A friend asked me to explain more about the burning man reference on my home page... here it is... you'll just have to imagine me smiling and getting excited while telling this story.

Burning Man is really hard to explain, it's a life-experience. It's a long weekend (well closer to a week for me) thing in the Black Rock desert in Nevada. The Black Rock desert is a playa -- essentially flat cracked hard packed earth that is dusty more than sandy. It's also in the middle of nowhere, about an hour and half off I-80, and still another hour from there to Reno.

I heard about it soon after arriving in San Francisco in sep '95, because my co-workers had all just arrived back from it. I knew I had to go. This year over 10000 people showed up, and built a "city". There is a huge wooden "man" that is constructed and overlooks the entire thing. On Sunday night, the man is burned to the ground and so are a bunch of other things. The whole thing is very pagan. People make theme camps, dress up or go naked, and wander about. Some things are far more weird than you'd see in the Folsom Street Fair (once yearly event in San Francisco, catering to the "bizzare" in sexual tastes, and would probably be struck down by law enforcement anywhere else). Many people do one drug or another, but it's not really required.

For me it was the end of my first year in California. I was and still am entirely burned out from the effort I put into making the technology at hotwired work. For that year I did pretty much nothing but work, and hang out with the incredibly creative and motivated people from work. At Burning Man we, a bunch of people from the "extended" hotwired family, built a version of bianca's Smut Shack. The biancaTrolls work at HotWired (or rather, worked at hotwired)... and the Smut Shack is... well I dunno how to explain it. The smut shack is modelled on a house that the Trolls lived in in Chicago while going to college. At any rate, it was our theme.

The Smut Shack was constructed by driving 3 foot rebar (revar? whatever) stakes into the ground, and putting 1" steel conduit over top to form a strut. We built 10' x 10' cubes out of the conduit, and the entire frame was 5 cubes by 2 cubes. Each narrow end of the frame was secured to the two large moving vans we brought all this stuff up in. The top of the frame was covered with two large blue tarps. The "walls" of the shack were built out of various gauzy psychadelic fabrics picked up surplus somewhere. We furnished the shack with sofas and chairs that we found on the streets of San Francisco and carted out in the moving vans. Music, great ambient stuff, is a huge part of the shack atmosphere, and we lugged out a 1200 W stereo system and a 4000W generator and enough gas to power it 24 hours a day for the week. The rest of the "atmosphere" was provided by (mostly pink, plus some soft white) small christmas lights which we lined all the poles and ropes holding the shack together. The soft pink and white light was just perfect.

The days were so bloody hot all you could do was find some shade and sit or rest and talk with others. I found if I drank beer during the day I'd get a hangover in a few hours even if I was guzzling water too, so I avoided it until evenings. After about 4pm it cools off a bit and the whole place comes alive. That's when everyone starts wandering to see the other camps, or maybe some of the bands or other shows that are playing. We welcomed anyone into the shack and let them crash or sit or do whatever they wanted.

On Friday and Saturday night we served food to everyone that came by. Grilled cheese with garlic one night, and quesadillas the next. I had taken a cardboard box and torn a side off and covered it with aluminum foil to make a serving platter. On the platter was the food of the night plus pieces of apple, orange, or peaches, plus vitamin C (for the people tripping, gotta keep them healthy), and "Up Time" (a natural stimulant from a company that advertised with hotwired once and left us hundreds of packets of them). By that time I hadn't shaved (or showered) for 4 days, had quite the hair growth, was running around in Tevas, shorts, a poncho, and a baseball cap. I totally got off on approaching walkers-by with the try offering them everything on it, and inviting them into the shack. (Where other people were serving some beverages and other munchies.) Of particular fun was approaching the people tripping on acid because I'd rush up and recite the contents of the tray rapidly, overwhelming the victim.

Somewhere between 3 and 4am a lot of camps put in for the night, but we still cranked the music and going strong. We'd catch the late night crowd... on my page I talk about the bubble thing we did, that was totally cool. A friend Julie brought out some bubble mix one night in the wee hours, and we stared making bubbles like kids. But it was too dark to see the bubbles, and there wasn't any wind to blow them around. Creativity in overdrive from having to solve so many problems with the limited materials we had with us I found a bright halogen construction light and an electric fan (which someone brought as a joke, to "cool" them during the day). With the light and the fan aimed to the sky we went through a couple litres of bubble mix shooting bubbles up into the sky. A bunch of people came to see the light and see what was going on, said they could see it for miles.

Some other themes included: disgruntled postal workers; an RV turned into a pirate ship; couch-potato camp (with Playa TV, someone brought all the gear needed to do TV broadcasting with them); bubble-wrap camp (huge rolls of bubble wrap for people to pop); "weird blinking lights"; some huge geodesic dome (actually there were two geodesics); a huge piece of art made out of 88 old pianos (which were burnt to the ground); a maze made out of various doors; a rave camp (set off 4 miles from the rest of the city, their sound system was state-of-the-art outdoor gear brought by employees of a company that makes outdoor sound systems, you could hear it clear 12 miles away if you were in the right direction); some group made a huge theatre screen out of pressboard and showed '60s porno tapes; some guy built a motorized couch out of an electric golf cart, including a stereo system, and headlights (and when he went in reverse, all the couch-riders would go "beep beep beep ..."); there were all these art-cars, like one made up to look like a shark.

There were 5 or 6 radio stations, including our own Radio Shack 87.9 FM broadcasting at 7 W on a makeshift antenna built by some guy from a radio networking company that had come out for the experience and to wire up microwave to get internet connectivity so that we could do live video and audio feeds from the events. (We actually broadcast on 87.9 at work all the time, call it "KHOT" even though that name is taken, and wait for the FCC to come by and say, uh, .5W is the legal max without a license. We've had people in nearby buildings send us email asking if it's us, and saying it's way cool.) There were two daily periodicals photocopied and delivered by the Disgruntled Postal Workers. There was a McSatan's burger grill in a trailer. There was a lifesize replica of the Mouse Trap board game, and it even worked a few times.

The week we went was the week of the full moon. It was so bright in the clear desert air I didn't need to bother with a flashlight most of the time. The playa being so flat is just incredible for bike riding... and with the moon I could ride around at night without any other lights. I even rode with my eyes closed because I didn't have to look at the ground for potholes or anything. That was all a bit scary though, especially when people driving their cars without lights would go roaring by at 100Mph.

The playa is unforgiving -- there were deaths this year. Some people didn't understand that on the playa a car does not skid, it tips over. The dust would kick up and blind you at times. On the way out I was freaking out when a dust storm surrounded the car I was in and we couldn't see two feet in front of us. A moment before we had been doing 70 Mph, and so were other people a few hundred feet either side of us. I kept having this image of another car appearing in front of us suddenly, another car that hadn't slowed down to a crawl in the dust.

I went to sleep between 5 and 7am most of the time I was there, and by 9am the sun had baked my tent to the point that I couldn't sleep any longer. But the whole experience charged me with adrenaline and the lack of sleep wasn't important, actually it probably contributed to the natural high I was on. For many people it is a time to reflect on their life and decide on changes. I say it was a life experience because it was one of those times that made me feel alive, something that gives meaning to it all.

Photos by Mike Kuniavsky.