As I type this in, it appears to speed through the week. A lot of stuff happened that I never wrote about: boredom, laziness, ecstasy, contentment, love. An event like Burning Man must be experienced to be understood, and even then you can only experience a part of it.

This is the part that I experienced, saw, created . . . starting, though I didn't know it at the time, with the anniversary of Fred MacMurray's birthday.

---

Monday morning, sunrise. Woke up some hours ago after a fitful yet still somehow restful night. Wandered through the pre-dawn, looking for a new home for Koinonea.

I'm nervous about this responsibility. We're a collective -- I am one person. Yet it is possible for one person, when correctly attuned with the collective, to act on that collective's behalf without worrying too much about making a big mistake.

Our problem this summer, and probably longer, is that we have not been fully attuned with each other. That's why we need to be on the community trip here in Black Rock -- and to do that, to have a cohesive Koinonea spot, I need to move us.

The sky is brightening in the East. I hardly ever see sunrises. I don't think I've ever meditated as the sun rose before. I am here. We are here, or will be soon. The wind turns warm. All is well, all is at peace, everything will be fine.

This isn't a litany of affirmations -- I know it'll work out -- I just have to do some work to make sure.

The path is clear, at least this part is -- the part I must walk alone. But I feel like there's more to write, more thoughts to explore before my meditative feeling of connectedness with the Unified Field dissipates further.

Why should it dissipate? This is a temporary autonomous zone. It encourages different states of conciousness. For the moment, at least, this one is mine.

Time to pack up and move.

---

Sun's getting up there -- must be like nine by now. I could find out, but I don't really want to.

Our spot is staked out, but I wanted to get my big tent up before heading to center camp to mark it on the map. Then the winds came . . . almost knocked my tent over before I could stake down some supporting lines that might've kept it up. It's tempting to go back to the little tent . . . this one's not quite right for high-wind situations. But, neither's the little one. The wind will die down soon, but then it'll be hot. Total extremes.

Speaking of which, I forgot sunscreen. Doh! Have to get the tent up (and other things) for shade . . . or at least to make more room in the van. Nice, solid structure (whoops, now it's rocking in the wind) with a tape deck playing DJ Tom's set from out here two years ago.

I need to shave. I wish there were more of us here.

---

Noon, give or take about three hours. Windstorm is worse, if anything. I made it to the greeter's map (barely), then went over to bianca's and helped them unload a truck.

Made myself a nice nest in the van. No chance of putting up my structures yet. Cheap little transistor radio is picking up happy hardcore. If my tent wasn't staked down it'd be in Utah by now. What a trip . . . I prepared to deal with heat these first few days of acclimation, but there's no getting acclimated to non-stop wind.

I told some of our HourLand friends that we're moving. They seemed to understand. Cramming into a small space this early is just silly. It's a big desert.

It's possible that the real disconnect between Koinonea and HourLand is that they're here to do, and we're here to be.

---

More stakes in the tent -- I'd probably lose it if I were to try to fold it into the van. I think the tent's ruined. Maybe I can salvage enough for a wind-resistant frame for the parachute.

Wind changed from steady to gusting. Big gusts, though. Music in the radio is all over the map -- just went from classical to what will probably turn out to be cheesy diva house. No attempt at a transition. I wonder who this is.

Green stains on my shirt from the cold palak paneer. Wish I could cook, or at least get to the fresh veggies in the cooler, but the van's way too full to manuever around inside.

---

The tent is a lost cause . . . too many broken bits. The van + parachute idea is a wash, too, but it's too windy to untie the parachute. The ropes may keep me awake, banging on the roof of the van. We'll see.

Rumours are, it'll be warmer tomorrow, and less windy -- definately so later in the week. Tonight is cold. Hope I can sleep okay in the van here. Sleep is important. Tomorrow, I'll probably spin at bianca's in the daytime, then meet people here in the evening.

Somebody's camped in the lee of my van -- no idea who. Looks like a rental car. I'll find out tomorrow.

Things start tomorrow.

---

At last.

Shivered all night, but it feels as if that somehow chased away my slight stuffy nose (or maybe it was the ketamine I snorted at bianca's last night.) Not sure if or when I slept, probably after I gave up and turned on the van's heater for a while, but I got out of bed late -- around ten -- and finally shaved. Now that I've given up on the beard thing, being unshaven is no fun.

After a nice breakfast of granola, rice milk, and fresh grapes I wandered over to bianca's again, and helped them move couches and set up sound. This earned me the great honor of being the first DJ in the '99 shack.

