Conversations Among the Ruins

July, 2010.

I'm in an In & Out drive thru with my roomate fighting back tears - those panic like ones, where you're spending your last buck fifty on a fountain mr. pibb at In & Out.

"So who cares?! You bought the ticket and it's done with. You told her you'd go so now you're going."

"I am so. Fucked. I spent the last of my savings on the ticket. I can't fucking believe I did that. I better see a unicorn resurrected from crystal ashes. I want my skin to turn sea foam green. Forever. I'm going to be eating minute rice from now until October. I'm such an idiot."

I stop wallowing long enough to see her frozen in a stare at me, twisted in my direction at a ninety degree angel in the car.

"Well how the fuck much was a ticket?!" She says.

"Three hundred and ninety dollars."

"And what do you do there?"

"I'm not sure. Like. Dance and walk around. I guess, under a pre text of radical self expression."

"Pffffffffwhew." She says and I feel the same. We drive in silence as I sip my Mr. Pibb in a panic that it would be my last Mr. Pibb for possibly ever. For all I know I could die at this shit.

Burning Man.

It would be a radically expensive way to relapse, die, or both.

I did what I always do, I hoped out loud and silently resented how it would be like every other stupid night at a rave/ club/ house party/ shady warehouse party I'd ever been to and since far outgrown, except I wouldn't be able to leave. In the mean time, I ate a shit load of minute rice and the occasional avocado when I could afford it, grumbling to myself that if I weren't going to stupid Burning Man I'd be having a bobbi from Capriottie's.

One of my best friends Corrine ( Playa alias: Angel Face) and Nick (Grandpappy) flew to Vegas from Chicago. The three of us took my VOLKSWAGEN BEETLE to Black Rock City. Do not do this. Corrine basically had to lay on top of everything in the back seat. We drove the seemingly ninety miles down the lonely old highway and Grandpappy, the vet bringing us virgins started to get excited.

"I can smell the dust" He kept saying. "What?!" I kept looking at him like he was crazy. He told me a while ago that I wasn't allowed to ash my cigarette out of the window. I did not appreciate this. I didn't smell anything but alkoli and I didn't see anything either. Just dust trails.

I had no idea what the fuck I was walking into, and I have a huge problem with this because I'm a control freak about my enviorment. What I walked into was, for the first time in my life, completely out of myself and into the arms of a tan girl with giant fuzzy boots, ears, and a skirt on saying "Welcome Home."

Not only did I have the most incredible experience of my life, my grudging indecision to go to Burning Man radically re coursed my life.

Firstly, I didn't meet people to party with. I acquired a family of people so radically different and incredible that beyond any other reason of placement on Earth besides for us to meet and create a structure/ camp together is just absurd. As a direct result of this fact alone I do not believe in coincidence. We have the rocket scientist, the carpenter, the brilliant artist, the mom, the gorgeous child, the architect, the musician, the exotic beauty, the sassy one, the heart throb, the hilariously wasted/ doted over one.. just to name a few.

This group... each so radically different from I yet so radically exactly the same. When others are free to express themselves at an unabashed level, you learn about yourself through them at just the level. I spent my first burn filling the pages of a journal because all I could do was write.

I burn sober. People seem amazed by that fact fairly often.

"You're so nice about it" JB says. "I see people offer you everything and you just politely say "no thanks I'm good. Why?"

These are the people that can get fucked up for fun. I'm not one of those people. I get wasted so that I can not feel or deal with things and it looks like I'm having fun. If there is anywhere in the world that I do NOT have to numb out how, what and why I feel it's on the Playa. Burning Man is literally the Astral Realm Wave of Experience here on Earth - as a PHYSICAL, EMOTIONAL entity.

Burning Man is a hyper spiritual experience for me and I would not alter that with external substance. The people that do, good for them, this is just my experience. I danced in a fifty mile per hour wind/ dust storm with just one person, the DJ. It was like the ultimate relationship for an hour - I needed him to play the music to dance and he needed me there to dance to play the music.

I lost it - just.. every part of myself that needed to shift.. in front of the Temple of Flux - utter hysterics as I just screamed it all out into the arms of two people I barely knew because of why I was painting what i was painting. Have you ever screamed or cried in a way that afterwards you just stop for a moment and think

"Has that been in me all along?" You have to wonder what shifted as a result.

