Trying to get on an earlier sleep schedule just means a day of punishment, I think. I thought if I went to bed at 12:30 I’d be able to wake up at 8:30 without too much fuss. But I know myself better…when used to crashing at 2am, my brain simply will not quit at midnight. Well, I tried. I’m just going to have to be sleepy in the morning.

I’ve been meaning to post anyway for ages. I wanted to write about Burning Man, which was so built up for me over the course of the last ten years that the reality could be nothing but deflating, despite the fact that I got to go flying around in a little plane and saw one of my favorite pieces of art ever there and stayed up past dawn on consecutive nights and roamed around in the desert–my car is still coated with playa-dust on the inside. Black Rock City is a lovely place, if a little obsessed with itself.

The thought of describing the art that I liked is daunting. I’m going to give it a shot, though. I’m afraid of boring myself with it, because it takes a lot of words to describe. Feel free to skip this entry if it bores you, too.

So one of the first things I saw, the first night I arrived, was a 100-foot wooden tower built to look like an oil derrick. You couldn’t miss it; it was well outside the main city horseshoe, but it was gigantic. Also at its base were huge metal worshipers…maybe 30 feet tall? industrial-style (gears and chains and so forth were the building materials) human beings in contorted postures of ecstatic worship. The sculptures had fire pulsing inside at various chakra points, and there were levers and buttons that onlookers could fiddle with to produce giant fireball-gouts of flame from out one fellow’s head and another woman’s gut. One woman’s chest pulsed with flame like an apocalyptic heartbeat.

If you join the line at the base of the tower, you are eventually allowed to climb it and survey the whole of Black Rock City from the top. This was a surreal event for me, as I had arrived in the desert mere hours ago, and to see the city from above was more or less to look down on a giant, hyper video arcade. At night, people and bicycles are decorated with glowing, flashing, and pulsing colored lights so that the art cars roaming the desert sans headlights don’t run them over. Most of the big art installations and all of the on-playa dance clubs also had considerable multicolored wattage pouring forth. The city itself is like a circle with one side rubbed out from 10:00 to 2:00, maybe two miles in diameter? and art is scattered throughout the city and far beyond it, so that you can travel a mile or two out into the open playa to visit more remote installations (this faux-derrick was only about a third out, compared to some of the farther-away installations.)

So anyway. From the top, you can look down on those frenzied worshipers and the much smaller flesh people milling among them, and see the panorama of the crazy city, and feel mild vertigo. Very nice. I climbed down and went on looking at other things in the city up close.

Now, like most wooden art in BRC, this derrick was slated to burn at the end of the week, the night before the Man burned. That day, though, there was an intense white-out dust storm (yet another apocolyptic experience that was maybe the best of all) that had delayed their preparations for that event, so the burn was delayed until after the Man burned on Saturday. I’m happy about that, because the Man would have been an awful anticlimax if I’d seen this first.

(Actually, the Man was already an anticlimax on its own. I wasn’t expecting much from it…and it didn’t let me down. Funny that the thing that started this whole crazy event is sort of an afterthought now. (and I think that would have been true even if he hadn’t been pre-burned this year.))

So after the Man burned on Saturday night, I and a few friends biked over to the derrick to see the show. The side facing the city was bound to be crowded, so we biked over to the far side of it. The Rangers had established a wide perimeter around the thing, and we were right at the edge of the cleared area. No one was behind us, and to either side were people widely spaced. I understand that being on the city side of this event was a vastly different and far more crowded experience.

Now, all day I had been hearing rumors about this event. They were using some ridiculous amount of rocket fuel to not just light it on fire, but to really explode it. The perimeter they had set up around the thing was so big I couldn’t see or hear the people opposite me on the circle, yet my friend (who has experience treating burn victims) didn’t trust even this generous distance and was even farther back from the edge than Mez & I, who were right up on it, talking to the Ranger who was on guard against folks suicidally rushing into the circle. From where we were, the figures of the metal worshipers were clearly visible, though less than hand-sized (a la “I’m skvishing your head”) and the tower was still of considerable size, field-of-vision-wise.

Nothing in Black Rock City starts on time. It was quiet where we were, and as the minutes flowed nonchalantly by with nothing happening, there was a growing sense of peaceful expectation. Half an hour or an hour passed from the time the thing was supposed to go. Finally, we saw a vehicle (a moped?) drive into the circle, and out the other side. Dim figures were visible moving quickly away from the structures in the center, out to the edge of the circle. Everybody stopped talking. And we waited.

I don’t really remember noticing the smoke start to rise, but it covered the base of the tower. Then it covered the bottom third of the tower, and the twisted worshipers disappeared into it. The cloud rose inexorably until it was covering the tower, and I realized it was getting bigger side to side too–then I realized it wasn’t necessarily getting bigger, it was just coming toward us. In a moment the stars were consumed in the creeping greyness and we were engulfed in a cloud of uncomfortably chemical-smelling smoke, and I thought nervously of my friend sitting 50 feet behind me, and wondered if I wasn’t making a stupid choice by trusting the perimeter set by strangers whose credentials I hadn’t bothered to familiarize myself with. What if they were incompetent? What if this smoke was flammable and they hadn’t counted on the wind? But I sat where I was, resigned to dying at Burning Man for my stupidity, being *pretty* sure I was going to survive but entertaining notions of how many people would die if the flames came out this far.

The smoke cleared in about a minute, and we saw the tower again, motionless, intact.