My sense of time was obliterated. By rough estimate, there were only 48 hours left in the event, and soon The Man would burn and a different Man would be telling us to leave. 

The gross irony of selling thousand-dollar tickets to an event that preached decommodification weighed heavily on me. Can a society function in a truly “decommodified” sense, or is there something inherently transactional in every interaction?

Why doesn’t the Org participate in its own set of rules and make this a public event on public land? The closure order denies access to what would normally be freely accessible and the Bureau of Land Management levies a hefty fee for the Org to rope it off - excluding and commodifying your public lands.

I’d already explored the Pareto principle, and I’d witnessed some of the lazier members of this utopian society content to do little each day drink underneath the communal shades toting a cavalier mentality and wielding the phrase “the playa will provide” while they party all night. To me, it seemed like a flippant rationalization for a lack of effort. Sure, it’s easy to frame that they’ve volunteered their time to participate out here, but at the heart of it they’re still exchanging labor for a ticket with a face and an after-market value; these volunteer positions have been commodified in their own way.

Furthermore, I’d seen some of the most offensive displays of affluence—from the glamorous nigh-supermodels strutting around the encircled million dollar RVs to the plug-and-play camps where the only thing you need to bring is a voracious appetite to party and a $10,000 down payment.

It’s one thing to do This Thing as a survivalist camping adventure—to bring your own gear (that you purchased from a retailer), haul it out here, and build a camp yourself with nothing more than a strong determination and a cordless impact drill. It’s another thing entirely to hire someone to pack as much comfort as can possibly fit into a freshly leased luxury RV and claim how you beat the elements.

I suppose that is the culture that Burning Man is supposedly running counter to—the people who have the vast wealth to afford to stave off any shred of discomfort they might feel. This seems to be the state of the world; a grotesque hoarding of wealth is simply a human effort to pad oneself from the harshness of the environment and to provide for one’s own personal comfort. The community at-large exists only to bask in your greatness. Maybe that was the “default world” blurring into this surreal fantasy Partyland, but, to me, the distinction between the haves and the have-a-lot-less is clear.

I was still hung up on the idea that free love and drugs would make the world a better place, and with This Thing raging to its crescendo, the feeling of FOMO crept in—what if, despite the steep price for entry, this place is the only place left on the planet to experience those things freely?

5:45 & F, early evening

I looked for a space to chill with campmates. I was desperate to find an appropriate forum to vent my “wow, does anyone else think this whole thing is bullshit?” attitude that had been brewing over the previous days. This was when I most needed to immerse myself back into that radical community who do think the “default world” has many, many of the same shortcomings that I was seeing here, and I possessed a willingness and a desire to change the status quo. I walked to the back of camp, one street further away from The Man, with the refreshingly breezy late afternoon sun filtering through the heavy shades constructed more than a week ago by many hard-working hands.

The conversation on the backside of the camp was light and friendly. There were people throwing sandbags at cornholes. Many others sat around in folding chairs, holding beers, relaxed like this were any other day at the beach. There were more than a dozen people back here, but I didn’t recognize anyone in the camp I’d been staying in all week—a lot of burner-folks can only come out for a few days and not stay a half-month—but I saw a new face recognizing me. 

She was brunette with long hair and glasses, wearing an oversize pink Hollister hoodie. I never heard her name, playa or otherwise. She was bright-eyed, lively and vibrant while the rest of the people bound to lounge chairs wore heavily tinted sunglasses to hide the eyes that looked like they were coming down from a drug bender—I, of course, could be projecting. 

I unfolded my camp chair and flopped into it, seated across the way from their conversation. I didn’t want to spook them with a sudden outburst about wealth-inequality and world injustice, so I was content to give her and her group a curt nod with a smile. She grinned brightly and returned to face her group, their chat was flirty and sassy and frisky; I was drawn in and quietly eavesdropping. This woman, this Girl In Pink, was in the middle of a highly animated discussion of a “Dunkaroo” maneuver – apparently it’s a sexual thing the post-millennials are doing that entails sticking your head in a five-gallon bucket of water and getting spanked on the ass. My face broke into a smirk. Auto-erotic asphyxiation and masochism! How delightful. The Girl In Pink glanced at me and added a wink that said, “come on, join the conversation. I won’t bite ;)”

Maybe experiencing the power imbalances involved in sado-maschism would help contrast the economic tension I was feeling. Instead, I froze. I had no words to make out loud. I wish I could have said something profound or funny or even just friendly, but my computer-brain and nervous system were genuinely fried at this point, and any charming sentence I may have conjured in the mind turned to gibberish as it approached my throat. I scratched the idea of speaking up and stayed splayed out in my camp chair. The seriousness in her look startled me, despite my own craving for intimacy. 

