Thursday became my de facto down day, since I’d stayed up so late and worked myself so hard on Wednesday night. About the only thing I managed to motivate to do in the daytime was to finally go take a shower with Josh in our beautiful Temple of Renewal. I was excited to finally get to experience our showers (they’d been closed the day before because the camp’s grey water cube hadn’t been emptied). And it was pretty amazing, especially compared to last year, although it would have been a whole lot better if a) the stall we were in hadn’t had a pulley with a stuck rope, so we couldn’t lift the shower bag up very high and had to crouch down to get water on our heads; and b) if we’d remembered to add some cold water to our shower bag before we used it (it had been sitting out in the brutal desert sun soaking up solar radiation for hours before we got around to using it and the water for our shower was HOT). Still, just getting wet and taking off a few layers of sweat and dust was awesome, and getting to see other people enjoying the showers while we were in there was fun too. I really do feel good about having provided something wonderful for everyone to enjoy...it definitely made all the time and effort we spent feel more worth it.
Thursday evening Josh and I had talked about going out to see some more art, but Josh was experiencing some upset stomach and watery guts so he didn’t want to venture far away from porta potties. He decided to stay at camp and take it easy. Around sunset, I went over to Pink Heart to check on Anji and see how she was feeling after the previous night’s antics, and ask if she wanted to go out for the evening with me (which she did). While I was there, she and I got our pictures taken by a guy with a mobile portrait studio. I love the way we look in the pictures...so relaxed and grubby and happy. You can just see the light shining out of both of us. :)
(I want to pause here for a brief digression about the weather, just so I remember for posterity: it was weirdly warm at night for pretty much the entire week. I never did wear my awesome playa coat, because all I ever needed even on the open playa was an overshirt or long sleeves, and I was fine. It seemed much more humid this year than other times, too, and I think this was because there had been rainstorms right before the event. I didn’t experience the super dry cuticles or nasal passages that I had in the past, and I was very grateful for that.)
So anyway, Anji and I met back up after dinner and decided to go see some art (including the inside of the giant flying saucer that was the Man’s base). We wanted to see the regional effigies burn, but we got out too late to see anything more than the end part so we just moved on. We had a great time biking around and looking at art (though occasionally my trike got caught in dust drifts and I had to get off and push it out. We saw all kinds of cool stuff, including the awesomely creepy and intricately detailed Photo Chapel, the gorgeous Truth In Beauty nude woman sculpture lit up with scintillating patterns of light that changed every few seconds (around her base it said “What would the world be like if women were truly safe?”), the mind-blowing giant color-changing swimming ichthyosaur skeleton puppet under its fabric tent, the giant color-changing letters of “BELIEVE”, a fire cube (no idea what this one was called), giant zoetropes of hands and apples and swinging monkeys, and finally, the interior of the flying saucer.
On the inside of the saucer, you could look out through its horizontal window slit onto the playa from above, which looked really amazing at night. There were all kinds of other cool things to look at in there too, including some mini zoetropes and something that looked like an abstract rendition of a human spine, with a meteorite suspended in the middle of it (this meteorite was supposedly something that anyone could look for and claim after the Man burned...I never did find out if someone recovered it, and if so what happened.) We actually didn’t spend all that much time in the Man’s base, because the saucer’s interior was not really designed to be a hangout place, it was designed more to be something you walked through and experienced and walked out of. The way you left was fun though: you got to slide down a big slide with a bump at the end that slowed you down enough so you could just hop off.
Once we finished at the Man, we decided to call it a night even though it was still relatively early (I was still pretty tired from my antics the night before). I was really glad to have gone out and see some more of the art though...I always want to see more than I do, but at least we hit some highlights. We rode back on the 9 o’clock road, and went our separate ways once we hit the Esplanade. I was asleep in the yurt by probably midnight.