Context: I am considering writing a longer blog/novelette about my trip. Burning Man in particular this year created a succession of stories worth retelling: Here is a sample. Comments and feedback welcome.
Names with a * have been changed to preserve some anonymity.
Friday. (Part 1) Suspension
"Pretend that your wounds are exotic tattoos."
- Rob Brezny, Free Will Astrology
- Rob Brezny, Free Will Astrology
The entire week I had been wrestling with the desire to visit our neighbors. I had placed my tent structure facing the street and away from camp in way that blocked the wind but also was a deliberate attempt to invite interaction. As such, I had a great view of the camp opposite my camp, Discofish (which has, in fact, a Discofish)
Camp Dragon Dragon had a small tower that perched over the street corner. I had passed by them numerous times during the week. My interaction with them had mostly consisted of waving at them or jumping on a stretch of green astroturf they had laid out across the street after which they would spray you with water so that you’d “get off their lawn.” This was a great thing in the intense heat of the day. Their entire setup was shaded netting over a steel frame and scattered with couches and chairs facing the street, like a dusty public living room.
Camp Dragon Dragon had a small tower that perched over the street corner. I had passed by them numerous times during the week. My interaction with them had mostly consisted of waving at them or jumping on a stretch of green astroturf they had laid out across the street after which they would spray you with water so that you’d “get off their lawn.” This was a great thing in the intense heat of the day. Their entire setup was shaded netting over a steel frame and scattered with couches and chairs facing the street, like a dusty public living room.
Talking to people isn’t that all hard for me. Overcoming the initial fear of meeting a stranger is still a big issue though. I had been making new friends all week, far more than a usual year at Burning Man. With nothing really going on, I woke up and walked over with my breakfast, and sat down among a collection of couches. I met a few folks, re-met some people I had seen on the Discofish the night before, and found out some of them were from San Francisco and they universally loved our outlandish Art Car. Someone made me a cup of coffee. I ate some sweets, and we chatted and bantered about. Little did I know that this was some premonitory PR.
After food, coffee, and regaining a general sense of humanity, I returned to my shade structure and thought about possible activities for the day. After weighing the options I had a strong feeling I should see Prism*. Our last conversation had not gone incredibly well. The week before, we had gone from spending three of the last six days together and “I’m really excited to spend time with you.” to “I’m feeling that I need to spend little to no contact in order for me to feel like our relationship is developing.” I can go into all the interpretations of this, suffice to say my approach to relationships is a little open ended and I tend to pick incredibly strong willed partners who like their freedom, and this was not out of scope. I also didn’t feel like I did anything all that wrong. But I did feel nervous about it, and I had spent the last two days doing some incredibly intense multi-hour group meditations on my own sense of worth, and my fear of abandonment. If anything I was ready to ‘see Rejection as a Redirection.”
It had occurred to me the night before that A) I knew where Prism was camped and B) I knew what her tent set up looked like, having watched her set up it in her warehouse the week before. And she was supposed to be close, in walk in camping, which was a few hundred feet away. Despite this, I hadn’t seen her since her arrival on Wednesday. I wasn’t about to swing down to her boyfriend’s camp, hat in hand and ask where she was. I just met him the week before and given Prism’s behavior I wasn’t sure how my presence was affecting their polyamorous connection.
I rode over to walk in camping, and immediately saw her, getting ready in her tent. We said a lot of things. However, the end result went as expected. Prism was struggling with fear of losing her boyfriend of three years, and our new connection, while sweet and full of potential, was coming with some unexpected overhead for her. She decided to end the relationship. I was sad, but at least I knew the result and my anxiety about our unresolved status went away. We had tried, and at least we figured it out relatively quickly. Only later would I reflect that while this was a fairly common occurrence, this was the first time in fifteen years that I was dumped on Playa.
Despite the break up, and the sadness of it, I didn’t have any real hard feelings about it, and we made some loose plans to hang out together and run some errands during the first part of the day. Fixxer (my default persona for burning man) got to work fixing some issues by borrowing a loaner bike from my camp so that we could do a quick ride, and stopping by Wonder Camp (we fix your shit camp) to see if they could manage a field repair to Prism’s bike. They said yes, so our game plan was to ride back to my camp and drop off our bikes, then walk to her boyfriend’s camp to pick up her broken bike. We proceeded north up the street and Prism turned the corner.
