Bumblers,

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. 

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.   

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.

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.

Bumble!,

Marc Bumble