Tales from the summer :II: A Renegade World vs a ‘Happy’ Dicktatorship

Three summers ago I had the extremely lucky chance to go to Black Rock City for the first time, to party for four days at the renegade Burning Man. It was a renegade because the official Burning Man was not allowed to happen due to Covid. I guess they couldn’t contract services, but they did organize a huge free party in the middle of the desert. I remember getting there as the sunset was starting, an orange light, still bright, was reflecting on the dust we were levantar while driving in the middle of the vast desert with no signs nor directions. We had to drive quite slowly so we wouldn’t crash into another car. We were all in silence paying attention and being alert, not in the way that we usually do in real life, where we are constantly fearing and protecting in case someone or something hurts us. It was quite the opposite. It was being alert to not hurting others by not being patient or for the fear of getting lost. It was exciting to feel the freedom of having absolute responsibility for the actions that we were starting to take. When we finally saw campsites and huge RVs parked and very well settled, we decided to look for a good spot to camp. It was pretty surprising how well we were doing on communication, teamwork and organization. I think it was because of that sense of group responsibility that gave us the opportunity to make things happen in the right way, in a communal way, caring about each of our needs. As I’m saying, that happened alone. We were feeling part of something that seemed very chaotic, but it was turning into a very organized chaos.

Once our very poor y cute campsite was half done (we had to wait for other friends to get there the next day), we ate something very quick and we took our bikes, some of us sharing the ride, and we went to see what was happening around. The only signs that we were seeing were the colorful lights settled in the campsites, in the form of hearts, crosses, circles, squares, letters, etc. One of our friends told us that we needed to remember them so that we could be able to get back to our ridiculous campsite without getting lost. Ok. These lights were our references. Keep concentrated. You had no other option than being present the whole time. And once we got to the playa, there we got lost, and the wind started to blow, and we had to put our goggles on. I myself forgot them at home, but it wasn’t too bad. With my scarf I was able to kind of hide my face and it was okay. How amazed we were to see all of these mobile arts, full of colorful lights and with all different kinds of music playing. How impressed we were! We definitely did not expect so many people and so much incredible art! How generous of them that they came here anyways, even if we didn’t have to pay to go and see all these beautiful things. We really thought it was going to be a small rave in the desert, and it turned out being the biggest and coolest free party that I have ever experienced.

My friends went to sleep pretty early because they were exhausted from our trip, but I decided to stay out, and my other friend too. We ate a bunch of Molly and started exploring the different stages, following some huge colorful cool buses with the bikes, getting stuck contemplating the artistic figures and stopping at some mobile machines that were parked. Until we had to stay in one place because the Molly was hitting us hard. It was a huge white tent and there we danced, we danced and we danced. He was tired too because he didn’t sleep for two days doing whatever, so he left and I decided to stay. I couldn’t leave. I was having too much fun and my heart was very much opened. I was able to connect with the music because I was indirectly feeling free because of how the event was. Open and freeing. My eyes were looking for some interesting people around, or at least funny, and I spotted three of them. One was an Italian girl that had a rose in her hair and was moving all around the dancefloor with a fake hand that she would slap people on the head with, making everyone smile. The other one was a southern Spanish guy that had a very pirate appearance and was talking a lot with a lot of people in a very Spanish accent. And the third one was a very good looking man, also from Spain, that had a too-funny way of dancing, and we would cross looks many times. I had a big crush and I ended up falling deeply in love. Months after, he ended up being my boyfriend and a big piece of narcissistic shit. What I’ve learned is that we need to be careful when our hearts are so open because the most disgusting people can enter them and destroy us little by little. But, anyway, I remember how wonderfully my emotions were flowing and my impetu of connecting. I made a friendship with the Italian girl and when that party was over we went to take our bikes to go to a place called Robot Heart. The day was starting but the sunrise was not happening yet. To see for the first time that light blue light on a white blue-ish dust, and people taking their bikes to go to any direction they wanted, it was just a special moment. I was experiencing the beginning of a day in the desert, and I could hear some old burners saying that we were very lucky to experience this renegade because it had the essence of the real Burning Man, and they had lost it for many years.

That Italian girl ended up being a friend of the pirate. So we and a French guy who was tall, blond with dreads and very nice looking and very agreeable, were asking people where was the Robot Heart. I saw my crush moving around with his bike so I went ask him where was the Robot Heart. He told me, in a surprised, shy and nervous look, that he didn’t know but that he was just going to follow everyone because the people were all heading there. So we did that and girl…when we got there…I couldn’t believe my eyes. The sun was rising, illuminating in an orange reflection, the biggest sound system I have ever seen in my life! What?! I couldn’t be more happy and I went straight to the very front to feel that bass. Oh my charming god. My whole body was vibrating and I stayed there for hours until the party was over. Dancing and dancing and freeing my body and soul. How beautiful it was and how grateful I felt. Thank you, Robot Heart.

