MISCmedia for 9/1/00
Unburnt

I JUST MIGHT BE the only "personal webzine" writer who's never been to Burning Man and has never really wanted to go there. There's something about the annual combo of a hippie "country fair" and a rave party on steroids that scares me.

It's not the rampant nudity, for sure. As I've written before, I can go naked in public. (Even in BM's 110-degree Nevada desert site, so long as I'm supplied with a gallon of SPF-1,000 sunburn lotion.)

It's not the official "All Participants, No Spectators" artistic policy. I've plenty of wacky talents I could offer to the BM public. (Heck, I could even sing selections from The Mikado dressed in a Hot Dog on a Stick uniform while perched on a forklift, if the price was right.)

It's not the line I hear all year round, every year, from BM fans that whichever is the current year will surely be the last edition of BM worth going to; that it just keeps getting too popular (particularly among non-insiders) for its own good. I've never been one for that elitist pretension that says I have to love "The People" but hate "The Sap Masses."

And it's not even necessarily the types of folk I know will be there. I've often successfully dealt, in smaller gatherings with 55-year-old hippie males out to ogle young feminine flesh; with teens who continually pronounce the exclamatory phrase "right on" in the form of a question; with self-proclaimed "native American shamen" who may never have even met a real native American; and with dot-com ultra-capitalist hustler boys who think blowing up fireworks and donning body paint makes them "rebels."

It's one thing, a simple and primal thing:

I'm deathly afraid of finding myself the only meat-eating non-pot-smoker for 200 miles, stuck for up to eight days with RV-mates intolerant of my nonconformity to their nonconformity, pleading with the drinking-water-truck drivers for a lift back to Reno (a place I have been to, and would love to go to again).

I know what some of my former counselors and Jungian therapists might say: that I must learn to overcome my fears by directly confronting them.

But there oughta be a way to confront these fears that would still allow me to sleep indoors, far from the racket of any all-night drum circles.

MONDAY: Fun with the BBC America cable channel.

ELSEWHERE:

• Words, definitions, and synonyms are hypertexted to mind-boggling depths at The Exploding Dictionary....

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