The Boy Scout and Miss Bliss

Back From Burning Man

First things first. I am back, a little worse for wear and pretty darn dusty. For all my fans out there looking for stories of the bizarre and images of the surreal, they are coming, but they will take some time. It was a long road back to what we 'Burners' call the DEFAULT world and I am going to need some time to get back into the swing of things.

The vacation was well worth it and much needed. The trek to Black Rock City, the five day stay and the trek back home took us 7 days and was arduous. Like any good climb up a mountain or swim across an ocean, it was grueling, but in the end, immensely satisfying.

There were 4 of us in our merry little band that we named "Nitro Tribe". Their names are changed here because much like Vegas, what happens at Burning Man, stays at Burning Man. Everyone at Burning Man gets a ‘name’. It is considered to be a sort of alternate world compared to the everyday life that most of us lead. Alternate worlds require alternate names.

There was 'Playa Mama', our veteran, having attended two previous burns and a damn good cook. Then there was 'Boy Scout', one of our newbies from a town way out on the east coast. This man could do many a strange and interesting thing with his Leatherman tool. Then came 'Baby Huey', another newbie from here in the Phoenix Metro area who had a unique way of enjoying his libation. Finally, there was 'f-Stop', which is the name I gave to myself for lugging around a 5lb Speed Graphic camera to photograph everything. This was my second burn.

To document all of our travels will take some doing. For those of you following my Flickr Account, I am posting about 3 to 4 digital images and videos a day. It will take about a month to post all of the 400+ digital images that I took. The bigger challenge will be developing the over 100 film images that I took (assuming they turn out at all….expired film, questionable lighting and lots of dust will make developing them problematic).

Eventually, most of these images will end up on Flickr and I will be setting up a webpage dedicated to all the images for the die-hard fans that want a glimpse into the mass insanity that is Burning Man. I also plan to produce a DVD for those that were brave enough to make the journey. Most of it will probably make its way onto YouTube before the end of the year.

I can’t relate too many of the individual stories of what happened at Burning Man, and there were many. When taken out of context, they wouldn’t make a lot of sense and when strung all together they would be very lengthy. So I will be using the experiences on the Playa to develop some fiction and metaphoric stories about what it was all about. The title to this blog represents one of those themes.

This blogging thing is an evolutionary process. It never stays the same for long. Another paradigm shift might be in the offing. So stay tuned.

One last thing. I hope be able to start attacking my readers blogs in the next 10 days or so. It is on my to-do list, but unfortunately life didn’t stop when I was out of town for 10 days, so right now, I am a tad bit swamped.