Ran into both Randy and C.J. there at different times, and found out where Mary, Galen, and a few other Koins are camped, so I stopped off to talk to Mary on my way home.

This barren patch of alkaline dirt bordered by green-flagged stakes really is home now. With less wind to fight against, I was able to turn my parachute into a messy-looking but viable shade structure, set out Anders' table and all the chairs (secured lightly with a rope tied to the van's bumper, just in case), and eat a relaxed dinner.

The little one-burner stove I brought doesn't work -- hopefully somebody with a working stove will get here before my cooler stops being cool and the eggs go bad. So, I had a cold salad of mushrooms (no, not that kind), green onions, carrots, chunks of summer sausage, and a nice vinagrette that I mixed up on the spot, washed down with freshly sun-brewed Twinings blackberry tea, further flavored with fresh limes. (The gong of fate sounds.)

This is how camping should be.

---

People are here, yay, people are here!

I spent much of the remainder of last night and all of this morning setting stuff up with people -- Rob, Anders, Claire, Carrie. Rob's espresso machine proved to be, as always, a hit.

As work slowed down for the afternoon, I strapped my music to my bike and, as usual, rode across to bianca's . . . just in time, as it turned out, because Dean didn't feel like playing anymore.

As I'd threatened to do, I played a nice blues/rock set, meandering through harder rock and even country to end up teaching someone how to spin swing (which didn't take long, she was clearly ready.) Then I took over again, with Barry White . . . and the crowd loved it.

They loved it!

Swapping between two CD's, a record company sampler and the Pulp Fiction soundtrack, I ran through a few other 70's funk/soul/pop tunes and then handed things off to Mike K. for the disco collections he thought he'd never play.

They still loved it! Even C.J. was dancing!

As we begged other nearby DJ's for disco to spin, Mike ran off to deal with the generator and I kept going, disco to funky house and eventually to kinda acid (but still bass-driven) house. Somewhere in there Dean tells me that a bunch of people have just taken acid, so I hurried to join them -- but by the time FreeForm was finally ready to start spinning, they'd all left on a wander.

Now I'm here, writing furiously as I feel the acid coming on. This is Burning Man. Yay.

---

Thursday morning, 9:40 AM (yes, I had to look), cracked out and about to attempt sleep. Thoughts still moving too quickly to write down.

Tried anyway. Failed. Crossed it out. Naptime.

---

Friday morning, 4 AM. I think I learned more from C.J.'s annual acid trip tonight than I did from mine last night. We talked about a lot of stuff, opening up more than before. That man has untold depths of wisdom . . . but he's lonely. He wants a partner, and he wants a family. He wants Koinonea to be that family.

Me too.

But it just ain't happening. Koinonea exists to throw totally amazing psy-trance parties, like we did tonight, and anything outside of that -- even something as simple as a communal food plan, when many of us are camped in the same 30' square for a week -- is well-nigh impossible.

So, like C.J., I'm still looking . . . but not yet giving up on Koinonea (and even if I were to find a family elsewhere, I'll never find another group able to generate this kind of energy for psytrance parties.)

I'm not sad about searching . . . it's led me to meet some amazing people, a growing number of whom are or will be part of that family.

So, maybe I've already found it . . . in fact, I know who the current core of "us" is -- but I'm still thinking that whatever this is that I'm seeking

---

Saturday morning. Not sure where my thoughts were going when I abruptly stopped writing, above. Best to leave it, I think.

Spent most of yesterday morning chatting with C.J., mostly about things he learned as a DJ in early 80's post-disco gay dance clubs. I'm really looking forward to hearing the non-mainstream "Italo-disco" that he played back then.

I had intended to spend the afternoon wandering before the spectators arrived en masse (we'd already reached 18,000 by mid-morning), but somehow never got far from bianca's and Come Into The Light. The whole internet.rockstar posse is there now (even Tris, who looks to be having a good time but couldn't let go of his laptop for long), and so I spent a few afternoon hours and then more in the evening doing K and chatting with those wonderful folks.

The afternoon also gave me time to talk deeply with Elly. I have such an amazingly intense love for her, surprising because there's no classic "love interest" thing between us (though I have to admit to some phsyical attraction, because she is beautiful and female and my sexual tastes lean towards beautiful females. But, I'm sure she knows that, and it doesn't get in the way of our friendship.)

Elly is very much a part of the "us" I was starting to talk about yesterday.

One of the things we discussed is that this is probably her last year at Burning Man. Three or four years seems to be about right for many people. As we discussed it, I was thinking that I'd like to be doing more next year -- last year I figured I'd learn and survive, this year I'd do a little more participating, and next year I'd do Big Art or join in a bigger production (like bianca's) or something.

