Erika has been doing this for years and assures me that (a) BM is somehow a Thing That Will Be Perfect For Me; (b) I’ll have fun; and (c) she won’t let me die. Okay, what the hell.
So lots of packing: everything from good socks and dustproof goggles and Nalgene water bottles to my trusty Utilikilt and a length of EL Wire and a quantity of midnight-blue body paint. (Because you can never be too prepared.)
I’ll be well outside of communications range during the event, encountering things like this and this and these.
What am I thinking? What will become of me? Are those ever the questions of the day; but as yet I have no answers. More eventually.
Commentary
Whatever becomes of you, you will be surrounded by and fanned by the warmth of great love. (and at the playa, I suspect, also by great swirls of creativity and alkali dust).
posted by Pablo, Aug 24 06 7:27 AM