Rattling & Giggling: Souvenir of Burning Man 2026 Part Two
...continued from Part One...
Medicine Trip
Burning Man is a great place to experience mind-altering substances. It is a safe supportive environment with many knowledgeable people in attendance. Judy and I had a couple of great experiences this year, which I'll describe in a moment. But first a word about vocabulary. Calling mind-altering substances "recreational drugs" implies that using them is a frivolous activity. I would argue that their purpose can be much deeper than recreation, depending on the mindset of the person experiencing them. Mind altering substances can have a healing power, and so the word "medicine" is perhaps more appropriate than the word "recreation". Mind altering substances can be a great reminder that there is more to our world—and to us—than we realize in our day-to-day existence. They can temporarily slow the chatter of our minds. And in doing that what typically emerges is a healing appreciation for the great beauty of everything. That is worth something.
A friend gifts us a small bottle containing a white powder. The lid of the bottle has a little spoon attached. Our friend instructs us to find a quiet place, take off all of our clothes, take a snort of the white powder in each nostril, and then see what happens. We enter into our little tent and follow his instructions exactly. The powder burns my sinuses and I resist the urge to blow my nose. We sit facing each other expectantly and then Woosh! we are in a different Universe. It feels like we are taking a space walk into an alternate reality, floating beside each other. It is a very plastic-feeling reality. Everything seems bouncy and pneumatic. I am reminded of a Beck album cover. I feel like I finally understand what the artist who made that album cover was trying to convey. Judy is reminded of the movie Yellow Submarine and she remembers a lover from her youth, a Russian boy named Tolya, who had memorized the entire movie. Judy squeezes her breasts together and her nipples pop out. I feel compelled to lick them. We describe our sensations to each other. "I wonder if anyone can hear us?" I say. As she talks I am not quite sure if I am hearing her voice auditorily or telepathically, so I look at her lips to determine which. Her lips are moving but her voice makes a kind of echo in my head so maybe it is both?
Across the street the electronic dance music blaring from camp Pickle enters our consciousness. It is a throbbing thudding kind of music, not particulary artistic, perhaps generated by a machine. "We deserve better music," Judy says. The neighboring camp's EDM finally stops for the night and we feel the urge to fill the silence with our own singing. We start belting out spirituals, Christmas songs, and snippets of pop songs from the 60's and 70's that we remember from our youth. If we can't remember the words we just start making up words. We sing from our bellies and we feel a great sense of release.
As the night deepens we try to describe to each other how we feel connected to the divine. Our little tent feels like a microcosm of the Universe, and we are the divine feminine and the divine masculine. Our bodies swirl around each other, slipping and sliding, as we explore various positions. I feel the warmth of Judy's body enveloping me like a second skin. As the drug wears off I feel myself returning to my default reality. We make love very slowly for a long long time.
Trips to the Porta Potty
This year unfortuneately the porta potties are about a quarter mile from our camp. We are on E street and a long line of about 50 porto potties are on C street. This is hard for me because I have a prostate condition that makes it hard to pee for long periods and then hard not to pee for brief intense frantic moments. So I spend a lot of time each day and night walking back and forth to the portos. On the bright side, I am getting lots of exercise and there are lots of interesting things to see on the way. There is the big blue dome of the Playa Choir, and often some very talented musicians are playing inside. There is the Hammock Hangout, a structure with a dozen hammocks stretched invitingly inside. And farther down toward sixth and Esplanade is the "Honey Puddle" camp if we want to indulge in some superb mead beverages. If we don't feel like drinking alcohol there is the "Orange Heart" camp serving mocktails. Late at night the "Native Tongue" camp comes alive with expert funky DJs at the helm, and Pickle camp across the street fires up their pulsating EDM.
All day and night a steady stream of quite interesting people are flowing up and down the path to the porto on bikes and on foot. A man in a World War II German soldiers' uniform explains that he is unique to the playa; he is the only person at all of Burning Man with this costume. Farther down the road a man helping disassemble a camp structure straddles a 10-foot tall four-by-four, legs wide, pumping it back and forth while groaning rhythmically. Breathlessly he exclaims "Why is it so hard for this to come..." (here he pauses dramatically) "...out of the ground!" As I mentioned before, burners like the puerile humor of the seventh grader. Not to be outdone, one day I wear my mankini to the portos. (The mankini is a skimpy form of male attire popularized by commedian Sacha Baron Cohen.) A woman passerby surveys me and declares "Nice banana hammock!"
On Thursday it rains all night and so in the morning the roads are a sticky muddy mess. The burners have come prepared for mud this year and most people have duct-taped plastic bags over their shoes. And instead of cursing the mud, they celebrate it. A group of half a dozen or so naked people from camp Gnome-Topia, all wearing gnome hats, and covered in mud, cram into a porto potty. When anyone opens the door, they all burst out laughing. Alternatively, people pretend the mud doesn't exist. "Good morning! Nice weather we are having, eh?" they say with a smirk. A couple of guys trot down the street tossing a muddy football back and forth to each other. They nod to me and when I affirm readiness they toss it to me laughing. It makes a big muddy stain on my chest. I return the football as skillfully as I can muster, not having tossed a football since high school.