But as I biked home across the playa this morning after sleeping in Marcy's dome with some other members of the nameless family I'm thinking I've found, I became extremely discouraged.

There were beer bottles and other trash all over. All over. How is it that some people simply cannot comprehend the simple idea that if they don't respect a shared resource then it will go away? Is there some recessive activist gene that I've been blessed or cursed with that gives me this understanding? What the fuck?

I could rant more in this vein, but instead I'm gonna nap for a few hours and then go out there with a trash bag or two. And if I do come back next year, I'll probably leave Friday afternoon, against the rush of beer-drinking, resource-destroying weekend spectators.

---

I've always told people that if you're outraged at some injustice, don't just rant -- DO SOMETHING. Positive action isn't really that hard to start. So, next year, I think I'll become a Ranger.

---

Sunday morning, coming down. Or maybe it's the afternoon now. Switched to a new pad -- "expert," this one says, all across the top. The old pad only said "expert" once. Does that make this one six times smarter?

I understand now why Hunter S. Thompson, the greatest of all mind-aletered writers (fuck, not just altered, he's gone, man) uses a tape recorder. Too many thoughts trying to get out. Hard to record them all, even harder to judge what's important.

The Man burned last night. Hopping EL-wire kangaroos and fish and all sorts of crazy things. My love is a burning thing. Saving pod #1 for staff & friends doesn't make it any less smutty to the innocent bystander, but we like it. Best kisses I've had in years, yet I end up spending the rest of the night in chaste cuddles with yet a third woman, one where we both knew we'd become friends some day but didn't know when.

Last night. Flipping along. Total count something like two hits of different batches of e, at least six big drops of clean, beautiful liquid with a cinnamony flavor, a shot of 151 from the Temple of Atonement to wash away my evil deeds if only for a night, a swig of beer, a gulp of vodka and cranberry juice -- not particularly in that order. Oh, and some nitrous. Wow, the nitrous. I went places.

So many people, some I know well, others not so well, if at all; some I see often, but most not often enough; all part of this trip. Some, too, were conspicuously missing. Perhaps the trip is not over until their influence is felt.

Walking from the Cloud Factory Institute of Nephology's discOasis back to the Critical Path "Let's Not Talk About Work" camp and then onwards to bianca's |___| shack, Leah asked me what my biggest fear is.

That's an easy question, even as far gone as I was, and I answered readily: losing friends. Almost all of my other fears are based, in some way, on that. It's not that I'm constantly running around thinking "oh my god, if I don't take more LSD then nobody will like me" or any silly petty insecurity trip like that. But I'll devote a lot of time and energy to making sure that if there's still even the faintest glimmer of a reason for a friendship to continue, then it does. It has made me unbearably sad to lose Charity's friendship over the last months. I didn't tell Leah that. She knows Charity. Maybe I should have, maybe she'd've been able to help me understand, to know if there's anything I can do. I feel so utterly lost on this one.

And it burns, burns, burns, that ring of fire.

---

Same day, same writing session, different line of thought. Or maybe it's the same line. Thought doesn't move linearly anyway. Writing barely does. I've given up on linear time, too.

Well, maybe not. Things still happen in order, one after another, but the order doesn't matter quite as much.

I've only done that much e before once, and never done that much acid before (it was two to three times my big dose last year here), and to do them together . . . amazing. I felt free. Nothing tied me to this consensual hallucination except friendships and the occasional need to sip or expel fluids, each with its' own dedicated orifice.

I've passed through being cracked out and around to the other side. Maybe I'm still tripping. Lots of work still to do, packing up and heading out tomorrow, returning to a civilization that collectively never missed us, nor we it.

Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose. Disconnection from the norm. Total release. Nothing, all, one. I am that, you are that, all is that, the source of being from which all else flows, the nothing, gone, all there.

Last night at the disc0asis, while Da and Mark and Leah and I sat and talked and breathed, Rocky played an old record of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, my parents' teacher and (indirectly) mine, talking about being. I'd guess that it's from the mid-sixties. At some deep, deep level, that put it all together.

This life, that life, it's all the same, all-one-bar-none. Like time, like writing, like thoughts, paths of fate do not always move in a clear, simple line. That early path, following my parents and their TM movement, is still rolling along, and I'm on it sometimes.

Knowing my path is good, even if it changes from day to day. It can get so confusing, feel so lost, when the path is twisted and unclear. The road to the Western Lands is dangerous, unpredictable; today's safe passage may be tomorrow's death-trap. Do most people feel lost all the time? What makes me so freakin' special? Am I just fooling myself?

