Vinny Goes to Burning Man
What truly goes on out there in the desert? Whatever the f*ck you want.
What truly goes on out there in the desert? Whatever the f*ck you want.
I never thought I’d go to Burning Man, but destiny is a strange and incomprehensible thing. I’d decided a week in advance to attend. Two weeks before that, I wasn’t even planning to be in America.
It was an intense summer in Tokyo, what I called my spiritual odyssey. I’d more or less shut out the world and spent all my time trying to heal, understand, and plunge into my inner depths.
For the past six years I’ve battled chronic back pain. Four months ago — at the beginning of summer — I hit rock bottom. The pain overwhelmed me. Something had to change. I surrendered.
In doing so, the universe guided me to several individuals who helped me see that the pain was not because of a physical abnormality in my back. My brain had created it as a distraction from repressed emotions and because of a disharmony within that derived from childhood (when I began repressing emotions).
It’s called TMS (the mindbody syndrome). With this newfound understanding, I began going to therapy, writing, reading, and unpacking my childhood, my present, my dreams.
The crazy thing is I actually got better. I’m back to sports, weight lifting, and everything I thought I couldn’t do before. My entire life is shifting; it’s beyond me.
Instead of trying to control what I can’t comprehend, I’m simply here for it, riding the wave. After three months of intense inner work amidst the sultry Japanese summer, I needed a break. For my birthday in early September, I decided to go home to Los Angeles to be with my friends and family.
I’d planned to continue my health kick and spiritual odyssey back in LA, yet Thatcher, one of my best friends, threw a wrench in that idea days before my flight when he texted: Come to Burning Man?
Ha! I thought. No shot. I couldn’t break my routine. But the call came again, this time from Morgan (Mo Hath), my brother-in-arms.
Dude, he texted a day after Thatcher. Should we send Burning Man? Now I actually considered it.
Goddamn it, I replied. It would be easier not to go — maybe that’s why we must.
We waited 24 hours to pull the trigger. During that time, my inner voice grew stronger.
Break your routine. Have a once-in-a-lifetime experience with your best friends days before you turn 29. You won’t be young forever and the timing may not align like this again.
The decision became obvious.
Mo and I got tickets, and I went Tokyo thriftin’ before sending it back to the U. S of A for the month — what would become the best month of my life after, well, the most challenging year of my life.
Why do we work so hard and stick to a routine if not to break it to pieces every once in a while?
Why are we alive if not to live?
Having never been to Burning Man before, I still didn’t know what it really was. You may not truly understand it even after reading this story, as it’s something you just gotta experience firsthand.
It’s easy to call it a music festival, but that just doesn’t cut it. Not even close.
Burning Man is a blank canvas for human beings to be the wild and magnificent and semi-deranged animals we are. Held from August 25, 2024 to September 2, 2024 in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, the burn is a gathering of hearts, a treasury of insanity, a river of free flowing inspiration and intense conditions which coalesce to create something otherworldly.
I don’t know why and I don’t know how, but fate has guided me into the melty, open arms of Camp Butter, my tribe and Burning Man home.
Each camp has its own distinct theme and is part of a village; every village lines a road; each road bears a number on a clock and a letter of the alphabet, creating a city of about 70,000 people surrounding the playa — a vacant desert where creators are free to set up their art, their creations, their madness.
There are no stages set up by the Burning Man organization, nor a lineup of paid musicians. Burning Man is an experience created by the people, as the only things the Burning Man organization sets up are the Man — a statue standing atop a base that has ranged from 40 to 105 ft over the years — and the Temple. They also sell ice. The rest is up to us, and we create some insane shit.
If you’d walk by Camp Butter, our location 3:15 D, you’d notice a fluttering sunflower-colored tower standing about thirty feet off the ground.
Perhaps not a sunflower, but an object reminiscent of AA grade salted butter. Ya, that’s it. The butterstick was the centerpiece of our camp, fit with a third-story DJ booth that looked over the cityscape and mountains in the distance.
With four yellow Camp Butter flags flowing majestically in the breeze, the stick was always a welcomed site from a distance, whether walking home from a nearby camp doling out hotdogs, or when straggling home in the small hours of the morning, when the city glows in haphazard light and the moon shines overhead.
Mo and I arrived on Tuesday. The phone stayed in the car. The rest of Camp Butter — about fifteen brave souls — were situated by the time we arrived.
How does this thing really work?
You sleep when you can and party when you can’t.
You bring what you need for the week: food, shelter, clothes, vibes, and a bike (or hoverboard, etc.) to get around. You give to others and take what they give you, as Burning Man subsists on a gift economy. Essentially, every camp has something to give to wandering burners to draw them in.
Us at Camp Butter set up the butterstick and a bar at our parties to lure in the curious, the traveling, the charmed, serving up free drinks, whacky vibes, trippy visuals, and devastating sets from the DJs in our crew.