Vehicles
The rain has actually improved the road conditions. When we first arrived it was incredibly dusty with big ruts hidden beneath the dust. Then for a day after the rain there were puddles. But now that the puddles have evaporated, and the art cars have squashed down all the clods of mud, the road is decent.
In 2022 Judy and I brought our folding ebikes to Burning Man on the train. There weren't many other ebikes at Burning Man then. But this year ebikes seem to be a majority. We see all types: cargo bikes, trikes, folding bikes, fatbikes and quadracycles. It is gratifying to see a whole city where people get around mainly by bike and by walking.
This year we've rented a pair of clunky one-speed cruisers from a neighboring camp. It is a challenge for me to have to pedal my bike and within a few days my thighs are burning. I've brought my bike tools and my bike repair expertise as one of my gifts to the playa. Our own bikes don't need any repairs so I am on the lookout for broken Yellow bikes (Burning Man's free informal bikeshare bikes). Over the course of the week I repair three of them: two with flat tires and one with a broken chain.
Man Burn
On Saturday evening excitement builds in preparation for the burning of the Man. Judy and I find a nice spot to view the event: a big comfy couch behind a 40-foot tall metallic green sculpture of a queen's head. We meet the artist, an Iranian woman name Giselle, and her husband. I ask if the head plans were computer generated. She says no, it was all done from drawings on paper. She says that each sheet metal triangle was hand-made to fit within 1/16 of an inch and then welded into place. And the entire sculpture was painted in an auto-body shop using the same color of green paint that Porsche's use. Her husband describes how the project took nine months to complete. He says they've moved from Ohio to Reno in order to build the sculpture closer to Burning Man. He gives us some flavored vodka beverages.
As we wait on the couch sipping our beverages Judy and I speculate on the meaning of the Man, and the burning of the Man. "Maybe the Man represents men, and the event was dreamed up by feminists to symbolize the destruction of the patriarchy," I suggest. "No," Judy says, "I think the Man represents 'The Man' as in authoritarian regimes, and burning him down is a subversive act heralding the revolution." We finally agree that the Man represents you and me, and our egos, and burning the Man represents a spiritual awakening.
Our speculations are interupted by fireworks erupting from the base of the Man structure, and then the Man himself explodes into flame. People cheer. The whole structure proceeds to burn down over the next half hour as Judy and I make our way back to camp.
Temple Burn
On Sunday evening the Temple is to be burned. This is a much more somber event than the Man burn. The Temple is a large 100-foot tall wooden structure where people have brought painful things that they want to let go of. RhythmWavers ride out as a group and we all sit on the ground, joining a big circle of people around the Temple that is over a mile in diameter. As we wait I feel weird and I put my face in my hands. "Are you okay?" Judy asks me. "There are many spirits here," I say in a voice that doesn't quite feel like my own.
In the distance the official fire lighters gradually and silently light the structure on fire. The crowd hushes. It is quite an experience to be with 50,000 people sitting together in silence. Soon fire engulfs the Temple structure and as it collapses I feel intense sadness and a feeling of release. The Rangers announce that "the perimeter is down" so that people can now approach the fire. The crowd surges forward and Judy and I are drawn forward with them. We watch the burning embers for a while and as we turn to go I see peoples' faces lit up yellow and orange in the darkness. A kind of love for humanity washes over me. We pass a woman lying on the ground sobbing with her friend hovering nearby holding space for her. Judy and I get lost on our way back to our bikes and we spend the next half hour wandering in search of them. Finally we find them and make our way back to camp.
Strike
"Floor! Floor!" someone cries out. This is the signal for everyone at RhythmWave to come running over to our dance floor so that together we can flip a row of the heavy bamboo flooring for disassembly. A group of twenty or so of us lines up on each side of the row. "One, two, three, lift!" shouts Eros, this year's floor master, and we lift. Piece by piece the floor comes apart. During strike we store the floor and all the other camp structures into three shipping containers that the org will store for us until next year.
Another big part of strike is "mipping the moop". Mip means "matter in place" and moop means "matter out of place". Mipping moop is burners' way of adhering to the principle of "leave no trace". After everything is put away into the shipping containers we comb every inch of our camp's ground for every speck of moop. "I found a bean!" I exclaim triumphantly, depositing it in a trash. "I found a grain of rice!" says Judy. Not to be outdone, Doug shouts "I found a screw!" and holds it up for everyone to admire.