I ran into something face first. I slowed down on my bike, and looked around, dazed. I was just following Prism, and she had cut through Dragon Dragon past the tower. I had my hat down low and what I hadn’t realized was that a human sized ceramic mannequin was exactly the distance off the ground to collide with my right eye. And it was heavy, as well as being internally reinforced with rebar. The it had likely pushed my glasses my face, cutting down through the skin over my cheekbone, while the force of the blow had cracked the twenty pound leg off the mannequin. After a quick consult with Prism over severity, we moved into Dragon’s living room, bleeding, while people started looking for emergency response gear. I compressed it with some gauze and cleaned up the extra blood with wet wipes.
Prism requested that we walk down to ER services, a few blocks away, which we did. They had me fill out paperwork and gave me a paper wristband. I was calm, if a little embarrassed. Prism sat a few feet away from me in a chair, visibly concerned. The ER team put a bandage on it and told me to take the paperwork to Central Services, which was the primary response Triage, to get stitches. I met Prism's eyes and saw something there. I walked over to her, told her I released her from any sense of obligation or need to take care of me. I could handle this going forward. She admitted she needed to get her things done and left. I told her I loved her and we picked up the bikes from Dragon Dragon and moved them to Discofish.
I found the core Fish crew and asked if I could borrow the Guppy, which was a electric tricycle tricked out in colored fur. Flintlock* volunteered to go with me. The pain level was low, like a 2 out of 10, but shortly after she suggested an escort to the ES (Emergency Services Tent, which was for more serious injuries), I felt a stabbing pain closer to 5 up the right side of my head, and a little dizzy. Was I concussed? Would I even be able to tell?
The Guppy provided us a quick transport down the block. ES was relatively close in any case. Flintlock dropped me off and I skipped the triage area with my paperwork and wristband and went directly into the air conditioned tent through an actual door.
I’d never been in the ES. The first aid station in 2011, yes, when someone jabbed me with a piece of fence post. But this was a palace compared to those set ups. This was a self contained field hospital. It was pretty well set up, with a center row of chairs facing the walls, and against the walls, makeshift cots and adjustable chairs for people. A quick survey revealed a few people likely in various stages of dehydration sickness while a few people wore arm slings or had bandages over lacerations. Pretty typical day at Burning Man, based on discussions with my EMT friends, who volunteered their time every year at the event.
An EMT eventually came and examined me, and filled out additional consent paperwork. I was eventually graduated to a doctor. Lynn* was a 2 year resident out of Las Vegas and worked the ER room. This was her first year at Burning Man, She had a received a free ticket in exchange for her volunteer work this week. She said the experience working triage was worth the trip alone. At first she thought I didn’t need stitches, but then she pulled at the wound and the clot came out. We put the bandages back and she went to get equipment. Lidocaine in, a quick burn, four stitches, and a tetanus shot, and I was up and out.
“Yes, I need someone to tell me who I am.” I hesitated. Reading palms is great but more intense than just giving someone an inspirational quote and a picture. And this guy was on LSD! The last time I did anything even resembling magic around people on acid, I lost a friend, who subsequently told me that he never wanted to me to practice “witchcraft” around him again (I’ll get into this story in a later chapter). I was also extremely drained from the morning’s events and doing any kind of improvisational divination like this generally left me tired. I can do two or three on a regular day, I had no idea if I had one left in me to give. I tried giving him the book. He seemed reluctant. I told him I could do book or hands, he said hands. Hands it was.
His life line was the strongest line on his palm. His mind and love line were decent, but nowhere near as developed. He had issues with love addiction. He had a strong talent for leadership and his fate line indicated some fortune with that, as well as roles where he interfaced with people. He had very strong protector lines. I compared it to his left hand which indicated a more balanced energy but one that struggled with sadness and depression. As I placed my fingers in each place on his palm, the surrounding circle of people got incredibly quiet. At each statement I made I would hear confirmations from the group, or from him. For them, Magic became completely, utterly real.
At some point we had turned off the main road and into a side street. We parked in front of a camp and several people got off to explore the camp. I wrapped up my reading I asked him how accurate my reading was. He said 100% accurate. We hugged. His lady friend immediately asked me to teach her what I just did. I told her some of my history and how I was taught by my mother and her friend, an actual Gypsy, but that I was reinforced by book learning. But no, she said that she saw me “reach into his palm with my fingers and draw out strands of energy.” Oh boy.
