Every year after Burning Man, people feel a little lost. They've had a tran-scendant experience, some little fun, and/or a lot of drugs, and they miss it. Kind of like when you leave summer camp.
Enter the concept of the "decompression" party. Several cities around the US (I don't know of any abroad) have large, open-air parties about a month later, inviting people to set up dance stages, performance spaces, wear costumes, etc, just like at BM. To try and recapture some of that Burning Man feeling, in order to feel some of the lost passion that they felt in the Northwest Nevada desert, to cure some of their ache for the experience.
So I bought two tickets to "LA Decom" ($10 apiece). I thought, maybe this is a way for Ellen to get a sense of what it was like -- athough I secretly suspected it would be weird/lame/boring. It was to be held in an open space right near downtown LA, not far from Dodger stadium and right next to Chinatown, in what used to be, I kid you not, a cornfield. In fact the way they clarified the location for the Decom party was to refer to its location as "yes, the cornfield." Apparently this piece of land, once the site of a Tongva Indian village, was for a hundred years a kind of railroad depot. The tracks were then removed and the city bought the land in the early 2ooo's. Then in 2005 an artist planted corn and dubbed the work "Not a Cornfield." I unfortunately never got to see the corn. It's now just a large dry dusty park.
Ellen and I arrived last Saturday for Decom and were greeted with the traditional Burning Man invocation, "welcome home." (I like this about Burning Man.) But the actual event was a bit disappointing. If Burning Man is Disneyland, then this was like a small-town San Gennaro festival. If Burning Man is the Super Bowl, then this was like a rural high school game. So we wandered around for an hour, enjoying the LA sun, and not much more. A few times, we got a little Burning Man type fun: some guy, sitting under a large shade structure, would yell "Gummy Mango?" and then slighshot the little individually wrapped candy at you. It hit me, but it didn't hurt -- I just picked it up and ate it. When I stood arms akimbo and feigned indignance -- "how dare you sir." He smiled and pegged me again. Yummy!
Then there was the Black Rock roller disco. A large area of plywood was laid down, and you could borrow skates and skate around. A few hardy souls tried it out -- they couldn't skate very well. No helmets. An accident waiting to happen. Or, as I then clarified to Ellen, "happening."
I kept saying to her, this is a pale shadow of what it was like. She said she understood. The only way to experience it is to go. At one point the wind kicked up and a significant amount of gritty dust blew in our face. "Now THAT'S what Burning Man was like," I exclaimed.
Still, we didn't have a terrible time. We wandered back out onto the street, hopped back on the Gold Line, back to the beautifully restored Union Station, where we had parked our car.
I wanted to poach some eggs, but the first one I reached for was stuck to the package. As everyone knows, this means it cracked and leaked, then dried. This is why, when buying eggs, one must touch every egg to make sure it moves. Michael Haney taught me this. Sure.
