I’m sitting here at home watching the live feed and listening to BMIR. Wow! I am Double Bummed to be missing the Burn this year. The biggest reason? For the first time in Burning Man history there will be a Double Acid Monday celebration. Twice in one Burn you get to celebrate this holiest of holidays.
If you are doubtful about wanting to celebrate tomorrow here are 4 reasons why you should:
1) Food conservation – who wants to eat on a belly full of 200 mics of LSD? Nobody. Make the food you have last and drop acid!
2) It will make the mud full of color and promise.
3) Lose track of time and space. With a little bit of Acid Monday Magic Thursday and the afterparty at the GSR in Reno will be here before you know it.
4) The Man and the Temple Burn Monday night! Double Burn!
From all indications Acid Monday at Burning Man is going to be a wet one with huge reserves of dusty mud, sinkholes and artboats. In honor of the more nautical nature of Burning Man 2023 and specifically for the first full day of the event you may be attending known formally as Acid Monday I present to you ‘Acid on Sea’ from 2006.
Someone gifted Hurricane Hilary a ticket to Burning Man2023
Ahoy Burners!
Sometimes the Playa Conditions Report writes itself – I had a hurricane in mind when imagining the conditions that will greet Burners on the playa this year. Does this make me Playa Nostradamus? Probably. But as you’ll see, I wasn’t the only one who predicted a hurricane in the forecast for TTITD 2023.
The aftermath of the hurricane will be one huge salt lake, giving Burning Man a nautical aspect for the first time in many decades. Are you prepared?
My advice: Leave your bikes at home
Have you ever rode a bike through a desert in a hurricane? Me neither. Because you can’t. The wind and rain will blow you and your useless bike over into a thick morass of playa mud from which you may never escape like a volcanic explosion at Pompeii.
The Burn of 79 CE…it was a good Burn!
In celebration of the newly arrived oceanic nature of the Burn I will be uploading a nautical based acid house mix shortly for Acid Monday – stay tuned for the link.
Nautical facts about Burning Man you probably didn’t know:
Old Grimey, the amazing Art Car for NectarVillage was Dreamed up, Designed and Built by the totally awesome Chris Crazy Fart Box. In its original form before it came to the playa it was a small boat Chris salvaged from the SF Harbor and brought to his bonded warehouse near the docks. That’s why the driver of Grimey always has to wear a Captain’s hat at all times. The hardest part of building Grimey was putting wheels on it and a car engine. But it is still seaworthy and in past Burns, right at dawn, it demonstrated its magical ability to float above the playa. If things get really out of hand with the Burner Hurricane of 2023, Old Grimey will be a great art boat to be aboard.
Something or rather someone at camp should also give you hope: Vice-Admiral Soup. Soup attended the Naval Academy in Annapolis and is a master sailor who eats hurricanes for breakfast. He practically lives on the water in the salty port town of Sausalito. Have you been to the grotto in his house? It’s amazing. He sails everyday to SF for his job in the HMS Salty Soup. It’s little wonder he is in charge of navigating the event this year for the BMORG Corp.
It’s also noteworthy that the Temple this year is based on the myth of Noah’s Ark and if you look on a map of the playa it has no fixed address this year.
Like any good Burner, I have no idea what the theme of this years Burn is and with the exception of 2007 can’t remember any theme but when I saw a mock up of the Man this year it certainly raised an eyebrow or three with me:
The Man 2023 [pictured above] currently being built on the playa by Fire Boy and a dedicated crew of metalsmiths and undersea welders.
Finally I think most veteran Burners will agree with me on the following: Of my top 10 experiences ever at the Burn, I was wet for seven of them. So enjoy the hurricane Burners and don’t forget your flippers.
Please read the following history of Bumblepuss – we are coming up on two decades of Bumblepuss and it’s important that those of you who have only been camping with Bumble since 2015 (or even later!) know and appreciate our storied history.
A quick history of the origins of Bumblepuss and couches…and I swear this is actually, mainly true according to my Burner diary/journal I keep from each Burn.
Close your eyes dear Bumble and remember back to the simpler times of 2007. Life was good. The iphone was not yet upon us. ‘Umbrella’ by Rihanna was making us feel gratitude for just being alive. There were a mere 47,097 Burners. The French were on strike. I drank beer and had a myspace account.
The Burn of 2007 was a tumultuous affair called ‘Green Man’ because it made most people sick. The Man was Burned twice, first on Monday by ‘the last true Burner’, Paul Addis, who would go on to perform his last piece of art on San Francisco’s troubled public transport system.
