Isn’t the ebb and flow of life interesting?

((hug))

yes i agree you sound like you were WAY too hard on yourself and taking the whole thing too seriously!

i have to admit i feel a sense of relief reading your post because it is the first thing i have heard that goes beyond that “bm is perfect utopia and life-changing and there’s 362 days until next year so i will count down every second until then and die with anticipation” thing that i hear a lot. i mean, i’m sure it’s a wonderful experience but nothing is perfect all the time, i just don’t think the real world is like that! it makes me feel like i wouldn’t fit in and it turns me off.

i appreciate reading what feels like a very real and honest account of an experience with real-life ups and downs. you should really write a book some day!!

and yes, living in SF/being part of our particular crew makes burning man sort of anticlimactic in terms of “fun things i’ve done with people i know”, which is why i definitely should have focused on “fun things to do with people i don’t know”. ivan was really good about that; i should have followed him around more.

jen: yes, i am a complete burning man masochist and was taking myself and the whole thing way too seriously. next year (?) there will be no self-doubt, and much less seriousness.

> i expected burning man to be the peak, but i actually peaked way earlier. burning man was not so much a pinnacle as an enormous after-party for the summer of 2006.

yes.

very well put. this ties into the issue of expectations that’s been so thoroughly discussed for the last week, but puts it in slightly less abstract and guilt-seeking terms. i think that a whole lot of us had an incredible summer. and burning man is supposed to be THE party and THE event. but… it’s not *really* a party, you know? not in the sense that some other events are a party. not in the sense that raindance was a party, or priceless was a party. burning man is such a mesh of types of experience and participation that it will never grant us the same sort of experience as, say, that amazing little weekend in belden.

of course, though, why would this summer have been any different? especially since there seems to be a trend in this direction of thought…? i’m not sure, but i’m going to stay with my theory for now. maybe it’s because some of the sub-communities have gotten *really* tight in the past six months. maybe it’s because burning man as an event is getting too big and can’t be as exquisite. maybe it’s just that we’re all past the point that burning man is going to completely blow our minds.

we’ve been using san francisco pretty darn well lately… it’s hard to see burning man as paradise if our hometown serves us almost as well.

this might not be a perfect analogy, but my brain keeps nudging me to talk about the tuesday night fP party to exemplify the problem. we all had an AMAZING night on tuesday night. because we had aaaaall of our friends, and we had our faaaavorite music, and we had a home to hang out in and feel safe in, and we had all set a lot of intention and put a lot of work into making sure that night was stellar.

but how often does that happen at burning man? isn’t your burn best when it’s loosely based on wandering, on discoveries, on spontaneous acts and random joys? but now that we know that there are all these planned events that we could be attending with our family, we structure our week around those and de-emphasize the random time.

we all peaked on tuesday night this year. i only had a couple hours in the rest of the week that even came *CLOSE* to how great tuesday night was.

and maybe we all also peaked a bit too much at priceless. or even, for you and me, on the renegade fashion show…

so… what to do, what to do… hmm…

less focus on dancing?

less focus on parties?

more focus on exploration?

more focus on SELF?

my most important truism about burning man is that it is first and foremost a self-centered event. but san francisco community is NOT self-centered. it’s wonderfully about lots of things outside the self. is this the dilemma?

love…

in summary:

a) long mea culpa regarding my total lack of empathy for you as a resident of the suburbs. i’m laaaame.

b) brief mea culpa regarding my failure to attend jay’s set or convince others to attend jay’s set. we all should have been there.

c) my thinkings that i’ve found in my brain due to my reading and responding to your post will be most cherished. i hope that you get good musings out of this that provide insight and guidance as we wander through this crazy scene we’ve got to play with.

$#&% character limits.

it seems like you gained a perspective you’d not been privvy to before (in yourself relative to this event) and it wasn’t exactly comfortable — far from it. which is totally normal. if you weren’t feelin it, you weren’t feelin it. it happens. it’s okay. it doesn’t mean others or you should make yourself feel guilty somehow for it.

anyway, be easy on yourself.

You’re a beautiful star; keep shining on!

I don’t think you’re capable of being a mediocre hooper.

I’m thinking of not doing music this New Years and instead camping on Santa Cruz Island.

mwah!