Burning Man: Google Bikes

Burning Man

I felt bad writing the last entry cause by the time I had wrote it I had already begun to acclimate to part of what was going on here but felt like I needed to blog about my initial experiences. So there you go.

Day 2: I have to say two things directly shifted my cynicism on Friday. First, I was so beaten up by the non-stop blasting Techno parties till about 4 or 5 AM that I was destroyed from lack of sleep. I headed over to Center Camp to get some coffee, grabbed the daily rag, Pee Clear, and as it turns out last edition ever of it. So I plopped my tired ass down on one of the many couches and listened to some singer songwriter stuff and chilled.

Shortly afterwards Heather, a BM veteran - well are there any other types really. Sorry, sorry I’m getting negative again but let me diverge for a moment. I realized that that is how you know when something is “over”. When, and I’m not exaggerating here, SO many conversations are about how it used to be different, how commercial it is now “BUT WHEN I first started coming to the burn back in 1830 blah blah….”

So Heather was very nice and we chatted a bit about things. Having recently realized (not sure why it took this damn long) that I don’t like dealing with jam-packed crowds, I asked her for her advice about the more chill places to go and things to see. Got some great tips and had a nice conversation about the world and things.

First realization: I realized then that everyone here is nice and just so damn pleasant and helpful. In fact this affirmed something I’ve thought for some time, that this is inherently how people want to act. In San Francisco, I know I’ve had the urge driven out of me by the constant small time street swindlers and I imagine living has done that to most of the rest of us as well. So here people collectively decide to be nice. That is a good thing. A bit weird at first but very refreshing. In fact it makes it so much easier to strike up a conversation with someone, not worrying about ulterior motives. It goes across sex, race and age.

So I spent the rest of the day walking deep out into the Playa to visit the various art installations and just kind of poke around. That’s when I discovered the Google bikes. What I heard was one of the Google trillionares buys a pile of bikes for folks here to share. The deal is that you can’t modify them, lock them, hide them or sit on them naked.

Let me tell you about being naked here, I’m so sick of seeing man junk that I can barely drop trou to pee. I’ve seen more dick in these past few days than a Catholic Priest at the boys orphanage. The final straw was the nasty Santa naked from the waist down except for his ass-less red leather chaps. Check out shirtcocking on the interweb.

Anyway, I grabbed one of the bikes and blasted around the entire place! What was taking me literally hours to walk around in the blazing sun now was a few breezy minutes. I could see everything and barley notice the stifling heat. It was really great and the second thing that transformed the experience of being here.

That’s all for now. I’ll try to get some photos together cause it was at this point that I think I got to see, what for me, was Burning Man.