Does it matter?

I don't think I got to total ego loss last night, but I certianly got to the point where it just didn't matter anymore. Ignorance of linear time, linear fate, point A to point B -- it was all now, and the now was the best possible now, or could be soon.

Some inspired wit spray-pained the words "Love is God" inside of a crosswalk on Haight street (where else?) Not sure what the conceptual connection is, but it seems to fit. It's all good.

So many friends here, more than last year, more than ever before in my life. I am deeply greatful.

Across camp, one of them is saying, half-seriously, "what could be better than taking drugs, twenty-four hours a day?" It's not about the drugs. They're a tool, and an imperfect one at that. It's about the trips. The experiences, the understanding, the growth. Learning, unlearning, relearning, evolving. And in the end, contentment.

But for now, that's all in the long run. No, actually, it isn't. There is no run, there is only now. There is only now, only now, only now, I repeat that in my brain and slowly come to greater understanding of what it really means.

Now.

Now I'm writing.

Now I'm hungry.

Time to eat.

Life can be that simple.

---

Sunday evening, in the Love Dodge. Somebody singing in Hindi on Da's stereo outside -- first track was a puja I recognized, my parents used to sing it. People chatting and giggling, others outside de-shacking couches into a large Budget rental truck. A red light blinks randomly nearby.

This is about the time that I think there should be a final word, a conclusion to this trip. Or maybe that'll come when I finally get home to collapse.

But I doubt that'll happen. This trip won't truly end, it'll just keep on fucking with my head until I reach some more permanent state of enlightenment.

And in the meantime, I'll make the concious decision to not indulge in the k floating around the Dodge. Enough drugs for one trip. The rest will come in time, as everything settles back into place.

---

Bumper sticker: "my other vehicle is my mind" -- seen on an early 80's Honda Civic as we drove home.

---

Tuesday, around 5:30 PM, Colma BART station.

Returned the van -- for some reason they didn't charge me a clean-up fee.

Now I'm on the train. BART is almost identical to the Metro back in D.C., but not as clean, and not really as useful a lot of the time. Public transportation doesn't do you as much good in the Bay Area unless you live and work and play in the city.

I'm sure there are some people who only leave the city for Burning Man, begging a space in a friend's rented RV.

While we were gone, CBS and Viacom announced that they plan to merge. I can't bring myself to care very much. It just can't seriously affect our experiences, our joy, the love we all felt, all feel.

Some of my friends appear to be returning to "normal" a lot faster than I am . . . I don't think I'm gonna let go that easily. Washing the playa dust from my skin doesn't remove the event from my heart, doesn't replace it with the built-up societially-approved intolerance that is the true answer to that now-cliched question "why can't we all just get along?"

Driving back, somebody realized that they needed to be in the same lane as me. I gently let them. Why wouldn't I? Sometimes I realize it too late, too. We're all human. We can get along. It's easy.

It has been suggested by people wiser than I to see all people as the Buddha. The attractive student reading ancient Greek literature who was sitting across from me, then got off at 16th and Mission. The older guy in the green baseball cap across the aisle, looks like a blue collar worker but I don't really think he is. The man in the suit, grimacing at the business section. The security guard with slicked-back hair at the Civic Center station. Every one is the Buddha.

I reach out my mind to these people as we speed towards Montgomery Street, and not one responds as I'd think the Buddha might respond . . . but that's of no real concern. Who am I to judge the mind of the Buddha, or of anyone?

Life's a lot easier if you just live it.

---

Outside the station, crossing Market onto 2nd on my way to a place I no longer work, to meet a friend who'll drive me home. Gave my only nickle to a man with a genuine smile, and wished him good luck. A young, hip-looking couple argues in Chinese as they hurry past, and I walk slowly as I write these words on the pad in my fake leather notebook, part of the life of another San Francisco September, both far and here.

Walking along 2nd past Mission the Buddha says to her friend (also the Buddha) "do you ever feel, like, in a hole?" but the response escapes me. I once felt that way, but escaped it, moved all the way across the country, dyed my hair blue, went to Burning Man. The Buddha, wearing a grey suit, says "I'll call you when I get home from the gym" into a cell phone, earpiece screwed into his left ear. Carrying a satchel stuffed with papers, The Buddha turns and sees me writing and smiles; I smile back; maybe he knows. I walk up to a window and order a mocha with soy milk from the Buddha listening to bad 80's pop turned up so loud that he can barely hear me. He asks "will that be all for you?", and for a moment, I've forgotten how to respond.