Burning Man, part 1

I arrived Monday night. I didn’t find a lift. Instead my sweet, dedicated, delightful partner drove me to Nevada, dropped me off and drove BACK to the South Bay.

Inside, I went to Media Mecca to register, but it was after 6pm and everyone had left for the day. Worse, no one there had heard of “journalist camp”. I went to find

signifier

at Techno Ghetto and see if I could camp with them just for the night until I found out what was going on but it turned out even better than that: a fantastic woman from his camp named Mills said “stay with us!”

Turned out Mills was one of the Flaming Lotus Girls and Techno Ghetto was part of Illumination Village. In the end, this was the most serendipitous of possible outcomes because everyone in the camp was amazing. The can-do women’s energy, the sexy gorgeous strong personalities and people, the lovely men who work and play with them, all contributed to daily joy.

It also meant I had awesome access to Jess and Brandi from the Mechabolic project and the people running Swarm and later amazing moments, all based out of Illumination Village.

For now, though, I was exhausted and decided to snooze a little before the lunar eclipse I knew was due for 2.30am.

Just as my alarm was going off, I hear shouting and people running. I snooze on… someone comes racing through the camp yelling “the Man is on fire!” I should get up, I think, groggily. I get dressed and sure enough, someone has set fire to the Man, five days early. The moon is an intense red as the eclipse continues. Havoc reigns. The energy is crazy. For the rest of the week, discussions about his motives, the subversiveness of the act, the rumours that YouTube had video of it that night will swirl around. “Where were you when the Man burned on Monday?” will become a question as pertinent for this group as a certain day in 1963 was for a previous generation.