Dear Diary . . . day by day

Wednesday September 6th - The Body at Burning Man
Ah, so I'm back from Burning Man. As usual, I'm wiped out, recovering, and not looking forward to the slow process of unpacking (which involves cleaning playa dust/dirt off of most everything I brought with me). Unfortunately, the very end of the trip ended on a sad/frustrating note, so I'm going to ignore that part of it and focus on the good parts.
The trouble, of course, is knowing where to begin.
We got in around midnight on Thursday. Luck had put our friend Dan in our greeter line, so we got pretty good directions to our camp (even if he encouraged us to camp somewhere else the first night due to the crowded nature of our camp). My new headlamp really helped when setting up camp in the dark, even if it is way too easy to blind the person you're trying to help just by looking at them.
After setting up camp, we wandered around, taking in the art on the playa. The lights and special effects at night at Burning Man are simply out of this world; I was glad we arrived at night, as it's like walking into this incredible wonderland of shooting flames and lasers - all on this utterly flat alkali dirt that kinda looks like regolith when the red flares go up and light the world from above.
One of the first art installations we saw was this huge face made out of metal. It had piercing blue eyes ringed in flame; every so often, tears of flame would shoot down out of the eyes, catching and rolling down the cheeks just like real tears. As we walked around the structure, we realized there were three faces back-to-back, the other two being made out of wood (and crying sand) and turf (crying water). It was just the most incredible thing to see straight off like that.
Further up the road to the man was the anus. I waited in line for 5 minutes for the priveledge of crawling through the anus and sliding down the slide on the other side. At the top of the stairs, before you enter the sphincter, a man with a microphone asked me to tell everyone how I was feeling right then. I shook my head - I wasn't warmed up to Burning Man yet and couldn't think of something to say. He insisted, so I shouted into the microphone "I really have to GO!" which was then echoed and mixed with other sounds as I pushed through the soft sphincter and slid down the other side.
To be continued . . .
Exercise log:
Burning Man. Playa. Riding against a desert wind. Set-up, tear-down, camping, travelling.
Writing log:

I'm currently reading:
Children of the Wind by Kate Wilhelm
Woman: An Intimate Geography by Natalie Angier

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