It has been a long night.

No one is stirring in camp. It is dark and quiet. As quiet as things get, anyway. The dance still rages on in all directions, but it sounds faint now that you’re home again.

The stars have moved a lot. The wind is chilly. Your legs ache, and your eyes are heavy. Take a slug of water. A few drops spill on the dust. Take another swallow.

Read more on the official Burning Man Blog.

He looked a look of vicious happiness

— Horse ebooks (@Horse_ebooks) March 19, 2012

Hey, don’t flinch. It’s a term of endearment. We’re hot, dusty and prickly out here. A little ribbing helps keep the spirits up, that’s all. It’s all love.

So hi, n00bs.

It’s ridiculous how recently I was you.

Anyway, welcome to Burning Man, huh? Interesting times. Bet you weren’t expecting such radical inclusion. Don’t worry. It’s not always like this. Just recently.

Read more on the official Burning Man Blog.

✈ Row 21: Old man, young woman, me
M: “That’s what I’m reading on my Kindle!”
YW: “Oh really? Where you at?
OM: “86%!”
J: “Ah, the future.”

— Jon Mitchell (@JonMwords) January 8, 2012

✈ Row 21: @alicianjenkins, now tweeting the incident.
J: “Are you doing what I just did?”
A: “Yep!
“J: “They write themselves sometimes.”

— Jon Mitchell (@JonMwords) January 8, 2012

Oh the irony. A 70+ man just leaned over, pointed to my paperback and said, “oh I’m reading that book on my kindle” #behindthetimes

— Alicia Jenkins (@aliciaNjenkins) January 8, 2012

Happy new year!

When these words hit the Internet, there was one minute left in 2011 on the East Coast of the U.S. By now, we’re past that, even if only by seconds. We’re in that new chapter of the future, and people don’t call the years “two thousand” anymore. It’s “twenty” from here on out. Quicker. Fewer characters. Faster downloads.

Yeah, it’s the future, baby.

Read more on the official Burning Man Blog.

It was the most compelling illusion I’d ever seen in my life.

The movie wasn’t any good. Boys in letter jackets, girls with ponytails, drive-thrus, giant cars. Not that I had much to say about chronicity, but their vocabularies were dated. “Golly.” “Swell.” All the while, my mouth was bursting with stars. I was in, all right.

Read more on the official Burning Man Blog.

It wasn’t until I was halfway through checking out that I realized I’d have to fit three bags of groceries into two in order to walk home, and Fred Meyer paper bags don’t have handles.

Everything went fine with one stuffed bag under each arm as I waddled across the parking lot, but my arms were starting to go by the time I reached the public sidewalk. I veered left toward home.

The bridge across I-84 stretched out long ahead of me. I noticed that the guardrail was about the right height to rest the bags on and readjust. But as I made my way over, I felt more than heard the bag under my left arm start to rip.

It began to settle in that this was going to be an adventure. I started shuffling the stuff around between bags to lighten the load on the ripped one, but it was no good. That bag was finished. So I just tried to wrap up some of the bigger, lighter things in the shreds of the bag and hold it against my body while I carried the intact bag under one arm. I made it about 20 more yards, and then the jar of salsa rolled out of the dying bag and smashed on my shoe.

I put everything down. I was halfway home. My only choice was to jam everything into the one remaining bag, but I knew even as I tried that this would be at least a failure if not an outright catastrophe. The ice cream was melting, the spinach container was crushed, I had so many cans of beans and tomato sauce that the paper would surely disintegrate under the weight.

I considered places to stash some groceries — in nasty bushes next to the street — so I could hustle home with the rest, turn back, and retrieve my cache. But that was a desperate plan, and I didn’t want to risk the food. Slowly, I began to despair.

But then a car pulled into the driveway right behind me and stopped. I heard the parking brake ratchet down. A man with curly black hair stepped out and went to open the trunk. “Do you need a bag?” he said.

“My god. Yes,” I stammered. “Thank you. Yes.”

He produced one paper bag — a Target one with handles — and one kind of grimy, blue fabric bag that I knew I could over-stuff. “Happy Halloween,” he said, and he handed them to me.

My arms throbbing, my fingers fumbling as I repacked the bags, I thanked him again as he got into his car. The phrase “First World problems,” a very hip and self-aware notion the elite like to use to congratulate themselves with a touch of self-deprecation, scrolled through my mind.

