sad and ok

so i’m not going back.

it’s ok.

i talked to my dad about it last weekend, as he’s back from taiwan already. he said that the oldest grandchild thing didn’t apply to me, as that only counts for sons of sons, not sons of daughters. the whole patriarchical thing. plus, that while it would be nice for me to be there, it wasn’t that big of a deal if i wasn’t, as the family would understand. and it’s not like i would get to see my grandmother anyway, as it’s closed casket.

i talked to my mom early this morning, and she said pretty much the same thing. plus, she was herself annoyed at all the silly rules around feng shui and numerology that was making the funeral occur almost three weeks later.

that helped a lot. because earlier in the week i was all despondent, wondering if i should have gone, just because i was thinking about it so much, wondering if i had made a big mistake.

but hmc said that i shouldn’t confuse that with being sad, and that it was fine for me to be sad. which i forget.

when my cat died, i remember staying home and ending up watching deep impact just because it was on. which wasn’t a good choice, seeing some dumb disaster asteroid movie where everyone dies. or almost. and feeling silly for bawling my eyes out over a stupid movie. but of course not really over the movie.

hmc suggested i try something similar to help get the grief out. what’s the saddest movie you can think of? i ended up with magnolia, because spartacus is more heroic-tragic than sad.

it sort of worked. but only kind of.

but tonight at yoga, at the end, during meditation, i was finally able to see it and deal with it. and during our singing of amazing grace, i was able to release it.

and it’s ok.

yay for judges

i finally talked to a judge in nevada about the traffic ticket i picked up in gerlach after burning man.

after pleading and grovelling, and since we couldn’t figure out between us exactly if and how traffic violation points transfer over to california, he agreed to change it to something that wouldn’t transfer over if i paid the full fine and just took a traffic class somewhere and sent him the certificate.

hooray for small things! hooray for the justice system! hooray for little towns still bilking outsiders from them big cities!

now do you think i can get away with an online traffic school, or will that piss him off?

orchestral manoeuvres

i was in lost angeles this weekend, visiting hmc and trying to avoid questions about whether i’m going back to taiwan or not.

which was relatively successful, although hmc has this odd habit recently of falling asleep early on saturday nights, leaving me to my own devices, forcing me to go and hang out with strippers and disco dancers all night. or watch dvd’s. one of those.

we did get to see hero at the arclight, which was gorgeous and wonderful, and i don’t know what xz is all about. it clearly makes sense to me. maybe xz just isn’t chinese enough.

also, the pixies played back home this weekend, which i willingly missed. i had decided long ago not to see the big reunion tour. not that i don’t love the pixies, i do love the pixies! i do! i think they’re one of the best bands ever. but i don’t know, maybe it was the fact that when they play, they just stand around just like they mocked themselves in that here comes your man video. or maybe it was all of that reunion tour bandwagon thing. or that it’s all paying for frank black’s therapy.

but when it actually came around, i was regretted not going.

fortunately, hmc saw that air was playing at the hollywood bowl this weekend with a full orchestra. and stereolab was opening.

so we went to that instead. it was nice and orchestral. and under the open sky, in the beautiful hollywood bowl. and we brought booze and fancy sandwiches. and egg salad.

plus, beck and some guy jason falkner came out for one song.

take that, frank’s therapist!

boxer response

i finally got a response this week from senator barbara boxer on the florida election protest senate proceedings depicted in the begninning of f/911:

pinhole serendipity

so remember those pinhole camera shots we took on the last day?

i emailed jason from camp pinhole after getting back from burning man, and he said he was going to mexico but developing the pictures after he came back, so check with him then. which i did this week, but no response. oh well, i guess that’s it for the pinhole…

but then burnin’ steph calls me up yesterday, and says she was at jason’s house to see if any of her shots from the last day came out (unfortunately not), and that jason had given her a few extra unclaimed prints as a donation to the artery. and she had talked to cheryl, and figured out that cheryl’s prints probably didn’t come out as well, since she didn’t see them at jason’s. but cheryl told her that i had taken a picture of the ferris wheel.