We were interrupted by her returning friends from the camp. “Guys, there’s a man over there who is suicidal and just stuck two knives into his legs.”
Friday (Part 2) Never Sleep Again
"Everything flows and nothing abides; everything gives way and nothing stays fixed."
“Guys, there’s a man over there who is suicidal and just stuck two knives into his legs.”
Being the only sober person around, I immediately jumped off the art car and hustled over. The young woman followed me. I could see a man sitting on the edge of a platform. He was leaning over, one hand on his head, like the thinking man. Two ¾ to 1 inch surgical steel gauges with handles were pierced through the meat of his upper thighs. Blood was streaming out of the holes. He was covered in piercings, so I assumed he had just pierced his legs. I asked if he was okay. A friend (presumably) who was sitting nearby in a hammock said he was fine, he had just done a suspension. She was going to give him 20 minutes and if he wasn’t responsive she’d take him to the ER Tent.
I immediately turned with my new friend and we walked back. The important thing was to explain to the other kids that everything was okay, and I tried giving them some context. I still don’t know if they understood. I couldn’t complete the reading but I told her to find my camp (she would the next day) I was exhausted and in absence of anything pressing I had to focus on self care. This may seem simple but in a way it wasn’t. This was Fixxer walking away from two people who were in obvious need. I just don’t do that. But I had to put myself first. If anything that was the lesson of the day. I’d been diverted twice already.
I did pass by Dragon Dragon and checked in. One camp member commented “If it had been anyone else it might have been problem, but it was you! We like you!” Funny then, that I had only decided to meet them that morning. Premonitory PR. I also found the mannequin’s creator, Marquis. We talked about the morning and she expressed how at peace I seemed with everything. I explained a little bit about the synchronicity of the day, and I wound up gifting her my own Elephant Toy. When you see the toy, you’ll immediately understand what I mean. Both in the obvious context, and in the artistic context. The story behind Nibru is a little complicated, and it really only comes up because I was part of the story, and I actually created some Nibrus of my own.
“Beginner Artist enters ConceptArt thinking it's DeviantArt and made up of similar artists when in reality it's populated by industry professionals and serious students. The new artist, known as "divinenibru" also thought that his little activity, based around other artists drawing their interpretations of his character named "Nibru", was awfully unique and worthy of everyone's time..
Faced with a possible tartlet armed with a drawing made on lined paper, the jaded denizens of ConceptArt expected the obvious; zero participation with some light flaming leading to the eventual closing of the thread.
it all started when Wesburt decided that enough was enough. Rather than mock the new user in customary passive-aggressive fashion, or direct them to ConceptArts's activity center, Wes did what no professional had previously dared; he joined in, becoming the first disciple and honorary templar in the church of Nibru. Like a true Nibru knight, he kept the trademark lined paper.
With one of their own taking the plunge, the art dragons of CA spread their sparkling wings, opened their gaping maws and unleashed a fiery barrage of professional-grade art based on a high school kid's doodle of a stitch-faced, MacDonalds-endorsing sneaker-wearing emo wizard with a doughnut on his head scrawled on notebook paper.“
Source: a (somewhat facetious but basically accurate) summary on https://encyclopediadramatica.se/ConceptArt#The_Legend_of_Nibru
I made a couple Nibrus, but one in particular I may have put a little too much into it. I paired the Nibru concept with Ganesh, giver and remover of obstacles, and I also put something I wrote when I was my young teens in therapy about how I felt during my parents fighting, abuse, and break up, and how I thought it was my fault, that they didn't love me. In effect, I linked this Nibru to my feelings of abandonment and self-worth.
I made a couple Nibrus, but one in particular I may have put a little too much into it. I paired the Nibru concept with Ganesh, giver and remover of obstacles, and I also put something I wrote when I was my young teens in therapy about how I felt during my parents fighting, abuse, and break up, and how I thought it was my fault, that they didn't love me. In effect, I linked this Nibru to my feelings of abandonment and self-worth.
Prism made an appearance and I introduced her to Marquis. We chatted for a bit, then all went our separate ways. Prism had some scheduled activities that she wanted to do, and I really just needed to sit down and take care of myself, eat, rest, handle my emotional and spiritual state.