I watched the man who helped me pull out of the driveway and turn left without looking. I heard the blare of a horn and a screech of brakes. A car skidded to a stop inches from the driver’s-side door protecting my rescuer. He must have been preoccupied thinking about his deed. I watched him peel off. The driver who almost hit him stayed still, stopped in the middle of traffic, for a while. I watched him, trying to see his expression. He must have been shocked.

After he drove away, I hoisted my new bags and carried them home. As soon as I put them down on the counter, the paper bag from Target fell apart, but by then I could laugh.

I’m starting a professional-ish blog, so you can choose whether you want sanity or madness. Everything is ablaze! is for madness, obviously. Just check the punctuation marks in the names.

My new blog is called Afterthoughts. It can be found at blog.jonmitchell.me. By reading these words, you are by no means obligated to follow me over there. That’s where I’ll get all my professional ya-yas out, so the blog you’re on now can remain 100% fun.

But just in case you’re still interested, here’s an excerpt from ⌘ The first afterthought.:

This will be a venue for one- and two-way conversations about the Internet for people who work on, in, and/or around it. I will write in the first person, but this is by no means a blog about me. It’s the place where I will be most comfortable talking about the so-called tech industry (as if it’s one monolithic thing) in broad, sweeping terms.

If that sounds interesting to you, go ahead and follow that blog, too. If you prefer madness, just stay here by all means. And as always, if you follow me on Twitter @JonMwords, you’ll get to the right place eventually.

Oh shit. I’d better go to bed.

Midnight aboard the Crystal Ship. We jam like the world forgot how to dance, and we’re the only ones who remember the steps. We throw down to show them how again. Like it’s our responsibility.

It is. They don’t know how to do it like we do. They have awkward steps. They ain’t got that fractal geometry. They can’t change the colors of their crystals at will like we can.

I’m makin that spit face like somebody just puked up a dinosaur bone.

CULTURE is a careless description of what’s happening most of the time. When it isn’t intentional, it’s just a pageant of internalized values. When it is a meant gesture, it is a reflection of highest ideals, not true selves.

Out here, though, we’ve got something. It’s low (low), it’s base (bass), but it’s beautiful, and we’re all in on the joke while everyone else laughs.

Photos 1-3 by Josh Adler, theother1percent.org. Photo 4 by Mischa Steiner.

It has been a long night.

No one is stirring in camp. It is dark and quiet. As quiet as things get, anyway. The dance still rages on in all directions, but it sounds faint now that you’re home again.

The stars have moved a lot. The wind is chilly. Your legs ache, and your eyes are heavy. Take a slug of water. A few drops spill on the dust. Take another swallow.

You pan through the darkness with your pale headlamp. There’s your tent, just like you left it, rainfly flapping around unzipped. Pop a squat on the fold-up camping stool that wound up becoming yours. Your feet feel glad.

Time to untie those boots again. The laces have hardened and caked with dust, as have your fingernails, but you manage to loosen the knot. You work the laces free. Grab onto your right boot with both hands and yank, harder, prying the heel off first. Feel your toes in your stiff socks slipping out. Peel away that sock and throw it in your tent. Forget about it for a few more days until it’s time to pack up and go.

Now the other lace, the other boot, the other sock. Your grateful feet feel the wind. You turn on your stool and slip into your flip flops, which live outside your tent flap this week. Don’t touch the bare playa with your feet, they said on the first day. You’ve done your best.

Twist the grooves, flip the lid, drink more water.

Remember dinner? Remember the pasta Val had just finished making when you rolled back into camp, sunburned, elated, knowing more about acupuncture than you knew there was to know? Your bottles were empty, so you refilled them from the jug hidden in the shade under the car. You put on your chapstick, which a woman in a top hat had given you that morning. And Val handed you a steaming bowl of green linguine covered in marinara sauce she was making all day long.

Then everybody started getting dressed, trying on different colors, painting faces in the side mirrors of each other’s cars, clipping LEDs onto various parts of outfits, then moving them. Everybody refilled their water bottles again. The sun set behind the mountains, and the neighborhood erupted with whoops and hollers and cheers.

Finally, at last, everyone was ready, and you rode off down the spire toward the thumping drums and blinking lights.