Resolutions
Burning Man is a time and place that we all set aside to stop the flow of our daily responsibilities for a week. We take this time to evaluate who we are and where we are going. During the course of the event I make several resolutions. Firstly Judy and I affirm with each other and with others our resolution from Burning Man 2022 that we want to make a cross-country bike trip to Burning Man next year. We want to demonstrate to the world that long-distance travel by solar-powered ebike is not only possible, but practical and fun. During Burning Man this year we serendipitously connect with one of the few people who have ever biked to Burning Man, Kursten Graham. He was giving a lecture on "How to Prepare for a Long Distance Bike Trip" at the Earth Guardians camp. When we arrive at the lecture he is giving the audience details on his trips to Brazil and Taiwan: what shoes to wear, how much stuff to bring, who he met and what he saw. We ask him about biking to Burning Man. He has done it himself a few times and he has helped others. He tried to start a group called "Burners Without Motors" (a play on the non-profit "Burners Without Borders") but no one else joined the group. He offers to help us with route planning.
We also encounter a campmate named Laughing Bear who is active with the "org" (Burning Man's administrative organization), with a group called the Artery that is responsible for placing artwork on the playa. He offers to help us connect with org administrators. He says he has a solar panel on his RV but it seems inconceivable to him that a vehicle can be powered by solar panels for long-distance travel. We hope to prove him wrong!
And at lunch one day a young man named Elvis (not his playa name, that's his default world name) joins us at our table. He is a powerhouse of a burner: active running a theme camp, instrumental in building many art cars and large artworks, and obviously just an all-round decent human being. We explain to him how we have observed a lot of burners "greening their burn" on the playa by bringing solar panels instead of using fossil fuel burning generators, but that virtually no one is addressing the question of greening how they get to the burn. Judy and I want to change that, we tell him, and make transportation to the burn part of the conversation. We evision a theme camp comprised of people who have biked to Burning Man, and perhaps that group will also organize a sag wagon to carry extra supplies and water from Reno that can't be brought in by bike. Elvis admires our project and offers to help however he can.
My second resolution is to make art. On Tuesday my friend Doug and I met to talk about making artwork together in the coming year. Doug and I have a long history of making art cars and immersive art together, most notably Sparky the Giant Rideable Unicorn. We both recognize that a regular schedule is helpful and we resolve to get together weekly. And we both agree that a tidy workshop is key to art-making. We resolve to help each other clean up our workshops. And we both agree that we want to work together on on something big, possibly several things. Upcoming opportunities include Ithaca's annual Illuminated Halloween bike parade; an exhibet at the Cherry Arts Gallery in February; and the Cosmic regional burn in mid-June.
And more resolutions. In thinking together about our marriage, Judy and I determine that cleanliness is one of the few issues that divide us. She wants more of it and I often just don't see it as important. Our discussions gel around an incident in which, after the rains here, I enter our little tent with muddy feet. I recognize the value of cleanliness—in a way, it is at the heart of our mission against burning fossil fuels. Carbon dioxide in our atmosphere is a form of "matter out of place". And so I resolve to neaten myself and my environment and to be clean in my thoughts and actions.
Furthermore in the resolutions department I have a realization about what underlies so much of my own personal heartbreak: my reluctance to call people on the phone. I trace my phonophobia to a grade-school prank that my buddy Geoff Lyman pulled on me. It must have been around the fourth grade. The phone rang. Phone calls then were usually for my sister Pam so I never bothered answering the phone. But this time it was for me. "Hello?" I answered in my squeaky fourth-grader voice. It was my classmate named Angie. She proceeded to confess her love for me in her thick southern accent. She said she had always admired me from a distance but now she wanted a deeper relationship with me. Oddly, I thought I heard giggling in the background? "Um, okay," I said and ended the conversation. I was confused. In the classroom Angie had never seemed to notice me. And sure enough the next day in class she didn't seem to be paying me any particular attention as usual. But Geoff seemed to be watching me intently, and when we had a moment alone he burst into laughter as he explained to me that he had a cousin from a southern state visiting. "Her voice sounds exactly like Angie!" he said. He had convinced his cousin to call me pretending to be Angie. "Wasn't that a great prank?" he gloated. But I ended up scarred for life, unable to use the phone like a normal person. And I began to prefer the company of books and math problems to the company of people. And I think that has hurt my long-distance relationships, particularly with my kids and my siblings. I remember how after I left home for college my own parents rarely ever called me, and I didn't call them, and how that was kind of hurtful, but I accepted it. I think about how my mom's relationships with her siblings and kids deteriorated in her later life and I resolve not to go out like that. I want to have a good authentic relationship with my siblings and kids before I die. And so I resolve to just fucking call my brothers and my sisters and my kids and anyone else who needs a good phone call. Because a phone is just a communication tool that anyone can learn to use well, so why not me?
Lastly in the resolutions department I resolve to write a book this winter. The title will be something like "Solarpunk Handbook", and I plan to record all of my experiences making ebikes and solar-powered projects. On the plane ride home I sketch out an outline.
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