Photo by Howard Banwell (Creative Commons License)

This is a slightly fictionalized account of true events

The naked man jumped up and down below us.  “This is undemocratic!” he shouted, spittle flying, “and unfair! And not participatory!  And not communal!”  He pointed.  He was electric, jerky, energy coursing through him, high and tweaking and just getting higher.

From the roof of the station, Christa called down:  “If you don’t let us alone, I’m going to have to make you suffer like you’ve never suffered before in your life.”

She was doing it to protect me.  Something dark had been chasing me all week:  I’d come to Burning Man and couldn’t quite figure out why.  No matter how nice people were,  I just wasn’t fitting.  Less than an hour after my arrival I was being driven around on an art boat at sunset to look at sculpture installations while topless girls danced and I opened bottles of champagne … and I was a square peg in the roundest of holes.

It got worse every day.  I smiled, I laughed, and festered.  I was lonely no matter what the size of the crowd.  Intimate conversations were like eating the flesh of my friends.  My limbs turned into dead skin and I dragged them from party to party.  I told a few people about it, old comrades.  “We’re so glad you’re here,” they said.  “It’ll get better.”  It got worse.

Finally, one day, after the desert and my volunteer position had chewed me up and spit me out, I told just a few friends that I needed them.  I was taking my best booze (I only bring the best) and my finest cigars (why smoke any other kind?) and bringing them to the roof of the BMIR studios.  And I wanted them to come, and be with me, and share what I had, and close in around me because without that circle I could not go on.  Read more »

Photo from MDCarchives; cropped by Beyond My Ken (talk) 05:04, 31 August 2011 (UTC)

After I wrote a blog post called “Is there too much positive energy at Burning Man?” several commenters invited me to come visit their camps and soak up their darkling ambiance.  One of them was Bat Country, a Hunter S. Thompson themed camp.

In fact I actually have visited Bat Country.  Here’s what happened. 

A few years back I was standing in the Will Call line for two hours.  A line like that, you get to know people, and I met a married couple.  The man’s name I can’t remember … it was something playa-generic … but the woman was named “Dirty Sugar.”  You don’t forget a name like that.

They were camping in Bat Country, and invited me over for outdoor movie night on Tuesday:  a double feature of the Johnny Depp version of “Fear and Loathing,” followed by “Gonzo,” a documentary about Thompson’s life and career, would be playing against the wall of an RV.

I said I’d be there.

The night was gorgeous.  I showed up about two thirds of the way through “Fear and Loathing.”  I asked around at the bar, but Dirty Sugar wasn’t there and I didn’t know anybody else.  Suddenly I saw an empty chair sitting just the right distance away from the structure the movie was playing on.

I pounced.  I sat down.  Took a swig of water.  Oh yeah:  this was a great seat.  I’d lucked out.

Ten minutes later, a guy walked out from the structure. He walked over to me.  “Hey,” he said, “would you like some tequila?” Read more »

It was the most compelling illusion I’d ever seen in my life.

The movie wasn’t any good. Boys in letter jackets, girls with ponytails, drive-thrus, giant cars. Not that I had much to say about chronicity, but their vocabularies were dated. “Golly.” “Swell.” All the while, my mouth was bursting with stars. I was in, all right.

Stars were bursting in my mouth as I scanned the warmth of the theater, the dim, throbbing lamps, the flickering projector. People were kicked back in their seats. Most were still wearing dusty fur coats, even though it was pretty warm in there. A red convertible roared around the corner and skidded to a stop in the middle of the screen.

And the stars kept bursting as I chewed on their flavor, crinkling the paper in my hands. I’m eating star bursts… in a late-night movie theater… in the middle of a dried-up, prehistoric lakebed on a freezing cold night… and I began to snap out of it. The genius of it all began to overwhelm me. Before long, it took every fiber of my being not to shout the truth out to everyone in the theater, but I knew they weren’t in the mood for truth. Read more »

Sailing homeward

He’s gone deep tonight – as deep as you can before the trash fence suddenly appears in your headlights.  He’s come to be alone.  He’s come to get away from the thumping techno that still echoes even out here, he’s come to get away from the green laser lights that still soar just over head.  If he turns around He’ll be able to see all of Black Rock City displayed in the distance like a mirage of heaven and hell, but he doesn’t turn around.  He looks at the stars.  Out here they fill the night sky.

It turns out he can’t get away from the music and the lasers and the city:  they follow him to the stars.  The only thing he can get away from, out here, is people.  It will have to do.  Read more »

Hello out there — if anyone is out there.

The Hun here, reporting from Reno where the ghosts and ghouls and glamorously undead have taken over the town. So far I’m safe here, barricaded in my house with eleven guns and a month’s supply of candy. But OMG! How I regret not warning you all weeks ago, when maybe we could’ve stopped this from happening. I should said something. But I kept it a secret, and now we’re all paying the price.

It may be too late for the truth to help things, but here we go. It started way back in August, when Stinger rolled into Gerlach with an angry-looking lump on her jaw.

She said it was a bee sting, and we all believed her. Maybe it really was a bee sting — but from what kind of bee? Even with medication, the lump didn’t heal. It just grew bigger, and blacker.

After a while, Stinger disappeared. We all figured she’d gone to the hospital to get that gigantic infected wound taken care of.

But then, a few days before the end of Playa Restoration, it happened. When the MOOP line showed up for work, Stinger was there. I don’t know how she got out to the desert; maybe she walked there. The lump was gangrenous and putrid, and it had eaten half her face. She didn’t seem to notice. She seemed… well, she seemed an awful lot like a zombie.

And then the worst happened: She attacked.

taking Deadpan unawares.

Read more »