The night whirled by in song and dance and shouted conversations. Your party split and rejoined and split again, everyone pulling in different directions. You jammed for an hour under a geodesic dome. You were nearly run over by a Victorian mansion on wheels, and then you jumped aboard and rode for a while. You traded jewels with a man whose accent you could barely understand. You watched hapless players lose an impossible game, and flames shot into the sky.

And after all that, you’re home again. Another day and night blown away. Slug more water. Time for bed.

Unclip your lights, remove your bracelets and other charms, stuff them in your pack. Remove the glowsticks from your shirt pockets.

Get the graywater jug, your toothbrush and toothpaste. The bristles are hardened now, but it feels good and clean. Spit into the jug, try not to smell it. Rinse with clean, cold water from your bottle, spit again. Screw the cap back on and slide the graywater back under the car. A few drops spill on the ground.

Splash a little water on your face, wipe it with a dirty shirt. Who cares? You’re really fading now. Shuffle over to the tent. Yank on the zipper, yank some more until the flap gives way.

The horizon is starting to glow. Just a little bit.

The quiet pulses in your ears. Throw down your coat. Collapse onto the air mattress. You sink toward the ground, and it folds around you. Pull the dusty, woolen blanket over you. You made it. You’re home. It’s warm again.

You survived.

All photos by the all-seeing Scott London.

Hey, don’t flinch. It’s a term of endearment. We’re hot, dusty and prickly out here. A little ribbing helps keep the spirits up, that’s all. It’s all love.

So hi, n00bs.

It’s ridiculous how recently I was you.

Anyway, welcome to Burning Man, huh? Interesting times. Bet you weren’t expecting such radical inclusion. Don’t worry. It’s not always like this. Just recently.

So, you saw the Dr. Seuss video, I assume. Pretty cool, right? Yeah, it really is like that. Here’s the thing, though. Those awesome people in the video are you!

You see? One does not simply watch Burning Man. One burns. Like a burnerly Burner, bro. You know?

No. I’m saying you are going to have a camera in your face out there. Every Burner’s face is like a camera lens focused on the most cinematic scene she’s ever seen. And you are the star of the show.

Do you know your lines? No? Good. If you come prepared with lines, you’re gonna screw them up. Someone’s going to zoom in on you and ask, “Have you seen the liger?” And he’ll have this dead-serious look on his face like, “Dude, seriously, there is an 800-pound liger loose out here somewhere and I LOST HIM.”

What are you gonna tell that guy?

He’s scared. Are you? What are you scared of? Ligers? Or not knowing what to say?

You have to improvise at Burning Man. Contingencies come up. Your tent blew onto the roof of the neighbors’ RV. You forgot clean underwear. Somebody lost his liger.

But that doesn’t mean we don’t practice. Oh no. It takes years to get ready for Burning Man. My first burn was in 2008. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. It’s a good thing I fell in with a rock solid camp of desperadoes who were nice enough to adopt me and my East Coast friends. It took us a few years, and some of us had to move Out West, but I’d say we’re part of the family now.

By the way, where are you camping?

Not sure yet? That’s okay. It’s hard to say this year, anyway. The whole city will be different. The ticket troubles this year affected lots of the big camps that are the landmarks out there. Burning Man going viral means there are a lot more n00bs than usual. That will change the tone.

So we’re going to need your help, n00bs. We need you to make this a great year. But that’s nothing new. Burning Man is made of your participation. We need you, not the other way around. We want you to wow us. Bring your bad selves to the playa and make Burning Man completely different.

Guides thrive out there, not tourists. Burners have a tendency to play tricks on tourists. We’ll give you crazy-ass directions that don’t take you anywhere near where you’re going. We’ll pretend we’re meditating and then leap up and scream bloody murder when you walk by. We’ll moon in your photographs and spike your oatmeal with absinthe.

And that might be the highlight of your week. That’s what we want. Roll with it. Be prepared to be surprised. Be open to it. You’re wonderful.

Your iPad will get playafied. Please don’t bring that!

And I’m assuming that you know about MOOP.

I’m just trying to help. I wouldn’t want you to be unprepared or have a bad time. Burning Man is the best thing I do. I want you to experience that. I just want to make sure you do. It’s not a YouTube video. Those Huffington Post people probably don’t even go.

Photos by the divinely inspired Scott London.

Happy new year!

When these words hit the Internet, there was one minute left in 2011 on the East Coast of the U.S. By now, we’re past that, even if only by seconds. We’re in that new chapter of the future, and people don’t call the years “two thousand” anymore. It’s “twenty” from here on out. Quicker. Fewer characters. Faster downloads.

