Burning Man

For those of you who are familiar with Burning Man, you might not be entirely surprised by the fact that some Burning Man regulars showed up in the Katrina aftermath to set up shop. For those of you who aren't familiar with Burning Man: it's basically a weeklong festival in the desert where art, music, sunburns, drugs, camping, and tens of thousands of people converge. They're survivalists, explorers of psychic realms, ex-hippies and hippie-wanna-bes.

Their camp in Mississippi happens to be right next door to a PDA camp in Mississippi.

Imagine our neatly-aligned blue and white plastic tents, rows of port-a-potties, worker bees running about in blue Presbyterian Disaster Assistance shirts, cell phones, white trucks, a well-organized kitchen, work orders lined up on clipboards.

Next door you have a mishmash of army tents, parachute-enclosed dwellings, temporary wooden huts, mud-covered VW vans, trance music flowing out of 5-foot high speakers, tattooed and pierced people decorating signs with colorful designs, lush sofas draped with boas resting in the sand.

Now imagine me approaching the Burning Man camp in a neighborly way, wearing my dorky uniform of blue shirt and khakis, and the disdain with which I am treated as I introduce myself and try to gather information about what type of projects the Burning Man team has been working on in this tiny town that the media forgot. Never have I felt more uncool. To them, I was "the Man". Only when I threw down the California references, mentioned that I used to live in San Francisco, said I had been to some Burning Man parties, did they even pretend to want to talk to me.

They ended up inviting me to their goodbye party, where they danced around a firepit and burned works of improvised art that were created with items salvaged from destroyed homes. Unfortunately, someone shot off a flare and started a minor forest fire. Total buzzkill.