The desert in itself opens your energy like the sun opens a flower. The air is different. On the playa the idea of sitting in front of a computer is foreign, as if you can hardly imagine it, or how or why you do it. I had my heart opened. Literally, by a man who taught me how to do it with his eyes.

"How will I go home and sit in front of a computer?" Tosh asked me a few times. I didn't know either.

For as amazing as Burning Man is, it's inevitable that you're going to lose your shit after it too. Why?

Because you found yourself through all of the people around you, except you were in an alternate reality of which you are no longer in. Now you're in front of a tv trying to remember how to use the remote. Alone. You have bills. Printed on paper. You realize how much you eat is fucking crazy, because you learned to live on sauce and noodles once a day for seven days. Throwing "apple" into the choice complicates it, now you can have basically anything in the world. You have to go back to work.

The concept of work baffles you, and you come to an understanding of the harsh realities of life on this planet as we have made it for ourselves.

You trudge along, planning next years burn down to the exact pieces of rebar you'll pack, the wigs you won't pack, and the list of the best things (Monster. Yoohoo.)

The next year comes and your whole life has changed, or at least mine has. I met a guy. I met him because he said to me

"Hey burner" one day and I did a 360 and said "You fuckin went to burning man?!" Today we burn together, have a dog and a house together, make art together, buy rocks together.

I had a much broader perspective of myself, my wellness, and what I was walking into. "I can smell it!!!!!" We yelled at each other excitedly down that million mile road to Black Rock City. "The DUST. THE DUSTTTTTTT!!!" I take video after video, sending them to Corrine (angel face) until my reception dies all together. I will not turn my phone on for ten days. It will be in a sealed ziplock bag in a cabinet under a box. Or something.

My last burn I made art. I had adventures. I laughed my tu tu off at camp with my family. I painted flamingos on people's faces. I spray painted shoes. I had a three hour conversation and breakfast with an Iranian film director because he accidentally picked my coffee up at center camp. I gifted Lola, my sacred Flourite Sphaelite to Peter and Alfonso - two of the most amazing people I have met on this planet to date. I sat on the front porch. I survived a two bike tun on a flaming RAMP OF DEATH. I painted canvas and faces and swung on a marry go round like a child, laughing so hysterically loud that I almost threw up. I sat in the middle of a thirty story metal pyramid. I went to meetings in Anonymous Village and I met a man that told me

"It is within the man burning that we attempt to, on a smaller level, re create what it was for each individual to arrive here." (On Earth)

In short, the things that clicked into my head about the evolution of this planet, where it's headed and why I am here became crystal, dusty clear as I watched the Temple of Transition burn in silence, because the temple does that -

burns in silence with fifty thousand people around it. It's just that kind of a moment. I simply wrote "New World Order" in the dust. We stayed on Playa for ten days and I got back here, got back to work, got back to life/ back to reality - because I have a sense of "Home" and what the most incredibly profound and special time of my life feels like. It's the Burn.

It is with a heavy heart that I write that the ticket fiasco has turned admission to our great City into a pile up on the 101 at peak rush. Basically, I don't know anybody that's gotten tickets. Like not one other person of the twenty five in our camp and the fifty in Harmon's camp.

This isn't to discredit the newcomers that did get tickets (I am one myself having gone to only two burns) because that shit is what killed the "rave" scene (and the drugs) but it was the ego and attitudes of people that were older. When love turns to ego all you have left is ego. And meth based drugs.

This incredibly beautiful girl I work with, Gina, has been telling me she's wanted to go to the burn for a while. I was walking out the other night and she stopped me, ran up to the door, and told me with a hopeful look on her face

"So I'm going to register for a ticket!!!!" She was so beautiful and innocent and excited, it was crushing. So I just smiled and said "I hope you can make it." Knowing full goddamn well that the tickets are sold out and the remaining ten k will be auctioned off to theme camp participants.

I am sad that people will not have the opportunity to stumble onto one of the most unique and unbelieveably inspiring times of their life.. where they get to be on this planet but not on this planet at all.