Yeah, it’s the future, baby.

But I bet I’m not the only Burner who doesn’t feel like I live by the Gregorian calendar anymore. Burning Man has rearranged the year.

Standing aboard the Crystal Ship on Burn Night, we say “Happy new year” to each other. What else can one say while the Man is burning? It’s the zero point. Reset the clock. The Man burns in 365 days. The Burner’s year ends with the summer, when the days are still long. January 1 is like its shadow.

It’s 2012 now. The Man burns in 244 days.

We count down each year to that summer night, but we name our Burns by the default calendar. Burning Man 2012. I’m sure we’ve all been thinking about this one for a while.

Burners are the kind of people who pay attention to Mayan prophecies, even if only to make fun of them. We like to think about time and history. We also build temples to honor the galaxy. And some of us are into aliens and what-have-you. But it’s not just us. This 2012 thing has permeated the culture. There’s no way to avoid it. This year is pivotal, even if only in our minds.

So happy new year, you dusty bunch. New Year’s Eve is the biggest party in the world. Burning Man can’t hold a candle to it. I don’t even think the comparison is a stretch. New Year’s parties, whether it’s the end of summer or the middle of winter, have their reputation for debauchery. But that’s not all there is to the Burn or the Ball Drop. On both nights, there are these moments of reverie, these still moments when we catch ourselves, and we stand by the edge of the racing river of time and fall silent.

The solstice is past. We get a little more light every day from here until summertime. Welcome to Twenty-Twelve, my neighbors. The 27th Year of Burning Man. What do you make of it?

All photos by the incomparable Scott London

It was the most compelling illusion I’d ever seen in my life.

The movie wasn’t any good. Boys in letter jackets, girls with ponytails, drive-thrus, giant cars. Not that I had much to say about chronicity, but their vocabularies were dated. “Golly.” “Swell.” All the while, my mouth was bursting with stars. I was in, all right.

Stars were bursting in my mouth as I scanned the warmth of the theater, the dim, throbbing lamps, the flickering projector. People were kicked back in their seats. Most were still wearing dusty fur coats, even though it was pretty warm in there. A red convertible roared around the corner and skidded to a stop in the middle of the screen.

And the stars kept bursting as I chewed on their flavor, crinkling the paper in my hands. I’m eating star bursts… in a late-night movie theater… in the middle of a dried-up, prehistoric lakebed on a freezing cold night… and I began to snap out of it. The genius of it all began to overwhelm me. Before long, it took every fiber of my being not to shout the truth out to everyone in the theater, but I knew they weren’t in the mood for truth.

I turned to my brother, my lover, and my friend. They looked tired of candy. “Let’s get the hell out of here.” They all nodded, and we gathered our gear and moved out.

We squeezed through the door. It was cold, dark and flat, and a weird city sat like a heap of jewels on the horizon. All of it. All of it except The Man, which had burned that night. How many hours ago, who could say? But we were very, very far from where all that happened. The Temple of Transition loomed in the distance like something that grew out of a tree stump.

We turned around and beheld the Black Rock Bijou. Another jewel. It looked so much smaller on the outside, but every detail was perfect. There was a name on the marquee, but it didn’t register. Around the right side, there was a brick wall, only it wasn’t, with an iconic brand written in white script across it, only it wasn’t. She leaned against the picture-perfect garbage can, under the believable streetlamp, and smoked a cigarette.

I walked around to the back. I would do that, deliberately crash the illusion for myself. I saw the plywood. I saw the cable snaking out ten yards away into the desert where a buried generator was growling softly.

I looked back to my friends, and they were talking to two people under the streetlamp, unbearably sexy people with airs of confidence. He had short, blond hair and astronaut pajamas, and she was darker-skinned than he and dressed like she could use someone to keep her warm. I recognized them; they had given us our candy when we got here. They made this!, I realized. These are the artists!.

We stood together talking about the illusion. We tried to thank them. The only thanks they wanted was for us to take home the thousands of stale skittles and starbursts they had left on the last day, but we declined. Our teeth were sticky enough.

Something skittered past our feet. A mouse! A fucking mouse on the playa! We were beside ourselves.

“We should name him!” the astronaut declared.

“Larry,” I said without hesitation.

“Larry the mouse!!” they all shouted in unison.