Camps set up bars specializing in spirits, cold brew coffee, matcha, anything and everything alcoholic and otherwise. Camps also dish out food at certain times of day, like hotdogs, tacos, ramen, etc.
You bring a mug and an I.D. with you when you go out. If a camp is serving up something, it’s gonna be free. People just want you to hang, party, and try their things.
There are barbecues and bars and drinking holes, as well as countless other outlandish installations that make up the city, like roller skating rinks and bouncy houses and putt-putt courses, comedy stages, talks, orgy domes, and miscellaneous structures to climb and gaze upon the desert.
The choice is yours, cold brew or an orgy to start the day.
There may be no paid lineup of artists at Burning Man, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t music. Big name musicians, beloved niche DJs, and deep cut killers come out to play for free at one of the many Mad Max-esque party barges.
After our first night out, Mo and I vibed hard as the morning sun melted over Mayan Warrior, a collaborative creation from artists, craftsmen, photographers, designers, technologists, architects and musicians from Mexico City and Northern California.
It’s a stage; it’s an art barge; it’s a production of light and sound, music and people, known for its green laser beam that soars into the heavens.
If you were to teleport through the green laser and into the crowd as the sun came up, you’d look around and say, obviously this is a music festi.
But it ain’t.
Artists come and perform not because they’re hired like with other music festivals, but because I imagine it’s one of the coolest experiences you can have as a musician. I guess playing a sunrise set at Burning Man is worth caking your DJ decks in dust.
We slept until the afternoon. I was hurting. But the vibes were high, the weather was ideal, and the hand-pumped misters were flowing judiciously at our first day party, Churning Man.
The sun set beyond the surrounding mountains, and the lights of the city spread like a wildfire. Dusk falls and the wolves howl. That is the people. The landscape comes alive at twilight — the blue hour. Things I simply can’t explain sail along the horizon while fire twirlers dance atop their RVs.
That night Mo, Thatcher and I embarked into the neon darkness. Twenty minutes later, we found ourselves at the Man statue.
The base of the Man comprises labyrinthian passages and quirky little rooms to explore. After meandering through them, we climbed above and gazed upon the playa. Suddenly, Thatch pulled out a couple of objects in linen bags and handed them to Mo and me. It was solid, heavy to hold.
What? said Mo, pulling out the object. Is this an axe? German hatchets with our initials engraved.
GROOMSMAN was penned into the steel, a ritual in Thatcher’s family. I couldn’t help but burst out laughing at how epic and inconceivable this moment was, not to mention the fact that we were holding hatchets at the top of the Man.
The boy is getting married. A woman took several pictures on my disposable film camera — she seemed more excited than us — and an iconic memory was etched into this dusty noggin for a lifetime.
Alas, after dismounting the Man, the playa winds blew me astray.
I was soon on my own without communication (walkie-talkies). I welcomed the solo adventure, as that’s what Burning Man is, a fucking adventure, one unlike any other on planet Earth, one in which you must be willing to lose yourself to find yourself.
After some eccentric engagements I wound up at the Temple, the only thing the Burning Man organization builds besides the Man.
The Temple is an agnostic site of healing, peace, and commemoration. Anyone is welcome to bring in items and add them to the walls: flags, pictures, mementos of those they’ve loved and lost and wish to see alight again. The Temple burns down on Sunday night, immortalizing and cleansing whatever’s within.
Benches surrounded a center piece and served as a welcomed respite from the debauchery of night. I sat there for a while until someone sat beside me, covered from head to toe. Something pulled at my heartstrings, as they, too, were alone.
Are you okay? I asked.
She unwrapped her scarf and took off her hat and glasses. She cried. We hugged, and I told her it’s going to be alright. Then we laughed. She was from Israel and spoke in an enigmatic and silly way. Her eyes were big and dark, and it felt like we were friends.
She gave me a baby Yoda figure she had in her bag. I gave her an orange Dragon Ball-Z keychain. We then made a music video on her phone to “Three Little Birds” by Bob Marley, sung by baby Yoda. We parted ways after about an hour. Fate would decide if our paths would converge again, on the playa or otherwise.
There are drugs at Burning Man. The choice is obviously yours whether they will be a part of your experience, but the burn never sleeps. Still, we needed to.
After some rest, Mo and I were able to get out at around noon the next day to cruise the playa and scope some of the art. We started at the site of a sinking pirate ship, its slanted interior full of maps and books and antiques. A silver sea dragon circled the site, with bubbles blowing from its nose at night.
We then huddled in the shade of a giant kaleidoscopic tin man staring into a telescope. The playa appears to expand endlessly, with art installations cresting the desert ocean like waves, over which skydivers casually fall from the washed out blue. The scene on the playa is straight out of Mad Max. There’s no other worthy comparison.