Burning Man has taught me where I am truly from in this universe. Not what it looks like, but what it feels like. I am not afraid of death and I sincerely look at my life today as if I have already died, because whoever I was before I was given the hope and love of that experience will never exist again. I have a greater faith in humanity, and it was the first real cracks of light for me - where the masks started to come off and I realized that I too have a spirit. These two people had an amazing project in 2010. I wish I had known their names, but it was a giant blue flaming blue sand culdron with an arrow that could be swung around. What was more incredible than what they made, were THEM themselves. I passed them crystals and they said I was beautiful and that i was light. I'll be on my death bed remembering that in ninety years. Not what it looks like, what it feels like.

In fact, I was waiting on some really rude and intolerant lawyers recently. It was their whole law firm having a party, and I overheard some of them discussing burning man, and how they go every year. As I poured the coffee I whispered "I burn too."
And they were complete snob motherfuckers to me about it, sniffing "that's nice" at me. That HURT me.

But you know what? I have faith that on the Playa they shared their water with somebody or helped somebody onto an art car. Fuck, it could have been ME. They wrote on the same temple of flux that I did, and they watched it burn in silence with me. Maybe they painted faces or let somebody wear their tu tu. The bottom line is this:

We are all better for the experience. Every single fifty one or two or three thousand of us. Wether we make it this year or not, it is the real deal, and I am happy for all of those that get to participate, that got to participate, and that will participate.

That being said, we were taking a drive down Joshua tree highway tonight.

"I don't even know if we should go. It won't be the same without Corrine, or Kat, or Al, or Marsh or Frog. I mean really. It's the year of the Dragon and embrace change and yadda yadda yadda, but maybe that change should be for other people because we already had our experience. What are we even going to do? Besides meet new people, which we will, and it will be incredible, but still.

It hurts to think that our collective families will be left out, and I sincerely don't know if I want to be a part of that. Maybe the theme camps are gigantic and fancy and important, but who will make our cucumber sandwiches? And who will build the shower? Who in the fuck is going to play the harmonica at dawn? The families are broken. I mean. We could do something else. Go to Grants Pass or something. Go see JB in SLC. I don't know."

Everybody has collectively kept their burner spirits. "If I don't get in, I don't get in. We'll do regionals and service."

In July of 2010 I accidentally purchased my soul back for three hundred and ninety dollars and I

certainly hope that others have the opportunity to find what I discovered; Who and what and why I am.

In addition to the joy and beauty of every single being around me.

I would eat instant rice for the rest of my life if I ever felt I would lose that and I could buy it back.

You can always go back - the option to choose to forget is always available.

But it isn't what it looks like.

It's how it feels, and what that means to you, and how you go out into the world and spread that feeling and meaning.

Once it gets on you, it's your choice wether you're going to keep it to share it, or resent it to squash it.

If you had an incredible, inspiring, open hearted older sibling that wanted to teach you how to experience the thing so much responsible for making them that way safely/ respectfully. How much of an impact would that have, and how much more likely would you be to respond safely, respectfully, and with the best of yourself?

Now. If you had an older sibling and your relationship was based on them talking about how incredible and special something was, however mom and dad fucked something big up right along the time you came along - and now the whole family is being ridiculed, and everybody is "less than" because it radically changed everything. How are newcomers going to respond to that?

The tickets are fucked. Demand far outweighs supply. That's the bottom line. Could you imagine how the people that have to answer to all of us feel? What would you do in the situation? When I have an answer for that I'll allow myself to judge the course they took - but I don't have an answer, and I don't want to scramble my nervous system trying to think of one.

I saw something up there about a kid that wanted to make a peacock jacket and it became this rant of "You newbie idiot you can't wear feathers." That broke my heart. Maybe it was a joke in the first place, but how would you feel? To be openly ridiculed like that in any area of your life, let alone by "Burners." Why not just say "Cool. Just use acrylic paint and a canvas coat. Feathers are moop." Who are we?

My point is if your family really got screwed, I mean really badly, would you be the one to point the finger, or would you be the one to love them through it and be there when they needed you, no matter what? Keep in mind this is a family that loved you first with open arms.