“Larry Harvey the mouse,” I corrected them.

“I wonder what he’s been eating all week.” the other artist marvelled.

“Starbursts,” my brother said.

Every burn I’ve been to has been bigger than the last. The illusion has been more imposing each time. I have more stories about illusions from that night, but I need to take an intermission. When you’re in the scene, it feels real, but you can only retell it frame by frame.

Burning Man is a big production. It requires logistics and vendors and medics and tickets. It takes a year-round crew to maintain the illusion. But it works. It keeps working every time.

Theater photos from the Black Rock Bijou.

Temple and burn photos thanks to the unbelievable Scott London.

Harveywood photo by my friend Mischa Steiner.

I think we can all sense it. It’s going to be a weird year.

Remember the day tickets went on sale? That was crazy. Servers went down in flames, people got bumped out of line, chaos ensued. That was in January. It’s August now. You know what else happens in August?

Yeah.

Tickets sold out for the first time. That’s wild. The streets of Black Rock City go all the way out to freaking L. They added :15 streets and :45 streets. We’re gonna need another airport, y’all.

Who got all these tickets, and who didn’t? Is it going to be more new folks? Mostly veterans? Or just the usual mix? We don’t really know how it’ll break down, but it sure is tempting to wonder. A weird year. Lots of uncertainty.

I’m not saying it doesn’t feel this way every year. Burning Man is always weird. But we don’t always use the proper reverence when we use the word “weird.” It has been diluted over time, and that’s a shame, because it’s a word Burners really need.

Wyrd used to be heavier, more profound. It used to be the exclusive purview of witches and warlocks; good folk were supposed to avoid it.

I’m not even doing it justice. Think about time way back before the universe was created. “Tohu va’vohu,” the Bible calls it: formless and void. That’s wyrd.

It’s going to be a wyrd year.

Tohu va’vohu. Formless and void. Like a prehistoric, dried-up lakebed, the flattest place in the world.

And, for good measure, it’s the middle of the night. Just the barest sliver of moon is cradled in the craggy mountains. Stars all over the place. Dead silence. Dust, rocks, nothing else.

Wyrd, man.

Now, start adding people one car at a time. Cars and people, some tents, some rickety lean-tos, stacking up like crooked little teeth, like defective Legos. Getting bigger now, getting closer together. More fires, more lanterns, more LEDs.

Now start hearing. Start at the lowest, thumping frequencies, lower than your heartbeat. Feel it in your feet. Feel it in your gut. Add in the mid-range now, some melody, some harmony, and now start turning up the gain.

We’re here. Welcome home.

The playa is just a wyrd place. Anything that happens there feels more weighty and portentous, even if it would feel mundane in the default world. Think about trudging to the port-a-potties in the morning, the kinds of macabre, burlesque, perverted little scenes you pass right by in the light of a new day like it’s just your neighbor mowing the lawn. Or sitting in traffic on Exodus day, crawling along that Mosaic commute and thinking about the godforsaken mountains of laundry you have to do.

Burning Man is our annual encounter with the Very Most Weird. Even not getting to go at all is profound.

This year will be very weird, indeed, in the sense of “weird” that means “novel, peculiar, unprecedented.” The very theme commands it: We’re undergoing a transformation. Division, exclusion, scarcity, these are new and un-Burner-like words, and we have been using them weightily for the first time to describe our culture.

It’s been said on these very pages that Burner culture might need to be dispersed across the land to accommodate this new reality. That would be weird. But it would be really wyrd to think about thousands of Burners across thousands of miles sending up hundreds of remote burns into the same sky on the same night. Good? Bad? Something to think about.

We’ve also seen more sinister reactions to this weird year. People selling tickets at offensive prices, people incensed that celebrity DJs weren’t getting special treatment in the ticket shortage, people believing obviously satirical blog posts and freaking out…

Weird.

But we have our principles. We have to be self-reliant in our response to these wyrd circumstances. We’ve managed our weirdness for 25 years. We can do it again.

See you in a couple weeks, I hope.

And after that, we can start thinking about an even wyrder year:

2012.

That moment when you’re leaning against the railing of some art car, dazed, head lolling to the music. It’s chilly and late, and you wonder if your night is over. Then again, it isn’t up to you. It’s up to the driver of this mutant vehicle, and she doesn’t seem to be very interested in the 3 o’clock plaza, your corridor back to camp. Your fellow Burner pokes you in the ribs.