DiscoFish was a bustle of activity. Keg was going to get to drive the Fish, during the day no less. This was a big deal for two reasons. Firstly, the Fish generally was a late night activity and we hadn’t gone out during the day all week, and secondly, we were going to run Disco! You would think this would be obvious but we’d already had some intense ontological discussions on the nature of Fish’s mission and the type of crowd that the Fish would attract given the type of music that we played. Several distinct factions had formed themselves around their respective genre preferences already. This year’s music had actually been great so far, better than previous years. But really, not that much Disco.
I got in a quick rest and packed my things and got ready for the evening. When the Fish rolled out, I was on it. We were running a couple different disco playlists, mostly composed of classic music.
The afternoon was beautiful with a gorgeous sunset. A topless woman in bondage gear made the fish’s stage her home for the first half of our run as we took the fish out into deep playa. We had a quick pit stop, and various people got on and off the bus.
At some point a man on a bicycle pulled up to us and directed us towards a group of people. For whatever reason, we were playing “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” on the tracklist. We had arrived at a Playa Wedding and we were playing one of the groom’s favorite songs!. Just another bit of playa magic. At some point someone from the party ran up to me and wrapped a wristband around my left wrist (a blue twin to the one Prism wore from Nowhere Burn). Mine said “Never Sleep Again.”
There was drinking. I ran the small bar inside of the fish for a while, and the Chocolate Stout flowed freely. I gave people playa fortunes. I met a trio of Saudi women, and this was their virgin year. One had a shaved head and the other wore a Hijab. Like the Chinese group, I can only imagine what sort of culture shock they were going through, but they seemed to be having a great time. Apparently Paris Hilton was on the bus as well, though I didn’t see her.
As the playa darkened, the playlist shifted, and started hearing some music I was fond of. And in a specific order that struck a chord. I asked where the playlist came from, and was told it was a disco playlist off of Spotify. In fact, it was MY playlist that I had given to the fish crew approximately 5 years previous, and as far as I knew had never seen play.
I don’t know about you, but there is a moment when you are pretty tipsy, and you’re listening to your favorite songs on an incredible state of the art sound system, and you’re singing the lyrics happily - that was my moment. (later, I would hear from a few people who came by that they loved the songs that night, that people didn’t play things like that on the playa… )
Now my heart was full. And I was drunk. At some point, I wound up on the stripper pole of the fish, stripped down to a red furry loincloth complete with striped tail, dancing to “People are Still Having Sex.” as we headed back into the city.
Right outside camp, we experienced a clunk, and fish jolted to a halt. Apparently the attachment between the stage and the bus snapped off while I was on it, but no harm was done. The stage was detached and rolled away, and the crew wandered off for a bit. There was some discussion about taking the fish back out but after our day I was fine with packing it in. I took another nap. Then I woke up, hearing the Fish start up again. And decided fuck it, I was going out again.
We went out with no front stage, and instead of a pole, we hung a lyra from the Fish’s “angler”. The trip out was kind of a blur. I remember coming back and declaring to Flintlock that I was maybe an 8.5 out of 10 in terms of how drunk I was. She disagreed, telling me it was a 9.8 out of 10. A few minutes later I came back and told her I had done an self-Diagnostic and I agreed with her assessment. Then I threw up.
As Flintlock puts it:
“I was walking you to your tent from the fish when you were super drunk, and you wanted to show me the spot where you ran into her. We walked over to the spot so that you could recount the incident and then we saw her lying on the ground. You showed me the broken leg, and then you got onto the ground and gave her a giant bear hug wrapping your arms and legs around her, kissing her on the cheek and apologizing for her broken leg. You and she had a whole conversation about the incident and you "made Peace" with her. I had to separate the two of you to take you back to your tent so you could barf, but you held her and rocked back and forth hugging her for a while.”
As far as I can recall, this is the first time in my life where I blacked out, since I have no memory of the hugging incident.
Saturday (Part 3)
We shape clay into a pot but it's the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want.
