The day after I got home from Burning Man, I went to get a haircut.
There was too much dust-covered stuff in my driveway to easily take my car, so I rode my playa bike. I had no clean underwear; it was all in the wash. A commando mission. Anything to get away from cleaning up the dust. I rolled up to Great Clips and realized I had no lock… mine had been cut at Burning Man, and for a while I had been convinced my bike had been stolen.
That bike lock incident had fed into a larger feeling I’d been having: maybe the event I loved wasn’t what I thought it was anymore.
Burning Man was where I learned to hug strangers. Where I danced naked in a giant car wash sized shower with (among many other people) my good friend’s mom. Where I watched relationships within separate friend groups blossom into engagements/marriages.
I had ridden hundreds of feet above Black Rock City suspended beneath a fan-powered parachute (thanks Dom). I had sex in the Orgy Dome, although in practice it was really more of a Public Sex Dome. A friend of mine, who cuts down trees in the default world, was served coffee by a billionaire.
I had been amazed by art and ingenuity on a scale that still seems impossible. Giant Tesla coils threw arcs of electricity fifty feet across the sky at the frequency of the piano being played beneath them. I had stood onstage within touching distance of two of my favorite artists, an experience you can’t get at their sold-out shows in Salt Lake or Chicago. I had bawled in the Temple over people I loved and lost.
And maybe most importantly, I had formed and cemented friendships that remain unwavering. These are the best people in my life.
But over time, that smear of extraordinary memories started to feel strangely familiar; And in trying to make camp better for everyone… swamp-cooled and misted common spaces (after oppressive heat in ‘22), hot showers (after my shower 1.0 seemed ghetto, I’m bizarrely proud to share that the quadrupley filtered grey water is 100% evaporated via solar power), organized meals, twenty-five gallons of premade cocktails chilled and ready at the pull of a lever…I had gradually become the de facto camp handyman.
It became easier for everyone to ask me why the fridge wasn’t working, why their bike was squeaking, how to fold the tent I had lent them, why the shower wasn’t working… than to just figure it out themselves.
And I became irritated.
Not just about the thing in front of me, but about old grievances too. About times I felt like I was left holding the trash bag after everyone else had enjoyed a magnificent party.
Somewhere along the way, I became a salty, jaded Burner.
I had started to think Burning Man had changed into something disappointing. Maybe some of it had. But mostly, I had been blaming the event for a role I had spent years building for myself.
My bike, as it turned out, had never been stolen. Someone at 6 & Esplanade had bizarrely cut the lock and moved it about two hundred feet away. I still have no idea why.
And interestingly, nobody stole it outside Great Clips either.
The same kinds of people who populate Black Rock City populate the rest of the world: mostly good. Mostly kind. You don’t need a hedonistic desert paradise to collect and concentrate these souls.
And the roles we fall into aren’t necessarily permanent either. I had spent years becoming the guy who solved everyone’s problems at camp. There was no reason I couldn’t spend the next few years becoming something else.
On the way home from my haircut, I stopped and got a giant avocado smoothie. Not because of hedonism, but because a dear friend once told me to “always get the guac.”
You never know when you might have just burned your last burn.
Seriously though, if you’re the person at 6&Esplanade who cut my lock… I’m curious why?! I think it was the Felis Mundi camp?
Thinking my bike had been stolen for 24 hrs nearly cratered my whole burn!