like the picture of the ferris wheel jason had donated to the artery.

i went over there last night to check it out, and lo and behold, there it is: my print!

since the pinhole camera shots are photonegative, i positivized it for your convenience.

hooray!

also, i finally got all of my burning man pictures up in fancy flash albums:

burning man: lomo shots
burning man: holga shots
burning man: polaroid joycam shots
burning man: shots of cirque de flambe

indecision 2004

times like these make me think about why kurtis doesn’t blog. how you don’t know if you want all these people knowing that much about you and your life. how much disclosure is too much?

sigh.

so it’s not technically true that i can’t get back in time for the funeral. it’s not until october 7th, which is two weeks from today.

what’s unclear is if i should. or need to. or want to.

mom says it’s ok that i don’t come. but i’m feeling bad about that. and then someone reminded me that i might be the oldest grandchild.

but on the other hand, my mom’s pretty straight about things like this. she wouldn’t tell me that i don’t have to come if she really wanted me to come or thought that i should.

the other factor that’s in consideration is that there’s this huge deal at work coming up that implements that exact same week. and i mean HUGE. it’s the first deal like this of its kind, and literally the whole company is very excited and concerned about it. and i got de facto stuck with project managing the deal. first big project in my new “job” with my new responsibilities.

it’s scheduled for installation in austin on tuesday night, october 5th. which is the same night i’d have to fly out if i were to make my grandmother’s funeral on the 7th in taiwan.

in the bigger picture, what’s more important? no question. family over job. you can always find a new job. you can’t find a new family.

but i don’t know if it’s really important to go or not.

i guess it’s more about whether i feel like it’s important to go or not. what it is doing is bringing up all this guilt about whether i’m a good son or not, and how i interact with my family, and how i far away i am to all of my relatives in taiwan. i know that a lot of this is just guilt, and i remember seeing hmc go through this when her grandmother thelma passed away earlier this year. hmc says that i need to just try and eliminate the guilt so i can make a clear decision about what’s right.

but of course, that’s the difficult part.

numb

my mom just called me from taiwan to tell me that my grandmother passed away on saturday.

this was my last grandparent, and the one i remember most. she came to stay with us when i was a kid, and i remember her watching bob barker on the price is right every day.

we were supposed to go see her when we finally went to taiwan next year. i haven’t been back for over ten years, and hadn’t shown hmc off to the folks back home.

now it’s too late. and i can’t even get back in time for the funeral.

tolkien be damned

so it’s finally decided. it’s even in motion.

more than a year later, hmc and i are actually going on a honeymoon.

after much hoo-hah and abortive planning and initial designs on france, japan, and hawaii, we’ve decided on three weeks in new zealand.

japan can wait until next year, maybe hitting it when we go to taiwan, which we’ve sort of committed to. hawaii’s relatively easy to get to. but new zealand, man, there hasn’t been a single person i’ve talked to who hasn’t said, “that should be fantastic!”

i’ve never been, but hmc went a few years back with her family. however, it was sort of a rushed trip involving lots of continuous driving. me, i’m planning on taking taxis all the way. maybe whale taxis. like that whale rider movie.

and that’s about all the details i have right now. we’ve booked tickets through the qantas website (which ends up being $100/per person cheaper than a travel agent), so the dates are set, but everything else is up in the air.

i am, however, armed with a brand new, freshly published lonely planet new zealand 2004.

plus, we’re not leaving until mid-november, so there’s still time.

where do i go to learn maori?

queer i

i’ve been catching up on my queer eye recently, plowing through something like six episodes this weekend, plus a couple of the queer eye uk series. this has nothing to do with them winning the emmy for best reality series, although i’m glad about that.

in doing so, i have realized that i still like this show, and it’s still entertaining, especially when they seem to have a serious effect on someone’s life and the straight guy takes it as an opportunity to change their life and not just get a bunch of free stuff.

although, i do get jealous and want the free stuff.