The pirate helped me get to my campsite because apparently he was my neighbour. And once I got there, my friends were playing chess and some others were preparing food and just talking. It was very beautiful to see my family there, curious about hearing my stories. It felt good.

But anyways. This is a resume of what the renegade meant for me and I have mentioned self-responsibility, caring for each other and the space, spontaneous sharing, and the opportunity to feel safe and open to connect with the music, with others and with oneself. Of course I had a guy at some point following me and bothering me, but that’s because our society is still very patriarcal. I felt free and encouraged enough to tell him to fuck off and it was probably because I felt I was in a safe place where if I ask for help I was going to immediately be supported; aware of the desert and its magic; and other things that I will make more clear now.

Two summers later I got a free ticket for Burning Man and one free vehicle pass. So, even if I was broke, I decided to go. I didn’t know if I was ever going to have a chance like that and I was really expecting it to be at least similar to the experience that I had in the renegade. But it is true that the context was very different, and my mood too. The valley were I now live, it was invaded by the smoke of the fires that surrounded us. Still now, while I’m writing this, there’s smoke outside. Not as bad though. But anyways, it made me very sad and very worried and I felt guilty for going to Burning Man. But a friend of mine and I had a plan of creating some chaos at Burning Man. We wanted to wheat paste some pamphlets at rich people’s campsites, write some articles once there, bringing our printer machine, and collect stories about the Burning Man and the organizers.

Once we got there, we started seeing cops everywhere; rangers and cops registering vans and RVs with guns and their faces hidden; people telling us which direction to go. Hours of waiting in the line until we were told that the picture of the vehicle pass we had, they couldn’t accept it, so they sent us to a place where they had wifi so we could try to contact the people from our campsite to see if they could bring us our vehicle pass. No one answered because it was 2am and they were probably sleeping or partying. So they guy that was working there and came first with a prepotente attitude, as if we should have known that you can’t have a picture of a vehicle pass, even if you have proven that it is not a used one, this guy came and once he realized we were two very nice and beautiful Spanish women, he was able to change his attitude and started looking at us in a different way. A flirty and almost sexual way. He left saying “let me see what I can do for you, girls”, and he came back joking that he couldn’t do anything but he ended up sticking a vehicle pass to our window and we celebrated for three seconds. We said that once we had our physical vehicle pass we could come back and give ours to someone else that can use it, but he replied that there was no need to, and that what we had to do is help anyone that needed help once we got in, and I thought, “Don’t you do that the rest of the year? Or is it just a Burning Man thing?”.

Once inside, everything was marked. You didn’t need your intuition to know where you were. It was like being in a very organized city that apparently had a lot of cop sirens. We got to our campsite and the people there were some of them awake but with no service, that’s why they couldn’t reply. They were very very kind people and as the days went by, I ended up having a tender feeling for all of them. Since it was my first official Burning Man experience, they took really good care of me, which I appreciated a lot. They told us amazing stories about the Burning Man whenever we coincided at the campsite. Especially her. A kind, tough, and free woman that cared for all of us all the time.

But besides that, I had a hard time connecting with anything else. I didn’t like the music, I struggled in liking the people and I struggled even more to connect with myself. The day that I decided to cook a big pot of stew for the campsite that gave me the ticket, I went with my bike to bring that to them. They were next to the tuna guys. They were the same people of the country fair in Eugene, Oregon, a place were I had gone this year for the first time and it is even more white than the Burning Man. I felt like I was on another planet, seriously. Which that would’ve been okay if I hadn’t been treated as a sexualized latina. The fat pedophile man that gave me the ticket didn’t thank me when I brought him the food. He was already eating a beautiful Irish stew that someone else had prepared. Not him, of course. And they were preparing tuna, of which they offered me a piece and I honestly thanked them. Having a piece of fresh tuna in the middle of the desert. It is such an experience. He asked me for the third time if I was going to come on Monday to help them undo the campsite and I affirmed for the third time. I could clearly feel his frustration about not having received any money from that ticket. But I was clear from the beginning that I was not able to afford it.

On Monday I showed up in the morning and stayed until dark to help them undo the campsite. He thanked me.

The day we were leaving the Burning Man I went pick up my pot, and when I got there, the fat pedophile fucker of Philippine children (he told us, a day that he was in a good mood, that he loves going to the Philippines and giving children sweet treats because they are so happy when they have one), he showed me where it was, I headed there, and guess what? It was full. Not only he didn’t eat it, but he didn’t share it with anyone. Where is the Burning Man spirit here, old motherfucker frustrated dick? This time I’ve really learned, don’t accept presents from pedophiles.

