Fire it up

Imagine the buzz coming off The Playa—as usual. “Oh my god that was fucking amazing!” It’s Burning Man’s most powerful, lingering, brain Burn, installed thousands of times every year. “OMGTWFA!” In fact, B Man just might lead the planet in OMGTWFAs every doggone year. What else comes close?

What other major event has the audacity to say, “Hey! You! Yeah, you! How would you like to have a life-changing curveball sideswipe you into Desert Oblivion for a few days? Wanna see what happens to you and your mind? You and your attitude? You and your hair?” Burning Man’s balls and humor have consistently served it well, from the very beginning until the very now. There’s really nothing like it. How cool and convenient that it happens about 100 miles from us!

Imagine a meeting of the Reno Sparks Convention Authority in 1988, and some of the fellas are spitballing a little, trying to guess what kind of events will be popular in the future of Northern Nevada. You think any of them envisioned something like … freaking Burning Man?

Where things have seemed to be fairly dark and quasi-insane the last 32 months, I have to admit that it’s delightfully mellow that we now live in a land where one can stop by the local pot shop on the way out of town to load up on brain-spinning goodies to take to an ecstatic mega-hoedown in the naked desert called Burning Man, an event which is, fortunately, not hostile to the THC-laden gummy bear experience. How nice to live long enough to see this pleasant dream from long ago finally realized. And we were right about the effing pot, all you Puritan bastards who oppressed us in the ’60s!

It’s amusing to muse about what happens to people from Germany, England, Paraguay and New Zealand when they first visit the Black Rock Desert. I can’t help but wonder how totally blown away they’ll be by the staggering beauty of The Great Elemental Circus of Air, Light, Heat, Stars and Dust, and then how truly freaking agog they will be when some burn buddy hands them a mushroom cloud margarita and be bop a lula they get right properly introduced and christened into this most mind-wobbling municipality.

At that point, if you’ve got any game at all, you suck it up, get your shit together, and realize that you’re in one swingin’ slaphappy town, one that’s ready for you and your dancing, dilated eyeballs. Really ready.

OMGTWFA.