my new plan is to start getting sloppy and messy and dressing badly. i’ll let the apartment go to rot. i’ll get a bad haircut and stop washing it. grooming? what grooming?

and then i’ll hide all my nice clothes and fill it with stuff i buy at old navy. or maybe ross dress for less. and then i’ll have them come over and remake my whole life and house, and get all this great stuff! and then live in a more beautiful place.

i can even make up this story about how my straight cluelessness has driven my wife away to live in a different city from me, and if i (un)straighten up, i can woo her back home! or is that quoo her?

this is brilliant.

now, how do i grow one of those “beer bellies”?

in between

talking with cheryl and listening about how she feels that she’s starting to pull back from the community because she knows she’s leaving in the next year, i’m reminded about how in many ways, i’ve already done this. the past year has been sort of uncertain, with the stated game plan being to get hmc back here, but with the possibility looming that she won’t be able to work up here and thus i should just go down there. the uncertainty has put on hold a lot of decisions and actions, like house hunting/buying, and a lot of commitments and responsibilities, which keeps me from taking on roles or jobs that would last more than a few months.

but now that hmc looks to be on her way back at the end of the year, suddenly i’m reversed and faced with reintegrating and recommitting with my friends, my job, my community. it’s all very confusing, honestly. and what if it’s only temporary? what if hmc moves up here, can’t find work, and we have to ultimately move down there anyway?

i don’t know.

i am glad, however, that this weekend i got to eat sushi and fried chicken. vegetarian best friends be damned!

plus, i got tickets to the new pj harvey show on october 21st!

stripper email

so back in may, when i was out in las vegas for sales kickoff, i had this funny interaction with a stripper that ended up in her telling me that i should go check out fwaam.com. what do i get but a comment from her the other day, saying that she had found me, and giving me grief that i had blogged about our exchange.

and now we’re emailing back and forth about, uh, i dunno. what do you email strippers about?

i think the best part is that people at work can’t seem to google this site, but the strippers can find it.

i love the internet.

optimizing performance, life, & baseball(!)

i’ve been in training the last few days, taking a class on optimizing oracle performance. note that i’m not an oracle dba by any stretch, but surprisingly i’ve been able to follow 90-95% of the class. it’s funny because i sit here and learn things that i may possibly never use since i don’t administrate oracle databases, but for me it’s more about seeing what causes performance problems and how to attack them, allowing me to gain better insights into what customers face and how to help them address their true issues instead of blaming our storage systems.

an interesting concept brought up was CTD: compulsive tuning disorder, which is a phenomenon originally coined by gaja krishna vaidyanatha & kirtikumar deshpande in their book oracle performance tuning 101 (maybe more about this later, i think i might actually have this at work). generally speaking, it’s the obsession of trying to make things better by tweaking everything, looking for gains in everything that is there. the problem usually arises when you don’t have a clear picture of what to actually is best to do and worse off, what effect doing anything in particular will make.

the interesting methodology to counter CTD is to specifically attack the largest causes of delays in response time: first change the thing that will effect what users will notice the most. and not only that, you want to do this for whatever business process is actually the most important overall.

thus if it’s taking twenty minutes to generate a purchase order, attack that first, because that’s important to the business, and then look at what’s causing someone to feel that the twenty minutes is too long, and fix that first. who cares if some job that runs in the middle of the night runs an hour longer than it should. it might be an easier fix, but why mess with that until much later?

so what happens if you apply this methodology to your life? this means that instead of running around constantly worrying about everything in your life and trying to make everything little thing better, instead you should try and find the things that really matter to you, and make improvements in those things first.

sure, i could spend time trying to get my printer to work wirelessly or figure out a way to switch between my tivo and my dvd player without a manual switchbox, but isn’t it better trying to come up with a more effective process to manage my day-to-day workload? or finding a job that i’m more enthusiastic about?

there’s this book floating around called getting things done: the art of stress-free productivity, which either is a good example of this or the antithesis. i haven’t had a chance to figure out which. there’s also a blog called 43 folders which is someone’s compilation of tips and organizational methods loosely based on the book, which is interesting and intriguing at the very least.

