Burn baby burn

From morning yoga on the desert plains, to the "Female ejaculation seminar" featured in the week's schedule of events, to "socially appropriate public menstruation day" ('let the rivers of red run free'), the opportunity for participation at Burning Man is endless.
At first mention, many assume Burning Man is like any other "festival"- every event and performance carefully orchestrated and executed to adhere to a schedule. You are the "spectator"; the others, the "performers". You observe, perhaps coolly, possibly halfheartedly, maybe enthusiastically, one show after another, your desire to participate growing as the crowd loosens up. You are an attendee, but the performers are carrying the show.
At Burning Man, there are no attendees. On this unearthly landscape, you create your interactions. You are the performer and the attendee. Once you accept that there is no careful execution of events, no staged performances -or even a sense of conventional time- you will realise that anything can happen. And it does.

We told our camp neighbour Geoff we were going in search of coffee and would be back in half an hour. We should have known. I don't think at this time we'd really realised the spirit of the playa. Anything can happen. My orienteering skills let me down, and I couldn't find the cafe whose location "I thought I knew" (its name was Scarbutts: you got a spanking every time you ordered a coffee).
Not surprisingly, we stumbled across a no-name coffee stall managed by a kindly west coast stereotype called Jeremy, all long haired, open-hearted and laid-back, and who seemed to have a PhD on the benefits of the "Burn" brand coffee maker. A girl walked past, not quite yet in the "morning after the night before stage", but well on her way- fluorescent dreads and fishnets a go-go. "Oooh, coffee's good" she says in wonder, eyes like dinner plates. She didn't stop for any herself. A muscled dreamer called Forest arrives, taking a break from "writing the story of life" on the platform which overlooks the coffee stall. He's an illustrator of children's books, but has been asked by his camp to etch the story of our existence onto the floor as part of an art installation. He asks us to join his camp, but we decide to stay in the suburbs with our liberal but stable middle-aged threesome neighbours, Geoff, Eric and Ray. We're kind of curious about who fits in where in that set-up.
It was midday and the desert sun had risen and was at it most menacing. We took shelter in centre camp, a large convivial space loaded with performance space, jugglers and acrobats, artwork, and cushions. It is also home to the only place in Black Rock City (BRC) which accepts hard currency as payment : the cafe.
As an atonement for a small violation of a BRC rule (never let anything hit the ground), we pledge to give back and volunteer that evening at the cafe.
Cycling back, I get heckled by an oversized black man (woman?) with a megaphone to give her (him?) a full moon. I do, and I'm told "it's a great bootie to boot".
We encounter a kissing booth, where my companion kisses a high-cheekboned and full-lipped man under a giant pair of wooden ones.
Meals aren't the focus of our experience, but our stomachs have risen with the sun and at the corner of 7.30 and Hanoi streets, French toast is being served on a silver tray. We line up like crazily dressed POWs for delicious cooked sweetness. Warm oatmeal follows, but true satisfaction comes in the form of a shower. We hear the what will soon become familiar spraying sound of the water truck, of the stream of water hitting the parched road. BRC government uses it as a way of keeping the dust moist, thus lessening the intensity of duststorms. A common practise in the city with no running water is to run behind the truck (clothing optional) and wash the dust, sand, sweat and bodily fluids off. The real challenge is not keeping up with the truck itself (which moves at about 15 km/h, but not slipping in the path of wet clay left in the truck's wake. The question we never want to know the answer to is: where does that water come from?

What is BURNING MAN

"So much of what you project is what will ultimately come back to you". This is a saying that has rung true for me in so many instances- from friends, to relationships, to jobs. At Burning Man, a festival whose core philosophy is participation as opposed to passivity, what you desire will one way or another find its way to you.
Cynics, hush- you are about to hear about something wonderful.

Relatively young, not so innocent, naive but open-minded, Kathy and I arrived in the chilly desert night with a brand-new tent and no idea how to set it up. After being welcomed at the gate by a woman called "Mighty" ("Welcome home!" she says, hugging us) and being made to roll in the dust as part of our desert initiation, it was time to conquer the anxiety-inducing tent pitching (for two relative novices). Headlights trained on our dusty camping spot at the edge of Black Rock City, in Black Rock Desert, Nevada, Kathy and I opened the foreboding object.4 From step 1 ("remove packaging; unfold tent") to step 7 ("tie rainflap onto pole "a" while tying other jargon-word piece of equipment onto impossible-to-find hook"), we had an accelerated lesson in setting it up in the second-harshest conditions (the worst being rain).
Twelve hours, 539km, one Wal-Mart and countless songs on the iPod had summoned up the need for a stiff one, so we cracked open our litre of vodka and downed a quick few, before venturing down 8 o'clock street and into a new definition of the word "participation". In those first few hours on this dusty desert plateau, whose lights and reach seemed endless and whose beyond is known locally as "infinity", both our perceptions were and are still skewed. There are the very first participants we see, beating what is still in our minds, a dead horse, but we know this could not be possible. There is the mutant vehicle, illuminated and blaring trance music, manned by an inebriated girl screaming "Forward hoooooo!" There is the stripper stage, where I discovered my hitherto undiscovered talent for pole dancing. There is Kathy, frozen in ecstasy for two hours, head on an Italian's shoulder, and coming to in the middle of the road at sunrise.
Despite being the most chronologically distant, these memories are the most impressive.

NEXT BLOG:
A day in the life of a "burner" (one who attends Burning Man)

Desperate Houseboy part 2

During those few weeks where I had endless spare time and an overriding sense of curiosity and adventure, I'd tramp the streets of San Francisco, observing the Mission district's Latinos, Dolores Park's hipsters, the Castro's aspiring divas and I knew that somewhere, among this mash of humanity, I would slide right in. I was craving a life in Fog City. I was therefore praying that my instincts would tell me that working for these people was the right thing to do, because as my mother always said "Trust your instincts".

As it turns out, my fears that my employers would morph into the Bundys or the Mansons were completely unfounded (and as some psychologists might argue, irrational). My job involved a short day that most full-time workers dream of, consisting of what most able-bodied people would call remedial tasks: washing laundry, drying laundry, folding laundry. Then of course there was the major task of chaperoning my employer to: the drycleaner's, hardware store, dump, supermarket and Golden Gate Park to admire the flowers.

Don't you think I can hear you saying "Oh, Ben has it SO easy, while we are here in our windowless cubicles entering line after line of encoded data into a black and green IBM computer (circa 1988) for 8 hours a day so that we can have our two weeks off a year to go to Fiji and our two weeks off at Christmas and then go back next year and do it all over again."

It will not, then, surprise you to know that as with any job, this one is not without its downfalls. I've left out the other burdens of my daily grind. There's the being taken out to lunch. And the fact that I've never worked a full week- oh the humanity. Then there's the continuous stream of other acts of generosity: home furnishings, vintage clothing from my employer's youth (which as it happens, I look GREAT in- and here's another chance to plug the boots), being driven around in 'The Jag", and the fact that I've had an array of guests, one of whom has been living on my couch for two weeks. All the tangible and material things, however, pale in comparison to Mike's overall friendliness, caring nature and approachability, and that's where I've really lucked out- who would want to work so closely with someone unbearable?