The experience with this man was not all. I saw a minor prostitute being touched by three men, I saw disgusting looks on women 24/7, and comments like “who’s gonna fuck her first, you or I?”. It felt like the burdel of hedonism and sexual distraction. I felt disgusted, honestly. I of course met some wonderful people, but:

What is wrong about Burning Man, it is not the Burning Man itself, nor Black Rock City. What is wrong with it is us, the people that compose this microsociety. Especially the rich. To see a minor age prostitute at Burning Man being touched in a very sexual way in the middle of a dance floor by three men, it is a reflection of our society that still has gender and power roles, where a minor decides first to sell her body instead of working in a company that exploits her in a different way and probably pays her less money, and is probably psychologically treated better with the company of men, whom most of the time, they don’t only go visit a prostitute because they want sex, but because they’re sad, frustrated, unhappy and lonely, and only need to talk with someone who’s caring.

What is wrong with Burning Man it is not the amount of money that there is, it is the hypocrisy of the rich really believing that they are being generous and in genuine solidarity with others by sharing for one week what they have bought at Walmart and need to get rid of as soon as possible, otherwise they will come back with the same shit that they brought to the festival. To be really in solidarity is when you have absolutely nothing and sharing is not predicted. Genuine solidarity is when you share your plate of food because you see someone that needs to eat. I would really like to see these rich people in real life. In this sense, the community they feel is fake and kind of a forgiveness they use to feel that they have done their good action of the year so they can still destroy the planet the rest of the year, and kill us all too.

Another aspect of having so much money and material in it, is that there exists a very well-organized group of thieves that steal as much as they can. Money equals un-solidarity equals distrust equals alarm equals defensiveness equals violence.

What is wrong with Burning Man is not the expensive outfits that people wear to show their bodies, but it is the pressure of having a perfect body, that especially women feel when they wear them. People fucking work out before going to the Burning Man. Do you really think they can actually feel free while they’re dancing? Absolutely not. What happens it is still the obsession of looking good for others, of comparing yourself with others, intensifying competition, superficiality and values that still perpetuate machismo culture, and seeing women as objects and thus, rape culture. I wouldn’t be saying that if I had not seen it. I’ve seen it myself and it is very sad to realize that women still are very insecure and men are empowered by women’s insecurities. I have of course seen queens that are very much empowered. I have not seen any men dancing and expressing themselves on the Robot Heart’s heart. Why? Because it is a very heterosexual place where men are scared, still, of looking “gay”. Men also need their own liberation but meanwhile, I’ve been told about a woman that woke up in the middle of the playa, almost naked and with her legs opened and not remembering a single thing of what happened.

The problem of Burning Man it is not that there are almost no native or black people. But the reason why there are not black, nor native people. It is because we live in a country where black slavery and colonizer culture are still very much alive, and Burning Man is a reflection of that. If there are almost no black, native, or transgender people, it is because the majority of them probably are not able to pay for the ticket and the fucking vehicle pass and everything else. Include them in real life and you can actually be speaking about inclusion and community. Don’t do it, and you’re just a cynical privileged blind and unaware racist terf that’s lying to yourself in order to not take responsibility because you’re comfortable where you are. What you’re feeling at Burning Man it is not freedom, it is comfort. Everyone should have the opportunity to choose! To choose if they want or don’t want to go to the Burning Man or elsewhere. I now see Burning Man as a first world country where refugees, immigrants and poor people can’t go because the borders are real borders, and the borders are white, rich, heterosexual, and homophobic.

What’s wrong with Burning Man is the fact that there are police. POLICE! And not only police, but secret police working in their best week of the year because they have the chance to finally express their frustration with a beautiful costume. Can we stop thinking that they protect us? For real. Still now we think that they are here to fucking take care of us. I had to hide every time that I wanted to take a line of whatever drug I was feeling like taking. Besides that being a pain in the ass, it generates a fear of getting caught and going to prison or paying a huge fee; guilt for doing something that’s “wrong”; the lack of that sense of responsibility because we’re being treated as children that don’t know what we’re doing and don’t know what’s good or bad for us. And actually, in an unconscious way, we do end up acting like that, which makes the festival a terrifying gathering of spoiled kids. I felt that with the paramedics. Well…if there are paramedics and rangers, I can pass out, and they will save me. When there’s people to save us, that means that we can’t save ourselves. We completely depend on others, making us become really useless and stupid beings. Which makes me think of the dominant spiritual philosophy of nowadays at Burning Man, which is constantly suggesting to us that we need to free ourselves from the inside to the outside; that puts the focus on oneself so we can stop being insecure and mean. A lot of people prefer to learn how to have better body posture so they can hide what’s really inside. And guess what? It works, but half-way. And I say half-way because when you mix US culture with eastern philosophy, you get an extreme capitalist, classist expression of the ego. It is the culture of showing off and competition and arrogance and little has to do with genuinity and curiosity. I was separately introduced to two women that had surgery in almost every spot of their bodies, which is fine and I will never criticize them for doing so. The problem again is why they need to change their appearance in order to feel accepted in society. What happened is that when I hugged them after saying our names, they pushed me away in a very similar subtle way. I’m still figuring out if it was because I had dust from partying for one whole day, or if it was because of my accent, or if it was because my outfit wasn’t a Burning Man outfit, or because of my smell that would stick to their smell of rich cleanliness, or because of a cultural thing where they don’t hug each other, which I doubt. Burning Man is full of classist judgment bullshit.