the other thing that’s interesting to me about this optimization approach is that it serves as a reminder to look at problems from a different way from everyone else. don’t accept the conventional wisdom on anything, but approach it from another direction, something that makes sense to you.

normal oracle performance tuning espouses reducing large numbers of event counts and ignoring idle event times, both of which may be fatal errors. sure, reducing the number of events may be helpful, but if you’ve got some events that are taking way too long because of how they’re erronously constructed, reducing the other events won’t appreciably help.

doing things contrary to the popular method for the sake of productivity is oddly innovative. i loathe baseball, but this article in the new york times on ichiro suzuki was fascinating: it analyzes his various hitting swings, and finds that he has not just one, but several unconventional swings. this allows him to adapt to a wide variety of pitches and hitting situations, and now he’s on the verge of breaking the record for most number of hits in a season, a mark that has stood since 1920!

a couple of other quick thoughts:

1. math is beautiful. there were a couple of quick mathematical concepts and proofs in here to demonstrate and illustrate things, and i was reminded and actually struck at how beautiful math is: everything is explained, it all works out. it’s wonderfully clear and precise.
   
2. in the other rooms, there were other classes and seminars: collections and credit, public speaking, and my favorite next door, one put on by the national meat association, apparently on “developing and implementing HACCP for meat & poultry plants (basic HACCP certification training)”. no kidding. i poked my head in and the slide was talking about ways to prevent spread of airborne illness. yum! right before lunch!

hello my name is:

so my yoga teacher thinks my name is jay.

or j. or maybe jaye or jeigh. or maybe just short for jay-z?

don’t get me wrong, i love my yoga teacher. but she’s never really been able to remember my name, even after seeing her repeatedly at bruinslair this year. but she at least does remember who i am, and that i regularly come to her class, and that i’m friends with the law.

but after she came back from norway or sweden or wherever she’s from this past time, she started calling me “jay”.

admittedly, i never corrected her, but i thought that might be awkward in the middle of class. and she kept forgetting my name anyway, so i thought that it might be just temporary.

only it stuck with her this time.

even after going to burning man and missing the week afterwards, she remembered it.

so now i’m jay, i guess.

there’s that concept she brought up about native americans having a secret name and a public name, such that people wouldn’t know your secret real name and thus have power over you. so maybe it’s just protection to prevent her from having power over me.

but what if she knows my real secret name?

because, oddly enough, i keep going to yoga…

made it

i’m home.

5 1/2 hours down there, a couple days of packing, moving and more packing and moving, and then 5 1/2 hours back up.

i can’t tell you how much i hate driving to los angeles and back. possibly the only thing i hate more than that is moving. you’d have to be married to me to get me to do either of these things for you. hell, i don’t even do either of these things for myself. i hire people to do this shit for me.

the best part: driving back at about 1 am or so on 205 (that connector between 5 and 580), i’m struggling to pass this car because it’s a slight upgrade, and i can’t manage to go faster than 82 in the fully loaded land cruiser. the car behind me signals for me to pull over and let him by, so i do, since i can’t really do anything about it. it turns out to be a sheriff’s patrol car, which whizzes by me and the other car, and ends up pulling over someone else gong slightly faster a couple minutes later.

thank you, traffic ticket karma faeries!

in the last 12 days, i’ve driven for stretches of 6 hours, 8 hours, and then 5 1/2 hours twice. either i live too far away from something or something lives too far away from me.

and i’ve got a presentation in seven hours. i think that means i should get some sleep.

painless moving preceeds the painful moving

alas, it’s all done.

thanks to jon, i’m now hosted on an honest webserver, so no more mucking about with redirects or masking or any of that nonsense. everything seems to work great, plus there are hidden features to running this site on a real webserver that suddenly make my life easier, and enable me to do cool shit in the future. like post this nifty flash app of pictures taken at burning man. well, yee-haw.

makes you wonder why i didn’t do it earlier.

because i’m dumb.

or stupid.

or cheap.

