blog.Adonis.net

You should not see the desert simply as some faraway place of little rain. There are many forms of thirst.

- William Langewiesche

I felt really detached this morning, like my body was back in the real world, but my brain was still in a drug-induced haze somewhere out on the playa. There was a sense of unreality about everything, like I was an observer and everything else was shifted just a bit to one side of reality. Strangely, it was a feeling I rather enjoyed.

I wish I had a lot of pictures of my Burning Man exploits to post here, but I don’t. My phone’s battery died shortly after arriving, with the Jeep’s following shortly thereafter. Fortunately, I have friends with cameras, and I’m hoping to appropriate some of their work, which will surely be better than anything I could have done myself.

It may be a good thing that there’s not much photographic evidence. Despite plenty of assurances otherwise, I’m not really convinced I looked good in a makeshift miniskirt so short that my balls fell out of it every time I bent over or sat down.

It was really good to be back. The place is just as strange and overwhelming and freeing as it was 10 years ago, just much, much bigger. It still also feels very much like home to me, even after enough years that I’m old enough to single-handedly skew the median age by a year or two.

I’m sunburned and exhausted, my feet hurt, and the Jeep will probably never be clean again, but I’m also feeling mentally and emotionally recharged, and I’m very thankful for the great people I met out there in the Nevada desert, and for everything those people shared with me over the last week. I suspect it’ll take some time to really feel like a part of the default world again, but that’s OK with me. I think I’d like to keep carrying this little bit of unreality around with me as long as I can.

Tags: burning man

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008 at 9:06 pm and is filed under travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.