Stories

Staring at the Sun: Excerpt from the Burning Man Book

Staring at the Sun: Excerpt from the Burning Man Book

This excerpt is from a Burning Man Book that Sidney Smith and I created. Below recounts our Wednesday morning from Burning Man 2013:

 

A heart glows in the sky and a colourful Robot glows next to it. We pedal towards over a thousand bouncing bodies on a desert in space. We park our bikes amongst the others, lock them up and run into the place we’ve been looking for. The music enters through our ears and slides past the drums, creeps into and envelops our minds, pours down our neck and floods our heart, caressing it in robotic sounds, symbiotic with our biology, we are cyborgs: plugged into these electronic noises to power our legs, our hips, our knees, our feet, all our extremities. The sounds blast and the bass thumps, and every once in a while, we thrust and we jump. We grind and we move, we shift and we slide, and it’s all, ALL about the groove. We fly with capes, steer with driving gloves, bob with top hats, and see with hearts in and on our eyes. Extrapolate the four of us to include the thousands more, and the variety, the creativity, the energy, the expression is a sight to behold, and with everything we do, there is no reason to withhold. . .

Disappearing Flowers

Disappearing Flowers

The girl who I had been noticing all week at the hotel had, by some divine miracle, decided to attend this bash as well. I sipped my shitty American beer, trying to possess an air of nonchalance, but her caramilky skin, wavy long brown hair, and the flowery orange dress she wore made me forget what cool was. She sat down on the off-white cushion next to mine and we started talking. I had originally thought she must have been in her mid-twenties, but was somewhat relieved (at least now I could relate) and somewhat disappointed (every heterosexual teenage guy lusts for older women) to learn that she too crawled from the womb in 1987. Her voice came to life when I told her I was turning eighteen in just over an hour. . .

The Evolution of Relationship

The Evolution of Relationship

Dark. Purple Night. I stood on an empty street corner beneath a lonely, cheerful street lamp. A bottle in my hand, a freshly fallen snowflake on my head. I looked up to see the winter precipitation spawning toward me; there were no pink roses.

Without moving my feet I began floating down the street. I felt like infinity trapped within an anecdote. I felt as though a bear in a birdcage must have felt, but with the glimmering ray of hope that the door would soon burst open. Dry cereal had taken control of my thoughts; however, the beer promptly washed that away. . .