“Wake up!” he insists.

“I’m awake,” you concede.

***

The moment a passer-by smiles at you from underneath a carved, wooden wild boar mask with broken, black tusks.

***

The moment the man stands up in the sweat hut, as naked as everyone, and starts singing “Hey Jude.” You wonder what his job is in the default world.

***

The moment you slice your knuckle with the dull multi-tool trying to punch the last hole in the last tennis ball to cover the last stake, setting up your tent on the first day.

You would have been done, ready, finally at home, but now you’re washing blood and playa off your hand, opening last year’s dusty first aid kit, swabbing with alcohol, wrapping a bandage, and laughing at yourself.

***

When I remember Burning Man, the memories never arise in any particular order. Some smell or photograph or garment on the closet floor will send me backward through time to some precise moment in the middle of a week in the desert.

Those memories don’t seem to lose their vividness. They all feel like little stories, not just dry recollections of facts or events. They’re different from default-world memories.

What if we could see our everyday experiences as little stories like that?

***

The moment you recoil in horror, rounding a corner in some dark camp in the middle of nowhere, following macabre, crackling jazz, and seared into your memory forever are the unending gyrations of two disgusting, freak-show shadow puppets copulating like pornographic devils, driven by some infernal piston.

Only later that night does it become the funniest thing that has ever happened to you.

***

That moment when you’re just walking the Esplanade at night, minding your own business, when the whole horizon lights up and a fireball unfurls into the sky, and you realize that an artful structure that was a playground to you only yesterday has just been immolated by its creators.

***

The moment you and the person with whom you’ve been sitting for hours, hiding out from a nasty dust storm, realize you don’t know each other’s names.

***

That moment, late in the afternoon, when the tires hit paved road on 447 after idling in the dust all day long, and you realize you’re leaving, it’s over, and you’re going back.

And an hour later, you lock eyes with the gas station attendant and wonder what in the world he sees.

***

What moments do you remember best?

I have a pen pal.

We’ve never met. Not in person, anyway. Well, not in the flesh, I mean. I find it hard to define what constitutes “in person” lately. It seems like a good bit of my person is having an out-of-body experience in a virtual world. And that’s where I met my pen pal.

We’re both Burners, of course. That’s how it started.

We met by the Internet’s water cooler, reading the same Burning Man posts and feeling giddy about summer coming on. Soon, we were sharing photos, little windows into each other’s days just 600 pixels wide.

That’s actually a pretty wide window into someone’s life, if it’s open and the blinds are drawn. Human beings are pretty vast, but we’re also vivid. A lot of light gets through even a tiny aperture, and our sensors are pretty sensitive.

Burners are not special in this way, but maybe we just tend to focus on the same scenes. It’s a startlingly immediate connection, a confluence of perspective, meeting a fellow Burner in the wild.

Not that I met my pen pal in the “default world” at all. I’m not ready to extend that burnerism to the Internet. That’s a little too @GreatDismal a vision of the future.

But wherever we are, screen names and avatars, we’re still living the principles, making normal moments into works of art and giving them to each other. Just because we can’t feel them doesn’t mean they aren’t there, and vice versa.

We can’t be all virtual, though. Our bodies have mass, and the enormous gravity of our eventual meeting at Burning Man exerts a powerful force.

“Will you be my pen pal?”, I asked in a direct message.

She said her heart skipped a beat when she read that. Strong stuff.

And now we make letters and send them to each other. It takes five days for them to traverse the west coast of the United States from south to north, and five again from north to south.

It’s incredible how, in 2011, this still-modern marvel feels like such a long wait.

Of course, when we met, all our communication was instantaneous. That’s much more like being “in person” than waiting a week for the answer to a question.

But then again, when we “DM,” — the deeply named “direct message” — we’re just touching the same old phone we touch with everyone else. The letters we touch are private. The only hands that hold them are the four that belong to us.

When we see each other’s face, though, it is the same face each time, the same hair, the same light, the same expression. And we’ve never heard each other’s voice. We could, but the bandwidth would be much narrower than in person. The tones would be all wrong.

None of it is meeting “in person,” now that I think about it. “In person” means “with the whole person at once.” There are still pieces missing here.

But this raises a challenging question: How often are we in person with anyone? It follows that, if our person is incomplete online, then parts of us can be on and off simultaneously. So, if we’re physically present with someone, but we’re thumbing our phones, are we in person?

