Are You ‘Last Minute Trip to Burning Man’ Rich?

No wonder people hate Burning Man, I thought, when I pictured it as a cynic might: rich people on vacation breaking rules that everyone else would be made to suffer for not obeying. Many of these people would go back to their lives and back to work on the great farces of our age. They wouldn’t argue for the decriminalisation of the drugs they had used; they wouldn’t want anyone to know about their time in the orgy dome. That they had cheered at the funeral pyre of a Facebook ‘like’ wouldn’t play well on Tuesday in the cafeteria at Facebook. The people who accumulated the surplus value of the world’s photographs, ‘life events’ and ex-boyfriend obsessions were now celebrating their freedom from the web they’d entangled all of us in, the freedom to exist without the internet.

Emily Witt went to Burning Man and wrote about it for the London Review of Books. Nice work if you can get it, eh?

Everything about Burning Man I know, love, and occasionally threaten to participate in, I learned from Burning Man season on Kickstarter, and it’s HAPPENING NOW, as luck would have it. Who needs potato salad when you have the Universal Vagina of Light?

Anyway, I love this class-driven (okay and sex-driven) peek into life on the Playa, as I love all class-driven peeks and all first-person, fish-out-of-water-but-not essays involving nudity at Burning Man. They are legion.
My favorite part is this:

My friends would bring food and water from San Francisco. They all delayed their planning with the flexibility of people who don’t worry about money. They bought plane tickets at the last minute, and then changed their flights. One of them still hadn’t got a ticket two days before he was supposed to go. One of them ordered a bicycle from eBay Now and had it delivered to his office within an hour, like a taco. One ended up flying the hundred miles from Reno to Black Rock City in a chartered Cessna.

They all delayed their planning with the flexibility of people who don’t worry about money.

Now let’s spend the rest of the day daydreaming about picking flights based not on which one is cheapest but on how convenient the date and time are for you.

Photo: arnog

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