Steel and fire shimmer in the sky, and machines as big as planes continually sail beside you. One such creation is El Pulpo, a fifty-foot metal octopus with great plumes of fire shooting out of its eight bobbing tentacles. The man driving the machine is sooty and smiling and surrounded by propane tanks with a grin planted on his face.
One might think with the total freedom, the burn would turn into a sort of purge. But it’s the opposite. The burn is guided by ten principles: radical inclusion, gifting, decommodifcation, radical self-reliance, radical self-expression, communal effort, civic responsibility, leaving no trace, participation, and immediacy. There is really only one rule: no pissing on the playa.
Seriously, don’t.
There’s something playful and meaningful and ritualistic about the whole thing. People take care of this place, and each individual’s effort in the micro contributes something extraordinary in the macro.
Give people a playground, a canvas, an economy based on sharing and generosity and love and see what happens. They show their best selves. They create magic.
A real city is more than just the monuments, just as the burn is more than big music stages. Tokyo is Tokyo because of the thousands upon thousands of hole-in-the-wall izakayas, but you can only be in one at a time. That is your experience, your Tokyo.
The same is true of Burning Man. The city is made up of 70,000 people, but it’s not the big DJ sets I remember most fondly. It’s the tiny moments, the details, the minutiae.
Each person does their part, and the energy reverberates. There are no lines, except for the inconsequential ones at the bars and perhaps those while waiting for a taco. There is nothing you have to do or see; there’s simply you, your friends, your bikes, and a will to explore.
After a morning excursion Mo and I reunited with the rest of the butters and set out once again in the midafternoon. With sand tornadoes twisting throughout the arid landscape, we embarked fifteen to twenty strong like a pack of marauders, one of the coolest sights I’d ever seen.
Drifting through the pale sky and perennial dust, one feels like they’re in an open-world steampunk video game where you can be anyone, do anything, go anywhere.
Decked out in overalls with a cowboy hat and some French 90s shades, I’d pump my bike as fast as I could and skid through the dust, feeling like a kid racing to the end of the block.
Our squad stopped at a bar for pickleback shots — whiskey and pickle juice — then played putt-putt golf nearby. We then listened to a talk by a few legendary rock climbers, accompanied by hotdogs and watermelon, and then dipped back out to the playa to rip around and play on giant standing swings.
We finished our outing at a shark-themed bar, where a hanging and very snarky shark called people off the street to come drink Chicago-themed beverages and listen to tunes.
That night we’d be partying on the Janky Barge, Burning Man veterans whom Camp Butter is in alliance with. With our squad piled onto the barge — the size of a double-decker school bus with a dance floor and DJ set on top — we left into the ethereal wasteland of cosmic order.
The barges move slowly across the playa, bumping music as loud as they can for roaming goons to groove to. One of the coolest experiences of the burn is to cruise around on your bike with friends, following art cars like little fish gliding on the backs of whales. Throughout the night, we’d cruise, stop, and party at other barges, installations and stages.
The next night, Camp Butter hosted another night party, where our DJs — Anna aka DJ Ashtré and Lauren Chase — absolutely crushed it. We were lucky to have art car Shiny, one of the most legendary art cars at the burn, post up beside the butterstick for our party, an impossible scene to pass without popping in for a vibe check.
I’ve never experienced a place like Burning Man where you can play music wherever you want, as loud as you want, whenever you want. Wanna start a party at your camp at 5 a.m.? You can, and you’ll probably get some stragglers in attendance.
There is no expectation to turn down your shit; there are no rules. Except no pissing on the playa. I mean it. Don’t.
Late into the night, a handful of us found ourselves at the camp Robot Heart, its massive wall of speakers playing possibly the loudest music one will ever hear.
We slapped in earplugs and when we’d had enough, our homie Neil poured up a tea ceremony on the purlieus of the dance floor.
Us stragglers finished with a sunrise set at Opulent Temple. At this delirious stage of the day, night, morning — it’s all the same — the voice goes hoarse and the heart opens up and the rising sun turns your fellow bandits into burning red silhouettes. The dust swirls and clings and falls from your hair, and you return home crusty, happy, beat.
These were my favorite moments.
The sun is rising or setting and the light pierces you and awakens you and consumes you; you become animals lost in the wilderness, beating hearts with nowhere to go but into one another’s arms. You make friends and they dance and ride beside you, cruising through the depth of morning looking beautiful and strange.
You hold kindred souls in nests high above the ground, not caring about sleep or the outside world, just watching the sun rise and the moon fade in the infinite space of their eyes until you can’t anymore.
You come alive before you rest. The walls come down. The dust must cover you completely to know how it good it feels to be clean. We’re just people, and people break. We’re animals, and it’s wonderful, and it’s life.
I can’t believe this is mine.
The next day was Saturday. That night, the Man would burn. We broke down camp and sailed into the evening, leaving for the event as a unit.