What is wrong with the Burning Man it is not only that they are using a preserved natural park, but that they have to pay for it, making it a private property for three weeks. And we know since the transition from feudalism to a capitalist world that privatizing lands have made regular people lose their freedom to use the land in a more caring, respectful, autonomous, self sufficient ways. In this way, the Burning Man represents the result of what festivities, the only moment and space we have to liberate ourselves completely, have become an exclusive, controlled, classist private party in a bought peace of land.

What is wrong with the hedonism is not hedonism itself. It is the fact that this hedonism shows us how bored, unhappy, unfulfilled, exhausted and scared we are the rest of the year. And in order to forget, we need to take drugs, by the way. We need a quick and effective feeling of joy and existential experience with a big dose of Molly because we can’t depend on ourselves and risk to not have fun during the only week of holidays a year that we have. What is life? What is life? How is your life out there that makes you believe that Burning Man is a place for expression and freedom?

This is my third year I’ve been living in a valley in South Oregon where I’m all the time surrounded by trees, flowers, animals, rivers and my beautiful grey cat. I’ve had the chance to little by little and in a very subtle way, connect with my surroundings and nature. It is beautiful to now know that eagles leave to the north when the vultures arrive from the south, and how the elks come down to the valley whenever there’s too much snow in the mountains. It is a precious gift to see deer moms eating grass with their little deers full of white spots on the back during spring. And one of the most magical sounds I’ve ever heard, the song of the coyotes almost every night. I now can understand why these animals and plants were and still are so sacred for the native people. And I think that’s why I’ve had this shocking experience at Burning Man. I really feel that I’m not part of the artificial world anymore and I really feel like my people are everything that surrounds me here, starting from my cat, but ending on a human being, passing through the leaves, the bees, the goats, the cows, the horses, the squirrels, not so much the ground squirrels (they’re kinda annoying), the river, the willows, the dust, the mud, and anything else that’s alive. And what makes me more sad is seeing the mountains burning, animals dying, men and women risking their lives to extinguish the flames because our tears are not enough. Perhaps, if we’d all come back to our home, nature, our tears would be enough. Meanwhile, the Burning Man is burning, and even if the WetWoman came to the Burning Man this year to give us a big sign, rain, we still burned the Burning Man. And that’s okay because it almost wouldn’t have made any practical difference. Burning the man it is not the problem, the problem is how very much alienated we are from nature and life. People at the Burning Man are so distracted by everything I’ve mentioned before, that they actually forget that they’re in a beautiful magical desert, a place where even if you want to hide, you can’t. The desert teaches us in a very straight way what is happening to ourselves. And I’m asking you, what did the desert show you? What are you going to do about it? And how much more time do you need to come back home?

This is like a personal relationship where one is constantly asking to be heard and attended to, and the other one is selfish and continues doing things without taking in consideration anything else that is not themselves. This is not a relationship anymore. It hasn’t been for centuries. This is a break-up where the victim is not going to scream for respect anymore. And the abuser can do whatever they want. But when the time comes our earth is going to make you directly see the consequences of the harm you, the rich, have caused to her, you can have a thousand jets to go travel to a private island, but we will know and will have learned what’s really important and necessary. We will use technologies only in the benefit of nature. We will have known how to grow our food, we will share it and we will be organized to make the best of everything, to take care of each other. We will know where to look for not poisoned water, we will have learned how to generate ecological sustainable energy for the community, we will have distributed the plantations in a more communal and caring way for the land, and we will stand together and fight back the day that you and your multimillionaire companies will admit that you too stole this from us, and before us, from Native Americans. You are free to choose. But if you decide to stay on this planet because you love nature, as it is said in your tinder profile, you gotta learn from native cultures. You gotta stop what you’re doing and transform yourself. Be really spiritual and stop insulting spirituality. If you want to live on this planet but don’t respect it, then take your private jet and go fly to mars, Elon Musk. We don’t need you.

I won’t come back to Burning Man because it makes me sad. I will only go back if they do a real renegade where there’s no police, if it is a place where not only the feeling but the actions of spontaneous sharing with each other is real, and it is free, and they don’t burn a single thing. I will only come back if everyone has the opportunity to go and share what they know. I will only go back if there is no more rape and transphobia. The Burning Man needs a transformation, otherwise it remains the result of a selfish, terrible, and destructive society.

From the river to the desert, with determination and love,

Nineta