There are a lot of people here tonight,
dancing in their socks.
And I can't help but wonder
how many of these socks
have been danced in before....

Everyone here has a story
of the first time they understood --
"grokked," as the geeks say --
dancing, perhaps in their socks,
as a greater, even total understanding
grew from the silence unheard
between the beats,
the unconscious shift from one position to the next,
hearing the music,
feeling the music,
BEING the music!

I arrived on the Playa early in the evening of Sunday, August 29, dropping off friends and stuff at various points and then setting up my own tent. This was my second year attending the purposefully little-known annual event called Burning Man and, like other mind-altering experiences, it proved to have a stronger effect on this second try than it'd had for my first.

This year, I was foresighted enough to bring a notebook so that I could record my thoughts and experiences. This is the contents of that notebook, filled with honesty, with reality as I saw it at the time, and often see it still. This is not a document to be read with pre-conceptions, for they may well be proven right -- yet by doing so, the rest of what I've written could well lose all true meaning.