Combining this post on Slashdot and this page into one…
How to have the Burning Man experience from the comfort of your own home:
- Pay an escort of your affectional preference subset to not bathe for five days, cover themselves in glitter, dust, and sunscreen, wear a skanky neon wig, dance close naked, then say they have a lover back home at the end of the night.
- Tear down your house. Put it in a truck. Drive 10 hours in any direction. Put the house back together. Invite everyone you meet to come over and party. When everyone leaves, follow them back to their homes, drink all their booze, and break things.
- Buy a new set of expensive camping gear. Break it.
- Stack all your fans in one corner of your living room. Put on your most fabulous outfit. Turn the fans on full blast. Dump a vacuum cleaner bag in front of them.
- Pitch your tent next to the wall of speakers in a crowded, noisy club. Go to sleep. Wake up 2 hours later in a 110+ degree tent.
- Only use the toilet in a house that is at least 3 blocks away. Drain all the water from the toilet. Only flush it every 4 days. Hide all the toilet paper.
- Visit a restaurant and pay them to let you alternate lying in the walk-in freezer and sitting in the oven.
- Don’t sleep for 5 days. Take a wide variety of hallucinogenic/emotion altering drugs. Pick a fight with your boyfriend/girlfriend.
- Cut, burn, electrocute, bruise, and sunburn various parts of your body. Forget how you did it. Don’t go to a doctor.
- Buy a new pair of favorite shoes. Throw one shoe away.
- Spend a whole year rummaging through thrift stores for the perfect, most outrageous costume. Forget to pack it.
- Listen to music you hate for 168 hours straight, or until you think you are going to scream. Scream. Realize you’ll love the music for the rest of your life.
- Get so drunk you can’t recognize your own house. Walk slowly around the block for 5 hours.
- Sprinkle dirty sand in all your food.
- Mail $200 to the Reno casino of your choice.
- Go to a museum. Find one of Salvador Dali’s more disturbing but beautiful paintings. Climb inside it.
- Spend thousands of dollars on a deeply personal art work. Hide it in a funhouse on the edge of the city. Blow it up.
- Set up a DJ system downwind of a three alarm fire. Play a short loop of drum’n’bass until the embers are cold.
- Reread Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany. Reread The City Not Long After by Pat Murphy. Cut off the bindings, throw all the pages up in the air, and shuffle them back together. Reread The City After Dhalgren by Samuel Murphy. Burn it. Reread the ashes.
- Throw a sprawling, drunken, week long party. Spend the next five weeks meticulously cleaning every square inch of your house.
- Bust your ass for a “community.” See all the attention get focused on the drama queen crybaby.
- Have a 3 a.m. soul baring conversation with a drag nun in platforms, a crocodile, and Bugs Bunny. Be unable to tell if you’re hallucinating.
You just can’t understand it ’till you’ve been.
I would add: Spend a year building amazing artistic projects. Cram them into a rented u-haul and take them out to the desert for a week. Let the weather and the people abuse and most likely destroy them. Take them home, leaving no trace. Recycle the materials.
I spend last night bending barstock making a disc golf basket, that I’m going to light up with racing sequenced EL wire, and I’m giving away disc golf discs.
I’m also photoshopping all of my Burning Man (San Diego) friends into a tarot card deck.
All of a sudden I feel like an artist! And soon I’ll be starving ’cause all this stuff costs too much!
Wow! And I thought my criticism of B.M. (so to speak) were harsh and nasty! In all fairness–dang, I can hardly believe that I feel compelled to say this–some of the participants do possess a measure of brain cell activity. It’s quite an eclectic group in terms of background, intelligence, etc. And, admittedly, fostering and sustaining any semblance of “community,” as it were, is a difficult task in California. At the events center where I currently work, an evangelical “rock” church meets every Sunday. Comprised of a multiracial, multiethnic group of largely rootless *Zuzuegler*, or newcomers, to the San Diego, this group is trying its gosh-darned level best to engender the old Gemeinschaftsideal. At B.M. they do it without being so preachy…