Burning Man and Vanished Dreams

What if all my goals and dreams go the way of the spiritual steampunk bacchanal I wished for in my youth?

Burning Man is an annual festival in the Nevada desert that takes place the week before Labor Day. The participants build a temporary city on the “playa” with lots of cool art and specific rituals dating back to its first form in 1986.

Young me wanted nothing more than to dive headfirst into the campground.

Large-scale art, community, post-apocalyptic aesthetic in the middle of nowhere? It sounded like a movie I could walk into and experience!

For a good seven years, Burning Man was my comfort food. There’s this incredible YouTube video by Teddy Saunders of Burners in 2011 reciting “Oh, the Places You’ll Go!” in costume, on location.

Any time I watched it, I would feel overwhelmed with potential and possibility and beauty. I watched it whenever I was anxious about something Main Character-y – traveling, interviewing for a job, going on a date, etc. It gave me the koach to tally forth into my destiny!

It was such a powerful video for me – and for the hundreds of people I recommended it to, I hoped – that when the muzh and I got married, my sister wrote graamen to it for one of our Sheva Brachos. (Graamen or gramen [etymology unknown] is when you take a common song and rewrite the words and rhyme scheme for a guest of honor, such as a Bar Mitzvah boy or a couple celebrating an anniversary. FYI, the key to a good graamen is to hit the punchline on the final word of the verse.) As soon as I heard the first notes of the beautiful score by Darius Holbert I was already crying, and I go back and watch the video of my loved ones sing-talking to me any time I want a good cry.

But slowly the appeal has worn off. The idea of going into the desert to be with a bunch of people who are rolling, with reports of private luxury tents and jets and general rich people tomfoolery, sounds more like an authentic experience that’s been Disneyfied in the name of social media content and less like the spiritual steampunk bacchanal I wished for as a twentysomething.

As a crotchety thirtysomething, Burning Man has become akin to Woodstock for me: Sure, it would have been cool to be there. But would it really be worth the cold, the mud, the traffic? Replace that with the heat, the dust and the traffic, and that pretty much sums up whence my priorities have shifted. I haven’t been camping in over a decade. Not that I wouldn’t, but it doesn’t appeal to me anymore.

So I grew out of the playa. So what? So I’ll never see the art installations firsthand. So I’ll never feel the camaraderie of making one of my own. So I’ll never know what I look like in scanty “festival gear.”

My concern is the vehemence with which I once wanted it. It’s like when I would become obsessed with a song – Hold Me Up by Live, Heart to Break by Kim Petras, Juicy by Doja Cat – and listen to it five hundred frisson-riddled times and then without warning, it would lose its magic and I’d have to move on.

I want that high. The high of wanting something so badly.

But if the cultural pieces I feel most strongly about are the ones I’ll feel the least for somewhere down the line, how can I trust my instincts?

What if all my dreams go the way of Burning Man?

What if I finish a novel and feel nothing? My college professor warned us that seeing your book on the shelf doesn’t really do anything, that it’s shit motivation for becoming a writer. With each project I know I’m becoming a better writer, but what if that doesn’t matter to me in ten years?

What if getting published is like all the shows I produced or directed for the stage, thinking I was forming a creative oeuvre for myself, that I look back on now and just go, Huh. Those were a lot of work.

I mean, like: What if my kids end up hating me?

What if these people, whose well-being and education are my priorities, grow up and in twenty years they want nothing to do with me? Am I going to look back on these times of intense care and bonding and be like, Huh. That was a lot of work.

I’m never going to get the assurance that I crave that some things have staying power. All I can do is believe my creative projects – or the benefits I get from creating, apart from the product itself – will be worth it. Have faith that my family will be loved and cherished until the end of time. Believe that even if I chose to go to Burning Man now, I would get something out of it, even if it isn’t what it could have been had I gone a decade ago.

And then, all I can do is keep my eyes peeled through the seasons and try to catch my passions as they pass.