I've never really had the urge before to attend Burning Man, but this year for some reason I became almost obsessed with the idea. Unfortunately, this fixation didn't occur until the event was already underway. Maybe it's because I have been struggling with the desire to finally get deeply involved in a creative activity and associate with other creative people. Also, since I am no longer connected to a work place and feel alienated from the community we live in due to the insane real estate circumstances, I crave the sense that I belong somewhere, even if only for a week or so.

From the time I got this notion yesterday (Tuesday), I really had only a few hours to commit or blow off the idea. In order for a trip to make sense, I would have had to assemble all the stuff to make it through four days in the desert, then head out for the six-plus hour drive to Gerlach and the playa, hoping that a $350 ticket would still be available at the gate.

I was up until after midnight looking at hundreds of amazing photos and reading blogs and stories about the event, and after a fitful night without much sound sleep, I finally decided to just enjoy the spectacle vicariously and stay put here. The coverage in blogs, press, and photos online is so good you get a real sense of the art and events there - as well as some of the anthropological richness, I think. Before long I will be off to Mexico anyway, for a different kind of adventure that is no less wondrous than a big staged artsy-fartsy countercultural extravaganza (not that there's anything wrong with that).

Later this evening, we were talking about the irony of the concurrent event in the Nevada desert and those in Louisiana and Missisipi. On the Burning Man playa, all all the folks who paid several hundred dollars each for admission are running around sampling all the free booze and food and entertainment, and gushing about how charitable they all are to each other, living for a week in a society where everyone is so mutually supportive and everything one needs is available as a gift from strangers. In the Gulf states, one of the lowest income parts of the country, people with no insurance on their cars or homes have lost everything. Most now have no job, no posessions, no income, no savings. They are not so idealistic given the realities that they face. A lot of them are no longer even alive to face the horror that grows more evident by the hour.

Soon enough, we may all feel the effects of what has happened there - as the devastation of petoleum production and refining facilties kicks the chocks out from an economy already perched on a steep downward slope.

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