Monday, September 26, 2011

Shadrach Close

PO Box 8573

Reno, NV 89507

Tel 775-225-4379

Dear Alex,

I hope this letter finds you well. I'm writing to tell you about Burning Man. It was quite a pity you missed out, it was a great burn and your brother was a fucking rockstar. I had a shit ton of people staying at my house the night before Nolan arrived. I had a little list that I had posted on the facebook couchsurfingcamp group, but even though I had it tagged with everyone who was coming, when they were arriving/departing, everyone who was supposed to show up on Sunday came on Saturday. My house was so full that no matter where you were, you were goosestepping over people to get to the rest room. It was an awesome party though and it was really cool to get to know people who were going to be in our camp for the week. I was up early that morning, and I was washing my car when your brother called me from the Greyhound station. I wanted to wash all the sap off of the roof so that when I strapped the mattress from the couchbed, it wouldn't be all sticky...but it's still kind of pointless to wash your car before Burning Man. I was constantly worrying beforehand about Nolan because he was so non-communicative. I told him to read the guide, book the flight, think of questions to ask me, and had very little response. It was a tight squeeze of two hours from when his plane landed till his bus departed in San Francisco (which btw, I wanted to ask you about. I had told YOU that IF you were going to arrive in SF a few days in advance AND if it were SIGNIFICANTLY cheaper, fly into SFO and I would come get you and we could hang out in The City. I was really peeved that the flight was scheduled to arrive late Sunday. I looked at flights from BWI to RNO and even with short notice, it was only about $50 more to go to RNO than SFO, factor in the cost of the bus ticket and BART to get to the station and it's only about a savings of $23 and adds a shit ton of time and pain in the ass to the equation).

I picked him up from the station and the sun was just barely coming up. He told me he had slept most of the bus ride and that the taxi from the airport into the city was really expensive. I really wanted to talk to him before he left home to tell him "This is doable, but you have to ask for help, you gotta ask a lot of strangers questions like 'how do I get into the city with the BART?'" and other things like that. I was bummed he spent alot of money needlessly. I was so stressed out when he called me well after his bus had left saying "I'm in San Francisco, now what?" I frantically looked on Craigslist and CS for a rideshare and actually found him one, plus I had it set up for him to take a BART to Berkeley where a good friend lives who could have hosted him for the night and found a dude on couchsurfing to take him the next day. If he had waited in the airport for an hour or so, this could have been worked out, but he decided to book it into the city and get a hotel. I was actually on my way up there in my car to get him and drive back when he called me and told me this. I was blabbing with you when I discovered that there was another bus leaving at 1am and he got on that one. He told me that he slept most of the time on the bus and said little about his 7 hour stint in SF. We went to Starbucks and got coffee, then went back to my house. Mom was up, but no one else was, so I just kind of puttered around my room getting piles of costumes and stuff together, then doing the same in the kitchen with food. When people woke up, I started really staging, getting everything that we were going to bring with us outside by the car. Finally, I had to wake up a surfer and tell her "I need the mattress from the couch, it's time to get up". Then I used my masterful Tetris skills to get all that shit in the car and on the roof and on the bike rack. We headed out just before noon and stopped for lunch at a brewery. Nolan was tired. I imagine he didn't sleep very well on the plane, in SF, on the bus, or the night before he left. This German dude David came with us in his minivan. He was 24 , very well prepared for the festival, and kind of introverted. We stopped for gas off I-80 in Wadsworth. There were a ton of burners there doing the same thing and an Aussie guy came up to me and said "Ey mate, yoo got a flat tire." Some people gave me a can of fixaflat, but he said "Yoo bean driving on the sidewall mate, it's proper fucked, you gotta put the spare on". This sucked a little bit, but as he pointed out, at least we were at a place with shade, cold drinks, a bathroom, and it didn't happen on the side of the road, on the playa where it would have been a major pain in the ass to get a jack under it, or god forbid, while we were on the interstate doing 70. We swapped it out fairly quickly and headed out on the road. David, mein deutscher freund behind us in the mini van, told me that my spare was really low. We pulled over and I was just going to find someone who had a bike pump, but we lucked out and found a dude with an air compressor and got my 30psi tire to 60. I busted out the button cape and gave him and his family some as thanks. Then we got moving again, Nolan slept. We made it into line eventually, and cracked some beers and got to partying. There was a group of Canadians I recognized from two years ago in line next to us. I came up to him and said "What up Tundra?!" and we partied together for a short while before wandering to the next place. I donned my button cape and bounced from car to car collecting treasures and conversations. The wind picked up and I hid in David's van with him. I felt somewhat guilty that Nolan and Mom were in the other car, but I figured that they had each other and David didn't have anyone to talk to. I liked David. I liked how he was trying to come out of his shell and experience things that were strange and foreign to him. Some moments I would like to mark about David, to show his character, like how I said since he had a minivan, he should take someone with him, someone being a total stranger who needed a ride. Dude had a freaking minivan, if he packed it better, he could have taken several people, but the idea of taking a total stranger seemed so dangerous and weird to him that he completely rejected it. Another example, when we first got to the festival, we drove to the Couchsurfing camp. He didn't know where he was going to camp. We found a pair of girls who were on a sofa together and chatted them up and David ended up camping next to them, not too far away from CScamp. The way he reacted though when I told them to get in the van and show us where to go though was funny to me, he seemed reluctant and I thought it was because he was afraid that they were going to crush his things, or that he was weirded out by two strangers getting in the car, even for a short ride. He told me later that he didn't want to inconvenience them, and I got the impression later that it was extremely important for him not to be a burden on anyone. It was cool though, they helped him set up his tent, and I think they wanted to go back to their camp for something anyway. When I went back to our camp afterward, Nolan and Mom had been setting up for a long time and were almost done. I fixed us a dinner of rice and beans mixed with mexicorn and chicken on tomato basil tortillas. It was kind of a chore to give it all away afterward to random people so my pot would be clean. I remember having to drink a lot of watered down, burned up food just so I wouldn't moop it anywhere. Mom went to bed and as exhausted as Nolan was, I told him we HAD to go out on the esplande for at least a short trip. We rode our bikes to a giant trojan horse that was covered in red neon. We parked our bikes and walked up onto it. Nolan smoked a cigarette and remarked how it was like some massive multiplayer online role playing game. I thought "yeah, it kind of is, people have all these weird avatars going off on their quests with their blinking lights and strange costumes. We headed out again and ended up in a giant fur covered cylinder. It had a wheel on one end and a stake on the other and it could be pushed in a circle, which was helpful to block the wind. There were two girls inside smoking cigarettes and writing shitty poetry. I took a flask of whisky with me and had a few pulls...or did I...I can't remember...Nolan smoked a cigarette. I gave the girls who were with us some "Hi, my name is" stickers that I had with me for them to write poetry on. More people showed up. I remember a guy laying on his back and another girl saying "I have a trick, wanna see?" the guy said he did and she pulled out her tit and squirted him with milk. Nolan and I looked at each other and laughed. This particular episode is what I tell people was his first taste of Burning Man..some dude getting lactated on. We went back to camp after that and passed out in the tent together.

Tuesday