Burming Man #3: Interludes & Backtracks

Before I delve into the craziness of last weekend, the meat of my Burning Man adventure, I have to add one little element I neglected to write about. (Don't worry: I'll wrap up the chronicle by Monday. Then I'll post about my current trip: I'm writing from a hotel in downtown Chicago.)

Shortly after we arrived that Wednesday, two men set up camp next to us. They had a shade structure and a little Buffet-style bar. Here's a picture. You can't see the bar, but it's on the other side of the white tent thingy.




They also had a fire pit (self-contained, of course: Leave No Trace) and we all gathered around it for a bit, introducing ourselves and chatting about our lives in the Default World.

One of our neighbors was a now-retired Internet millionaire. He couldn’t have been more than 40, maybe 45. He and his friend had just finished camping somewhere down near Lake Tahoe and then had gotten fitted for custom ski boots before heading on up to Black Rock City.

They asked what we did for a living. The others—techies & landscape designers & marketing guys—took their turns and then it was my turn.

What did I do? Or, as the question always implies: what am I? With which “Camp” do I identify myself? Am I an academic? An accountant? An artist? A teacher? A stripper?

Well, I started to say, my husband and I have a small media imaging company and we write press releases and website copy but also write copy for and design brochures, etc etc blah etc blah etc blah. Which is technically true.

But something just fucking didn’t feel right but before I could say anything—I mean I think I was in mid-inhale--my good friend M. jumped right in and said “No!”—like a knight he was, I swear!—“She’s a writer. She wrote this novel called The Jar-Born Sage, he wrote one, too”—pointing of course to R. He stopped and looked straight at me. “They’re writers.” (It was his eyes. They were outraged. What was I saying?)

Oh yeah. M. had me caught out. What had I been doing? After all this time, after all the sacrifices I’d made, all the things I’d done over the years to carve out enough time and space to work, all that effort spent feng shui-ing my mind so that I could birth first that novel, so that I could make room for the one now gestating, here I was denying it all! In a blink of an eye! Blithely. Like it was nothing. Like a Judas I was. Identifying myself not by who I am but by how I earn my money, how I pay my rent.

But this is how I came to Burning Man, you see—only a week and a half ago, but it seems like eons… That first novel hasn’t sold yet. I’m 33, soon to be 34. I’m starting the next book, but: my metaphorical bones are older and when it rains parts of my body ache.

But now? After I saw the things I saw there? After the things I felt?

I’m a writer. That’s what I am.