Last True Burner
Soup and myself might have had something called an Art Car crash caused by a technical malfunction that sent someone to the hospital in Reno. As far as we know he lived but he could be dead now, it was a long time ago. The art car in question, Sage-N-ator (2007) nee Satreheddron (2003, 2005) was designed and built originally by a pyromaniac engineer named Docktor Random who designed fire suppression sprinkler systems for a living (I swear to God this is true). At a small decompression party in San Diego he once tried to set a beach on fire using old christmas trees and homemade explosives. The beach won but by the narrowest of margins. He was probably not a great engineer to rig an RV to be driven from the roofdeck. Safety third blah blah blah…
Our humble narrator found himself washing dishes during the 2007 Temple Burn in the notorious indentured labor camp known ironically as HBGB “Healers” (These people should be avoided). Soup was completely fried as well by the HBGB experience. Something needed to change or that was going to be the last Burn. On a 15 hour ride to the much missed official decompression party at the Grand Sierra Soup and I decided to do something different. We thought – ‘hey lets have less work and stress for ourselves by creating a Village and the Camp we’ll create and live in within the Village will do practically nothing but seem really important and cool.’ 2008 rolls around and after a shabbat service in Berkeley where our idea was blessed by a rabbi and given the name ‘Bumblepuss’ we started on our path to create the Camp and Village you know and love.
True to our original sleep-deprived vision on HWY 447 in 2007 all these many years later Bumblers still do very little besides avoid the hot midday sun, slap goats, eat food, tell jokes and consume drugs. This is a good thing.
The blessed free couches of 2008
One of the biggest pre-playa tasks we had to do for a new Camp and Village was to plan and obtain all the infrastructure needed. Much of the original infrastructure from the “condos” to the kitchen and lounge pole structure and even much of the kitchen equipment, chairs and storage was purchased, donated or stolen in 2008. The fact that it still exists and provides you Bumblers with shade and bacon to this very day is a dusty miracle.
Bumble dues that first year of 2008 were only $50 per person (inflation eh?!) and our diet consisted mainly of bacon, hummus and Costco burgers. Thankfully the angry Burner Gods were looking down upon us and shook their fists and blessed us with the Great Financial Crisis for without the GFC Nectarvillage would not have been possible.
We obtained a temporary storage unit in Oakland and slowly built up our inventory of infrastructure over the summer leading up to the Burn. But one of the biggest challenges was how do you get a bunch of couches for lazy Bumblers that are comfy and of a high quality but on a very very limited budget?
During the GFC lots of bad people were being punished by losing their homes.
They were driven into exodus in a hurry, often leaving their furniture outside their undeserved, overleveraged and now empty homes. Noticies were put on craigslist. For several weekends Soup and I borrowed the huge-ass truck of a Burner named Edge and we scrambled around to all the fashionable communities in the Bay Area where furniture was being recklessly abandoned. Looking back on my list we visited Fruitvale, Hayward, Fremont, South San Francisco, north San Jose, Richmond (kitchen chairs) and even East Palo Alto. We had hundreds of comfy, high quality almost new, ‘lets refi our house for the 7th time and buy all new ticky tacky furniture, what could go wrong’ couches from the bad people to pick from and we chose the best for you and for the thousands of Bumblers and visitors who came before you. We also picked up our first two refrigerators for the camp in this manner, one of which was abandoned in 2012 on the side of a highway in Fallon, NV.
Yes, that couch is headed to Burning Man
Many things have been done on those couches including but not limited to sleeping, just lying about, not doing much of anything and vaping/hippie crack stuff and they have served with distinction. If those OG couches are being replaced they should be Burned at a ceremony on open playa, perhaps Wednesday at 2pm slightly past and to the left of the Man. No need to tell ARTery, just let folks who may be concerned know that Soup grumbled something about it was ‘probably ok’ when he was half asleep, sneezing in a robe and cowboy hat.
Lounge on the couches well Bumblers, you deserve it.
Almost a Bumbler
As a quick aside…in recognition of the contribution of the Great Financial Crisis to the successful creation of Bumblepuss and NectarVillage we invited long time Burner and hedge fund manager Michael Burry to camp with us in 2009. He refused. But according to my daily Burner journal ‘Fire Mike’ did come by and sat with us on the couches and we ate some potato chips, he played drums and Adam introduced us to DMT vaping and we laughed a bit and wigged out a bit and then he went on his way and we continued to lounge there until nightfall came. We ate a little bit of hummus and Costco hamburgers, did some drugs, dressed up pretty, put on some lights so as not to be darkwads and headed out on our bikes singing ‘BUMBLE!’ every so often but we still lost each other after 20 minutes anyways.
Some people in the universe have claimed the Burn of 2022 was, like, really really hard. I came away inspired. Inspired to spread the gospel of Burning Man into corners not traditionally associated with #BurnerLife
Mixed martial arts and boxing fans are an underrepresented community at the Burn. Less so with each passing year despite the best efforts of Death Guild. There are tens of millions fight fans out there and they could really freshen the Burn up a bit. Imagine hundreds of Dagestani fighters wrestling bears on the Esplanade. I bet you haven’t seen that before on the playa.
