Burning Man
Mood:  incredulous
Topic: (partial story)
So we left on Monday morning to drive there, 3 vehicles. I wasn't driving very much because I'd eaten a potent brownie the night before and was still pretty wasted.
It was about an 8 hour journey or so to get there, and I had this mildly crazy guy riding with me, which sure made things interesting.
We get out to the playa, (spanish for beach) which is just a big wasteland. There was a duststorm blowing when we got there, so visibility was shit, and everything was getting coated with white dust right from the start. The wind made it pretty hard to get our camp sent up, so we only put up the tent that evening, before it got dark.

A friend and I decided to go ahead and visit our good friend Lucy that night, so we grabbed her and wandered off into the night, completely unfamiliar with the layout of the city. I knew that there were 7 streets in a semicircle, all with blown names like Delirium, Ego, Fetish, Catharsis, and they were interconnected with roads that were times, like 1:00 2:00 3:00 and so on.
This semicircle that Black Rock City was made up of was 2 and half miles across. So my buddy and I go wandering off into the darkness, completely unfamiliar with the city, not knowing or expecting anything that Burning Man might have to offer.

We wander out into the city, and I am just BLOWN AWAY. There is all sorts of music being played, there were these huge dome tents that wer e basically nightclubs, where they had DJs spinning music, lights dancing all around, and people having a wild time.
The people who were out and about were wearing the craziest costumes, and then they were covered in flashing or glow in the dark lights. It looked like a combination of Tron and Mardi Gras.People were just letting loose and being themselves, doing pretty much whatever they feel. I remember riding on top of this mutant vehicle (a double decker bus that was a party on wheels). I was on top, and I looked down and saw a ninja go skittering off the side of the bus and jump onto a different one.
The nighttime scene was amazing. You're out in the middle of nowhere, so there's no glow from city lights and whatnot. and they do the festival during the week of the new moon, so there's no glow from that, either, and this area is so absolutely flat that you can see for miles and miles and miles in every direction.



The heavens were so large and mighty, then you look around you, and all those lit up people and dancehalls and vehicles cover the horizon. You're looking out and it seems as if the world you're in is part of outer space, as if you're walking around through the cosmos and meeting all these strange and alien people.
The trippiest place I've ever fucking been to.

The nighttime scene was just spectacular, never seen anything like it before. There was such an air and energy of love here. 30000 people who are all together in the same place for the same thing. To let loose and have a good time. There was so much love, just being given out freely from everyone.
The whole concept of Black Rock City is about giving, and being generous. Not just with physical items, but with yourself.
During the daytime, there's so much going on, also. The landscape is COMPLETELY different than the night time.
The lights and all start fading away in the late hours of the morning, but the music continues on all day long.
The party is nonstop, it's always going on, someplace, somewhere.

There's a lot of lights and sound going on at all times, bou get used to it. There's so much to be done that you're pretty much constantly active all day long, doing something or other, being out in the hot desert sun can be pretty draining just by itself. And then at night, the galaxy comes alive, and you can't just sit around your camp, no matter how damned tired you are. There's so much to be experienced that it would be a total waste! You should be totally exhausted by the end of the night and have no problems getting to sleep.
So you end up having a long long day of going around to all these different radical workshops. Such a variety of things that people bring with them to do! You could stop by someone's camp and jam out with them, or watch porno and eat some eggs. Go critique vaginas and penises, even.
Look at all the liberated naked people wandering about getting nice suntans. People give so freely of themselves, they open up so much, since no one is here to judge or criticize. Fat ugly people walk around naked completely unabashed, and no one decries them for it. They are actually embraced more for letting go like that.
Quite liberating, really.

It's such an enchanted, place, really.

I swear that this place is made of pixie dust.
The crazy friend we brought with us seemed to fit right in for a while, had such a great time running around naked and being odd since no one was giving him shit for it. Seemed like it was a pretty good and healthy thing for him, really. He was having such a great time.


Until the end. He hadn't spent too much time at our camp during that week. He'd come back every once in a while during the day with some homosexual man he'd met during the day. He pretty much never ate from what I noticed and I think that someone fed him some bad drugs while he was off wandering around.
Coke and ketamine kombo.

No bueno.

So he really started losing it during the last few days we were there, just not making quite so much sense, not being quite as coherent and he had been.
And when the Burn was over and we were heading out, he decided that he didn't want to leave the playa, that this was his home. He decided he wanted to join the rangers who clean up the playa and get things set up and arranged, but they didn't want to have him there. Its something you have to arrage well ahead of time, and they don't really care for having to take care of crazy people.

It's a major drain on the people and the finances. So they came and told us that they would either send him to county jail or to the asylum if he didn't leave with us that morning.

He didn't want to go, it was soooooo hard to get him to just get into the vehicle with us. I really had a bad feeling about him riding along with me, because he had really changed. Totally lost it.
He hated everyone in our group except for myself and one other person, so we had to coax him into coming along with us. He sat in between us in the front seat because my car was completely crammed with stuff.

