I'm sitting here just before 9pm with a live internet video feed from Burning Man, waiting for The Burn - which is scheduled for 9:30. I've been looking in at various times over the past few days, never having a connection problem, but tonight, as I anticipated, there were bandwidth problems as people like me from around the world decided to try to be there vicariously for the culimination of the week of playa activity. I connected after several dozen attemps, and now will keep my session alive until the flames die down.

Earlier this afternoon, I rode my bicycle to the gym. As I returned home along empty back streets, I thought of the thousands of bicycles scurrying around the Black Rock City thoroughfares. I rode home through a new development of enormous million-dollar McMansions on tiny lots. Only an initial swath has been completed, with many still under construction and a large area eerily devoid of anything developed but a wide paved road lined with trees and faux-Victorian lamp poles. Down this wide desolate boulevard I rode, trying to envision myself surrounded by the raucous activity at BRC - thousands of bizarrly and scantily clad denizans walking and pedalling, and fantastic mutant cars in all shapes and sizes.

But I was alone, with no sound but the wind setting of a small roar in my ears as I rolled along. Then, a mile or so ahead I saw then heard a large piece of earthmoving equipment tearing up some dirt. As far as I know it wasn't equipped with a bunch of trashed living room furniture and coolers full of Red Bull, or occupied by burned-out revelers, and I didn't observe any animalistic veneer or flame and smoke generating activity, so my musing had apparently not manifested a mutant vehicle there on the dreary housing tract.

I turned down a street away from the undeveloped area into a section of completed houses. They are all done up in fake representations of Colonial or Mediterranean, or Craftsman and other unrecognizable tricks of facade bits and pieces. There were no people visible anywhere, although there were a lot of high-priced Japanese and German sedans and SUVs parked on the street. Either everyone was holed up in the bloated houses or they were behind the identical privacy fences enjoying their postage-stamp patios on the tiny lots. As I rounded a corner, a small Asian child on a new bicycle approached and, seeing me, screwed up his face and stuck out his toungue. He was the only tangible human presence in the whole development.

Rounding a corner, I approached a long section of incomplete houses lining both sides of the street. Without the finishing-touch fakery and still devoid of their carefully selected alternating innocuous pastel colors, they had a dreary gray sameness, like Eastern German mass housing of the coldwar era. With scaffolding erected in front of each, I had a sense of riding through a set under construction for some future knock-off of a Stepford Wives movie.

From the end of the street, penetrating Trance music pulsed and throbbed. In place of the Mexican radio music I normally heard riding through this area while the immigrant workers were toiling, this was a direct hook into my Burning Man musing. As I reached the end of the street and edge of the development, I discovered tht the music came from beyond, somewhere in the old Naval Air Station where we are temporarily camped out, in such spendid isolation.

After I arrived at home I tried to nap, or meditate, but thoughts of the Louisiana horrors and Burning Man raced through my head unstoppable, so I sat down to hammer out the previous blog entry. And now, the Man has burned. I know from experience that with time, this obsession with what I have missed will subside, and I can move on the next opportunity - to embrace or reject.

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