Yes, the Burn was a bit dusty and at times the winds were challenging but there are so many communities that haven’t yet experienced it. Maybe for you it isn’t mixed martial arts fans but the Wisconsin Lions Club or your local Pipefitters Union. Look around you, unless you live in certain parts of the Bay Area almost every community you see hasn’t experienced the Burn. Maybe they should.
Not posted until after the Burn so sadly this was no help to you, apologies – ED
“It was desert when we got here, officer.” Larry Harvey, 1991
Who, How, Which Guide 1991
The Burn of 1990
In the absence of humans for the past two years the Black Rock desert has returned to full bloom. Once upon a time Larry Harvey, Chicken John and other intrepid early Burners left San Francisco to colonize the Greater Gerlach Metropolitan Area (GGMA). Back in the day it wasn’t a desert but a perfectly preserved Pleistocene era forest complete with Woolly Mammoths. Beginning their trip in Spring they arrived in Gerlach and started chopping down the forest and hunting the last remaining Mammoths to extinction. They used the wood to build the first Man and other art structures, the furs and fat from the Mammoth to make warm furry coats decorated with trinkets and to make torches to light the way at night. Some of these traditions still survive. But after several Burns the forest did not. Desertification took hold and the last tree was chopped down in 2007 at Green Man to make the spine of the twice Burned man.
But now, sadly, its all grown back like a Talking Heads song:
Once there were port-a-potties Now it’s a peaceful oasis You’ve got it, you’ve got it
This was a Porn and Eggs Now it’s all covered with daisies You got it, you got it
I miss the Jiffy Lubes, Robot Hearts, and Barbie Death Camp
You got it, you got it
Bring an axe. While the Early Arrival crew has been busy chopping down the forest to bring back the desert we all love (thank you!), it won’t be totally cleared. Our location, 8 and E will be about 20% White Spruce. We’ll cut it down and make cricket bats to gift to our fellow Burners. There’s nothing quite like the Burner Principles of Immediacy and Radical Self Reliance than clear-cutting the area you will live on with a great team of Bumblers.
Most wildlife will have fled but some will remain. Giant Beaver, Musk Ox and Reindeer are sure to be spotted. Firearms are prohibited so they will need to be hunted with bow and arrow. Bikes will be practically useless with all the tree stumps, rotting animal carcasses and other natural detritus creating a bumpy ride – free up some space and leave the bikes at home. Bring a jacket. The new ice age is windy, overcast and chilly – it will take several Burns to return the Black Rock to its full platonic version of a desert.
I look forward to working with you Burners to bring back the natural environs of Black Rock Desert that our Creators and Founders envisioned and made happen with LSD, sweat and chainsaws.
Soon an announcement will be made in regards to tickets for this years’ 2022 thing in the desert, AKA Burning Man. You should be excited.
Bumblepuss and Nectarvillage intend to participate to our fullest and to make it our best year since the Burn of 2003, which will never be topped.
Some of you may have heard of Covid-19. Still fewer Bumbleers have concerns about Covid-19 and related misanthropic pandemic-ery. I am here to address those Bumblers with such knowledge and related concerns.
Rest assured Bumblers. Bumble Elders have met and we have a plan.
In order that there be not only equality but equity at Bumblepuss and NectarVillage it has been decided that all Bumblers and future Bumblers planning to camp with us in 2022 need to show proof of being infected with Covid-19 at some time within the last five years.
Priority will be given to certain Covid-19 variants. Those who received the OG ChinaFlu variant in 2019 through November 2020 will be admitted automatically. Those who were gifted the Delta Tau Delta variant will have points deducted from their application but are likely to get in. Bumblers blessed with the Alpha and Omega variants may be asked to camp elsewhere. Those special Bumblers who are granted the Omnikrom virus or any of the variants from January 19th, 2022 forward with the express purpose of camping with Bumblepuss will be made Camp Leads as reward for your special dedication and initiative to all things Bumble.
If you have any questions, just realize all decisions by Bumble Elders are final.
Note: This post is part of a collection of articles, speculative essays, links to podcasts and videos and other media around the subject:
Did Covid-19 Escape from a Lab?
It’s a hobby of mine to watch this subject and to watch the culture and meta-space around the subject. Posts here are not an endorsement beyond finding them interesting. Almost certainly some of these articles and ideas will be false or proven false over time.
David A. Relman, an American microbiologist at the Stanford University School of Medicine, published an opinion piece in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) in which he called for a complete, international, and transparent investigation into the possibility that SARS-CoV-2, the virus which causes COVID-19, leaked out of a lab in China.
CONSUMPTION BLOG 