With the skunkstench ever so gradually diminishing

and the sun shining unoccluded most days,

we enjoyed another quiet week as

in another land Operation Enduring Fun ramped up dustily over on the Black Rock.

Thursday’s much cooler-than-expected beginnings turned into a much hotter [118 in certain Pueblo parking lots]-than-expected day of errands usual [groceries etc.] and un- [slider window

install for the Taco, a surprisingly good [and cheap!] lunch among apparent local mafiosi and faltering geriatrics from what must have been a nearby care facility while waiting for it and

Linda’s final Adventure in Dentistry], then fifty-mile visibility – the Huajas  [not shown] in view

from the minute we hit the freeway – and Greenhorn not so long after.

Here

on the mountain, despite

the fact that it sometimes feels more like some relative suburbs, the air says fall is coming

while beyond us

[WAY out beyond us] in those intensively temporary suburbs Out West, the Man in the Hat 

was being immemortialized on the run-up to the First Burn without Him, Art Cars obediently

circling around The Man [sans hat] for what seemed at this mediated as opposed to self-medicated distance like yet again another Spectacle of Spectacularly Bad Art, but Being

There all the boring-looking bicycling would most likely not only be way better than that but bright, shiny, chrome and, most importantly Fun, something with which I’ve always had a problem.  So from Fun distanced, but intermittently monitoring the webcam as well as the Voice of the Man at 1000+ miles remove, I was left puzzling over whether this year’s thirty-five foot polar bear made of car hoods will ultimately prove as eloquent a boost to climate change consciousness as were the tens of thousands of board feet of finished lumber burned to address the plight of the world’s forests last year.  Meanwhile Lefty’s Temple gained a new friend all the way from Tokyo while Sunday the remaining thousands anticipated ever more

thousands of board feet about to burn in honor of all the year’s personal human losses in their Temple,  Well, yeah, ya Gotta. Be. There…whereas at this remove I’m totally in it for BMIR’s

PSAs as long as their burnin’ banalities don’t drive me away…”only five and a half hours to Wadsworth” [if the BIA don’t nail ya’s], and no driving over ten miles an hour on the playa because as everybody knows*** it’s driving over ten miles per hour, not 50,000 vehicles, that causes those ruts* and with them all those deadly little downwind dunes**.

So off they go, and off the air, first the webcast and then the radio, Burningman Vicarious Media done for another year, whereas My Problem, like Aggie’s [who probably got it from me] is failing

to find Fun all that fun, so weeks of fun, hanging out and interacting, remains forever beyond my Endurance.  A dinner party here and there, seventy + miles an hour down a dirt road on occasion, memories of certain late take-offs in Santa Cruz, yeah…but that much Fun, all at once in one place?   Ah, no.

Meanwhile we are belatedly blessed with Water at last…

* They may have been thinking of Richard Noble because when he set the land speed record it was reported that as the car approached the speed of sound the shock wave depressed the desert ahead of it.  When I set my personal land speed record of 110 mph for a 1964 Plymouth Belvedere wagon on the Black Rock Desert in 1996 no such thing happened.

** The BLM continues to insist there can’t be ANY relationship between 50,000 [+] vehicles for two [++] weeks plus 70,000 [?] bicycles tooling around a dry dusty lake bed in August and the downwind dunes that began appearing right around the time they began raking in increasingly hefty “permit” fees for Operation Enduring Fun, but anecdotal evidence differs.

***https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lin-a2lTelg                    Just couldn’t resist that last one; it’s Canadian, after all.