also, he saved our bacon at monkeySARS, by stepping up and letting us host it here as well. the free web hosting solution i had found suddenly and abruptly came to an end, because they went through and saw that i hadn’t been participating in their message board forums.

what, are you kidding? what am i, fourteen again? who’s got time for that shit?

fuck that. i’ll pay cash. or cash equivalent. blood, at least. personal favors. mob hits.

anyway, all is well. that move was actually pretty easy. on the other hand, i have to drive down to lost angels today to help hmc move from one apartment to the other. and then drive left over large items of furniture back up here.

which may be more painful, since it involves physical labor. and trying not to fall asleep while driving long distances.

wheee!

overwhelmed

there’s too much going on.

i’m really tired, and i can’t tell if it’s just the readjustment from burning man, or whether it’s just me trying to fight off this cold.

oddly enough, everything seems to be moving very slowly. i sit in meetings and feel like everyone’s at half speed. i sit and work at the computer, and think the laundry must be done, and only ten minutes have elapsed. perhaps i’ve developed super powers like the flash! or maybe i’ve accidentally taken lots of crystal meth?

(stupid repeated question: “so, what did you end up doing at burning man?”)

but all this stuff has happened while i’ve been away! they dropped the charges against kobe. netflix and tivo are consdering a partnership where they just stream your next netflix movie onto your tivo.

there’s just too much information to assimilate, and while maybe burning man would have put that into perspective, instead it just makes me feel that there’s so much to catch up on. i usually read my rss feeds via the news plugin in trillian, but recently i’ve been playing around with bloglines which has the advantage of being able to see a lot more at once, but i think i really like it because i can use it to watch flickr streams of keywords, like everyone’s pictures of graffiti. or san francisco. or even burning man.

maybe it’s my own fault. i’m overloading myself when i should be simplifying.

but there are all these movies to see, stuff to read, tasks to do, and my tivo’s full.

or maybe i just need to stop blogging. apparently it makes you sick.

bmpm

post mortem:

i dug this up from the last time i got back from burning man in 2000:

well, it’s certainly not anywhere as radical as all that. i’m tired, a lot more tan, and i seem to have a little of cheryl’s cold. i was smart enough to take today off ahead of time so i didn’t have to jump right back into work.

and of course i took lots and lots of pictures, but i still need to take three more holga shots to finish off that roll, and then i can get everything developed. there’s also the polaroids, but i don’t know how i’m going to scan those suckers in. anyone have a flatbed i can borrow for an hour?

bm2004: coming home almost unscathed

home and alive.

we packed up without much trouble, and were on the road by 9:30 in the morning. with all the traffic, it took us about eight hours to get back home. cheryl definitely had a cold, so she was a little miserable on the ride home. her sinuses were clogged or something, so she her head was stuffed up and she couldn’t really hear, so i would say something, and she’d say, “what?” and then she’d say something, only really really quietly because her voice was super amplified in her stuffy head, so i’d be like, “what?” all the way home.

mika’s alive and fine. and hungry, as normal.

when i got home i took what may have been the best shower in the history of the world. warm water, soap everywhere, hair washing with shampoos and conditioner, rinse and repeat. i was in there until my fingers and toes were all wrinkled. i almost didn’t come out. in fact, i may still be in there.

so, how was it? it was great. it was fun. was it life-changing? i don’t think so, this time. do i have regrets? yes, i have three:

1. steel-toed dickies boots: i wore them last time, and i’ve worn them since, and dammit, they’re just too small. i swear, and i mean swear that i’ll never wear these fuckers again. luckily i just ended up with a small blister on one toe, but it’s just unnecessary.
   
2. pinhole: i wish i had gone in on saturday to try and take pictures, which i had intended to and even rode out there, but just didn’t go in at the last moment.
   