Camp Butter.
Every barge and unimaginable creation on wheels circles the Man, creating a perimeter that is possibly the biggest party on planet Earth. Nobody holds back, as this is the crescendo.
After an hour or two of dancing at the Bandits art car (futuristic death-race raccoon?) to classic fire-themed songs such as “We Didn’t Start The Fire,” fire-twirlers surrounded the Man. Despite the mystifying ring of lights and creations, the scene felt primitive — the fire and connection with the land and spirits.
Burning Man is elemental both in its embrace of fire, earth, water and air, and in the way it breaks you down until you’re bare. It feels real. Raw. This shit ain’t for the faint of heart.
The Man erupted in a mushroom cloud, imprinting the sky in red and black, fire and golden light. Then proceeded the most absolutely insane fireworks show I’ve ever seen, and which I’d be hard pressed to imagine isn’t one of the greatest put on in the world. (Picking up the theme?)
The remnants of the Man smoldered below, where naked burners danced around its embers.
We partied through the night, dipping between art barges in the playa and smaller sets in the city. Saturday night was a movie, but there was more to come.
Sunday was the last day of Burning Man. Temple burn.
Mo and I visited the Temple on our morning excursion a few days prior, my only time during the day. I brought with me all the notes I’d made about my back over the years, the routines, the stretches, the messages that kept me sane — keep going, Vin. You don’t have to understand it. This is happening for you.
I taped them to the wooden frame of the Temple, writing on the outside of the top card:
All healing is within us.
I was coming home to shed all the shit I’d accumulated over the years, all the pain and hurt and misunderstanding. But I could never have imagined it would happen like this. Throughout the week practically my entire torso was peeling like a snake, too, which was fitting.
I was shedding my past.
We slept and packed up the rest of the things throughout the day. By nightfall, those of us who remained peddled lethargically out to the Temple when we saw a fire growing. We joined all the others to watch the Temple fall and burn away parts of our pain, our joy, our life.
Our squad passed around some wine and took bites from sausage and cheese. We hugged as a crew. We cried. It felt good. Sad. Happy. Dark. Light. That night was an intense dust storm — a white out — the first of this year’s burn. The fire swirled with the gusts.
The embers roared and an orange glow illuminated the black sky, and through the crowd, we could see figures standing in front of the fire to keep it controlled, their silhouettes eerie and billowing in the storm as if the fire were the remains of a downed starship in a distant galaxy.
The storm grew stronger. We couldn’t sit there any longer. We departed back to camp and could barely see as we peddled across the playa. No longer the biggest party on Earth, the landscape became faint neon lights in white wind, a memory of what was.
We made it back, hunkered down and soon went to sleep, awakening in the morning to the sound of rain upon our tents.
It took about three hours to exodus. A man from the car beside us in line wandered through the ranks of dusty trucks and RVs, offering free cold brew coffee. Mo and I graciously accepted.
I missed the butters and moonflower. I missed the dust and shenanigans.
On our way back to California, Mo and I stopped in a rushing river to bathe. It was glorious, a reminder that just because the party is over, the celebration of life need not die.
We drove through the jaw-dropping Eastern Sierras, where snow-topped mountains rise into the sky from every direction. After a fourteen hour drive through the desert and green meadows, the cows and mountains and rivers and freeways, the clock struck twelve. It was my birthday. We deliriously unpacked in my driveway.
For the next couple of days I felt like a shell of myself, a loose bag of jumbled emotion, that is until I faced the blank page. It would take days to start this story, weeks to complete it. I’m a writer because I have these experiences and the way I process them is by writing.
I long to show the world that these crazy experiences are crucial; perhaps, they’re why we’re here. They make me realize that we’re all lost, and maybe being lost in a wondrous world that makes no sense isn’t such a bad thing.
We have these experiences and then we’re expected to go back to everyday life. But these experiences change everyday life. At the burn, I found myself asking, is that life (our routines, our work, the entertainment, the comparison — the facade) or is this?
Life is not Burning Man, and I don’t think any of us would last long if it was. But these experiences make you think. Maybe we learn to make more room for the miraculous in everyday life. Maybe we discover that it’s okay to fucking send it every once in a while.
Perhaps just as important as the routine is allowing it to shatter, so it may be rebuilt with a renewed consciousness. Our spirit craves this from time to time.
Burning Man takes our patience, our cleanliness, our sanity. It also illuminates the parts of us we didn’t know existed. I was meant to come to Burning Man at this pivotal period of change. I was meant to go through years of pain. I was meant to break, burn, and be reborn from the ashes. I was meant to come home.
I can’t shake this higher frequency that started at the burn. I can’t shake the emotions, as destiny is a mysterious and beautiful thing that I feel unequivocally attuned to.
Life goes on, and this dusty heart keeps expanding.
