[PREV - FOCUSING_THE_GREY_LENS]    [TOP]

FIRST_THROUGH_THE_FIRE

                                 October    3, 2007
                                 November   5, 2007




   A quotation:
                                 [ref]

   I remember them returning from their
   week on the playa, locking themselves
   into their bedrooms, actually
   shedding tears about what appeared to
   be a devastating return to what is
   widely accepted as modern
   civilization. Even my therapist at
   the time looked horrified during our
   first session after her first trip to
   Burning Man. "'Why do we live like
   this,' I have to keep asking myself,"
   I remember her saying.

This is a hard one to know
how to deal with.

I didn't have anything like this
reaction myself, but then I've never
understood the extreme enthusiasm the
event provokes in some people                I often think: "Haven't you ever
                                             done anything cool before?"
   There's an obvious cyncical take on
   this: they did a lot of crazy drugs,
   and now they're crashing.

   Another is: yeah, vacation's over,
   now you've got to stop slacking.
   Rough, eh?



I have a suspicion that there's
something a little more than that
going on:  many, many people live
in a more constrained world than
I do... they go around behaving
Normal out of some combination
of habit, inclination, and defensive
reaction, and they don't really
know how much of each it is.

   For people like this, to be
   subjected to the world of               If anything at Black Rock,
   Burning Man where everything            it often seems that Weird
   like that is inverted --                threatens to be the new
                                           Normal enforced by the usual
   Maybe it really does call               mechanisms of conformity.
   some things into question.
                                                EVIL_THOUGHT_NUMBER_23487
      The way the nominally real
      world is set-up: things are
      done in an orderly fashion
      often for no good real reason:
      a symbolic imposition of order
      on chaos.



--------
[NEXT - LAST_THE_NIGHT]