3. that traffic ticket in gerlach: driving through gerlach, i was distracted by the kids washing cars for money, because they were using a firehose or something and spraying each other from one end of the parking lot to the other. thus, i ended up not seeing this guy crossing the street in the crosswalk, and waved an apology to him as i scooted by him. which wasn’t good enough for the waiting police officer. $190(!) fine. i’ll pay it, but now i have to call the nevada courthouse and figure out if they pass points across to california dmv, and if so, if they’ll let me take traffic school to mitigate that or not. sigh.

more than anything else, i remember talking to micheline on saturday, and we were talking about how some people weren’t enjoying burning man because they had come with such huge expectations and ideals that it was hard for them because it wasn’t living up to them or it was so different than they had expected. and we pretty much agreed that like everything else in life, it’s better not to weigh yourself down with such things, and instead just have an attitude that “it is what it is,” and just allow yourself to experience it, and look back and review it afterwards if you need to. but that way you get to live it as it’s happening, and see what’s going on, instead of noticing what’s not.

bm2004: pinhole

sunday morning we headed over to pinhole camp, where they set people up with big cardboard barrels that are large pinhole cameras with sheets of photo paper inside, allowing people to take photo negative pictures themselves. they then develop the pictures in their makeshift lab inside a cube truck, allowing people to see and take the results home themselves!

they were pretty hectic that morning, so we hung around and helped out, donating our extra water so they would have enough to develop, and then learning how to load the barrels so they would be ready to go out.

then we got to take a couple of them out and try our hand at pinhole photography. i took a picture of this crazy large ferris wheel which has three seats inside, where you sit there and bicycle pedal, spinning you and your compatriots around, and slowly moving the ferris wheel along the ground. cheryl took a far off shot of starmageddon and macroscopic microcosm.

alas, when we checked back later in the day, i turns out that their chemicals had gone south, and between that and packing up camp, no shots from that day had been developed. we got some contact info; hopefully we can see what happened with our efforts.

since we had to give up our bikes which were heading back on the trailer at noon, we hiked out to the temple of stars. the temple is much wider this year, spanning a quarter mile, but they were already taking apart the further expanses of walkway and piling them up at the base in preparation for the burn that evening. as always, it’s a beautiful structure, made up of animal skeleton toy punch outs and other ornate wooden pieces. this year’s temple definitely had a japanese feel to it, and was beautifully somber. there were people all over, leaving notes and momentos, remembrances and confessions. many were crying in sorrow. i felt like i should, but i couldn’t. i never really can.

later that evening, we came back out for the temple burn. while most of blyss were hanging out on the big surly camp bus, i went up to get a closer view, and bumped into joy, so we watched the burn together. beautiful.

we rode the surly bus back to camp, and then walked across the playa in search of what remaining music there was, but cheryl wasn’t in the mood and was coming down with something, so we ended up walking back mostly along the esplanade.

1. it is sad how people are unable to stay silent for more than ten minutes, even for something that’s supposed to be a meaningful ceremony. sometimes people just need to shut the fuck up.
2. my legs are sore, my ass is sore, and my feet hurt from wearing boots that are (still) a half size too small.
3. we did happen upon the group that were spinning fireworks. yes, fireworks. now i’ve decided that fire spinners are pussies. firework spinning, now that’s impressive.

bm2004: art & burn

after breakfast, i finally got some sleep in the nice air conditioned blyss abyss dome. mmmmm wonderful blissful sleep.

in the afternoon i tooled around the playa with kurtis, exploring and looking some of the art. we stumbled upon the chasm, which was the project by elsewhere campmate jd. it’s a cool work: like the earth has split open, revealing an alien archeological excavation site, complete with strange alien tubes and periscopes down into the ground and an indecipherable metal instruction manual.

my favorites:

• the ambient armchair encounter: brilliantly simple, it’s just a few armchairs sitting out on the playa under beach umbrellas, each with a speaker on either side of the head and a subwoofer underneath. you sit down, and just sink into gentle ambient music as you look out across the desert. wonderful.
  
• io: the improbable orchestra: as they describe it: “IO consists of a 4 speakers arranged in a circle pointing towards a central podium/command console. Visually enticing and mysterious sets of knobs and buttons are laid out to lure a passer-by into experimenting with the sculpture. IO creates a 24-hour dynamic, ambient, soundscape determined by user input via physical controls.” it’s like playing with your own 808! super fun and super cool.
  