It isn't all sexy sparkle ponies and blinky lights burner babies. Lets respond with the principals of love and self reliance that this city so much tought us and just love as many people as we can through this.

<3,
Heather Co.

I'll tell you how it happened.
I sat on a dusty carpet for
two hours drinking iced
coffee

listening to a Hindu
flute band under a
sea of white flags

making up a
sphere shaped
ceiling. Eventually

I stood,
separated

from my friends,
and three hundred
feet later

started a
conversation.

I can't remember
why I stopped to
speak but

for three hours
we stood there.

Peter is an angel
in my real time life.

He delivers babies
for a living and he
reminds me that

this is all but a
spec - a very
important

spec
in my life span
of unlimited
time.

I know that
I've had more
lives than

I've had fingers and
toes and

I can't tell you
what happened
the moment I met

both Peter and
Alfonso - I have

no what
to explain
at all - simply how

and a forward
of

a reminder
of light.

We are the crystals,
crystal rabbit eared
dusted faces in a
sea of how about
not today with the

fuck it.

Hot sun cimmeron
skys of blue divers -
all the happy planes of

witching light of
astral light.

We share soul planting
scriptured seeds of
self to self to one entire
whole to one to plus

all.

We are the crystals,
the sun magnifies energy
of perplex swinging paradox
pendulums wrapped in a

schism of ripping
protective
wrap - it's a

Ghandi in a
turbin with a
unicorn horn over

these tap shoe
dancing lightning
flashing eyes.

That do not chase
the storms - the

raw sadness of
real life crying
icicle tears

under a moon
band of a glitter

dust

pyramid. Of a
family
pyramid.

Father Sun.

Sister

Sky.

(I wrote this in two minutes on the playa as I stared at Kaley.)

"Tell me how you met Corrine."
I said to Missa one day.
"Well. It was fifth grade or somewhere around there. We were in Catholic school and the auditorium was packed and very quiet. The door opened loudly and this little girl with bright red hair and a stuffed bear backpack came walking in. Everybody stared at her but she didn't even seem to notice. She just walked to her seat like anybody would,as hundreds of kid watched and her shoes squeeked the floor. Didn't phase her at all."

"Well that's dead on."
"Yeah."

I have watched my counter soul for nearly a decade now. A decade of raves and death and veggie pot stickers. Clubs and leggings and themed house parties. Glitter makeup, hair dye, manicures, decending those stairs at Smartbar, to lose phones, drop drinks, order drinks, burn cigarette holes into the skin of strangers. We've spaced out in airports and rolled our eyes on airplanes. I've watched love and the absence of love come and go for her. New coats and vintage eyes, fuzzy boots and Troma shirts. Toy guns at Simones, shovling out cars, dancing in Los Angeles. Dancing in Detroit. Dancing in Black Rock City and oh yeah. Chicago too. "Fucking Chicago" - So sorry for the F love.

We've waited in line for concerts for hours wearing small dresses in February without tickets. Drawing a joint cartoon character in a notebook under a pool table as the dry ice couldron of red headed sluts steamed nearby. We've gone to weddings dressed like an A list and costume stores on stealth missions and we have the ability to laugh so hard in a room we end up in some other world. We call those Broomstick Vacations in Jami's guest room. We trade wigs and music and pain and focused rage towards whomever did what to either of us.

We paint canvas and bitch and have brunch when we're able to get it together in the same time zone. She wraps rocks in gold wire, her hair in L wire, her head in ragged bands, and she's too beautiful for most of the rest of the world. Especially in the way she realizes very little of that fact.

She is a victorian room of antique, solid gold, covered in books and knowledge, star fire and truth, and on the other hand, an asteroid galaxy tour of knife stabbing self projection. She likes martini glasses, reading glasses, stolen glasses from Skylark, and takes great pride in her ability to bake vegan cupcakes. Her cats are her children and she is the first person to ever make me shut up about my dislike for cats, because she is somebody that I love enough

to appreciate her love for them.

Her hair is a tangle of galaxy gold fire fleks of dark Earth red and in her own right she is a form of rock never found on a shelf. Only in the sun, on top of a mountain, with a family of scores of others. She hates her freckles I call them constellations. The ones she's been to, the ones she comes from, and the ones she'll go to.