What if we’re looking at the person, but the phone is in our hand? It’s just a matter of attention, isn’t it? So, if our phone is in our pocket, and we’re talking with someone, but we’re thinking about our pen pal, only a direct message away, what about then? Are we even in person with ourselves?

Good thing there’s Burning Man, huh? We’ve got a principle of Immediacy for that. I mean, some people bring their phones out there, but it’s awfully dusty.

I’m guessing that when I meet my pen pal, let’s say, at the Man base on Monday at sunset, there will be very little doubt.

How do you know when you’re grown up?

The question may strike you as trivial, but let it sit for a moment. There are clear answers to it in some parts of the world, but the part from which I hail is quite vague on this point.

All the rights of passage in my life so far have been either dully underwhelming (my Bar Mitzvah? my driver’s license? my 18th birthday?), or they’ve been sudden, shocking, and rushed (graduation, first apartment, income taxes). None left me with a sense of having transformed in any believable way. When I have felt initiated, it has typically been into something unwelcome. (Oh, boy. Now I’m a taxpayer.)

America doesn’t really have formal initiations. We have prescribed achievements, hoops to jump through, but they don’t come with any kind of clarity or assurance. Our institutions offer us degrees or licenses or certificates, but it’s still up to us to figure out for ourselves what good they are.

When I think of my ideal, romanticized rite of passage I wish I’d had, I wish for two things: some kind of shared experience, in which my community recognizes the occasion together, and some set of values or principles that become mine to live by afterward, so I know what to do.

Whether I imagine some solitary wilderness trial, or a purging, cleansing ritual, or some kind of quest, or some transmission from the elders, whatever exotic, nostalgic rite comes to mind, I want this communal recognition that something BIG has happened, and I want a way to understand what it means.

You don’t get that when you get your driver’s license.

But when you’ve been in traffic since sundown, and you’ve turned off the paved roads, and you first hear that crazy milieu of intertwining beats bumping from different cars, and then the horizon gets lighter, and you’re moving again, and the dust is kicking up, and then you’re there, and they check your tickets, and you jump out of your car with the engine still running and you grab that hammer and wail on that bell and shout “I’m hoooome!!!”…

Well, at the very least, you know you’re on to something.

We may be past the point where it’s no longer cool to talk about Burning Man as a tribal gathering or a religious pilgrimage or some kind of New Spirituality. Cool or uncool, I still do it, but I won’t bore you with that here.

I just want to consider this year’s truly awesome theme, Rites of Passage, and see Burning Man through the lens of something momentous.

Burner life has a profound time cycle. We count down the days until tickets go on sale, until we finish work or school or keeping up the house, until we leave, until the gates open, until the man burns. We don’t just go to Burning Man; we pass through it.

We all know what this means to us, how much it costs in money, time, and effort. But we know why we go through it. We all have our own reasons. Some of them are big and grand, some of them are private, just for us. But we also have these shared principles that give us a common purpose.

These are the things we bring back to the default world, in our hibernation from Burning Man, until we’re ready to pass through it all over again.

A rite of passage is an act of growing up, and I don’t just mean maturing; I mean getting older. Time, at least from our ordinary, human perspective, only moves forward.

As rites of passage go, our week at Burning Man is pretty long. That’s a lot of time to reflect, a lot of days to fill with activity. Where should we go next? What should we do? For a ritual, this Burning Man thing seems kind of unstructured. Now that we’re here, are we just supposed to wander around?

Of course, the ritual does have a structure; it’s just more complex than the structure of, say, a Caribbean cruise, where some guy in shorts and a white sun visor tells you what to do all day.

There’s the burning of the Man on Saturday night, of course, and the Temple the next night. But those are all the way at the end.

What about this morning, now that we’ve finally got the tennis balls on our tent stakes and the pink fur zip-tied to our handlebars?

I guess we’ll look in the What-Where-When Guide…

One of my favorite rituals at Burning Man is answering the question “What time is it?” Some people like to be Dada when asked that; at my camp, it is customary to answer “Twenty minutes!” But my preferred answer is the obvious one: “Day,” “sunset,” “night,” “sunrise.” A day at Burning Man has these four distinct chapters, and you really don’t have to ask which one you’re in.

Of course, there is that one art car with the giant, red digital clock on the front, but I never can tell whether it’s telling the truth or not.