• observer/observed: a 10 foot cube with translucent plexiglass, which is reflective on the outside during the day, so the insiders can only see out, and which is reflective on the inside during the night, so the outsiders can only see in. we got to talk to one of the guys who made it and watched him try and windex that sucker down.

honestly, i don’t have much to say about the burn. beforehand they had hundreds of fire spinners performing, in what was the largest fire spinning performance the world has ever seen. however, it just kind of went on too long and they were too far away, even though we were a few rows from the front. they did have some cool ones, though, like the guy who was spinning that huge flaming tetrahedron, and those girls who spun at each other and then did backflips. and of course, the hula hoops.

then the observatory burned, the man burned, the man fell down. everyone rushed to the middle, and was ground around like a big blender, and shot out of the human centrifuge, and i lost everyone i was with.

i ambled over to the mutaytor camp, where they were having some huge last performance, but i was quickly bored. more than anything, i wanted to go back and brush my teeth, since i realized that i hadn’t brushed my teeth in a whole day.

on the way hit christopher and betty ray’s nebula exhibit, and they were there and managed to get the flamethrower portion going as well. flamethrowers, man! nothing is better.

having brushed my teeth, and having stayed up the entire night before and danced my share, i went to bed and slept a sound eight hours of sleep.

bm2004: the longest day

i finally took a shower yesterday. fucking great. more than anything, being out on the playa really fucks up my hair. i just don’t have good hair for being out here. it’s too long, product sucks up dust, and even without product it dries funny and dries out funnier.

in the afternoon we went out on the artery art tour, custom arranged by the fabulous evil burnin’ steph, so we had our own art car driving us around the playa to see lots of the art installations, complete with a tour guide. did you know that burning man gives out the most art grants in the state of california?

we got back in time to cook up friday night dinner, which was an unqualified success. cheryl’s precooked hummus and babaganoush was a big hit, and bob and mary’s parboiled chicken which they just reheated on the grill was yummy and delicious.

that night, we went out mog hunting again. it’s mog hunting season! first, however, we futiley chased this rumor that goldie was out here and playing at lush tonight. as you could have guessed, this turned out to be uncategorically untrue: goldielocks is not goldie. after much wandering and many rogue destinations, we found those space cowboys way out on the playa, and shook our asses to much delight.

1. strobe lights are for pussies. flame throwers, man! if you want flashing lights, just use flame throwers!
2. all we really want is a bassline that will FUCK YOU UP.
3. favorite quote overheard by the porta potties: guy: “so what do you think of burning man?” girl: “wow, it’s pretty wild!”
4. coming back in from the playa, it’s funny how you have to dodge more and more pee spots as you get closer to the esplanade. cats manage to cover up their messes, why can’t we?
5. my favorite thing was where erum would go up to people all day and ask them point blank, “do you want to make love, or do you just want to fool around?”

i came back in at about 5am, and hung out in the kitchen, drinking hot water with erum and michael t. i was about to go to bed, when i noticed that thin strip of lightening sky in the east, signaling that the sun was about to come up. i almost went to bed anyway, but somehow at that critical moment i just decided not to… instead i biked out to the playa to watch the sun rise. beautiful. clouds, mountains, everything slowly changing colors. and then came the blazing sun, lighting everything for miles, including the hundreds of people streaming from all parts of the city, slowly walking towards the temple of stars.

then i biked back out to the mog for some more dancing, and especially to hear joy play a kick ass set in the morning to cap off a perfect morning. rock on.

bm2004: wherefore art car?

spent yesterday unsuccessfully trying to hitch rides on art cars. the first one was going back to center camp where we had just been, the second one went 10 feet and then stopped, the third one went 50 feet before stopping, and the fourth one never even started moving.

we did find some good house music at pinkies (pink mammoth camp), and then a nice boy named thaddeus biked the four of us back to center camp on his makeshift pedicab.

