Craigslist

Black Rock City from above

​Craiglist missed connections, what luscious fruits of information you provide! As a heretofore non-Burner, I could previously only imagine the feats of hedonism that go down inside the "permission engine" of Black Rock City every year. But thanks to Craigslist, I no longer have to. Missed connections tell me all I need to know:

-- The value of creative dress (or creative non-dress):

"You had the words "PET ME" shaved into your chest...... And I did! And I really enjoyed it!"

-- The importance of spontaneity:

I was unlocking my blue fuzzy bicycle after a crazy night of adventures, about to head back to my side of the playa for some pre-dawn fire play, when a stunningly beautiful blond woman appeared and started dancing with me, followed by an equally attractive man. We laughed and hugged and suddenly we were kissing passionately <3 it was absolutely beautiful, and fucking hot as hell. He started finger fucking me as I did the same to her. The bass was dropping, the sun was rising and with you two I was in bliss.

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Taymar Richard Gillmore

​"Hell," as P.B. Shelley wanly admitted, "is a city very much like London," but it's hard to imagine this simile gaining much traction at this year's Burning Man. The theme for the 2010 installment of the gigantic annual art party held in the Nevada desert was "Metropolis: The Life of Cities," which seemed a heroic conceit as we arrived Friday before the event to the usual ramshackle sprawl of tents, RVs and portable toilets. Some few thousand toolbox visionaries labored through a long weekend of dust, wind, and freakishly cold temperatures to bring it all together.

Black Rock City's gates opened hours early in advance of an anticipated thunderstorm, and revelers drove straight into a swarm of police stopping cars at random for spurious offenses. For feds and local cops alike, the sight of a record 50,000 freakish out-of-state tourists is like rattling a stick inside a long-neglected swill bucket. These woes were plaguing the festival well before my first Burn. This would be my fifth, but, like reelection campaigns and sex comedy, repetition is farce.

Despite any angst imposed by nature and authorities, there's always some unifying happenstance early on that brings the event into sharp focus, turning a lumpish haul of lip-cracked and skin-blistered civilians into a subculture on a spree, and this year it was the double rainbow after Monday's thunderstorm. As soon as the clouds broke and twin bands of impossibly bright color lassoed across the sky above Black Rock City, people dove into the streets with the giddy fervor of corn farmers saved from drought. One fellow, wits clearly addled by this minor chromatic miracle, ran through Center Camp screaming "What does it me-e-e-e-an?"

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