Word Soup

When Deb and I were in Belgium, one bartender we met during a session of nibbling on "mixed grills" and gin waxed poetic about burning man for roughly an hour, explaining how the festival was a spiritual experience akin to having the world's entire catalog of information injected intravenously into your right eye by the deity of your choice while buck naked atop Mount Kilimanjaro. I've never been, but I've wandered, out of my gourd, through more than my fair share of even bigger temporary cities built on the back of a half-million drunk trust-fund babies to know what it is -- both good and bad.

Don't get me wrong; I think these events are fantastic gestation chambers for art, music and culture; I get how they let rigid nine-to-fivers shake off the binds of routine. I also understand how the event is chock full of powerful and beautiful moments striped by chemical additives (or not, you straight edge radical you). I have no problems with the event itself, it's the post-event spiritual pretense I could do without.

I mean really, you had a great weekend; you had unprotected (again) sex with a guy in a pink wig from Berlin under a blue tarp, you did a few mushrooms, and the night sky in the desert is fucking fantastic -- particularly under the glare of a forty foot metal dragon sculpture that breathes fire. I'm with you. But let's leave it there, ok?

I don't enjoy that discussion that begins with someone who believes in auras and the healing powers of rocks explaining their sunburned, epic, holistic transmogrification -- and ends, should you show the slightest sign of critical thinking, with that same person telling you you're incapable of understanding the spiritual and existential ramifications of 50,000 people shitting in a desert.

My girlfriend thinks it might be a coastal thing. Maybe. But I'm generally wide open to all manner of weird, and as someone who thinks patriotism is the refuge of scoundrels, isn't one to let a coastal feud cloud my judgment of beauty. I'd be willing to go someday with a pale ale intravenous wearing only a thong and these. Sign me up. Just don't pretend you saw Jesus in the latrine.

Anyway, my rambling preamble was triggered by this article on safe sex at Burning Man in the San Francisco Chronicle, simply because I enjoy a good, smarmy lead in paragraph, and the reality of STDs struck me as an oddly fascinating and mean balance to the traditional burning man epiphany narrative:

"While attendees of the yearly arts festival known as Burning Man come from all over the nation and the world, the impact of the costly desert bacchanalia is felt pretty strongly around San Francisco. Many rejoice at the sudden lack of rich hippies and art cars dripping Barbie heads and Legos onto the roads when fog breaks down cheap art-store epoxy, and the ease with which one can get brunch in the Mission. There are virtually no white dudes with dreadlocks for seven square miles. San Francisco smug levels ratchet back to tolerable in the absence of arty hipster trust fund brats and Web 2.0 lets-resurrect-Pets.com-as-a-vlog leeches. Super annoying guys don't hit on me in bars assuming I know what the hell they're talking about when they use terms like "the burn," "the man" and "off the grid.""