Today is her birthday and birthday girl I'd take a bullet for you. It'd mean you were here. Here in this neon place on a listless Friday afternoon. I'd better be in a good outfit in the sun and you would need to be in charge of the pictures at my services, as you are my champion arm photochop chop job fixer.

Morbid dreams aside we take it all where we take it all because we keep meeting each other in the exact same life - spot. So tonight, it's your flight landing, chop sticks and rocks and you and me burning it all out in the middle of my condo. Do you think? We could have a bonfire in some swimming pool with those flipper flops so we can just keep swimming, into desert sand with tabasco sauce. Shit I just basically became the super of the place. Veggie pizza head non marshmellow eating Fox.

"I named her Fox in a haze of meth and ketamine, on some floor in some basement. She was sitting on a couch. Late for classes at UIC. I couldn't move all I could see was her natural red hair with bleached blonde streaks. It was a fox tail, and that was her tail."

That is one of the only memories I keep with welcome from those floors on those days, and she is one of the only people of which has continually evolved with me, at my side, always, at some moby concert hearing shot in the back of the head.

You do not have a Birthday because you were never born and you will never die.

But we can have our pow wow in any state you choose
for the time
being.

You can bring that teddy bear , and I'll play the tambourine. Our shoes will squeak and we'll remember names to be as such and forget the ones that need be forgotten.

I wanted to just carry on the way I always to you about you for your birthday. Thank you for being who you are in my life. This absurd life, where the path is like those candy dot things, in a candy store, wrapped up in a glass jar. I can't wait until you walk into this door.

I might fall out of my chair. A few times. Well worth the trip.

I am way out west lately. Southwest of the southwest "Town" - It isn't a city it hasn't hit me that way yet, hit me on a freezing street of drip puddled ice on my skin / when are you

hey when are you coming home? It's a spin mass head warp of time zone fill/ hit the meeting get into the circle drink coffee light the marlboro/ I never know how to spell that word luckily the pack is always next to my key pad.

Briefly, you were my lover. It was on some astral realm far off into the desert where we spun in some cages hanging from a fire spitting elephant, holding hundreds of people and us, tangled up in the wire of the cage. I chased you forever and imagined an imaginary life with you, picked you up off the strip at three a.m and let my wife crawl into bed with us. I passed you two of my favorite spheres and when you left, you left, farther away than I thought you would go. I felt you forget me and get occupied with other people places and things. I did the same.

And today is your birthday; you thought I forgot about you, let you blow away in this valley up into the Rockies. I laugh to as what are you now 22? Twenty seven right? Today is your twenty seventh birthday?

"I taste like twenty seven." We laugh before I blurt out after an awkward silence that I met someone, and you get silent and choke out "I'm happy for you. That's important."

And the world spins as a place now where I respect you differently, where we talk of our playa family and I tell you that everything, no matter what, will be alright. You sigh out an unconvincing noise of forced indifference before I say

Hey. I love you. You are my family. My fam-il-y and you matter. Not like moop, like matter, not out of place in my heart.

Today I painted. To the point that I accidentally spray painted my white tattoo yellow, so we'll see what happens. I have space and drop cloth and giant canvases and ideas.

I'm sleeping less and working more and today this man I'm stupid in love with turned to me he said

"Someday somebody is going to randomly discover your art. They are going to be affluent and powerful and you'll be an over night mega success. It'll happen just like that."

So I stood there, staring at him, a cigarette in one of my hands, a spray bottle of yellow paint clicking as I shook the other.

It's been one year since I started painting canvas and I do it for the head fuck of it all, in order to create something that I utterly hate for a period of time until it turns into something I love. Much a symbolism of my own self. In one year I have painted thirty nine pieces, and I have thousands more. Ideas, that always turn to something different. It's life in a square in a nutshell.

I have a dull migrane and I'm too lazy to make another pot of coffee or set my alarm for 7:09 a.m. I'm obsessed with this crystal castles track and in this quiet dark I know I need to sleep but I've been thinking

a lot lately

about how fucked up it was when I first moved here. But I made it through. I made it through and here I am.

HL