I could feel the panic start in the lips and fingertips. Those went numb as shallow breathing passed through a throat exceedingly parched. The vibe under the shade swung from boisterous to blue as the next 6-hour shift began, and the two dozen staff shuffled off to catch the next dusty bus to the Gate. The Girl In Pink left with them. Before she cleared the Lounge, she turned her head over her shoulder and looked back at me. On her face is a mask of confusion or incredulous rejection―why did this guy look at me the way he did and then completely ignore me? Maybe the real world is transactional and I just get stuck not knowing how to give or receive things.

A haunting personal despair washed over me. What if I could not speak? What if I could only make faces at people to express complex emotions? What if the only way I had to communicate with people was via a variety of bird noises? I tried to make a soft hum from the center of my throat, just to test to see if the voicebox still works. Nothing came out. 

In the same way you can’t have a giver without a taker – a dunker can’t exist without a spanker, so to speak – maybe the most inclusive and loving communities, both small and large, are accepting of being both transactional and decommodified at the same time. 

. . .

Black Rock City was vastly different in appearance compared to just 12 hours ago. The intensity and density of the city continued to build into the final weekend. The huge climax was yet to come, and I wasn’t sure what to expect when this temporary metro reached its dramatic and fiery end. At least I’d survived to see it. I hoisted myself out of my camp chair and decided to lay low in my zippered tent to shake off these missed connection blues and prepare myself for the evening. Right around the time of the evening playa howl, a loud argument erupted in camp as tensions began to boil over. A couple, in their tent just eight feet away from me, exchanged an intense dialogue, and their pointed words ripped through both tent’s thin nylon fabric. 

“How could you?” she sobbed. She said it again and again, stammering and sucking breath between sobs.

“I didn’t know it would upset you so much.” He was soft-spoken and obviously guilty.

“I thought we were doing this together. I didn’t think we came here to fuck a bunch of randoms.” Her words were bitter and furious.

I couldn’t hear his murmured reply. A clear relationship transgression had occurred here, or a failure to communicate, and it had done plenty to upset someone. In my own tent, I had already stripped naked to change into my evening playa costume, so I shimmied into my kit as quietly as I could to let this couple have their space. It was surreal to be so viscerally close to a couple on the very edge of a complete meltdown/breakup, so voyeuristically near something so personal, and it again got me thinking about trust, passion, and connection; the very reciprocal nature that lies just beneath every gesture and act.

With harsh vibrations all around, I felt called to take a quiet bike ride to better find myself, or at least to find myself in better company. Since I had already let someone else take a ride on my village bicycle, I decided to poach a bike from the same rack. Maybe ownership doesn’t exist out here! Maybe I was truly in the wrong for thinking it was my bike at all—if all commodities have no value, everything is free for the taking to whomever wants it. I had earlier unwillingly gifted a bike, now an unseen person was gifting me a bike. That’s how karma works, right?

Guilt and shame rationalized away, I hopped on a non-descript and filthy BMX bike and rolled through camp, quietly past the emotionally overloaded couple, and out through camp to the backstreet. With the evening beginning in earnest and the Neons and Fires lighting their respective torches, I wheeled off into the din of the pulsing desert party—taking turns down streets on a whim, lured by sounds and chasing sights—simply following the non-thought of instinct and compulsion.

. . .

The Snooty Coyote, night

The energy on playa was electric. I was fully locked into this trip, ready to completely immerse myself into the nearest open camp I could find. At first sight of it, the warmly lit and tidy Snooty Coyote seemed like a perfect place. There was plenty of nearby bike parking, there looked to be an active bartender and a couple of people seated in barstools, plus one empty seat seemingly reserved for me. I strode into their camp like it was mine.

“Hi all,” I greeted them with a wave and flashed a smile with as much canine as I could muster.

“Hey, guy,” they greeted back. “Want something to drink?”

I dangled my dusty cup by the carabiner and wiggled it side to side. “Only if I’m not intruding."

“We’ve got Black Russians and Irish Negronis,” the bartender kindly offered. 

I slid onto the vinyl cushioned barstool and offered her my cup. “Since you’re offering, I’ll have to try one of each,” I said, with a wink. While she prepared the first cocktail, I turned to my new neighbors at the bar and noticed they were in the process of loading a fanny pack with metal tins and plastic bottles—and a lot of white powder. “Only if I’m not intruding,” I said again, much more quietly now that I realized they were in the middle of packing their evening’s party favors. 