then the windstorms came in, and we were stranded in whiteout conditions for hours. fortunately, we had just bumped into jenifir, a friend of cheryl’s who was part of cosmic giggle, and had a nice convenient dome to hide out at next to center camp for a few hours, getting to know sunil, emo, mya, and worshipping the chia goddess.

possibly the best part of the afternoon was getting to spend time and get to know zen better. the funny thing is that she says that she loves hmc, and now she’s getting to know me, but she still can’t figure out hmc+me and how that works. she sees that something’s there and that it’s great, but she’s really curious what it’s about. it’s a secret! we’ll never tell! (ok, but don’t tell anyone: she’s the bestest most brilliant amazing person i’ve ever met, and she’s always got my back. and all we do is have fun all the time!)

at night we went to opulent temple of venus, but the big white dome between otov and lush had this kick ass marching band: the march fourth! marching band from portland. they were a blast, and they even did a tom waits cover. eventually, we found the unimog over at lotus camp and danced our asses off.

1. beef jerky is really yummy. plus, after you’re done, the ziplock bag makes a handy in-tent garbage bag!
2. my ass hurts already from riding around. that crocodile needs a fat padded seat. or maybe i just need more of an ass.

bm2004: everything but the prom

made it out here in six hours, including a stop in truckee for lunch & gas, and another gas topoff in gerlach.

coming in you could see huge sandstorms hundreds of feet high over the playa. they said that it was super dusty and windy this year, and they weren’t kidding around.

we had a little trouble finding camp elsewhere, because it wasn’t where it was supposed to be (which i guess you could have figured out by the name, huh?). wandering around, we did find shawn hailey in the sea otter camp, who was having a ball at his first burning man. after heading over to blyss abyss, we found carrie asleep in the air conditioned(!) dome, so she was able to lead us back to camp not too far away and set us up right.

we biked out that night to see the launching of the LEM, which was the sunrise moonbase installation by our elsewhere campmate david. which was fucking out there. way out there. it was nice to be out there in a little lunar module, listening to to the moon landing tapes, and looking at your own little desolate lunar landscape.

1. crocodile rocks! this bike does indeed kick ass. i successfully gave erin a ride, but it’s definitely trickier riding with two. and neigh impossible with someone who isn’t that great at riding bikes, because then one topples the other and we just both go a-tumblin’. i thought the croc had a flat as i had loaded it onto the trailer, so i was afraid that we were going to have to get it fixed when we got out here. i even picked up a patch kit and everything in preparation. but when we picked up the biks, the tire was fine. thanks you bike faeries!
2. i take back everything bad i said about the meal plan. dinner was sooooo yummy, including delicious pineapple coconut soup! mmmmm good.
3. i don’t care what anyone says. leaving a part where space cowboys and the unimog are playing for one that’s playing 80’s prom music is a bad idea.

thunderbirds are go!

all right kids, i’m off to the desert! i’ll be sure to get everyone burning man souvenirs at the burning man shop, like some burning man “burning” man lighters, burning man charcoal, burning man “we’re #1” foam hands, burning man beer hats, and of course the ever popular “my friends were naked at burning man and all they got me was this lousy burning t-shirt”.

the land cruiser’s all packed, i just have to stop at slaveway on the way out to get some ice and some of those starbucks frappuccinos (to keep me awake), and then pick up cheryl and we’re off.

did you know they sell tiny little rolls of toilet paper in tiny protective plastic sleeves so you can carry them around with you? wasteful packaging, but useful for camping. or perhaps the desert. hmmmm.

i’ll be glad to be without computers for a week. give my rsi a break. and my brain too. i might come back and do a slew of posts when i get back. or i may not. i did have the sick idea that if i had one of these silly things i could blog from the desert! it’s got wifi! and runs on AAA batteries! the non wifi version runs for 700(!) hours, but the wifi version slyly doesn’t mention.

oddly enough, i’ve been pretty thirsty and dehydrated for the past couple of weeks, and it was really just too hot in the city for my taste. but this will probably be better in the desert, right?