How to successfully enjoy the tangible experience of the playa, the art, the culture, and the overall “joie de vivre” of Burning Man, Black Rock Desert, the elements, and vacuous way you subject yourself to painfully wonderful memories of a dozen years that is slightly about a week or so.

*or*

I just made another title for something that had one

*or*

That internet email meme about doing the Burn at home (because I will, yet again, not be going this year)

And so it goes:

If you want to do the Burn, but cannot get to the playa, please enjoy this short task list of simple at-home modifications that can be carried out to realistically recreate “playa time” and experience.

(internet text as follows)

  • Tear down your house. Put it in a truck. Drive 10 hours in any direction. Put the house back together. Invite everyone you meet to come over and party. When they leave, follow them back to their homes, drink all their booze, and break things.
  • Pay an escort of your affectional preference subset to not bathe for five days, cover themselves in glitter, dust, and sunscreen, wear a skanky neon wig, dance close naked, then say they have a lover back home at the end of the night.
  • Stack all your fans in one corner of the living room. Put on your most fabulous outfit. Turn the fans on full blast. Dump a vacuum cleaner bag in front of them.
  • Buy a new set of expensive camping gear. Break it.
  • Only use the toilet in a house that is at least 3 blocks away. Drain all the water from the toilet. Only flush it every 3 days. Hide all the toilet paper.
  • Set your house thermostat so it’s 50 degrees for the first hour of sleep and 100 degrees the rest of the night.
  • Before eating any food, drop it in a sandbox and lick a battery.
  • Mail $200 to the Reno casino of your choice.
  • Make a list of all the things you’ll do different next year. Never look at it.
  • Search alleys untill you find a couch so unbelievably tacky and nasty filthy that a state college frat house wouldn’t want it. Take a nap on the couch and sleep like you are king of the world.
  • Shop at Wal-mart, Cost-Co, and Home Depot until your car is completely packed with stuff. Tell everyone that you’re going to a “Leave-No-Trace” event. Empty your car into a dumpster.
  • Spend thousands of dollars and several months of your life building a deeply personal art work. Hide it in a funhouse on the edge of the city. Hire people to come by and alternate saying “I love it” and “this sucks balls”. Blow it up.
  • Cut, burn, electrocute, bruise, and sunburn various parts of your body. Forget how you did it. Don’t go to a doctor.
  • Walk around your neighborhood and knock on doors until someone offers you cocktails and dinner.
  • “Downsize” last year’s camp by adding two geodesic domes, a new sound system, art car, and 20 newbies.
  • Lean back in a chair until that point where you’re just about to fall over, but you catch yourself at the last moment. Hold that position for 9 hours.
  • Don’t sleep for 5 days. Take a wide variety of hallucinogenic/emotion altering drugs. Pick a fight with your boyfriend/girlfriend.
  • Set up a DJ system downwind of a three alarm fire. Play a short loop of drum’n’bass until the embers are cold.
  • Have a 3 a.m. soul baring conversation with a drag nun in platforms, a crocodile and Bugs Bunny. Be unable to tell if you’re hallucinating. Lust after Bugs Bunny.
  • Spend a whole year rummaging through thrift stores for the perfect, most outrageous costume. Forget to pack it.
  • Talk incessantly about how, “next year… we are totally doing an art car, and theme camp.  It will be totally easy.. we can get started after decompression… it’s going to be awesome.  You know what we should really do..” and so on.
  • Read “Dhalgren” by Samuel R. Delany. Read “The City Not Long After” by Pat Murphy. Cut off the bindings, throw all the pages up in the air, and shuffle them back together. Reread “The City After Dhalgren” by Samuel Murphy. Burn it. Read the ashes.
  • Listen to music you hate for 168 hours straight, or until you think you are going to scream. Scream. Realize you’ll love the music for the rest of your life.
  • Spend 5 months planning a “theme camp” like it’s the invasion of Normandy. Spend Monday-Wednesday building the camp. Spend Thurs-Sunday nowhere near camp because you’re sick of it or can’t find it.
  • Bust your ass for a “community.” See all the attention get focused on the drama queen crybaby.
  • Get so drunk you can’t recognize your own house. Walk slowly around the block for 5 hours.
  • Tell your boss you aren’t coming to work this week but he should “gift” you a paycheck anyway. When he refuses accuse him of not loving the “community”.
  • Ask your most annoying neighbor to interrupt your fun several times a day with third hand gossip about every horrible thing that’s happened in the last 24 hours. Have them wear khaki.
  • Go to a museum. Find one of Salvador Dali’s more disturbing, but beautiful paintings. Climb inside it.

About Uncle Fishbits

I'm.. just this guy, you know?

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