“Not at all.” A curly-haired man with a greying goatee quickly dabbed a pinky finger to his tongue and pressed it into a tin of white dust. It came out chalky and crystalline, full-moon white and glittering like diamonds. “We believe in sharing the love here.”

My eyes widened. He looked at me with curiosity and thrust the tip of his pinky at me in a kind of ‘up yours’ gesture. “Go on, take it.”

The bartender slid my filled cup back in front of me while she watched carefully, expectantly. 

I looked at the man pointing his pinky at my face as my heart rate quickened. He could have been Argentinian, or Spanish, or—who knows—a vaguely blended Latin European. His English was confident but his accent was rich and exotic, and I trusted the moment enough to just let go and put safety into a very distant third place. I leaned over slowly and let my tongue hang out like a panting dog. As he stabbed his pinky against it, reflexively my eyes closed tight. 

I winced and reeled back in my seat. “Yow, a bitter pill.”

“Just relax, my friend, your drink will wash it all down nicely.” He returned his pinky to the stash and took a dose for himself. I shook my head, bewildered, and decided I better start seriously relaxing.

“I’m Escobal, welcome to our little corner of love and good-times.” 

“Ah, t-thank you.” I stuttered, suddenly feeling the need to put a guard up. “I’m Wolfman.”

“Ah,” he beamed, “if you are not careful, that will put fur on your back.” The whole bar laughed and I blushed hot, gripping my lukewarm drink with both hands. I could already feel them clumsily morphing into paws while everyone else at the bar happily took their turn with the stash. 

I sat back and listened to their story. Escobal told me that he and his campmates come from all over the world, gathering here for what they said is the biggest party. He said there is nothing like this anywhere else, this free-love fest, where the art looms large and you can stroll into any neighborhood camp unannounced and you will be treated like a favorite guest. I certainly was a living example of that tonight. 

I definitely got the sense that there is a whole ecosystem of drugs out here—providers and takers—and some people come equipped to serve not only themselves but their entire neighborhood. No questions asked, no invoices served, just an unconditional sharing of every single resource available. At the heart of it, perhaps this is what keeps the fire burning—or the neon glowing—at The Man.

He asked me where I came from, what I was doing out here. I lamented that I had left my camp with no real destination or pack to run with. “You just have not found your people yet,” he consoled me. 

He zipped up his fanny pack now stuffed with a wild amount of euphoria-inducing chemicals. The bartender finished breaking down her bar and turned off a few lights—I was slow to realize that the Snooty Coyote was closing down for the night. “Do not worry, Wolfman.” Escobal’s face was soft, wizened, as he kindly escorted me to my bike. “They will find you, if you howl loud enough.” He and his friends picked up their bikes and rode off, leaving me underneath the open sky, the distant and looming thunderstorm flashing and rumbling in ominous warning.

9:30-ish & E, after midnight

After a long, heart-pounding bike ride to work out the worst effects of the drugs and alcohol, I pulled off the street in front of a place that offered a welcoming spread of fuzzy pillows under a soothing glow of mint blue illumination. A drizzle of rain had started, but the clouds threatened much more. I needed a place to rest my legs and get very, very tucked in—the acid (at least, I hoped to God that’s all it was) was running hot and I was starting to dissolve into something much more quivering. I parked in front of a well-lit sign: Soul Pavilion.

I teetered off-balance as I laid the bike down in their front yard and staggered my way to a pile of pillows on the hard playa floor. I belly-flopped into the soft mass, relieved to be somewhere slightly secure and out of the weather. But I couldn’t relax here, not yet. My lower guts and bladder stabbed me with a severe alert: “Always know where the restrooms are.” I said it into the pillow, reciting it like a curse. “Shit,” I lamented—public toilets.

Through some raw force of will not to shit where I sleep, I pressed myself up to my feet and shambled back to the playa street, now challenged to find an Org-sponsored bank of portos. I glanced around, but my vision had long-since gone surreal and untrustworthy. I had to pick a direction where they might be and hope they appeared. I set off, keeping the Soul Pavilion side of the street on my right. The rain started to pick up in intensity, and some of the nearby sound camps had already unplugged. I was leaving tracks in the skiff of slick mud; I could easily retrace my steps, as long as I could remember where I put them.