He talked and talked and talked and just wouldn't shut the fuck up. Kept saying how "our friends were evil and spreading their evil through the world and how they must be stopped, those fucking bean counters, they should give me everything I want whenever I want it, the fucks!"
He's communed with the 'zeit geist' and he has said that "this is the way it is, no more heaven, back to hell, are you takin me away from eden? I'd rather die in the desert than go back to the hell you came from!"
(basically what he was saying, except not quite as coherent as I just said it)

It was getting really really really fucked up and hard to deal with. Driving us crazy.

Welllllll, he tried kicking out the windshield,
and then he punched my dash and car a bunch.
Then crawled into the back seat, on top of all the stuff that was piled up. It's kind of illegal here not to have a seat belt on, so I knew we were gonna get pulled over for it since there were so many police cruising the roads.

Wouldn't that have been wonderful? Getting pulled over while having a schizo bastard in the car talking about how evil we are and how there are literally tons of drugs in the vehicle (which there weren't) but even then we would have gotten searched and it would be SUCH a fiasco.
So we're cruising along and he's on top of the pile of stuff, screaming and flailing and being a complete asshole.

And what do know? One Mr. Piggie drives by and turns on his cherries.

We're all worried, waiting for him to turn around and come back and pull us over.
Which never happened.
Apparently the line of cars was so damned long that he just didn't even bother with it. would have been too much hassle.
Things were getting way too intense in my car, dealing with Mr. Loony Bin, so I had to pull over. We were going fucking nuts having to deal with this fuck.
My buddy gets out of the car, and then the insane dude follows him out. Friends in the vehicle behind us pulled over, but the truck with the trailer didn't pull over. We were thinking of tying him up and putting him in the trailer so none of us had to deal with him while we were driving,
since he was quite a liability, what with his thrashing and all, he could have killed us.

And he was excited to get us pulled! So we're standing outside the vehicles, waiting for the truck to come back around, wondering what the fuck we are to do.

Dude starts flipping out, running around and shit, then he runs towards my friends car and jumps and the open door. One of my friends was standing between the car and door, and got smashed between
Then the crazy guy jumps on the hood of my car, then up on the roof and starts treating it like it is a trampoline, big grin on his face, caving it in further with each jump.
"WHAT THE FUCK ARE DOING YOU FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT?!?!?!?!?" I jumped on the trunk and then dove into him, tackling him onto the hood, then we pulled him onto the ground. He laid there going "Oh it hurts *cough cough*" just trying to get attention and make us feel sympathy for him
Then the fucker runs off into the desert.
We stand there going "What the fuck do we do? We can't just leave him here, can we?"
So my buddy and I, the ones who weren't considered evil by him, we ran after him and brought him back and got him into the car. He sure did show us a lot of respect and love for being the ones the he actually liked, by yelling at us and kicking at us. He wouldn't stop talking about his crazy shit, except for maybe 3 seconds, then he'd be rambling right along on the crazy train again.
He started getting violent, kicking the roofs and punching the back window. We're trying to get him to stop, to shut the fuck up and be calm.

And then he told us "Hey guys, I'm going"

With two swift kicks of his shoeless feet, he puts out one of the passenger windows. And starts climbing out feet first, while I'm driving 70 mph down the road.

Fortunate for him, I slowed down and pulled over before he hit the ground. I'm sure he cut himself up on the broken glass a bit, heard him saying ouch a bunch.
"Bye guys, I'm gone."
"I'm going."
Runs off into the desert towards this lake, wearing jeans, a tshirt, and a pair of socks.
No water. No food. No wallet. Flipping us off the whole way.
The people who have been so tolerant of all his bullshit, the people have supported his crazy ass and helped keep him in line, making sure that he's loved and t aken care of.
And he thinks we're evil. This is how he repays us, after everything we've done for him.
He'd been doing really well before the festival.
I guess it just isn't a good place for people with mental instabilities to go.
He wasn't able to cope with the loss of paradise, and felt that we were taking him to hell, even though we're going to a place almost as wonderful as that land of joy.
He couldn't cope with the disappearance of this land he felt so free in.
Poor soul. He's pretty intelligent, even has his moments of brilliance at times, but that got washed away, dissolved.



We just left him out there, on an Indian reservation, that lake was a holy lake that they keep watch on to make sure no one is swimming in it, so I'm sure he's been found and taken away by now.
We can't say that we didn't at least try. We coaxed him away from the playa, took his dangerous ass with us, risked our own life and limb to try and help him.
Brought him back when he took off, even after he'd trounced the roof of my car in.

Busting out the window was just the last straw.


This just happened yesterday. Gotta call my insurance company and tell them about it. I'm pretty sure my policy doesn't cover crazy people damage, though. :oP
I hope I can remember more of the crazy shit that goes on in my life so that I can tell all the stories someday.