The point is, there’s always something coming up; just let time run its course. If the sun’s about to set, the Lamplighters are about to do their solemn duty. If the sun’s about to rise, the DJs at Skinny Kitty are about to spin a set that will make you dance while you cry.

Don’t worry; your time at Burning Man will be occupied.

Each day has a cycle, and the week unfolds in seven cycles. We can grow up a great deal in that span of time.

It can get tiring. We have taken to giving the days of the week themes of their own (Tutu Tuesday!!!! *burp*) in an effort to keep it spontaneous, but a lot of Burning Man is repetition:

Waking up from the cold/heat, slipping on flip-flops, trudging to the porta-potty, brushing our teeth at the greywater trough, banging the dust out of our shoes, putting on makeup, rummaging for the day’s costume…

Remembering to drink water, refilling our bottle, dehydrating and rehydrating all over again…

Watching the sun set, strapping on headlamps, switching on blinky lights, walking out onto the Esplanade and gasping at the spectacle.

These are what chores are like at Burning Man.

Well, almost. There’s also sweeping out the camp, baby-wiping the knives and forks, swapping out the compost, filling up the generator, nailing down the wall of the structure that just blew over, making the tea, bandaging the cut, washing our feet, washing her feet, and let’s not even get started with the art car.

There are so many tasks! So many little details to occupy our time, if you really think about it. I thought we went to Burning Man to party and have fun, but this is starting to sound an awful lot like real life…

Well, yeah. Exactly. We aren’t just going to a party; we are transforming a whole week of our life. We’ve got inner-child things to do, but we’ve also got big-kid things to do. We might even have to be grown-ups. What about our relationships? What about our jobs? Our money? Oh god, what about the environment! These things don’t go away at Burning Man!

No, indeed. Time does not stop there. If anything, the conditions require more of us than the default world: More self-reliance. More self-awareness. More self-sufficiency. Burning Man can grow you right up.

This year, instead of just serenely presiding over us, the Man is taking a step. This is a first. We can think of Burning Man as a rite of passage every year, but why be so explicit this time?

Well, why do we observe any rite of passage precisely when we do? Maybe it’s just time.

Time only moves forward. We’re growing up as individuals, and we’re growing up as an event. It’s inevitable. Change is afoot in the organization. The proverbial torch is being passed, although, in our case, it’s a giant, walking effigy. A new generation of participants is on the ascent. We’ve got big shoes to fill, but, eventually, we have to will ourselves to step up and lead.

Certainly, Burning Man is a society that deviates from The Norm. But it would be silly to suggest that Burning Man is a place without norms. One of the truest conceits of Burner culture, in my opinion, is the distinction between “home,” the playa, and the “default world,” which gives our annual gathering a sense of deviation, but also one of return. We leave behind our default values and behaviors, and we return to something more natural and fundamental to us.

But clearly, “home” is not an arrangement without order, tradition, or hierarchy. I doubt humans can help themselves. We may not like to think of Burning Man as a stratified place, but it is.

Nothing wrong with that, though. Not inherently. The fact is, some people have been burning for 20 years, some for 10, some one, some none. Those are remarkable differences in experience of something so extreme and dynamic as Burning Man. It’s only natural that those who’ve been before will set the tone for those still bewildered by the blinky lights.

The vets have built Black Rock City before.

They know what will stand up to the winds and what will blow away. Their art can refer to ideas that have bandied about the playa before, continuing the long conversation.

They know how to chill their beer, heat their shower, and evaporate their gray water.

In fact, these skills are second-nature to them now, so they can concentrate on participation and immediacy.

For a newcomer, logistics can be the whole festival, if one isn’t well-prepared.

That’s why joining an established camp is such a good idea. Speaking from what little experience I have, there’s no better way to be brought quickly up to speed than by camping with a seasoned outfit willing to accommodate newcomers. It may take a couple years to get your sea legs, but the everyday pulse of being part of a theme camp naturally encourages growth, if you fall in with the right people.

You might start by unloading dusty couches off a truck or driving stakes all day, but there’s no better motivation to jump in with both feet than watching those bad-ass leaders directing traffic at your camp. Your awe will urge you to participate. Sooner or later, after you pour enough drinks or sweep out enough dust, people will start remembering your name, or they’ll make you up a new one that will stick, and then you’ll start to feel at home.