It was a massive relief to find them relatively quickly—10 portos in a row, 10 doors to choose from with not a single person in line. I gritted my teeth for the grim ordeal that is using a ‘festival toilet’ and picked one at random—the sixth from the right (or was it forth from the left?)—and flew the door open to step inside, expecting nothing but the nauseating horror of human excrement. 

Instead, a soft glow of twinkling fairy lights. The scent of eucalyptus. Fresh rolls of TP, stacked high and dry. An immaculately clean seat; a relatively low crap reservoir. With the pitter-patter of the desert rain on the roof, I closed my eyes and imagined I was doing my business in the nicest AirBnB bathroom I could book. There was even a little wooden box with extra large, foil-wrapped alcohol wet wipes and the note: “If it doesn't come out of your body - DON’T FLUSH IT DOWN THE POTTY.” The words were threatening but the smiley face was emphasized. 

I tore into one and gleefully sanitized my hands and wrists, stashing the MOOPy scraps in an unused pocket. I couldn’t believe it—I had been gifted the nicest porto experience completely at random. Someone took the effort to make this place, of all places, as nice as they could, and they did it completely anonymously. I quietly pressed open the door to the same vacant porto plaza, feeling relieved and even refreshed. I turned away from my lucky break to face the way I had come. I could easily spy the soft minty glow of the Pavilion through the haze of the weather.

The pillows I had left not long ago were still vacant but there were more souls in camp this time. The rain had stirred them up and into action—things weren’t getting soaked but they were starting to get damp. I was still in survival mode and in no shape to serve this community, so I made straight for the pillow pile, only to be halted by the next person to come into focus—the same glasses, the same brunette, the same pink Hollister hoodie.

“Hey.” I found my ability to speak.

“Hey,” she replied. “I know you.”

“Yeah, in Box Camp. What a–,” she cut me off.

“I camp with my friends here but I just finished my shift with Box.” She raised an eyebrow at me, content to finish my previous sentence for me: “What are you doing here?”

I lowered my chin and tried to focus my drifting, tired eyes. I felt a heaving sigh of exhaustion and the honest truth rush out of me. “I need a place to crash out.” And as I stood there with my pitiful need exposed, I brought my focus on to her. I could see her face too, tired, but empathetic, maybe even a little primal in her nurturing nature. There was a long beat of silence, like she was waiting for me to deliver the other half of my scripted line.

“...And I probably need a hug.”

Her face lit up. Maybe she still had some buzzing energy in her post-shift, and the spirit of gifting coursed like lightning tonight. My admission sparked something in her, and she stepped up close to me, almost nose-to-nose, and calmly whispered, “Do you know how to heart hug?”

A smirk tightened my lips, and my soul screamed at me to say ‘yes, and’, but I couldn’t lie to her. “No, but you can teach me.”

She grinned with the same bright white smile I had seen earlier and cocked her head to the side. “Point to your left ear,” she commanded.

I did as she asked and she did the same. “This is how we line up - left ear to left ear.” It didn’t make sense for about a half second. Her chest came to settle against mine, her hands slipped around my waist and pressed up against my back. I rested my heavy hands on her hips, she leaned her head softly against me, the height difference in us set her ear closer to my shoulder. Immediately I could feel it: our thundering, desynchronized hearts, banging up against each other, chaotic and arrhythmic.

“Whoa,” I said, like Keanu Reeves discovering The Matrix.

“Yeah,” she replied firmly. “We’re gonna take three big breaths like this, ok?” She shimmied her feet a little closer between mine and tossed out the rest of her breath with a sigh.

“Ready?” She didn’t leave room for dialogue before drawing an inhale into her expanding lungs—I followed her lead and I could feel us further pressing together. She started her sigh of exhale and I turned my breath around to match it. 

“Again—” Our bodies only had the span of one breath to get more comfortable with each other, but already I could feel it working. Each breath brought us closer, tightening this brand new bond with a ratchet-like click. The second breath lasted twice as long as the first. We got back to the bottom of the exhale and a long pause lingered while I waited for her to start the next inhale.

“This is the last one, breathe into your belly—” upon uttering her order I immediately felt her belly breath expand and I quickly relaxed myself to do the same. At the apex of it, we were like two human balloons, fully inflated and ready to drift away. 

But then, as the simultaneous exhale melted us all together, without question our hearts calibrated. One shared heartbeat:

Whump,

whump,

whump.

After an endless moment between this third breath and the next, she whispered, “When you do it right, you never want the hug to end.” We stayed like that, together in a soft shared embrace, for an uncountable number of breaths while a high desert thunderstorm drenched the ancient lake basin.