- Lao Tzu
I was up early. I was regularly getting 3-5 hours of sleep a night with a short nap or two, but my body was handling it. No exhaustion or immune system hits. I mostly took it easy around camp that morning, deliberately taking it slow and focusing on self care. My beautiful camp mates manifested a feast - eggs and hash browns, and coffee, and I sat in a chair by the main group, still feeling drunk, and wondering when the hangover would hit. It never did.
I was interrupted by the young lady from the palm reading experience. Apparently she had tracked me down to my camp, and brought a friend. We'll call her Nefertiti* - she was a therapist who worked with psychedelic care on the side.
So, I guess here is where I tell you that I'm a witch. Yes, with an initiation and everything.
The story is that my mom was really into the feminism proponent and pagan practitioner Starhawk back in the day, had a copy of her book, The Spiral Dance, and was doing wiccan circles and hanging out in shaman teepees and who knows what else in the backwoods and college gatherings in the late 70's early 80's in Santa Cruz. All good. I was raised to sing songs to the moon goddess, to play with fire, and how to meditate and get centered at a very early age. The whole Christianity thing was interesting, I didn't really know too much about it (kind of like as a Christian you might have a vague idea of Judiasm or Hinduism). I mean I sang in the Christmas choir, I knew the basics, but I didn't really GET the idea of the bible until I went to catholic school in my teens.
The point is I was raised weird. And I believed in Magic, and Leprechuans, and I thought that Dragons were real and one lived on the West Side of Santa Cruz by Steamer Lane. My parents didn't really encourage me one way or the other but you know when your mom is casting spells and reading palms for people you kind of just accept it as a fact of life.
So this leads me back to the questions Nefertiti was asking me. Again, she was insisting that she seen me do "something" with her friend's palm and she wanted to know what I had to say about it.
On my facebook page when it asks about my religion I just put "Really, Really Geeky." For me to talk about this I have to set a frame of reference and it gets really stupid really fast. I don't believe that leprechauns and dragons are real anymore, but I do believe in Magic.
I think Magic is about your intent. The universe (whatever we refer to the material world) is just this infinite space and even with our best tools we can only perceive a slice of it.
I subscribe to the Robert Anton Wilson Camp. This guy used to be an editor for Playboy Magazine and he used to collect letters from people who would write to Playboy about all the various conspiracies that the US government was involved in. They would throw it in a pile called the crank file. At some point he took the crank file and started writing a book with some of the wackier theories in the file. That book expanded into the novels that became "The Illuminatus Trilogy".
This is a tough book. It starts off as a fiction book and then it gets weird. It directly references world events and places, and has a narrative, but in places it uses a "stream of consciousness" writing that was made famous with James Joyce's Ulysses. The worst part is, when you read it, it will actually change the way you perceive the world. This is far more disconcerting than it sounds.
The best example is that the book claims that the number 23 is an enigma number and that all kinds of spooky events and incidents can be traced back to this number. This is all well and good when you're reading.... so you close the book and go back to your daily business...
And then the number 23 starts popping the fuck up EVERYWHERE in your REAL LIFE. This is not a drill, this is a real fucking thing that happens when you read the book.
Now, you can get into a couple of camps on this.
a) It's pure randomness that 23 is popping up, and it's coincidence. It's not testable in any case
b) 23 IS the magic number and it's everywhere (Michael Jordan's shirt, omg!)
c) Somewhere in between where it's real and it's not real.
Wilson's point of view is that he's a skeptic, he will always be a skeptic, but he's no atheist, and he's observed some weird stuff in his life and he's happy to concede that we can't really understand existence. He writes a whole book about the "Inquisition" which is essentially about the dogmatism that has driven our understanding of science in the direction it already has, while ruining other legitimate scientists' careers. He uses this as a cautionary tale. It's not about the evil conspiracy of science, it's about normal people getting caught up in their own beliefs to the point that they can't see any other view. His goal is "To try to get people into a state of generalized agnosticism, not agnosticism about God alone but agnosticism about everything."
Personally I feel like we are biologically pre-disposed to create patterns (akin to Cognitive Bias) , and this is both a gift and a curse. The point is to notice its power. If you tell me 23 is important then the number 23 will start to go higher and higher on the importance scale. Maybe I wouldn't even notice it consciously but if I see the symbol in my field of vision I will certainly be more sensitive to it and THEN see it and THEN attach meaning to it - which reinforces its importance - whereas previously I would have never seen it. It's like when you buy a Toyota and suddenly start to see Toyotas everywhere.
In Wilson's POV, it's always about catching yourself in the act of observing. Of being aware that reality is what you observe, and realizing that if you can have any number of beliefs, at least create one that's cool and works for you. Pronoia and the Church of the Sub Genius share some DNA with the movements he started or was more than casually involved with.
The other guy that I'm majorly influenced by is Stuart Wilde. Wilde gives no fucks, he's like the Noam Chomsky of the New Age circuit, simultaneously pissing people off with wild conjecture and yet nailing incredible insight to the wall. Hideous and fascinating all at once. One of the many ideas Wilde propounds on is that the universe is basically in a quantum state. Like with light that simultaneously exists as a wave and a photon, there are elements of the universe that don't actually exist until someone comes along and observes them.
Wilde is into manifesting shit. Basically creating the reality that you want with your intent. You observe reality and it CHANGES itself to fit your intent. And honestly, I can buy into this, (with a healthy scoop of skepticism) Maybe it's biological, maybe it's magic, I can't say. But I can tell you that when I was dirt poor and wanted a book about making money in the self help section of the bookstore his book about manifesting money literally fell off the shelf in front of me. And that's not a singular occurrence. According to him, multiple people have written to him about his book falling off the bookshelf in front of them. Spookyyyyy..
The book worked, btw. As well as the second one that randomly showed up in my life at an unexpected place... but that's another story.
The last bit I want to talk about is Synchronicity. Basically it's when something happens, you get a bit of data in your existence, and then later something else comes along that reinforces that data. (The problem that humans generally ignore non-reinforcing data)
In any case, 23 could be an example.
My creating a little plastic elephant with a stitched eye and then getting stitches right beneath my eye, in a place that I've injured several times in the past, could be an example.
My walking around the playa realizing I needed to get over my sense of unworthiness and then having a complete stranger scream out randomly aloud " there's no such thing as Playa Magic.
YOU'RE WORTH IT, YOU'RE WORTH IT, YOU'RE WORTH IT."
I meannnnn, that could be an example.
The extension of the idea is that if Fate is real, can you actually control of the effect? To use a simple analogy, if Life is like a deck of cards, can you stack the deck without touching it to make the card you want come to the top? I can't really say. I certainly can't prove it. What I can say with certainty is that you can arrange yourself, your mindset, to play the "game of Life" as if that card were going to come to top. When it actually does it will sure as fuck seem like Magic to everyone else.
If that seems like a cop out, well, I stick to what I think is plausible. Back to Nefertiti, who has now heard all this and seems disappointed. No ability to rewrite someone's DNA has manifested itself at this point.
She asked me to her palm read again, which I did. I did explain that during parts of the read, I was consulting my intuition, and that possibly I was reading something off her, but I wasn't conscious of it. Wilde called it "The Etheric", positing that we are connected by energy out to about 40 feet and we actually do affect each other. I personally think if anything like the Etheric is true, it doesn't have a range.
I wrap things up with Nefertiti and say goodbye. I don't really know what to say - she seems really excited by the Etheric idea, I give her my default address information and name and she says she'll find me, and that we'll trade book names.
*****
I meannnnn, that could be an example.
The extension of the idea is that if Fate is real, can you actually control of the effect? To use a simple analogy, if Life is like a deck of cards, can you stack the deck without touching it to make the card you want come to the top? I can't really say. I certainly can't prove it. What I can say with certainty is that you can arrange yourself, your mindset, to play the "game of Life" as if that card were going to come to top. When it actually does it will sure as fuck seem like Magic to everyone else.
If that seems like a cop out, well, I stick to what I think is plausible. Back to Nefertiti, who has now heard all this and seems disappointed. No ability to rewrite someone's DNA has manifested itself at this point.
She asked me to her palm read again, which I did. I did explain that during parts of the read, I was consulting my intuition, and that possibly I was reading something off her, but I wasn't conscious of it. Wilde called it "The Etheric", positing that we are connected by energy out to about 40 feet and we actually do affect each other. I personally think if anything like the Etheric is true, it doesn't have a range.
I wrap things up with Nefertiti and say goodbye. I don't really know what to say - she seems really excited by the Etheric idea, I give her my default address information and name and she says she'll find me, and that we'll trade book names.
*****
